The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  He got up off his stool watchfully, and moved down the bar so he could go through the gap in the counter if he had to.

  I swiveled on my stool and caught some of the conversation. As far as I could hear, it was going like this.

  “You expunged me, Mary!” the guy with the miserable face was saying. “Did you?”

  “Now look here!” the other man cut in. “It’s up to her whether she does or doesn’t.”

  “You shut up,” the newcomer said. “Well, Mary? Did you?”

  “Yes, Mack, I did,” she said. “Sam had nothing to do with it. It was entirely my idea—and your fault.”

  I couldn’t see Mack’s face, but his body sort of tightened up, shaking, and he put his arms out as though he was going to haul Mary out of her seat. Sam—I presumed Sam was the man in the booth—seized his arm, yelling at him.

  That was where Geraghty came in, ordering them to quit where they were. They didn’t like it, but they did, and Mary and Sam finished their drinks and went out of the bar, and Mack, after glaring after them, came up and took a stool next but one to mine.

  “Rye,” he said. “Gimme the bottle—I’ll need it.”

  His voice was rasping and bitter, a tone I realized I hadn’t heard in maybe months. I suppose I looked curious; anyway, he glanced at me and saw I was looking at him, and spoke to me.

  “Know what that was all about?”

  I shrugged. “Lost your girl?” I suggested.

  “Much worse than that—and she isn’t so much a lost girl as a heartless she-devil.” He tossed down the first of the rye that Geraghty had brought for him. I noticed that Geraghty had moved to the other end of the counter and was washing glasses. If he was out of the habit of listening to people’s troubles, I wouldn’t blame him, I thought.

  “She didn’t look that way,” I said at random.

  “No, she doesn’t.” He took another drink and then sat for a while with the empty glass between his hands, staring at it.

  “I suppose you have Contacts?” he said at last. It was a pretty odd question, and I answered it automatically out of sheer surprise.

  “Well—yes of course I have!”

  “I haven’t,” he said. “Not now. Not any more. Damn that woman!”

  I felt the nape of my neck prickle. If he was telling the truth—well, he was a kind of living ghost! Everyone I knew had at least one Contact; I had three. My wife and I had a mutual, of course, like all married couples, and as insurance against our being killed together in a car wreck or by some similar accident I had an extra one with my kid brother Joe and a third with a guy I’d known in college. At least, I was fairly sure I did; I hadn’t heard from him in some months and he might perhaps have expunged me. I made a mental note to look him up and keep the friendship moving.

  I studied this lonely guy. His name was Mack—I’d heard him called that. He was probably ten years older than I was, which made him in his middle forties—plenty old enough to have dozens of potential Contacts. There was nothing visibly wrong with him except this look of unspeakable misery he wore—and if he really had no Contacts at all, then I was surprised the look was of mere misery, not of terror.

  “Did—uh—did Mary know that she was your only Contact?” I said.

  “Oh, she knew. Of course. That’s why she did it without telling me.” Mack refilled his glass and held the bottle toward me. I was going to refuse, but if someone didn’t keep the poor devil company, he’d probably empty the bottle himself, and then maybe walk out staggering drunk and fall under a car and be done for. I really felt sorry for him. Anyone would have.

  “How did you find out?”

  “She—well, she went out tonight and I called at her place and someone said she’d gone out with Sam, and Sam generally brings her here. And there she was, and when I put it to her she confessed. I guess it was as well the bartender stepped in, or I’d have lost control and maybe done something really serious to her.”

  I said, “Well—how come she’s the only one? Have you no friends or anything?”

  That opened the floodgates.

  The poor guy—his full name was Mack Wilson—was an orphan brought up in a foundling home which he hated; he ran away in his teens and was committed to reform school for some petty theft or other, and hated that too, and by the time he got old enough to earn his living, he was sour on the world, but he’d done his best to set himself straight, only to find that he’d missed learning how. Somewhere along the line he’d failed to get the knack of making friends.

  When he’d told me the whole story, I felt he was truly pitiable. When I contrasted his loneliness with my comfortable condition, I felt almost ashamed. Maybe the rye had a lot to do with it, but it didn’t feel that way. I wanted to cry, and I hardly even felt foolish for wanting.

  Round about ten or ten-thirty, when most of the bottle had gone, he slapped the counter and started to get down from his stool. He wobbled frighteningly. I caught hold of him, but he brushed me aside.

  “Home, I guess,” he said hopelessly. “If I can make it. If I don’t get run down by some lucky so-and-so who’s careless what he hits because he’s all right, he has Contacts aplenty.”

  He was darned right—that was the trouble. I said, “Look, don’t you think you should sober up first?”

  “How in hell do you think I’ll get to sleep if I’m not pickled?” he retorted. And he was probably right there, too. He went on, “You wouldn’t know, I guess: what it’s like to lie in bed, staring into the dark, without a Contact anywhere. It makes the whole world seem hateful and dark and hostile. . . .”

  “Jesus!” I said, because that really hit me.

  A sudden glimmer of hope came into his eyes. He said, “I don’t suppose—no, it’s not fair. You’re a total stranger. Forget it.”

  I pressed him, because it was good to see any trace of hope on that face. After a bit of hesitation, he came out with it.

  “You wouldn’t make a Contact with me, would you? Just to tide me over till I talk one of my friends round? I know guys at work I could maybe persuade. Just a few days, that’s all.”

  “At this time of night?” I said. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea; still, I’d have him on my conscience if I didn’t fall in.

  “They have all-night Contact service at LaGuardia Airport,” he said. “For people who want to make an extra one as insurance before going on a long flight. We could go there.”

  “It’ll have to be a one-way, not a mutual,” I said. “I don’t have twenty-five bucks to spare.”

  “You’ll do it?” He looked as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down, and settled his check and hustled me to the door and found a cab and we were on the way to the airport before I really knew what was happening.

  * * * *

  The consultant at the airport tried to talk me into having a mutual; Mack had offered to pay for it. But I stood firm on that. I don’t believe in people adding Contacts to their list when the others are real friends. If something were to happen to me, I felt, and somebody other than my wife, or my brother, or my long-time friend from college, were to pick me up, I was certain they’d all three be very much hurt by it. So since there were quite a few customers waiting to make an extra Contact before flying to Europe, the consultant didn’t try too hard.

  It had always been a source of wonder to me that Contact was such a simple process. Three minutes’ fiddling with the equipment; a minute or two to put the helmets properly on our heads; mere seconds for the scan to go to completion during which the brain buzzed with fragments of memory dredged up from nowhere and presented like single movie frames to consciousness . . . and finished.

  The consultant gave us the standard certificates and the warranty form—valid five years, recommended reinforcement, owing to personality development, temporal-geo-graphical factor, in the event of death instantaneous transfer, adjustment lapse, in the event of more than one Contact being extant some possibility of choice, and
so on. And there it was.

  I never had been able to make sense of the principle on which Contact worked. I knew it wasn’t possible before the advent of printed-molecule electronics, which pushed the information capacity of computers up to the level of the human brain and beyond. I knew vaguely that in the first place they had been trying to achieve mechanical telepathy, and that they succeeded in finding means to scan the entire content of a brain and transfer it to an electronic store. I knew also that telepathy didn’t come, but immortality did.

  What it amounted to, in lay terms, was this: only the advent of death was enough of a shock to the personality to make it want to get up and go. Then it wanted but desperately. If at some recent time the personality had been, as it were, shown to someone else’s mind, there was a place ready for it to go to.

  At that point I lost touch with the explanations. So did practically everybody. Resonance came into it, and maybe the receiver’s mind vibrated in sympathy with the mind of the person about to die; that was a fair picture, and the process worked, so what more could anyone ask?

  I was later in coming out from under than he was; this was a one-way, and he was being scanned which is quick, while I was being printed which is slightly slower. When I came out he was trying to get something straight with the consultant, who wasn’t interested, but he wouldn’t be just pushed aside—he had to have his answer. He got it as I was emerging from under the helmet.

  “No, there’s no known effect. Sober or drunk, the process goes through!”

  The point had never occurred to me before—whether liquor would foul up the accuracy of the Contact.

  Thinking of the liquor reminded me that I’d drunk a great deal of rye and it was the first time I’d had more than a couple of beers in many months. For a little while I had a warm glow, partly from the alcohol partly from the knowledge that, thanks to me, this last lonely man wasn’t lonely any more.

  Then I began to lose touch. I think it was because Mack had brought the last of the bottle along and insisted on our toasting our new friendship—or words like that. Anyway, I remembered that he got the cab and told the hackie my address and then it was the next morning and he was sleeping on the couch in the rumpus room and the doorbell was going like an electric alarm.

  I pieced these facts together a little afterwards. When I opened the door, it was Mary standing there, the woman who had expunged Mack the day before.

  She came in quite politely, but with a determined expression which I couldn’t resist in my morning-after state, and told me to sit down and took a chair herself.

  She said, “Was it true what Mack told me on the phone?”

  I looked vacant. I felt vacant.

  Impatiently, she said, “About him making a Contact with you. He called me up at two a.m. and told me the whole story. I wanted to throw the phone out the window, but I hung on and got your name out of him, and some of your address, and the rest from the phone book. Because I wouldn’t want anybody to have Mack wished on him. Not anybody.”

  By this time J was starting to connect. But I didn’t have much to say. I let her get on with it.

  “I once read a story,” she said. “I don’t remember who by. Perhaps you’ve read it too. About a man who saved another man from drowning. And the guy was grateful, gave him presents, tried to do him favors, said he was his only friend in all the world, dogged his footsteps, moved into his home—and finally the guy who’d saved him couldn’t stand it any longer and took him and pushed him back in the river. That’s Mack Wilson. That’s why Mack Wilson has been expunged by everybody he’s conned into making Contact with him in the past two mortal years. I stood it for going on three months, and that’s about the record, as I understand it.”

  There was a click, a door opening, and there was Mack in shirt and pants, roused from his sleep in the rumpus room by the sound of Mary’s voice. She got in first. She said, “You see? He’s started already.”

  “You!” Mack said. “Haven’t you done enough?” And he turned to me. “She isn’t satisfied with expunging me and leaving me without a Contact in the world. She has to come here and try to talk you into doing the same! Can you imagine anybody hating me like that?”

  On the last word his voice broke, and I saw that there were real tears in his eyes.

  I put my muddled mind together and found something to say.

  “Look,” I said. “All I did this for was just that I don’t think anyone should have to go without a Contact nowadays. All I did it for was to tide Mack over.” I was mainly talking to Mary. “I drank too much last night and he brought me home and that was why he’s here this morning. I don’t care who he is or what he’s done—I have Contacts myself, I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t, and until Mack fixes up something, maybe with somebody where he works, I’ll go bail for him. That’s all.”

  “That’s the way it started with me,” Mary said. “Then he moved into my apartment. Then he started following me on the street to make sure nothing happened to me. He said.”

  “Where would I have been if something had?” Mack protested.

  Just then I caught sight of the clock on the wall, and saw it was noon. I jumped up.

  “Jesus!” I said. “My wife and kids get back at four, and I promised to clear the apartment up while they were away.”

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Mack said. “I owe you that, at least.”

  Mary got to her feet. She was looking at me with’ a hopeless expression. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” she said.

  So she was right. So Mack was very helpful. He was better around the house than a lot of women I’ve known, and, though it took right up until my wife got home with the children, the job was perfect. Even my wife was impressed. So since it was getting on toward the evening, she insisted on Mack staying for supper with us, and he went and got some beer, and over it he told my wife the spot that he’d been put in, and then, at around nine or half past, he said he wanted an early night because of work tomorrow, and went home.

  Which seemed great under the circumstances. I dismissed what Mary had said as the bitterness of a disappointed woman, and felt sorry for her. She hadn’t looked the type to be so bitter when I first saw her the evening before.

  It was about three or four days later that I began to catch on. There was this new craze for going to see pre-Contact movies, and though I didn’t feel that I would get a bang out of watching soldiers and gunmen kill each other without Contact to look forward to, my wife had been told by all her friends that she oughtn’t to miss out on this eerie thrill.

  Only there was the problem of the kids. We couldn’t take eleven-month twins along, very well. And we’d lost our regular sitter, and when we checked up there just didn’t seem to be anyone on hand.

  I tried to talk her into going alone, but she didn’t like the idea. I’d noticed that she’d given up watching pre-Contact programs on TV, so that was of a piece.

  So we’d decided to scrap the idea, though I knew she was disappointed, until Mack called, heard the problem, and at once offered to sit in.

  Great, we thought. He seemed willing, competent, and ever eager to do us the favor, and we had no worries about going out. The kids were fast asleep before we left.

  We parked the car and started to walk around to the movie house. It was getting dark, and it was chilly, so we hurried along although we had plenty of time before the start of the second feature.

  Suddenly my wife glanced back and stopped dead in her tracks. A man and a boy following close behind bumped into her, and I had to apologize and when they’d gone on asked what on earth wets the trouble.

  “I thought I saw Mack following us,” she said. “Funny . . .”

  “Very funny,” I agreed. “Where?” I looked along the sidewalk, but there were a lot of people, including several who were dressed and built similarly to Mack. I pointed this out, and she agreed that she’d probably been mistaken. I couldn’t get her to go beyond probably.

  The rest of o
ur Walk to the movie was a kind of sidelong hobble, because she kept staring behind her. It got embarrassing after a while, and suddenly I thought I understood why she was doing it.

  I said, “You’re not really looking forward to this, are you?”

  “What do you mean?” she said, injured. “I’ve been looking forward to it all week.”

  “You can’t really be,” I argued. “Your subconscious is playing tricks on you—milking you think you see Mack, so that you’ll have an excuse to go back home instead of seeing the movies. If you’re only here because of your kaffeeklatsch friends who’ve talked you into the idea, and you don’t actually think you’ll enjoy it, let’s go.”

  I saw from her expression I was at least half right. But she shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Mack would think it was awfully funny, wouldn’t he, if we came right home? He might think we didn’t trust him, or something.”