The Very Best of F & SF v1 (22 page)

To pace himself,
he thought, I’ll make up an encyclopedia; I’ll try to list everything that
begins with an “a.” Let’s see. He pondered. Apple, automobile, acksetron,
atmosphere, Atlantic, tomato aspic, advertising—he thought on and on,
categories slithering through his fright-haunted mind.

All at once
light flickered on.

He lay on the
couch in the living room, and mild sunlight spilled in through the single
window. Two men bent over him, their hands full of tools. Maintenance men, he
realized. They’ve been working on me.

“He’s conscious,”
one of the technicians said. He rose, stood back; Sarah Benton, dithering with
anxiety, replaced him.

“Thank God!” she
said, breathing wetly in Poole’s ear. “I was so afraid; I called Mr. Danceman
finally about—”

“What happened?”
Poole broke in harshly. “Start from the beginning and for God’s sake speak
slowly. So I can assimilate it all.”

Sarah composed
herself, paused to rub her nose, and then plunged on nervously, “You passed
out. You just lay there, as if you were dead. I waited until two-thirty and you
did nothing. I called Mr. Danceman, waking him up unfortunately, and he called
the electric-ant maintenance—I mean, the organic-roby maintenance people, and
these two men came about four-forty-five, and they’ve been working on you ever
since. It’s now six-fifteen in the morning. And I’m very cold and I want to go
to bed; I can’t make it in to the office today; I really can’t.” She turned
away, sniffling. The sound annoyed him.

One of the
uniformed maintenance men said, “You’ve been playing around with your reality
tape.”

“Yes,” Poole
said. Why deny it? Obviously they had found the inserted solid strip. “I
shouldn’t have been out that long,” he said. “I inserted a ten-minute strip
only.”

“It shut off the
tape transport,” the technician explained. “The tape stopped moving forward;
your insertion jammed it, and it automatically shut down to avoid tearing the
tape. Why would you want to fiddle around with that? Don’t you know what you
could do?”

“I’m not sure,” Poole
said.

“But you have a
good idea.”

Poole said
acridly, “That’s why I’m doing it.”

“Your bill,” the
maintenance man said, “is going to be ninety-five frogs. Payable in
installments, if you so desire.”

“Okay,” he said;
he sat up groggily, rubbed his eyes, and grimaced. His head ached and his
stomach felt totally empty.

“Shave the tape
next time,” the primary technician told him. “That way it won’t jam. Didn’t it
occur to you that it had a safety factor built into it? So it would stop rather
than—”

“What happens,” Poole
interrupted, his voice low and intently careful, “if no tape passed under the
scanner? No tape—nothing at all. The photocell shining upward without
impedance?”

The technicians
glanced at each other. One said, “All the neuro circuits jump their gaps and
short out.”

“Meaning what?”
Poole said.

“Meaning it’s
the end of the mechanism.”

Poole said, “I’ve
examined the circuit. It doesn’t carry enough voltage to do that. Metal won’t
fuse under such slight loads of current, even if the terminals are touching. We’re
talking about a millionth of a watt along a cesium channel perhaps a sixteenth
of an inch in length. Let’s assume there are a billion possible combinations at
one instant arising from the punch-outs on the tape. The total output isn’t
cumulative; the amount of current depends on what the battery details for that
module, and it’s not much. With all gates open and going.”

“Would we lie?”
one of the technicians asked wearily.

“Why not?” Poole
said. “Here I have an opportunity to experience everything. Simultaneously. To
know the universe and its entirety, to be momentarily in contact with all
reality. Something that no human can do. A symphonic score entering my brain
outside of time, all notes, all instruments sounding at once. And all
symphonies. Do you see?”

“It’ll burn you
out,” both technicians said, together.

“I don’t think
so,” Poole said.

Sarah said, “Would
you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Poole?”

“Yes,” he said;
he lowered his legs, pressed his cold feet against the floor, shuddered. He
then stood up. His body ached. They had me lying all night on the couch, he
realized. All things considered, they could have done better than that.

At the kitchen
table in the far corner of the room, Garson Poole sat sipping coffee across
from Sarah. The technicians had long since gone.

“You’re not
going to try any more experiments on yourself, are you?” Sarah asked wistfully.

Poole grated, “I
would like to control time. To reverse it.” I will cut a segment of tape out,
he thought, and fuse it in upside down. The causal sequences will then flow the
other way. Thereupon I will walk backward down the steps from the roof field,
back up to my door, push a locked door open, walk backward to the sink, where I
will get out a stack of dirty dishes. I will seat myself at this table before
the stack, fill each dish with food produced from my stomach... I will then
transfer the food to the refrigerator. The next day I will take the food out of
the refrigerator, pack it in bags, carry the bags to a supermarket, distribute
the food here and there in the store. And at last, at the front counter, they
will pay me money for this, from their cash register. The food will be packed
with other food in big plastic boxes, shipped out of the city into the
hydroponic plants on the Atlantic, there to be joined back to trees and bushes
or the bodies of dead animals or pushed deep into the ground. But what would
all that prove? A video tape running backward... I would know no more than I
know now, which is not enough.

What I want, he
realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one microsecond. After that it
doesn’t matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to understand
or see.

I might try one
other change, he said to himself. Before I try cutting the tape. I will prick
new punch-holes in the tape and see what presently emerges. It will be
interesting because I will not know what the holes I make mean.

Using the tip of
a microtool, he punched several holes, at random, on the tape. As close to the
scanner as he could manage... he did not want to wait.

“I wonder if you’ll
see it,” he said to Sarah. Apparently not, insofar as he could extrapolate. “Something
may show up,” he said to her. “I just want to warn you; I don’t want you to be
afraid.”

“Oh dear,” Sarah
said tinnily.

He examined his
wristwatch. One minute passed, then a second, a third. And then—

In the center of
the room appeared a flock of green-and-black ducks. They quacked excitedly,
rose from the floor, fluttered against the ceiling in a dithering mass of
feathers and wings and frantic in their vast urge, their instinct, to get away.

“Ducks,” Poole
said, marveling. “I punched a hole for a flight of wild ducks.”

Now something
else appeared. A park bench with an elderly, tattered man seated on it, reading
a torn, bent newspaper. He looked up, dimly made out Poole, smiled briefly at
him with badly made dentures, and then returned to his folded-back newspaper.
He read on.

“Do you see him?”
Poole asked Sarah. “And the ducks.” At that moment the ducks and the park bum
disappeared. Nothing remained of them. The interval of their punch-holes had
quickly passed.

“They weren’t
real,” Sarah said. “Were they? So how—”

“You’re not real,”
he told Sarah. “You’re a stimulus-factor on my reality tape. A punch-hole that
can be glazed over. Do you also have an existence in another reality tape, or
one in an objective reality?” He did not know; he couldn’t tell. Perhaps Sarah
did not know, either. Perhaps she existed in a thousand reality tapes; perhaps
on every reality tape ever manufactured. “If I cut the tape,” he said, “you
will be everywhere and nowhere. Like everything else in the universe. At least
as far as I am aware of it.”

Sarah faltered, “I
am real.”

“I want to know
you completely,” Poole said. “To do that I must cut the tape. If I don’t do it
now, I’ll do it some other time; it’s inevitable that eventually I’ll do it.” So
why wait? he asked himself. And there is always the possibility that Danceman
has reported back to my maker, that they will be making moves to head me off.
Because, perhaps, I’m endangering their property—myself.

“You make me
wish I had gone to the office after all,” Sarah said, her mouth turned down
with dimpled gloom.

“Go,” Poole
said.

“I don’t want to
leave you alone.”

“I’ll be fine,” Poole
said.

“No, you’re not
going to be fine. You’re going to unplug yourself or something, kill yourself
because you’ve found out you’re just an electric ant and not a human being.”

He said,
presently, “Maybe so.” Maybe it boiled down to that.

“And I can’t
stop you,” she said.

“No.” He nodded
in agreement.

“But I’m going
to stay,” Sarah said. “Even if I can’t stop you. Because if I do leave and you
do kill yourself, I’ll always ask myself for the rest of my life, what would
have happened if I had stayed. You see?”

Again he nodded.

“Go ahead,” Sarah
said.

He rose to his
feet. “It’s not pain I’m going to feel,” he told her. “Although it may look
like that to you. Keep in mind the fact that organic robots have minimal
pain-circuits in them. I will be experiencing the most intense—”

“Don’t tell me
any more,” she broke in. “Just do it if you’re going to, or don’t do it if you’re
not.”

Clumsily—because
he was frightened—he wriggled his hands into the microglove assembly, reached to
pick up a tiny tool: a sharp cutting blade. “I am going to cut a tape mounted
inside my chest panel,” he said, as he gazed through the enlarging-lens system.
“That’s all.” His hand shook as it lifted the cutting blade. In a second it can
be done, he realized. All over. And—I will have time to fuse the cut ends of
the tape back together, he realized. A half hour at least. If I change my mind.

He cut the tape.

Staring at him,
cowering, Sarah whispered, “Nothing happened.”

“I have thirty
or forty minutes.” He reseated himself at the table, having drawn his hands
from the gloves. His voice, he noticed, shook; undoubtedly Sarah was aware of
it, and he felt anger at himself, knowing that he had alarmed her. “I’m sorry,”
he said, irrationally; he wanted to apologize to her. “Maybe you ought to leave,”
he said in panic; again he stood up. So did she, reflexively, as if imitating
him; bloated and nervous, she stood there palpitating. “Go away,” he said
thickly. “Back to the office where you ought to be. Where we both ought to be.”
I’m going to fuse the tape-ends together, he told himself; the tension is too
great for me to stand.

Reaching his
hands toward the gloves he groped to pull them over his straining fingers.
Peering into the enlarging screen, he saw the beam from the photoelectric gleam
upward, pointed directly into the scanner; at the same time he saw the end of
the tape disappearing under the scanner... he saw this, understood it; I’m too
late, he realized. It has passed through. God, he thought, help me. It has
begun winding at a rate greater than I calculated. So it’s
now
that—

He saw apples,
and cobblestones and zebras. He felt warmth, the silky texture of cloth; he
felt the ocean lapping at him and a great wind, from the north, plucking at him
as if to lead him somewhere. Sarah was all around him, so was Danceman. New
York glowed in the night, and the squibs about him scuttled and bounced through
night skies and daytime and flooding and drought. Butter relaxed into liquid on
his tongue, and at the same time hideous odors and tastes assailed him: the
bitter presence of poisons and lemons and blades of summer grass. He drowned;
he fell; he lay in the arms of a woman in a vast white bed which at the same
time dinned shrilly in his ear: the warning noise of a defective elevator in
one of the ancient, ruined downtown hotels. I am living, I have lived, I will
never live, he said to himself, and with his thoughts came every word, every
sound; insects squeaked and raced, and he half sank into a complex body of homeostatic
machinery located somewhere in Tri-Plan’s labs.

He wanted to say
something to Sarah. Opening his mouth he tried to bring forth words—a specific
string of them out of the enormous mass of them brilliantly lighting his mind,
scorching him with their utter meaning.

His mouth
burned. He wondered why.

Frozen against
the wall, Sarah Benton opened her eyes and saw the curl of smoke ascending from
Poole’s half-opened mouth. Then the roby sank down, knelt on elbows and knees,
then slowly spread out in a broken, crumpled heap. She knew without examining
it that it had “died.”

Poole did it to
itself, she realized. And it couldn’t feel pain; it said so itself. Or at least
not very much pain; maybe a little. Anyhow, now it is over.