Alternating Currents (6 page)

‘Busy doing what, Gunner?’

‘Busy trying to think of what I want to see them for.’ And I turned off the viewphone, got up and walked out, leaving the others gobbling into emptiness behind me. What I needed was a long, long walk, and I took it.

~ * ~

When I was tired of walking I went to the office and evicted Haber from his private quarters. I kept him standing by what had once been his own desk while I checked with Candace and found that she had made all my appointments for that evening, then I told him to get lost. ‘And thanks,’ I said.

He paused on his way to the door. ‘For what, Gunner?’

‘For a very nice office to kill time in.’ I waved at the furnishings. ‘I wondered what you’d spent fifty grand on when I saw the invoices in the Chicago office, Haber, and I admit I thought there might have been a little padding. But I was wrong.’

He said woundedly: ‘Gunner, boy! I wouldn’t do anything like that.’

‘I believe you. Wait a minute.’ I thought for a second, then told him to send in some of the technical people and not to let anybody, repeat anybody, disturb me for any purpose whatever. I scared him good, too. He left a shaken man, a little angry, a little admiring, a little excited inside, I think, at the prospect of seeing how the great man would get himself out of this one. Meanwhile the great man talked briefly to the technicians, took a ten minute nap, drank the Martinis out of his dinner tray and pitched the rest of it in the dispos-all.

Then, as I had nearly an hour before the appointments Candace had set up for me, I scrounged around fat-cat Haber’s office to see what entertainment it offered.

There were his files. I glanced at them and forgot them; there was nothing about the hoarded memoranda that interested me, not even for gossip. There were books on his shelf. But I did not care to disturb the patina of dust that even the cleaning machines had not been able to touch. There was his private bar, and the collection of photographs in the end compartment of his desk drawer.

It looked like very dull times waiting, until the studio men reported in that they had completed their arrangements at my request, and the 3-V tape-effects monitor could now be controlled by remote from my desk, and then I knew I had a pleasant way of killing any amount of time.

Have you ever played with the console of a 3-V monitor, backed by a library of tape-effect strips? It is very much like being God.

All that the machine does is take the stored videotapes that are in its files and play them back. But it also manipulates size and perspective or superimposes one over another ... so that you can, as I in fact have done, put the living person of someone you don’t like in a position embarrassing to him, and project it on a montage screen so that only a studio tech can find the dots on the pattern where the override betrays its presence.

Obviously, this is a way out of almost any propaganda difficulty, since it is child’s play to make up any event you like and give it the seeming of reality.

Of course, everybody knows it can be done. So the evidence of one’s own eyes is no longer quite enough, even for a voter. And the laws can cut you down. I had thought of whomping up some frightful shame around Connick, for example. But it wouldn’t work; no matter when I did it there would still be time for the other side to spread the word of an electoral fraud, and a hoax of this magnitude would make its own way on to the front pages. So I used the machine for something much more interesting to me. I used it as a toy.

I started by dialling the lunar base at Aristarchus for background, found a corps of Rocketmen marching off in the long lunar step, patched my own face on to one of the helmeted figures and zoomed in and out with the imaginary camera, watching R3/C Odin Gunnarsen as a boy of nineteen, scared witless but doing his job. He was a pretty nice boy, I thought objectively, and wondered what had gone wrong with him later. I abandoned that and sought for other amusements. I found Candace’s images on tape in the files and pleasured myself with her for a time. Her open, friendly face gave some dignity to the fantastic bodies of half a dozen 3-V strippers in the files; but I stopped that child’s game.

I looked for a larger scope. I spread the whole panoply of the heavens across the screen of die tape machine. I sought out the crook of the Big Dipper’s handle, traced its arc across half the heavens until I located orange Arcturus. Then I zoomed in on the star, as littler stars grew larger and hurtled out of range around it, sought its seventy grey-green planets and located number five among them, the watery world that Knafti had spawned upon. I bade the computing mind inside the tape machine reconstruct the events of the orbit bombing for me, and watched hell-bombs splash enormous mushrooms of poisonous foam into the Arcturan sky, whipping the island cities with tidal waves and drowning them in death.

Then I destroyed the whole planet. I turned Arcturus into a nova and watched the hot driven gases sphere out to embrace the planet, boil its seas, slag its cities ... and found myself sweating. I ordered another drink from die dispenser and switched the machine off. And then I became aware that the pale blue light over the door to Haber’s office was glowing insistently. It was time; my visitors had arrived.

~ * ~

Connick had brought his kids along, three of them; the lover from Donnegan General had brought two more; Knafti and Colonel Peyroles had Timmy Brown. ‘Welcome to Romper Room,’ I said. ‘They’re making lynch mobs young this year.’

They all yelled at me at once - or all but Knafti, whose tweeting chitter just didn’t have the volume to compete. I listened, and when they showed signs of calming down I reached into fat-cat Haber’s booze drawer and poured myself a stiff one and said, ‘All right, which of you creeps wants first crack?’ And they boiled up again while I drank my drink. All of them, except Candace Harmon, who only stood by the door and looked at me.

So I said, ‘All right, Connick, you first. Are you going to make me spread it all over the newscasts that you had a dishonourable discharge? ... And by the way, maybe you’d like to meet my assistant blackmailer; Miss Harmon over there dug up the dirt on you.’

Her boyfriend yelped, but Candace just went on looking. I didn’t look back, but kept my eyes on Connick. He squinted his eyes, put his hands in his pockets and said, with considerable self-restraint, ‘You know I was only seventeen years old when that happened.’

‘Oh, sure. I know more. You had a nervous breakdown the year after your discharge, space cafard, as they call it on the soapies. Yellow fever is what we called it on the Moon.’

He glanced quickly at his kids, the two that were his own and the one that was not, and said rapidly: ‘You know I could have had that DD reversed—‘

‘But you didn’t. The significant fact isn’t that you deserted. The significant fact is that you were loopy. And, I’d say, still are.’

Timmy Brown stuttered: ‘One
moment.
I, Knafti, have asked that you cease—’

But Connick brushed him aside. “Why, Gunnarsen?’

‘Because I intend to win this election. I don’t care what it costs - especially what it costs you.’

‘But, I, Knafti, have instructed—’ That was Timmy Brown trying again.

‘The Armistice Commission issued orders—’ That was Peyroles.

‘I don’t know which is worse, you or the bugs!’ And that was Candace’s little friend from the hospital, and they all were talking at once again. Even Knafti came dragging towards me on his golden slug’s belly, chirruping and hooting, and Timmy Brown was actually weeping as he tried to tell me I was wrong, I had to stop, the whole thing was against orders and why wouldn’t I
desist
?

I shouted: ‘Shut up, all of you!’

They didn’t, but the volume level dropped minutely. I rode over it: ‘What the hell do I care what any of you want? I’m paid to do a job. My job is to make people act a certain way. I do it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be paid to make them act the opposite way, and I’ll do that, too. Anyway, who the hell are you to order me around? A stinkbug like you, Knafti? A GI quack like yourself, Whitling? Or you, Connick. A—’

‘A candidate for public office,’ he said clearly. And I give him much mana; he didn’t shout, but he talked right over me. ‘And as such I have an obligation—’

But I out-yelled him anyway. ‘Candidate! You’re a candidate right up till the minute I tell the voters you’re a nut, Connick. And then you’re dead! And I will tell them, I promise, if—’

I didn’t get a chance to finish that sentence, because all three of Connick’s kids were diving at me, his own two and the other one. They sent papers flying off Haber’s desk and smashed his sand-crystal decanter; but they didn’t get to my throat, where they clearly were aimed, because Connick and Timmy Brown dragged them back. Not easily.

I allowed myself a sneer. ‘And what does that prove? Your kids like you, I admit - even the one from Mars. The one that Knafti’s people used for vivisection - that Knafti himself worked over, likely as not. Nice picture, right? Your bug-buddy there, killing babies, destroying kids ... or didn’t you know that Knafti himself was one of the boss bugs on the baby-killing project?’

Timmy Brown shrieked wildly, ‘You don’t know what you are doing. It was not Knafti’s fault at
all!’
His ashen face was haggard, his rotten teeth bared in a grimace. And he was weeping.

~ * ~

If you apply heat to a single molecule it will take off like a torn with a spark under his tail, but you cannot say where it will go. If you heat a dozen molecules they will fling out in all directions, but you still do not know which directions they will be. If, however, you heat a few billion, about as many as are in a thimble of dilute gas, you know where they will go: they will expand. Mass action. You can’t tell what a single molecule may do - call it the molecule’s free will, if you like -but masses obey mass laws. Masses of anything; even so small a mass as the growling troop that confronted me in Haber’s office. I let them yell, and all the yelling was at me. Even Candace was showing the frown and the darkening of the eyes and the working of the lips, although she watched me as silently and steadily as ever.

Connick brought it to a head: ‘All
right,
everybody,’ he yelled, ‘now listen to me! Let’s get this thing straightened out!’

He stood up, a child gripped by each elbow and the third, the youngest, trapped between him and the door. He looked at me with such loathing that I could feel it - and didn’t like it, either, although it was no more than I had expected, and he said: ‘It’s true. Sammy, here, was one of the kids from Mars. Maybe that has made me think things I shouldn’t have thought - he’s my kid now, and when I think of those stink-bugs cutting—’

He stopped himself and turned to Knafti. ‘Well, I see something. A man who would do a thing like that would be a fiend. I’d cut his heart out with my bare hands. But you aren’t a man.’

Grimly he let go of the kids and strode towards Knafti. ‘I can’t forgive you. God help me, it isn’t possible. But I can’t blame you - exactly - any more than I can blame lightning for striking my house. I think I was wrong. Maybe I’m wrong now. But - I don’t know what you people do - I’d like to shake your hand. Or whatever the hell it is you’ve got there. I’ve been thinking of you as a perverted murderer and a filthy animal, but I’ll tell you right now, I’d rather work together with you - for your base, for peace, for whatever we can get together on - than with some human beings in this room!’

I didn’t stay to watch the tender scene that followed.

I didn’t have to, since the cameras and tape recorders that the studio people had activated for me behind every one-way mirror in the room would be watching for me. I could only hope they had not missed a single word or scream, because I didn’t think I could do that scene over again.

I opened the door quietly and left. And as I was going I caught the littlest Connick kid sneaking past me, headed for the 3-V set in the waiting room, and snaked out an arm to stop him. ‘Stinker!’ he hissed. ‘Rat fink!’

‘You may be right, I told him, ‘but go back and keep your father company. You’re in on living history today.’

“Nuts! I always watch
Dr Zhivago
on Monday nights, and it’s on in five minutes and—’

‘Not tonight it isn’t, son. You can hold that against me, too. We preempted the time for a different show entirely.’

I escorted him back into the room, closed the door, picked up my coat and left.

~ * ~

Candace was waiting for me with the car. She was driving it herself.

‘Will I make the nine-thirty flight?’ I asked.

‘Sure, Gunner.’ She steered on to the autotraffic lane, put the car on servo and dialled the scatport, then sat back and lit a cigarette for each of us. I took it and looked morosely out the window.

Down below us, on the slow-traffic level, we were passing a torchlight parade, with floats and glee clubs and free beer at the major pedestrian intersections. I opened the glove compartment and took out field glasses, looked through them—

‘Oh, you don’t have to check up, Gunner. I took care of it. They’re all plugging the programme.’

‘I see they are.’ Not only were the marchers carrying streamers that advertised our present show, that was now already beginning to be on the air, but the floats carried projection screens and amplifiers. You couldn’t look anywhere in the procession without seeing Knafti, huge and hideous in his gold carapace, clutching the children and protecting them against the attack of that monster from another planet, me. The studio people had done a splendid job of splicing in no time at all. The whole scene was there on camera, as real as I had just lived it.