The paper was easy to read for a paleolinguist with special training in pulps—easier than the curious concept of breakfast was to assimilate. What mattered was the date. 1948—and the headlines refreshed his knowledge of the Cold War and the impending election. (There was something he should remember about that election . . .)
He saw it clearly. Kirth-Labbery’s genius had at last evolved a time machine. That was the one escape, the escape which the scientist had not yet tested and rather distrusted. And Lavra had poked the green button because Norbert Holt had said she had poked (would poke?) the green button.
How many buttons could a wood poke poke if a wood poke would poke . . . “The breakfast didn’t seem to agree with him, Doctor.”
“Maybe it was the paper. Makes me run a temperature every morning too!”
“Oh, Doctor, you do say the funniest things!”
“Nothing funnier than this case. Total amnesia, as best we can judge by his lucid moments. And his clothes don’t help us—must’ve been on his way to a fancy-dress party. Or maybe I should say fancy-««dress!”
“Oh, Doctor . . . !”
“Don’t tell me nurses can blush. Never did when I was an intern—and you can’t say they didn’t get a chance! But this character here—not a blessed bit of identification on him! Riding some kind of newfangled bike that got smashed up . . . Better hold off on the solid food for a bit—stick to intravenous.”
He’d had this trouble before at ritual dinners, Vyrko finally recalled. Meat was apt to affect him badly—the trouble was he had not at first recognized those odd strips of oily solid which accompanied the egg as meat.
The adjustment was gradual and successful, in this case as in other matters. At the end of two weeks, he was eating meat easily (and, he confessed, with a faintly obscene nonritual pleasure), and equally chatting with nurses and fellow patients about the events (which he still privately tended to regard as mummified museum pieces) of 1948.
His adjustment, in fact, was soon so successful that it could not long endure. The doctor made that clear.
“Got to think about the future, you know. Can’t keep you here forever. Nasty unreasonable prejudice against keeping well men in hospitals.”
Vyrko allowed the expected laugh to come forth. “But since,” he said, gladly accepting the explanation that was so much more credible than the truth, “I haven’t any idea who I am, where I live, or what my profession is—”
“Can’t remember anything? Don’t know if you can take shorthand, for instance? Or play the bull fiddle?”
“Not a thing.” Vyrko felt it hardly worth while to point out his one manual accomplishment, the operation of the as yet uninvented electronic typewriter.
“Behold,” he thought, “the Man of the Future. I’ve read all the time travel stories. I know what should happen. I teach them everything Kirth-Labbery knew and I’m the greatest man in the world. Only the time travel never happens to a poor dope who took for granted all the science around him, who pushed a button or turned a knob and never gave a damn what happened, or why, between that action and the end result. Here they’re just beginning to get two-dimensional black-and-white short-range television. We had (will have?) stereoscopic full-color wo rid-wide video— which I’m about as capable of constructing here as my friend the doctor would be of installing an electric light in Ancient Rome. The Mouse of the Future . . .”
The doctor had been thinking too. He said, “Notice you’re a great reader. Librarian’s been telling me about you—went through the whole damn hospital library like a bookworm with a tapeworm!”
Vyrko laughed dutifully. “I like to read,” he admitted.
“Ever try writing?” the doctor asked abruptly, almost in the tone in which he might reluctantly advise a girl that her logical future lay in Port Said.
This time Vyrko really laughed. “That does seem to ring a bell, you know . . . It might be worth trying. But at that, what do I live on until I get started?”
“Hospital trustees here administer a rehabilitation fund. Might wangle a loan. Won’t be much, of course; but I always say a single man’s got only one mouth to feed—and if he feeds more, he won’t be single long!”
“A little,” said Vyrko with a glance at the newspaper headlines, “might go a long way.
It did. There was the loan itself, which gave him a bank account on which in turn he could acquire other short-term loans—at exorbitant interest. And there was the election.
He had finally reconstructed what he should know about it. There had been a brilliant Wheel-of-If story in one of the much later pulps, on If the Republicans had won the 1948 election. Which meant that in fact they had lost; and here, in October of 1948, all newspapers, all commentators, and most important, all gamblers, were convinced that they must infallibly win.
On Wednesday, November third, Vyrko repaid his debts and settled down to his writing career, comfortably guaranteed against immediate starvation.
A half dozen attempts at standard fiction failed wretchedly. A matter of “tone,” editors remarked vaguely, on the rare occasions when they did not confine themselves to the even vaguer phrases of printed rejection forms. A little poetry sold—“if you can call that selling,” Vyrko thought bitterly, comparing the financial position of the poet with his own world.
His failures were beginning to bring back the bitterness of boredom, and his thoughts turned more and more to that future to which he could never know the answer.
Twins. It had to be twins—of opposite sexes, of course. The only hope of the continuance of the race lay in a matter of odds and genetics.
Odds . . . He began to think of the election bet, to figure other angles with which he could turn foreknowledge to profit. But his pulp-reading had filled his mind with fears of the paradoxes involved. He had calculated the election bets carefully; they could not affect the outcome of the election, they could not even, in their proportionately small size, affect the odds. But any further step . . .
Vyrko was, like most conceited men, fond of self-contempt, which he felt he could occasionally afford to indulge in. Possibly his strongest access of self-contempt came when he realized the simplicity of the solution to all his problems.
He could write for the science fiction pulps.
The one thing that he could handle convincingly and skillfully, with the proper “tone,” was the future. Possibly start off with a story on the Religious Wars; he’d done all that research on his novel. Then . . .
It was not until he was about to mail the manuscript that the full pattern of the truth struck him.
Soberly, yet half-grinning, he crossed out Kirth Vyrko on the first page and wrote Norbert Holt.
Manning Stern rejoiced loudly in this fresh discovery. “This boy’s got it! He makes it sound so real that . . .” The business office was instructed to pay the highest bonus rate (unheard of for a first story), and an intensely cordial letter went to the author outlining immediate needs and offering certain story suggestions.
The editor of Surprising was no little surprised at the answer:
. . . I regret to say that all my stories will be based on one consistent scheme of future events and that you must allow me to stick to my own choice of material . . .
“And who the hell,” Manning Stern demanded, “is editing this magazine?” and dictated a somewhat peremptory suggestion for a personal interview.
The features were small and sharp, and the face had a sort of dark aliveness. It was a different beauty from Lavra’s, and an infinitely different beauty from the curious standards set by the 1949 films; but it was beauty and it spoke to Norbert Holt.
“You’ll forgive a certain surprise, Miss Stern,” he ventured. “I’ve read Surprising for so many years and never thought . . .”
Manning Stern grinned. “That the editor was a surprise? I’m used to it—your reaction, I mean. I don’t think I’ll ever be quite used to being a woman . . . or a human being, for that matter.”
“Isn�
�t it rather unusual? From what I know of the field . . .”
“Please God, when I find a man who can write don’t let him go all male-chauvinist on me! I’m a good editor,” said she with becoming modesty “(and don’t you ever forget it!), and I’m a good scientist. I even worked on the Manhattan Project—until some character discovered that my adopted daughter was a Spanish War orphan. But what we’re here to talk about is this consistent-scheme gimmick of yours. It’s all right, of course; it’s been done before. But where I frankly think you’re crazy is in planning to do it exclusively.”
Norbert Holt opened his briefcase. “I’ve brought along an outline that might help convince you . . .”
An hour later Manning Stern glanced at her watch and announced, “End of office hours! Care to continue this slugfest over a martini or five? I warn you—the more I’m plied, the less pliant I get.”
And an hour after that she stated, “We might get someplace if we’d stay someplace. I mean the subject seems to be getting elusive.”
“The hell,” Norbert Holt announced recklessly, “with editorial relations. Let’s get back to the current state of opera.”
“It was paintings. I was telling you about the show at the—”
“No, I remember now. It was movies. You were trying to explain the Marx Brothers. Unsuccessfully, I may add.”
“Un . . . sue . . . cess . . . fully,” said Manning Stern ruminatively. “Five martinis and the man can say unsuccessfully successfully. But I try to explain the Marx Brothers yet! Look, Holt. I’ve got a subversive orphan at home and she’s undoubtedly starving. I’ve got to feed her. You come home and meet her and have potluck, huh?”
“Good. Fine. Always like to try a new dish.”
Manning Stern looked at him curiously. “Now was that a gag or not? You’re funny, Holt. You know a lot about everything and then all of a sudden you go all Man-from-Mars on the simplest thing. Or do you? . . . Anyway, let’s go feed Raquel.”
And five hours later Holt was saying, “I never thought I’d have this reason for being glad I sold a story. Manning, I haven’t had so much fun talking to— I almost said ‘to a woman.’ I haven’t had so much fun talking period since—”
He had almost said since the agnoton came. She seemed not to notice his abrupt halt. She simply said, “Bless you, Norb. Maybe you aren’t a male-chauvinist. Maybe even you’re . . . Look, go find a subway or a cab or something. If you stay here another minute I’m either going to kiss you or admit you’re right about your stories—and I don’t know which is worse editor-author relations.”
Manning Stern committed the second breach of relations first. The fan mail on Norbert Holt’s debut left her no doubt that Surprising would profit by anything he chose to write about.
She’d never seen such a phenomenally rapid rise in author popularity. Or rather you could hardly say rise. Holt hit the top with his first story and stayed there. He socked the fen (Guest of Honor at the Washinvention), the pros (first President of Fantasy Writers of America), and the general reader (author of the first pulp-bred science fiction book to stay three months on the best-seller list).
And never had there been an author who was more pure damned fun to work with. Not that you edited him; you checked his copy for typos and sent it to the printers. (Typos were frequent at first; he said something odd about absurd illogical keyboard arrangement.) But just being with him, talking about this, that and those . . . Raquel was quite obviously in love with him—praying that he’d have the decency to stay single till she grew up and you know, Manningcita, I am Spanish; and the Mediterranean girls . . .
But there was this occasional feeling of oddness. Like the potluck and the illogical keyboard and that night at FWA . . .
“I’ve got a story problem,” Norbert Holt announced. “An idea, and I can’t lick it. Maybe if I toss it out to the lions . . .”
“Story problem?” Manning said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “I thought everything was outlined for the next ten years.”
“This is different. This is a sort of paradox story, and I can’t get out of it. It won’t end. Something like this: Suppose a man in the remote year X reads a story that tells him how to work a time machine. So he works the time machine and goes back to the year X minus 2000—let’s say, for instance, now. So in ‘now’ he writes the story that he’s going to read two thousand years later, telling himself how to work the time machine because he knows how to work it because he read the story which he wrote because—”
Manning was starting to say “Hold it!” when Matt Duncan interrupted with “Good old endless-cycle gimmick. Lot of fun to kick around but Bob Heinlein did it once and for all in ‘By His Bootstraps.’ Damnedest tour de force I ever read; there just aren’t any switcheroos left after that.”
“Ouroboros,” Joe Henderson contributed.
Norbert Holt looked a vain question at him; they knew that one word per evening was Joe’s maximum contribution.
Austin Carter picked it up. “Ouroboros. The worm that circles the universe with its tail in its mouth. The Asgard Serpent, too. And I think there’s something Mayan. All symbols of infinity—no beginning, no ending. Always out by the same door where in you went. See that magnificent novel of Eddison’s, The Worm Ouroboros; the perfect cyclic novel, ending with its recommencement, stopping not because there’s a stopping place but because it’s uneconomical to print the whole text over infinitely.”
“The Quaker Oats box,” said Duncan. “With a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a box with a Quaker holding a . . .”
It was standard professional shoptalk. It was a fine evening with the boys. But there was a look of infinitely remote sadness in Norbert’s Holt’s eyes.
That was the evening that Manning violated her first rule of editor-author relationships.
They were having martinis in the same bar in which Norbert had, so many years ago, successfully said unsuccessfully.
“They’ve been good years,” he remarked, apparently to the olive.
There was something wrong with this evening. No bounce. “That’s a funny tense,” Manning confided to her own olive.
“I’ve owed you a serious talk for a long time.”
“You don’t have to pay the debt. We don’t go in much for being serious, do we? Not so dead-earnest-catch-in-the-throat serious.”
“Don’t we?”
“I’ve got an awful feeling,” Manning admitted, “that you’re building up to a proposal, either to me or that olive. And if it’s me, I’ve got an awful feeling I’m going to accept—and Raquel is never going to forgive me.”
“You’re safe,” Norbert said dryly. “That’s the serious talk. I want to marry you, darling, and I’m not going to.”
“I suppose this is the time you twirl your black mustache and tell me you have a wife and family elsewhere?”
“I hope to God I have!”
“No, it wasn’t very funny, was it?” Manning felt very little, aside from wishing she was dead.
“I can’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve loved two women before; one had talent and a brain, the other had beauty. I think I loved her. The damnedest curse of Ouroboros is that I’ll never quite know. If I could take that tail out of that mouth . . .”
“Go on,” she said. “Talk plot-gimmicks. It’s nicer.”
“And she is carrying . . . will carry . . . my child—my children, it must be. My twins . . .”
“Look, Holt. We came in here editor and author— remember back when? Let’s go out that way. Don’t go on talking. I’m a big girl but I can’t take . . . everything. It’s been fun knowing you and all future manuscripts gratefully received.”
“I knew I couldn’t say it. I shouldn’t have tried. But there won’t be any future manuscripts. I’ve written every Holt I’ve ever read.”
“Does that make sense?” Manning aimed the remark at the olive, but it was gone. So was the martini.
“He
re’s the last.” He took it out of his breast-pocket, neatly folded. “The one we talked about at FWA—the one I couldn’t end. Maybe you’ll understand. I wanted somehow to make it clear before . . .”
The tone of his voice projected the unspoken meaning, and Manning forgot everything else. “Is something going to happen to you? Are you going to— Oh my dear, no! All right, so you have a wife on every space station in the asteroid belt; but if anything happens to you . . .”
“I don’t know,” said Norbert Holt. “I can’t remember the exact date of that issue. . .” He rose abruptly. “I shouldn’t have tried a goodbye. See you again, darling—the next time round Ouroboros.”
She was still staring at the empty martini glass when she heard the shrill of brakes and the excited upspringing of a crowd outside.
She read the posthumous fragment late that night, after her eyes had dried sufficiently to make the operation practicable. And through her sorrow her mind fought to help her, making her think, making her be an editor.
She understood a little and disbelieved what she understood. And underneath she prodded herself. “But it isn’t a story. It’s too short, too inconclusive. It’ll just disappoint the Holt fans—and that’s everybody. Much better if I do the damnedest straight obit I can, take up a full page on it . . .”
She fought hard to keep on thinking, not feeling. She had never before experienced so strongly the I-have-been-here-before sensation. She had been faced with this dilemma once before, once on some other time-spiral, as the boys in FWA would say. And her decision had been . . .
“It’s sentimentality,” she protested. “It isn’t editing. This decision’s right. I know it. And if I go and get another of these attacks and start to change my mind . . .”
She laid the posthumous Holt fragment on the coals. It caught fire quickly.
The next morning Raquel greeted her with, “Manningcita, who’s Norbert Holt?”
Manning had slept so restfully that she was even tolerant of foolish questions at breakfast. “Who?” she asked.
The Compleat Boucher Page 56
