Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  Her voice cracked like a whip now. “John! This room is not secure.”

  He started, and awareness came into his eyes. He glanced around at terrified doctors and technicians.

  “Rebecca, I studied them all first hand. I made it my business. I had to. Three eleven year old boys, Rebecca. They have parents. Grandparents. Brothers and sisters, playmates, hopes and dreams. They have futures,” he cried, and stopped. He straightened to his full height and met her eyes squarely. “I will not murder them, even for you. I can’t.”

  “Madre de dios, no!” Ruiz-Sanchez moaned in terror. The anesthesiologist began singing his death-song, softly and to himself. A technician bolted hopelessly for the door.

  Rebecca Howell screamed with rage, a hideous sound, and slammed her hands down on the nearest console. One hand shattered an irrigator, which began fountaining water. “You bastard,” she raged. “You filthy bastard!”

  He did not flinch. “I’m sorry. I thought I could.”

  She took two steps backward, located a throwable object and let fly. It was a tray of surgical instruments.

  Dimsdale stood his ground. The tray itself smashed into his mouth, and a needle-probe stuck horribly in his shoulder. Technicians began fleeing.

  “Reb,” he said, blood starting down his chin, “whoever orders this incredible circus, you and your fucking desk can’t outwit Him! Archer died, eleven years ago. You cannot have him back. If you’ll only listen to me, I can—”

  She screamed again and leaped for him. Her intention was plainly to kill him with her hands, and he knew she was more than capable of it, and again he stood his ground.

  And saw her foot slip in the puddle on the floor, watched one flailing arm snarl in the cables that trailed from the casing of the pineal restarter and yank two of them loose, saw her land face first in water at the same instant as the furiously sparking cables, watched her buck and thrash and begin to die.

  Frantically he located the generator that fed the device and sprang for it. Ruiz-Sanchez blocked his way, holding a surgical laser like a dueling knife. Dimsdale froze, and the doctor locked eyes with him. Long after his ears and nose told him it was too late, Dimsdale stood motionless.

  At last he slumped. “Quite right,” he murmured softly.

  Ruiz-Sanchez continued to aim the laser at his heart. They were alone in the room.

  “I have no reason to think this room has been bugged by anyone but Rebecca,” Dimsdale said wearily. “And the only thing you know about me is that I won’t kill innocent people. Don’t try to understand what has happened here. You and your people can go in peace; I’ll clean up here. I won’t even bother threatening you.”

  Ruiz-Sanchez nodded and lowered the laser.

  “Go collect your team, Doctor, before they get themselves into trouble. You can certify her accidental death for me.”

  The doctor nodded again and began to leave.

  “Wait.”

  He turned.

  Dimsdale gestured toward the open cryotank. “How do I pull the plug on this?”

  Ruiz-Sanchez did not hesitate. “The big switch. There, by the coils at this end.” He left.

  An hour and a half later, Dimsdale had achieved a meeting of minds with her chief security officer and her personal secretary, and had been left alone in the den. He sat at her desk and let his gaze rest on the terminal keyboard. At this moment thousands of people were scurrying and thinking furiously; her whole mammoth empire was in chaos. Dimsdale sat at its effective center, utterly at peace. He was in no hurry; he had all the time in the world, and everything he had ever wanted.

  We do get smarter every time, he thought. I’m sure of it.

  He made the desk yield up the tape of what had transpired in the cryotheater, checked one detail of the tape very carefully, satisfied himself that it was the only copy, and wiped it. Then, because he was in no hurry, he ordered scotch.

  When she’s twenty, I’ll only be fifty-seven, he thought happily. Not even middle-aged. It’s going to work. This time it’s going to work for both of us. He set down the scotch and told the desk to locate him a girl who had been born at one minute and forty-three seconds before noon. After a moment, it displayed data.

  “Orphan, by God!” he said aloud. “That’s a break.”

  He took a long drink of scotch on the strength of it, and then he told the desk to begin arranging for the adoption. But it was the courtship he was thinking about.

  Concerning “Soul Search”:

  I have always felt faintly guilty about the Campbell Award.

  Every year the members of the World Science Fiction Society1 vote on the Hugo Awards for professional and fannish achievement in sf. Since 1973 they have also voted the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. It is technically a non-Hugo, and has been privately sponsored by Conde-Nast Publications, former publishers of Analog (formerly Astounding), the magazine which the late John Campbell used to invent modern science fiction. Davis Publications, Analog’s new owner, will continue the tradition. The award was originally suggested by Ben Bova, who was named editor of Analog when John died. Anyone whose first professional sf publication took place within the previous two years is eligible.2

  In 1974 Lisa Tuttle and I tied for the second Campbell Award.

  It was the first award of any kind that I ever won (barring a scholarship), and I tied for it fair and square, and I’m quite proud of it. And yet there is a certain sense in which I feel a little funny about it.

  You see, I suspect in my heart of hearts that if he had lived, John W. Campbell would have hated my stuff.

  Or at least failed to buy it with any regularity. I don’t write watchacall your average Astounding story. I’ve never written a story with an engineer as the protagonist. I’m massively ignorant of science, and rarely write stories about physical problems. I don’t know how to design a planet, and I don’t much want to learn; I tend to keep my stories in and around known ones. The second Callahan story ever published, “The Time Traveler,” caused one Analog reader to cancel his subscription because they’d “stopped printing science fiction.”

  Don’t get me wrong. I think that if we had ever met, John and I would have found many many things to agree about. It’s hard to be certain what those things would have been; I understand that his thought was, like a UFO, capable of sudden 180° course changes without structural damage. But I’d guess that we would have agreed on a number of important things: the value of reason and technology and liberty and hope and conscience and competence for a start. I have enjoyed a lot of the stories that John Campbell paid money for.

  I just don’t think he would have bought much of my particular brand of sf for Analog.

  Until now. When I sent the manuscript of “Soul Search” to Ben Bova (at Omni, where he has lately gone after seven years as editor of Analog), I said in the cover letter, “This is the first story I’ve written that I really think John Campbell would have bought.”

  It’s such a Campbellian notion, precisely the kind of idea he used to toss at writers over those famous lunches. “Okay, assume reincarnation. Now: what happens to cryogenics?” Whether he would have actually bought the story you have just read or not can never be known, but I think it’s the kind of story idea that would have made John’s eyes light up.

  Incidentally, while I know many people who emphatically believe in reincarnation, I have never met or read one who could satisfactorily explain population growth. As far as I know the hypothesis I offer in “Soul Search”—that human population is inversely proportional to that of other species—is original with me. The beauty of it is that since I haven’t specified which species (Cats, dogs and dolphins, certainly. But do goats have souls? Owls? Salmon? Oats? Cockroaches? Viruses? Computers?)3 the hypothesis cannot be disproved unless and until we have a complete and accurate census of all life on Earth.

  (Come to think, why limit souls to earth? What about that old sf notion that the Martian race has been dying off as ours expands? Could
our population explosion have been triggered by a supernova halfway across the universe? Could our cycles of warfare correspond to the breeding cycle of some distant race of methane breathers? Excuse me while I go write a couple more stories.)

  In short, the Steady State Theory of the Continuum of Souls is still tenable—at least cannot be disproved—while the Big Bang Theory raises more questions than it answers. (By the way, if you do limit the continuum of souls to Terra, neither theory addresses planetary disaster, either past [glaciation] or projected [the ecodeath scenario so beloved by Luddities].)

  The point, the purely Campbellian point is that reincarnation cannot be disproved today, and may conceivably become provable in the near future, with tools a-buildin’ today. Therefore it’s past time to begin speculating about it.

  1 —i.e., anybody in the world who chooses to bother. You, if you like.

  2 —each year George Martin publishes an anthology of original stories by all the Campbell Award nominees, called New Voices. (Pocket) Highly recommended.

  3 —When I lived on the Fundy Shore, there was a stand of rock maples back up the Mountain that I got to know pretty well. Some of ’em even became volunteer blood-donors for my pancakes. I’m sure they had souls.

  Concerning “Spider vs. The Hax Of Sol III”:

  I know a simple, four-letter word whose meaning can, by the transposition of the last two letters, be precisely reversed—without altering its pronunciation.

  To substantiate this claim, I have to go back just over five years.

  Five years ago Jim Baen was the editor of Galaxy magazine, in the process of making it the second-best-selling magazine in the business. I was a novice sf writer, with no novels and fewer than half a dozen short stories published. Jim had bought exactly one of these for Galaxy (well, it was the only one I showed him), and a couple of times when I’d passed through New York he had thrown me a double sawbuck for a day’s worth of reading slushpile. “Slush” is the technical term for unsolicited manuscripts, and for about 99.6% of them, it is a very charitable description indeed. The remaining four tenths of a percent are what keeps sf alive and growing, and in particular they were what was keeping Galaxy alive and growing five years ago, as the publisher gave Jim a monthly budget of two cheese sandwiches, a firkin of salt and a buffalo nickel with which to produce the magazine. Furthermore each month’s budget tended to actually leave the accounting department in the following fiscal year, or worse. Jim needed his slush combed pretty thoroughly.

  (I wish to note here that to my knowledge Jim always warned his writers at point-of-sale to expect late payment. I have known editors less forthright.)

  Anyway, I was on the phone with him one day, I forget who called who or why, I remember I was in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, working on a story called “Stardance” with my wife Jeanne, and didn’t want to be distracted.

  “Here’s a good question,” he said. “What’s the difference between a critic and a book reviewer?”

  I thought about it. “I guess I’d say a critic is someone who evaluates books in terms of the objective standards of serious literature. A reviewer is someone who believes those standards to be either imaginary or irrelevant, and evaluates books in terms of his own prejudices.”

  “Say it simpler.”

  I was itching to get back to my little basement writing-nook. “Uh…a critic tells you whether or not it’s Art; a reviewer tells you whether or not it’s any damn good to read.”

  “Done,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “The pay is half a cheese sandwich.”

  “What?”

  “All right, all right, you can have the buffalo nickel; Pournelle and Geis are splitting the salt.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re my new book reviewer. Deadline is next week; we’ll call it a guest column and then phase you in permanently in a couple of months.”

  “You’ve got a book reviewer. One of the biggest names in the business.”

  “I had a book reviewer. Sturgeon has this bad habit.”

  “Eh?”

  “Eating. We owe him a great many cheese sandwiches.”

  “Ah. I take it the cheese sandwiches you are offering me are similarly promissory in nature?”

  “You’ve got it. Same as buying stories: I promise to pay you before you die—but you have to promise not to die.”4

  You can’t let editors push you around in this business or you’re finished. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want me to stop work on a novella which is no question going to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus next year,5 just put that on hold for awhile, read about a dozen books and think of something coherent to say about them, type the whole thing up and send it in by next week, stick my neck out by telling people what I think is good and bad on the basis of my three whole years in the business—and furthermore you want me to do this month after month—and furthermost, the pay for all this is cheese sandwiches that arrive so late I can’t even Edam; is that, in essence, your offer?”

  “Well summarized.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Which might make me sound like a bit of a chump. After all, each month’s column took three weeks to prepare, leaving one week in which to earn a living. But consider: for the next several years (until I resigned over a disagreement with the publisher as to which of us was writing the column) my name was featured prominently on the cover of every issue of Galaxy, in plain view of a great many citizens. At least seventy-five thousand people took a copy into their homes and exposed their families and friends to it each month. Untold thousands of people who left the magazine-stand without a copy yet carried away the subconscious impression that this Robinson must be some kind of prominent or prolific guy, to be featured on every cover. Now this was no inducement at all to Ted Sturgeon, whose reputation simply could not be any bigger or better. He didn’t need exposure, he needed cheese sandwiches.6 But me? Since the age of thirteen I have stood six-one and weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds: such a metabolism can survive on the promise of cheese sandwiches.

  And so was born “Spider vs. The Hax Of Sol III.”

  And things began happening.

  At the end of my first year as a reviewer, I was named Best Critic of the Year by the readers of Locus, the excellent newspaper of sf. (The word “critic” itched me a bit—but Locus, apparently agreeing that to call me a critic is some kind of travesty, and unwilling to court semantic dispute by establishing a “reviewer” category, solved the problem by dropping “critic” altogether from its poll.) Incoming correspondence peaked at about twenty letters a week, and has remained constant. My only major overhead—buying sf—disappeared, and in fact my problem now is disposing of the surplus. (Most of the books I receive for review are surplus.) I acquired a number of new friends in the business (a small number, as most writers seem to believe a good review is only what they deserve), and a number of new enemies (a rather larger number, as most writers seem to believe that a bad review can only come from an admixture of envy, stupidity and innate evil).

  And, as a side effect, readership of my own stories increased. People who liked my columns decided that if I was that entertaining talking about books, imagine how entertaining I’d be telling stories. People who hated my columns wanted to prove that I had no business criticizing anyone else’s work.

  The net result is that as I write this, five years almost to the day since Jim Baen decided to take a chance on an unknown (a decision for which he says he received a huge amount of static from some quarters), I’m making a (tenuous) living at my trade.

  So it seems to me that if you take the word “bane” (“Nemesis; cause of destruction or ruin.”) and reverse the last two letters, you totally reverse the meaning. It is at Jim Baen’s insistence that the following, my first-ever “guest” review column, is reprinted here, despite its amateurishness, and I understand how he feels. He has reason to be proud.

  And I have reason to be g
rateful.

  (Lest, however, you put this book down with the erroneous impression that any editor is a totally nice guy, I direct your attention to the logo at the head of the following column. It is the original logo for “Spider vs. The Hax,” commissioned by Baen and drawn by Freff. I first saw it when it was printed, and I sent what I considered a mild letter [no specific death threats] to Jim, suggesting that perhaps the logo “lacked dignity” a trifle. Freff happened to be in the office when my letter arrived, and their mutual response follows the column.)

  4 —Actually, Jim got me every penny I was owed. Eventually.

  5 —no, I haven’t got fivesight. I say that about every story; it just happened to be true this time.

  6 Ted raises rabbits.

  SPIDER VERSUS THE HAX OF SOL III

  I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I just have that kind of mind, and there’s nothing I can do about it. When Jim Baen asks me for a guest review, all I can visualize is a psychopathic butler, ex-Army no doubt, who instead of announcing the guests as they arrive, lines them up and begins inspecting them for flaws. “Suck in that gut, sister. You there, call that a shave?” I’m sorry, honest.

  So here’s a guest review, Jim.

  Laurels first, then brickbats, with the white elephant saved for last. I’m sorry to say that there are no perfect books waiting for you at your bookstore this month, genties and ladlemen. But some come closer than others.

  Closest is Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison (Harper & Row, price unknown). This, friends, is one king hell collection of gutpunching, groin-kicking, arm-breaking short stories, subtitled “A Pantheon of Modern Gods” and dedicated to the proposition that if gods die when their followers stop believing, then gods are born when beliefs crystallize. Harlan takes a look at some of the gods we’re raising up these days, and makes it quite clear that we’d better start learning how to placate them, like pronto. Written over a period of ten years, the stories are superbly crafted and chillingly effective, the kind of which Heinlein once said that you should serve a whisk-broom with every shot, so that the customer can brush the sawdust off him when he gets back up. But in the three or four times I’ve met Harlan, I’ve noticed a severe strain on our relationship in that he has nothing to bitch at me about, and so I ought to add some beefs.