(2/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume II: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  We don't need to watch him now, thought Hudson. The time we'll have to watch is when he is forced to admit he can't fix the machine.

  And both Hudson and Cooper had been kept sane enough, for there had been the cabin to be built and the winter's supply of wood to cut and the hunting to be done.

  But then there would come a time when all the chores were finished and there was nothing left to do.

  "You ready to go?" asked Cooper.

  "Sure. All rested now," said Hudson.

  They hoisted the pole to their shoulders and started off again.

  Hudson had lain awake nights thinking of it and all the thoughts had been dead ends.

  One could write a natural history of the Pleistocene, complete with photographs and sketches, and it would be a pointless thing to do, because no future scientist would ever have a chance to read it.

  Or they might labor to build a memorial, a vast pyramid, perhaps, which would carry a message forward across fifteen hundred centuries, snatching with bare hands at a semblance of immortality. But if they did, they would be working against the sure and certain knowledge that it all would come to naught, for they knew in advance that no such pyramid existed in historic time.

  Or they might set out to seek contemporary Man, hiking across four thousand miles of wilderness to Bering Strait and over into Asia. And having found contemporary Man cowering in his caves, they might be able to help him immeasurably along the road to his great inheritance. Except that they'd never make it and even if they did, contemporary Man undoubtedly would find some way to do them in and might eat them in the bargain.

  They came out of the woods and there was the cabin, just a hundred yards away. It crouched against the hillside above the spring, with the sweep of grassland billowing beyond it to the slate-gray skyline. A trickle of smoke came up from the chimney and they saw the door was open.

  "Wes oughtn't to leave it open that way," said Cooper. "No telling when a bear might decide to come visiting."

  "Hey, Wes!" yelled Hudson.

  But there was no sign of him.

  Inside the cabin, a white sheet of paper lay on the table top. Hudson snatched it up and read it, with Cooper at his shoulder.

  Dear guys--I don't want to get your hopes up again and have you disappointed. But I think I may have found the trouble. I'm going to try it out. If it doesn't work, I'll come back and burn this note and never say a word. But if you find the note, you'll know it worked and I'll be back to get you. Wes.

  Hudson crumpled the note in his hand. "The crazy fool!"

  "He's gone off his rocker," Cooper said. "He just thought...."

  The same thought struck them both and they bolted for the door. At the corner of the cabin, they skidded to a halt and stood there, staring at the ridge above them.

  The pyramid of rocks they'd built two months ago was gone!

  XI

  The crash brought Gen. Leslie Bowers (ret.) up out of bed--about two feet out of bed--old muscles tense, white mustache bristling.

  Even at his age, the general was a man of action. He flipped the covers back, swung his feet out to the floor and grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall.

  Muttering, he blundered out of the bedroom, marched across the dining room and charged into the kitchen. There, beside the door, he snapped on the switch that turned on the floodlights. He practically took the door off its hinges getting to the stoop and he stood there, bare feet gripping the planks, nightshirt billowing in the wind, the shotgun poised and ready.

  "What's going on out there?" he bellowed.

  There was a tremendous pile of rocks resting where he'd parked his car. One crumpled fender and a drunken headlight peeped out of the rubble.

  A man was clambering carefully down the jumbled stones, making a detour to dodge the battered fender.

  The general pulled back the hammer of the gun and fought to control himself.

  The man reached the bottom of the pile and turned around to face him. The general saw that he was hugging something tightly to his chest.

  "Mister," the general told him, "your explanation better be a good one. That was a brand-new car. And this was the first time I was set for a night of sleep since my tooth quit aching."

  The man just stood and looked at him.

  "Who in thunder are you?" roared the general.

  The man walked slowly forward. He stopped at the bottom of the stoop.

  "My name is Wesley Adams," he said. "I'm--"

  "Wesley Adams!" howled the general. "My God, man, where have you been all these years?"

  "Well, I don't imagine you'll believe me, but the fact is...."

  "We've been waiting for you. For twenty-five long years! Or, rather, I've been waiting for you. Those other idiots gave up. I've waited right here for you, Adams, for the last three years, ever since they called off the guard."

  Adams gulped. "I'm sorry about the car. You see, it was this way...."

  The general, he saw, was beaming at him fondly.

  "I had faith in you," the general said.

  He waved the shotgun by way of invitation. "Come on in. I have a call to make."

  Adams stumbled up the stairs.

  "Move!" the general ordered, shivering. "On the double! You want me to catch my death of cold out here?"

  Inside, he fumbled for the lights and turned them on. He laid the shotgun across the kitchen table and picked up the telephone.

  "Give me the White House at Washington," he said. "Yes, I said the White House.... The President? Naturally he's the one I want to talk to.... Yes, it's all right. He won't mind my calling him."

  "Sir," said Adams tentatively.

  The general looked up. "What is it, Adams? Go ahead and say it."

  "Did you say twenty-five years?"

  "That's what I said. What were you doing all that time?"

  Adams grasped the table and hung on. "But it wasn't...."

  "Yes," said the general to the operator. "Yes, I'll wait."

  He held his hand over the receiver and looked inquiringly at Adams. "I imagine you'll want the same terms as before."

  "Terms?"

  "Sure. Recognition. Point Four Aid. Defense pact."

  "I suppose so," Adams said.

  "You got these saps across the barrel," the general told him happily. "You can get anything you want. You rate it, too, after what you've done and the bonehead treatment you got--but especially for not selling out."

  XII

  The night editor read the bulletin just off the teletype.

  "Well, what do you know!" he said. "We just recognized Mastodonia."

  He looked at the copy chief.

  "Where the hell is Mastodonia?" he asked.

  The copy chief shrugged. "Don't ask me. You're the brains in this joint."

  "Well, let's get a map for the next edition," said the night editor.

  XIII

  Tabby, the saber-tooth, dabbed playfully at Cooper with his mighty paw.

  Cooper kicked him in the ribs--an equally playful gesture.

  Tabby snarled at him.

  "Show your teeth at me, will you!" said Cooper. "Raised you from a kitten and that's the gratitude you show. Do it just once more and I'll belt you in the chops."

  Tabby lay down blissfully and began to wash his face.

  "Some day," warned Hudson, "that cat will miss a meal and that's the day you're it."

  "Gentle as a dove," Cooper assured him. "Wouldn't hurt a fly."

  "Well, one thing about it, nothing dares to bother us with that monstrosity around."

  "Best watchdog there ever was. Got to have something to guard all this stuff we've got. When Wes gets back, we'll be millionaires. All those furs and ginseng and the ivory."

  "If he gets back."

  "He'll be back. Quit your worrying."

  "But it's been five years," Hudson protested.

  "He'll be back. Something happened, that's all. He's probably working on it right now. Could be that he messed up the time
setting when he repaired the unit or it might have been knocked out of kilter when Buster hit the helicopter. That would take a while to fix. I don't worry that he won't come back. What I can't figure out is why did he go and leave us?"

  "I've told you," Hudson said. "He was afraid it wouldn't work."

  "There wasn't any need to be scared of that. We never would have laughed at him."

  "No. Of course we wouldn't."

  "Then what was he scared of?" Cooper asked.

  "If the unit failed and we knew it failed, Wes was afraid we'd try to make him see how hopeless and insane it was. And he knew we'd probably convince him and then all his hope would be gone. And he wanted to hang onto that, Johnny. He wanted to hang onto his hope even when there wasn't any left."

  "That doesn't matter now," said Cooper. "What counts is that he'll come back. I can feel it in my bones."

  And here's another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.

  God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!

  "Wes is working on it right now," said Cooper confidently.

  XIV

  He was. Not he alone, but a thousand others, working desperately, knowing that the time was short, working not alone for two men trapped in time, but for the peace they all had dreamed about--that the whole world had yearned for through the ages.

  For to be of any use, it was imperative that they could zero in the time machines they meant to build as an artilleryman would zero in a battery of guns, that each time machine would take its occupants to the same instant of the past, that their operation would extend over the same period of time, to the exact second.

  It was a problem of control and calibration--starting with a prototype that was calibrated, as its finest adjustment, for jumps of 50,000 years.

  Project Mastodon was finally under way.

  * * *

  Contents

  2 B R 0 2 B

  by KURT VONNEGUT

  Got a problem? Just pick up the phone. It solved them all--and all the same way!

  Everything was perfectly swell.

  There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

  All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

  Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

  The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.

  One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.

  Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.

  X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.

  Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.

  The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.

  A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found.

  The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer.

  Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners.

  Never, never, never--not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan--had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use.

  A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath a popular song:

  If you don't like my kisses, honey, Here's what I will do: I'll go see a girl in purple, Kiss this sad world toodle-oo. If you don't want my lovin', Why should I take up all this space? I'll get off this old planet, Let some sweet baby have my place.

  The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. "Looks so real," he said, "I can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it."

  "What makes you think you're not in it?" said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. "It's called 'The Happy Garden of Life,' you know."

  "That's good of Dr. Hitz," said the orderly.

  * * * * *

  He was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital's Chief Obstetrician. Hitz was a blindingly handsome man.

  "Lot of faces still to fill in," said the orderly. He meant that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blanks were to be filled with portraits of important people on either the hospital staff or from the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

  "Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something," said the orderly.

  The painter's face curdled with scorn. "You think I'm proud of this daub?" he said. "You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?"

  "What's your idea of what life looks like?" said the orderly.

  The painter gestured at a foul dropcloth. "There's a good picture of it," he said. "Frame that, and you'll have a picture a damn sight more honest than this one."

  "You're a gloomy old duck, aren't you?" said the orderly.

  "Is that a crime?" said the painter.

  The orderly shrugged. "If you don't like it here, Grandpa--" he said, and he finished the thought with the trick telephone number that people who didn't want to live any more were supposed to call. The zero in the telephone number he pronounced "naught."

  The number was: "2 B R 0 2 B."

  It was the telephone number of an institution whose fanciful sobriquets included: "Automat," "Birdland," "Cannery," "Catbox," "De-louser," "Easy-go," "Good-by, Mother," "Happy Hooligan," "Kiss-me-quick," "Lucky Pierre," "Sheepdip," "Waring Blendor," "Weep-no-more" and "Why Worry?"

  "To be or not to be" was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination.

  * * * * *

  The painter thumbed his nose at the orderly. "When I decide it's time to go," he said, "it won't be at the Sheepdip."

  "A do-it-yourselfer, eh?" said the orderly. "Messy business, Grandpa. Why don't you have a little consideration for the people who have to clean up after you?"

  The painter expressed with an obscenity his lack of concern for the tribulations of his survivors. "The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me," he said.

  The orderly laughed and moved on.

  Wehling, the waiting father, mumbled something without raising his head. And then he fell silent again.

  A coarse, formidable woman strode into the waiting room on spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag and overseas cap were all purple, the purple the painter called "the color of grapes on Judgment Day."

  The medallion on her purple musette bag was the seal of the Service Division of the Federal Bureau of Termination, an eagle perched on a turnstile.

  The woman had a lot of facial hair--an unmistakable mustache, in fact. A curious thing about gas-chamber hostesses was that, no matter how lovely and feminine they were when recruited, they all sprouted mustaches within five years or so.

  "Is this where I'm supposed to come?" she said to the painter.

  "A lot would depend on what your business was," he said. "You aren't about to have a baby, are you?"

  "They told me I was supposed to pose for some picture," she said. "My name's Leora Duncan." She waited.

  "And you dunk people," he said.

  "What?" she said.

  "Skip it," he said.
/>   "That sure is a beautiful picture," she said. "Looks just like heaven or something."

  "Or something," said the painter. He took a list of names from his smock pocket. "Duncan, Duncan, Duncan," he said, scanning the list. "Yes--here you are. You're entitled to be immortalized. See any faceless body here you'd like me to stick your head on? We've got a few choice ones left."

  She studied the mural bleakly. "Gee," she said, "they're all the same to me. I don't know anything about art."

  "A body's a body, eh?" he said, "All righty. As a master of fine art, I recommend this body here." He indicated a faceless figure of a woman who was carrying dried stalks to a trash-burner.

  "Well," said Leora Duncan, "that's more the disposal people, isn't it? I mean, I'm in service. I don't do any disposing."

  The painter clapped his hands in mock delight. "You say you don't know anything about art, and then you prove in the next breath that you know more about it than I do! Of course the sheave-carrier is wrong for a hostess! A snipper, a pruner--that's more your line." He pointed to a figure in purple who was sawing a dead branch from an apple tree. "How about her?" he said. "You like her at all?"

  "Gosh--" she said, and she blushed and became humble--"that--that puts me right next to Dr. Hitz."

  "That upsets you?" he said.

  "Good gravy, no!" she said. "It's--it's just such an honor."

  "Ah, You admire him, eh?" he said.

  "Who doesn't admire him?" she said, worshiping the portrait of Hitz. It was the portrait of a tanned, white-haired, omnipotent Zeus, two hundred and forty years old. "Who doesn't admire him?" she said again. "He was responsible for setting up the very first gas chamber in Chicago."

  "Nothing would please me more," said the painter, "than to put you next to him for all time. Sawing off a limb--that strikes you as appropriate?"

  "That is kind of like what I do," she said. She was demure about what she did. What she did was make people comfortable while she killed them.

  * * * * *

  And, while Leora Duncan was posing for her portrait, into the waitingroom bounded Dr. Hitz himself. He was seven feet tall, and he boomed with importance, accomplishments, and the joy of living.