Nova 2 Read online

  “While grandfather could make nothing more useful of this ‘graftonite’ than bas-relief photographs, I have used it (along with mechanical irises and gelatine lenses) to form the boy’s eyes,” he said, and pointed to a detail. “When a tiny image has been focused on each graftonite ‘retina,’ a pantographic scriber traces swiftly over it, translating the image to motions in the brain.”

  Similar levers conveyed motions from the gramophone ears, and from hundreds of tiny pistons all over the body—the sense of touch.

  The hydraulic fluid was a suspension of red particles like blood corpuscles. When it oozed to the surface through pores, these were filtered out—it doubled as perspiration.

  The brain contained a number of springs, wound to various tensions. With the clockwork connecting them to various limbs, organs and facial features, these comprised Ernie’s “memory.”

  Grafton let the plans roll shut with a snap and ordered James to charge the glasses with champagne. “Gentlemen, I give you false Ernie Barnes—from his balloon lungs out to his skin of rubberized lawn, fine wig and dentures—an all-American boy, made in the U.S.A.!”

  “One thing, though,” said the captain. “Won’t his parents notice he doesn’t—well, grow?”

  Sighing, the inventor turned his back for a moment, and gripped the edge of his workbench to steady himself. A solemn silence descended upon the group as they saw him take off his glasses and rub his eyes.

  “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “I have taken care of everything. In one year’s time, this child will appear to be suddenly stricken with influenza. His fever will rise, he will weaken. Finally I see him call his mother’s name. She approaches the bedside.

  “ ‘Mom,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a wicked kid. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me? For—for I’m going to be an angel from now on.’ His eyes flutter shut. His mother bends and kisses the burning forehead. This triggers the final mechanism, and Ernie appears to—to—”

  They understood. One by one, the time-patrol put down their glasses and slipped silently from the room. Carl was elected to take the robot back to 1937.

  “He was supposed to bring the kid here to headquarters,” said Captain Charles Conn. “But he never showed up. And Ernie’s still in power. What went wrong?” A worried frown puckered his somewhat bland features as he leafed through the appointment calendar.

  “Maybe his timer went wrong,” Chas suggested. “Maybe he got off his time-bike at the wrong place. Maybe he had a flat—who knows?”

  “He should have been back by now. How long can it take to travel fifty years? Well, no time to figure it out now. According to the calendar, we’ve all got to double again. I go back to become Charlie. Charlie, you go back to fill in as Chuck. Chuck becomes Chas, and Chas, you take over for Carl.” He paused, as the men exchanged badges. “As for Carl—we’ll all be finding out what happens to him soon enough. Let’s go!”

  And, singing the time-patrol song (yes, they felt silly, but such was the President’s mandate) in deep bass voices, they climbed on their glittering time-bicycles, set the egg-timers on their handlebars, and sped away.

  Carl stepped out from behind a tree in 1937. The kid was kneeling in his sandpile, apparently trying to tie a tin can to a puppy’s tail. The gargoyle face looked at Carl with interest.

  “GET OUTA MY YARD! GET OUT OR I’LL TELL ON YA! YOU HAFTA PAY ME ONE APPLE OR ELSE I’LL—”

  Still straddling the time-bike, Carl slipped forward to that autumn, picked a particularly luscious apple, and bought a can of ether at the drugstore. Clearly it would take both to get this kid.

  “I ’spose,” said the druggist, “I ’spose ya want me to ask ya why you’re wearing a gold football helmet with wings on it and a long red cape. But I won’t. Nossir, I seen all kinds . . .”

  In revenge, Carl shoplifted an object at random: a Mark Clubb Private Eye Secret Disguise Kit.

  Blending back into his fading-out self, Carl held out both hands to the boy. The right held a shiny apple. The left held an ether-soaked handkerchief.

  As Carl shoved off into the gray, windswept corridors of time, with the lumpy kid draped over his handlebars, it occurred to him he needed a better hiding place than Headquarters. The FBI would swoop down on them first, searching for their missing President. A better place would be the mansion of Wilbur Grafton. Or even . . . hmmm.

  “An excellent plan!” Wilbur sat by the swimming pool, nursing his injured knee. “We’ll smuggle him into the White Fort itself—the one place no one will think of looking for him!”

  “One problem is, how to get him in, past all the guards and the—” Wilbur pushed up his glasses and meditated. “You know the President’s dog—that big ugly mongrel that appears with him in the Eat More Horsemeat commercials—Ralphie?”

  Compulsively Carl sang: “Ralphie loves it, every bite! Why don’t you try horse tonight?”

  “I’ve been working on a replica of that dog. It should be big enough to contain the boy. You dispose of the real dog tonight, after curfew, then we’ll disquise the boy and send him in.”

  When the dog came out of the White Fort to organically fertilize the lawn, Carl was waiting with the replica dog and an ether-soaked rag. Within a few minutes he had consigned the replica to a White Fort guard and dropped Ralphie in the dim, anonymous corridors of time. No one need fear the boy’s discovery, for the constraints of the dog-shell were such that he could make only canine sounds and motions.

  Carl reported back to the mansion.

  “I have a confession to make,” said the old inventor. “I am not Wilbur Grafton, only a robot.

  “The real Wilbur Grafton invented a rejuvenator. Wishing to try it without attracting attention, he decided to travel into the past—back to 1905, where he would work as an assistant to his grandfather, Orville Grafton.”

  “Travel back in time? But that takes a time-bike!”

  “Precisely. To that end, he agreed to cooperate with the time-patrol. On the night he demonstrated the Steam-Driven Boy, you recall he left the room and returned wearing the James shell? It was I in the shell. The real Wilbur slipped outside, borrowed one of your time-bikes, and went to 1905. He returned the bike on automatic control. I have taken his place ever since.”

  Carl scratched his head. It seemed to make a kind of sense. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “So that you might benefit by it. Using your disguise kit, you can pose as Wilbur Grafton yourself. I realize a time-patrolman’s salary is small—especially when one has to do quintuple shifts for the same money. Meanwhile I have a gloriously full life. You could slip back in time and replace me.” The robot handed him an envelope. “Here are instructions for dismantling me—and for making the rejuvenator, should you ever feel the need for it. This is a recorded message. Good-bye.”

  Why not, Carl thought. Here was the blue swimming pool, the “stereo,” the whole magnificent house. James, his father, stood discreetly by, ready to pour champagne. And the upstairs maid was uncommonly pretty. It could be a long, long life, rejuvenated from time to time. . .

  Ernie sprawled in a giant chair, watching himself on television. When a guard brought in the dog, it bit him. He was just about to call the vexecutioner, to teach Ralphie a lesson, when something in the animal’s eyes caught his attention.

  “So it’s you, is it?” He laughed. “Or I should say, so it’s me. Well, don’t bite me again, understand? If you do, I’ll leave you inside that thing. And make you eat nasty food, while I sing about it on TV.”

  “Poop,” the child was thinking, Ernie knew.

  “I can do it, kid. I’m the President, and I can do anything I like.

  That’s why I’m so fat.” He stood up and began to pace the throne room, his stomach preceding him like a front wheel.

  “Poopy-poop,” thought the boy. “If you can do anything, why don’t you make everybody go to bed early, and wash their mouths out if they say—”

  “I do, I do. But the
re’s a little problem there. You’re too young to understand this—I don’t understand it all myself, yet—but ‘everybody’ is you, and you’re me. I’m all the people that ever were and ever will be. All the men, anyway. All the women are the girl who used to be upstairs maid at Wilbur Grafton’s.”

  He began explaining time-travel to little Ernie, knowing the kid wasn’t getting half of it, but going on the way big Ernie had explained it all to him: Carl Conn, posing as Wilbur, had grown old. Finally he’d decided it was time to rejuve, and go back in time. Fierce old Ralphie, still lurking in the corridors of time, had attacked him, and there’d been quite an accident. One part of Carl had returned to 1905, to become Orville Grafton. Another part of him got rejuvenated, along with the dog, and had popped out in 1937.

  “That Carl-part, my boy, was you. The rejuvenator wiped out some of your memory—except for dreams—and it made you look all different.

  “You see, your job and mine, everybody’s job, is to weave back and forth in time—” he wove his clumsy hands in the air, “—being people. My next job is to be a butler, and yours is to pretend to be a robot pretending to be you. Then probably you’ll be my dad, and I’ll be his dad, and then you’ll be me. Get it?”

  He moved the dog’s tail like a lever, and the casing opened. “Would you like some ice cream? It’s okay with me, only nobody else gets none.”

  The boy nodded. The upstairs maid, pretty as ever, came in with a Presidential sundae. The boy looked at her and his scowl almost turned to a smile.

  “Mom?”

  I Tell You, It’s True

  by Poul Anderson

  Poul Anderson sold his first science fiction story in 1944 and has not looked back since. He is almost a prototype of the ideal science fiction writer with a degree in physics to back up a masterful story telling technique—plus an enviable capacity for food and beer as well as the ability to speak Danish. Some of his stories are light entertainment. Others are grimly complete in their examination of the possibilities of a technological innovation, and this is one of them.

  The mansion stood on the edge of Ban Pua town, hard by the Nan River. Through a door open to its shady-side verandah, you saw slow brown waters and intensely green trees beyond that flickered in furnace sunlight. Somewhere monkeys chattered. A couple of men in shabby uniforms stoically kept watch. Their rifles looked too big for them. George Rainsdon wondered if they had personally been in combat against his countrymen.

  He brought his attention back to the interior. Now, he thought. The sweat that plastered his shirt to him felt suddenly cold. Yet this room, stripped of the luxuries that the landlord owner had kept, was almost serene in its austerity. The four Thais across the table were much more at ease than the five Americans.

  Rainsdon knew what implacability underlay those slight, polite smiles. Behind Chukkri hung portraits of Lenin and Ho Chi Minh.

  Attendants brought tea and small cakes.

  Rainsdon made a sitting bow. “Again I thank Your Excellency for agreeing to receive our delegation,” he said with the fluency that years as a diplomat in Bangkok had given him. “Believe me, sir, the last thing my government wishes is a repetition of the Vietnam tragedy. We desire no involvement in the conflict here except to act as peacemakers.” He laid on the table the box he was carrying. “In token, we beg that you accept this emblem of friendship.”

  “I thank you,” the leader of the Sacred Liberation Movement answered. “The solution of your difficulty is quite simple. You need merely withdraw your military personnel. But let us see the gift you graciously bring.”

  He opened the package and took forth a handsome bronze statuette in an abstract native-derived style. Its plaque held soft words. One of his generals frowned. Chukkri flashed him a sardonic glance that might as well have said aloud, Not even the Americans are stupid enough to imagine that assassinating us will halt the advance of our heroic troops. “Please thank your President on my behalf,” he uttered.

  The warmth of his touch completed the activation of a circuit.

  Rainsdon leaned forward. Go for broke! His slight giddiness passed into a feeling that resembled his emotions when he had led infantry charges in Korea in his long passed youth. The rehearsed but wholly sincere words torrented from him:

  “Your Excellency. Gentlemen. Let me deliver, at this private and informal conference, the plain words of the United States Government. The United States has no aggressive intentions toward the people of Thailand or any other country. Our sole desire is to help Thailand end the civil war on terms satisfactory to everyone. The first and most essential prerequisite for peace is that your organization accept a cease-fire and negotiate in good faith with the legitimate government to arrange a plebiscite. Your ideology is alien to the Thai people and must not be forced on them. However, you will be free to advocate it, to persuade by precept and example, to offer candidates for office. If defeated, they must accept with grace; if victorious, they must work within the existing system. But we do not want you to renounce your principles publicly. If nothing else, you can be valuable intermediaries between us and capitals like Hanoi and Peking. Thereby you will truly serve the cause of peace and the liberation of the people.”

  They sat still, the short, neat Asian men, for a time that grew and grew. Rainsdon’s back ached from tension. Would it work? Could it? How could it? He had said nothing they hadn’t heard a thousand times before and scorned as mendacious where it was not meaningless. They had fought, they had lost friends dear to them, they were ready to be slain themselves or to fight on for a weary lifetime; their cause was as holy to them as that of Godfrey of Bouillon had been to him—though it was no mere Jerusalem they would rescue from the infidel, it was mankind.

  Finally, frowning, a fist clenched beside his untasted cup of tea,

  Chukkri said, very low and slow: “I had not considered the matter in just those terms before. Would you explain in more detail?” Rainsdon heard a gasp from his aides. They had not expected their journey would prove anything except a barren gesture. Glory mounted in him. It does work! By God, it works!

  He got busy. The circuitry in the statuette would fuse itself into slag after three hours. That ought to be ample time. The CIA had planned this operation with ultimate care.

  The laboratories stood on the peninsula south of San Francisco, commanding a magnificent view of ocean if it were possible to overlook the freeway, the motels, and the human clutter on the beach. The sanctum where Edward Sigerist and Manuel Duarte had brought their guests made it easy to ignore such encroachments. The room, though big, was windowless; the single noise was a murmur of ventilators blowing air which carried a faint tinge of ozone; fluorescent panels threw cold light on the clutter of gadgetry burying the workbenches around the walls, and on the solitary table in the center where six men sat and regarded a thing.

  Fenner from MIT spoke: “Pretty big for that level of output, isn’t it?” His tone was awed; he was merely breaking a lengthy silence.

  “Breadboard circuit,” Sigerist answered, equally unnecessarily considering what a jumble of wires and electronic components the thing was. “Any engineer could miniaturize it to the size of your thumb, for short-range work, in a few months. Or scale it up for power, till three of them in synchronous satellites could blanket the Earth. If he couldn’t do that, from the cookbook, he’d better go back to chipping flints.” He was a large, shaggy, rumpled man. His voice was calm but his eyes were haunted.

  “Of course, he’d need the specs,” said his collaborator, lean, intense, dark-complexioned Duarte. His glance ranged over the visitors. Fenner, physicist, sharp-featured beneath a cupola of forehead; Mot-tice, biochemist from London, plump and placid except for the sweat that now glistened on his cheeks; tiny Yuang of the Harvard psychology department; and Ginsberg of Cal Tech, who resembled any grocer or bookkeeper till you remembered his Nobel Prizes for quantum field theory and molecular biology. “That’s why we brought you gentlemen here.”

  “Why the
secrecy?” Yuang asked. “Our work has all been reported in the open literature. Others can build on it, as you have done. Others doubtless will.”

  “N-n-not inevitably,” Sigerist replied. “Kind of a fluke, our success. This isn’t a big outfit, you know. Mostly we contract to do R and D on biomedical instrumentation. I’m alone in having a completely free hand, which is how come I get away with studying dowsing. I was carrying on Rocard’s investigations, which were published back in the mid-’60’s and never got the attention they deserved.” Receiving blank stares: “Essentially, he gave good theoretical and experimental grounds for supposing that dowsing results from the nervous system’s response to variations in terrestrial magnetism. I was using your data too, Dr. Mottice, Dr. Ginsberg. Then at the Triple-A-S meeting three years ago, I happened to meet Manuel at an afterhours beer party. He was with General Electric . . . He called to my notice the papers by Dr. Yuang and Dr. Fenner. We both took fire; I arranged for him to transfer here; we worked together. Kept our mouths shut, at first because we weren’t sure where we were going, later because we made a breakthrough and suddenly realized what it meant to the world.” He shrugged. “An unlikely set of coincidences, no?”

  “Well,” Ginsberg inquired, “what effects do you anticipate?”

  “For openers,” Duarte told him, “we can stop the war in Thailand. Soon after, we can stop all war everywhere.”

  The room was long, mirrored, ornate in the red plush fashion of Franz Josef’s day. The handful of men who sat there were drab by contrast, like beetles.

  Not a bad comparison, thought the President of the United States. For Party Secretary Tupilov, at least. Premier Grigorovitch seems a bit more human.

  He made the slight, prearranged hand signal. His interpreter responded by nervously tugging his necktie. It energized a circuit in what appeared to be a cigarette case.