Dealing in Futures Part 25

I didn't mean to murder her. That was not in my mind at all. But I suppose in my pa.s.sion, or abandon, I carelessly propped my strong leg against the wall and then thrust with too much strength. At any rate there was a snap and a tearing sound. She gave a small cry and the lower half of my body was suddenly awash in blood. I had snapped her spine and evidently at the same time caused considerable internal damage. She must have lost consciousness very quickly, though her heart did not stop beating for nearly a minute.

Disposing of the body was no great problem, conceptually. In the laundry room I found a bag large enough to hold her comfortably. Then I went back to the room and put her and the sheet she had besmirched into the bag.

Getting her to the recycler would have been a problem if it had been a normal hour. She looked like nothing so much as a body in a laundry bag. Fortunately, the corridor was deserted.

The lock on the recycler room was child's play. The furnace door was a problem, though; it was easy to unlock but its effective diameter was only 25 centimeters.

So I had to disa.s.semble her. To save cleaning up, I did the job inside the laundry bag, which was clumsy, and made it difficult to see the fascinating process.

I was so absorbed in watching that I didn't hear the door slide open. But the man who walked in made a slight gurgling sound, which somehow I did hear over the cracking of bones. I stepped over to him and killed him with one kick.

At this point I have to admit to a lapse in judgment. I relocked the door and went back to the ch.o.r.e at hand. After the woman was completely recycled, I repeated the process with the man-which was, incidentally, much easier. The female's layer of subcutaneous fat made disa.s.sembly of the torso a more slippery business.

It really was wasted time (though I did spend part of the time thinking out the final touches of the plan I am now engaged upon). I might as well have left both bodies there on the floor. I had kicked the man with great force-enough to throw me to the ground in reaction and badly bruise my right hip-and had split him open from crotch to heart. This made a bad enough mess, even if he hadn't compounded the problem by striking the ceiling. I would never be able to clean that up, and it's not the sort of thing that would escape notice for long.

At any rate, it was only twenty minutes wasted, and I gained more time than that by disabling the recycler room lock. I cleaned up, changed clothes, stopped by the waldo lab for a few minutes, and then took the slidewalk to the Environmental Control Center.

There was only one young man on duty at the ECC at that hour. I exchanged a few pleasantries with him and then punched him in the heart, softly enough not to make a mess. I put his body where it wouldn't distract me and then attended to the problem of the "door."

There's no actual door on the ECC, but there is an emergency wall that slides into place if there's a drop in pressure. I typed up a test program simulating an emergency, and the wall obeyed. Then I walked over and twisted a few f.l.a.n.g.es around. n.o.body would be able to get into the Center with anything short of a cutting torch.

Sitting was uncomfortable with the bruised hip, but I man-aged to ease into the console and spend an hour or so studying logic and wiring diagrams. Then I popped off an access plate and moved the micro-waldo down the corridors of electronic thought. The intercom began buzzing incessantly, but I didn't let it interfere with my concentration.

Nearside is protected from meteorite strike or (far more likely) structural failure by a series of 128 bulkheads that, like the emergency wall here, can slide into place and isolate any area where there's a pressure drop. It's done automatically, of course, but can also be controlled from here.

What I did, in essence, was to tell each bulkhead that it was under repair, and should not close under any circ.u.mstance. Then I moved the waldo over to the circuits that controlled the city's eight airlocks. With some rather elegant microsurgery, I transferred control of all eight solely to the pressure switch I now hold in my left hand.

It is a negative-pressure b.u.t.ton, a dead-man switch taken from a power saw. So long as I hold it down, the inner doors of the airlocks will remain locked. If I let go, they will all iris open. The outer doors are already open, as are the ones that connect the airlock chambers to the suiting-up rooms. No one will be able to make it to a s.p.a.cesuit in time. Within thirty seconds, every corridor will be full of vacuum. People behind airtight doors may choose between slow asphyxiation and explosive decompression.

My initial plan had been to wire the dead-man switch to my pulse, which would free my good hand and allow me to sleep. That will have to wait. The wiring completed, I turned on the intercom and announced that I would speak to the Coordinator, and no one else.

When I finally got to talk to him, I told him what I had done and invited him to verify it. That didn't take long. Then I presented my demands: Surgery to replace the rest of my limbs, of course. The surgery would have to be done while I was conscious (a heartbeat dead-man switch could be subverted by a heart machine) and it would have to be done here, so that I could be a.s.sured that n.o.body fooled with my circuit changes.

The doctors were called in, and they objected that such profound surgery couldn't be done under local anesthetic. I knew they were lying, of course; amputation was a fairly routine procedure even before anesthetics were invented. Yes, but I would faint, they said. I told them that I would not, and at any rate I was willing to take the chance, and no one else had any choice in the matter.

(I have not yet mentioned that the ultimate totality of my plan involves replacing all my internal organs as well as all of the limbs-or at least those organs whose failure could cause untimely death. I will be a true cyborg then, a human brain in an "artificial" body, with the prospect of thousands of years of life. With a few decades-or centuries!-of research, I could even do something about the brain's shortcomings. I would wind up interfaced to EarthNet, with all of human knowledge at my disposal, and with my faculties for logic and memory no longer fettered by the slow pace of electrochemical synapse.) A psychiatrist, talking from Earth, tried to convince me of the error of my ways.

He said that the dreadful trauma had "obviously" unhinged me, and the cyborg augmentation, far from effecting a cure, had made my mental derangement worse. He demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that my behavior followed some cla.s.sical pattern of madness. All this had been taken into consideration, he said, and if I were to give myself up, I would be forgiven my crimes and manumitted into the loving arms of the psychiatric establishment.

I did take time to explain the fundamental errors in his way of thinking. He felt that I had quite literally lost my ident.i.ty by losing my face and genitalia, and that I was at bottom a "good" Derson whose essential humanity had been perverted by physical and existential estrangement. Totally wrong. By his terms, what I actually am is an "evil" person whose true nature was revealed to himself by the lucky accident that released him from existential propinquity with the common herd.

And "evil" is the accurate word, not maladjusted or amoral Dr even criminal. I am as evil by human standards as a human is evil by the standards of an animal raised for food, and the a.n.a.logy is accurate. I will sacrifice humans not only for my survival but for comfort, curiosity, or entertainment. I will allow to live anyone who doesn't bother me, and reward generously those who help.

Now they have only forty minutes. They know I am -end of recording 25 September 2058 Excerpt from Summary Report I am Dr. Henry Janovski, head of the surgical team that worked on the ill-fated cyborg augmentation of Dr. Wilson Cheetham.

We were fortunate that Dr. Cheetham's insanity did interfere with his normally painstaking, precise nature. If he had spent more time in preparation, I have no doubt that he would have put us in a very difficult fix.

He should have realized that the protecting wall that shut him off from the rest of Nearside was made of steel, an excellent conductor of electricity. If he had insulated himself behind a good dielectric, he could have escaped his fate.

Cheetham's waldo was a marvelous instrument, but basically it was only a pseudo- intelligent servomechanism that obeyed well-defined radio-frequency commands. All we had to do was override the signals that were coming from his own nervous system.

We hooked a powerful amplifier up to the steel wall, making it in effect a huge radio transmitter. To generate the signal we wanted amplified, I had a technician put on a waldo sleeve that was holding a box similar to Cheetham's dead-man switch. We wired the hand closed, turned up the power, and had the technician strike himself on the chin as hard as he could.

The technician struck himself so hard he blacked out for a few seconds.

Cheetham's resonant action, perhaps a hundred times more powerful, drove the bones of his chin up through the top of his skull.

Fortunately, the expensive arm itself was not damaged. It is not evil or insane by itself, of course. Which I shall prove.

The experiments will continue, though of course we will be more selective as to subjects. It seems obvious in retrospect that we should not use as subjects people who have gone through the kind of trauma that Cheetham suffered. We must use willing volunteers. Such as myself.

I am not young, and weakness and an occasional tremor in my hands limit the amount of surgery I can do-much less than my knowledge would allow, or my nature desire. My failing left arm I shall have replaced with Cheetham's mechanical marvel, and I will go through training similar to his-but for the good of humanity, not for ill.

What miracles I will perform with the knife!

I don't often see direct influences of the literary sort in my work, but that story's an exception. I was going through a Poe phase, having read Julian Symons's fascinating biography The Tell-Tale Heart (Harper & Row, 1978) and then rereading the short stories. For the love of G.o.d, Montressor.

When the last page came out of the typewriter, I was afraid I had written an absolutely unpublishable (or at least unsalable) story. Too much graphic s.e.x and violence for the science fiction magazines; too much hard science for the slicks.

Indeed, I sent it off to a science fiction magazine and got back a more-in-sorrow-- than-in-anger rejection letter. My wife talked me into sending it to Playboy, though, and they accepted it by return mail. (Her services as a literary consultant are available for a very high fee.) Playboy didn't care for the t.i.tle. I suggested "Tom Swift and His Electric p.e.n.i.s,"

but for some reason they decided the original one was okay after all.

This next story also resulted from an arbitrarily chosen topic. I was stranded in St.

Louis for five days in midsummer, the temperature hitting three digits before noon each day. I had a room with an air conditioner and a typewriter, though, and was facing a science fiction convention where I would have to do a reading. Decided to write a funny story for it.

"Write what you know" is a solemn and totally false adage you find in bad books about writing. It occurred to me, though, that I'd never written a story about what I know best: being a science fiction writer. That seemed like fertile ground for a silly tale.

SEVEN AND THE STARS.

Sometimes it's best to settle for part of the truth. When you're at a c.o.c.ktail party and some stranger asks what you do for a living, you don't come right out and say "I'm a science fiction writer." Sometimes it's better to say "I'm a novelist," or "I'm a freelance writer," or even "I'm between jobs right now." Because you can get the d.a.m.nedest responses.

Now, I'm not bothered by the philistines who mumble something about "that Buck Rogers stuff" and wander vaguely away. Nor even the people who have a terrific story idea and will split fifty-fifty, if you'll do the writing. (I always tell them I'm dead-lined and give them my ex-agent's phone number.) What bothers me is some of the nuts you meet, if they're unpleasant ones, and the people who think that you yourself must be a nut.

People find out you write science fiction and they automatically think you share their belief in flying saucers, yetis, the Loch Ness monster, the Tooth Fairy, anything.

Most of the sf writers I know don't even believe in NASA.

Still, you can't stay away from c.o.c.ktail parties. If a writer refuses a free drink, they find out about it and take away his Guild membership.

So I was at this West Village c.o.c.ktail party, having canapes for dinner, when an elegant woman in fifty-dollar jeans came up and asked me the Question. You can't lie to fifty-dollar jeans. There's something sincere about that kind of excess.

"Oh," she said, "you must be interested in UFOs."

Here I have to admit to some incipient s.e.xism, or at least an optimistic mating instinct. If she'd been a man, I would've rolled my eyes ceilingward and said something disparaging. And life would be simpler now. As it was, I put on a serious expression and said only that I didn't think there was enough evidence to come to a conclusion.

She dimpled gloriously and said she thought she had evidence. My instincts should have told me that screwb.a.l.l.s come in all shapes and sizes. But I was attracted to her, and she didn't seem too loony, and in the back of my mind was the idea that there might be a story here-not science fiction, but the cheap kind of breathless exploitation that fuels the weekly tabloids. I'd never stooped that low before. But the rent was due and I actually was at that party for the canapes.

"What sort of evidence?" I asked. "I've never seen a photograph, or anything, that I thought was very convincing."

"It's . . . hard to describe. You might think I was crazy or something."

"Not at all. That's not an accusation a science fiction writer would make lightly.

Six impossible things before breakfast, you know."

"If you really are interested, I'd rather show you. Come to my place after the party?"

No, I'd rather be poked in the eye with something sharp. I told her I'd be ready to leave whenever she was. She circulated for a while and I finished my dinner.

I should have smelled a rat. One minute of conversation and she wants me to come spend the evening. It was not for my lean and hairy personage.

We walked to an underground lot and picked up her car, a well-restored old Jaguar sedan. On the drive out to Westchester I learned that she was an a.n.a.lyst for a munic.i.p.al-fund outfit. So I was able to check her out-a couple of years ago I had some Hollywood money and put it into munic.i.p.als-and found that she was very sharp. About her "evidence," though, she offered nothing. I didn't ask, of course.

Her name was Lydia Martell. She lived in North Tarrytown, in an upper-middle- cla.s.s stucco house overlooking the Hudson and the train. I expressed surprise that she had such a large place; she said she'd been married once.

The first thing I noticed, inside, was a strong citrus odor, like those sachets little old ladies bring back from Florida. Other than that, the house was severely modern, unrelentingly tasteful. When Lydia went off to make coffee, I did some discreet snooping. Most of the wall hangings were numbered-and-signed contemporary prints, though pride of place went to a spare drawing by Pica.s.so, an original nude. If she was a nut, she was the richest one I'd ever met.

She returned with a tray, two cups of coffee, and a metal tube. "Exhibit A," she said.

The tube was very peculiar-looking. It was the kind of silvery blue you might a.s.sociate with outdoors equipment: pack frames and ski poles of anodized aluminum.

But it seemed to glow, and it was too heavy to be aluminum. Much too heavy. I hefted it in the palm of my hand.

"Right," she said. "If that were made of solid gold it would weigh less."

It '.

s impressive.

I peered through it; it was just an empty tube of thin metal.

"What's the story?"

"Exhibit B." She took the tube from me and stood it on its end, on the coffee table.

"Come on out, Seven."

A voice came from the tube. "You found one." Behind me, I heard a door click open. I turned-and saw one of those six impossible things you're supposed to believe before breakfast.

He, or she, or it was about eight feet tall and scrawny. It had the right number of legs and arms and eyes. No mouth to speak of, or with. Another blue tube swung on a chain around its neck, and it walked slowly, with the aid of two staffs. It was scaly blue and smelled like an orange grove in heat.

"Uh," I said.

"He is a scientist?" the tube said.

"Not exactly," Lydia said. "A science fiction writer."

"Please explain."

"They're people who tell stories about the future, usually in terms of science."

"We have those on my world," it said. "We keep them in a special place. Away from the young."

"Well, there weren't any scientists at the party. The biologist didn't show up. If you'd let me go to the university-"

"No, not yet. One at a time. Do you, science fiction writer, know much about science?"

"I-I read the magazines," I said. "You're . . . from another planet? Another dimension?"

"Yes, both. Perhaps he will do."

My brain was sitting there with the clutch in. The only mundane explanation I could come up with was that this was some elaborate joke involving psychedelics. I'd been turning down LSD for twenty years; now I wished I'd tried it once, for a data base. Everything else seemed so real.

"Lydia, this isn't some kind of a hoax? Like a Muppet, or-"

"Seven, shake hands with him."

The creature clumped over, transferred both staffs to its left hand, and offered its right. It was rough and dry and hotter than a fevered child's skin. "I am real," it said.

"At least as real as you are.

Then it sat down, a painfully slow operation accompanied by alarming noises.

Sitting on the floor, it was almost at eye level. And too close.

"Please explain in a way he can understand, Lydia."

"Seven is marooned here. He's . . . well, something like a tourist. His ship's drive broke down, and Earth was the nearest place where he could survive and maybe get help. He orbited for a few weeks, monitoring our broadcasts, and then landed here."

"Reluctantly," Seven said. "I'm not really sure you can help me. From your programs it seems likely you will harm me."

"But those are just entertainments," I started to protest. "n.o.body-"

"Exactly. Fiction is truth is fiction."

I took a sip of coffee and was surprised that the cup didn't rattle; I didn't spill any of it. That would happen in fiction. "How did you wind up here? Why did you choose Lydia?"