The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  Mr. Grebb roared defiance. He ran his truck his way! Them delivery slips were crazy, anyhow. Customers weren’t complaining, were they? They got what they ordered and what was put on his truck, didn’t they? If Joe Hallix got things all messed up, it wasn’t his fault! He took the beer where he was told to take it! Them four kegs…

  He steamed to himself as he drove out of the brewery with a fresh load. He’d pinned that bookkeeper guy’s ears back, all right! Thought he was smart, huh? Said he was going to check back on earlier deliveries. The devil with him! Let him check all he wanted!

  But Mr. Grebb was privately worried. As he swore to himself, he drove his truck with greater insolence and abandon even than usual. And he fretted. Because the system of delivery slips was complicated. He had never fathomed all its intricacies. He had devised, instead, a system of magnificent simplicity for his own guidance, which magnificently ignored the piddling details of paperwork. He delivered the beer. But he was belligerently uneasy.

  When he returned to his boarding-house he was loudly and fulsomely enraged. The bookkeeper guy had been at him again. Not only the four kegs from yesterday were now in question. Two from the day before and one from the day before that and three from another day earlier still.

  The bookkeeper talked with asperity. Threateningly. He hadn’t any proof yet, he said, but it looked very queer. There was a lot of beer missing. Mr. Grebb, said the bookkeeper, had messed up his delivery slips so thoroughly that it was not possible yet to guess how much beer had gone astray. Maybe only sixty or seventy kegs, but it might have been going on for months.

  Mr. Grebb went to his favorite tavern that night and literally bellowed his opinion of Joe Hallix to the world. Joe Hallix had done this to him! Joe Hallix had mixed up his delivery slips just to get him in trouble. Joe Hallix was a man of minute character indeed, to hear Mr. Grebb tell it.

  Meanwhile, down in the cellar of his landlady’s house, a device of coils and wires and radio tubes reposed inert and forgotten. But a needle on one tiny dial pointed to twenty milliamperes, and another dial registered nineteen-point-six kilovolts.

  And in a certain area in a certain direction from that device there were strictly local rain-showers in a space no more than twenty feet across. Sometimes the rain fell there when it wasn’t raining anywhere else. It was exactly as if that small twenty-foot circle were somewhere connected with another weather process—or a time-track—so that it received rain quite independently of the ground about it.

  Naturally, nobody noticed it. It was night and everything was rain-wet to begin with, and nobody would have understood, anyhow.

  A couple of hundred miles away, however, there were people who would have understood it, if they’d known. There had been much learned discussion of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks, and as Mr. Grebb bellowed his fury in a tavern around the corner from his boarding house, an eminent mathematician was making an address to a scientific society.

  “Professor Muntz has disappeared,” he announced regretfully, “and his disappearance is clearly the result of his excessive shyness. However, the references to experimental evidence in his work have borne fruit. He speaks of interdimensional stresses leading to a tendency of disparate time-streams to coalesce. Then he observes that experimental evidence throws some of his equations into question. A careful study of his equations has disclosed a trivial error in assumption which, when corrected, modifies his equations into accord with the experimental results he mentions.

  “There can be no doubt that he has achieved experimental proof of the reality of time-streams, of whole systems of reality, which are parallel to but separate from the reality we know. And what does that mean? It means that if we miss a train in this reality, somewhere there is a cosmos in which we catch it. A thief who has been undetected in the universe we know, has somewhere made some slip which has led to his discovery.”

  The learned scientist went on and on with his speech, two hundred miles from where Mr. Grebb bellowed to his tavern companions of the iniquity of Joe Hallix.

  Next morning, Mr. Grebb was bleary-eyed and morose. He almost lacked appetite. He ate only twelve pancakes and almost forced himself to mop up the plate. He was uneasy. If sixty or seventy kegs of beer were missing, due to his fine scorn of bookkeeping details, he was in a bad fix. If that bookkeeper guy hunted back for six months or so and found even more missing—well, that would make it right serious. Mr. Grebb was ready to weep with vexation and terror of jail.

  But he went out of the front door. Keeping gallantly to established custom even in this time of stress, he stooped for the newspaper his landlady paid for and sadly complained she never received. As he bent over, there was a loud slapping noise. A rolled-up newspaper hit him a resounding whack in the seat of the pants.

  He roared, grabbed it, and plunged for the street to avenge the indignity. But there was no paper-boy anywhere about. The paper had materialized in mid-air above a twenty-foot circle which yesterday had received rain independently of neighboring territory.

  Mr. Grebb was formidable as he marched at last toward his bus. He was large and coarse and infuriated. He rode on the bus, scowling. A fat woman stood beside his seat. She glared at him because he did not offer his place to a fat lady. He unfolded a newspaper to intercept the glare. A minor headline caught his eye:

  AJAX BREWERY VICTIMIZED

  Underneath was a news-item. More than four hundred kegs of beer had cleverly been diverted from the regular channels of trade during the past six months. Unscrupulous customers had bought them at cut rates from a dishonest employee.

  Irregularities had been suspected, and on the previous day a bookkeeper, checking up, had quite accidentally looked in a drawer containing office-supplies in the delivery director’s desk. He found there, casually hidden, forged delivery slips used to cover past diversions, and other delivery slips made ready for use in future thefts. Confronted with the evidence, Joe Hallix had confessed to a six-months’ career in the racket and had been placed under arrest.

  Mr. Grebb stared blankly. The item was infinitely plausible, but it simply was not true. That had not happened yesterday. When he left the brewery the bookkeeper was still frankly suspicious of him.

  Then, suddenly, Mr. Grebb’s mouth dropped open. His mental processes were never clear, so he did not reason. But the newspaper story was exactly what he would like to believe, and therefore he was convinced instantly that this was exactly what Joe Hallix had been doing.

  * * * *

  He became filled with a bellicose triumph. The newspaper slipped from his hands and fell to the floor of the bus, to be trampled on and soiled and so ultimately to go unglanced-at into a trash box. But Mr. Grebb steamed. So that was what Joe Hallix was doing! And he was blaming the missing beer on an innocent truck-driver of utter integrity—on Mr. Grebb himself!

  He stalked into the warehouse with magnificent dignity, to find himself confronted by Joe Hallix, by the bookkeeper, and by two other men of ominous aspect.

  “Look here, Grebb!” said the bookkeeper sternly. “I worked all night on this thing! There’s four hundred kegs of beer missing in the past six months! Every record is straight but yours? Your delivery slips are a mess! What’ve you been putting over?”

  Mr. Grebb breathed heavily.

  “Me,” said Mr. Grebb dramatically, “I been thinkin’! Thinkin’ about why my records always get jammed up an’ why Joe Hallix always keeps pickin’ on me an’ ripenin’ me up for a fall guy for him! Any of the other drivers will tell you I’m a right guy, an’ any one of ’em will tell you he’s a crook!”

  The bookkeeper interrupted impatiently, but Mr. Grebb bellowed him down.

  “Look in his desk!” he roared in righteous wrath. “Look where he keeps his blank forms! You’ll find the whole works right there! Right in this here drawer!”

  He thumped with a hairy ham of a hand, breathing in snorts of indignation.

  Joe Hallix tried to laugh scornfully. But it wasn’t good. That
Mr. Grebb, of all humans, should have hit so instantly and with such uncanny accuracy upon the hiding-place of papers he had to have handy for the working of his racket, and which nobody in the world should ever have thought of looking for, was simply beyond belief. It was too sudden and too startling and too starkly impossible.

  Joe Hallix tried to laugh it off, but sweat poured out on his forehead. When the bookkeeper, after one look at his graying face, stooped to pull out the drawer, Joe Hallix got panicky. And the two ominous gentlemen turned their attention to him.

  Mr. Grebb returned to his boarding house in a mood of triumphant indignation. He was as near to perfect happiness as he would ever get. Joe Hallix was unmasked and headed for jail, and he, Mr. Grebb, was proven innocent as a babe unborn. Moreover, that half-keg of beer he had managed to get away with, two months before, would never be charged against him.

  He was magnificent in his sensations of vindicated purity. He told his landlady about it at supper. But he did not mention the newspaper. He did not understand that, and therefore he ignored it. She listened admiringly.

  “I always knew you were smart, Mr. Grebb,” she said with conviction. “That’s why I asked you about that machine down in the basement. Did you ever get time to look at it again, Mr. Grebb?”

  “It’s no good,” said Mr. Grebb largely. “It’s just some stuff put together crazy. It don’t work.”

  “Too bad,” said the landlady. “And I’ve let it clutter up my cellar all this time.”

  “I’ll get it out for you,” said Mr. Grebb, generously. “Give it a couple kicks to get it in two pieces so I can handle it easy, an’ I’ll pile it out on the sidewalk for the garbage man to haul away.”

  Which, out of the kindness of his heart, he did. It is still a mystery in high scientific circles just what Professor Muntz did with himself, and what sort of experimental apparatus he had to back his work in The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks. Some eminent scientists still hope he will turn up eventually, in spite of his passionate shyness. It is not likely, because he jumped out of the way of a truck and landed in front of a bus. In this time-track, at any rate. Perhaps in another, different conditions prevail. But life and the theory of multiple time-tracks are full of paradoxes.

  In this time-track the paradox was that nobody would ordinarily think of Mr. Grebb and Professor Muntz in the same breath, so to speak, yet their careers most curiously impinged upon each other. Mr. Grebb was driving the truck that Professor Muntz dodged when he jumped in front of the bus, and Mr. Grebb moved into the lodging Professor Muntz vacated, and Mr. Grebb kicked to pieces the device which was the Professor’s life-work, and set the fragments out on the sidewalk for the garbage-man.

  But Professor Muntz had his effect on Mr. Grebb, too. It was his device that brought those newspapers from another time-track and enabled Mr. Grebb to unmask the fine villainy of Joe Hallix. It is due to Professor Muntz’ life-work in fact—it is its fine fruit—that Mr. Grebb still drives a truck for the Ajax Brewing Company.

  TINY AND THE MONSTER, by Theodore Sturgeon

  She had to find out about Tiny—everything about Tiny.

  They were bound to call him Tiny. The name was good for a laugh when he was a pup, and many times afterward.

  He was a Great Dane, unfashionable with his long tail, smooth and glossy in the brown coat which fit so snugly over his heavily muscled shoulders and chest. His eyes were big and brown and his feet were big and black; he had a voice like thunder and a heart ten times his own great size.

  He was born in the Virgin Islands, on St. Croix, which is a land of palm trees and sugar, of soft winds and luxuriant undergrowth whispering with the stealthy passage of pheasant and mongoose. There were rats in the ruins of the ancient estate houses that stood among the foothills—ruins with slave-built walls forty inches thick and great arches of weathered stone. There was pasture land where the field mice ran, and brooks asparkle with gaudy blue minnows.

  But—where in St. Croix had he learned to be so strange?

  When Tiny was a puppy, all feet and ears, he learned many things. Most of these things were kinds of respect. He learned to respect that swift, vengeful piece of utter engineering called a scorpion, when one of them whipped its barbed tail into his inquiring nose. He learned to respect the heavy deadness of the air about him that preceded a hurricane, for he knew that it meant hurry and hammering and utmost obedience from every creature on the estate. He learned to respect the justice of sharing, for he was pulled from the teat and from the trough when he crowded the others of his litter. He was the largest.

  These things, all of them, he learned as respects. He was never struck, and although he learned caution he never learned fear. The pain he suffered from the scorpion—it happened only once—the strong but gentle hands which curbed his greed, the frightful violence of the hurricane that followed the tense preparations—all these things and many more taught him the justice of respect. He half understood a basic ethic: namely, that he would never be asked to do something, or to refrain from doing something, unless there was a good reason for it. His obedience, then, was a thing implicit, for it was half reasoned; and since it was not based on fear, but on justice, it could not interfere with his resourcefulness.

  All of which, along with his blood, explained why he was such a splendid animal. It did not explain how he learned to read. It did not explain why Alec was compelled to sell him—not only to sell him but to search out Alistair Forsythe and sell him to her.

  She had to find out. The whole thing was crazy. She hadn’t wanted a dog. If she had wanted a dog, it wouldn’t have been a Great Dane. And if it had been a Great Dane, it wouldn’t have been Tiny, for he was a Crucian dog and had to be shipped all the way to Scarsdale, New York, by air.

  The series of letters she sent to Alec were as full of wondering persuasion as his had been when he sold her the dog. It was through these letters that she learned about the scorpion and the hurricane, about Tiny’s puppyhood and the way Alec brought up his dogs. If she learned something about Alec as well, that was understandable. Alec and Alistair Forsythe had never met, but through Tiny they shared a greater secret than many people who have grown up together.

  “As for why I wrote you, of all people,” Alec wrote in answer to her direct question, “I can’t say I chose you at all. It was Tiny. One of the cruise-boat people mentioned your name at my place, over cocktails one afternoon. It was, as I remember, a Dr. Schwellenbach. Nice old fellow. As soon as your name was mentioned, Tiny’s head came up as if I had called him. He got up from his station by the door and lolloped over to the doctor with his ears up and his nose quivering. I thought for a minute that the old fellow was offering him food, but no—he must have wanted to hear Schwellenbach say your name again, So I asked about you. A day or so later I was telling a couple of friends about it, and when I mentioned the name again, Tiny came snuffling over and shoved his nose into my hand. He was shivering. That got me. I wrote to a friend in New York who got your name and address in the phone book. You know the rest. I just wanted to tell you about it at first, but something made me suggest a sale. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to have something like this going on and not have you meet Tiny. When you wrote that you couldn’t get away from New York, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do but send Tiny to you. And now—I don’t know if I’m too happy about it. Judging from those pages and pages of questions you keep sending me, I get the idea that you are more than a little troubled by this crazy business.”

  She answered: “Please don’t think I’m troubled about this! I’m not. I’m interested, and curious, and more than a little excited; but there is nothing about the situation that frightens me. I can’t stress that enough. There’s something around Tiny—sometimes I have the feeling it’s something outside Tiny—that is infinitely comforting. I feel protected, in a strange way, and it’s a different and greater thing than the protection I could expect from a large and intelligent dog. It’s strange, and it’s mysterious en
ough; but it isn’t at all frightening.

  “I have some more questions. Can you remember exactly what it was that Dr. Schwellenbach said the first time he mentioned my name and Tiny acted strangely? Was there ever any time that you can remember when Tiny was under some influence other than your own—something which might have given him these strange traits? What about his diet as a puppy? How many times did he get…” and so on.

  And Alec answered, in part: “It was so long ago now that I can’t remember exactly; but it seems to me Dr. Schwellenbach was talking about his work. As you know, he’s a professor of metallurgy. He mentioned Professor Nowland as the greatest alloy specialist of his time—said Nowland could alloy anything with anything. Then he went on about Nowland’s assistant. Said the assistant was very highly qualified, having been one of these Science Search products and something of a prodigy; in spite of which she was completely feminine and as beautiful a redhead as had ever exchanged heaven for earth. Then he said her name was Alistair Forsythe. (I hope you’re not blushing, Miss Forsythe; you asked for this!) And then it was that Tiny ran over to the doctor in that extraordinary way.

  “The only time I can think of when Tiny was off the estate and possibly under some influence was the day old Debbil disappeared for a whole day with the pup when he was about three months old. Debbil is one of the characters who hang around here. He’s a Crucian about sixty years old, a piratical-looking old gent with one eye and elephantiasis. He shuffles around the grounds running odd errands for anyone who will give him tobacco or a shot of white rum. Well, one morning I sent him over the hill to see if there was a leak in the water line that runs from the reservoir. It would only take a couple of hours, so I told him to take Tiny for a run.