Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  I tried to shut off the phone, and my hand was shaking so bad I missed, spinning the volume knob to minimum. “Sharon you gotta believe me,” he hollered from far far away, “I’m into rape fantasy, I’m not into rape!” and then I had found the right switch and he was gone.

  I got up very slowly and toddled off to the liquor cabinet, and I stood in front of it taking pulls from different bottles at random until I could no longer see his face, his earnest, baffled, half ashamed face hanging before me.

  Because his hair was thin sandy blond, and his jaw was a bit too square, and his nose was a trifle hooked, and his blue eyes were just the least little bit too far apart. They say everyone has a double somewhere. And Fate is such a witty little motherfucker, isn’t he?

  I don’t remember how I got to bed.

  I woke later that night with the feeling that I would have to bang my head on the floor a couple of times to get my heart started again. I was on my makeshift doss of pillows and blankets beside her bed, and when I finally peeled my eyes open she was sitting up in bed staring at me. She had fixed her hair somehow, and her nails were trimmed. We looked at each other for a long time. Her color was returning somewhat, and the edge was off her bones. She sighed.

  “What did Jo Ann say when you told her?”

  I said nothing.

  “Come on, Jo Ann’s got the only other key to this place, and she wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t a friend. So what did she say?”

  I got painfully up out of the tangle and walked to the window. A phallic church steeple rose above the lowrises a couple of blocks away.

  “God is an iron,” I said. “Did you know that?”

  I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. “And I’m a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?”

  “If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. Or else He’s the dumbest designer that ever lived.”

  Of a thousand possible snap reactions she picked the most flattering and hence most irritating. She kept silent, kept looking at me, and thought about what I had said. At last she said, “I agree. What particular design screwup did you have in mind?”

  “The one that nearly left you dead in a pile of your own shit,” I said harshly. “Everybody talks about the new menace, wireheading, fifth most common cause of death in less than a decade. Wireheading’s not new—it’s just a technical refinement.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Are you familiar with the old cliche, ‘Everything in the world I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Didn’t that ever strike you as damned odd? What’s the most nutritionally useless and physiologically dangerous ‘food’ substance in the world? White sugar. Glucose. And it seems to be beyond the power of the human nervous system to resist it. They put it in virtually all the processed food there is, which is next to all the food there is, because nobody can resist it. And so we poison ourselves and whipsaw our dispositions and rot our teeth. Maltose is just as sweet, but it’s less popular, precisely because it doesn’t kick your blood-sugar in the ass and then depress it again. Isn’t that odd? There is a primitive programming in our skulls that rewards us, literally overwhelmingly, every time we do something damned silly. Like smoke a poison, or eat or drink or snort or shoot a poison. Or overeat good foods. Or engage in complicated sexual behavior without procreative intent, which if it were not for the pleasure would be pointless and insane. And which, if pursued for the pleasure alone, quickly becomes pointless and insane anyway. A suicidal brain-reward system is built into us.”

  “But the reward system is for survival.”

  “So how the hell did ours get wired up so that survival threatening behavior gets rewarded best of all? Even the pro-survival pleasure stimuli are wired so that a dangerous overload produces the maximum pleasure. On a purely biological level man is programmed to strive hugely for more than he needs, more than he can profitably use.

  “The error doesn’t show up as glaringly in other animals. Even surrounded by plenty, a stupid animal has to work hard simply to meet his needs. But add in intelligence and everything goes to hell. Man is capable of outgrowing any ecological niche you put him in—he survives at all because he is The Animal That Moves. Given half a chance he kills himself of surfeit.”

  My knees were trembling so badly I had to sit down. I felt feverish and somehow larger than myself, and I knew I was talking much too fast. She had nothing whatever to say, with voice, face or body.

  “It is illuminating,” I went on, fingering my aching nose, “to note that the two ultimate refinements of hedonism, the search for ‘pure’ pleasure, are the pleasure of cruelty and the pleasure of the despoliation of innocence. We will overlook the tempting example of your father because he was not a normal human being. Consider instead the obvious fact that no sane person in search of sheerly physical sexual pleasure would select an inexperienced partner. Everyone knows that mature, experienced lovers are more competent, confident and skilled. Yet there is not a skin mag in the world that prints pictures of men or women over twenty-five if they can possibly help it, and in the last ten years or so teenagers and pre-teens have been much preferred. Don’t tell me about recapturing lost youth: the root is that a fantasy object over twenty cannot plausibly possess innocence, can no longer be corrupted.

  “Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure, which given his gregarious nature would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you’ll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration—and maybe two that know how to give a terrific backrub. That business of your father leaving all his money to the Church and leaving you ‘a hundred dollars, the going rate’—that was artistry. I can’t imagine a way to make you feel as good as that made you feel rotten. That’s why sadism and masochism are the last refuge of the jaded, the most enduring of the perversions; their piquancy is—”

  “Maybe the Puritans were right,” she said. “Maybe pleasure is the root of all evil. Oh God! but life is bleak without it.”

  “One of my most precious possessions,” I went on blindly, “is a button that my friend Slinky John used to hand-paint and sell below cost. He was the only practicing anarchist I ever met. The button reads: ‘GO, LEMMINGS, GO!’ A lemming surely feels intense pleasure as he gallops to the sea. His self-destruction is programmed by nature, a part of the very same life force that insisted on being conceived and born in the first place. If it feels good, do it.” I laughed, and she flinched. “So it seems to me that God is either an iron, or a colossal jackass. I don’t know whether to be admiring or contemptuous.”

  All at once I was out of words, and out of strength. I yanked my gaze away from hers and stared at my knees for a long time. I felt vaguely ashamed, as befits one who has thrown a tantrum in a sickroom.

  After a time she said, “You talk good on your feet.”

  I kept looking at my knees. “I think I used to be an actor once.”

  “Will you tell me something?”

  “If I can.”

  “What was the pleasure in putting me back together again?”

  I jumped.

  “Look at me. There. I’ve got a half-ass idea of what shape I was in when you met me, and I can guess what it’s been like since. I don’t know if I’d have done as much for Jo Ann, and she’s my best friend. You don’t look like a guy whose favorite kick is sick fems, and you sure as hell don’t look like you’re so rich you got time on your hands. So what’s been your pleasure, these last few days?”

  “Trying to understand,” I snapped. “I’m nosy.”

  “And do you understand?”

  “Yeah. I put it together.”

  “So you’ll be going now?”

&nbs
p; “Not yet,” I said automatically. “You’re not—”

  And caught myself.

  “There’s something else besides pleasure,” she said. “Another system of reward, only I don’t think it has much to do with the one I got wired up to my scalp here. Not brain-reward. Call it mind-reward. Call it…joy—the thing like pleasure that you feel when you’ve done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or when the unfolding of the Universe just seems especially apt. It’s nowhere near as flashy and intense as pleasure can be. Believe me! But it’s got something going for it. Something that can make you do without pleasure, or even accept a lot of pain, to get it.

  “That stuff you’re talking about, that’s there, that’s true. What’s messing us up is the animal nervous system and instincts we inherited. But you said yourself, Man is the animal that outgrows and moves. Ever since the first brain grew a mind we’ve been trying to outgrow our instincts, grow new ones. Maybe we will yet.” She pushed hair back from her face. “Evolution works slow, is all. It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape, and you want a smart one in a lousy few thou? That lemming drive you’re talking about is there—but there’s another kind of drive, another kind of force that’s working against it. Or else there wouldn’t still be any people and there wouldn’t be the words to have this conversation and—” She paused, looked down at herself. “And I wouldn’t be here to say them.”

  “That was just random chance.”

  She snorted. “What isn’t?”

  “Well that’s fine,” I shouted. “That’s fine. Since the world is saved and you’ve got everything under control I’ll just be going along.”

  I’ve got a lot of voice when I yell. She ignored it utterly, continued speaking as if nothing had happened. “Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends—none and all there is—and I think the rest of my life I will dedicate myself to the middle of the road and see how that works out. Starting with the very weak tea and toast I’m going to ask you to bring me in another ten minutes or so. With maltose. But as for this other stuff, this joy thing, that I would like to begin learning about, as much as I can. I don’t really know a God damned thing about it, but I understand it has something to do with sharing and caring and what did you say your name was?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I yelled.

  “All right. What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “What did you come here for?”

  I was angry enough to be honest. “To burgle your fucking apartment!”

  Her eyes opened wide, and then she slumped back against the pillows and laughed until the tears came, and I tried and could not help myself and laughed too, and we shared laughter for a long time, as long as we had shared her tears the night before.

  And then straightfaced she said, “You’ll have to wait a week or so; you’re gonna need help with those stereo speakers. Butter on the toast.”

  Concerning “God Is An Iron”:

  Only two things need to be said about this story, and the first is that it forms Chapter Two of my next novel, Mindkiller.

  The second is that, while the character of Karen Scholz is not drawn from life and is wholly imaginary, the business involving her father is not fiction. It is a transcript, as near verbatim as my memory will produce, of a story a woman told me in 1967. (And if she’s still alive out there, I’d love to hear from her.) Animals like her father are not made up by writers for shock value; they exist.

  God is an iron…and that’s a hot one.

  Concerning “Rah Rah R.A.H.”:

  When Jim Baen left Galaxy, shortly before I did, it was to become sf editor of Ace Books. Ace promptly became the largest publisher of sf in the world, printing more titles in 1977 than any other house.

  Suddenly Jim found himself in custody of a great many cheese sandwiches.

  So he built the magazine he had always wanted Galaxy to be and couldn’t afford to make it, and he named it Destinies. It was a quarterly paperback bookazine from Ace, a book filled with fiction and speculative fact and artwork and all the little extras that make up a magazine, and it was the most consistently satisfying and thought-provoking periodical that came into my house, not excluding Omni and the Scientific American. I did review columns for the first five issues, dropping out for reasons that in retrospect seem dumb.

  So one day shortly after I quit writing reviews for Destinies, Jim called and offered me a proposition: he would send me a xerox of the newest Robert Heinlein manuscript, months in advance of publication, if I would use the book as a springboard for a full-length essay on the lifework of Heinlein, for Destinies. The new book was Expanded Universe, which by now you will almost certainly have seen and therefore own; let me tell you, it blew me away.

  The following is what came spilling out of me when I was done reading Expanded Universe—and when I used it as my Guest of Honor speech at Bosklone, the 1980 Boston sf convention, it was received with loud and vociferous applause. Perhaps I overestimated the amount of attention people pay to critics. Perhaps the essay was unnecessary.

  But oooh it was fun!

  RAH RAH R.A.H.!

  A swarm of petulant blind men are gathered around an elephant, searching him inch by inch for something at which to sneer. What they resent is not so much that he towers over them, and can see farther than they can imagine. Nor is it that he has been trying for nearly half a century to warn them of the tigers approaching through the distant grasses downwind. They do resent these things, but what they really, bitterly resent is his damnable contention that they are not blind, his insistent claim that they can open up their eyes any time they acquire the courage to do so.

  Unforgivable.

  How shall we repay our debt to Robert Anson Heinlein?

  I am tempted to say that it can’t be done. The sheer size of the debt is staggering. He virtually invented modern science fiction, and did not attempt to patent it. He opened up a great many of sf’s frontiers, produced the first reliable maps of most of its principal territories, and did not complain when each of those frontiers filled up with hordes of johnny-come-latelies, who the moment they got off the boat began to complain about the climate, the scenery and the employment opportunities. I don’t believe there can be more than a handful of science fiction stories published in the last forty years that do not show his influence one way or another. He has written the definitive time-travel stories (“All You Zombies—” and “By His Bootstraps”), the definitive longevity books (Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough For Love), the definitive theocracy novel (Revolt In 2100), heroic fantasy/sf novel (Glory Road), revolution novel (The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress), transplant novel (I Will Fear No Evil), alien invasion novel (The Puppet Masters), technocracy story (“The Roads Must Roll”), arms race story (“Solution Unsatisfactory”), technodisaster story (“Blowups Happen”), and about a dozen of the finest science fiction juveniles ever published. These last alone have done more for the field than any other dozen books. And perhaps as important, he broke sf out of the pulps, opened up “respectable” and lucrative markets, broached the wall of the ghetto. He continues to work for the good of the entire genre: his most recent book sale was a precedent-setting event, representing the first-ever SFWA Model Contract signing. (The Science Fiction Writers of America has drawn up a hypothetical ideal contract, from the sf writer’s point of view—but until “The Number of the Beast—” no such contract had ever been signed.) Note that Heinlein did not do this for his own benefit: the moment the contract was signed it was renegotiated upward.

  You can’t copyright ideas; you can only copyright specific arrangements of words. If you could copyright ideas, every living sf writer would be paying a substantial royalty to Robert Heinlein.

  So would a lot of other people. In his spare time Heinlein invented the waldo and the waterbed (and God knows what else), and he didn’t patent them either. (The first waldos were built by Nathan
Woodruff at Brookhaven National Laboratories in 1945, three years after Heinlein described them for a few cents a word. As to the waterbed, see Expanded Universe.) In addition he helped design the spacesuit as we now know it.

  Above all Heinlein is better educated, more widely read and traveled than anyone I have ever heard of, and has consistently shared the Good Parts with us. He has learned prodigiously, and passed on the most interesting things he’s learned to us, and in the process passed on some of his love of learning to us. Surely that is a mighty gift. When I was five years old he began to teach me to love learning, and to be skeptical about what I was taught, and he did the same for a great many of us, directly or indirectly.

  How then shall we repay him?

  Certainly not with dollars. Signet claims 11.5 million Heinlein books in print. Berkley claims 12 million. Del Rey figures are not available, but they have at least a dozen titles. His latest novel fetched a record price. Extend those figures worldwide, and it starts to look as though Heinlein is very well repaid with dollars. But consider: at today’s prices you could own all 42 of his books for about a hundred dollars plus sales tax. Robert Heinlein has given me more than a C-note’s worth of entertainment, knowledge and challenging skullsweat, more by several orders of magnitude. His books do not cost five times the price of Philip Roth’s latest drool; hence they are drastically underpriced.