by Jerry
Naturally, Dansk reminded himself, he’d built a delay into his instructions. The new postulates wouldn’t take effect until he began at the con . . .
It would have done no good to give immediacy to the postulates. For even should the computer order an instant change in course, and kick the giant nuclear engine into life, the Wanderer’s great curving path through space would still carry it close enough to New New Rochelle to create disaster.
Only the power of the Ark force could save New New Rochelle now, no matter what the computer did. And for the sake of keeping his own already complex calculations as simple as possible, Dansk wanted that Wanderer to be exactly where he figured it would be when he reached the stand.
“Fifteen minutes to go!” said Clark. “If you’re not in action by then, you’ll be too late to stop the first perturbations on New New Rochelle. The populace will panic.”
“Listen!” ordered Dansk.
And they heard it, as they beamed up the shaft, heard the computer’s broadcast to New New Rochelle. The first seven words were the same ones Taal was seeing at this moment on Printout. The rest of the message would never be seen or heard by Taal and her people.
GIFT TIME, said the broadcast. GIFT TIME APPROACHES. STAND BY. Then: ULTIMATUM. THIS IS ULTIMATUM TO THE PLANET ORBITING CLASS C STAR AT GALACTIC COORDINATES 2548-921-5843. YOU WILL PROVIDE THE FOLLOWING ITEMS, AND IN THE EXACT QUANTITIES STATED, OR WE WILL DESTROY YOU.
The list of supplies demanded by the computer was a long one, ranging from nuclear fuel to fresh Eridani pama juice to—what?—a rocking chair. Over and over the ultimatum and the list were broadcast.
Angrily, Clark switched off his headset. Even should New New Rochelle respond upon the instant, which was patently impossible, the Wanderer was already too close to avoid creating perturbations.
“That’s what you get with these antique infrared computers,” he fumed. “Miscalculations.”
But now they had reached the surface and were tumbling into the chaser. And it was Dansk, not Clark, who was consulting his watch. Twelve minutes to go.
The stand stood far out, a million miles out, and four more precious minutes were lost warping out to it.
Then they were passing through air locks, and Dansk’s moment had come.
Blood pounding, the elation wild, he raced past Clark, past the waiting technicians assembled at their posts, past the still and silent funnels of power, and up, up, up into the spiring top of the stand.
There was one last portal to be opened, the one that could only be opened by the touch of an Ark IVs signet ring, and then he was in the transparent bubble housing the Ark force controls.
The whole galaxy lay spread out giddily all about him; Dansk was gripped with that wild sense of disembodiment, that exhilarating sense of floating alone in the universe, and of being able to make all of it, meteorite or galaxy, do his bidding—as indeed he could.
Six minutes. There was time, and time to spare. Dansk fed his calculations into the computer, adjusted his hands above the keys—and waited.
Then it was time.
He thumbed the communicator button.
After the time lag of distance Bonae’s face appeared on the little screen to his left.
Bonae’s face was eager, tense, and even across the gulf of space Dansk could see that Bonae, too, was caught up in the fever of the moment, living it vicariously, remembering the days when he, too, had been an Ark IV and not yet promoted to Ark V and command.
“This is Dansk!” Dansk said in the time-hallowed ritual of the Service. “Archimedes IV Dansk! Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world!”
It was ritual, but more than ritual. Every Ark IV must obtain final, last-minute permission to loose the terrible power of the Archimedes force. The requirement was the one last safeguard against misuse.
“Archimedes IV Dansk, I give you the place to stand,” said Bonae, his shoulder moving as he threw a switch out of camera range.
The time lag. Then Dansk heard the familiar and unmistakable click. The Ark force was unlocked and at his command.
“Then I have the place to stand,” exulted Dansk in the concluding words of the ritual, “and I will move the world—now!”
His fingers played over the keys, building a concerto of power, drawing in the tenuous threads of the cosmic rays, turning the threads to filaments, the filaments to strands, the strands to rope, the rope to chain, the chain to cable . . . building up and building up the moments of force, constructing the moments from the energy that everywhere flooded the galaxy.
Archimedes had first said it, Archimedes so long ago lost back there in the fabric of the past. He, too, had calculated his moments of force, and been enthralled. All he had wanted was a place to stand.
And now Dansk and all of mankind, through the force that they called the Archimedes force in honor of the man who had first calculated the possibilities, had discovered the power he had foreseen—discovered it in a harnessing of the cosmic rays—and in the building of a space platform, a place to stand.
They could and did move worlds. Usually the worlds were very small indeed: disabled spaceships, precious-metaled asteroids too far from market to profitably mine, tons of construction equipment . . .
But sometimes they were worlds—real worlds—a world moved from a sun ready to go nova . . . a wanderer threatening another world.
Up and up built the force at Dansk’s command, pouring through the collectors into the funnels of power, building and building.
If Dansk chose, he could stand here forever, and forever build power. And in time he would have more, far more than he needed to move the Wanderer. In time he would have power enough to move the galaxy and everything in it.
But he would not do that. He was of Ark Command. Still, just the knowledge that he had such power was a wild exaltation.
And it was not a difficult process at all, this moving of worlds. Principles known since before the technological era back in the twentieth century did the job. Archimedes and his leverages, Newton and his mechanistic universe . . .
Naturally, it was a little more complicated than that. Neither Archimedes nor Newton had taken into account the conclusions of a man-to-be named Einstein, nor the possibility that space might be curved. But all one had to do was feed that information into the calculations.
Dansk reached the peak of power he needed.
For a moment he thought about the beautiful golden girl he had seen in the computer room, and of what her name might be.
Well, she would not be disappointed. Gift Time would arrive—but the Gifts would not be from New New Rochelle. They would be from half a hundred worlds, a charitable contribution channeled through Archimedes Command. And they would be brought as often as necessary.
The Wanderer had a long trip ahead. Not to another planet, to repeat the story of pillage and destruction. The new basic postulates in its computer would prevent that.
Instead the Wanderer would travel to a planetless sun—one it could call its own—so that it might become what the long-ago development company had planned that it become, and in the becoming be a home for the people of the Wanderer—a home that did not require the killing of other worlds to survive.
Dansk began to move the planet, disturbing its rotational spin not at all, sending it toward its distant rendezvous.
And as he did so, Clark, far below in the body of the stand, broadcast the previously prepared tape, the one that said the Wanderer’s ultimatum had been accepted.
In Chapel, Taal saw that Gift Time was assured, and gave thanks to Systems that she and her people were once again accepted as worthy.
Atop the stand, Dansk cried out in final ritual:
“I have moved the world!”
1971
THE MAN WHO DEVOURED BOOKS
John Sladek
He fattened on knowledge—until consumed by a greater wisdom!
“WE can give you knowledge,” said the salesmanthing.
Claude
Mabry looked all around his room: mildewed wallpaper, broken linoleum, dirty long underwear slung over a chair that had a weak leg, the clock face that had been cracked and repaired so many times with scotch tape that he could hardly see it said 3:20.
“I’m smart enough for me,” he said. “There’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good.”
“That’t right,” said the salesman-thing, “and there’s such a thing as being so smart you have to wash dishes down at Stan’s Chili Bowl to earn enough to live—here.”
Claude could not reply. The whole thing reminded him of the Bible: a snake or whatever it was dressed up like a man, offering “knowledge”—it just didn’t make sense.
“Look, I don’t mean to be unpleasant,” said the salesman. “But we Guzz are a hell of a lot more powerful and a hell of a lot smarter than your species. If we’d wanted to, we could have vaporized your whole planet—but it’s not our way. So when somebody comes offering to make you smart, don’t knock it.”
Claude wanted to rip off that grinning, false mansuit and see what the Guzz looked like. He half-rose, then sank back again and looked at the floor.
“If you’re so good, why do you want to do anything for me?”
“I don’t want to do anything for you. I voted to turn Earth into a bird refuge. But we have a democratic form of government and the majority wanted to make your kind fit citizens to share the universe with us.”
“All right, how do I know you can make me smart?”
The salesman opened his briefcase and took out a handful of bright brochures. “Don’t take my word for it that we can make you one of the smartest men on Earth,” he said. “Don’t take it from me that being smart is worthwhile. Millions are trying our plan. Thousands have tried it already. Have a look.”
He handed Claude a folder showing full-color pictures of quiet scholars, white-coated scientists, dignified judges and beaming businessmen. Their testimonials were capped with red headlines:
COULDN’T READ OWN NAME—
NOW COMMANDS 20 LANGUAGES!
FAMOUS ECONOMIST
“HATED ARITHMETIC”
“DUMB OX”
TO BRILLIANT THEOLOGIAN—IN 7 MONTHS!
“But—what would I study?”
“Everything” The salesman produced another slick booklet and began turning the pages, showing Claude pictures of happy housewives and hairy-handed laborers reading heavy volumes, farmers peering through microscopes and grannies using slide rules. “We call our system the Interface Way. Every person we accept must study at least two subjects intensively. If the subjects are unrelated, all the better. We mix mathematics with literature, we throw theoretical physics at a medical specialist, we give the mathematician theology.”
“What would I get?”
“If we accepted you, you’d be tested. Then we’d know.”
“What do you mean, if?” Claude felt he had just been offered a million-dollars, but at the word “if” it had shrunk to about a nickle. The stranger, sensing his anxiety, spoke soothingly. “Don’t worry too much about that. We won’t be testing your I.Q. or previous knowledge. In fact, the less of either, the better. We want people who haven’t had a chance, people who feel useless because the sleeping genius within them has never been awakened. What do you say?”
“I don’t know. What would it cost me?”
“All the money in the world couldn’t buy you a better education pal. But all it costs is your signature.”
“Well—oh, hell, why not?”
“Why not?” echoed the salesman, handing him a pen. Claude signed a few forms in various colors and the salesman gave him a copy of each.
“Claude,” he said, “you’ve just made your first intelligent decision.”
THE Guzz had pretty well taken over Earth, in every way. Guzz-developed gadgets were in every home. Clergymen thanked the Lord from their pulpits that the Guzz were not warlike or vicious but a truly democratic—ah—people. The government made daily announcements of new Guzz gifts to humanity.
They quietly disarmed the nuclear powers, they made efficient clean-air and sewage-disposal systems for our cities, they introduced new food sources and birth-control plans in Asia. Hardly a government bureau in the world had not been approached by the Guzz with a suggestion or a gift—and these aliens used no stronger forces than tact and kindly persuasion.
The only disagreeable thing about them was the way they looked—both at home and in Earth-drag.
On their own planet (or so it was said, for no one had yet visited them) the Guzz were disagreeably vermiform. Here, so as not to spook the natives, they wore human forms of plastic.
Their movements in these were natural enough, but they all looked alike. As far as most people, including Claude, were concerned, the Guzz were just so many talking store-window dummies.
THE first box that arrived was a table-top computer equipped with keyboard, microphone, speaker and visual display screen. That night when he returned from Stan’s Chili Bowl, Claude lay awake looking at all that gleaming, complicated junk and wondering if he might have made a mistake in even hoping . . .
Next day three packages arrived. The first contained books and a sheaf of documents: a certification that Claude Mabry was eligible for this correspondence course, more copies of the various forms he’d signed—and a booklet entitled: Welcome, Future Genius!
The government of Guzz and your own government wish to take this opportunity to welcome you . . . conditions and bylaws . . . You may not always see the reasons for instructions given you in this course, but they are necessary to ensure efficient use of your time.
The enclosed books are for Lesson One. The books required for each lesson will be provided with the lesson. At various points in the program you will be asked to study them thoroughly.
Claude glanced at the titles of the books: The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud; Verbal Behavior, B.F. Skinner; Towards Information Retrieval, Fairthome; were only a few.
The dream book looked interesting but inside, like all the others, it was full of long-winded sentences that didn’t mean anything.
The second package contained a tape cassette titled: Program for Lesson One and simple instructions for loading it into the teaching computer.
As soon as Claude could do so, he switched on the machine. He might have expected it to give him a problem, to register the fact that it was turned on, or at least to ask his name, but it did none of these things.
Instead, it politely requested him to eat a sandwich.
Claude scratched his head. The Guzz had to be joking. He could imagine them watching him right now, laughing at his stupidity. So this was the big learning course! So this . . .
He remembered the third package and tore it open. Inside was a cellophane-wrapped sandwich. Though Claude turned it over and over, he could see only one difference between this and any other cellophane-wrapped sandwich: Inside the wrapper was a plain printed name slip. But instead of “ham and cheese” or “peanut butter and grape jelly” it simply read: Eat me.
The bread was a little stale but he enjoyed the salami or para-salami inside.
An hour later he correctly answered a request to explain how and why dreams were subject to syntactical rules. The answer was obvious.
Two hours later he had read Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge, read it at skimming speed because it was already perfectly familiar to him.
A lesson or two later Claude had gone through about fifty difficult books without any trouble. He progressed rapidly through the programs, though it did not seem like progress at all: he simply knew what he was doing. Using Fourier analysis to solve problems in electronics seemed something he had always known, just as he had always realized the gross truth of Newtonian mechanics and the finer truth of quantum mechanics, the position of Hubert Van Eyck in Flemish painting, the syllogistic properties of an Andrew Marvell poem, the flaws in the historical theories of Spengler and Toynbee—or for that matter, how to prepare sauce o
zene with seven ingredients. Scraps of learning, areas of learning, even whole complex structures of learning were suddenly his.
Having learned, he worked. By the fourth lesson Claude had gone through Godel’s proof of the necessary incompletness of mathematical theorems and picked holes in Lucas’s application of this to mechanical devices. He had also put forth an aesthetic theory understandable by perhaps ten men, refutable by no more than one. He had nearly destroyed mathematical economics, and devised a tentative translating machine. He was hardly aware that these things had not been done before, nor was he really aware of the transition from his job at the Chili Bowl to a research fellowship at a prominent university.
THE transition came about from his publication of various monographs in journals, the names of which he knew only from footnotes in the books he was skimming. Some of the monographs came back. He had sent them to wrong addresses, or to journals long out of print.
Others, like his “Queueing Theory Applied to Neural Activity” and “On Poetic Diction,” became classics. Men with tweedy manners but sharp suits and clean attaché cases came to see him. They sat in the steamy, oily kitchen of Stag’s Chili Bowl and talked with him about quasar explanations, new codes of international law and logic mechanisms. True, many prodigies were springing up now that the Guzz offered their massive home study program. But for the time being, genius was still something universities fought over. And so, almost without knowing it (he was thinking of other things), Claude Mabry gave Stan his notice, packed his T-shirts and blue jeans and entrained for Attica University.
He remembered only isolated facts about this trip: sending a change-of-address card to the Guzz; losing his ticket; not bringing enough pager (and so alighting from the train at Attica, where University officials were waiting to greet him, his hands so full of slips of toilet paper on which were penciled notes toward a theory of history that he could not accept the handshakes of these venerables). Without comment he settled into his new life and went on working.
