Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  Her inventory of promising illegalities narrowed to a mere tetrad of possibles: vice (not as a victim or tool but as an entrepreneur), murder, rape, fraud or stealing. But she detested both murder and rape: both victimized, and both were confessions of one or another kind of inadequacy. The purveying of vice at first seemed more appealing, if one could avoid victimizing nice guys and gals, if one could concentrate on rich and irresponsible customers; but when you analyzed that to the wall, you found that you had to victimize nice guys and gals in order to please wealthy debauchery; Dorita hated hurting good-hearted people, so that was out.

  The only tabu left for consideration was fraud or stealing.

  At first glance, either fraud or stealing would directly or indirectly victimize nice guys and gals. But Dorita quickly saw that the world was full of fat cats who had got that way by one or another sort of victimization, if only by exploiting workers or by paying no interest on checking accounts. Therefore, with her left lobe critically prompting her wide-ranging right lobe (while her left lobe casually collected B’s and C’s in her school work), Dorita began to lay plans for becoming the most untouchable and large-scale-successful defrauder and burglar since Robin Hood, with all of Robin’s penchant for sharing the wealth with the needy.

  When she first began to practice her new craft on schoolmates, Dorita discovered that she had two unfair advantages. Great!

  Advantage One: Studying a female classmate who was standing and haltingly reciting in answer to a teacher-question, Dorita found that somehow she was anticipating every word that her classmate was saying. Trying this on others, she discovered that she could read what was forming just below the surfaces of their conscious minds. Trying it eventually on teachers, having a strong feeling that she could read their evaluations, which were developing as recitations proceeded, Dorita tested by getting into teachers’ classbooks at times when she sensed that the teachers were distant, and in every case she found that the anticipated evaluation had been marked down. Right-lobe achievement, brought under left-lobe control!

  Advantage Two: Pussy-cat-sitting on her bed in her room, meditating, idly eyeing a half-finished glass of ginger ale on the table beside the chair she had just departed, Dorita whimsically reflected how nice it would be if the ginger ale would just come to her; and then, remembering that telekinetic ability was not infrequently linked with telepathy, which she had, she seriously willed that the ginger ale come. It came, all over her, without the glass. Laughing while she cleaned herself and theorized, she guessed that you had to have a full mental definition of what was to come, before you tried moving it— and also a restrictive definition, so that the table would not come along with the glass of liquid. This ability, too, she honed. Same lobal interplay.

  Soon classmates were beginning to miss things out of their lockers—and to discover them back there within hours—although the lockers were palmprint-locked. Dorita had not bothered to fake palmprints, which she thought maybe she could have done. But she understood now that she must for certain know what she wanted out of the closed place before she tampered; a couple of times she had merely asked for the locker contents, not knowing what those contents might be, and nothing had come.

  Before long, teachers began to miss class record books which had been in locked drawers, and to find them in there later. It became more subtle: a teacher, examining her classbook,. would find a certain student marked A for yesterday, although she could swear that she had entered a C or D; but the A was in the teacher’s own hand, with no evidence of erasure. The student beneficiary was never Dorita; nor was it, except by accident, ever a favorite classmate, just somebody who needed help.

  The best-heeled student in school missed a hundred-note from his billfold. That one never came back to him; but five indigent students discovered unexpected twenties in their billfolds or purses.

  Dorita now went a step further. Finding an excuse to interview the principal, she detected in his mind an intent to put a fire-insurance policy in the school safe that night. Next day, the policy was gone from the safe, but it turned up in the safe again the following morning. Dorita had successfully put together mind-monitoring and body-snatching.

  After high-school graduation at sixteen, she refused college, explaining to her irritated but not altogether mystified father that she had to get a job and find herself. (Her most recent test scores had been so high that a dozen top colleges would have bid competitively for her, despite her shaky scholarship; even the educational achievement measures were high: both her lobes had been involuntarily soaking up stuff.)

  She went to the Big Apple in mid-2463 with a small grubstake from her father, found an apartment with a roommate (female), and located work as a waitress in a fast-food operation. Her roommate was rather attractive, which reminded Dorita that she hadn’t yet broken the homosexual semi-no-no; but with a roomie you avoid such things, they breed only living trouble. There were plenty of attractive young men around, too; but Dorita, having already scored in that game, had little time for them.

  What she did have time for was banks, on mornings soon after they opened and before her day’s work began at eleven, and also on bank-open Monday evenings between eight and nine. She sampled five banks, all main offices, before opening her first account on her first payday.

  Her procedure was the same in all five banks. She would enter, look ingenuous, saunter around sizing up the physical and mental terrain. When she sensed that a guard or a customer consultant had eyes on her, she would let her head drift around until she spied that person, and to him (or her) she would mouth from across the room: “Can you help me?” Their sense always was that this wide-eyed round-mouthed blonde kid of perhaps fourteen (as remarked, her age was sixteen) was looking for her father or mother. When the employee would beckon to her, she would approach and plead: “Sir” (or “Madam,” the approach worked on either sex), “I have a little money that I’d like to invest, can you help me?” And after several minutes of earnest conversation, preferably with an assistant manager, she would produce five credits. The employee would smile tolerantly and aver that there was little he could recommend other than an ordinary savings account. She would inquire intently about such matters as withdrawal privileges and interest; then, all indecisive, she would stand and say, “Thank you so much, but I really will have to think about it—”

  She would depart with a good deal of mind-tapped information about that bank’s operations, but without opening an account because accounts in more than one prey-bank could lead to trouble. Probably some of the assistant managers from diversified banks would tell each other, at exchange or drinking clubs, the story of the wide-eyed blonde kid with five bucks to invest; if two of them had seen her and compared notes, they would probably chuckle and wonder how many banks she would visit before investing—“Some little comparative shopper!”—and let it go at that; no harm done.

  By the time she opened her first checking account with a hundred-credit deposit, which was most of her first two weeks’ pay, she knew the generalities of what she needed to know in order to bring off a telekinetic heist. Refinements were needed; and she had figured excuses to go up the management pyramid in order to get them telepathically. But telepathy alone was not enough: she had to reason out what questions to get answered. And before moving to get any money, she wanted to know the hazards involved in getting rid of it.

  Meanwhile it became evident that she needed more capital than she could earn in fast food. Without too much difficulty, she found a job as a waitress in a fairly decent night-spot restaurant on Fifty-Second Street; the restaurant had a lot of business-dinner trade, so she went for the five-to-one shift and got it. The salary was half again her fast-food pay, and her tips doubled the salary. Two weeks later, she had what she needed for operations.

  Having set aside ninety-five credits in small bills, she visited a branch manager in a sixth bank. Producing the money, she told the official that a man on the street had given it to her in exchange for her wristwat
ch, and she had got to thinking that it might be bad money or even hot money; could he help her, please? The official scrutinized every bill (some new, most worn); he got out a book of teletyped serial numbers, sampled the bills, and checked the sample against the book; then, smiling, he returned the bills and assured her that to the best of his knowledge and belief they were neither counterfeit nor hot; but he warned this little girl against taking money from strangers. Dorita departed with all the information that had been going through the man’s mind about identifying hot bills and laundering money.

  She checked and filled out the information as follows. Compiling a list of five small private detective agencies listed in small type in the yellow pages, she visited each of these dicks, showed him the money, and gave him the story about the wristwatch. After seeing all five and paying their advisory fees, her cash had dwindled to forty-five credits: she had paid fifty credits for a gold mine. True, she was now superficially known to six banks and five private eyes—but to what end?

  Approach to final operation:

  Dorita telekinetically forged a line-out and correction in her checking account passbook; the correction reduced a ninety-credit deposit to eighty credits. Patiently then she stood in line at the window of the same teller; and when her turn came, she showed him the correction, told him she hadn’t noticed it until just now, assured him that the original ninety-credit entry had been the correct amount. He studied the entry, shook his head, muttered that he just never did that sort of thing; but he had to admit that the correction was in his handwriting. He couldn’t out-check it, his vouchers were long since filed; she’d have to see an assistant manager—and, since she was such a piteous pretty little girl, he left his window, conducted her to the official, repeated the story, and left her there. The assistant manager said kindly that the vouchers weren’t available to him, Dorita would have to see the cashier.

  The matronly cashier was hostile at first, but Dorita’s abashed girlhood brought her around. “Let me show you what the problem is,” the cashier said; and she conducted Dorita into the open bank vault. “Have you ever been in one of these vaults?” Wide-eyed, Dorita negated. The cashier pointed in turn to three rooms, each barred by a locked grill. “In there are private deposit boxes rented by our customers—you can rent one, Miss Lanceo, whenever you choose, if you have valuable papers or wish to keep ready cash there. In there we keep deposited cash until it is collected for storage in a Brinks warehouse.” Dorita caught it that this happened every Thursday. “Now, in this third room, we store what is related to your problem. Here we file all our vouchers on individual transactions for a period of seven years, and then the vouchers are destroyed. You see, even a microflake wouldn’t show the type of error that you are reporting; we have to keep the originals. Now, my dear, just look through those bars at those stacks and stacks of vouchers. It would take one of our busy people at least an hour of lost work to probe into those stacks and produce the voucher that would settle your question about a mere ten credits. Really, if you don’t mind, I’d rather give you the ten credits out of pocket.” Dorita caught it that she meant, out of contingency cash.

  “You’re just awfully nice,” murmured intimidated Dorita, “and I can see how my problem seems awful little in comparison with all the money in that other room. Your teller was probably right, anyway. I’d rather just drop the matter.”

  The cashier hugged her arm. “No, I insist, my dear. You just come back to my office, and I’ll give you a nice ten-credit bill.”

  Dorita brought off a blush. “Well, if you insist. But I’d rather you’d make it five credits, that way neither of us would be out more than five.”

  The cashier gave her an impulsive hug. “Honey, come over to this, gate where all the money is. How much cash do you guess is in there? If you come within a million credits of the right figure, I’ll give you ten; if you miss, we’ll make it five.” Dorita read the figure in the cashier’s mind; deliberately, she guessed too low by millions.

  And now Dorita had all she needed.

  When the Brinks people arrived on Thursday morning, they were greeted by an abashed bank staff. All the money from the past week was gone.

  The afternoon papers headlined: FIVE MILLION CR BANK HEIST!

  Dorita serenely continued to work in her restaurant. The telekinetically stolen money was stashed in a locus easily-available to her alone. Nobody else could possibly find it.

  That right brain lobe of Dorita’s was incredible! First it had provided her with sure intuitions, then with telepathic readings, then with projective telepathy (she could compel a person by telepathic suggestion), then with telekinesis—and, surely the final revelation, with tempokinesis.

  Her left lobe kept trying to rationalize her right lobe’s developing powers. In the end, her left lobe had to content itself with guiding and controlling those powers.

  The concept of reading or partially controlling another person’s mind was deceptively easy for her left lobe to accept and even to rationalize. Even the concept of mentally compelling an object to move instantaneously from one space-locus to another was semi-rationalizable, though the question how it might be done put the left lobe into a symbolic blur. But movement in time. .. .

  Can’t happen! insisted Left. No possible conceptualization!

  To hell with your conceptualization. Right retorted. Excuse me, not to hell with it—just use it to find a way for us to try movement in time!

  It had to be a checkable thing, and simple at first. Her initial thought was to send something into the future by a few minutes: she could check its vanishing and reappearance by her cutichron. Right objected: Not future! something wrong with that. Try past. Left didn’t have the theory of unconcresced probabilities, which was what was wrong with futuring; but Dorita did accept that the test must be a transition into the past. And that sort of transition would be infinitely tougher to test. Besides, neither Right nor Left had the faintest idea how to gauge whether a thing would go into the past, once sent, by one day or by twenty or what.

  Encouraged by her teleportations, Dorita devised a combinaison. On 20 August 2463, she wrote a note to a friend, predating it to 10 August, asking her friend to phone her on 21 August for a special reason. She mailed the note, willing as it dropped into the box that it be delivered on 11 August. On 21 August, her friend phoned: “Dorita, I have your note—what’s up?” Dorita queried: “When did you receive it?” “That’s a funny thing,” the friend said; “it came two weeks ago, but it was dated 10 August, only ten days ago. Dorita, are you slipping?”

  It did not occur to Dorita that she had created a tiny time-paradox (which anyhow could have no effect on the world’s growth). Dorita only exulted in the sure knowledge that she had brought off a backtime passage with merely a forty percent time-error on her first try. During several ensuing months, she worked on the new art, refining it progressively.

  Thus, when she stole the bank money early in 2464, Dorita was able to hide it unfindably: in her own apartment—two days in the past.

  She laundered the stolen money, developing a simple generalization: every letter in all the serial numbers would be changed to the next one in the alphabet, and each number would become the prior number. And then she simply willed it to happen, and it happened. To crack that would take a cryptographer looking for a change-code, an utterly improbable police hypothesis. She had worked around letters W through Z, knowing from her mind-taps that they had not yet been used in the official serialization.

  The next problem was the one that plagues authors: distribution. She set aside twenty percent for herself: a million made a very nice grubstake As beneficiaries of the remaining four million, she built a list of twenty charities; but the difficulty was, how to deposit an average of Cr 200,000 into the treasury of each charity without unbalancing books or otherwise raising eyebrows. Much of her time during the next few weeks was methodically devoted to visiting each charity in the guise of a cub reporter for one or another newskenner, asking to
see the books, and locating the cash depository; in this operation, her projective hypnosis worked well; her treatment included a stipulation that they would notice no change in their cash balances, and indeed that they would permanently forget her visits. Wasn’t it Jesus who had exhorted, “Give in secret?” Once all that was accomplished, it was easy (relaxed in her apartment) to change all their books and send money to all their safes. Presumably, deserving people would benefit, although you never knew about a charity.

  As for her own million, it would have been nice to invest it at interest; but any large investment by previously impecunious Miss Lanceo would be sure to arouse curiosity; and since all investments were centrally registered in Erthworld Union Headquarters, any combination of small investments even under pseudonyms would eventually be brought together by somebody. So she played it safe, economically devouring her own capital, drawing it up from the past of her apartment and spending it as needed, while continuing at the restaurant as a waitress for self-screening and for laughs.

  Eventually she dared a dangerously desperate thing. Instead of merely calling up money, she moved herself into the past to fetch it—having not a clue in the world as to whether she could ever find her way back to the present with or without the money.

  After a number of erroneous backtime drolleries comparable to repeatedly missing your ways in the mirror-maze of a funny-house, quite by accident she found herself again in the present with a fistful of notes.

  For quite awhile afterward, the intricacies of learning how to time-dive (right lobe somehow initiating, left lobe trying to control) totally engrossed her off-duty interest. But shortly after she had seduced Marc Antony away from Cleopatra, the fascination of time-diving palled.