She giggled. “The frightening thing is that you really mean that. Very well, then, if we have to go back, we have to. But you’re right about the Academy: they mustn’t ever know about the Confederacy—”
“Or about you!”
“Thank you, my darling, or about me. So what are we going to do?”
“No fair—I asked you first!”
Turns out Basset coils work fine on Freenies, too, so once they scraped the glue offa Spin’s carapace, I was back t’guessin’ which one I was talkin’ to.
“I concur with Georgie, Lord, and with you: somehow we must account for ourselves and the time we’ve been gone—without telling the whole truth.”
Mighta been Charm. Didn’t matter, the way the other two perched with him on the foota my bed, bobbin’ their eyestalks in agreement. Somethin’ the little fella said rang a bell in my mind, but a very small one, very faint. Leave it alone—it’d come t’me.
“Well, we can mention the hijackin’, even Nagasaki. That much is safe an’ duly recorded in Georgie’s databanks.” Another tiny bell tinkled in m’subconscious. Annoyin’, it was.
“Gee, Bemie,” Koko said, planted in an armchair by the bedroom window, “there’s all those bodies to account for, too.” She was knittin’ three tiny sweaters—looked like toilet-plunger cozies.
“Not t’mention the fact that Heplar, at least, was done in with an extremely foreign weapon. Hell, the coroner’ll be pickin’ flechettes outa his body from now to—”
“Bemie!” Georgie pleaded, “you’re making me sick to my stomach!”
Which brought around another conundrum’d been nib-blin’ at me; Georgie didn’t have a stomach. She was a thirty-meter discoid weighin’ more tons’n Carter’d had little peanuts an’ packin’ enough horsepower t’part the Red Sea an’ give it a trim over the ears.
But she was also a painfully-pretty slender five-foot blonde with robin’s-egg eyes an’ alabaster skin whom I’d made passionate love to in a prerecorded fantasy more times’n I’d care t’relate t’strangers. Embarrassed m’self, thinkin’ about it in mixed company.
How real was that fantasy? Real enough for an intruder t’torture her in it, leavin’ weepin’ puckered wounds with his imaginary cigarette. I’d verbally reprogramed her recovery, not a scar showin’, but when I’d offered to erase the ugly memories, she’d refused on the grounds that even the ugliest experiences are a parta personality, of character—obliteratin’ them’d be the same as obliteratin’ her.
Some kinda girl, My Georgie.
But what kind? Made me wonder if the story about Will Sanders mightn’t be true—that he’d imagined his way into the Confederacy. Was it any more real than Georgie’s world of sunlit meadows an’ ancient oaks? For that matter, are any of us real t’one another? Maybe we all love a picture in our heads, a picture a whole lot different from reality— whatever that is.
Is lovin’ a machine, bein’ loved by her, perverted?
Now here we were in orbit, twenty-thousand-odd Confederate metric miles out an’ still climbin’. Half a dozen CRTs were lit up on the console, patched into the Telecom system. I was sayin’ m’last good-byes t’Win an’ Koko in one of ’em, Howell in another, t’Deejay an’ Ooloorie who shared a split-screen connectin’ San Francisco an’ Laporte, t’Will an’ Fran an’ Mary-Beth—not a single one of whom was any whit more real—nor less so—than the TV phantom who’d turned out t’be my Georgie. Olongo had a monitor to himself, which seemed only fittin’, somehow.
“Now you’re absolutely certain you’ve got your stories straight?” the President inquired for the dozenth time. “You all know what you’re going to say?”
All those little bells’d finally jangled into place inside m’head. “Sure do, Your Executivity. Cromney an’ his gang—includin’ m’late unlamented, treacherous assistant-pirated up on me when I wasn’t lookin’, insisted that I take ’em all to a primitive era, an’ under great duress, I obliged ’em—the middle twentieth century, t’be exact. I pulled a little wowser on ’em an’ let ’em off at the comer of August 9th an’ Nagasaki. I think my bosses’ll see the humor of that—it’s just about their level of sportsperson-ship.”
“What about Merwin and Hulbert?” Howell asked. “They’re not going down as mutineers, too, are they?” “Poor ol’ duffers got pulled off as hostages,” I answered. “Fortunes of war—another concept the Academy’ll go for. Besides, it’ll save ’em the pension-money.”
Our alibi was pat: I’d lie in m’teeth, with Georgie’s doctored records—but not her real memories—t’back me up, an’ the whole deal signed, sealed, folded, stapled, an’ mutilated by the testimony of three Very Important foreign dignitaries my superiors were in a blue funk about, anyway. Georgie’s willin’ness t’tamper with the truth’d allow us t’show up back on Luna only a few hours after we’d originally taken off. She ain’t a time-machine for nothin’.
She was a very smart time-machine these days. Her extra brains’d been the Praxeology Department computers at good ol’ Laporte U., Ltd., an’ leavin’ ’em behind woulda effectively lobotomized her. While I’d been gettin’ well, Deejay’d done a bit of remodlin’—now half a hundred innocent-lookin’ nontechnical fumishin’s—bunkbeds, lockers, plumbin’—were packed with sophisticated Confederate nanoelectronics an’ the formerly remote portions of Georgie’s personality safely transferred into them.
She’d stand inspection an’ maintenance—I checked her out m’self—an’ personally spliced the DreamCap cable back together.
Playin’ the controls like a piano virtuoso, I lined up on the complicated machinery floatin’ before us in orbit. Looked like the innards of an old-time Atwater-Kent. In the middle was a Georgie-sized aperture, over which were emblazoned the words J. V. TORMOUNT ENTERPRISES, LTD. Some sorta corporate connection of Olongo’s, the biggest Probability Broach apparatus in the Solar System.
I turned around in my seat. “You guys all strapped down nice an’ tight?”
Three little pink Army helmets, various semiobscene appendages pokin’ out here an’ there, gimme the nod. “Georgie? Got all your electrons lined up in a row?” The prettiest face this side of Olympus winked at me. “I’m ready, dear.”
“All set at your end, Deejay?”
“We’re ready,” replied the good-lookin’ physicist. “Well, okay, then-—no sense prolongin’ the agony!” I twiddled dials that’d bring us back to the twenty-third century as soon as we were through the Broach, leaned forward on the tiller, jettin’ us toward the aperture.
I scanned the monitors, lightin’ at last on the Sanders’ screen.
“Good-bye, folks. I’ll never forget—”
WHAM!
We popped into a different universe, a giant bhie flash behind us as the Broach closed tumblin’ Georgie end over end before I got her stabilized. I pushed buttons for a long, leisurely ride back home.
We were in our private sunlit grove of trees at the edge of endless meadows, the breezes fresh as they stirred the knee-high grasses around us. We stood beneath a spreading, ancient oak, Georgie an' I, that same goddamned songbird warblin’ in the leafy branches overhead. She leaned against the age-roughened bark, her warm, smooth hands in mine. I gazed deeply into her bottomless azure eyes.
“Baby, we gotta stop meetin like this. My bones're gettin’ too old t’do it outdoors on the ground all the time."
The gentle wind caressed her pale blond hair. She giggled, glancin’ downward, dimples appearin’ magically in her satiny cheeks. “Just once more, for old-times’ sake?” I shrugged. “I can’t say no, not t’you, baby.”
Releasin my hands, she unfastened m’gunbelt. Sanders’d gotten m’Colt back t’me, an’ it was good t’have the old warhorse around again. I let the rig fall, my heart beginnin’t’pound, an’ / imagined I could see hers beatin’ wildly, as well, in the breathtakin' scallop of her sheer an’ lovely summer blouse. Her breasts were rounded an’ in-vitin’. I bent f touch her, but she grinned, fumblin’ with the z
ipper of my coverall in a manner that was no way innocent.
Suddenly, m'eager manhood stood before her. I was pretty impressed m’self. We—
“Bernie!”
“Errrk!” I snatched at m’shoulder holster, then relaxed a mite. It was the coronary-ward for me, sooner or later, I knew it.
“Bemie, we sincerely regret waking you,” explained Charm, his two little buddies lined up right behind him on m’chest an’ parts south.
“What’s up, fellas? We home already?” I pulled a cigar outa my breast pocket an’ lit it, dialed a beer.
“Not precisely—but we have an urgent need to speak with you beforehand. You recall, of course, the original purpose of our mission?”
Puffin’ blue smoke: “Sure. T’see ancient Japan, an’— oh, you mean your mission, don’tcha? Bein’ with God an’ passin’ the divine experience on to your posterity. Nice work if you can get it.”
He nodded with his eyestalk. “But there is a complication, Bemie.”
“Howzat?”
“Well—and I certainly mean no offense—we have observed you, Bemie, getting hijacked, getting beaten up, getting lost, getting disoriented by Academy conditioning, getting arrested, getting drunk, getting shot, getting—•”
“Enough, already! I see your point: I’m a real go-getter, but—”
“But God you ain’t,” Charm said.
And the Lord spake, even saying, “Hallelujah! Not t’leave out Hosannah in excelcis deo—bananas an’ all! That’s exactly what I been tellin’ you little twerps all along! There ain’t no god; there’s only people, of various assorted shapes an’ dispositions.”
“And modalities of existence,” beautiful imaginary Georgie added from one of the monitors.
“Kinda like the way you put that, honey.”
“Yet you see the difficulty, don’t you, Bemie?” Charm scooted up another coupla inches an’ peered into my eyes. “While we have lost a deity—and gained a great and good friend—we have also acquired a monumental problem...” “Which is?”
“Which is that our species still believes in you—and we can’t bring ourselves to disillusion them. It could very well destroy the civilization you created for us.”
“And so,” Color continued, sorta theoretically shoulderin’ his companion over onto the chair-arm, “we have reached a decision, O Former Lord.”
“Make that ‘Lord Emeritus’.” I had a bad feelin’ about this.
“Yes,” said Spin, “and we have, er, interrupted you and Georgie to announce it.”
“Don’t do me no more favors!”
“Be nice,” said Georgie. “There’s always the Instant Replay.”
I sighed. “All right, then—shoot.”
“Well, Bernie,” the Ambassador said, “since we dare not go back and interbreed our information into the gene-pool—as enlightening as it may be—we have decided...” .. to remain with you...” Color said.
“... forever!” said Spin.
“Oh, goodie!” Georgie cried, dimplin’ up again.
You ever seen a grown man cry?
About the Author
Self-defense consultant and former police reservist, L. Neil Smith has also worked as a gunsmith and a professional musician. Born in Denver in 1946, he traveled widely as an Air Force “brat,” growing up in a dozen regions of the United States and Canada. In 1964, he returned home to study philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, and wound up with what he refers to as perhaps the lowest grade-point average in the history of Colorado State University.
Neil recently completed his second stint on the Libertarian Party's national platform committee. In 1978 he ran against an entrenched Republican Speaker for a seat in the state legislature, earning 15 percent of the vote on a total campaign expenditure of $44.00.
L. Neil Smith’s previous books—all published by Bal-lantine/Del Rey—are The Probability Broach, The Venus Belt, and Their Majesties' Bucketeers.
Table of Contents
1 The Temporal Authorities
2 Grounds for Complaint
3 Inca Dinka Doo
4 Harry’s Other Shoe
5 A Grizzly Tale
6 The Jape of the Ape
7 Zootier than Thou
8 Boots ’n’ Saddlesores
9 Green Blooms the Gumshoe
10 Outa Condition
11 Stone Walls Do Not
12 Nor Iron Bars
13 The Dog Who Knew too Much
14 The Magnificent Eleven
15 The Ship Who What?
16 A Stool-Pigeon in a Chair Tree
17 Seven of Swords
18 Background Music
19 Waiting for the Veterinarian (Or Someone like Him)
20 A Freenie in the Works
21 Cromney Gets the Point
22 Edna’s Last Stand
23 Is It Live or Is It Muzak?
About the Author
Nagasaki Vector Page 23
