The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  After all, Professor Riverdale was a good, kind man. It was true that he was romantically obsessed with the idyll of all-American freckle-faced boyhood to an unhealthy degree, but he was so far in denial about it that he would never have done anything in the least improper.

  All he wanted to do, when he sat down at Bobby’s bedside, was help Bobby get over the tragedy. So he started with pleasant conversation. He told Bobby all about the wonderful scientists in the far future who had discovered the secret of time travel, and how they were now working to find a way to make people live forever.

  And Bobby, lucky boy, had been selected to help them. Instead of going to an orphanage, Bobby would be transformed into, well, nearly into a superhero! It was almost as though Bobby would never have to grow up. It was every boy’s dream! He’d have super-strength and super-intelligence and never have to wash behind his ears, if he didn’t feel like it! And, because he’d live forever, one day he really would get to go to the planet Mars.

  If the immortality experiment worked. But Professor Riverdale—or Professor Bill, as he encouraged Bobby to call him—was sure the experiment would work this time, because such a lot had been learned from the last time it had been attempted.

  Professor Bill moved quickly on to speak with enthusiasm of how wonderful the future was, and how happy Bobby would be when he got there. Why, it was a wonderful place, according to what he’d heard! People lived on the moon and on Mars, too, and the problems of poverty and disease and war had been licked, by gosh, and there were no Communists! And boys could ride their bicycles down the tree-lined streets of that perfect world, and float down summer rivers on rafts, and camp out in the woods, and dream of going to the stars…

  Observing, however, that Bobby lay there silent and withdrawn, Professor Bill cut his rhapsody short. He concluded that Bobby needed psychiatric therapy to get over the guilt he felt at having caused the deaths of his parents and siblings.

  And this was a profound mistake, because Bobby Ross—being a normal ten-year-old all-American boy—had no more conscience than Pinocchio before the Cricket showed up, and it had never occurred to him that he had been responsible for the accident. Once Professor Bill pointed it out, however, he burst into furious tears.

  So poor old Professor Bill had a lot to do to help Bobby through his pain, both the grief of his loss and the physical pain of his transformation into an immortal, of which there turned out to be a lot more than anybody had thought there would be, regardless of how much had been learned from the last attempt.

  He studied Bobby’s case, paying particular attention to the details of his recruitment. He looked carefully at the footage taken by the operatives who had collected Bobby, and the mural on the barn caught his attention. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the sight of the ballplayer must have been Bobby’s last happy memory, the final golden moment of his innocence.

  ***

  “What’d he do?” asks Clete, taking his turn at rummaging in the ice chest. “Wait, I’ll bet I know. He used the image of the mural in the kid’s therapy, right? Something to focus on when the pain got too bad? Pretending he was going to a happy place in his head, as an escape valve.”

  “Yeah. That was what he did.”

  “There’s only root beer left. You want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, so why was this such a bad idea? I remember having to do mental exercises like that, myself, at the Base school. You probably did, too.”

  “It was a bad idea because the professor didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” says Porfirio. The distant barn is wavering in the heat, but he never takes his eyes off it.

  ***

  Bobby’s other doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing, either. They’d figured out how to augment Bobby’s intelligence pretty well, and they already knew how to give him unbreakable bones. They did a great job of convincing his body it would never die, and taught it how to ward off viruses and bacteria.

  But they didn’t know yet that even a healthy ten-year-old’s DNA has already begun to deteriorate, that it’s already too subject to replication errors for the immortality process to be successful. And Bobby Ross, being an all-American kid, had got all those freckles from playing unshielded in ultraviolet light. He’d gulped down soda pop full of chemicals and inhaled smoke from his dad’s Lucky Strikes and hunted for tadpoles in the creek that flowed past the paper mill.

  And then the doctors introduced millions of nanobots into Bobby’s system, and the nanobots’ job was to keep him perfect. But the doctors didn’t know yet that the nanobots had to be programmed with an example to copy. So the nanobots latched onto the first DNA helix they encountered, and made it their pattern for everything Bobby ought to be. Unfortunately, it was a damaged DNA helix, but the nanobots didn’t know that.

  Bobby Ross grew up at the secret laboratory, and as he grew it became painfully obvious that there were still a few bugs to be worked out of the immortality process. There were lumps, there were bumps, there were skin cancers and deformities. His production of Pineal Tribrantine Three was sporadic. Sometimes, after months of misery, his body’s chemistry would right itself. The joint pain would ease, the glands would work properly again.

  Or not.

  Professor Bill was so, so sorry, because he adored Bobby. He’d sit with Bobby when the pain was bad, and talk soothingly to send Bobby back to that dear good year, 1951—and what a golden age 1951 seemed by this time, because it was now 1964, and Bobby had become Robert, and the world seemed to be lurching into madness. Professor Bill himself wished he could escape back into 1951. But he sent Robert there often, into that beautiful summer afternoon when Hank Bauer flung his length across the green diamond—and the ball had smacked into his leather glove—and the crowds went wild!

  Though only in Robert’s head, of course, because all this was being done with hypnosis.

  Nobody ever formally announced that Robert Ross had failed the immortality process, because it was by no means certain he wasn’t immortal. But it had become plain he would never be the flawless superagent the Company had been solving for, so less and less of the laboratory budget was allotted to Robert’s upkeep.

  What did the Company do with unsuccessful experiments? Who knows what might have happened to Robert, if Professor Bill hadn’t taken the lad under his wing?

  He brought Robert to live with him in his own quarters on the Base, and continued his education himself. This proved that Professor Bill really was a good man and had no ulterior interest in Robert whatsoever; for Bobby, the slender kid with skin like a sun-speckled apricot, was long gone. Robert by this time was a wizened, stooping, scarred thing with hair in unlikely places.

  Professor Bill tried to make it up to Robert by giving him a rich interior life. He went rafting with Robert on the great river of numbers, under the cold and sparkling stars of theory. He tossed him physics problems compact and weighty as a baseball, and beamed with pride when Robert smacked them out of the park of human understanding. It made him feel young again, himself.

  He taught the boy all he knew, and when he found that Robert shone at Temporal Physics with unsuspected brilliance, he told his superiors. This pleased the Company managers. It meant that Robert could be made to earn back the money he had cost the Company after all. So he became an employee, and was even paid a modest stipend to exercise his genius by fiddling around with temporal equations on the Company’s behalf.

  ***

  “And the only problem was, he was a psycho?” guesses Clete. “He went berserk, blew away poor old Professor Riverdale and ran off into the sunset?”

  “He was emotionally unstable,” Porfirio admits. “Nobody was surprised by that, after what he’d been through. But he didn’t kill Professor Riverdale. He did run away, though. Walked, actually. He walked through a solid wall, in front of the professor and about fifteen other people in the audience. He’d been giving them a lecture in advanced temporal paradox theory. Just smiled a
t them suddenly, put down his chalk, and stepped right through the blackboard. He wasn’t on the other side when they ran into the next room to see.”

  “Damn,” says Clete, impressed. “We can’t do that.”

  “We sure can’t,” says Porfirio. He stiffens, suddenly, seeing something move on the wall of the barn. It’s only the shadow of the circling hawk, though, and he relaxes.

  Clete’s eyes have widened, and he looks worried.

  “You just threw me a grenade,” he says. Catching a grenade is security slang for being made privy to secrets so classified one’s own safety is compromised.

  “You needed to know,” says Porfirio.

  ***

  The search for Robert Ross had gone on for years, in the laborious switchback system of time within which the Company operated. The mortals running the 1964 operation had hunted him with predictable lack of success. After the ripples from that particular causal wave had subsided, the mortal masters up in the twenty-fourth century set their immortal agents on the problem.

  The ones who were security technicals, that is. The rank-and-file Preservers and Facilitators weren’t supposed to know that there had ever been mistakes like Robert Ross. This made searching for him that much harder, but secrecy has its price.

  It was assumed that Robert, being a genius in Temporal Physics, had somehow managed to escape into time. Limitless as time was, Robert might still be found within it. The operatives in charge of the case reasoned that a needle dropped into a haystack must gravitate toward any magnets concealed in the straw. Were there any magnets that might attract Robert Ross?

  “Baseball!” croaked Professor Riverdale, when Security Executive Tvashtar had gone to the nursing home to interview him. “Bobby just loved baseball. You mark my words, he’ll be at some baseball game somewhere. If he’s in remission, he’ll even be on some little town team.”

  With trembling hands he drew a baseball from the pocket of his dressing gown and held it up, cupping it in both hands as though he presented Tvashtar with a crystal wherein the future was revealed.

  “He and I used to play catch with this. You might say it’s the egg out of which all our hopes and dreams hatch. Peanuts and Crackerjack! The crack of the bat! The boys of summer. Bobby was the boy of summer. Sweet Bobby…He’d have given anything to have played the game…It’s a symbol, young man, of everything that’s fine and good and American.”

  Tvashtar nodded courteously, wondering why mortals in this era assumed the Company was run by Americans, and why they took it for granted that a stick-and-ball game had deep mystical significance. But he thanked Professor Riverdale, and left the 1970s gratefully. Then he organized a sweep through Time, centering on baseball.

  ***

  “And it didn’t pan out,” says Clete. “Obviously.”

  “It didn’t pan out,” Porfirio agrees. “The biggest search operation the Company ever staged, up to that point. You know how much work was involved?”

  ***

  It had been a lot of work. The operatives had to check out every obscure minor-league player who ever lived, to say nothing of investigating every batboy and ballpark janitor and even bums who slept under the bleachers, from 1845 to 1965. Nor was it safe to assume Robert might not be lurking beyond the fruited plains and amber waves of grain; there were Mexican, Cuban and Japanese leagues to be investigated. Porfirio, based at that time in California, had spent the Great Depression sweeping up peanut shells from Stockton to San Diego, but neither he nor anyone else ever caught a glimpse of Robert Ross.

  It was reluctantly concluded that Professor Riverdale hadn’t had a clue about what was going on in Robert’s head. But, since Robert had never shown up again anywhere, the investigation was quietly dropped.

  Robert Ross might never have existed, or indeed died with his mortal

  family. The only traces left of him were in the refinements made to the immortality process after his disappearance, and in the new rules made concerning recruitment of young operatives.

  The Company never acknowledged that it had made any defectives.

  ***

  “Just like that, they dropped the investigation?” Clete demands. “When this guy knew how to go places without getting into a time transcendence chamber? Apparently?”

  “What do you think?” says Porfirio.

  Clete mutters something mildly profane and reaches down into the paper bag between his feet. He pulls out a can of potato chips and pops the lid. He eats fifteen chips in rapid succession, gulps root beer, and then says: “Well, obviously they didn’t drop the investigation, because here we are. Or something happened to make them open it again. They got a new lead?”

  Porfirio nods.

  ***

  1951. Porfirio was on standby in Los Angeles. Saturday morning in a quiet neighborhood, each little house on its square of lawn, rows of them along tree-lined streets. In most houses, kids were sprawled on the floor reading comic books or listening to Uncle Whoa-Bill on the radio, as long low morning sunlight slanted in through screen doors. In one or two houses, though, kids sat staring at a cabinet in which was displayed a small glowing image brought by orthicon tube; for the future, or a piece of it anyway, had arrived.

  Porfirio was in the breakfast room, with a cup of coffee and the sports sections from the Times, the Herald Express, the Examiner, and the Citizen News, and he was scanning for a certain profile, a certain configuration of features. He was doing this purely out of habit, because he’d been off the case for years; but, being immortal, he had a lot of time on his hands. Besides, he had all the instincts of a good cop.

  But he had other instincts, too, even more deeply ingrained than hunting, and so he noticed the clamor from the living room, though it wasn’t very loud. He looked up, scowling, as three-year-old Isabel rushed into the room in her nightgown.

  “What is it, mi hija?”

  She pointed into the living room. “Maria’s bad! The scary man is on the TV,” she said tearfully. He opened his arms and she ran to him.

  “Maria, are you scaring your sister?” he called.

  “She’s just being a dope,” an impatient little voice responded.

  He carried Isabel into the living room, and she gave a scream and turned her face over his shoulder so she wouldn’t see the television screen. Six-year-old Maria, on the other hand, stared at it as though hypnotized. Before her on the coffee table, two little bowls of Cheerios sat untasted, rapidly going soggy in their milk.

  Porfirio frowned down at his great-great-great-great-(and several more greats) grand-niece. “Don’t call your sister a dope. What’s going on? It sounded like a rat fight in here.”

  “She’s scared of the Amazing No Man, so she wanted me to turn him off, but he’s not scary,” said Maria. “And I want to see him.”

  “You were supposed to be watching Cartoon Circus,” said Porfirio, glancing at the screen.

  “Uh-huh, but Mr. Ringmaster has people on sometimes, too,” Maria replied. “See?”

  Porfirio looked again. Then he sat down beside Maria on the couch and stared very hard at the screen. On his arm, Isabel kicked and made tiny complaining noises over his shoulder until he absently fished a stick of gum from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

  “Who is this guy?” he asked Maria.

  “The Amazing No Man,” she explained. “Isn’t he strange?”

  “Yeah,” he said, watching. “Eat your cereal, honey.”

  And he sat there beside her as she ate, though when she dripped milk from her spoon all over her nightgown because she wasn’t paying attention as she ate, he didn’t notice, because he wasn’t paying attention either. It was hard to look away from the TV.

  A wizened little person wandered to and fro before the camera, singing nonsense in an eerily high-pitched voice. Every so often he would stop, as though he had just remembered something, and grope inside his baggy clothing. He would then produce something improbable from an inner pocket: a string of sausages. A bunch of banan
as. A bottle of milk. An immense cello and bow. A kite, complete with string and tail.

  He greeted each item with widely pantomimed surprise, and a cry of “Woooowwwwww!” He pretended he was offering the sausages to an invisible dog, and made them disappear from his hand as though it were really eating them. He played a few notes on the cello. He made the kite hover in midair beside him, and did a little soft-shoe dance, and the kite bobbed along with him as though it were alive. His wordless music never stopped, never developed into a melody; just modulated to the occasional Wowww as he pretended to make another discovery.

  More and more stuff came out of the depths of his coat, to join a growing heap on the floor: sixteen bunches of bananas. A dressmaker’s dummy. A live sheep on a leash. An old-fashioned Victrola, complete with horn. A stuffed penguin. A bouquet of flowers. A suit of armor. At last, the pile was taller than the man himself. He turned, looked full into the camera with a weird smile, and winked.

  Behind Porfirio’s eyes, a red light flashed. A readout overlaid his vision momentarily, giving measurements, points of similarity and statistical percentages of matchup. Then it receded, but Porfirio had already figured out the truth.

  The man proceeded to stuff each item back into his coat, one after another.

  “See? Where does he make them all go?” asked Maria, in a shaky voice. “They can’t all fit in there!”

  “It’s just stage magicians’ tricks, mi hija,” said Porfirio. He observed that her knuckles were white, her eyes wide. “I think this is maybe too scary for you. Let’s turn it off, okay?”

  “I’m not scared! He’s just…funny,” she said.

  “Well, your little sister is scared,” Porfirio told her, and rose and changed the channel, just as Hector wandered from the bedroom in his pajamas, blinking like an owl.

  “Papi, Uncle Frio won’t let me watch Amazing No Man!” Maria complained.