Complete Stories Page 7

  I gunned our ship straight for the Bin, and looked over at Charlie with a hard grin. He looked a little pale. I think he might have backed out if I hadn’t been there.

  We were both wearing scuba diving gear…yellow rubber suits and a couple of tanks of compressed oxygen apiece. He said that even though it would feel like we were out there for hours, we wouldn’t need pressure suits. A suit’s joints would have heated up too much anyway. As it was, Charlie had had to design us special beefed-up and frictionless exo-skeletons. It had taken a while to get used to them. If you weren’t careful, you could brain yourself going to scratch your ear.

  Each of us had one of Charlie’s Regulators set into the rubber suit right over the navel, and now we dialed them on. I felt like I could smell the extra time, a tingling high in my sinuses. My nose seemed to expand and I felt like a horse, a horse I’d seen in a zoo when I was four. I remembered the scrape I’d gotten on my knee that day, and Mommy tucking me in. I seemed to taste blood in my mouth and I could hear Poochy screaming. My eyes snapped open.

  Nothing looked different, except the clock on the control panel seemed to have stopped. The next fifteen hours of my life would last about a tenth of a second, normal time.

  Charlie was already undogging the hatch and I walked over to help him. As I walked, the air felt like a thick jelly, and rubbing against it heated me up unpleasantly. Finally the hatch cracked open and the jelly wafted us and our equipment into outer space. This was the part I’d had my doubts about, but the hard vacuum just felt like a crisp fall day. The raw solar radiation warmed my cheeks pleasantly.

  Charlie ripped the hatch door loose from the ship, tore it in half, and handed me the larger piece. What with the souped-up exoskeleton and my speeded-up reflexes, the thick metal felt like balsa wood.

  The Bin was about two k’s off, and I could see a missile come easing out of a hole in the side. It came floating towards us like a big lazy fish. Aiming carefully, I threw a chunk of metal at it when it was a thousand meters off. The recoil of my throw sent me spinning, and it took a minute of pitching out small pieces of the hatch to stop myself. The Rocket was exploding in slow motion. It looked like a flower blooming.

  Charlie waved his fist at me happily, and by throwing some more pieces of the hatch we got ourselves moving towards the Bin at a good clip. Two more missiles swam out, but they were just after our ship and we let them go. I began to doubt that the Bin’s robot brain could see us at all.

  Just then the lasers started up. A beam was sweeping towards my mid-section a lot faster than I liked. I pitched a big piece of that hatch past my feet, and the recoil pushed me headfirst away from the level of the ray. But it was close, and my feet felt a little warm.

  Again, it took me a minute to stop spinning. There were four laser rays. Three of them were happily roasting our ship, but my narrow escape seemed to have attracted the attention of the fourth. It was still after me. We weren’t carrying radios, so I could only signal Charlie by waving desperately.

  The ray was almost on me again, and I didn’t have time to see if Charlie noticed or not. I dodged, but this time the unbearably bright ray caught up with me while I was still spinning. I was dizzy, and it was getting hot. It was hard to think. Should I turn the Regulator dial? Which way should I turn it?

  Suddenly the light went out. Painfully I stopped the spinning and looked around. Charlie had knocked out the laser with a lucky throw.

  The Bin thought it was taking evasive action now. I could tell because there was a cloud of gas oozing out of the engines. But Charlie and I were so speeded up that the ship looked like it was standing still. We closed in on it, and Charlie split open the hull with a high-speed karate chop. I glanced back at our ship. The three lasers were melting it like an ice-cream cone, and a missile was starting to explode next to it. It was going to be a long walk home.

  The Moon was not too far away, and it filled what seemed like half the sky. Most of it was dark, lit only by Earthlight. Some mountain peaks made points of light near the terminator. Somewhere down there was a mountain called J-67, inside of which Charlie had his hideout.

  While he set up the launching tube, I began hauling the gold out of the Bin. There were 200 bars, each with a mass of some 10 keys…which is a lot to push around, even in free-fall.

  Meanwhile, Charlie had set the sights of the launching tube on three reference stars and switched on the gyros. I fitted in a gold bar, pulled back the spring and pressed the release. Our first million bucks went tumbling down its trajectory towards the slopes of J-67.

  I kept hauling the bars out, and Charlie kept zinging them off. God, it was hard work. And was I hungry! Hours and hours passed. Finally I was so weak that I thought one of the gold bars was a roast chicken. I could almost hear it cackling as I gnawed at it. Someone made me stop moving. It was Charlie laying me out on the Bin’s hull. Listlessly I watched him launch a few more bars. Suddenly I felt a twitch in the metal plates beneath me.

  The rear end of the ship was beginning to swell up. I went and tapped Charlie’s shoulder and pointed aft. His mouth was covered by the breathing mask, but I could see his eyes light up. He made an exploding motion with his hands and legs. I remembered then. The Loonies had the Bin booby-trapped with a bomb.

  I was ready to leave and to hell with the last few bars of gold, but Charlie had a different idea. We each turned our Regulators up another notch.

  I was moving so fast now that the light coming from the Moon looked funny. The pounds were melting off me faster than a taxi-meter clicks. Finally the last gold bar was shipped off.

  We each ripped a big chunk off the front end of the Bin, being careful not to uncover that explosion. Then we started pitching pieces at the Earth to get us moving towards the Moon. The important thing, of course, was to save some of the hull to use as a retro-rocket when you came tumbling down at those unbelievably sharp mountains.

  I felt an unfamiliar twitching. Zoozie was sitting on me like a chicken on an ostrich egg. “Thanks, baby. I didn’t think I had it in me.”

  She laughed musically and lifted her plump leg over me as she slid off. “That’s a beachy crib,” she said, looking out the window. My car had pulled up in front of our house.

  Charlie met us at the door, suspicious as a father waiting up for his son on prom night. “Who’s this?” he demanded.

  “I’m Zoozie. Parley-voo bounce?”

  Charlie looked at her sadly. “You’d better leave now. You don’t know what Mr. Myers is really after.”

  “Will you shut up!” I pulled her in and closed the door behind us. God, I was hungry. I felt like I hadn’t eaten good food in a hundred years.

  But Charlie wouldn’t let up. “Did he tell you how we got here?”He had a protective arm around her, the goddamn vegetarian.

  “Just can it, Mr. Clean,” I shouted. “The decision is hers. I’m ready to buy her the best prosthetic leg that money can …” I stopped suddenly. Things were developing a little faster than I’d planned.

  Zoozie was looking back and forth between us. “You tollahs jab so old. Fancy dress?”

  “We’re from 2050,” Charlie said, speaking slowly. “We stole lots of gold and had to hide for a hundred years. Now we’re rich and we’re safe, but Eddie can’t get what he wants to eat.”

  There was no use putting it off. I answered the question in her eyes. “I’d like to buy one…one of your drumsticks.”

  Charlie held the door open for her. We listened as her footsteps pattered into the distance. “Don’t worry, Eddie,” he said. I’ve got some slime mold evolving under the Regulator. We’ll be feasting on horseshoe crab before you know it.”

  ============

  Note on “Sufferin’ Succotash”

  Written in Summer, 1979.

  The 57th Franz Kafka, Ace Books, 1983.

  I made my first stab at writing science-fiction when I was a senior at Swarthmore College, and I actually wrote the first few pages of this story in 1967. In 1979, I was pushi
ng hard to become a pro SF writer, and I wanted always to have a story in the mail. So I dug out “Sufferin’ Succotash” and finished it. In a way, this is my first SF story that I started, although it’s not the first that I finished.

  Oh, but wait, I did write an even earlier science-fiction story; it was called “The Miracle,” and appeared in The Pegasus, an annual magazine published by The Chevalier Literary Society in Louisville, Kentucky, March, 1962. If you want to read that one, you’ll have to find a copy of The Pegasus! I can’t bring myself to reprint it.

  The Chevalier Literary Society was in fact a social club for high-school boys in Louisville. There were about six of these high-school fraternities in Louisville, and we all had to publish annual literary magazines to lend an air of legitimacy. The Pegasus of June, 1963, contains an actually usable piece of writing by me, a stream-of-consciousness piece called “Bus Ride—December 20, 1962.” Later I lifted this piece nearly intact for use at the end of the third chapter of my transreal novel The Secret of Life.

  A New Golden Age

  “It’s like music,” I repeated. Lady Vickers looked at me uncomprehendingly. Pale British features beneath wavy red hair, a long nose with a ripple in it.

  “You can’t hear mathematics,” she stated. “It’s just squiggles in some great dusty book.” Everyone else around the small table was eating. White soup again.

  I laid down my spoon. “Look at it this way. When I read a math paper it’s no different than a musician reading a score. In each case the pleasure comes from the play of patterns, the harmonies and contrasts.” The meat platter was going around the table now, and I speared a cutlet.

  I salted it heavily and bit into the hot, greasy meat with pleasure. The food was second-rate, but it was free. The prospect of unemployment had done wonders for my appetite.

  Mies van Koop joined the conversation. He had sparse curly hair and no chin. His head was like a large, thoughtful carrot with the point tucked into his tight collar. “It’s a sound analogy, Fletch. But the musician can play his score, play it so that even a legislator …” he smiled and nodded donnishly to Lady Vickers. “Even a legislator can hear how beautiful Beethoven is.”

  “That’s just what I was going to say,” she added, wagging her finger at me. “I’m sure my husband has done lovely work, but the only way he knows how to show a person one of his beastly theorems is to make her swot through pages and pages of teeming little symbols.”

  Mies and I exchanged a look. Lord Vickers was a crank, an eccentric amateur whose work was devoid of serious mathematical interest. But it was thanks to him that Lady Vickers had bothered to come to our little conference. She was the only member of the Europarliament who had.

  “Vat you think our chances are?” Rozzick asked her in the sudden silence, his mouth full of unchewed cauliflower.

  “Dismal. Unless you can find some way of making your research appeal to the working man, you’ll be cut out of next year’s budget entirely. They need all the mathematics money for that new computer in Geneva, you know.”

  “We know,” I said gloomily. “That’s why we’re holding this meeting. But it seems a little late for public relations. If only we hadn’t let the government take over all the research funds.”

  “There’s no point blaming the government,” Lady Vickers said tartly. “People are simply tired of paying you mathematicians to make them feel stupid.”

  “Zo build the machine,” Rozzick said with an emphatic bob of his bald little head.

  “That’s right,” Mies said, “Build a machine that will play mathematics like music. Why not?”

  Lady Vickers clapped her hands in delight and turned to me, “You mean you know how?”

  Before I could say anything, Mies kicked me under the table. Hard. I got the message. “Well, we don’t have quite all the bugs worked out …”

  “But that’s just too marvelous!” Lady Vickers gushed, pulling out a little appointment book. “Let’s see…the vote on the math appropriation is June 4…which gives us six weeks. Why don’t you get your machine ready and bring it to Foxmire towards the end of May? The session is being held in London, you know, and I could bring the whole committee out to feel the beauty of mathematics.”

  I was having trouble moving my mouth. “Is planty time,” Rozzick put in, his eyes twinkling.

  Just then Watson caught the thread of conversation. In the journals he was a famous mathematician…practically a grand old man. In conversation he was the callowest of eighteen-years-olds. “Who are you trying to kid, Fletch?” He shook his head, and dandruff showered down on the narrow shoulders of his black suit. “There’s no way …” He broke off with a yelp of pain. Mies was keeping busy.

  “If you’re going to make that train, we’d better get going,” I said to Lady Vickers with a worried glance at my watch.

  “My dear me, yes,” she agreed, rising with me. “We’ll expect you and your machine on May 23 then?” I nodded, steering her across the room. Watson had stuck his head under the table to see what was the matter. Something was preventing him from getting back out.

  When I got back from the train station, an excited knot of people had formed around Watson, Rozzick and Mies. Watson spotted me first, and in his shrill cracking voice called out, “Our pimp is here.”

  I smiled ingratiatingly and joined the group. “Watson thinks it’s immoral to make mathematics a sensual experience,” Mies explained. “The rest of us feel that greater exposure can only help our case.”

  “Where is machine?” Rozzick asked, grinning like a Tartar jack-o’-lantern.

  “You know as well as I do that there is none. All I did was remark to Lady Vickers …”

  “One must employ the direct stimulation of the brain,” LaHaye put in. He was a delicate old Frenchman with a shock of luminous white hair.

  I shook my head. “In the long run, maybe. But I can’t quite see myself sticking needles in the committee’s brainstems five weeks from now. I’m afraid the impulses are going to have to come in through normal …”

  “Absolute Film,” Rozzick said suddenly. “Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger invented in the 1920s. Abstract patterns on screen, repeating and differentiating. Is in Warszaw archives accessible.”

  “Derisory!” LaHaye protested. “If we make of mathematics an exhibit, it should not be a tawdry son et lumière. Don’t worry about needles, Dr. Fletcher. There are new field methods.” He molded strange shapes in the air around his snowy head.

  “He’s right,” Watson nodded. “The essential thing about mathematics is that it gives aesthetic pleasure without coming through the senses. They’ve already got food and television for their eyes and ears, their gobbling mouths and grubbing hands. If we’re going to give them mathematics, let’s sock it to them right in the old grey matter!”

  Mies had taken out his pen and a pad of paper. “What type of manifold should we use as the parameter space?”

  >> - - - <<<br />
  We couldn’t have done it if we’d been anywhere else but the Center. Even with their staff and laboratories it took us a month of twenty-hour days to get our first working math player built. It looked like one of those domey old hair-dryers growing out of a file cabinet with dials. We called it a Moddler.

  No one was very interested in being the first to get his brain mathed or modified or coddled or whatever. The others had done most of the actual work, so I had to volunteer.

  Watson, LaHaye, Rozzick and Mies were all there when I snugged the Moddler’s helmet down over my ears. I squeezed the switch on and let the electrical vortex fields swirl into my head.

  We’d put together two tapes, one on Book I of Euclid’s Elements, and the other on iterated ultrapowers of measurable cardinals. The idea was that the first tape would show people how to understand things they’d vaguely heard of…congruent triangles, parallel lines and the Pythagorean theorem. The second tape was supposed to show the power and beauty of flat-out pure mathematics. It was like we had two excursions: a l
eisurely drive around a famous ruin, and a jolting blast down a drag-strip out on the edge of town.

  We’d put the first tape together in a sort of patchwork fashion, using direct brain recordings as well as artificially punched-in thought patterns. Rozzick had done most of this one. It was all visualized geometry: glowing triangles, blooming circles and the like. Sort of an internalized Absolute Film.

  The final proof was lovely, but for me the most striking part was a series of food images which Rozzick had accidentally let slip into the proof that a triangle’s area is one-half base times height.

  “Since when are triangles covered with anchovy paste?” I asked Rozzick as Mies switched tapes.

  “Is your vision clear?” LaHaye wanted to know. I looked around, blinking. Everything felt fine. I still had an afterglow of pleasure from the complex play of angles in Euclid’s culminating proof that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the two sides.

  Then they switched on the second tape. Watson was the only one of us who had really mastered the Kunen paper on which this tape was based. But he’d refused to have his brain patterns taped. Instead he’d constructed the whole thing as an artificial design in our parameter space.

  The tape played in my head without words or pictures. There was a measurable cardinal. Suddenly I knew its properties in the same unspoken way that I knew my own body. I did something to the cardinal and it transformed itself, changing the concepts clustered around it. This happened over and over. With a feeling of light-headedness, I felt myself moving outside of this endless self-transformation…comprehending it from the outside. I picked out a certain subconstellation of the whole process, and swathed it in its logical hull. Suddenly I understood a theorem I had always wondered about.

  When the tape ended I begged my colleagues for an hour of privacy. I had to think about iterated ultrapowers some more. I rushed to the library and got out Kunen’s paper. But the lucidity was gone. I started to stumble over the notation, the subscripts and superscripts; I was stumped by the gappy proofs; I kept forgetting the definitions. Already the actual content of the main theorem eluded me. I realized then that the Moddler was a success. You could enjoy mathematics—even the mathematics you couldn’t normally understand.