by C. L. Moore
"Heaven forfend," Kelvin said, still sweating a little.
"Consider the opportunities. Suppose a troglodyte of the far past had access to your brain? He could achieve anything he wanted."
It had become important, somehow, to find a logical rebuttal to the robot's arguments. Like St. Anthony—or was it Luther?—arguing with the devil, Kelvin thought dizzily. His headache was worse, and he suspected he had drunk more than was good for him. But he merely said: "How could a troglodyte understand what's in my brain? He couldn't apply the knowledge without the same conditioning I've had."
"Have you ever had sudden and apparently illogical ideas? Compulsions? So that you seem forced to think of certain things, count up to certain numbers, work out particular problems? Well, the man in the future on whom the device is focused doesn't know he's en rapport with you, Kelvin. But he's vulnerable to compulsions. All you have to do is concentrate on a problem and then press the button. Your rapport will be compelled—illogically, from his viewpoint—to solve that problem. And you'll be reading his brain. You'll find out how it works. There are limitations; you'll learn those too. And the device will insure health, wealth and fame for you."
"It would insure anything, if it really worked that way. I could do anything. That's why I'm not buying!"
"I said there were limitations. As soon as you've successfully achieved health, fame and fortune, the device will become useless. I've taken care of that. But meanwhile you can use it to solve all your problems by tapping the brain of the more intelligent specimen in the future. The important point is to concentrate on your problems before you press the button. Otherwise you may get more than Tharn on your track."
"Tharn? What—"
"I think an—an android," the robot said, looking at nothing. "An artificial human ... However, let us consider my own problem. I need a small amount of gold."
"So that's the kicker," Kelvin said, feeling oddly relieved. He said, "I haven't got any."
"Your watch."
Kelvin jerked his arm so that his wristwatch showed. "Oh, no. That watch cost plenty."
"All I need is the goldplating," the robot said, shooting out a reddish ray from its eye. "Thank you." The watch was now dull grey metal.
"Hey!" Kelvin cried.
"If you use the rapport device, your health, fame and fortune will be assured," the robot said rapidly. "You will be as happy as any man of this era can be. It will solve all your problems—including Tharn. Wait a minute." The creature took a backward step and disappeared behind a hanging Oriental rug that had never been east of Peoria.
There was silence.
Kelvin looked from his altered watch to the flat enigmatic object in his palm. It was about two inches by two inches, and no thicker than a woman's vanity-case, and there was a sunken push-button on its side.
He dropped it into his pocket and took a few steps forward. He looked behind the pseudo-Oriental rug, to find nothing except emptiness and a flapping slit cut in the canvas wall of the booth. The robot, it seemed, had taken a powder. Kelvin peered out through the slit. There was the light and sound of Ocean Park amusement pier, that was all. And the silvered, moving blackness of the Pacific Ocean, stretching to where small lights showed Malibu far up the invisible curve of the coastal cliffs.
So he came back inside the booth and looked around. A fat man in a swami's costume was unconscious behind the carved chest the robot had indicated. His breath, plus a process of deduction, told Kelvin that the man had been drinking.
Not knowing what else to do, Kelvin called on the Deity again. He found suddenly that he was thinking about someone or something called Tharn, who was an android.
Horomancy ... time ... rapport ... no! Protective disbelief slid like plate armor around his mind. A practical robot couldn't be made. He knew that. He'd have heard—he was a reporter, wasn't he?
Sure he was.
Desiring noise and company, he went along to the shooting gallery and knocked down a few ducks. The flat case burned in his pocket. The dully burnished metal of his wristwatch burned in his memory. The remembrance of that drainage from his brain, and the immediate replacement, burned in his mind. Presently bar whisky burned in his stomach.
He'd left Chicago because of sinusitis, recurrent and annoying. Ordinary sinusitis. Not schizophrenia or hallucinations or accusing voices coming from the walls. Not because he had been seeing bats or robots. That thing hadn't really been a robot. It all had a perfectly natural explanation. Oh sure.
Health, fame and fortune. And if—
Tharn!
The thought crashed with thunderbolt impact into his head.
And then another thought: I am going nuts!
A silent voice began to mutter insistently over and over. "Tharn—Tharn—Tharn—Tharn—"
And another voice, the voice of sanity and safety, answered it and drowned it out. Half aloud, Kelvin muttered: "I'm James Noel Kelvin. I'm a reporter—special features, legwork, rewrite. I'm thirty years old, unmarried, and I came to Los Angeles today and lost my baggage checks and—and I'm going to have another drink and find a hotel. Anyhow, the climate seems to be curing my sinusitis."
Tharn, the muffled drum-beat said almost below the threshold of realization. Tharn, Tharn.
Tharn.
He ordered another drink and reached in his pocket for a coin. His hand touched the metal case. And simultaneously he felt a light pressure on his shoulder.
Instinctively he glanced around. It was a seven-fingered, spidery hand tightening—hairless, without nails—and white as smooth ivory.
The one, overwhelming necessity that sprang into Kelvin's mind was a simple longing to place as much space as possible between himself and the owner of that disgusting hand. It was a vital requirement, but one difficult of fulfillment, a problem that excluded everything else from Kelvin's thoughts. He knew, vaguely, that he was gripping the flat case in his pocket as though that could save him, but all he was thinking about was: I've got to get away from here.
The monstrous, alien thoughts of someone in the future spun him insanely along their current. It could not have taken a moment while that skilled, competent, trained mind, wise in the lore of an unthinkable future, solved the random problem that had come so suddenly, with such curious compulsion.
Three methods of transportation were simultaneously clear to Kelvin. Two he discarded; motorplates were obviously inventions yet to come, and quirling—involving, as it did, a sensory coil-helmet—was beyond him. But the third method—
Already the memory was fading. And that hand was still tightening on his shoulder. He clutched at the vanishing ideas and desperately made his brain and his muscles move along the unlikely direction the future man had visualized.
And he was out in the open, a cold night wind blowing on him, still in a sitting position, but with nothing but empty air between his spine and the sidewalk.
He sat down suddenly.
Passers-by on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga were not much surprised at the sight of a dark, lanky man sitting by the curb. Only one woman had noticed Kelvin's actual arrival, and she knew when she was well off. She went right on home.
Kelvin got up laughing with soft hysteria. "Teleportation," he said. "How did I work it? It's gone ... Hard to remember afterwards, eh? I'll have to start carrying a notebook again."
And then—"But what about Tharn?"
He looked around, frightened. Reassurance came only after half an hour had passed without additional miracles. Kelvin walked along the Boulevard, keeping a sharp lookout. No Tharn, though.
Occasionally he slid a hand into his pocket and touched the cold metal of the case. Health, fame and fortune. Why, he could—
But he did not press the button. Too vivid was the memory of that shocking, alien disorientation he had felt. The mind, the experiences, the habit-patterns of the far future were uncomfortably strong.
He would use the little case again—oh, yes. But there was no hurry. First he'd have
to work out a few angles.
His disbelief was completely gone.
Tharn showed up the next night and scared the daylights out of Kelvin again. Prior to that, the reporter had failed to find his baggage tickets, and was only consoled by the two hundred bucks in his wallet. He took a room—paying in advance—at a medium-good hotel, and began wondering how he might apply his pipeline to the future. Very sensibly, he decided to continue a normal life until something developed. At any rate, he'd have to make a few connections. He tried the Times, the Examiner, the News, and some others. But these things develop slowly, except in the movies. That night Kelvin was in his hotel room when his unwelcome guest appeared.
It was, of course, Tharn.
He wore a very large white turban, approximately twice the size of his head. He had a dapper black moustache, waxed downwards at the tips like the moustache of a mandarin or a catfish. He stared urgently at Kelvin out of the bathroom mirror.
Kelvin had been wondering whether or not he needed a shave before going out to dinner. He was rubbing his chin thoughtfully at the moment Tharn put in an appearance, and there was a perceptible mental lag between occurrence and perception, so that to Kelvin it seemed that he himself had mysteriously sprouted a long moustache. He reached for his upper lip. It was smooth. But in the glass the black waxed hairs quivered as Tharn pushed his face up against the surface of the mirror.
It was so shockingly disorientating, somehow, that Kelvin was quite unable to think at all. He took a quick step backward. The edge of the bathtub caught him behind the knees and distracted him momentarily, fortunately for his sanity. When he looked again there was only his own appalled face reflected above the washbowl. But after a second or two the face seemed to develop a cloud of white turban, and mandarin-like whiskers began to form sketchily.
Kelvin clapped a hand to his eyes and spun away. In about fifteen seconds he spread his fingers enough to peep through them at the glass. He kept his palm pressed desperately to his upper lip, in some wild hope of inhibiting the sudden sprouting of a moustache. What peeped back at him from the mirror looked like himself. At least it had no turban, and it wore horn-rimmed glasses. He risked snatching his hand away for a quick look, and clapped it in place again just in time to prevent Tharn from taking shape in the glass.
Still shielding his face, he went unsteadily into the bedroom and took the flat case out of his coat pocket. But he didn't press the button that would close a mental synapse between two incongruous eras. He didn't want to do that again, he realized. More horrible, somehow, than what was happening now was the thought of re-entering that alien brain.
He was standing before the bureau, and in the mirror one eye looked out at him between reflected fingers. It was a wild eye behind the gleaming spectacle lens, but it seemed to be his own. Tentatively he took his hand away ...
This mirror showed more of Tharn. Kelvin wished it hadn't. Tharn was wearing white knee-boots of some glittering plastic. Between them and the turban he wore nothing whatever except a minimum of loincloth, also glittering plastic. Tharn was very thin, but he looked active. He looked quite active enough to spring right into the hotel room. His skin was whiter than his turban, and his hands had seven fingers each, all right.
Kelvin abruptly turned away, but Tharn was resourceful. The dark window made enough of a reflecting surface to show a lean, loinclothed figure. The feet showed bare and they were less normal than Tharn's hands. And the polished brass of a lamp base gave back the picture of a small, distorted face not Kelvin's own.
Kelvin found a corner without reflecting surfaces and pushed into it, his hands shielding his face. He was still holding the flat case.
Oh, fine, he thought bitterly. Everything's got a string on it. What good will this rapport gadget do me if Tharn's going to show up every day? Maybe I'm only crazy. I hope so.
Something would have to be done unless Kelvin was prepared to go through life with his face buried in his hands. The worst of it was that Tharn had a haunting look of familiarity. Kelvin discarded a dozen possibilities, from reincarnation to the déjà vu phenomenon, but—
He peeped through his hands, in time to see Tharn raising a cylindrical gadget of some sort and leveling it like a gun. That gesture formed Kelvin's decision. He'd have to do something, and fast. So, concentrating on the problem—I want out!—he pressed the button in the surface of the flat case.
And instantly the teleportation method he had forgotten was perfectly clear to him. Other matters were, however, obscure. The smells—someone was thinking—were adding up to a—there was no word for that, only a shocking visio-auditory ideation that was simply dizzying. Someone named Three Million and Ninety Pink had written a new flatch. And there was the physical sensation of licking a twenty-four-dollar stamp and sticking it on a postcard.
But, most important, the man in the future had had—or would have—a compulsion to think about the teleportation method, and as Kelvin snapped back into his own mind and time, he instantly used that method ...
He was falling.
Icy water attacked him hard. Miraculously he kept his grip on the flat case. He had a whirling vision of stars in a night sky, and the phosphorescent sheen of silvery light on a dark sea. Then brine stung his nostrils.
Kelvin had never learned how to swim.
As he went down for the last time, bubbling a scream, he literally clutched at the proverbial straw he was holding. His fingers pushed the button down again. There was no need to concentrate on the problem; he couldn't think of anything else.
Mental chaos, fantastic images—and the answer.
It took concentration, and there wasn't much time left. Bubbles streamed up past his face. He felt them, but he couldn't see them. All around, pressing in avidly, was the horrible coldness of the salt water ...
But he did know the method now, and he knew how it worked. He thought along the lines the future mind had indicated. Something happened. Radiation—that was the nearest familiar term—poured out of his brain and did peculiar things to his lung-tissues. His blood cells adapted themselves ...
He was breathing water, and it was no longer strangling him.
But Kelvin had also learned that his emergency adaptation could not be maintained for very long. Teleportation was the answer to that. And surely he could remember the method now. He had actually used it to escape from Tharn only a few minutes ago.
Yet he could not remember. The memory was expunged cleanly from his mind. So there was nothing else to do but press the button again, and Kelvin did that, most reluctantly.
Dripping wet, he was standing on an unfamiliar street. It was no street he knew, but apparently it was in his own time and on his own planet. Luckily, teleportation seemed to have limitations. The wind was cold. Kelvin stood in a puddle that grew rapidly around his feet. He stared around.
He picked out a sign up the street that offered Turkish Baths, and headed moistly in that direction. His thoughts were mostly profane ...
He was in New Orleans, of all places. Presently he was drunk in New Orleans. His thoughts kept going around in circles, and scotch was a fine palliative, an excellent brake. He needed to get control again. He had an almost miraculous power, and he wanted to be able to use it effectively before the unexpected happened again. Tharn ...
He sat in a hotel room and swigged scotch. Gotta be logical!
He sneezed.
The trouble was, of course, that there were so few points of contact between his own mind and that of the future-man. Moreover, he'd got the rapport only in times of crisis. Like having access to the Alexandrian Library, five seconds a day. In five seconds you couldn't even start translating ...
Health, fame and fortune. He sneezed again. The robot had been a liar. His health seemed to be going fast. What about that robot? How had he got involved, anyway? He said he'd fallen into this era from the future, but robots are notorious liars. Gotta be logical.
Apparently the future was peopled by creatures not unlike the ca
st of a Frankenstein picture. Androids, robots, so-called men whose minds were shockingly different ... Sneeze. Another drink.
The robot had said that the case would lose its power after Kelvin had achieved health, fame and fortune. Which was a distressing thought. Suppose he attained those enviable goals, found the little push-button useless, and then Tharn showed up? Oh, no. That called for another shot.
Sobriety was the wrong condition in which to approach a matter that in itself was as wild as delirium tremens, even though, Kelvin knew, the science he had stumbled on was all theoretically quite possible. But not in this day and age. Sneeze.
The trick would be to pose the right problem and use the case at some time when you weren't drowning or being menaced by the bewhiskered android with his seven-fingered hands and his ominous rod-like weapon. Find the problem.
But that future-mind was hideous.
And suddenly, with drunken clarity, Kelvin realized that he was profoundly drawn to that dim, shadowy world of the future.
He could not see its complete pattern, but he sensed it somehow. He knew that it was right, a far better world and time than his. If he could be that unknown man who dwelt there, all would go well.
Man must needs love the highest, he thought wryly. Oh, well. He shook the bottle. How much had he absorbed? He felt fine.
Gotta be logical.
Outside the window, street-lights blinked off and on. Neons traced goblin languages against the night. It seemed rather alien, too, but so did Kelvin's own body. He started to laugh, but a sneeze choked that off.
All I want, he thought, is health, fame and fortune. Then I'll settle down and live happily ever after, without a care or worry. I won't need this enchanted case after that. Happy ending.
On impulse he took out the box and examined it. He tried to pry it open and failed. His finger hovered over the button.
How can I—he thought, and his fingers moved half an inch ...
It wasn't so alien now that he was drunk. The future man's name was Quarra Vee. Odd he had never realized that before, but how often does a man think of his own name? Quarra Vee was playing some sort of game vaguely reminiscent of chess, but his opponent was on a planet of Sirius, some distance away. The chessmen were all unfamiliar. Complicated, dizzying space-time gambits flashed through Quarra Vee's mind as Kelvin listened in. Then Kelvin's problem thrust through, the compulsion hit Quarra Vee, and—
