But Poochy was here first, the woman said, turning to Salsbury.
He did not know what sort of expression was on his face, but it must not have been too charming, for she turned paler than she had been, the rouge on her cheeks like red clouds floating over the milkiness of her face. Quickly, she took Poochy in her arms and hustled back to the waiting room.
After Debert strapped Intrepid down and put him to sleep with sodium pentathol, Salsbury and Lynda went back to the waiting room. They were there for an hour. The doughy woman made a show of her displeasure. She talked to Poochy in that stupid tone parents use when chucking their fat babies under the chin. When it barked, she went into long, wailing monologues about her poor suffering canine. At the end of an hour, Debert came out, a few spots of blood on his blue smock.
How is he? Victor asked, feeling somehow absurd being so concerned about a dog, yet, remembering what the dog had done for him; where he would have been without Intrepid. He would have been, simply, dead on the lawn, leaking blood all over the grass.
I put twenty-six stitches in his shoulder, Debert said. The wound on his hip was a little more ragged. I couldn't really use stitches there. I stopped the bleeding; powdered it heavily; drew it together with a tape and cloth compression bandage. He lost a good bit of blood and needed a transfusion. Shot of penicillin to protect against infection. He'll sleep for another hour or so under the drugs, then drift into a natural sleep that should last until late this evening. He's going to live, though it will take a few weeks for him to heal properly. He might always have a slight limp in the right foreleg, due to the separated shoulder muscles. That'll be his only mark, though. I'd like to keep him for a week. Then you can bring him back once a week for a month until we're sure everything has knitted properly.
They thanked him. Vic felt like someone had found him under a concrete mixer and had thankfully brought a crowbar and worked him loose. He paid Debert, surprised that the bill was so low.
On their way home, they stopped at a grocery while Lynda bought two thick steaks and all the trimmings. They also collected a few of her things. The ride home and the preparation of supper in which they both took part had a curiously manic air. They were, they knew, over-reacting to the news that they were all, once again, alive after an assassination attempt. They were cheering their good fortune so the gods might not think them ungrateful. And, in a way, they were trying to pretend, at least for a short while, that the trouble was over. The big showdown had come and passed; now they could settle down and live like real people.
But lurking in their minds was the understanding that anything might yet happen-anything at all. And whatever did happen, it would be highly unpleasant. Thinking these thoughts but mouthing jovialities, they dug into their steaks and baked potatoes sometime around six-thirty. They were just finishing with dishes of sherbert when the noise came from the living room, the banging and thumping of something negotiating the turn of the staircase leading from the second floor.
Victor Salsbury, a cool, well-modulated voice said.
It was the 810-40.04, awake at last.
It was time for another briefing.
CHAPTER 12
The computer trunk, featureless as before, floated into the kitchen, seemed to register his presence with some invisible bank of sensors. You are accompanied by someone else, it said. Identify them, please.
My wife, Salsbury said, stretching things a bit.
The computer was silent a moment, adjusting to the information that was certain to require more than a little shifting of data. You are not permitted it began.
Whatever authority you had over me is gone, Salsbury told it.
On the surface of the trunk, two squares began to glow yellow. Place your hands here for your next series of orders, the computer said.
I repeat, Salsbury said, that whatever authority you had over me is gone.
On the glowing plates, the computer said.
If you expect to have authority over me, even the littlest bit of authority, you will have to tell me enough about this thing to keep me alive. As it is, I've killed three robot men and one robot dog sent by those lizard-things, though I have no idea what in the hell-
Lizard-things? But you must be wrong. The vacii invasion is not to begin for several days yet. Put your hands on the glowing-
Go to hell! You can come look at the parts of the robots if you want. You can stay until one-thirty in the morning when the portal opens in the wall and more of them come through. Or maybe the lizards will come themselves this time.
There was another pause. The plates on the trunk surface ceased to glow. You are telling the truth, it said, as if it had lie-detecting devices wired into it.
Damn straight. And I've just decided that this isn't worth sticking around for. I can't trust you'll tell me everything. I think the wise thing for us to do is get out of here now, fast, move somewhere else where I can paint and-
That would be unwise. The computer's voice was a monotone and had already begun to sound hollow and boring.
You think? Why?
Because, the 810-40.04 said, if you don't continue the plan and defeat the vacii, they'll pour into this continuum, overwhelm it and establish one of their cultural experiments. In six months, they'll rule this world.
Six months? An alien invasion? That's insanity!
You've seen them in the wall, Lynda reminded him.
He shook his head in agreement. Let's get this over with, then. Brief me.
Put your hands on the glowing-
No, he said matter-of-factly. I will not let you delve into my mind and fill me up with orders I don't even know you've given me. Brief me verbally.
It would be impossible to control you as before. You have become too human in time since the last stage of the operation. Your psyche has been allowed to recover from its hypno-training.
Verbal, he said.
You must carry the first briefing, it said. My data banks must include the present situation.
He told it all that had happened since he had left it in the cave to go purchase the Jacobi house. When he was done, he said, Now maybe you can tell me why you wouldn't respond when I came to you to find out about the lizard-things and the robots.
You must realize that an 810-40.04 has a contained power source and that I can only operate in the time allotted by the plan. Otherwise I risk draining my reserves, which could be disastrous. Without computer briefing, you might fail. The plan might fail. We mis-estimated the time of the first vacii attacks. Seriously mis-estimated. Otherwise, you would not have had to face the robots unarmed.
Who am I working for? he asked, not bothering to comment on the first answer, afraid that the well of information would dry up if he didn't fill his buckets quickly.
The oppressed people of the vacii experimental society of Earth Number 4576.
Salsbury waited for more. When there wasn't any more, he said, What is that supposed to mean? Where are these oppressed people?
Two-hundred-and-eighty-five years in the future, the 810-40.04 said.
They sat still, hardly breathing. Vic cleared his throat. And what Is Well, is that where I came from? From 2255 A.D.?
Yes.
But why doesn't he remember that future? Lynda asked, leaning over the table toward the trunk as if it were a person.
Because he never lived it, the computer said.
Wait, Salsbury interrupted. I'm not tracking clearly. When did I live, then?
Never, the computer said. You're an android.
He looked at Lynda; she at him. She took his hand, which was the sign he needed to maintain his confidence. He spoke to the 810-40.04 again. I'm not made of wires and tubes. I bleed real blood.
Android, not robot, the computer said. You were a product of the Artificial Wombs, grown from a chemicall
y simulated egg and a chemically simulated sperm, each with carefully engineered genes. From all appearances, you are a natural born man. You think, feel, and react like a man, like Victor Salsbury who was chosen because data about him had survived the centuries; his work gained renown after his death. You have, it is agreed, a soul like any man, for you are in all ways human except for those differences built into you. They are three. One: in a crisis, you react with more speed than a man should, for your mental process are stimulated by danger and you can tap them with the fluency of some wild animals. Two: you have an ability to produce and use an adrenalin-like substance which is secreted by a mechanism buried in your liver. This has the single drawback of making you highly susceptible to alcoholic beverages, but this cannot be helped. Three: you have great recuperative powers far beyond the normal. Otherwise, you are a man.
If this cause is so important, Victor said, why not send one of those oppressed people back? He would be more fanatical. You would be more certain of his cooperation, though he would not have my recuperative powers or reactions.
That is reason enough, the machine said. But, also, a man cannot travel so far into the past, unfortunately.
Why not?
As he travels backwards, a man grows younger. If he begins his journey as a fifty year old, travels twenty years into the past, he is then thirty. No man can, therefore, return further into the past than his birth date. Since, in our future, the average age under the vacii is only eighty-two, we have no chance of finding a real man old enough to come back to this period and still be an adult when he arrives.
But why didn't I react like a man? Vic asked. He suspected why. The suspicion lingered in the back of his mind, frightening yet tantalizing.
The computer continued in a level tone. The artificial atmosphere of the mechanical wombs can help us achieve many things. The flow of time can be compressed or stretched. In your case, we made the interior of the womb capsule an accelerated time pocket. It took two years to create you, but you were carefully aged 310 years in that time. When you came back into the past in the normal time-flow reversal, you ended up in 1970 as a twenty-five-year-old man.
Salsbury could think of nothing to say, nothing to ask. He could only look at his body, his hands, and think about how old he was how really really old.
Lynda thought of something. If we stop these these vacii and can live a normal life, will Vic live to be 310?
The computer seemed to take a moment for reflection. He will be a fixture of the present, will not wink out of existence. He will live a healthy life, though it is not certain he will grow to be 310. He will not be living a preordained life, but a future of his own choosing. His mortality should be every bit as shaky as anyone's in this era.
You've more or less convinced me the vacii must be stopped, Salsbury said. But why? What are they and where are they from?
They are an intelligent extra-galactic race. Not only have they conquered faster-than-light travel, but probability travel as well. Or at least one probability line of them has.
Salsbury looked properly perplexed, and the computer's sensors must have registered the expression.
Imagine, the computer said, that this is not the only Earth that exists. There are thousands, millions, billions, countless Earths with slightly different histories. There are an infinity of probabilities, all existing in the same space and time, but separated by quasi-dimensional spaces. Traveling from one to the other of these probabilities involves finding the weak spots in the quasi-dimensional spaces, the places where the probabilities almost touch. Once these are found, equipment is erected to weaken these places further until, finally, a bubble develops between the two probabilities, a bubble through which you can pass. At first, living tissue cannot move through the bubble and survive, for it is a vacuum filled with randomly bouncing electrons freed when the quasi-dimensional space is broken down to form the bubble. These electrons have a mass all out of proportion to their size. Tremendous density. They're like bullets that are of micro-micro size; they corrode the flesh, though they do not harm the plasti-steel alloy of the robots specially built to transverse the primitive bubble.
Once on the other side, the robots can bring through equipment to set up a beam generator from this side of the bubble. When the beams from both sides are locked, the bubble becomes a doorway that even flesh can pass through without difficulty. The vacii have sent robots through to destroy you but have not yet opened the bubble to animal transport. They will do that shortly, as soon as they have killed you, or before.
But to return to the origins of the vacii, the lizard-men. They landed on an Earth of one of the other probability lines and conquered it. From there, they spread out in both directions on the plane of probabilities, defeating one counter-Earth after another. We are the seventy-sixth to fall. We have not essentially been conquered from space, but from our own other probabilities. Here, at Harold Jacobi's house, in the summer of 1970, the vacii took over this probability. They established as experimental station, then proceeded to worlds beyond ours, into other probabilities.
Unknown to the vacii manning the station, on this world, our world-the future from which you and I have come-man discovered time travel. It was obvious, at once, to those in our future, that a time machine could be used as a weapon against the vacii rulers. If someone could be sent into the past to stop the vacii takeover of our worldline, the future would be entirely different. Man would be free. And, perhaps, the other vacii empires could fall like dominoes, backwards through the other probability lines they conquered; one Earth becoming free after another.
That was it. But it was too complicated to grasp all its significances in one sitting. Salsbury could only let it settle into his mind where he could later proceed to try to understand it. The lizards in the wall were aliens. But they were coming from a counter-Earth, not directly from the stars. He had been sent from the future of this Earth to stop their invasion before it began
What do you mean by experimental stations? Lynda asked. And what is the future like under the vacii?
The vacii, the 810-40.04 said, are nearly emotionless creatures. Perhaps they do experience love, pity, and hate among themselves, though to a small degree; but they have no feelings toward men. They look to man as an inferior animal to be experimented with. Where man's personality includes creativity and human interaction, the vacii have only scientific curiosity. They live for their experiments. The purpose of the race is to glean knowledge from the universe, or thus has developed their chief philosophy. Man is not the only race they have brought under their rule. There are other species throughout several galaxies. With each new race it subdues, the vacii begins controlled social experiments. How will men, for instance, react in a world of total anarchy? To find out, the vacii produce a world of anarchy and watch for a few centuries. The experiment never ends really, continuing as long as one human being is left alive in that experimental situation. Or maybe they create a world of pure democracy. Or a world ruled by teen-agers. Or they introduce a certain invention into the established society, perhaps a new weapon, perhaps something making genetic control possible. All sorts of things.
And on this probability line, in our own future? Salsbury asked.
Fascism, the computer said. Man has had his two-hundred-and-eighty-five years of Hitlers. It is not a pleasant place-your future.
Three-hundred years of fascist rule
The men who structured this operation were confident of your cooperation up to this point. It was realized that you would begin to grow less like the Puppet and more as a human being, which you are. Whether you would be anxious to help at this point was not known. If you rejected direct briefing through my sensor plates, then a series of senso-tapes was provided to show you the world of your future, show you what it will be like as a vacii experiment.
A hundred questions had risen now. Why, Salsbury asked, couldn't all
this knowledge have been implanted in my mind to start, as well as a complete set of orders?
Because, as you grew younger, all the knowledge in your memory cells would fade. You arrived here with a blank brain and would have arrived blank even if you had been briefed in the future.
Then how did I know to kill Harold Jacobi?
A small chemical tape, impervious to unaging, was built into your brain. It played back your orders on your arrival. While you slept those two weeks in the cave, I filled you in on your background as Victor Salsbury, but there was not time to tell you more, and no room for another chemical tape to have been implanted at the start
The senso-tapes, Lynda said. What are they?
They affect all your senses, the computer said. If you will each put a hand on one of the glow plates, I will transmit them to you. The nerves in your fingertips are enough to guarantee reception.
Salsbury grabbed Lynda's hand as she reached out. He spoke to the computer. This would be a fine moment to indoctrinate both of us, to turn me into a Puppet again.
No, the 810-40.04 said. It would not work. You are no longer receptive.
He looked skeptical.
You are too humanized now, the computer said. Surely you can see that.
He shrugged, reached out as Lynda did, touched the transmission plates on the top of the trunk. They faded into another world.
You are in a cell. Underground. There is no window. Only the gray cement floor, the gray damp walls, and the black iron bars that seal you off from the dimly lighted corridor beyond. You have not been fed your breakfast; it is getting toward the end of the lunch hour as well, and you have had nothing. A rat runs across the floor, stops at your bars and looks in. You realize, for the first time, that you are lying on the floor, on a level with the rat. The rat is looking directly into your eyes, its own eyes gleaming crimson, hot. It shows its teeth, very pointed teeth, in a vicious grin, the grin of every predator since time immemorial. It would like to chew on your eyeballs. You can't let that happen. You try to move and get halfway up, fall back onto the floor. You are so terribly weak. The rat comes closer. You try to think why you are here in this place, why this is happening. You were on the wrong side of some political issue, but you can't remember what it was. It hardly matters in a fascist regime. But it couldn't have been this important, could it? The rat scampers two feet closer. Could it? Closer You scream. But there is no one interested in your plight.
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