screamed less. He approached death with greater calm. He even hastened the process,
deliberately inhaling great draughts of water, deliberately wriggling to attract the
shark. When they had the guards kick him to death he kept yelling, "Harder," until
he couldn't yell anymore.
And finally when they set up a screen test, he fervently told the audience that
the Russian government was the most terrifying empire the world had ever known,
because this time they were efficient at keeping their power, because this time
there was no outside for barbarians to come from, and because they had seduced the
freest people in history into loving slavery. His speech was from the heart-- he
loathed the Russians and loved the memory that once there had been freedom and law
and a measure of justice in America.
And the prosecutor came into the room ashenfaced.
"You bastard," he said.
"Oh. You mean the audience was live this time?"
"A hundred loyal citizens. And you corrupted all but three of them."
"Corrupted?"
"Convinced them."
Silence for a moment, and then the prosecutor sat down and buried his head in his
hands.
"Going to lose your job?" Jerry asked.
"Of course."
"I'm sorry. You're good at it."
The prosecutor looked at him with loathing. "No one ever failed at this before.
And I had never had to take anyone beyond a second death. You've died a dozen times,
Crove, and you've got used to it."
"I didn't mean to."
"How did you do it?"
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"I don't know."
"What kind of animal are you, Crove? Can't you make up a lie and believe it?"
Crove chuckled. (In the old days, at this level of amusement he would have laughed
uproariously. But inured to death or not, he had scars. And he would never laugh
loudly again.) "It was my business. As a playwright. The willing suspension of
disbelief."
The door opened and a very important looking man in a military uniform covered
with medals came in, followed by four Russian soldiers. The prosecutor sighed and
stood up. "Good-bye, Crove."
"Good-bye," Jerry said.
"You're a very strong man."
"So, " said Jerry, "are you. " And the prosecutor left.
The soldiers took Jerry out of the prison to a different place entirely. A large
complex of buildings in Florida. Cape Canaveral. They were exiling him, Jerry
realized.
"What's it like?" he asked the technician who was preparing him for the flight.
"Who knows?" the technician asked. "No one's ever come back. Hell, no one's ever
arrived yet."
"After I sleep on somec, will I have any trouble waking up?"
"In the labs, here on earth, no. Out there, who knows?"
"But you think we'll live?"
"We send you to planets that look like they might be habitable. If they aren't, so
sorry. You take your chances. The worst that can happen is you die."
"Is that all?" Jerry murmured.
"Now lie down and let me tape your brain."
Jerry lay down and the helmet, once again, recorded his thoughts. It was
irresistible, of course: when you are conscious that your thoughts are being taped,
Jerry realized, it is impossible not to try to think something important. As if you
wer performing. Only the audience would consist of just one person. Yourself when
you woke up.
But he thought this: That this starship and the others that would be and had been
sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they
were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for
centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some
would survive.
I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and
transferred it to tape.
Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the
Hun. My child will be Mohammed. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.
One of us, someday, will sack Rome.
Then the somec was injected, and it swept through him, taking consciousness with
it, and Jerry realized with a shock of recognition that this, too, was death: but a
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welcome death, and he didn't mind. Because this time when he woke up he would be
free.
He hummed cheerfully until he couldn't remember how to hum, and then they put his
body with hundreds of others on a starship and pushed them all out into space, where
they fell upward endlessly into the stars. Going home.
CLAP HANDS AND SING
0n the screen the crippled man screamed at the lady, insisting that she must not
run away. He waved a certificate. "I'm a registered rapist, damnit!" he cried.
"Don't run so fast! You have to make allowances for the handicapped!" He ran after
her with an odd, left-heavy lope. His enormous prosthetic phallus swung crazily,
like a clumsy propeller that couldn't quite get started. The audience laughed madly.
Must be a funny, funny scene!
Old Charlie sat slumped in his chair, feeling as casual and permanent as glacial
debris. I am here only by accident, but I'll never move. He did not switch off the
television set. The audience roared again with laughter. Canned or live? After more
than eight decades of watching television, Charlie couldn't tell anymore. Not that
the canned laughter had got any more real: It was the real laughter that had gone
tinny, premeditated. As if the laughs were timed to come now, no matter what, and
the poor actors could strain to get off their gags in time, but always they were
just this much early, that much late.
"It's late," the television said, and Charlie started awake, vaguely surprised to
see that the program had changed: Now it was a demonstration of a convenient
electric breast pump to store up natural mother's milk for those times when you just
can't be with baby. "It's late."
"Hello, Jock," Charlie said.
"Don't sleep in front of the television again, Charlie."
"Leave me alone, swine," Charlie said. And then: "Okay, turn it off."
He hadn't finished giving the order when the television flickered and went white,
then settled down into its perpetual springtime scene that meant off. But in the
flicker Charlie thought he saw-- who? Name? From the distant past. A girl. Before
the name came to him, there came another memory: a small hand resting lightly on his
knee as they sat together, as light as a long-legged fly upon a stream. in his
memory he did not turn to look at her; he was talking to others. But he knew just
where she would be if he turned to look. Small, with mousy hair, and yet a face that
was always the child Juliet. But that was not her name. Not Juliet, though she was
Juliet's age in that memory. I am Charlie, he thought. She is-- Rachel.
Rachel Carpenter. In the flicker on the screen hers was the face the random light
had brought him, and so he remembered Rachel as he pulled his ancient body from the
chair; thought of Rachel as he peeled the clothing from his frail skeleton,
delicately, lest some rough motion s
trip away the wrinkled skin like cellophane.
And Jock, who of course did not switch himself off with the television, recited:
"An aged man is a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick."
"Shut up," Charlie ordered.
"Unless Soul clap its hands."
"I said shut up!"
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"And sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress."
"Are you finished?" Charlie asked. He knew Jock was finished. After all, Charlie
had programmed him to recite it, to recite just that fragment every night when his
shorts hit the floor.
He stood naked in the middle of the room and thought of Rachel, whom he had not
thought of in years. It was a trick of being old, that the room he was in now so
easily vanished, and in its place a memory could take hold. I've made my fortune
from time machines, he thought, and now I discover that every aged person is his own
time machine. For now he stood naked. No, that was a trick of memory; memory had
these damnable tricks. He was not naked. He only felt naked, as Rachel sat in the
car beside him. Her voice-- he had almost forgotten her voice-- was soft. Even when
she shouted, it got more whispery, so that if she shouted, it would have all the
wind of the world in it and he wouldn't hear it at all, would only feel it cold on
his naked skin. That was the voice she was using now, saying yes. I loved you when I
was twelve, and when I was thirteen, and when I was fourteen, but when you got back
from playing God in Sao Paulo, you didn't call me. All those letters, and then for
three months you didn't call me and I knew that you thought I was just a child and I
fell in love with-- Name? Name gone. Fell in love with a boy, and ever since then
you've been treating me like... Like. No, she'd never say shit, not in that voice.
And take some of the anger out, that's right. Here are the words... here they come:
You could have had me, Charlie, but now all you can do is try to make me miserable.
It's too late, the time's gone by, the time's over, so stop criticizing me. Leave me
alone.
First to last, all in a capsule. The words are nothing, Charlie realized. A dozen
women, not least his dear departed wife, had said exactly the same words to him
since, and it had sounded just as maudlin, just as unpleasantly uninteresting every
time. The difference was that when the others said it, Charlie felt himself
insulated with a thousand layers of unconcern. But when Rachel said it to his
memory, he stood naked in the middle of his room, a cold wind drying the parchment
of his ancient skin.
"What's wrong?" asked Jock.
Oh, yes, dear computer, a change in the routine of the habitbound old man, and you
suspect what, a heart attack? Incipient death? Extreme disorientation?
"A name," Charlie said. "Rachel Carpenter."
"Living or dead?"
Charlie winced again, as he winced every time Jock asked that question; yet it was
an important one, and far too often the answer these days was Dead. "I don't know."
"Living and dead, I have two thousand four hundred eighty in the company archives
alone."
"She was twelve when I was-- twenty. Yes, twenty. And she lived then in Provo,
Utah. Her father was a pianist. Maybe she became an actress when she grew up. She
wanted to."
"Rachel Carpenter. Born 1959. Provo, Utah. Attended--"
"Don't show off, Jock. Was she ever married?"
"Thrice."
"And don't imitate my mannerisms. Is she still alive?"
"Died ten years ago."
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Of course. Dead, of course. He tried to imagine her-- where? "Where did she die?"
"Not pleasant."
"Tell me anyway. I'm feeling suicidal tonight."
"In a home for the mentally incapable."
It was not shocking; people often outlived their minds these days. But sad. For
she had always been bright. Strange, perhaps, but her thoughts always led to
something worth the sometimes-convoluted path. He smiled even before he remembered
what he was smiling at. Yes. Seeing through your knees. She had been playing Helen
Keller in The Miracle Worker, and she told him how she had finally come to
understand blindness. "It isn't seeing the red insides of your eyelids, I knew that.
I knew it isn't even seeing black. It's like trying to see where you never had eyes
at all. Seeing through your knees. No matter how hard you try, there just isn't any
vision there." And she had liked him because he hadn't laughed. "I told my brother,
and he laughed," she said. But Charlie had not laughed.
Charlie's affection for her had begun then, with a twelve-year-old girl who could
never stay on the normal, intelligible track, but rather had to stumble her own way
through a confusing underbrush that was thick and bright with flowers. "I think God
stopped paying attention long ago." she said. "Any more than Michelangelo would want
to watch them whitewash the Sistine Chapel."
And he knew that he would do it even before he knew what it was that he would do.
She had ended in an institution, and he, with the best medical care that money could
buy, stood naked in his room and remembered when passion still lurked behind the
lattices of chastity and was more likely to lead to poems than to coitus.
You overtold story, he said to the wizened man who despised him from the mirror.
You are only tempted because you're bored. Making excuses because you're cruel.
Lustful because your dim old dong is long past the exercise.
And he heard the old bastard answer silently, You will do it, because you can. Of
all the people in the world, you can.
And he thought he saw Rachel look back at him, bright with finding herself
beautiful at fourteen, laughing at the vast joke of knowing she was admired by the
very man whom she, too, wanted. Laugh all you like, Charlie said to his vision of
her. I was too kind to you then. I'm afraid I'll undo my youthful goodness now.
"I'm going back," he said aloud. "Find me a day."
"For what purpose?" Jock asked.
"My business."
"I have to know your purpose, or how can I find you a day?"
And so he had to name it. "I'm going to have her if I can."
Suddenly a small alarm sounded, and Jock's voice was replaced by another.
"Warning. Illegal use of THIEF for possible present-altering manipulation of the
past."
Charlie smiled. "Investigation has found that the alteration is acceptable.
Clear." And the program release: "Byzantium."
"You're a son of a bitch," said Jock.
"Find me a day. A day when the damage will be least-- when I can..."
"Twenty-eight October 1973."
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That was after he got home from Sao Paulo, the contracts signed, already a
capitalist before he was twenty-three. That was during the time when he had been
afraid to call her, because she was only fourteen, for God's sake.
"What will it do to her, Jock?"
"How should I know?" Jock answered. "And what difference would it make to you?"
He looked in the mirror again. "A difference."
<
br /> I won't do it, he told himself as he went to the THIEF that was his most
ostentatious sign of wealth, a private THIEF in his own rooms. I won't do it, he
decided again as he set the machine to wake him in twelve hours, whether he wished
to return or not. Then he climbed into the couch and pulled the shroud over his
head, despairing that even this, even doing it to her, was not beneath him. There
was a time when he had automatically held back from doing a thing because he knew
that it was wrong. Oh, for that time! he thought, but knew as he thought it that he
was lying to himself. He had long since given up on right and wrong and settled for
the much simpler standards of effective and ineffective, beneficial and detrimental.
He had gone in a THIEF before, had taken some of the standard trips into the past.
Gone into the mind of an audience member at the first performance of Handel's
Messiah and listened. The poor soul whose ears he used wouldn't remember a bit of it
afterward. So the future would not be changed. That was safe, to sit in a hall and
listen. He had been in the mind of a farmer resting under a tree on a country lane
as Wordsworth walked by and had hailed the poet and asked his name, and Wordsworth
had smiled and been distant and cold, delighting in the countryside more than in
those whose tillage made it beautiful. But those were legal trips. Charlie had done
nothing that could alter the course of history.
This time, though. This time he would change Rachel's life. Not his own, of
course. That would be impossible. But Rachel would not be blacked from remembering
what happened. She would remember, and it would turn her from the path she was meant
to take. Perhaps only a little. Perhaps not importantly. Perhaps just enough for her
to dislike him a little sooner, or a little more. But too much to be legal, if he
were caught.
He would not be caught. Not Charlie. Not the man who owned THIEF and therefore
could have owned the world. It was all too bound up in secrecy. Too many agents had
used his machines to attend the enemy's most private conferences. Too often the
Attorney General had listened to the most perfect of wiretaps. Too often politicians
who were willing to be in Charlie's debt had been given permission to lead their
opponents into blunders that cost them votes. All far beyond what the law allowed;
who would dare complain now if Charlie also bent the law to his own purpose?
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