Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (24 page)

When the ambulance arrived, Alceste and Sima descended to the street, where they were met by uniformed policemen who had official instructions to pick up a couple answering to their description. “Wanted for floater robbery with assault. Dangerous. Shoot to kill.” The police Alceste disposed of, and also the ambulance driver and intern. He and Sima departed in the ambulance, Alceste driving like a fury, Sima operating the siren like a banshee.

They abandoned the ambulance in the downtown shopping district, entered a department store, and emerged forty minutes later as a young valet in uniform pushing an old man in a wheelchair. Outside the difficulty of the bust, Sima was boyish enough to pass as a valet. Frankie was weak enough from assorted injuries to simulate the old man.

They checked into the Ross Splendide, where Alceste barricaded Sima in a suite, had his shoulder attended to and bought a gun. Then he went looking for John Strapp. He found him in the Bureau of Vital Statistics, bribing the chief clerk and presenting him with a slip of paper that gave the same description of the long-lost love.

“Hey, old Johnny,” Alceste said.

“Hey, Frankie!” Strapp cried in delight.

They punched each other affectionately. With a happy grin, Alceste watched Strapp explain and offer further bribes to the chief clerk for the names and addresses of all girls over twenty-one who fitted the description on the slip of paper. As they left, Alceste said, “I met a girl who might fit that, old Johnny.”

That cold look came into Strapp’s eyes. “Oh?” he said.

“She’s got a kind of half lisp.”

Strapp looked at Alceste strangely.

“And a funny way of tilting her head when she talks.”

Strapp clutched Alceste’s arm.

“Only trouble is, she isn’t girlie-girlie like most. More like a fella. You know what I mean? Spunky-like.”

“Show her to me, Frankie,” Strapp said in a low voice.

They hopped a floater and were taxied to the Ross Splendide roof. They took the elevator down to the twentieth floor and walked to suite 20-M. Alceste code-knocked on the door. A girl’s voice called, “Come in.” Alceste shook Strapp’s hand and said, “Cheers, Johnny.” He unlocked the door, then walked down the hall to lean against the balcony balustrade. He drew his gun just in case Fisher might get around to last-ditch interruptions. Looking out across the glittering city, he reflected that every man could be happy if everybody would just lend a hand; but sometimes that hand was expensive.

John Strapp walked into the suite. He shut the door, turned and examined the jet-haired inky-eyed girl, coldly, intently. She stared at him in amazement. Strapp stepped closer, walked around her, faced her again.

“Say something,” he said.

“You’re not John Strapp?” she faltered.

“Yes.”

“No!” she exclaimed. “No! My Johnny’s young. My Johnny is—”

Strapp closed in like a tiger. His hands and lips savaged her while his eyes watched coldly and intently. The girl screamed and struggled, terrified by those strange eyes that were alien, by the harsh hands that were alien, by the alien compulsions of the creature who was once her Johnny Strapp but was now aching years of change apart from her.

“You’re someone else!” she cried. “You’re not Johnny Strapp. You’re another man.”

And Strapp, not so much eleven years older as eleven years other than the man whose memory he was fighting to fulfill, asked himself, “Are you my Sima? Are you my love—my lost, dead love?” And the change within him answered, “No, this isn’t Sima. This isn’t your love yet. Move on, Johnny. Move on and search. You’ll find her someday—the girl you lost.”

He paid like a gentleman and departed.

From the balcony, Alceste saw him leave. He was so astonished that he could not call to him. He went back to the suite and found Sima standing there, stunned, staring at a sheaf of money on a table. He realized what had happened at once. When Sima saw Alceste, she began to cry—not like a girl, but boyishly, with her fists clenched and her face screwed up.

“Frankie,” she wept. “My God! Frankie!” She held out her arms to him in desperation. She was lost in a world that had passed her by.

He took a step, then hesitated. He made a last attempt to quench the love within him for this creature, searching for a way to bring her and Strapp together. Then he lost all control and took her in his arms.

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he thought. “She’s so scared of being lost. She’s not mine. Not yet. Maybe never.”

And then, “Fisher’s won, and I’ve lost.”

And last of all, “We only remember the past; we never know it when we meet it. The mind goes back, but time goes on, and farewells should be forever.”

T
here was a man who mutilated history. He toppled empires and uprooted dynasties. Because of him, Mount Vernon should not be a national shrine, and Columbus, Ohio, should be called Cabot, Ohio. Because of him the name Marie Curie should be cursed in France, and no one should swear by the beard of the Prophet. Actually, these realities did not happen, because he was a mad professor; or, to put it another way, he only succeeded in making them unreal for himself.

Now, the patient reader is too familiar with the conventional mad professor, undersized and overbrowed, creating monsters in his laboratory which invariably turn on their maker and menace his lovely daughter. This story isn’t about that sort of make-believe man. It’s about Henry Hassel, a genuine mad professor in a class with such better-known men as Ludwig Boltzmann (
see
Ideal Gas Law), Jacques Charles, and André Marie Ampère (1775-1836).

Everyone ought to know that the electrical ampere was so named in honor of Ampère. Ludwig Boltzmann was a distinguished Austrian physicist, as famous for his research on black-body radiation as on Ideal Gases. You can look him up in Volume Three of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, BALT to BRAI. Jacques Alexandre César Charles was the first mathematician to become interested in flight, and he invented the hydrogen balloon. These were real men.

They were also real mad professors. Ampère, for example, was on his way to an important meeting of scientists in Paris. In his taxi he got a brilliant idea (of an electrical nature, I assume) and whipped out a pencil and jotted the equation on the wall of the hansom cab. Roughly, it was: dH = ipdl/r
²
in which p is the perpendicular distance from P to the line of the element dl; or dH = i sin θ dl/r
²
. This is sometimes known as Laplace’s Law, although he wasn’t at the meeting.

Anyway, the cab arrived at the Académie. Ampère jumped out, paid the driver and rushed into the meeting to tell everybody about his idea. Then he realized he didn’t have the note on him, remembered where he’d left it, and had to chase through the streets of Paris after the taxi to recover his runaway equation. Sometimes I imagine that’s how Fermat lost his famous “Last Theorem,” although Fermat wasn’t at the meeting either, having died some two hundred years earlier.

Or take Boltzmann. Giving a course in Advanced Ideal Gases, he peppered his lectures with involved calculus, which he worked out quickly and casually in his head. He had that kind of head. His students had so much trouble trying to puzzle out the math by ear that they couldn’t keep up with the lectures, and they begged Boltzmann to work out his equations on the blackboard.

Boltzmann apologized and promised to be more helpful in the future. At the next lecture he began, “Gentlemen, combining Boyle’s Law with the Law of Charles, we arrive at the equation pv = p
_o
v
_o
(1 + at). Now, obviously, if
_a
S
^b
= f (x) dxχ(a), then pv = RT and
_v
S f (x,y,z) dV = O. It’s as simple as two plus two equals four.” At this point Boltzman remembered his promise. He turned to the blackboard, conscientiously chalked 2 + 2 = 4, and then breezed on, casually doing the complicated calculus in his head.

Jacques Charles, the brilliant mathematician who discovered Charles’s Law (sometimes known as Gay-Lussac’s Law), which Boltzmann mentioned in his lecture, had a lunatic passion to become a famous paleographer—that is, a discoverer of ancient manuscripts. I think that being forced to share credit with Gay-Lussac may have unhinged him.

He paid a transparent swindler named Vrain-Lucas 200,000 francs for holograph letters purportedly written by Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Pontius Pilate. Charles, a man who could see through any gas, ideal or not, actually believed in these forgeries despite the fact that the maladroit Vrain-Lucas had written them in modern French on modern notepaper bearing modern watermarks. Charles even tried to donate them to the Louvre.

Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life. This is what happened to Henry Hassel, professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University in the year 1980.

Nobody knows where Unknown University is or what they teach there. It has a faculty of some two hundred eccentrics, and a student body of two thousand misfits—the kind that remain anonymous until they win Nobel prizes or become the First Man on Mars. You can always spot a graduate of U.U. when you ask people where they went to school. If you get an evasive reply like: “State,” or “Oh, a freshwater school you never heard of,” you can bet they went to Unknown. Someday I hope to tell you more about this university, which is a center of learning only in the Pickwickian sense.

Anyway, Henry Hassel started home from his office in the Psychotic Psenter early one afternoon, strolling through the Physical Culture arcade. It is not true that he did this to leer at the nude coeds practicing Arcane Eurythmies; rather, Hassel liked to admire the trophies displayed in the arcade in memory of great Unknown teams which had won the sort of championships that Unknown teams win—in sports like Strabismus, Occlusion, and Botulism. (Hassel had been Frambesia singles champion three years running.) He arrived home uplifted, and burst gaily into the house to discover his wife in the arms of a man.

There she was, a lovely woman of thirty-five, with smoky red hair and almond eyes, being heartily embraced by a person whose pockets were stuffed with pamphlets, microchemical apparatus, and a patella-reflex hammer—a typical campus character of U.U., in fact. The embrace was so concentrated that neither of the offending parties noticed Henry Hassel glaring at them from the hallway.

Now, remember Ampère and Charles and Boltzmann. Hassel weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. He was muscular and uninhibited. It would have been child’s play for him to have dismembered his wife and her lover, and thus simply and directly achieve the goal he desired—the end of his wife’s life. But Henry Hassel was in the genius class; his mind just didn’t operate that way.

Hassel breathed hard, turned and lumbered into his private laboratory like a freight engine. He opened a drawer labeled
DUODENUM
and removed a .45-caliber revolver. He opened other drawers, more interestingly labeled, and assembled apparatus. In exactly seven and one half minutes (such was his rage), he put together a time machine (such was his genius).

Professor Hassel assembled the time machine around him, set the dial for 1902, picked up the revolver and pressed a button. The machine made a noise like defective plumbing and Hassel disappeared. He reappeared in Philadelphia on June 3, 1902, went directly to No. 1218 Walnut Street, a red-brick house with marble steps, and rang the bell. A man who might have passed for the third Smith Brother opened the door and looked at Henry Hassel.

“Mr. Jessup?” Hassel asked in a suffocated voice.

“Yes?”

“You are Mr. Jessup?”

“I am.”

“You will have a son, Edgar? Edgar Allan Jessup—so named because of your regrettable admiration for Poe?”

The third Smith Brother was startled. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I’m not married yet.”

“You will be,” Hassel said angrily. “I have the misfortune to be married to your son’s daughter. Greta. Excuse me.” He raised the revolver and shot his wife’s grandfather-to-be.

“She will have ceased to exist,” Hassel muttered, blowing smoke out of the revolver. “I’ll be a bachelor. I may even be married to somebody else … Good God! Who?”

Hassel waited impatiently for the automatic recall of the time machine to snatch him back to his own laboratory. He rushed into his living room. There was his redheaded wife, still in the arms of a man.

Hassel was thunderstruck.

“So that’s it,” he growled. “A family tradition of faithlessness. Well, we’ll see about that. We have ways and means.” He permitted himself a hollow laugh, returned to his laboratory, and sent himself back to the year 1901, where he shot and killed Emma Hotchkiss, his wife’s maternal grandmother-to-be. He returned to his own home in his own time. There was his redheaded wife, still in the arms of another man.

“But I
know
the old bitch was her grandmother,” Hassel muttered. “You couldn’t miss the resemblance. What the hell’s gone wrong?”

Hassel was confused and dismayed, but not without resources. He went to his study, had difficulty picking up the phone, but finally managed to dial the Malpractice Laboratory. His finger kept oozing out of the dial holes.

“Sam?” he said. “This is Henry.”

“Who?”

“Henry.”

“You’ll have to speak up.”

“Henry Hassel!”

“Oh, good afternoon, Henry.”

“Tell me all about time.”

“Time? Hmmm …” The Simplex-and-Multiplex Computer cleared its throat while it waited for the data circuits to link up. “Ahem. Time. (1) Absolute. (2) Relative. (3) Recurrent. (1) Absolute: period, contingent, duration, diurnity, perpetuity—”

“Sorry, Sam. Wrong request. Go back. I want time, reference to succession of, travel in.”