Star Song and Other Stories Part 8

It was a question that sent a shiver up his back. If that happened, he would be out of business. Period.

He headed toward home, the awful thought of it churning through his mind...

and, preoccupied with the defense of his property, he never even heard the mugger coming.

He just barely felt the crushing blow on the back of his head.

He came to gradually, through a haze of throbbing pain, to find himself staring up at a soft pastel ceiling. The forcibly clean smell he'd always a.s.sociated with hospitals curled his nostrils.... "h.e.l.lo?" he called tentatively.

There was a moment of silence. Then, suddenly, there was a young woman leaning over him. "Ah-you're back with us," she said, peering into each of his eyes in turn. "I'm Doctor Sanderson. How do you feel?"

"My head hurts," Radley told her. "Otherwise... okay, I guess. What happened?"

"Best guess is that you were mugged," she told him. "Apparently by someone who doesn't like long conversations with his victims. You were lucky, as these things go: no concussion, no bone or nerve damage, only minor bleeding. You didn't even crack your chin when you fell."

Reflexively, Radley reached up to rub his chin. Bristly, but otherwise undamaged. "Can I go home?"

Sanderson nodded. "Sure. You'll have to call someone to get you, though-your friend didn't wait."

"Friend?" Radley frowned. The crinkling of forehead skin gave an extra throb to his headache.

"Fellow who brought you in. Black man-medium build, slightly balding. Carried you about five blocks to get you here-sweating pretty hard by that time, I'll tell you." She frowned in turn. "He told the E/R people you needed help-we just a.s.sumed he was a friend or neighbor or something."

Radley started to shake his head, thought better of it. "Doesn't sound like anyone I know," he said. "I certainly wasn't with anyone when it happened."

Sanderson shrugged slightly. "Good Samaritan, then. A vanishing breed, but you still get them sometimes. Anyway. Your shoes are under the gurney there; come on down to the nurses' station when you're ready and we'll run you through the paperwork."

He thought about calling Alison to come get him, but decided he didn't really want to wake her up at this time of night. Especially not when he'd have to explain why he'd been out so late.

With his wallet gone, he had no money for a cab, but a tired-eyed policeman who had brought in a pair of prost.i.tutes gave him a lift home. What the blow on the head had started, the long trek up the steps to his apartment finished, and he barely made it to his bed before collapsing.

His headache was mostly gone when he awoke. Along with most of the day.

"Yeah, I figured you were sick or something when you didn't show up this morning," Pete said when he called the print shop. "Didn't expect it was something like this, though. You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Radley a.s.sured him, a wave of renewed shame warming his face.

How could he ever have thought someone with Pete's loyalty would betray him?

"Let me shower and change and I'll come on down."

"You don't need to do that," Pete said. "Not hardly worth coming in now, anyway.

If I may say so, it don't sound to me like you oughta be running 'round yet, and I can handle things here okay." There was a faintly audible sniff/snort, and Radley could visualize the other man smiling. "And I really don't wanna have to carry you all the way home if you fall apart on me."

"There's that," Radley conceded. "I guess you're right. Well... I'll see you in the morning, then."

"Only if you feel like it. Really-I can handle things until you're well.

Oops-gotta go. A customer just came in."

"Okay. Bye."

He hung up and gingerly felt the lump on the back of his head. Yes, Pete might have had to carry him home, at that. That little outing had sure gone sour.

As had his attempt to catch a murderer. And his attempt to solve a rape. And his attempt to stop an embezzlement.

In fact, everything the Book had given him had gone bad. One way or another, it had all gone bad.

"But it's truth," he gritted. "I mean, it is. How can truth be bad?"

He had no answer. With a sigh, he stood up from the kitchen chair. The sudden movement made his head throb, and he sat down again quickly. Yes, Pete might indeed have wound up carrying him.

Like someone else had already had to do.

Radley flushed with shame. In his mind's eye, he saw a medium-build black man, probably staggering under Radley's weight by the time he reached the hospital.

Quietly helping to clean up the mess Radley had made of himself.

"I wish they'd gotten his name," he muttered to himself. "I'll never get a chance to thank him."

He looked down at the Book... and a sudden thought struck him. If the Book contained the names of all the criminals in town, why not the names of all the Good Samaritans, too?

He opened to the Yellow Pages, feeling a renewed sense of excitement. Perhaps this, he realized suddenly, was what the Book was really for. Not a tool for tracking down and punishing the guilty, but a means of finding and rewarding the good. The G's... there they were. Ge, Gl, Go...

There was no Good Samaritans listing.

Nor was there an Altruists listing. Nor were there listings for benefactor, philanthropist, hero, or patriot. Or for good example, salt of the earth, angel, or saint.

There was nothing.

He thought about it for a long time. Then, with only a slight hesitation, he picked up the phone.Alison answered on the fourth ring. "h.e.l.lo?"

"It's me," Radley told her. "Listen." He took a careful breath. "I know the difference now. You know-the difference between true and truth?"

"Yes?" she said, her voice wary.

"Yeah. True is a group of facts-any facts, in any combination. Truth is all the facts. Both sides of the story. The bad and the good."

She seemed to digest that. "Yes, I think you're right. So what does that mean?"

He bit at his lip. She'd been right, he could admit now; he had enjoyed the knowledge and power the Book had given him. "So," he said, "I was wondering if you'd like to come up. It's... well, you know, it's kind of a chilly night."

The Book burned with an eerie blue flame, and its non-plastic bag burned green.

Together, they were quite spectacular.

The Broccoli Factor

"So," Tom Banning said, his voice m.u.f.fled by the coffee cup hovering just below mustache level. "How's life in the hot lane?"

"Don't ask," Billy Hayes sighed, spooning the last few chunks of ice from his water gla.s.s into his own mug. The Inst.i.tute's cafeteria invariably served their coffee at a temperature which, in his opinion, was just short of the melting point of lead. "The last confinement scheme officially went down the gutter this morning, and we're right back on square one."

Banning slurped some coffee and shook his head. "Remember the good old days when fusion power was going to be just around the corner?"

"Yeah," Hayes retorted. "That was maybe twenty years before artificial intelligence was going to be just around the corner."

Banning grimaced. "Talk about job security."

Hayes nodded, and for a minute they sat silently, each contemplating in his own way the perversity of the Universe. "So what's the trouble this time?"

Banning asked at last.

"Oh, the usual," Hayes shrugged. "We can get the plasma hot enough, but we can't figure out how to keep it confined long enough in the center of the vacuum chamber. Every time we reconfigure the fields to eliminate one instability-Blooie!-another one crops up, drives the plasma out to the wall, and that's that."

"Computer design doesn't help?"

"Not so far. I don't suppose you've got JUNIOR to the point of understanding plasma physics yet?"

"Don't rub it in," Banning growled.

"Sorry," Hayes apologized. "Still stuck at the two-year-old intelligence level, eh?"

Banning glared down into his coffee. "We got him to the level of a six-month-old exactly eight months after the breakthrough. Six months later he was a year old.

It took just two more months to get him where he is now... and we haven't gotten him to budge since."Hayes nodded. He'd heard the litany a hundred times in the past four years-just as Banning had spent endless lunch breaks listening to his litany. Just a couple of broken old men, he thought sourly. Flat up against the wall of the Universe, without an exit sign in sight. "At least you don't have to worry about funding,"

he offered.

"Not from congressional committees, no," Banning agreed darkly. "But on the other hand, you don't have the entire j.a.panese computer industry breathing down your neck."

Hayes sighed. "A pity you can't at least get him to the three-year-old level.

My grandson just turned three, and he loves to tinker with mechanical toys. Give a three-year-old AI the magnetohydrodynamic equations and it might just come up with something."

"Be thankful JUNIOR's not still at the six month level," Banning said dryly.

"He'd take your equations and chew them to a pulp."

"Gum them to a pulp, you mean," Hayes corrected him. "Six-month-olds don't have any teeth."

"Just like sixty-year-olds," Banning said, snorting a chuckle as he readjusted his upper plate. "You suppose the secret of the Universe is that life is round?"

" 'Pi are round; cornbread are square,' " Hayes said, quoting the hairy old joke from his youth. It was one of the chestnuts he brought out periodically to try on ever-younger sets of new Inst.i.tute employees, who were generally unanimous in failing to see any humor in it. "And on that note, I guess lunch is over," he added.

"Yeah," Banning agreed with a sigh. "Back to uselessly banging our heads."

"Six-month-olds do that a lot, too," Hayes said. "Mostly when they're crawling under coffee tables."

"Haven't programmed a coffee table into JUNIOR's environment," Banning said as they headed for the cafeteria door. "Maybe I ought to try it."

"Yeah-it'd be interesting to hear what a computer sounds like when it cries.

Well, happy hunting."

Four hours later Banning's private line rang. "h.e.l.lo?"

"It's Billy," Hayes identified himself. "Listen, you said earlier that JUNIOR's environment can be programmed. "Can JUNIOR himself be programmed, too?"

"Sure," Banning said, frowning. "You can dump any peripheral stuff into him-"

"Without affecting his intelligence?"

"Such as it is, sure."

"Can you lend him to me? Say, for six hours?"

"Take all the time you want," Banning sniffed. "Adopt him, for all I care.

I'm thinking of quitting and joining a monastery, anyway."

"Yeah, well, don't invest in rosary beads just yet," Hayes told him. "Your idiot savant computer may just be good for something, after all."

The red glow on the monitor faded, and Banning shook his head in wonderment.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned. You did it. You really and truly did it."

"We sure did," Hayes nodded. "Me and JUNIOR."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," Banning repeated, reverently. "After all these years. Real, genuine fusion."

"It's the fluctuating confinement fields that broke the deadlock," Banning told him, tapping the printout still snaking its way out of the printer. "JUNIOR has to alter them every ten microseconds or so to keep the plasma confined, but that appears to be well within his capabilities."

"Capabilities, yes. Sophistication, no." Banning fixed him with a puzzled and slightly ominous look. "Come on, Billy; I came to see your triumph, like you asked, and I agree you're a genius. So now level with me-because if you got JUNIOR past the two-year-old level last month and didn't tell me about it then, I swear I'm going to strangle you."

Hayes shook his head. "No such luck, I'm afraid. JUNIOR's no further along than he was when you loaned him to me."

"Then kindly explain that," Banning demanded, waving at the fusion test chamber.

"JUNIOR can't possibly have the intelligence or expertise that demonstration showed."