Authors: John Varley
“You’ve got it!” I shouted. “You had it in your desk all this time, and you made me go through that damn story over and over—”
Words failed me. I forgot about Louise in her commando duds, forgot about Sherman the android tank, forgot about everything but the stunner Louise had stolen from me that night, and which she was now lifting from Mayer’s desk drawer.
* * *
“Don’t be silly, Bill,” she said. “This is another one. It isn’t even burned. Take a look.” And she tossed it to me.
I looked at it. She was right. This one was intact. I turned it over in my hands, noted the position of the trigger and of a little switch on the side. It occurred to me that I was holding a powerful weapon.
I looked up at Louise, and a stunner materialized in her hand, pointed at my forehead. One moment it was in a holster on her hip, and the next it was in her hand.
“You wouldn’t shoot me, would you, Louise?”
She gave me an odd look, then an odd smile, and the weapon was back in its holster. I’d heard a whirring sound that time, but I still didn’t see how it was done.
“You’re right,” she said, and turned away. “Sherman, if he tries anything funny, shoot to disable.”
“Right.”
So much for undying love. And I was no fool; I put the stunner on the remains of Mayer’s desk and went back toward my chair. Louise was already sitting, but I was too agitated to do anything but stand.
Louise had her elbows on the chair arms, and was massaging
her forehead with the tips of her fingers. She looked very tired. She spoke without looking up.
“Sherman, there’s something wrong with that stunner. Will you take a look?”
The robot picked it up, turned it over in his hands, then did something that made it split into two halves. There wasn’t anything inside. It was just a plastic shell.
“I thought it felt light,” she said, when he showed it to her. She looked to Mayer. “Doctor Mayer, I want to know—”
“I prefer not to be called Doctor,” Mayer said.
“Doctor Mayer,” Louise said, pointedly, “this stunner belongs to me. One of my people lost it. I’d like to know where you got it.”
“Where did you lose it?”
“I’m asking the questions here.”
“And maybe I’m not answering them.”
Louise sighed. “Why don’t we dispense with the melodramatic talk, Doctor?”
“That cuts both ways,” Mayer said. I looked at him again. He was calm on the outside, but now I saw he was smouldering underneath. I guess I would have been, too, if somebody’d just ripped my desk apart. On the other hand, there was Sherman, and I thought Mayer was making a very dangerous stand.
“I lost the stunner about a week ago,” Louise said. “In 1955.”
“And I found it thirty years ago. Also in 1955.”
Louise glanced at Sherman.
“I think he’s lying,” the robot said. Louise nodded, and gestured for Sherman to go to Mayer. As the robot did so, Mayer lost a little of his composure.
“Are you going to torture me?” he asked.
“Depends on how melodramatic you want to get.” Mayer made an involuntary move away as Sherman took him by the arm. The robot encircled Mayer’s wrist with his huge metal hand, and waited, just holding it there.
“Did you find it yourself?” Louise asked.
“Yes,” Mayer said. Sherman shook his head.
“Who did find it?”
Mayer looked down at Sherman’s hand, and then I did too, and I’ll bet we both had the same thought at the same time:
polygraph.
Or the far-future equivalent, which I was willing to bet was better than the one used on me earlier that same day.
“That’s right,” Louise said, making me wonder if mindreading was one of her many talents. “Now, we can play twenty questions and a lie will tell me as much as the truth, but it takes a while to zero in on it that way. We don’t have a lot of time, but we
do
have some drugs that will make you tell all in about ten seconds—though they tend to use up brain cells—and we
do
have a heartless machine who can cause you a lot of pain if I give him the order.”
I don’t know if Mayer caught it, but Sherman gave Louise a quick glance. I couldn’t swear to it—I didn’t know much about reading a robot’s expressions—but I thought he looked hurt.
Heartless, indeed. Sherman tank, my ass.
A robot who had apologized to a computer terminal, presumably on the principle that it might be a distant ancestor?
So I decided Louise was pulling some sort of bluff. I guess I should have told Mayer about it. I didn’t. I wanted to hear his story at least as badly as Louise did. Maybe more.
I’d figured out why he hadn’t told me about the stunner in his desk. I think he would have showed it to me if Louise hadn’t interrupted us. He was simply doing what any good scientist would do, attacking my story, getting me to draw what I’d said I’d seen with no prompting from him.
Still, I was pissed off. I sat back and waited to see what he’d do.
“I thought you had all the time in the world,” Mayer said.
“We did, once. Now we’ve only got a little, and you’re using it up at a faster rate than you can imagine.”
“Can’t you tell me anything about—”
“Not yet. Maybe later. I make you no promises; it’s still possible we can salvage this fiasco with minimal damage. It’s no longer possible to save the whole world, but I hope to preserve
a piece of it.” She shrugged. “It’s what I’ve done all my life, fighting a delaying action. Now, you will talk.”
And Mayer did.
* * *
“There was a plane crash in Arizona in 1955,” he began.
“I know. I was on the plane.”
That stopped Mayer for a moment.
“Then you admit it?”
“Admit what? Oh, you think I made the plane crash. No, Doctor, it was nothing as simple or straightforward as that. We were
saving the lives
of everyone aboard that plane.”
Mayer looked stunned. I probably did, too. I was about to say something, but Louise went on.
“Yes, Doctor Mayer. Your daughter is alive and well.”
* * *
I couldn’t begin to report what was said in the next half hour. Much of it was shouted, in an atmosphere of disbelief and anger. I won’t even pretend that I understood much of it. I’m far from sure I understand most of it even now. Time travel, paradoxes, the end of the universe…it was a lot to digest in one lump.
But she said she had been saving people’s lives. The mechanism she described for doing it was so complicated and bizarre that the only way I had of believing
any
of it was a kind of reverse logic: if she was going to lie, why tell such an
improbable
lie?
But if she was telling the truth…it meant the blood and gore and suffering that had come to dominate my entire life was no more real than a corpse in a Hollywood mad-slasher movie. It meant all those people were alive somewhere, in an incomprehensible future.
“No, not all of them, Bill,” Louise had said gently, at one point. “Only the crashes in which there were no survivors. Any witnesses to what we were doing would have caused a paradox.”
It seemed a quibble to me. I felt such a load lifting from my shoulders…
* * *
“We didn’t catch it for a long time,” Louise told Mayer. “That fact that your daughter was aboard the plane.”
“She was only twenty-two,” Mayer said. He was weeping. “She had just been married. She was on her way to California, to Livermore, to introduce her new husband to me and…and Naomi. I think it killed Naomi, too, indirectly. She was my wife, and she—”
“Yes, we know,” Louise said, gently.
“You know everything, don’t you?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be back here questioning you. We didn’t know your daughter was on that Constellation because she was traveling under her new last name. We saw you at the crash site, but couldn’t find out why you were there. We finally pieced it together, with a lot of time-tank observation. We had to look at indirect things. We were up against a lot of temporal censorship.” She glanced at Sherman. “And it wasn’t until a short time ago we knew you had come into possession of the other lost stunner.”
Mayer had purchased the thing from an Indian, who said he had found it a long ways from the main impact site. The Indian had told him the stunner would produce a not-unpleasant tingling sensation when the trigger was depressed. Sherman and Louise looked at each other when Mayer said that. I don’t know; maybe the battery was failing. The one I found sure as hell kicked harder than that.
“What I must know,” Louise finally said, “is what happened to the insides of the stunner? Do you know?”
Mayer was silent. I was surprised. I didn’t know what he might have to gain by continuing to hold out. I should have known, but by then I was reeling from too much information, too fast.
“He knows,” Sherman said. The robot was no longer holding Mayer’s hand; I guess he didn’t need to anymore, or maybe it had never been necessary. Maybe it was just a show to impress the savages.
“I do know where it is,” Mayer said.
“I want you to tell me, Doctor.” She looked at him, and he
said nothing. She sighed—I can’t begin to describe how weary she seemed—and stood up again.
“Doctor Mayer,” she said. “Let’s dispense with the threats. I think you’ve figured out that I have no intention of hurting you. I don’t claim it’s because I’m such a sweet person; if it would preserve the project, I’d slice you up thinner than baloney, and never blink an eye.”
“We all realize how cold-blooded you are, Ms. Baltimore,” Mayer said.
“Okay. I can’t hurt you. I admit it. It would make things worse than they already are. I’m down to pleading, and, I hope, to reasoning. Do you understand what I said about paradox?”
“I believe I do.”
“And you’re still ready to jeopardize everything?”
“I don’t acknowledge that as proven. You said yourself the damage has already been done; you’re striving now only to minimize it. By your own admission, you yourself will be erased from reality no matter what happens here tonight. Bill has already caused the paradox. It’s unstoppable. Isn’t that right?”
Louise gave me a reluctant nod. Then she rallied again.
“But it’s still possible to choose between two disasters. One of them is terrible, but the other is absolute.”
Mayer shook his head.
“I don’t believe you know that.”
From the expression on Louise’s face, I started to wonder if Mayer had his own built-in polygraph.
“Maybe I don’t,” she admitted. “But why won’t you tell us where the rest of the stunner is?”
“Because it’s all I have left,” Mayer said, quietly. “I don’t intend to spend my few remaining years wondering if you pulled some temporal con-game on me. You said my daughter is alive in your world. I demand that you prove it. Take me there. Then I’ll tell what I know.”
* * *
Do you believe a drowning man sees his entire life flash before his eyes? I didn’t; I still don’t. I’ve talked to too many people
who
thought
they were about to die, and then survived, and while they recalled some scattered images and went through some experiences that might be called religious, there was no sequential review, no actual reliving of anything.
Nevertheless, something a lot like that happened to me then. It didn’t take more than a second. I was clearheaded as I reviewed where I had been, where I was now, and what I might expect from the future.
Then I stood up, and as Mayer finished saying,
Then I’ll tell you what I know
, I said, “I want to go, too.”
* * *
Louise did not seem surprised. I suspected it was impossible to surprise her at that point; I supposed she had seen everything that would happen here this night, and was going through this conversation for reasons unfathomable to me. I was right—she could no longer be surprised—but I was also wrong, as I found out later; she didn’t know what was going to happen. She proved it by turning to Sherman with a helpless look.
“What do I do now?” she asked him.
I think Mayer was as startled by this as I was. Suddenly, things shifted around, and I don’t know if any of us really knew who was in charge.
Unless it was Sherman. You don’t know what inscrutable is until you’ve tried to figure out what a robot is thinking. Mayer seemed to have the same thought. At least, when he went on with his pitch, he aimed it at Sherman, not Louise.
“What’s the difference?” he said, with a pleading note in his voice. “You’ve got three alternatives. You go back with the insides of that stunner, and you leave me here. You go back
without
the stunner, and you leave me here. Or you go back, take me, I tell you where the stunner’s insides are, you come back to get them—”
“We don’t know if we can do that,” Sherman reminded him. “There may not even be enough time for another trip.”
“That’s your problem,” Mayer said. “I want you to tell me what happens. What are the results of my actions?”
“Immediately? Nothing at all. We will leave, and you and Mister Smith will go back to your lives. They have been disrupted, but you will never notice a thing. Life will continue to seem as it always has been; reality will not be altered for you. Eventually you both will die.”
It’s funny how one word will bring something home that you may have understood intellectually but haven’t yet felt in your gut. Louise and Sherman came from a place where I had been dust for a thousand years.
“As a result of the changes introduced into your lives by the things you have seen and heard in the last month or so, you will each do things much differently than you would have done in what we like to think of as the ‘preordained’ order of things. Those changes will affect the lives of others. The effects will spread over the years and centuries. It is probable, approaching certainty, that these events will wipe out our time machine. And, of course, Louise and myself and all our contemporaries, but that isn’t important.
“The important thing for you, Doctor Mayer, is that if Louise
didn’t
exist, then she never went back to 1955. She never boarded that airplane—at considerable risk to her own life, I might add—and never rescued your daughter. It would mean that your daughter did indeed die in the Arizona desert.”