Nova 2 Read online

  “Actually I have written my will once and for all, leaving my property to the Good Samaritan Rest Home for the Aged, and I do not intend to change it. But I worry that some clever young lawyer will find a way to break the will. They’re always doing that when you disinherit someone.”

  “Mrs. Johnson,” the Colonel said, “you have a whole town full of friends who will testify that you always have been in full possession of your faculties, if it ever should come to that, God forbid! Mrs. Fredericks?”

  “Nasty old woman,” Sally muttered. “Where are Mother and Father? I don’t see them. I don’t think they’re here at all.”

  “Sh-h-h!”

  “I’m leaving my money to my cat,” said a bent old woman with a hearing aid in her ear. “I’m just sorry I won’t get to see their faces.” The Colonel smiled at her as he nodded her back to her seat at the left front. Then he recognized a man sitting in the front row. “Mr. Saunders.”

  The man who arose was short, straight, and precise. “I would like to remind these ladies of the services of our legal aid department. We have had good luck in constructing unbreakable legal documents. A word of caution, however—the more far-fetched the legatee, though to be sure the more satisfying, the more likely the breaking of the will. There is only one certain way to prevent property from falling into the hands of those who have neither worked for it nor merited it—and that is to spend it

  “Personally, I am determined to spend on the good life every cent that I accumulated in a long and—you will pardon my lack of humility—distinguished career at the bar.”

  “Your personal life is your own concern, Mr. Saunders,” the Colonel said, “but I must tell you, sir, that we are aware of how you spend your money and your time away from here. I do not recommend it to others nor do I approve of your presenting it to us as worthy of emulation. Indeed, I think you do our cause damage.”

  Mr. Saunders had not resumed his seat. He bowed and continued, “Each to his own tastes—I cite an effective method for keeping the younger generation in check. There are other ways of disposing of property irretrievably.” He sat down.

  John pulled Sally back from the doors. “Go to the car,” he said. “Get out of here. Go back to the house and get our bags packed. Quick!”

  “Mrs. Plummer?” the Colonel said.

  Sally pulled away from John.

  The familiar figure stood up at the front of the room. Now John could identify beside her the gray head of Henry Plummer, turned now toward the plump face of his wife.

  “We all remember,” Mrs. Plummer said calmly, “what a trial children are. What we may forget is that our children have children. I do my best not to let my daughter forget the torments she inflicted upon me when she was a child. We hide these things from them. We conceal the bitterness. They seldom suspect. And we take our revenge, if we are wise, by encouraging their children to be just as great a trial to their parents. We give them candy before meals. We encourage them to talk back to their parents. We build up their infant egos so that they will stand up for their childish rights. When their parents try to punish them, we stand between the child and the punishment. Fellow senior citizens, this is our revenge: that their parents will be as miserable as we were.”

  “Mother! No!” Sally cried out.

  The words and the youthful voice that spoke them rippled the audience like a stone tossed into a pond. Faces turned toward the back of the meeting room, faces with wrinkles and white hair and faded eyes, faces searching, near-sighted, faces disturbed, faces beginning to fear and to hate. Among them was one face John knew well, a face that had dissembled malice and masqueraded malevolence as devotion.

  “Do as I told you!” John said violently. “Get out of here!”

  For once in her life, Sally did as she was told. She ran down the hall, pushed her way through the big front doors, and was gone. John looked for something with which to bar the doors to the meeting room, but the hall was bare. He was turning back to the doors when he saw the oak cane in the corner. He caught it up and slipped it through the handles. Then he put his shoulder against the doors.

  In the meeting room the gathering emotion was beginning to whip thin blood into a simulation of youthful vigor, and treble voices began to deepen as they shouted encouragement at those nearest the doors. “A spy!”

  “Was it a woman?”

  “A girl.”

  “Let me get my hands on her!”

  The first wave hit the doors. John was knocked off balance. He pushed himself forward again, and again the surge of bodies against the other side forced him back. He dug in his feet and shoved. A sound of commotion added to the shouting in the meeting room. John heard something—or someone—fall.

  The next time he was forced from the doors the cane bent. Again he pushed the doors shut; the cane straightened. At the same moment he felt a sharp pain across his back. He looked back. The Colonel was behind him, breathing hard, the glow of combat in his eyes and the cane in his hand upraised for another blow, like the hand of Abraham over Isaac.

  John stepped back. In his hand he found the cane that had been thrust through the door handles. He raised it over his head as the Colonel struck again. The blow fell upon the cane. The Colonel drew back his cane and swung once more, and again his blow was parried, more by accident than skill. Then the doors burst open, and the wild old bodies were upon them.

  John caught brief glimpses of flying white hair and ripped lace and spectacles worn awry. Canes and crutches were raised above him. He smelled lavender and bay rum mingled with the sweet-sour odor of sweat. He heard shrill voices, like the voices of children, cry out curses and maledictions, and he felt upon various parts of his body the blows of feeble fists, their bones scarcely padded, doing perhaps more damage to themselves than to him, though it seemed sufficient.

  He went down quickly. Rather too quickly, he thought dazedly as he lay upon the floor, curled into a fetal position to avoid the stamping feet and kicks and makeshift clubs.

  He kept waiting for it to be over, for consciousness to leave him, but most of the blows missed him, and in the confusion and the milling about, the object of the hatred was lost. John saw a corridor that led between bodies and legs through the doors that opened into the meeting room. He crawled by inches toward the room; eventually he found himself among the chairs. The commotion was behind him.

  Cautiously he peered over the top of a fallen chair. He saw what he had overlooked before—a door behind the rostrum. It stood open to the night. That was how the Colonel, with instinctive strategy, had come up behind him, he thought, and he crept toward it and down the narrow steps behind the town hall.

  For a moment he stood in the darkness assessing his injuries. He was surprised: they were few, none serious. Perhaps tomorrow he would find bruises enough and a lump here and there and perhaps even a broken rib or two, but now there was only a little pain. He started to run.

  He had been running in the darkness for a long time, not certain he was running in the right direction, not sure he knew what the right direction was, when a dark shape coasted up beside him. He dodged instinctively before he recognized the sound of the motor.

  “John!” It was a voice he knew. “John?”

  The Volkswagen was running without lights. John caught the door handle. The door came open. The car stopped. “Move over,” he said, out of breath. Sally climbed over the gear shift, and John slid into the bucket seat. He released the hand brake and pushed hard on the accelerator. The car plunged forward.

  Only when they reached the highway did John speak again. “Is Johnny all right?”

  “I think so,” Sally said. “But he’s got to see a doctor.”

  “We’ll find a doctor in Orange Grove.”

  “A young one.”

  John wiped his nose on the back of his hand and looked at it. His hand was smeared with blood. “Damn!”

  She pressed a tissue into his hand. “Was it bad?”

  “Incredible!” He laughed harshly
and said it again in a different tone. “Incredible. What a day! And what a night! But it’s over. And a lot of other things are over.”

  Johnny was crying in the back seat.

  “What do you mean?” Sally asked. “Hush, Johnny, it’s going to be all right.”

  “Grammy!” Johnny moaned.

  “The letters. Presents for people who don’t need anything. Worrying about what mother’s going to think . . .”

  The car slowed as John looked back toward the peaceful town of

  Sunset Acres, sleeping now in the Florida night, and remembered the wide lawns and the broad porches, the brick streets and the slow time, and the old folks. “All over,” he said again.

  Johnny still was crying.

  “Shut up, Johnny!” he said between his teeth and immediately felt guilty.

  “John!” Sally said. “We mustn’t ever be like that toward our son.”

  She wasn’t referring just to what he had said, John knew. He glanced back toward the small figure huddled in the back seat. It wasn’t over, he thought; it was beginning. “It’s over,” he said again, as if he could convince himself by repetition. Sally was silent. “Why don’t you say something?” John asked.

  “I keep thinking about how it used to be,” she said. “He’s my father. She’s my mother. How can anything change that? You can’t expect me to hate my own father and mother?”

  It wasn’t over. It would never be over. Even though the children sometimes escaped, the old folks always won: the children grew up, the young people became old folks.

  The car speeded up and rushed through the night, the headlights carving a corridor through the darkness, a corridor that kept closing behind them. The corridor still was there, as real in back as it was revealing in front, and it could never be closed.

  The Steam-Driven Boy

  by John Sladek

  Science fiction is beginning to parody itself, which can only be a Very Good Thing. There is nothing like a touch of humor to destroy the pompous and self-inflated. John Sladek, an American now residing in London, is a humorist, and a generally black one at that, with books like Black Alice and The Reproductive System. He now delivers the final and definitive time-travel story.

  Captain Charles Conn was thinking so hard his feet hurt. It reminded him of his first days on the force, back in ’89, when walking a beat gave him headaches.

  Three time-patrolmen stood before his desk, treading awkwardly on the edges of their long red cloaks and fingering their helmets nervously. Captain Conn wanted to snarl at them, but what was the point? They already understood his problems perfectly—they were, after all, Conn himself, doubling a shift.

  “Okay, Charlie, report.”

  The first patrolman straightened. “I went back to three separate periods, sir. One when the President was disbanding the House of Representatives, one when he proclaimed himself the Supreme Court, one when he was signing the pro-pollution bill. I gave him the whole business—statistics, pictures, news stories. All he would say was, ‘My mind’s made up.’ ”

  Chuck and Chas reported similar failures. There was no stopping the President. Not only had he usurped all the powers of federal, state and local government, but he used those powers to deliberately torment the population. It was a crime to eat ice cream, sing, whistle, swear, or kiss. It was a capital offense to smile, or to use the words “Russia” or “China.” Under the Safe Streets Act it was illegal to walk, loiter or converse in public. And of course Negroes and anyone else “conspicuous” were by definition criminals, and came under the jurisdiction of the Race Reaction Board.

  The Natural Food Act had seemed at first almost reasonable, a response to scientists’ warnings about depleting the soil and endangering the environment. But the fine print specified that henceforth no fertilizers were to be used but human or canine excrement, and all farm machinery was forbidden. In time the newspapers featured pictures of farmers trudging past their rusting tractors to poke holes in the soil with sharp sticks. And in time, the newspapers had their paper supply curtailed. Famine warnings were ignored until the government had to buy wheat from C****.

  “Gentlemen, we’ve tried everything else. It’s time to think about getting rid of President Ernie Barnes”

  The men began to murmur among themselves. This was done with efficiency and dispatch, for Patrolman Charlie, knowing that Chuck was going to murmur to him first, withheld his own murmuring until it was his turn. And when Chuck had murmured to Charlie, he fell silent, and let Charlie and Chas get on with their murmuring before he murmured uneasily to Chas.

  The captain spoke again. “Getting rid of him in the past would be easier than getting rid of him now, but it’s only part of the problem. If we remove him from the past, we have to make sure no one notices the big jagged hole in history we’ll leave. Since as time-police we have the only time-bikes around, the evidence is going to make us look bad. Remember the trouble we had getting rid of the pyramids? For months, everyone went around saying, ‘What’s that funny thing on the back of the dollar?’ Remember that?”

  “Hey Captain, what is that funny thing—?”

  “Shut up. The point is, you can change some of the times some of the time, and, uh, some of the—Look at it this way: Ernie must have shaken hands with a million people. We rub him out, and all these people suddenly get back all the germs they rubbed off on him. Suddenly we have an epidemic.”

  “Yeah, but Captain, did he ever shake any hands? He never does any more. Just sits there in the White Fort, all fat and ugly, behind his FBI and CIA and individualized anti-personnel missiles and poison germ gas towers and—and that big, mean dog.”

  Captain Conn glared the patrolman down, then continued: “My idea is, we kidnap Ernie Barnes from his childhood, back in 1937. And we leave a glass egg.”

  “A classic?”

  “A glass egg. Like they used to put under chickens when they took away their children. What I mean is, we substitute an artificial kid for the real one. Wilbur Grafton says he can make a robot replica of Ernie as he looked in 1937.”

  Wilbur Grafton was a wealthy eccentric and amateur inventor well known to all members of the time-patrol. Their father, James Conn, was one of Wilbur’s employees.

  “Another thing. Just in case somebody back in 1937 gets suspicious and takes him apart, we’ll have the robot built of pre-1937 junk. Steam-driven. No use giving away the secrets of molecular circuitry and peristaltic logic before their time.”

  The four of them, with a fifth patrolman (Carl), arrived one evening at the mansion of Wilbur Grafton. To the butler who admitted them, each man said “Hello, Dad,” to which their unruffled father replied, “Good evening, sir. You’ll find Mr. Grafton in the drawing room.”

  The venerable millionaire, immaculate in evening clothes, welcomed them, then excused himself to prepare the demonstration. James poured generous drinks, and while some of the party admired the authentic 1950’s appointments of the room—including a genuine “stereo” phonograph—others watched television. It was almost curfew time, and the channels were massed with Presidential commercials :

  “Sleep well, America! Your President is safe! Yes, thanks to I.A.M.—individual antipersonnel missiles—no one can harm our Leader. Think of it: over ten billion eternally vigilant little missiles all around the White Fort, guarding his sleep and yours. And don’t forget—there’s one with your name on it.”

  Wilbur Grafton returned and at curfew time one of the men asked him to begin the demonstration. He wheezed with delight. His glasses twinkling, he replied: “My good man, the demonstration is already going on.” Pressing one of his shirt studs, he added, “And here is—The Steam-Driven Boy!”

  His body parted down the middle and swung open in two halfshells, revealing a pudgy youngster in knitted swim trunks and striped T-shirt, who was determinedly working cranks and levers. The boy stopped operating the “Grafton wheeze-laugh” bellows, climbed out of the casing, took two steps, and froze.

  �
�Then where’s the real Wilbur Grafton?” asked Chuck.

  “Right here, sir.” The butler put down a priceless Woolworth’s decanter and pulled his own nose, hard. Clanking and creaking, he parted like a mummy case to give up the living Grafton, once more flawlessly attired.

  “Must have my little japes,” he wheezed, as the real James came in with more drinks. “Now, allow me to re-animate our little friend for you.”

  He inserted a crank in the boy’s ear and gave it several vigorous turns. With a light chuffing sound, and emitting only a hint of vapor, the small automaton came to life. That piggish nose, those widespaced eyes, that malicious grin were familiar to all present from Your President Cares posters.

  As the white-haired inventor stooped to make some further adjustment at the back of the automaton’s fat neck, “Ernie” kicked him authentically in the knee.

  “Did you see that precision?” Wilbur gloated, dancing on one leg.

  The robot was remarkably realistic, complete to a frayed strip of dirty adhesive tape on one shiny elbow. Charlie made the mistake of squatting down and offering Ernie some candy. Two other patrolmen helped their unfortunate comrade to a sofa, where he was able to get his head back to stop the bleeding. The little machine shrieked with delight until Wilbur managed to shut it off.

  “I am confident that his parents will never notice the switch,” he said, leading the way to his workshop. “Let me show you the plans.”

  The robot had organs analogous to those of a living being, as Wilbur Grafton’s plans showed. The heart and veins were really an intricate hydraulic system; the liver a tiny distillery to volatilize eaten food and extract oil from it. Part of this oil replenished the veins, part was burned to feed the spleen’s miniature steam engine. From this, belts supplied power to the limbs.

  Digressing, Wilbur explained how his grandfather, Orville Grafton, had developed a peculiar substance, a plate of it would vary in thickness according to the intensity of light striking it.