The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  He had dropped to his knees and he gathered my frantic hands into his two big quiet ones.

  "It might well be," he said. "Jemmy will help us find out."

  The other figure knelt beside Dr. Curtis. There was a curious waiting kind of silence, but it wasn't me he was looking at. It wasn't my hands he reached for. It wasn't my voice that cried out softly.

  But it was the Francher kid who suddenly launched himself into the arms of the stranger and began to wail, the wild noisy crying of a child—a child who could be brave as long as he was completely lost but who had to dissolve into tears when rescue came.

  The stranger looked over the Francher kid's head at Dr. Curtis. "He's mine," he said. "But she's almost one of yours."

  ~ * ~

  It could all have been a dream, or a mad explosion of imagination of some sort; but they don't come any less imaginative than Mrs. McVey, and I know she will never forget the Francher kid. She has another foster child now, a placid plump little girl who loves to sit and listen to woman-talk—but the Francher kid is indelible in the McVey memory. Unborn generations will probably hear of him and his shoes.

  And Twyla—she will carry his magic to her grave, unless (and I know she sometimes hopes prayerfully) Francher someday goes back for her.

  Jemmy brought him to Cougar Canyon, and here they are helping him sort out all his many gifts and capabilities—some of which are unique to him—so that he will be able, finally, to fit into his most effective slot in their scheme of things. They tell me that there are those of this world who are developing even now in the footsteps of the People. That's what Jemmy meant when he told Dr. Curtis I was almost one of his.

  And I am walking. Dr. Curtis brought Bethie. She only touched me softly with her hands and read me to Dr. Curtis. And I had to accept it then—that it was mostly myself that stood in my own way. That my doctor had been right: that time, patience and believing could make me whole again.

  The more I think about it the more I think that those three words are the key to almost everything.

  Time, patience and believing—and the greatest of these is believing.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  ALFRED BESTER

  Alfred Bester’s starburst (Signet, 1958) may well be, in average of dazzling quality, the finest collection yet published of science-fantasy shorts by a single author. Mostly (I’m proud to say) they’re from F&SF, during the early 1950’s—after which brilliant burst Mr. Bester settled down to other matters, such as writing novels, both future (the stars my destination) and contemporary (“who he?”), and a witty and pointed monthly commentary on TV and allied arts for Holiday. Now here’s the first new Bester short story in over four years, concerning (as Bob Mills accurately described it) a crime that mulishly refuses to allow itself to be committed, a time-travel paradox that (crowning Besterian paradox!) blithely contains no paradox, and a mad professor who gets saner and saner as the story gets madder and madder.

  THE MEN WHO MURDERED MOHAMMED

  There was a man who mutilated history. He toppled empires and uprooted dynasties. Because of him, Mount Vernon should not be a national shrine, and Columbus, Ohio, should be called Cabot, Ohio. Because of him the name Marie Curie should be cursed in France, and no one should swear by the beard of the Prophet. Actually, these realities did not happen, because he was a mad professor; or, to put it another way, he only succeeded in making them unreal for himself.

  Now, the patient reader is too familiar with the conventional mad professor, undersized and overbrowed, creating monsters in his laboratory which invariably turn on their maker and menace his lovely daughter. This story isn’t about that sort of make-believe man. It’s about Henry Hassel, a genuine mad professor in a class with such better-known men as Ludwig Boltzmann (see Ideal Gas Law), Jacques Charles, and André Marie Ampère (1775-1836).

  Everyone ought to know that the electrical ampere was so named in honor of Ampère. Ludwig Boltzmann was a distinguished Austrian physicist, as famous for his research on black-body radiation as on Ideal Gases. You can look him up in Volume Three of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, BALT to BRAI. Jacques Alexandre César Charles was the first mathematician to become interested in flight, and he invented the hydrogen balloon. These were real men.

  They were also real mad professors. Ampère, for example, was on his way to an important meeting of scientists in Paris. In his taxi he got a brilliant idea (of an electrical nature, I assume) and whipped out a pencil and jotted the equation on the wall of the hansom cab. Roughly, it was: dH = ipdl/r2 in which p is the perpendicular distance from Ρ to the line of the element dl; or dH = i sin θ dl/r2. This is sometimes known as Laplace’s Law, although he wasn’t at the meeting.

  Anyway, the cab arrived at the Académie. Ampère jumped out, paid the driver and rushed into the meeting to tell everybody about his idea. Then he realized he didn’t have the note on him, remembered where he’d left it, and had to chase through the streets of Paris after the taxi to recover his runaway equation. Sometimes I imagine that’s how Fermat lost his famous “Last Theorem,” although Fermat wasn’t at the meeting either, having died some two hundred years earlier.

  Or take Boltzmann. Giving a course in Advanced Ideal Gases, he peppered his lectures with involved calculus, which he worked out quickly and casually in his head. He had that kind of head. His students had so much trouble trying to puzzle out the math by ear that they couldn’t keep up with the lectures, and they begged Boltzmann to work out his equations on the blackboard.

  Boltzmann apologized and promised to be more helpful in the future. At the next lecture he began, “Gentlemen, combining Boyle’s Law with the Law of Charles, we arrive at the equation pv = po vo (1 + at). Now, obviously, if aSb = f (x) dxχ(a), then pv = RT and vS f (x,y,z) dV = 0. It’s as simple as two plus two equals four.” At this point Boltzman remembered his promise. He turned to the blackboard, conscientiously chalked 2 + 2 = 4, and then breezed on, casually doing the complicated calculus in his head.

  Jacques Charles, the brilliant mathematician who discovered Charles’s Law (sometimes known as Gay-Lussac’s Law), which Boltzmann mentioned in his lecture, had a lunatic passion to become a famous paleographer—that is, a discoverer of ancient manuscripts. I think that being forced to share credit with Gay-Lussac may have unhinged him.

  He paid a transparent swindler named Vrain-Lucas 200,000 francs for holograph letters purportedly written by Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Pontius Pilate. Charles, a man who could see through any gas, ideal or not, actually believed in these forgeries despite the fact that the maladroit Vrain-Lucas had written them in modern French on modern notepaper bearing modern watermarks. Charles even tried to donate them to the Louvre.

  Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life. This is what happened to Henry Hassel, professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University in the year 1980.

  Nobody knows where Unknown University is or what they teach there. It has a faculty of some two hundred eccentrics, and a student body of two thousand misfits—the kind that remain anonymous until they win Nobel prizes or become the First Man on Mars. You can always spot a graduate of U.U. when you ask people where they went to school. If you get an evasive reply like: “State,” or “Oh, a freshwater school you never heard of,” you can bet they went to Unknown. Someday I hope to tell you more about this university, which is a center of learning only in the Pickwickian sense.

  Anyway, Henry Hassel started home from his office in the Psychotic Psenter early one afternoon, strolling through the Physical Culture arcade. It is not true that he did this to leer at the nude coeds practicing Arcane Eurythmics; rather, Hassel liked to admire the trophies displayed in the arcade in memory of great Unknown teams which had won the sort of championships that Unknown teams wi
n—in sports like Strabismus, Occlusion, and Botulism. (Hassel had been Frambesia singles champion three years running.) He arrived home uplifted, and burst gaily into the house to discover his wife in the arms of a man.

  There she was, a lovely woman of thirty-five, with smoky red hair and almond eyes, being heartily embraced by a person whose pockets were stuffed with pamphlets, microchemical apparatus, and a patella-reflex hammer—a typical campus character of U.U., in fact. The embrace was so concentrated that neither of the offending parties noticed Henry Hassel glaring at them from the hallway.

  Now, remember Ampère and Charles and Boltzmann. Hassel weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. He was muscular and uninhibited. It would have been child’s play for him to have dismembered his wife and her lover, and thus simply and directly achieve the goal he desired—the end of his wife’s life. But Henry Hassel was in the genius class; his mind just didn’t operate that way.

  Hassel breathed hard, turned and lumbered into his private laboratory like a freight engine. He opened a drawer labeled DUODENUM and removed a .45-caliber revolver. He opened other drawers, more interestingly labeled, and assembled apparatus. In exactly seven and one half minutes (such was his rage), he put together a time machine (such was his genius).

  Professor Hassel assembled the time machine around him, set the dial for 1902, picked up the revolver and pressed a button. The machine made a noise like defective plumbing and Hassel disappeared. He reappeared in Philadelphia on June 3, 1902, went directly to No. 1218 Walnut Street, a red-brick house with marble steps, and rang the bell. A man who might have passed for the third Smith Brother opened the door and looked at Henry Hassel.

  “Mr. Jessup?” Hassel asked in a suffocated voice.

  “Yes?”

  “You are Mr. Jessup?”

  “I am.”

  “You will have a son, Edgar? Edgar Allan Jessup—so named because of your regrettable admiration for Poe?”

  The third Smith Brother was startled. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I’m not married yet.”

  “You will be,” Hassel said angrily. “I have the misfortune to be married to your son’s daughter. Greta. Excuse me.” He raised the revolver and shot his wife’s grandfather-to-be.

  “She will have ceased to exist,” Hassel muttered, blowing smoke out of the revolver. “I’ll be a bachelor. I may even be married to somebody else… Good God! Who?”

  Hassel waited impatiently for the automatic recall of the time machine to snatch him back to his own laboratory. He rushed into his living room. There was his redheaded wife, still in the arms of a man.

  Hassel was thunderstruck.

  “So that’s it,” he growled. “A family tradition of faithlessness. Well, we’ll see about that. We have ways and means.” He permitted himself a hollow laugh, returned to his laboratory, and sent himself back to the year 1901, where he shot and killed Emma Hotchkiss, his wife’s maternal grandmother-to-be. He returned to his own home in his own time. There was his redheaded wife, still in the arms of another man.

  “But I know the old bitch was her grandmother,” Hassel muttered. “You couldn’t miss the resemblance. What the hell’s gone wrong?”

  Hassel was confused and dismayed, but not without resources. He went to his study, had difficulty picking up the phone, but finally managed to dial the Malpractice Laboratory. His finger kept oozing out of the dial holes.

  “Sam?” he said. “This is Henry.”

  “Who?”

  “Henry.”

  “You’ll have to speak up.”

  “Henry Hassel!”

  “Oh, good afternoon, Henry.”

  “Tell me all about time.”

  “Time? Hmmm…” The Simplex-and-Multiplex Computer cleared its throat while it waited for the data circuits to link up. “Ahem. Time. (1) Absolute. (2) Relative. (3) Recurrent. (1) Absolute: period, contingent, duration, diurnity, perpetuity—”

  “Sorry, Sam. Wrong request. Go back. I want time, reference to succession of, travel in.”

  Sam shifted gears and began again. Hassel listened intently. He nodded. He grunted. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Right. I see. Thought so. A continuum, eh? Acts performed in past must alter future. Then I’m on the right track. But act must be significant, eh? Mass-action effect. Trivia cannot divert existing phenomena streams. Hmmm. But how trivial is a grandmother?”

  “What are you trying to do, Henry?”

  “Kill my wife,” Hassel snapped. He hung up. He returned to his laboratory. He considered, still in a jealous rage.

  “Got to do something significant,” he muttered. “Wipe Greta out. Wipe it all out. All right, by God! I’ll show ‘em.”

  Hassel went back to the year 1775, visited a Virginia farm and shot a young colonel in the brisket. The colonel’s name was George Washington, and Hassel made sure he was dead. He returned to his own time and his own home. There was his redheaded wife, still in the arms of another.

  “Damn!” said Hassel. He was running out of ammunition. He opened a fresh box of cartridges, went back in time and massacred Christopher Columbus, Napoleon, Mohammed and half a dozen other celebrities. “That ought to do it, by God!” said Hassel

  He returned to his own time, and found his wife as before.

  His knees turned to water; his feet seemed to melt into the floor. He went back to his laboratory, walking through nightmare quicksands.

  “What the hell is significant?” Hassel asked himself painfully. “How much does it take to change futurity? By God, I’ll really change it this time. I’ll go for broke.”

  He traveled to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and visited a Madame Curie in an attic workshop near the Sorbonne. “Madame,” he said in his execrable French, “I am a stranger to you of the utmost, but a scientist entire. Knowing of your experiments with radium— Oh? You haven’t got to radium yet? No matter. I am here to teach you all of nuclear fission.”

  He taught her. He had the satisfaction of seeing Paris go up in a mushroom of smoke before the automatic recall brought him home. “That’ll teach women to be faithless,” he growled… “Guhhh!” The last was wrenched from his lips when he saw his redheaded wife still— But no need to belabor the obvious.

  Hassel swam through fogs to his study and sat down to think. While he’s thinking I’d better warn you that this not a conventional time story. If you imagine for a moment that Henry is going to discover that the man fondling his wife is himself, you’re mistaken. The viper is not Henry Hassel, his son, a relation, or even Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906). Hassel does not make a circle in time, ending where the story begins—to the satisfaction of nobody and the fury of everybody—for the simple reason that time isn’t circular, or linear, or tandem, discoid, syzygous, longinquitous, or pandicularted. Time is a private matter, as Hassel discovered.

  “Maybe I slipped up somehow,” Hassel muttered. “I’d better find out.” He fought with the telephone, which seemed to weigh a hundred tons, and at last managed to get through to the library.

  “Hello, Library? This is Henry.”

  “Who?”

  “Henry Hassel.”

  “Speak up, please.”

  “HENRY HASSEL!”

  “Oh. Good afternoon, Henry.”

  “What have you got on George Washington?”

  Library clucked while her scanners sorted through her catalogues. “George Washington, first president of the United States, was born in—”

  “First president? Wasn’t he murdered in 1775?”

  “Really, Henry. That’s an absurd question. Everybody knows that George Wash—”

  “Doesn’t anybody know he was shot?”

  “By whom?”

  “Me.”

  “When?”

  “In 1775.”

  “How did you manage to do that?”

  “I’ve got a revolver.”

  “No, I mean, how did you do it two hundred years ago?”

  “I’ve got a time machine.”

  “Well, there�
�s no record here,” Library said. “He still doing fine in my files. You must have missed.”

  “I did not miss. What about Christopher Columbus? Any record of his death in 1489?”

  “But he discovered the New World in 1492.”

  “He did not. He was murdered in 1489.”

  “How?”

  “With a forty-five slug in the gizzard.”

  “You again, Henry?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no record here,” Library insisted. “You must be one lousy shot.”

  “I will not lose my temper,” Hassel said in a trembling voice.