He studied Grayson's folder. It was too early to tell about academic work, but the fourth-classman was a bear—or a fool—for extra duty. He had gone out for half a dozen teams and applied for membership in the exacting Math Club and Writing Club. The Commandant glanced up; Grayson was still in his extreme brace. The Commandant suddenly had the queer idea that Grayson could hold it until it killed him.
"One hundred hours of pack drill," he barked, "to be completed before quarter-term. Cadet Grayson, if you succeed in walking off your tours, remember that there is a tradition of fellowship in the Corps which its members are expected to observe. Dismiss."
After Grayson's steel-sharp salute and exit the Commandant dug deeper into the folder. Apparently there was something wrong with the boy's left arm, but it had been passed by the examining team that visited Io. Most unusual. Most irregular. But nothing could be done about it now.
The President, softer now in body than on his election day, and infinitely more cautious, snapped: "It's all very well to create an incident. But where's the money to come from? Who wants the rest of Io anyway? And what will happen if there's war?"
Treasury said: "The hoarders will supply the money, Mr. President. A system of percentage bounties for persons who report currency hoarders, and then enforced purchase of a bond issue."
Raw Materials said: "We need that iron, Mr. President. We need it desperately."
State said: "All our evaluations indicate that the Soviet Premier would consider nothing less than armed invasion of his continental borders as occasion for all-out war. The consumer-goods party in the Soviet has gained immensely during the past five years and of course their armaments have suffered. Your shrewd directive to put the Republic in a warlike posture has borne fruit, Mr. President…"
President Folsom XXV studied them narrowly. To him the need for a border incident culminating in a forced purchase of Soviet Io did not seem as pressing as they thought, but they were, after all, specialists.
And there was no conceivable way they could benefit from it personally.
The only alternative was that they were offering their professional advice and that it would be best to heed it. Still, there was a vague, nagging something …
Nonsense, he decided. The spy dossiers on his Cabinet showed nothing but the usual. One had been blackmailed by an actress after an affair and railroaded her off the Earth. Another had a habit of taking bribes to advance favorite sons in civil and military service. And so on. The Republic could not suffer at their hands; the Republic and the dynasty were impregnable. You simply spied on everybody— including the spies—and ordered summary executions often enough to show that you meant it, and kept the public ignorant: deaf-dumb-blind ignorant. The spy system was simplicity itself; you had only to let things get as tangled and confused as possible until nobody knew who was who. The executions were literally no problem, for guilt or innocence made no matter. And mind control, when there were four newspapers, six magazines, and three radio and television stations, was a job for a handful of clerks.
No; the Cabinet couldn't be getting away with anything. The system was unbeatable.
President Folsom XXV said: "Very well. Have it done."
Mrs. Grayson, widow, of New Pittsburgh, Io, disappeared one night. It was in all the papers and on all the broadcasts. Some time later she was found dragging herself back across the line between Nizhni-Magnitogorsk and New Pittsburgh in sorry shape. She had a terrible tale to tell about what she had suffered at the hands and so forth of the Nizhni-Magnitogorskniks. A diplomatic note from the Republic to the Soviet was answered by another note which was answered by the dispatch of the Republic's First Fleet to Io which was answered by the dispatch of the Soviet's First and Fifth Fleets to Io.
The Republic's First Fleet blew up the customary deserted target hulk, fulminated over a sneak sabotage attack, and moved in its destroyers.
Battle was joined.
Ensign Thomas Grayson took over the command of his destroyer when its captain was killed on his bridge. An electrified crew saw the strange, brooding youngster perform prodigies of skill and courage, and responded to them. In one week of desultory action the battered destroyer had accounted for seven Soviet destroyers and a cruiser.
As soon as this penetrated to the flagship Grayson was decorated and given a flotilla. His weird magnetism extended to every officer and man aboard the seven craft. They struck like phantoms, cutting out cruisers and battlewagons in wild unorthodox actions that couldn't have succeeded but did—every time. Grayson was badly wounded twice, but his driving nervous energy carried him through.
He was decorated again and given the battlewagon of an ailing four-striper.
Without orders he touched down on the Soviet side of Io, led out a landing party of marines and bluejackets, cut through two regiments of Soviet infantry, and returned to his battlewagon with prisoners: the top civil and military administrators of Soviet Io.
They discussed him nervously aboard the flagship.
"He had a mystical quality, Admiral. His men would follow him into an atomic furnace. And—and I almost believe he could bring them through safely if he wanted to." The laugh was nervous.
"He doesn't look like much. But when he turns on the charm—watch out!"
"He's—he's a winner. Now I wonder what I mean by that?"
"I know what you mean. They turn up every so often. People who can't be stopped. People who have everything. Napoleons. Alexanders.
Stalins. Up from nowhere."
"Suleiman. Hitler. Folsom I. Jenghiz Khan."
"Well, let's get it over with."
They tugged at their gold-braided jackets and signalled the honor guard.
Grayson was piped aboard, received another decoration and another speech. This time he made a speech in return.
President Folsom XXV, not knowing what else to do, had summoned his Cabinet. "Well?" he rasped at the Secretary of Defense.
Steiner said with a faint shrug: "Mr. President, there is nothing to be done. He has the fleet, he has the broadcasting facilities, he has the people."
"People!" snarled the President. His finger stabbed at a button and the wall panels snapped down to show the Secret Servicemen standing in their niches. The finger shot tremulously out at Steiner. "Kill that traitor!" he raved.
The chief of the detail said uneasily: "Mr. President, we were listening to Grayson before we came on duty. He says he's de facto President now—"
"Kill him! Kill him!"
The chief went doggedly on: "—and we liked what he had to say about the Republic and he said citizens of the Republic shouldn't take orders from you and he'd relieve you—"
The President fell back.
Grayson walked in, wearing his plain ensign's uniform and smiling faintly. Admirals and four-stripers flanked him.
The chief of the detail said: "Mr. Grayson! Are you taking over?"
The man in the ensign's uniform said gravely: "Yes. And just call me
'Grayson,' please. The titles come later. You can go now."
The chief gave a pleased grin and collected his detail. The rather slight, youngish man who had something wrong with one arm was in charge—
complete charge.
Grayson said: "Mr. Folsom, you are relieved of the presidency. Captain, take him out and—" He finished with a whimsical shrug. A portly four-striper took Folsom by one arm. Like a drugged man the deposed president let himself be led out.
Grayson looked around the table. "Who are you gentlemen?"
They felt his magnetism, like the hum when you pass a power station.
Steiner was the spokesman. "Grayson," he said soberly, "we were Folsom's Cabinet. However, there is more that we have to tell you.
Alone, if you will allow it."
"Very well, gentlemen." Admirals and captains backed out, looking concerned.
Steiner said: "Grayson, the story goes back many years. My predecessor, William Malvern, determined to overthrow the regime, holding that i
t was an affront to the human spirit. There have been many such attempts. All have broken up on the rocks of espionage, terrorism, and opinion control—the three weapons which the regime holds firmly in its hands.
"Malvern tried another approach than espionage versus espionage, terrorism versus terrorism, and opinion control versus opinion control. He determined to use the basic fact that certain men make history: that there are men born to be mould breakers. They are the Philips of Macedon, the Napoleons, Stalins and Hitlers, the Suleimans—the adventurers. Again and again they flash across history, bringing down an ancient empire, turning ordinary soldiers of the line into unkillable demons of battle, uprooting cultures, breathing new life into moribund peoples.
"There are common denominators among all the adventurers.
Intelligence, of course. Other things are more mysterious but are always present. They are foreigners. Napoleon the Corsican. Hitler the Austrian. Stalin the Georgian. Philip the Macedonian. Always there is an Oedipus complex. Always there is physical deficiency. Napoleon's stature. Stalin's withered arm—and yours. Always there is a minority disability, real or fancied.
"This is a shock to you, Grayson, but you must face it. You were manufactured.
"Malvern packed the Cabinet with the slyest double-dealers he could find and they went to work. Eighty-six infants were planted on the outposts of the Republic in simulated family environments. Your mother was not your mother but one of the most brilliant actresses ever to drop out of sight on Earth. Your intelligence heredity was so good that we couldn't turn you down for lack of a physical deficiency. We withered your arm with gamma radiation. I hope you will forgive us.
There was no other way.
"Of the eighty-six you are the one that worked. Somehow the combination for you was minutely different from all the other combinations, genetically or environmentally, and it worked. That is all we were after. The mould has been broken, you know now what you are.
Let come whatever chaos is to come; the dead hand of the past no longer lies on—"
Grayson went to the door and beckoned; two captains came in. Steiner broke off his speech as Grayson said to them: "These men deny my godhood. Take them out and—" he finished with a whimsical shrug.
"Yes, your divinity," said the captains, without a trace of humor in their voices.
Dominoes
[Star Science Fiction Stories #1, 1953]
"MONEY!" his wife screamed at him. "You're killing yourself, Will. Pull out of the market and let's go some place where we can live like human—"
He slammed the apartment door on her reproaches and winced, standing in the carpeted corridor, as an ulcer twinge went through him.
The elevator door rolled open and the elevator man said, beaming:
"Good morning, Mr. Born. It's a lovely day today."
"I'm glad, Sam," W. J. Born said sourly. "I just had a lovely, lovely breakfast." Sam didn't know how to take it, and compromised by giving him a meager smile.
"How's the market look, Mr. Born?" he hinted as the car stopped on the first floor. "My cousin told me to switch from Lunar Entertainment, he's studying to be a pilot, but the Journal has it listed for growth."
W. J. Born grunted: "If I knew I wouldn't tell you. You've got no business in the market. Not if you think you can play it like a craps table."
He fumed all through his taxi ride to the office. Sam, a million Sams, had no business in the market. But they were in, and they had built up the Great Boom of 1975 on which W. J. Born Associates was coasting merrily along. For how long? His ulcer twinged again at the thought.
He arrived at 9:15. Already the office was a maelstrom. The clattering tickers, blinking boards, and racing messengers spelled out the latest, hottest word from markets in London, Paris, Milan, Vienna. Soon New York would chime in, then Chicago, then San Francisco.
Maybe this would be the day. Maybe New York would open on a significant decline in Moon Mining and Smelting. Maybe Chicago would nervously respond with a slump in commodities and San Francisco's Utah Uranium would plummet in sympathy. Maybe panic in the Tokyo Exchange on the heels of the alarming news from the States—panic relayed across Asia with the rising sun to Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, and crashing like a shockwave into the opening New York market again.
Dominoes, W. J. Born thought. A row of dominoes. Flick one and they all topple in a heap. Maybe this would be the day.
Miss Illig had a dozen calls from his personal crash-priority clients penciled in on his desk pad already. He ignored them and said into her good-morning smile: "Get me Mr. Loring on the phone."
Loring's phone rang and rang while W. J. Born boiled inwardly. But the lab was a barn of a place, and when he was hard at work he was deaf and blind to distractions. You had to hand him that. He was screwy, he was insolent, he had an inferiority complex that stuck out a yard, but he was a worker.
Loring's insolent voice said in his ear: "Who's this?"
"Born," he snapped. "How's it going?"
There was a long pause, and Loring said casually: "I worked all night. I think I got it licked."
"What do you mean?"
Very irritated: "I said I think I got it licked. I sent a clock and a cat and a cage of white mice out for two hours. They came back okay."
"You mean—" W. J. Born began hoarsely, and moistened his lips. "How many years?" he asked evenly.
"The mice didn't say, but I think they spent two hours in 1977."
"I'm coming right over," W. J. Born snapped, and hung up. His office staff stared as he strode out.
If the man was lying—! No; he didn't lie. He'd been sopping up money for six months, ever since he bulled his way into Bern's office with his time machine project, but he hadn't lied once. With brutal frankness he had admitted his own failures and his doubts that the thing ever would be made to work. But now, W. J. Born rejoiced, it had turned into the smartest gamble of his career. Six months and a quarter of a million dollars—a two-year forecast on the market was worth a billion! Four thousand to one, he gloated; four thousand to one! Two hours to learn when the Great Bull Market of 1975 would collapse and then back to his office armed with the information, ready to buy up to the very crest of the boom and then get out at the peak, wealthy forever, forever beyond the reach of fortune, good or bad!
He stumped upstairs to Loring's loft in the West Seventies.
Loring was badly overplaying the role of casual roughneck. Gangling, redheaded, and unshaved, he grinned at Born and said: "Wat-cha think of soy futures, W. J.? Hold or switch?"
W. J. Born began automatically: "If I knew I wouldn't—oh, don't be silly.
Show me the confounded thing."
Loring showed him. The whining generators were unchanged; the tall Van de Graaf accumulator still looked like something out of a third-rate horror movie. The thirty square feet of haywired vacuum tubes and resistances were still an incomprehensible tangle. But since his last visit a phone booth without a phone had been added. A sheet-copper disk set into its ceiling was connected to the machinery by a ponderous cable. Its floor was a slab of polished glass.
"That's it," Loring said. "I got it at a junkyard and fixed it up pretty. You want to watch a test on the mice?"
"No," W. J. Born said. "I want to try it myself. What do you think I've been paying you for?" He paused. "Do you guarantee its safety?"
"Look, W. J.," Loring said, "I guarantee nothing. I think this will send you two years into the future. I think if you're back in it at the end of two hours you'll snap back to the present. I'll tell you this, though. If it does send you into the future, you had better be back in it at the end of two hours. Otherwise you may snap back into the same space as a strolling pedestrian or a moving car—and an H-bomb will be out of your league."
W. J. Bern's ulcer twinged. With difficulty he asked: "Is there anything else I ought to know?"
"Nope," Loring said after considering for a moment. "You're just a paying passenger."
"Then let's go." W. J. B
orn checked to make sure that he had his memorandum book and smooth-working pen in his pocket and stepped into the telephone booth.
Loring closed the door, grinned, waved, and vanished—literally vanished, while Born was looking at him.
Born yanked the door open and said: "Loring! What the devil—" And then he saw that it was late afternoon instead of early morning. That Loring was nowhere in the loft. That the generators were silent and the tubes dark and cold. That there was a mantle of dust and a faint musty smell.
He rushed from the big room and down the stairs. It was the same street in the West Seventies. Two hours, he thought, and looked at his watch. It said 9:55, but the sun unmistakably said it was late afternoon.
Something had happened. He resisted an impulse to grab a passing high-school boy and ask him what year it was. There was a newsstand down the street, and Born went to it faster than he had moved in years.
He threw down a quarter and snatched a Post, dated September 11th, 1977. He had done it.
Eagerly he riffled to the Post's meager financial page. Moon Mining and Smelting had opened at 27. Uranium at 19. United Com at 24.
Catastrophic lows! The crash had come!
He looked at his watch again, in panic. 9:59. It had said 9:55. He'd have to be back in the phone booth by 11:55 or—he shuddered. An H-bomb would be out of his league.
Now to pinpoint the crash. "Cab!" he yelled, waving his paper. It eased to the curb. "Public library," W. J. Born grunted, and leaned back to read the Post with glee.
The headline said: 25000 RIOT HERE FOR UPPED JOBLESS DOLE.
Naturally; naturally. He gasped as he saw who had won the 1976
presidential election. Lord, what odds he'd be able to get back in 1975 if he wanted to bet on the nomination! NO CRIME WAVE, SAYS
COMISSIONER. Things hadn't changed very much after all. BLONDE
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 7
