One Million Tomorrows M

by Bob Shaw

  When the two men had left the room Carewe took another drink, savoring its malty warmth. He walked to the table and examined the globe of the world. It was small, about the size of an orange, cupped inside a complex gimbal arrangement surmounted by a lens system, and the arrangement of the land masses was all wrong. He looked at it more closely and saw that everything was reversed, as if seen in a mirror. The surface of the globe was grayed with thousands upon thousands of place names, all of them far too small to be read with the naked eye. Carewe examined the base of the globe’s stand and discovered two rows of buttons with the legends “Latitude” and “Longitude.” Impressed with the beautiful engineering of the device, he touched a larger red button. The globe swung to pre-set coordinates and the lens system blazed with light.

  Carewe ooked up at the portion now being projected onto the ceiling of the room, taking a sip of his drink as he did so, but the liquor seemed to lose its taste as he saw that the African township of Nouvelle Anvers was in the center of the brightly glowing map. For some reason, Barenboim and Pleeth had been studying the small area of the continent in which Carewe had come so close to losing his life.

  He switched off the projector and returned to his seat, anxious to appear at ease before his employers returned to the room.

  XII

  Carewe, who had never knowingly seen a private detective before, studied Theodore Gwynne with interest. He was a small, quick man who appeared to have cooled around the age of fifty. His eyes were alert, and he had a brain which seemed to race all the time, obsessively, with the object of producing witty comments on everything that was said. Carewe could see him seizing on even the most banal remark and worrying it like a terrier until he had torn off an aphoristic shred. Every conversational exchange among the four men in Pleeth’s library ended with one of Gwynne’s epigrams, delivered in a low voice and accompanied by a very white smile. Carewe had initial doubts about the little man’s qualifications, but he noticed that Barenboim spoke to him with some deference and listened attentively to every word of Gwynne’s replies.

  “As I see it, Theo, we’re giving you two jobs to take care of at once,” Barenboim was saying thoughtfully, pressing his puffy hands together to form a steeple.

  “Two jobs, but you’d get a hell of a shock if I sent in two bills.” Gwynne’s teeth flashed briefly. “Sorry, Hy—go on.”

  Barenboim smiled tolerantly. “We’re asking you to find Willy’s wife. Then there’s the question of Willy himself—he’s convinced someone has been trying to kill him.”

  “That’s bad.” Gwynne sent Carewe a sympathetic glance. “There’s only one thing more depressing than somebody trying to kill you, and that’s somebody succeeding.”

  Carewe nodded in sage agreement. He had noticed the way in which Barenboim had made clear his reservations about the reality of the threat to his life. One part of his mind was annoyed at not being able to convince anybody that he was a murder target; but the log fire was warming his feet, the Scotch he had drunk was warming his stomach, and a delicious relaxation had spread through him, turning his weariness into a sensual pleasure.

  “There’s no problem,” he said sleepily. “I want to work closely with Theo while he’s locating my wife. He’ll be able to look after my health at the same time, I presume.”

  “Dr. Gwynne, I presume.” Gwynne rubbed his hands. “I’ll be able to put in an additional bill for medical services.”

  “That reminds me, Willy—you’re still convalescing,” Barenboim said. “Have you seen a doctor here yet?”

  “Not yet. I’m getting used to operating on one cylinder.”

  “Well, it sounds pretty serious to me. I’ll send a company medical officer out to see you.”

  “Don’t bother, Hy.” Carewe’s newfound distrust of hospitals flared up. “I’ll see my own doctor in the morning.”

  “All right. Have him debit Farma.”

  “Thanks, Hy.” Carewe caught himself on the verge of drifting into sleep. “I’d better get on home.”

  “There’s no need for that.” Pleeth, who had been perched with uncharacteristic stillness on his invisible QueenVic chair, spoke with an odd intensity, as he fingered the cigar-like gold ornament on his chest. “The least I can do is offer you a bed.”

  Carewe shook his head. “I’d prefer to get back to my own place—that’s where Athene would expect to find me.” He stood up and, after making sure that Gwynne had his home number, made his way out to his bullet. By the time he got home his legs were buckling slightly at every step and he fell asleep on the instant of lying down.

  In the morning he awoke to find that his fears for Athene’s safety, so easily dispelled by Barenboim’s arguments on the previous evening, had returned in full force. According to the president’s logic nobody had any reason to harm Athene, but by the same logic nobody had any reason to harm Carewe. Yet he had come close to death three times in one twenty-four hour period. Although not hungry, he took a light breakfast of eggs and citrus juice, then went to the communicator and called Dr. Westi’s office. He arranged for an appointment for ten o’clock and filled in the intervening time by renewing his facial depilatory and finding fresh clothes.

  Dr. Westi’s office was on the eighth floor of the Three Springs medical arts building. Carewe arrived there a little early but the cybersec admitted him right away. Westi, a scholarly-looking man who apparently had not cooled until he was over sixty, waved him into a chair.

  “Good morning, Will,” he said amiably. “Having adjustment problems?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I see from your compcard that you and Athene have just been registered as immortals with the State Health Board. I thought perhaps …”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, sex isn’t rearing its ugly head—but can you do anything for a collapsed lung?” Carewe explained what had happened to him as best he could without going into the reasons for his abrupt departure from the Uations field hospital.

  “I suppose I should be grateful to you, young Will,” Westi said, eyeing Carewe speculatively. “In nearly eighty years of practice this is my first opportunity to treat a stab wound. Take off your tunic while I see what they’ve been doing to you.” He activated a desk-mounted computer terminal and asked it for details of the treatment Carewe had been given during his African hospitalization. After a barely perceptible delay, the instrument slid out a tongue of paper which Westi examined with interest. He set it aside and removed the dressing from Carewe’s chest. Carewe avoided looking downwards as the doctor’s warm dry fingers touched the area of the wound.

  “This looks all right,” Westi said finally, his voice shaded with doubt. “Exactly how long is it since you took your shot, Willy?”

  Carewe did some mental arithmetic. “Ten days.” “I see. And who supplied the gun?”

  “I work for Farma,” Carewe said, keeping his voice level in spite of his stirrings of apprehension, “so naturally…”

  “Farma E.12, was it?”

  “Of course—why do you ask?”

  “Nothing important. The rate of healing was perhaps a little slower than I’d have expected for an immortal. Probably there were complicating factors. Now sit here while I check up on that lung.” Westi put a holoviewer against Carewe’s ribs and examined the right lung. Carewe, appalled at the idea of accidentally catching a glimpse of his own interior, kept his eyes closed. “That looks healthy enough. I think we can put it to work again.”

  “What do you have to do? Pump it up?”

  “Nothing so drastic.” Westi smiled. “I’m going to inject some adhesive into your thorax and re-attach the lung to your ribs. You won’t feel a thing.”

  Carewe nodded glumly, and tried fixing his thoughts on Athene’s face.

  Creeping downwards from zenith, the sun changed shape as it crossed the invisible boundaries of the weather control zones. Like an amoeba, a drop of oil moving on glass, it distorted, elongated, split into bloody tears and coalesced. The fading force
s of winter, defeated by orbital geometries, glowered from the north but were held in check. Carewe walked aimlessly in his garden, trying to adjust to the new tempo of events. Since the first morning he had been called to Barenboim’s suite the days had been uneven flickers of light and darkness, slipping past him at supernatural speed. Now, suddenly, he was trapped in a temporal amber, waiting for Gwynne’s call. He walked the length of the garden several times, toying with the idea of doing something with the hummocks of Martian lichen which were getting out of control, but unable to give serious consideration to anything so trivial.

  “There you are, Willy,” came a man’s voice from the next garden. “Where have you been lately?”

  Carewe turned and saw the sun-browned face of Bunny Costello looking over the fence. “Africa,” he said, vainly wishing he had detected Costello’s presence in time to avoid contact. His neighbor was the oldest man he knew, even older than Barenboim—he had been born in the earlier half of the Twentieth Century and the development of biostats had come just in time to save him from the grave.

  “Africa, eh?” Costello snorted in disbelief. “Mrs. Carewe with you?”

  “What have you heard, Bunny?”

  “Heard? What about?”

  Carewe sighed heavily. “About Athene and me. What have you heard?”

  “Not a thing. Besides, I don’t repeat gossip—I’m all in favor of old-fashioned marriage, Willy boy.”

  So they know, Carewe thought. “Why don’t you try it?”

  “Really?” Carewe began to move away.

  “Cruel, Willy. Very cruel. I was married, you know.” “Yeah—but I can’t remember her face. Or even her name.

  The afternoon air was suddenly cool on Carewe’s forehead. “That’s some memory you’ve got there, Bunny.”

  “It’s as good as anybody else’s—goes back about a hundred years.”

  “But I know men who can remember twice that far back.” What’s the point? Carewe wondered. What use is your million tomorrows if you can’t hold on to them?

  “Continuity is everything,” Costello said, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Memories have to be reinforced, you know. I kept a diary for some time, and photographs but I lost them. Traveled a bit too, and lost continuity.

  Do you keep a diary, Willy?” “No..

  “Start. All I need is one clue. One clue and I’d win back fifty years, but I was in South America during the Unification and nobody can find my records.”

  “How about hypnosis?”

  “No good. The cellular imprints have gone. They get swamped out eventually, even in mortals, and I guess the biostats speed up the process.” Costello smiled ruefully. “Aging and remembering might be the same thing, Willy boy. And if you stop aging …”

  It took Carewe a long time to break free of Costello and get back to the privacy of his dhome. He took a shower, then made some cofftea, but the depression which had come over him while talking to the old cool refused to disperse. Could it be that there would come a day, perhaps only a hundred years in the future, on which he would have to check his diary to remember the color of Athene’s hair? Without absolute continuance of the personality was there such a thing as immortality? Or did it simply mean that his deathless body would be inhabited by a series of strangers, each fading imperceptibly into the next as the biological slates were wiped clean?

  Acting on the spur of the moment, he searched drawers and closets until he found a fresh notebook. At the top of the first page he wrote 28 April 2176. He studied the blank white sheet, tapping the pen against his teeth, but was unable to decide on what to say or how to say it. Flowing confidence beginning, “Dear Diary”? Or should he be cryptic—“Wife pregnant today, father unknown”—and hope the Carewe of a century later would be able to reconstruct the fragments?

  He threw the notebook aside, went to the communicator and instructed it to check itself. All circuits were operable. Dissatisfied and tense, he walked around the dhome breathing deeply and steadily to test the action of his right lung. It appeared to be working well and there was no discomfort from the punctures Dr. Westi had made in his chest. He was ready to do anything if

  only Gwynne would call. The thought came that it could take Gwynne several days even to pick up a lead, and he groaned aloud. If this was a sample of immortality…

  The call came a little after nine o’clock. Carewe had at length drifted into a restless sleep and he sat up in darkness, the chime of the communicator fading in his ears. There was a moment of disorientation as he saw the glowing image of Gwynne’s head drifting at the set’s projection focus, then it all came back. He lurched across to the communicator, shivering, and told it he was accepting the call.

  Gwynne’s blindly questing eyes came to life. “There you are, Will. Did I wake you up?”

  “Sort of. I’m feeling a bit rough.”

  “You look like you’ve been shot at.” Gwynne’s face contorted into a theatrical scowl. “Who said ‘Fire at Will’? Come on, speak up—who said it?”

  “Have you any news of my wife?” Carewe said stolidly, wondering what miracles of competence the little man had achieved in the past to win Barenboim’s esteem.

  Gwynne instantly looked contrite. “No hard news, but I’ve got a strong lead.”

  “What sort of a lead?”

  “Well, I started with that call your wife received— the one that was supposed to have come from you. It was made from a public comset in the Three Springs civic services block.”

  “That gets us nowhere, doesn’t it?”

  “In this line of business getting nowhere often means getting somewhere. There aren’t any drug manufacturing concerns in the Three Springs area apart from Farma—correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I contacted a few friends on the computer staffs of the credit clearing houses—confidentially, of course—and I found that a character by the name of Solly Hyman had been in town for one day. Hyman comes from Seattle and he does casual work for an agency called the Soper Bureau.”

  “These names don’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Probably not—but I happen to know that Soper is retained by a firm called NorAmBio.”

  “I’m with you now.” Carewe felt the hair on his temples stir slightly as his heart began to pound. NorAmBio was a middle-sized pharmaceuticals company heavily committed to biostatic production and research.

  Gwynne’s teeth flashed white. “There’s more. Last year NorAmBio’s engineering subsidiary acquired a , slightly shaky outfit called Frictionfree Bearings in Idaho Falls. The plant’s been lying idle for months but I hear there’s been some unusual activity there in the last day or two—or should I say the last night or two?”

  “You mean …?”

  “I can’t be positive, Will.”

  “But you think my wife is there!”

  Gwynne shrugged. “We’ll soon know for sure—I’m going down there right now. I thought you’d like to have a progress report.”

  “I’m going with you,” Carewe announced.

  Gwynne hesitated, his large-jawed face clouded with doubt. “I wouldn’t be too happy about that. It might be a little dangerous—and I’m the one who’s getting paid to take the risks.”

  “Forget it,” Carewe snapped. “Just tell me where you are and I’ll be right there.”

  A few minutes later, just as he was leaving the house, the communicator chimed again. He turned back impatiently, half-expecting to see Gwynne, but the topaz light which presaged an intercontinental non-visual message was winking. When he accepted the call a printed message appeared at the projection focus. The dateline showed it was from the Unations base near Nouvelle Anvers, and the message read:

  FURTHER EXAMINATION OF THE FLOATER WHICH SANK HAS REVEALED TRACES OF GORDONITE ON THE HEIGHT SENSOR LINKAGE. I OWE YOU AN APOLOGYwed E MATTER WILL NOW BE INVESTIGATED FULLY. BE CAREFUL. DEWEY STORCH.

  Carewe nodded with satisfaction and made a photocopy of the message to show to Gwynne and
Barenboim. Later, as he was hurtling towards Three Springs, it occurred to him that it was a little crazy for a glass figurine to feel pleased at having discovered definite proof that somebody was trying to smash him in pieces.

  XIII

  “You know the best way to embarrass somebody?” Gwynne turned sideways in the front seat of his bullet. Behind his head the lights of an isolated Idaho community, dimmed by the plastic wall of the tubeway, streamed past like an irregular burst of tracer.

  “No.” Carewe would have preferred to remain quiet and think about Athene, but when borne along by the pneumatic peristalsis of the tubeway there was not even the task of steering to occupy Gwynne.

  “You do what I’m doing now.”

  “Which is?” Carewe examined the little man’s face, which stared back at him intently.

  “Don’t you notice it?”

  “You mean you’re staring at me?”

  “Not at you.” Gwynne moved his face a little closer. “I’m staring at your mouth. If you want to embarrass somebody, stare at his mouth while he’s talking.”

  “Thanks.” Carewe said heavily. “I’m sure that information will be of increasing value to me as I progress through life.”

  “Think nothing of it; my brain’s full of stuff like that. One of the advantages of being well-read.”

  Carewe frowned. People kept mentioning literature to him and, as far as he could remember, all or most of them were cools. Was that how they passed their time? He settled back in his seat and tried to relax, but the immediate future was filled with unsettling obscurity and he found himself driven to talk to Gwynne.

  “You really do read books?” he asked reluctantly.

  “Of course, Willy boy. Don’t you?”

  “No. I watch Osman on tridi sometime,” Carewe said defensively.