by John Varley
“No shots!” he wailed, and began to struggle again. Evangeline quickly hid the syringe behind her back, but the damage had been done. It took another couple minutes to get him back to the cowering, passive state of panic he’d been in before.
“I’ve got some motion sickness pills, too,” Evangeline said in a small voice.
“Give them to me. Here you go, Jubal. Take a couple of these. They’ll make you feel better.”
“No shots?”
“No shots, I promise.”
Jubal put the pills in his mouth and chewed on them. I looked over my shoulder and nodded to Evangeline. She jammed the needle into his butt.
So I lied.
IN A FEW minutes Jubal was a lot calmer. In fact, he was too damn calm. He was so loopy from the drug that he was unable to answer any of the thousand questions I had for him. About all he could do was giggle and float around the trailer like a short, chubby balloon. He seemed to enjoy bouncing off the walls.
“What was that stuff you gave him?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. The guy said it would calm anybody down.”
“What guy? How did you find him?”
“I know people,” she said, unhelpfully, and I left it alone.
“I’m going next door to borrow a puke-sucker,” she said, and was out the door again. Naturally, we’d never needed one of those handy little airvacs, but we had a neighbor who was subject to sudden eruptions if he moved around too quickly. Embarrassing, but some people never entirely adjust.
We got the place more or less back in order. I was terrified for several hours that there might be a concealed camera or mike that my spy sweeper had missed. I didn’t bother Evangeline with that thought. What was the point? If one was there, somebody would be along to collect us all in a very short time.
When enough time had passed, and Jubal was snoring gently, loosely tied into a corner so he wouldn’t hurt himself, we devoted ourselves to two questions. How had Jubal gotten here, and what the hell were we going to do about it?
Evangeline didn’t know the whole story, so I filled her in on what Travis had told us. I know, I’d been sworn to secrecy, but Evangeline was a part of it now.
She was quick on the uptake.
“That rocket that blasted off from the Falklands,” Evangeline said. “That must have been a diversion.”
“I think so, too. Who would have suspected that Jubal would mail himself out?”
Because that’s what must have happened.
But how had he gotten himself into that . . . black bubble, and how had he gotten the bubble inside the box, sealed it up, and dropped it off into whatever mailbox they used at the Power Company?
Jubal was first and foremost a tinkerer. With the facilities he had, it would be child’s play for him to build a machine that would load up the box and ship it.
Now, if I was running the place, the moment that phony rocket ship blasted through the ceiling of Jubal’s lab, I’d have sealed off the whole island tighter than a gnat’s ass. Nothing would come in or go out until I’d figured out where Jubal was. So Jubal must have sent the package out before the ship took off.
It could be done. It was an insane idea, but it was the only way out of his prison for a guy who couldn’t fly. Leave it to Jubal to come up with such a solution, thinking outside the box, as it were.
But what was the black bubble? Jubal wasn’t in any shape to answer that, so we tried to find out what we could from the clues we had.
He was dressed in his usual Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. We went through his pockets. There was no money, no wallet, no keys. What use did Jubal have for any of those things? There was a little notebook with pages covered in Jubal’s childish scrawl, most of it seeming to be about penguins.
There was another little black box.
Jubal must have been holding it when the black bubble opened, then lost it in his panic. But when I was gathering up the garbage I saw it, grabbed it, and gave it a look.
“Is this yours?” I asked Evangeline. She frowned, and shook her head.
It had all the earmarks of one of Jubal’s gizmos. I say “box,” but it was irregularly shaped, and I saw it would nestle neatly into my left hand. Jubal is a lefty. It was maybe eight inches long, three wide, an inch thick. There were maybe a dozen buttons on the front of it, and several dials on the side, and a blank screen. None of them were labeled.
“You couldn’t pay me enough to punch one of those buttons,” Evangeline said.
Me, either. It seemed likely that this was the thing he’d used to make the black bubble around himself. I had no desire to see the inside of one, even though I knew Jubal had survived it. I carefully wrapped it in a cloth and put it in one of my drawers with some other junk.
“SO WHAT ARE we going to do with him?” Evangeline asked.
“I don’t know.”
We stared at him for a while longer. Then Evangeline cleared her throat in that way people do when they have something to say and are having a hard time getting it out.
“What?”
“Ray, don’t hate me, but I sort of have to suggest this.”
“Spit it out.”
“What if we . . . turned him in?”
I had known that was coming. How did I know? I’m not proud of it, but the same thing had occurred to me.
“We can’t keep him here,” she pointed out. “He’s just barely manageable when he’s doped up, and we can’t keep him doped up forever. Tell you the truth, I’m not happy about doping him up at all.
“To get control of him, for the time being . . . you do what you have to. I understand that. And it was my idea, and I got the stuff . . . but what now? Where can we take him? Where will he be okay?”
“Only place I know of is Earth,” I said. Which was true. He wouldn’t like the low gravity of Mars any better than he liked the almost zero gee of Phobos.
“I mean, I can’t understand why he left in the first place,” she went on. “You say he destroyed all the Squeezers on Earth, and that’s another thing I don’t understand. Why did he do that?”
“I have no idea. Lately he seemed to have sort of adopted me as his conscience. He never really got over his shock at how the Squeezer could be used as a weapon.”
“Jiminy Garcia-Strickland.”
“Yeah. We had long talks about things.”
“So did he ever hint that he was going to escape?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and scanning through our correspondence, and all I can see is that he sent me that key before all of this came down. So he had been thinking about escaping. But he never talked about it. I know he’d gotten paranoid. He thought people were listening in.”
“They probably were.”
“Most likely. So he couldn’t just call me up and say ‘set an extra plate for supper, bubba, I’m on my way.’”
She sighed. Then she looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“Ray . . . it just doesn’t add up. All this fuss over him. There’s something you aren’t telling me.”
She was right.
So there it was. I’d sworn a solemn oath not to tell anyone. Evangeline was mentioned specifically.
But screw that. Evangeline was as deep in hot water as I was now, and she deserved to know everything I did. The problem was how to tell her. It was just so goddam crazy . . .
I sighed. “There’s no way to ease into this, I just have to come out and say it. It’s simple, really. Jubal is the only one who can make Squeezers.”
She kept looking at me, waiting for the punch line. Then she shook her head.
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
IT WAS ACTUALLY what I typed, and so did Dad, at about the same time. Mom, too.
I decided to tell it the way Travis had. It was the only way that made any sense. If it made sense at all.
“Quantum leaps,” I said.
“Don’t get all mathematical on me, Ray. You know I’m not good at it.”
“Neither am I, at least not on that level. But you understand the concept, right?”
“Uh . . . something about jumping from one state to another, without exactly occupying any of the spaces between?”
“Works for me. You go along for a long time and things stay pretty much the same, maybe you make a little progress here and there. Then, out of the blue, you’re kicked up to the next level.”
“What next level?”
“The next level of anything, but we’re talking about knowledge here, or technology. The Squeezer was a quantum leap in both senses . . . but it seems like it was only a quantum leap in knowledge for Jubal. For the rest of us, it was a leap in technology, we suddenly had a new thingamajig that did neat stuff ...”
GO BACK TO the Stone Age, Travis had suggested. Or farther, back to the missing link between apes and men. Monkeys that walked upright on the African plains.
Enter language, tool use, and fire. I don’t know if anyone knows what order those came in, and it doesn’t really matter. They were all quantum leaps, and nothing was ever the same after any of them were first used.
Sure, language must have evolved gradually, it wasn’t a case of one ape man suddenly coming out with “to be, or not to be, that is the question.” Tools, too, to a lesser extent. One ape starts to use a rock to pound on stuff, and the other apes notice, and it’s monkey see, monkey do. Then an ape finds out you can do better with a stone with a sharp edge, then another figures out how to chip an edge . . . and on and on. Took a long, long time before prehumans were making spears and bows and arrows, but not that long in evolutionary terms. Not as long as it took them to learn to stand upright.
Fire must have been different. Maybe that’s why it’s still almost a mystical power to us. Think of how many religions use fire for sacrifices. Picture it: A guy walks into the cave, and he’s got some fire on a stick. He pokes the stick into a pile of wood he’s gathered up. You’d be impressed, wouldn’t you? Probably you’d run away from it at first, but after you’d had some cooked meat and saw how you could handle the stuff, and how you could poke it into the face of a saber-toothed tiger and watch the sucker run away . . . well, you just couldn’t help loving the stuff, right? My guess is that, once some genius figured out how to handle fire, all the tribes of cavemen, everywhere, were using fire by the end of the week. It was just too damn good to ignore and so easy to use.
But did they know how to make fire? Maybe not. Maybe they had to wait for lightning to strike and start one, then try to keep it going. It goes out, and they’re screwed.
The fire had gone out on Earth, and everybody was hard at work trying to track down the modern Prometheus.
In case you didn’t know, the whole title of Mary Shelley’s book was Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. Just thought I’d toss that in.
“WE’VE HAD OTHER quantum leaps,” I told Evangeline. “But probably nothing like the discovery of fire. The Industrial Revolution was just a series of more efficient ways to use fire.”
“Power,” she said.
“Exactly. The steam engine, electricity . . . none of it was for free. You could trace all energy back to the sun, which is big-time fire. Even hydro power is the sun evaporating water that falls on the land. Oil, gas, all stored solar energy. The sun is what makes the wind blow.”
“Nuclear power,” she suggested.
“Another quantum leap. A different kind of fire, and at first it looked like something for nothing. You know, they were talking about free power, just giving it away, when they made the first nuclear reactor. Turned out that building them was a lot harder than they thought. Fusion . . . still working on it, that turned out to be even harder, but nobody’s working on it too hard now that we have the Squeezer.
“There was no worldwide research leading up to the Squeezer. Jubal was more like Alexander Graham Bell, working in his lab, suddenly he’s got a telephone.”
“But Bell built on other people’s work,” Evangeline said. “Electrical experimenters, chemists . . . I don’t know. Didn’t Jubal?”
“I don’t know,” I had to admit. “When you can get him to talk about it, he talks about superstrings and branes and esoteric stuff like that. I don’t understand it at all. I’d always assumed that other scientists did . . . I mean, the ones they picked to go to the Falklands and study at his feet. I guess everybody assumed that.”
“And you’re saying they were wrong.”
She thought about it. I could practically see her mind going down the same paths my own had taken when Travis revealed this to us. She shook her head.
“It doesn’t make sense. Look at your caveman. He starts a fire, and everybody sees how he does it. How hard can it be?”
“Pretty tough for somebody with an IQ of maybe five, and an instinctive fear of fire. All animals fear fire except us . . . and we treat it with healthy respect.”
“Still ...”
“You’re looking at it wrong. Say the caveman genius comes into the cave with a shotgun. He’s figured out how to make one. And think about what all that would take. One, he has to invent gunpowder. Two, he has to figure out how to make iron, cast it, bore it out, make some sort of spark mechanism. And I wasn’t kidding, much, about the IQ. Say he tries to explain how to make one to these other people, folks who have a vocabulary of nine or ten words and still haven’t quite figured out all the uses of the opposable thumb. You figure they’d be able to mix gunpowder? Could a chimpanzee?”
“You’re saying the best minds on the planet are so far behind Jubal that they’re like apes?”
I shrugged. “No, it doesn’t really work that way. Analogies only go so far. Jubal’s the smartest man I’ve ever met, but there are people who are just as smart as him.”
“So what’s the story?”
“I wish I knew. Jubal’s head’s been examined just about every way a head can be examined, trying to find out what’s different about it. Your first thought has got to be that when his dad nearly killed him, beating him with that nail-studded two-by-four, something happened to his brain. One theory is that some part of his brain adjusted, some cross connection to the higher math functions or something like that—and he was already very good at higher math before he was hurt—but it’s all guesswork. There’s been fights about who gets Jubal’s brain when he’s dead, and plenty of people who’d like to take it apart while he’s still alive. Some of them even claim he’d survive the experience.”
“Which brings us to the golden goose.”
“The goose that laid the golden eggs.”
“Whatever.”
“Yeah, but in Jubal’s case it’s more like that old joke about my brother is crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken. We’d get him some help, but we need the eggs.”
She looked over at Jubal again, snoring quietly in his safety web.
“Poor guy. All he’s ever wanted is to be left alone.”
“That’s why he’s tried so hard for twenty years to teach gunpowder making and iron smelting to the other monkeys. But there’s something about the Squeezer that no other human mind has succeeding in grasping. Not yet anyway. There’s a thousand theories about what that might be . . . but they’re monkey theories, they’re bound to be wrong. Jubal’s brain is the quantum leap this time. He seems to have the first human brain that is able to deal with quantum mechanics on a practical level. And there’s only one of them.”
“And we have him,” she said, quietly.
We both looked at him for a while.
“We are so fucked,” she said.
“You said it.”
“What are we going to do?”
“HELLO ... MOM?”
“Ray, where are you? And why aren’t I getting a picture?”
“I’m at my trailer.” No need for specifics. And there was no picture because I’d turned it off. “I guess the camera’s broken. Listen, Mom—”
“Have you finished those applications, Ray? The school year is beginning soon, and I’ve told
you and told you.”
“Mom . . . I need to see you.”
Long pause.
Do all moms have extrasensory perception, or is it just mine? I can pull off anything with Dad, just distract him a little and there you go. But something in the very little I said, or in the way I said it, had tickled her trouble radar.
“Sure,” she said, cautiously. “Come right over. I’m home.”
“I sort of need to see you here. And sort of . . . soon.”
Longer pause.
“Are you in trouble, honey?” Not What have you done? I really appreciated that.
“There is some trouble, yeah.”
Very short pause.
“I’ll be on the next bus.”
I’D MADE THE call from the other bubble, the one that used to be packed with tourists but was pretty deserted now, what with the recent violence.
I’d moved out here so in case I was traced and someone came to do something about it, Evangeline would see me being rousted and try to think of something to do with Jubal before the troops descended on my trailer again.
As to what exactly that would be . . . we hadn’t gotten that far.
But if they were watching, they were subtle. Mom showed up along with a few other passengers and I jetted over to her. She looked a question at me, and I just shook my head and took her hand and led her along toward the trailer.
Let me tell you, I was never so happy to have someone to dump a problem on.
17
ABOUT EIGHT HOURS later a guy and a girl guided another guy down the wide tunnel leading to the Phobos air locks. They each had hold of an arm. All three of them were in space suits, as you’d expect of people heading toward a lock. All three of them had their helmets on and locked down.
How do you tell a drunk in a space suit? By the barf on his faceplate. This chubby little fellow’s was coated with the stuff, and there were big splashes of it on the outside, too, and from time to time a bit of it flew off. Everybody gave the trio a wide berth, given the behavior of vomit in free fall.
Not an uncommon sight in Phobos, at least the tourist part. The three people were the very picture of two disgusted employees and one fat Earthie with a load on.
