Assignment in Tomorrow

by Anthology

  “What happened to the boss?” he demanded hoarsely. “Who’s he?”

  “Put your gun away, Pinero. The boss died of a heart attack. That shouldn’t surprise you—he was expecting it any day.”

  “Yeah, I know. But how’d that guy get in?”

  Moss stirred impatiently. “He was here all along. Send the truck back. I’m not moving. I’ll take care of Talbot.”

  The gangster looked uncertain, but, in lieu of another commander, he obeyed Moss’s order. “Well, O.K. if you say so.” He closed the door.

  When Pinero had gone down the hall, Moss turned to face Gilroy.

  “You’re not scared—much!” Gilroy said.

  Moss ignored his sarcastic outburst. “Where were we?” he asked. “Oh, yes. While you were standing there shivering, I had time to think over my offer. I’ll operate for nothing.”

  “You bet you will!” Gilroy wagged his gun forcefully.

  Moss sniffed at it. “That has nothing to do with my decision. I have no fear of death, and I’m not afraid of your evidence. If I do operate, it will be because of my interest in the experiment.” Wood intercepted Moss’s speculative gaze. It mocked, hardened, glittered sinisterly. “But, of course,” Moss added smoothly, “I will definitely operate. In fact, I insist on it!”

  His hidden threat did not escape Wood. Once he lay under Moss’s knife it would be the end. A slip of the knife—a bit of careful carelessness in the gas mixture—a deliberately caused infection—and Moss would clear himself of the accusation by claiming he could not perform the operation, and therefore was not the vivisectionist. Wood recoiled, shaking his head violently from side to side.

  “Wood’s right,” the editor said. “He knows Moss better. He wouldn’t come out of the operation alive.”

  Gilroy’s brow creased in an uneasy frown. The gun in his hand was a futile implement of force; even Moss knew he would not use it—could not, because the surgeon was only valuable to them alive. His purpose had been to make Moss operate. Well, he thought, he had accomplished that purpose. Moss offered to operate. But all four knew that under Moss’s knife, Wood was doomed. Moss had cleverly turned the victory to utter rout.

  “Then what the hell’ll we do?” Gilroy exploded savagely. “What do you say, Wood? Want to take the chance, or keep on in a dog’s body?”

  Wood snarled, backing away.

  “At least, he’s still alive,” the editor said fatalistically.

  Moss smiled, protesting with silken mockery that he would do his best to return Wood’s body.

  “Barring accidents,” Gilroy spat. “No soap, Moss. He’ll get along the way he is, and you’re going to get yours.”

  He looked grimly at Wood, jerking his head significantly in Moss’s direction.

  “Come on, chief,” he said, guiding the editor through the door and closing it. “These old friends want to be alone—lot to talk over——”

  Instantly, Wood leaped before the door and crouched there menacingly, glaring at Moss with blind, vicious hatred. For the first time, the surgeon dropped his pose of indifference. He inched cautiously around the wall toward the door. He realized suddenly that this was an animal——

  Wood advanced, cutting off his line of retreat. Mane bristling, head lowered ominously between blocky shoulders, bright gums showing above white curved fangs, Wood stalked over the floor, stiff-jointed, in a low, inexorably steady rhythm of approach.

  Moss watched anxiously. He kept looking up at the door in an agony of longing. But Wood was there, closing the gap for the attack. He put up his hands to thrust away——

  And his nerve broke. He could not talk down mad animal eyes as he could a man holding a gun. He darted to the side and ran for the door.

  Wood flung himself at the swiftly pumping legs. They crashed against him, tripped. Moss sprawled face down on the floor. He crossed his arms under his head to protect his throat.

  Wood slashed at an ear. It tore, streaming red. Moss screeched and clapped his hands over his face, trying to rise without dropping his guard. But Wood ripped at his fingers.

  The surgeon’s hands clawed out. He was kneeling, defenseless, trying to fight off the rapid, aimed lunges—and those knifelike teeth——

  Wood gloated. A minute before, the scrubbed pink face had been aloof, sneering. Now it bobbed frantically at his eye level, contorted with overpowering fear, blood flowing brightly down the once scrupulously clean cheeks.

  For an instant, the pale throat gleamed exposed at him. It was soft and helpless. He shot through the air. His teeth struck at an angle and snatched—The white flesh parted easily. But a bony structure snapped between his jaws as he swooped by.

  Moss knelt there after Wood had struck. His pain-twisted face gasped imbecilically, hands limp at his sides. His throat poured a red flood. Then his face drained to a ghastly lack of color and he pitched over.

  He had lost, but he had also won. Wood was doomed to live out his life in a dog’s body. He could not even expect to live his own life span. The average life of a dog is fifteen years. Wood could expect perhaps ten years more.

  In his human body, Wood had found it difficult to find a job. He had been a code expert; but code experts, salesmen and apprentice workmen have no place in a world of shrinking markets. The employment agencies are glutted with an over-supply of normal human intelligences housed in strong, willing, expert human bodies.

  The same normal human intelligence in a handsome collie’s body had a greater market value. It was a rarity, a phenomenon to be gaped at after a ticket had been purchased for the privilege.

  “Men’ve always had a fondness for freaks,” Gilroy philosophized on their way to the theater where Wood had an engagement. “Mildly amusing freaks are paid to entertain. The really funny ones are given seats of honor and power. Figure it out, Wood. I can’t. Once we get rid of our love of freaks and put them where they belong, we’ll have a swell world.”

  The taxi stopped in a side street, at the stage entrance. Lurid red-and-yellow posters, the size of cathedral murals, plastered the theater walls; and from them smirked prettified likenesses of Wood.

  “Gosh!” their driver gasped. “Wait’ll my kids hear about this. I drove the Talkin’ Dog! Gee, is that an honor, or ain’t it?”

  On all sides, pedestrians halted in awe, taxis stopped with a respectful screech of brakes; then an admiring swarm bore down on him.

  “Isn’t he cute?” women shrieked. “So intelligent-looking!”

  “Sure,” Wood heard their driver boast proudly, “I drove him down here. What’s he like?” His voice lowered confidentially. “Well, the guy with him—his manager, I guess—he was talkin’ to him just as intelligent as I’m talkin’ to you. Like he could understand ev’y word.”

  “Bet he could, too,” a listener said definitely.

  “G’on,” another theorized. “He’s just trained, like Rin-tin-tin, on’y better. But he’s smart all right. Wisht I owned him.”

  The theater-district squad broke through the tangle of traffic and formed a lane to the stage door.

  “Yawta be ashamed ayeshelves,” a cop said. “All this over a mutt!”

  Wood bared his fangs at the speaker, who retreated defensively.

  “Wise guy, huh?” the mob jeered. “Think he can’t understand?”

  It was a piece of showmanship that Wood and Gilroy had devised. It never failed to find a feeder in the form of an officious policeman and a response from the crowd.

  Even in the theater, Wood was not safe from overly enthusiastic admiration. His fellow performers persisted in scratching his unitching back and ears, cooing and burbling in a singularly unintelligent manner.

  The thriller that Wood had made in Hollywood was over; and while the opening acts went through their paces, Wood and Gilroy stood as far away from the wings as the theater construction would permit.

  “Seven thousand bucks a week, pal,” Gilroy mused over and over. “Just for doing something that any mug out in the audience can
do twice as easily. Isn’t that the payoff?”

  In the year that had passed, neither was still able to accustom himself to the mounting figures in their bank book. Pictures, personal appearances, endorsements, highly fictionized articles in magazines—all at astronomical prices——

  But he could never have enough money to buy back the human body he had starved in.

  “O.K., Wood,” Gilroy whispered. “We’re on.”

  They were drummed onto the stage with deafening applause. Wood went through his routine perfunctorily. He identified objects that had been named by the theater manager, picking them out of a heap of piled objects.

  Ushers went through the aisles, collecting questions the audience had written on slips of paper. They passed them up to Gilroy.

  Wood took a long pointer firmly in his mouth and stood before a huge lettered screen. Painfully, he pointed out, letter by letter, the answers to the audience’s questions. Most of them asked about the future, market tips, racing information. A few seriously probed his mind.

  White light stabbed down at him. Mechanically, he spelled out the simple answers. Most of his bitterness had evaporated; in its place was a dreary defeat, and dull acceptance of his dog’s life. His bank book had six figures to the left of the decimal—more than he had ever conceived of, even as a distant Utopian possibility. But no surgeon could return his body to him, or increase his life expectancy of less than ten years.

  Sharply, everything was washed out of sight: Gilroy, the vast alphabet screen, the heavy pointer in his mouth, the black space smeared with pale, gaping blobs of faces, even the white light staring down——

  He lay on a cot in a long ward. There was no dreamlike quality of illusion in the feel of smooth sheets beneath and above him, or in the weight of blankets resting on his outstretched body.

  And independently of the rest of his hand, his finger moved in response to his will. Its nail scratched at the sheet, loudly, victoriously.

  An interne, walking through the ward, looked around for the source of the gloating sound. He engaged Wood’s eyes that were glittering avidly, deep with intelligence. Then they watched the scratching finger.

  “You’re coming back,” the interne said at last.

  “I’m coming back.” Wood spoke quietly, before the scene vanished and he heard Gilroy repeat a question he had missed.

  He knew then that the body-mind was a unit. Moss had been wrong; there was more to identity than that small gland, something beyond the body. The forced division Moss had created was unnatural; the transplanted tissue was being absorbed, remodeled. Somehow, he knew these returns to his natural identity would recur, more and more—till it became permanent—till he became human once more.

  A Matter of Form by H.L. Gold. Copyright, 1938, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., for Astounding Science-Fiction; reprinted by permission of the author.

  RICHARD WILSON

  Some science-fiction writers hold down jobs by day and do their writing in the long hours of the night; Richard Wilson, though, spends his nights as a news editor, presiding over a battery of teletypes in New York’s Times Square, and puts in his storywriting time by day. Search not for an open and sunlit quality in his prose, however; you are more likely to find it as wry and darkling as——

  Back to Julie

  You can’t go shooting off to that dimension for peanuts. I don’t want to give you the impression that peanuts had become scarce here and that we’d found our economy in the fix of having to import them sidewise. What I mean is that if you’re one of the rare ones equipped functionally to do the side shuffle, you ought to be well paid for it.

  That’s what I told Krasnow. And he wasn’t after peanuts. I said I’d do it if he made it worth my while. He said he’d make it worth my while because he had to and how much did I want. I told him. That gave him to pause, but only briefly. After he’d agreed I told him to make him feel better that it had to be a lot because you can’t take it with you. You can’t skip with the swag. You have to go naked. You can’t get there with so much as a sandal on your foot or a filling in your tooth.

  So Krasnow, sweat pouring off his florid face as he worked the combination of the safe, and his fat jowls quivering unhappily around his cigar as he counted out the bills, put up the money. Ten per cent was in advance and the rest went into a bank account in my name. I paid off a batch of bills, then undressed and took the side trip.

  Honest John Krasnow was a crooked District Attorney who wanted to be Governor, and then President. He had the Machine, but he didn’t have the People. And because he needed the People he needed me. I’d been to this other dimension—the one on the farthest branch of the time-tree—and I could give him what he wanted.

  Krasnow found that out after I’d been hauled up in front of him, as D.A., on a check-kiting charge. I’d had something of a reputation before that and in trying to live up to it I’d done some plain and fancy spending. Nothing that fifteen or twenty thousand dollars wouldn’t have fixed, though. While I was scrounging around trying to get it I kited a few checks. They pyramided me right into the D.A.’s office, where Krasnow was very sympathetic. A man of my position in the scientific world, he said, tch-tch. As one of our fair city’s outstanding citizens, he said, and so on and so on. It was quite a lecture and even coming from Krasnow it made me feel contrite.

  So I told him about myself. I told him where I was born and where I went to school and how it was at the university and where I’d been on sabbaticals, including this other dimension. He believed me. I can’t account for it, except possibly because Krasnow was a crook and I wasn’t, exactly. He was a big time operator. I was a small time one, and a failure besides. Anyhow he believed me and we made the deal.

  The journey to that other dimension isn’t a pleasant one. It does upsetting things to the stomach and you see things thin and elongated, as if you were sitting down front and to the side in a movie.

  I got there, as I was pretty sure I would, and waited for the hiccups to subside. Hiccupi laterally I had called them when I considered doing an article for the medical journal. Then I stole some clothing, which was one of the riskiest parts of it all, and waited for it to be morning. I didn’t have any money, of course, so I had to hitchhike into town.

  I could have stolen myself a better fit, but people aren’t clothes-conscious in that dimension. They’re more interested in what you are and what you can do. The man I rode in with was very impressed with what I told him was my ability to eliminate the long wait in the production of ivory by speeding up the growth cycle of elephants and he tipped me handsomely. I was less impressed with his talent of growing cobless com and therefore had to return only a small part of the sum.

  This world had developed remarkably like Earth. I mean like our Earth, which falls into what I have designated Timeline One Point One, since it’s the one I’m most familiar with. Every other world called itself Earth, too, of course, if it had a language. I’d visited, briefly, hundreds of the parallel worlds, hovering over primordial swamps, or limitless oceans, or insect kingdoms, or radioactive planetoids, before I’d found the one that was truly parallel. That was in Timeline Seventeen Point Zero Eight and it had refrigerators, platinum blondes, automobiles, airplanes, apple pie, newspapers, television, Scotch and soda—just about everything we consider to be the things that make life worth while. It had little differences, too. But that was to be expected in a timeline where the binomics could create a new world every time somebody changed his mind.

  Thus the cobless corn man was driving what looked to me like a Chevrolet but which was, in his frame of reference, a Morton. He let me off near a downtown restaurant where, thanks to our conversation about the elephants, I had enough money for breakfast. It wasn’t considered ethical to exchange ability-impressions outside the limits of certain rigidly defined groups, so I didn’t try to outimpress the waitress.

  Then, fed and fitting a little better into my stolen clothes, I walked to the recorder’s office and spent the r
est of the morning looking up old documents. There was nothing there for Krasnow, as I’d suspected, But for me there was a pretty file clerk. In talking to her I verified my belief that people in that other dimension aren’t much different. Except in the one basic respect that interested Krasnow, of course.

  We had lunch together and I spent the afternoon in the library but didn’t find anything there, either, and then I had dinner with the girl. Her name is Julie and I told her mine was Heck, for Hector, which it is. She thought this was clever and we got along fine.

  She had a nice apartment and a delightful sense of hospitality. The next day when Julie went to work I stayed home and washed the dishes and made the bed and used the telephone.

  I ran up quite a bill with my long distance calls, but I found out what I needed to know. I impressed a lot of people with the elephant story and pretended to be impressed hardly at all with what they told me, although I often was, very much.

  The trouble with those people is that they don’t know how to lie, if that’s a trouble.

  I don’t think it is. Neither did Krasnow, obviously. He wouldn’t have sent me off on my expensive side trip if he had. Of course Krasnow looked at it objectively, What he wanted from Timeline Seventeen Point Zero Eight was not for himself at all. It was for everybody else. He wanted the formula for the truth gas that these people had developed long ago and had loosed on their world to cure war.

  They’d been in a bad way, you see, although it was no worse than the sort of thing we were up against. Their transocean squabbles and power politics seemed to have settled down into a pattern or a war or two per generation. Just like us. So the man who had invented the truth gas became a global hero, after a certain amount of skepticism and cynicism. All the doubts vanished, of course, after the gas had got to working. So did war.