Picking up the vidphone, he dialed 214, the extension for the maintenance circuit of the building. “Listen,” he said, when the homeostatic entity answered. “I’m now in a position to divert some of my funds in the direction of settling my bill vis-à-vis your clean-up robots. I’d like them up here right now to go over my apt. I’ll pay the full and entire bill when they’re finished.”
“Sir, you’ll pay your full and entire bill before they start.”
By now he had his billfold in hand; from it he dumped his supply of Magic Credit Keys—most of which, by now, had been voided. Probably in perpetuity, his relationship with money and the payment of pressing debts being such as it was. “I’ll charge my overdue bill against my Triangular Magic Key,” he informed his nebulous antagonist. “That will transfer the obligation out of your jurisdiction; on your books it’ll show as total restitution.”
“Plus fines, plus penalties.”
“I’ll charge those against my Heart-Shaped—”
“Mr. Chip, the Ferris & Brockman Retail Credit Auditing and Analysis Agency has published a special flier on you. Our recept-slot received it yesterday and it remains fresh in our minds. Since July you’ve dropped from a triple G status creditwise to quadruple G. Our department—in fact this entire conapt building—is now programed against an extension of services and/or credit to such pathetic anomalies as yourself, sir. Regarding you, everything must hereafter be handled on a basic-cash subfloor. In fact, you’ll probably be on a basic-cash subfloor for the rest of your life. In fact—”
He hung up. And abandoned the hope of enticing and/or threatening the clean-up robots into entering his muddled apt. Instead, he padded into the bedroom to dress; he could do that without assistance.
After he had dressed—in a sporty maroon wrapper, twinkle-toes turned-up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel—he poked about hopefully in the kitchen for some manifestation of coffee. None. He then focused on the living room and found, by the door leading to the bathroom, last night’s greatcape, every spotty blue yard of it, and a plastic bag which contained a half-pound can of authentic Kenya coffee, a great treat and one which only while pizzled would he have risen to. Especially in view of his current abominable financial situation.
Back in the kitchen he fished in his various pockets for a dime, and, with it, started up the coffeepot. Sniffing the—to him—very unusual smell, he again consulted his watch, saw that fifteen minutes had passed; he therefore vigorously strode to the apt door, turned the knob and pulled on the release bolt.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
A knock sounded on the door. “Hey, Joe, baby, it’s me, G. G. Ashwood. And I’ve got her right here with me. Open up.”
“Put a nickel in the slot for me,” Joe said. “The mechanism seems to be jammed on my side.”
A coin rattled down into the works of the door; it swung open and there stood G. G. Ashwood with a brilliant look on his face. It pulsed with sly intensity, an erratic, gleaming triumph as he propelled the girl forward and into the apt.
She stood for a moment staring at Joe, obviously no more than seventeen, slim and copper-skinned, with large dark eyes. My god, he thought, she’s beautiful. She wore an ersatz canvas workshirt and jeans, heavy boots caked with what appeared to be authentic mud. Her tangle of shiny hair was tied back and knotted with a red bandanna. Her rolled-up sleeves showed tanned, competent arms. At her imitation leather belt she carried a knife, a field-telephone unit and an emergency pack of rations and water. On her bare, dark forearm he made out a tattoo. CAVEAT EMPTOR, it read. He wondered what that meant.
“This is Pat,” G. G. Ashwood said, his arm, with ostentatious familiarity, around the girl’s waist. “Never mind her last name.” Square and puffy, like an overweight brick, wearing his usual mohair poncho, apricot-colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers, he advanced toward Joe Chip, self-satisfaction smirking from every molecule in his body: He had found something of value here, and he meant to make the most of it. “Pat, this is the company’s highly skilled, first-line electrical type tester.”
Coolly, the girl said to Joe Chip, “Is it you that’s electrical? Or your tests?”
“We trade off,” Joe said. He felt, from all around him, the miasma of his uncleaned-up apt; it radiated the specter of debris and clutter, and he knew that Pat had already noticed. “Sit down,” he said awkwardly. “Have a cup of actual coffee.”
“Such luxury,” Pat said, seating herself at the kitchen table; reflexively she gathered the week’s heap of ’papes into a neater pile. “How can you afford real coffee, Mr. Chip?”
G. G. Ashwood said, “Joe gets paid a hell of a lot. The firm couldn’t operate without him.” Reaching out he took a cigarette from the package lying on the table.
“Put it back,” Joe Chip said. “I’m almost out and I used up my last green ration stamp on the coffee.”
“I paid for the door,” G.G. pointed out. He offered the pack to the girl. “Joe puts on an act; pay no attention. Like look how he keeps his place. Shows he’s creative; all geniuses live like this. Where’s your test equipment, Joe? We’re wasting time.”
To the girl, Joe said, “You’re dressed oddly.”
“I maintain the subsurface vidphone lines at the Topeka Kibbutz,” Pat said. “Only women can hold jobs involving manual labor at that particular kibbutz. That’s why I applied there, instead of the Wichita Falls Kibbutz.” Her black eyes blazed pridefully.
Joe said, “That inscription on your arm, that tattoo; is that Hebrew?”
“Latin.” Her eyes veiled her amusement. “I’ve never seen an apt so cluttered with rubbish. Don’t you have a mistress?”
“These electrical-expert types have no time for tarradiddle,” G. G. Ashwood said irritably. “Listen, Chip, this girl’s parents work for Ray Hollis. If they knew she was here they’d give her a frontal lobotomy.”
To the girl, Joe Chip said, “They don’t know you have a counter talent?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t really understand it either until your scout sat down with me in the kibbutz cafeteria and told me. Maybe it’s true.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. He said you could show me objective proof of it, with your testing battery.”
“How would you feel,” he asked her, “if the tests show that you have it?”
Reflecting, Pat said, “It seems so—negative. I don’t do anything; I don’t move objects or turn stones into bread or give birth without impregnation or reverse the illness process in sick people. Or read minds. Or look into the future—not even common talents like that. I just negate somebody else’s ability. It seems—” She gestured. “Stultifying.”
“As a survival factor for the human race,” Joe said, “it’s as useful as the psi talents. Especially for us Norms. The anti-psi factor is a natural restoration of ecological balance. One insect learns to fly, so another learns to build a web to trap him. Is that the same as no flight? Clams developed hard shells to protect the
m; therefore, birds learn to fly the clam up high in the air and drop him on a rock. In a sense, you’re a life form preying on the Psis, and the Psis are life forms that prey on the Norms. That makes you a friend of the Norm class. Balance, the full circle, predator and prey. It appears to be an eternal system; and, frankly, I can’t see how it could be improved.”
“I might be considered a traitor,” Pat said.
“Does it bother you?”
“It bothers me that people will feel hostile toward me. But I guess you can’t live very long without arousing hostility; you can’t please everybody, because people want different things. Please one and you displease another.”
Joe said, “What is your anti-talent?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Like I say,” G. G. Ashwood said, “it’s unique; I’ve never heard of it before.”
“Which psi talent does it counteract?” Joe asked the girl.
“Precog,” Pat said. “I guess.” She indicated G. G. Ashwood, whose smirk of enthusiasm had not dimmed. “Your scout Mr. Ashwood explained it to me. I knew I did something funny; I’ve always had these strange periods in my life, starting in my sixth year. I never told my parents, because I sensed that it would displease them.”
“Are they precogs?” Joe asked.
“Yes.
“You’re right. It would have displeased them. But if you used it around them—even once—they would have known. Didn’t they suspect? Didn’t you interfere with their ability?”
Pat said, “I—” She gestured. “I think I did interfere but they didn’t know it.” Her face showed bewilderment.
“Let me explain,” Joe said, “how the anti-precog generally functions. Functions, in fact, in every case we know of. The precog sees a variety of futures, laid out side by side like cells in a beehive. For him one has greater luminosity, and this he picks. Once he has picked it the anti-precog can do nothing; the anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment—”
“She goes back in time,” G. G. Ashwood said.
Joe stared at him.
“Back in time,” G.G. repeated, savoring this; his eyes shot shafts of significance to every part of Joe Chip’s kitchen. “The precog affected by her still sees one predominant future; like you said, the one luminous possibility. And he chooses it, and he’s right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl—” He shrugged in her direction. “Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t. So that’s one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision after he’s made it. She can enter the situation later on, and this problem has always hung us up, as you know; if we didn’t get in there from the start we couldn’t do anything. In a way, we never could truly abort the precog ability as we’ve done with the others; right? Hasn’t that been a weak link in our services?” He eyed Joe Chip expectantly.
“Interesting,” Joe said presently.
“Hell-‘interesting’?” G. G. Ashwood thrashed about indignantly. “This is the greatest anti-talent to emerge thus far!”
In a low voice Pat said, “I don’t go back in time.” She raised her eyes, confronted Joe Chip half apologetically, half belligerently. “I do something, but Mr. Ashwood has built it up all out of proportion to reality.”
“I can read your mind,” G.G. said to her, looking a little nettled. “I know you can change the past; you’ve done it.”
Pat said, “I can change the past but I don’t go into the past; I don’t time-travel, as you want your tester to think.”
“How do you change the past?” Joe asked her.
“I think about it. One specific aspect of it, such as one incident, or something somebody said. Or a little thing that happened that I wish hadn’t happened. The first time I did this, as a child—”
“When she was six years old,” G.G. broke in, “living in Detroit, with her parents of course, she broke a ceramic antique statue that her father treasured.”
“Didn’t your father foresee it?” Joe asked her. “With his precog ability?”
“He foresaw it,” Pat answered, “and he punished me the week before I broke the statue. But he said it was inevitable; you know the precog talent: They can foresee but they can’t change anything. Then after the statue did break—after I broke it, I should say—I brooded about it, and I thought about that week before it broke when I didn’t get any dessert at dinner and had to go to bed at five P.M. I thought Christ—or whatever a kid says—isn’t there some way these unfortunate events can be averted? My father’s precog ability didn’t seem very spectacular to me, since he couldn’t alter events; I still feel that way, a sort of contempt. I spent a month trying to will the damn statue back into one piece; in my mind I kept going back to before it broke, imagining what it had looked like…which was awful. And then one morning when I got up—I even dreamed about it at night—there it stood. As it used to be.” Tensely, she leaned toward Joe Chip; she spoke in a sharp, determined voice. “But neither of my parents noticed anything. It seemed perfectly normal to them that the statue was in one piece; they thought it had always been in one piece. I was the only one who remembered.” She smiled, leaned back, took another of his cigarettes from the pack and lit up.
“I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting toward the door.
“Five cents, please,” the door said as he seized its knob.
“Pay the door,” Joe said to G. G. Ashwood.
When he had lugged his armload of testing apparatus from the car to his apt he told the firm’s scout to hit the road.
“What?” G.G. said, astounded. “But I found her; the bounty is mine. I spent almost ten days tracing the field to her; I—”
Joe said to him, “I can’t test her with your field present, as you well know. Talent and anti-talent fields deform each other; if they didn’t we wouldn’t be in this line of business.” He held out his hand as G.G. got grumpily to his feet. “And leave me a couple of nickels. So she and I can get out of here.”
“I have change,” Pat murmured. “In my purse.”
“You can measure the force she creates,” G.G. said, “by the loss within my field. I’ve seen you do it that way a hundred times.”
Joe said, briefly, “This is different.”
“I don’t have any more nickels,” G.G. said. “I can’t get out.”
Glancing at Joe, then at G.G., Pat said, “Have one of mine.” She tossed G.G. a coin, which he caught, an expression of bewilderment on his face. The bewilderment then, by degrees, changed to aggrieved sullenness.
“You sure shot me down,” he said as he deposited the nickel in the door’s slot. “Both of you,” he muttered as the door closed after him. “I discovered her. This is really a cutthroat business, when—” His voice faded out as the door clamped shut. There was, then, silence.
Presently Pat said, “When his enthusiasm goes, there isn’t much left of him.”
“He’s okay,” Joe said; he felt a usual feeling: guilt. But not very much. “Anyhow he did his part. Now—”
“Now it’s your turn,” Pat said. “So to speak. May I take off my boots?”
“Sure,” he said. He began to set up his test equipment, checking the drums, the power supply; he started trial motions of each needle, releasing specific surges and recording their effect.
“A shower?” she asked as she set her boots neatly out of the way.
“A quarter,” he murmured. “It costs a quarter.” He g
lanced up at her and saw that she had begun unbuttoning her blouse. “I don’t have a quarter,” he said.
“At the kibbutz,” Pat said, “everything is free.”
“Free!” He stared at her. “That’s not economically feasible. How can it operate on that basis? For more than a month?”
She continued unperturbedly unbuttoning her blouse. “Our salaries are paid in and we’re credited with having done our job. The aggregate of our earnings underwrites the kibbutz as a whole. Actually, the Topeka Kibbutz has shown a profit for several years; we, as a group, are putting in more than we’re taking out.” Having unbuttoned her blouse, she laid it over the back of her chair. Under the blue, coarse blouse she wore nothing, and he perceived her breasts: hard and high, held well by the accurate muscles of her shoulders.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” he said. “Take off your clothes, I mean?”
Pat said, “You don’t remember.”
“Remember what?”
“My not taking off my clothes. In another present. You didn’t like that very well, so I eradicated that; hence this.” She stood up lithely.
“What did I do,” he asked cautiously, “when you didn’t take off your clothes? Refuse to test you?”
“You mumbled something about Mr. Ashwood having overrated my anti-talent.”
Joe said, “I don’t work that way; I don’t do that.”
“Here.” Bending, her breasts wagging forward, she rummaged in the pocket of her blouse, brought forth a folded sheet of paper which she handed him. “From the previous present, the one I abolished.”
He read it, read his one-line evaluation at the end. “Antipsi field generated—inadequate. Below standard throughout. No value against precog ratings now in existence.” And then the codemark which he employed, a circle with a stroke dividing it. Do not hire, the symbol meant. And only he and Glen Runciter knew that. Not even their scouts knew the meaning of the symbol, so Ashwood could not have told her. Silently he returned the paper to her; she refolded it and returned it to her blouse pocket.
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