The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

by Robert Silverberg

  I wrote “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine” in June, 1972, at a time when the current feminist usage of “Ms.” had not evolved and the abbreviation was merely short for “manuscript.” I suppose it could have been considered a properly “relevant” story, in the parlance of the day, since it did embody some thoughts about the need for transformation of contemporary society and did indeed, pre-Watergate, poke some fun at President Nixon, the Pentagon, the polluters of the environment, and other widely acknowledged villains of the day. I still don’t think that stories like this are apt to change the world. I do think this one is a pretty funny story which amiably deflates a lot of contemporary nonsense.

  Incidentally, by the time Ten Tomorrows was published in 1973, the Vietnam war was over, nobody was making non-negotiable demands any more, the error of mellowness and self-realization was getting under way, and the publishers shrewdly didn’t announce anywhere on the cover of the book that its contents were meant to be “relevant.”

  Just as well, I thought. A few years later Elwood reprinted the story in another anthology called Visions of Tomorrow, which also included fiction by such irrelevant old-guard types as Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, and H.G. Wells, and achieved not one whit toward the betterment of humanity, though it did provide 390 pages of lively and entertaining reading.

  ——————

  If life is to be worth living at all, we have to have at least the illusion that we are capable of making sweeping changes in the world we live in. I say at least the illusion. Real ability to effect change would obviously be preferable, but not all of us can get to that level; and even the illusion of power offers hope, and hope sustains life. The point is not to be a puppet, not to be a passive plaything of karma. I think you’ll agree that sweeping changes in society have to be made. Who will make them, if not you and me? If we tell ourselves that we’re helpless, that meaningful reform is impossible, that the status quo is here for keeps, then we might as well not bother going on living, don’t you think? I mean, if the bus is breaking down and the driver is freaking out on junk and all the doors are jammed, it’s cooler to take the cyanide than to wait around for the inevitable messy smashup. But naturally we don’t want to let ourselves believe that we’re helpless. We want to think that we can grab the wheel and get the bus back on course and steer it safely to the repair shop. Right? Right. That’s what we want to think. Even if it’s only an illusion. Because sometimes—who knows?—you can firm up an illusion and make it real.

  The cast of characters. Thomas C——, our chief protagonist, age twenty. As we first encounter him he lies asleep with strands of his own long brown hair casually wrapped across his mouth. Tie-dyed jeans and an ECOLOGY NOW! sweatshirt are crumpled at the foot of the bed. He was raised in Elephant Mound, Wisconsin, and this is his third year at the university. He appears to be sleeping peacefully, but through his dreaming mind flit disturbing phantoms: Lee Harvey Oswald, George Lincoln Rockwell, Neil Armstrong, Arthur Bremer, Sirhan Sirhan, Hubert Humphrey, Mao Tse-tung, Lieutenant William Calley, John Lennon. Each in turn announces himself, does a lightfooted little dance expressive of his character, vanishes, and reappears elsewhere in Thomas’s cerebral cortex. On the wall of Thomas’s room are various contemporary totems: a giant blowup photograph of Spiro Agnew playing golf, a gaudy VOTE FOR McGOVERN sticker, and banners that variously proclaim FREE ANGELA, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PIG FORCE, POWER TO THE PEOPLE, and CHE LIVES! Thomas has an extremely contemporary sensibility, circa 1970-72. By 1997 he will feel terribly nostalgic for the causes and artefacts of his youth, as his grandfather now is for raccoon coats, bathtub gin, and flagpole sitters. He will say things like “Try it, you’ll like it” or “Sock it to me,” and no one under forty will laugh.

  Asleep next to him is Katherine F——, blonde, nineteen years old. Ordinarily she wears steel-rimmed glasses, green hip-hugger bells, a silken purple poncho, and a macramé shawl, but she wears none of these things now. Katherine is not dreaming, but her next REM cycle is due shortly. She comes from Moose Valley, Minnesota, and lost her virginity at the age of fourteen while watching a Mastroianni-Loren flick at the North Star Drive-In. During her seduction she never took her eyes from the screen for a period longer than thirty seconds. Nowadays she’s much more heavily into the responsiveness thing, but back then she was trying hard to be cool. Four hours ago, she and Thomas performed an act of mutual oral-genital stimulation that is illegal in seventeen states and the Republic of Vietnam (South), although there is hope of changing that before long.

  On the floor by the side of the bed is Thomas’s dog Fidel, part beagle, part terrier. He is asleep too. Attached to Fidel’s collar is a day-glo streamer that reads THREE WOOFS FOR PET LIB.

  Without God, said one of the Karamazov boys, everything is possible. I suppose that’s true enough, if you conceive of God as the force that holds things together, that keeps water from flowing uphill and the sun from rising in the west. But what a limited concept of God that is! Au contraire, Fyodor: With God everything is possible. And I would like to be God for a little while.

  Q. What did you do?

  A. I yelled at Sergeant Bacon and told him to go and start searching hooches and get your people moving right on—not the hooches but the bunkers—and I started over to Mitchell’s location. I came back out. Meadlo was still standing there with a group of Vietnamese, and I yelled at Meadlo and asked him—I told him—if he couldn’t move all those people, to get rid of them.

  Q. Did you fire into that group of people?

  A. No, sir, I did not.

  Q. After that incident, what did you do?

  A. Well, I told my men to get on across the ditch and to get into position after I had fired into the ditch.

  Q. Now, did you have a chance to look and observe what was in the ditch?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And what did you see?

  A. Dead people, sir.

  Q. Did you see any appearance of anybody being alive in there?

  A. No, sir.

  This is Thomas talking. Listen to me. Just listen. Suppose you had a machine that would enable you to fix everything that’s wrong in the world. Let’s say that it draws on all the resources of modern technology, not to mention the powers of a rich, well-stocked imagination and a highly developed ethical sense. The machine can do anything. It makes you invisible; it gives you a way of slipping backward and forward in time; it provides telepathic access to the minds of others; it lets you reach into those minds and c-h-a-n-g-e them. And so forth. Call this machine whatever you want. Call it Everybody’s Fantasy Actualizer. Call it a Time Machine Mark Nine. Call it a God Box. Call it a magic wand, if you like. Okay. I give you a magic wand. And you give me a magic wand too, because reader and writer have to be allies, co-conspirators. You and me, with our magic wands. What will you do with yours? What will I do with mine? Let’s go.

  The Revenge of the Indians. On the plains ten miles west of Grand Otter Falls, Nebraska, the tribes assemble. By pickup truck, camper, Chevrolet, bicycle, and microbus, they arrive from every corner of the nation, the delegations of angry redskins. Here are the Onondagas, the Oglallas, the Hunkpapas, the Jicarillas, the Punxsatawneys, the Kickapoos, the Gros Ventres, the Nez Percés, the Lenni Lenapes, the Wepawaugs, the Pamunkeys, the Penobscots, and all that crowd. They are clad in the regalia that the white man expects them to wear: feather bonnets, buckskin leggings, painted faces, tomahawks. See the great bonfire burn! See the leaping sweat-shiny braves dance the scalping dance! Listen to their weird barbaric cries! What terror these savages must inspire in the plump suburbanites who watch them on Channel Four!

  Now the council meeting begins. The pipe passes. Grunts of approval are heard. The mighty Navaho chieftain, Hosteen Dollars, is the main orator. He speaks for the strongest of the tribes, for the puissant Navahos own hotels, gift shops, oil wells, banks, coal mines, and supermarkets. They hold the lucrative national distributorships for the superb pottery of their Hopi and Pue
blo neighbors. Quietly they have accumulated vast wealth and power, which they have surreptitiously devoted to the welfare of their less fortunate kinsmen of other tribes. Now the arsenal is fully stocked: the tanks, the flamethrowers, the automatic rifles, the halftracks, the crop-dusters primed with napalm. Only the Big Bang is missing. But that lack, Hosteen Dollars declares, has now been remedied through miraculous intervention. “This is our moment!” he cries.

  “Hiawatha! Hiawatha!” Solemnly I descend from the skies, drifting in a slow downward spiral, landing lithely on my feet. I am naked but for a fringed breechclout. My coppery skin gleams glossily. Cradled in my arms is a hydrogen bomb, armed and ready. “The Big Bang!” I cry. “Here, brothers! Here!” By nightfall Washington is a heap of radioactive ash. At dawn the Acting President capitulates. Hosteen Dollars goes on national television to explain the new system of reservations and the roundup of palefaces commences.

  Marin County District Attorney Bruce Bales, who disqualified himself as Angela Davis’s prosecutor, said yesterday he was “shocked beyond belief” at her acquittal.

  In a bitter reaction, Bales said, “I think the jury fell for the very emotional pitch offered by the defense. She didn’t even take the stand to deny her guilt. Despite what has happened, I still maintain she was as responsible as Jonathan Jackson for the death of Judge Haley and the crippling of my assistant, Gary Thomas. Undoubtedly more so, because of her age, experience, and intelligence.”

  Governor Ronald Reagan, a spokesman at the capitol said, was not available for comment on the verdict.

  The day we trashed the Pentagon was simply beautiful, a landmark in the history of the Movement. It took years of planning and a tremendous cooperative effort, but the results were worth the heroic struggle and then some.

  This is how we did it:

  With the help of our IBM 2020 multiphasic, we plotted a ring of access points around the whole District of Columbia. Three sites were in Maryland—Hyattsville, Suitland, and Wheaton—and two were on the Virginia side, at McLean and Merrifield. At each access point, we dropped a vertical shaft six hundred feet deep, using our Hughes fluid-intake rotary reamer coupled with a GM twin-core extractor unit. Every night, we transported the excavation tailings by truck to Kentucky and Tennessee, dumping them as fill in strip-mining scars. When we reached the six-hundred-foot level we began laying down a thirty-six-inch pipeline route straight to the Pentagon from each of our five loci, employing an LTV molecular compactor to convert the soil castings into semi-liquid form. This slurry we pumped into five huge adjacent underground retaining pockets that we carved with our Gardner-Denver hemispherical subsurface backhoe. When the pipelines were laid we started to pump the stored slurry toward the Pentagon at a constant rate, calculated for us by our little XDS computer and monitored at five-hundred-meter intervals along the route by our Control Data 106a sensor system. The pumps, of course, were heavy-duty Briggs & Stratton 580’s.

  Over a period of eight months, we succeeded in replacing the subsoil beneath the Pentagon’s foundation with an immense pool of slurry, taking care, however, to avoid causing any seismological disturbances that the Pentagon’s own equipment might detect. For this part of the operation we employed Bausch & Lomb spectrophotometers and Perkin-Elmer scanners, rigged in series with a Honeywell 990 vibration-damping integrator. Our timing was perfect. On the evening of July 3, we pierced the critical destruct threshold. The Pentagon was now floating on a lake of mud nearly a kilometer in diameter. A triple bank of Dow autonomic stabilizers maintained the building at its normal elevation; we used Ampex homeostasis equipment to regulate flotation pressures. At noon on the Fourth of July, Katherine and I held a press conference on the steps of the Library of Congress, attended chiefly by representatives of the underground media, although there were a few non-freak reporters there too. I demanded an immediate end to all Amerikan overseas military adventures and gave the President one hour to reply. There was no response from the White House, of course, and at five minutes to one, I activated the sluices by whistling three bars of The Star-Spangled Banner into a pay telephone outside FBI headquarters. By doing so, I initiated a slurry-removal process, and by five after one, the Pentagon was sinking. It went down slowly enough so that there was no loss of life: the evacuation was complete within two hours, and the uppermost floor of the building didn’t go under the mud until five in the afternoon.

  Two lions that killed a youth at the Portland Zoo Saturday night were dead today, victims of a nighttime rifleman.

  Roger Dean Adams, eighteen years old, of Portland, was the youth who was killed. The zoo was closed Saturday night when he and two companions entered the zoo by climbing a fence.

  The companions said that the Adams youth first lowered himself over the side of the grizzly bear pit, clinging by his hands to the edge of the wall, then pulling himself up. He tried it again at the lions’ pit after first sitting on the edge.

  Kenneth Franklin Bowers of Portland, one of young Adams’ companions, said the youth lowered himself over the edge, and as he hung by his fingers, he kicked at the lions. One slapped at him, hit his foot, and the youth fell to the floor of the pit, sixteen feet below the rim of the wall. The lions then mauled him, and it appeared that he bled to death after an artery in his neck was slashed.

  One of the lions, Caesar, a sixteen-year-old male, was killed last night by two bullets from a foreign-made rifle. Sis, an eleven-year-old female, was shot in the spine. She died this morning.

  The police said they had few clues to the shootings.

  Jack Marks, the zoo director, said the zoo would prosecute anyone charged with the shootings. “You’d have to be sick to shoot an animal that has done nothing wrong by its own standards,” Mr. Marks said. “No right-thinking person would go into the zoo in the middle of the night and shoot an animal in captivity.”

  Do you want me to tell you who I really am? You may think I am a college student of the second half of the twentieth century, but in fact I am a visitor from the far future, born in a year which by your system of reckoning would be called A.D. 2806. I can try to describe my native era to you, but there is little likelihood you would comprehend what I say. For instance does it mean anything to you when I tell you that I have two womb-mothers, one ovarian and one uterine, and that my spermfather in the somatic line was, strictly speaking, part dolphin and part ocelot? Or that I celebrated my fifth neurongate raising by taking part in an expedition to Proxy Nine, where I learned the eleven soul-diving drills and the seven contrary mantras? The trouble is that from your point of view we have moved beyond the technological into the incomprehensible. You could explain television to a man of the eleventh century in such a way that he would grasp the essential concept, if not the actual operative principles (“We have this box on which we are able to make pictures of faraway places appear, and we do this by taming the same power that makes lightning leap across the sky.”), but how can I find even the basic words to help you visualize our simplest toys?

  At any rate, it was eye-festival time, and for my project I chose to live in the year 1972. This required a good deal of preparation. Certain physical alterations were necessary—synthesizing body hair, for example—but the really difficult part was creating the cultural camouflage. I had to pick up speech patterns, historical background, a whole sense of context. (I also had to create a convincing autobiography. The time-field effect provides travelers like myself with an instant retroactive existence in the past, an established background of schooling and parentage and whatnot stretching over any desired period prior to point of arrival, but only if the appropriate programming is done.) I drew on the services of our leading historians and archeologists, who supplied me with everything I needed, including an intensive training in late-twentieth-century youth culture. How glib I became! I can talk all your dialects: macrobiotics, ecology, hallucinogens, lib-sub-aleph, rock, astrology, yoga. Are you a sanpaku Capricorn? Are you plagued by sexism, bum trips, wobbly karma, malign planetary conjunctions
? Ask me for advice. I know this stuff. I’m into everything that’s current. I’m with the Revolution all the way.

  Do you want to know something else? I think I may not be the only time-traveler who’s here right now. I’m starting to form a theory that this entire generation may have come here from the future.

  BELFAST, Northern Ireland, May 28—Six people were killed early today in a big bomb explosion in Short Strand, a Roman Catholic section of Belfast.

  Three of the dead, all men, were identified later as members of the Irish Republican Army. Security forces said they believed the bomb blew up accidentally while it was being taken to another part of the city.

  One of the dead was identified as a well-known IRA explosives expert who had been high on the British Army’s wanted list for some time. The three other victims, two men and a woman, could not be identified immediately.

  Seventeen persons, including several children, were injured by the explosion, and twenty houses in the narrow street were so badly damaged that they will have to be demolished.

  One day I woke up and could not breathe. All that day and through the days after, in the green parks and in the rooms of friends and even beside the sea, I could not breathe. The air was used up. Each ugly thing that I saw was ugly because of man—man-made or man-touched. And so I left my friends and lived alone.

  EUGENE, Ore. (UPI)—A retired chef and his dog were buried together recently as per the master’s wish.

  Horace Lee Edwards, seventy-one years old, had lived alone with his dog for twenty-two years, since it was a pup. He expressed the wish that when he died the dog be buried with him.