The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  It was all mixed up. There were two problems, really. How to cure a cold—coryza. And how to become healthy, rich and famous in a practically prehistoric era—for Quarra Vee.

  A small problem, however, to Quarra Vee. He solved it and went back to his game with the Sirian.

  Kelvin was back in the hotel room in New Orleans.

  He was very drunk or he wouldn't have risked it. The method involved using his brain to tune in on another brain in this present twentieth century that had exactly the wavelength he required. All sorts of factors would build up to the sum total of that wavelength—experience, opportunity, position, knowledge, imagination, honesty—but he found it at last, after hesitation among three totals that were all nearly right. Still, one was righter, to three decimal points. Still drunk as a lord, Kelvin clamped on a mental tight beam, turned on the teleportation, and rode the beam across America to a well-equipped laboratory, where a man sat reading.

  The man was bald and had a bristling red moustache. He looked up sharply at some sound Kelvin made.

  "Hey!" he said. "How did you get in here?"

  "Ask Quarra Vee," Kelvin said.

  "Who? What?" The man put down his book.

  Kelvin called on his memory. It seemed to be slipping. He used the rapport case for an instant, and refreshed his mind. Not so unpleasant this time, either. He was beginning to understand Quarra Vee's world a little. He liked it. However, he supposed he'd forget that too.

  "An improvement on Woodward's protein analogues," he told the red-moustached man. "Simple synthesis will do it."

  "Who the devil are you?"

  "Call me Jim," Kelvin said simply. "And shut up and listen." He began to explain, as to a small, stupid child. (The man before him was one of America's foremost chemists.) "Proteins are made of amino acids. There are about thirty-three amino acids—"

  "There aren't."

  "There are. Shut up. Their molecules can be arranged in lots of ways. So we get an almost infinite variety of proteins. And all living things are forms of protein. The absolute synthesis involves a chain of amino acids long enough to recognize clearly as a protein molecule. That's been the trouble."

  The man with the red moustache seemed quite interested. "Fischer assembled a chain of eighteen," he said, blinking. "Aberhalden got up to nineteen, and Woodward, of course, has made chains ten thousand units long. But as for testing—"

  "The complete protein molecule consists of complete sets of sequences. But if you test only one or two sections of an analogue you can't be sure of the others. Wait a minute." Kelvin used the rapport case again. "Now I know. Well, you can make almost anything out of synthesized protein. Silk, wool, hair—but the main thing, of course," he said, sneezing, "is a cure for coryza."

  "Now look—" said the red-moustached man.

  "Some of the viruses are chains of amino acids, aren't they? Well, modify their structure. Make 'em harmless. Bacteria, too. And synthesize antibiotics."

  "I wish I could. However, Mr.—"

  "Just call me Jim."

  "Yes. However, all this is old stuff."

  "Grab your pencil," Kelvin said. "From now on it'll be solid, with riffs. The method of synthesizing and testing is as follows—"

  He explained, very thoroughly and clearly. He had to use the rapport case only twice. And when he had finished, the man with the red moustache laid down his pencil and stared.

  "This is incredible," he said. "If it works—"

  "I want health, fame and fortune," Kelvin said stubbornly. "It'll work."

  "Yes, but—my good man—"

  However, Kelvin insisted. Luckily for himself, the mental testing of the red-moustached man had included briefing for honesty and opportunity, and it ended with the chemist agreeing to sign partnership papers with Kelvin. The commercial possibilities of the process were unbounded. Dupont or GM would be glad to buy it.

  "I want lots of money. A fortune."

  "You'll make a million dollars," the red-moustached man said patiently.

  "Then I want a receipt. Have to have this in black and white. Unless you want to give me my million now."

  Frowning, the chemist shook his head. "I can't do that. I'll have to run tests, open negotiations—but don't worry about that. Your discovery is certainly worth a million. You'll be famous, too."

  "And healthy?"

  "There won't be any more disease, after a while," the chemist said quietly. "That's the real miracle."

  "Write it down," Kelvin clamored.

  "All right. We can have partnership papers drawn up tomorrow. This will do temporarily. Understand, the actual credit belongs to you."

  "It's got to be in ink. A pencil won't do."

  "Just a minute, then," the red-moustached man said, and went away in search of ink. Kelvin looked around the laboratory, beaming happily.

  Tharn materialized three feet away. Tharn was holding the rod-weapon. He lifted it.

  Kelvin instantly used the rapport case. Then he thumbed his nose at Tharn and teleported himself far away.

  He was immediately in a cornfield, somewhere, but undistilled corn was not what Kelvin wanted. He tried again. This time he reached Seattle.

  That was the beginning of Kelvin's monumental two-week combination of binge and chase.

  His thoughts weren't pleasant.

  He had a frightful hangover, ten cents in his pocket, and an overdue hotel bill. A fortnight of keeping one jump ahead of Tharn, via teleportation, had frazzled his nerves so unendurably that only liquor had kept him going. Now even that stimulus was failing. The drink died in him and left what felt like a corpse.

  Kelvin groaned and blinked miserably. He took off his glasses and cleaned them, but that didn't help.

  What a fool.

  He didn't even know the name of the chemist!

  There was health, wealth and fame waiting for him just around the corner, but what corner? Some day he'd find out, probably, when the news of the new protein synthesis was publicized, but when would that be? In the meantime, what about Tharn?

  Moreover, the chemist couldn't locate him, either. The man knew Kelvin only as Jim. Which had somehow seemed a good idea at the time, but not now.

  Kelvin took out the rapport case and stared at it with red eyes. Quarra Vee, eh? He rather liked Quarra Vee now. Trouble was, half an hour after his rapport, at most, he would forget all the details.

  This time he used the push-button almost as Tharn snapped into bodily existence a few feet away.

  The teleportation angle again. He was sitting in the middle of a desert. Cactus and Joshua trees were all the scenery. There was a purple range of mountains far away.

  No Tharn, though.

  Kelvin began to be thirsty. Suppose the case stopped working now? Oh, this couldn't go on. A decision hanging fire for a week finally crystallized into a conclusion so obvious he felt like kicking himself. Perfectly obvious!

  Why hadn't he thought of it at the very beginning?

  He concentrated on the problem: How can I get rid of Tharn? He pushed the button ...

  And a moment later, he knew the answer. It would be simple, really.

  The pressing urgency was gone suddenly. That seemed to release a fresh flow of thought. Everything became quite clear.

  He waited for Tharn.

  He did not have to wait long. There was a tremor in the shimmering air, and the turbaned, pallid figure sprang into tangible reality.

  The rod-weapon was poised.

  Taking no chances, Kelvin posed his problem again, pressed the button, and instantly reassured himself as to the method. He simply thought in a very special and peculiar way—the way Quarra Vee had indicated.

  Tharn was flung back a few feet. The moustached mouth gaped open as he uttered a cry.

  "Don't!" the android cried. "I've been trying to—"

  Kelvin focused harder on his thought. Mental energy, he felt, was pouring out towards the android.

  Tharn croaked. "Trying—you didn't—give me—chanc
e—"

  And then Tharn was lying motionless on the hot sand, staring blindly up. The seven-fingered hands twitched once and were still. The artificial life that had animated the android was gone. It would not return.

  Kelvin turned his back and drew a long, shuddering breath. He was safe. He closed his mind to all thoughts but one, all problems but one.

  How can I find the red-moustached man?

  He pressed the button.

  -

  This is the way the story starts:

  Quarra Vee sat in the temporal warp with his android Tharn, and made sure everything was under control.

  "How do I look?" he asked.

  "You'll pass," Tharn said. "Nobody will be suspicious in the era you're going to. It didn't take long to synthesize the equipment."

  "Not long. Clothes—they look enough like real wool and linen, I suppose. Wristwatch, money—everything in order. Wristwatch—that's odd, isn't it? Imagine people who need machinery to tell time!"

  "Don't forget the spectacles," Tharn said.

  Quarra Vee put them on. "Ugh. But I suppose—"

  "It'll be safer. The optical properties in the lenses are a guard you may need against mental radiations. Don't take them off, or the robot may try some tricks."

  "He'd better not," Quarra Vee said. "That so-and-so runaway robot! What's he up to, anyway, I wonder? He always was a malcontent, but at least he knew his place. I'm sorry I ever had him made. No telling what he'll do in a semi-prehistoric world if we don't catch him and bring him home."

  "He's in that horomancy booth," Tharn said, leaning out of the time-warp. "Just arrived. You'll have to catch him by surprise. And you'll need your wits about you, too. Try not to go off into any more of those deep-thought compulsions you've been having. They could be dangerous. That robot will use some of his tricks if he gets the chance. I don't know what powers he's developed by himself, but I do know he's an expert at hypnosis and memory erasure already. If you aren't careful he'll snap your memory track and substitute a false brain-pattern. Keep those glasses on. If anything should go wrong, I'll use the rehabilitation ray on you, eh?" And he held up a small rod-like projector.

  Quarra Vee nodded. "Don't worry. I'll be back before you know it. I have an appointment with that Sirian to finish our game this evening."

  It was an appointment he never kept.

  Quarra Vee stepped out of the temporal warp and strolled along the boardwalk towards the booth. The clothing he wore felt tight, uncomfortable, rough. He wriggled a little in it. The booth stood before him now, with its painted sign.

  He pushed aside the canvas curtain and something—a carelessly hung rope—swung down at his face, knocking the horn-rimmed glasses askew. Simultaneously a vivid bluish light blazed into his unprotected eyes. He felt a curious, sharp sensation of disorientation, a shifting motion that almost instantly was gone.

  The robot said, "You are James Kelvin."

  The End

  PRIVATE EYE

  Astounding Science Fiction - January 1949

  with Henry Kuttner

  (as by Lewis Padgett)

  The problem of getting away with murder is an old one. But with the Eye to watch your move for fifty years back, it was a new and apparently insolvable one! But there was, actually, an infinitely tougher problem—

  -

  The forensic sociologist looked closely at the image on the wall screen. Two figures were frozen there, one in the act of stabbing the other through the heart with an antique letter cutter once used at Johns Hopkins for surgery. That was before the ultra-microtome, of course.

  "As tricky a case as I've ever seen," the sociologist remarked. "If we can make a homicide charge stick on Sam Clay, I'll be a little surprised."

  The tracer engineer twirled a dial and watched the figures on the screen repeat their actions. One—Sam Clay—snatched the letter cutter from a desk and plunged it into the other man's heart. The victim fell down dead. Clay started back in apparent horror. Then he dropped to his knees beside the twitching body and said wildly that he didn't mean it. The body drummed its heels upon the rug and was still.

  "That last touch was nice," the engineer said.

  "Well, I've got to make the preliminary survey," the sociologist sighed, settling in his dictachair and placing his fingers on the keyboard. "I doubt if I'll find any evidence. However, the analysis can come later. Where's Clay now?"

  "His mouthpiece put in a habeas mens."

  "I didn't think we'd be able to hold him. But it was worth trying. Imagine, just one shot of scop and he'd have told the truth. Ah, well. We'll do it the hard way, as usual. Start the tracer, will you? It won't make sense till we run it chronologically, but one must start somewhere. Good old Blackstone," the sociologist said, as on the screen, Clay stood up, watching the corpse revive and arise, and then pulled the miraculously clean paper cutter out of its heart, all in reverse.

  "Good old Blackstone," he repeated. "On the other hand, sometimes I wish I'd lived in Jeffreys' time. In those days, homicide was homicide."

  -

  Telepathy never came to much. Perhaps the developing faculty went underground in response to a familiar natural law after the new science appeared—omniscience. It wasn't really that, of course. It was a device for looking into the past. And it was limited to a fifty-year span; no chance of seeing the arrows at Agincourt or the homunculi of Bacon. It was sensitive enough to pick up the "fingerprints" of light and sound waves imprinted on matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had happened. After all, a man's shadow can be photographed on concrete if he's unlucky enough to be caught in an atomic blast. Which is something. The shadow's about all there is left.

  However, opening the past like a book didn't solve all problems. It took generations for the maze of complexities to iron itself out, though finally a tentative check-and-balance was reached. The right to kill has been sturdily defended by mankind since Cain rose up against Abel. A good many idealists quoted, "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground." But that didn't stop the lobbyists and the pressure groups. Magna Carta was quoted in reply. The right to privacy was defended desperately.

  And the curious upshot of this imbalance came when the act of homicide was declared nonpunishable, unless intent and forethought could be proved. Of course, it was considered at least naughty to fly into a rage and murder someone on impulse, and there was a nominal punishment—imprisonment, for example—but in practice this never worked because so many defenses were possible. Temporary insanity. Undue provocation. Self-defense. Manslaughter, second-degree homicide, third degree, fourth degree—it went on like that. It was up to the State to prove that the killer had planned his killing in advance; only then would a jury convict. And the jury, of course, had to waive immunity and take a scop test, to prove the box hadn't been packed. But no defendant ever waived immunity.

  A man's home wasn't his castle—not with the Eye able to enter it at will and scan his past. The device couldn't interpret, and it couldn't read his mind; it could only see and listen. Consequently the sole remaining fortress of privacy was the human mind. And that was defended to the last ditch. No truth serum, no hypnoanalysis, no third degree, no leading questions.

  If, by viewing the prisoner's past actions, the prosecution could prove forethought and intent, O.K.

  Otherwise, Sam Clay would go scot-free. Superficially, it appeared as though Andrew Vanderman had, during a quarrel, struck Clay across the face with a stingaree whip. Anyone who has been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war can understand that, at this point, Clay could plead temporary insanity and self-defense, as well as undue provocation and possible justification. Only the curious cult of the Alaskan Flagellantes, who make the stingaree whips for their ceremonials, know how to endure the pain. The Flagellantes even like it; the pre-ritual drug they swallow transmutes pain into pleasure. Not having swallowed this drug, Sam Clay very naturally took steps to protect himself—irrational steps, perhaps, but qui
te logical and defensible ones.

  Nobody but Clay knew that he had intended to kill Vanderman all along. That was the trouble. Clay couldn't understand why he felt so let down.

  -

  The screen flickered. It went dark. The engineer chuckled.

  "My, my. Locked up in a dark closet at the age of four. What one of those old-time psychiatrists would have made of that. Or do I mean obimen? Shamans? I forget. They interpreted dreams, anyway."

  "You're confused. It—"

  "Astrologers! No, it wasn't either. The ones I mean went in for symbolism. They used to spin prayer wheels and say 'A rose is a rose is a rose,' didn't they? To free the unconscious mind?"

  "You've got the typical layman's attitude toward antique psychiatric treatments."

  "Well, maybe they had something, at that. Look at quinine and digitalis. The United Amazon natives used those long before science discovered them. But why use eye of newt and toe of frog? To impress the patient?"

  "No, to convince themselves," the sociologist said. "In those days the study of mental aberrations drew potential psychotics, so naturally there was unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. Those medicos were trying to fix their own mental imbalance while they treated their patients. But it's a science today, not a religion. We've found out how to allow for individual psychotic deviation in the psychiatrist himself, so we've got a better chance of finding true north. However, let's get on with this. Try ultraviolet. Oh, never mind. Somebody's letting him out of that closet. The devil with it. I think we've cut back far enough. Even if he was frightened by a thunderstorm at the age of three months, that can be filed under Gestalt and ignored. Let's run through this chronologically. Give it the screening for ... let's see. Incidents involving these persons: Vanderman, Mrs. Vanderman, Josephine Wells—and these places: the office, Vanderman's apartment, Clay's place—"