Friday (34 page)

The silly questions speeded up. I found myself just getting acquainted with the details of Ming ceramics when a message showed up in my terminal saying that someone in staff wanted to know the relationships between men’s beards, women’s skirts, and the price of gold. I had ceased to wonder at silly questions; around Boss anything can happen. But this one seemed supersilly. Why should there be
any
relationship? Men’s beards did not interest me; they tickle and often are dirty. As for women’s skirts, I knew even less. I have almost never worn skirts. Skirted costumes can be pretty but they aren’t practical for travel and could have gotten me killed three or four times—and when you’re home, what’s wrong with skin? Or as near as local custom permits.

But I had learned not to ignore questions merely because they were obvious nonsense; I tackled this one by calling up all the data I could, including punching out some most unlikely association chains. I then told the machine to tabulate all retrieved data by categories.

Durned if I didn’t begin to find connections!

As more data accumulated I found that the only way I could see all of it was to tell the computer to plot and display a three-dimensional graph—and that looked so promising that I told it to convert to holographic in color. Beautiful! I did not know why these three variables fitted together but they did. I spent the rest of that day changing scales, X versus Y versus Z in various combinations—magnifying, shrinking, rotating, looking for minor cycloid relations under the obvious gross ones…and noticed a shallow double sinusoidal hump that kept showing up as I rotated the holo—and suddenly, for no reason I can assign, I decided to subtract the double sunspot curve.

Eureka! As precise and necessary as a Ming vase! Before dinnertime I had the equation, just one line that encompassed all the silly data I had spent five days dragging out of the terminal. I punched the chief of staff’s call and recorded that one-line equation, plus definitions of variables. I added no comment, no discussion; I wanted to force the faceless joker to ask for my opinions.

I got the same answer back—i.e., none.

I fiddled for most of a day, waiting, and proving to myself that I could retrieve a group picture from any year and, through looking only at male faces and female legs, make close guesses concerning the price of gold (falling or rising), the time of that picture relative to the double sunspot cycle, and—shortly and most surprising—whether the political structure was falling apart or consolidating.

My terminal chimed. No face. No pat on the back. Just a displayed message: “Operations requests soonest depth analysis of possibility that plague epidemics of sixth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries resulted from political conspiracy.”

Fooey! I had wandered into a funny farm and was locked up with the inmates.

Oh, well! The question was so complex that I might be left alone a long time while I studied it. That suited me; I had grown addicted to the possibilities of a terminal of a major computer hooked into a world research net—I felt like Little Jack Horner.

I started by listing as many subjects as possible by free association: plague, epidemiology, fleas, rats, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Newton, conspiracies, Guy Fawkes, Freemasonry, Illuminati, OTO, Rosicrucians, Kennedy, Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Pearl Harbor, Green Bowlers, Spanish influenza, pest control, etc.

In three days my list of possibly related subjects was ten times as long.

In a week I knew that one lifetime was not nearly long enough to study in depth all of my list. But I had been told to tackle the subject so I started in—but I placed my own meaning on “soonest”—i.e., I would study conscientiously at least fifty hours per week but when and how I wished and with no cramming or rawhiding…unless somebody came along and explained to me why I should work harder or differently.

This went on for weeks.

I was wakened in the middle of the night by my terminal—override alarm; I had shut it off as usual when I went to bed (alone, I don’t recall why). I answered sleepily, “All right, all right! Speak up, and it had better be good.”

No picture. Boss’s voice said, “Friday, when will the next major Black Death epidemic occur?”

I answered, “Three years from now. April. Starting in Bombay and spreading worldwide at once. Spreading off planet at first transport.”

“Thank you. Good night.”

I dropped my head to the pillow and went right back to sleep.

I woke up at seven hundred as usual, held still for several moments and thought, while I grew colder and colder—decided that I really had heard from Boss in the night and really had given him that preposterous answer.

So bite the bullet, Friday, and climb the Thirteen Steps. I punched “local one.” “Friday here, Boss. About what I told you in the night. I plead temporary insanity.”

“Nonsense. See me at ten-fifteen.”

I was tempted to spend the next three hours in lotus, chanting my beads. But I have a deep conviction that one should not attend even the End of the World without a good breakfast…and my decision was justified as the special that morning was fresh figs with cream, corned-beef hash with poached eggs, and English muffins with Knott’s Berry Farm orange marmalade. Fresh milk. Colombian high-altitude coffee. That so improved things that I spent an hour trying to find a mathematical relationship between the past history of plague and the date that had popped into my sleep-drenched mind. I did not find one but was beginning to see some shape to the curve when the terminal gave me a three-minute warning I had punched in.

I had refrained from having my hair cut and my neck shaved but otherwise I was ready. I walked in on the tick. “Friday reporting, sir.”

“Sit down. Why Bombay? I would think that Calcutta would be a more likely center.”

“It might have something to do with long-range weather forecasts and the monsoons. Fleas can’t stand hot, dry weather. Eighty percent of a flea’s body mass is water and, if the percentage drops below sixty, the flea dies. So hot, dry weather will stop or prevent an epidemic. But, Boss, the whole thing is nonsense. You woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me a silly question and I gave you a silly answer without really waking up. I probably pulled it out of a dream. I’ve been having nightmares about the Black Death and there really was a bad epidemic that started in Bombay. Eighteen ninety-six and following.”

“Not as bad as the Hong Kong phase of it three years later. Friday, the analytical section of Operations says that the next Black Death epidemic won’t start until a year later than your prediction. And not Bombay. Djakarta and Ho Chi Minh City.”

“That’s preposterous!” I stopped abruptly. “Sorry, sir, I guess I was back in that nightmare. Boss, can’t I study something pleasanter than fleas and rats and Black Death? It’s ruining my sleep.”

“You may. You are through studying plague—”

“Hooray!”

“—other than to whatever extent your intellectual curiosity causes you to tidy up any loose ends. The matter now goes to Operations for action. But action will be based on your prediction, not on that of the mathematical analysts.”

“I have to say it again. My prediction is nonsense.”

“Friday, your greatest weakness is lack of awareness of your true strength. Wouldn’t we look silly if we depended on the professional analysts but the outbreak was one year earlier, as you predicted? Catastrophe. But to be a year early in taking prophylactic measures does no harm.”

“Are we going to try to stop it?” (People have been fighting rats and fleas throughout history. So far, the rats and fleas are ahead.)

“Heavens, no! In the second place, the contract would be too big for this organization. But in the first place I do not accept contracts that I cannot fulfill; this is one such. In the third place, from the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which overcrowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness. Plague is a nasty death but a quick one. Starvation also is a nasty death…but a very slow one.”

Boss grimaced, then continued. “This organization will limit itself to the problem of keeping
Pasteurella pestis
from leaving this planet. How will we do this? Answer at once.”

(Ridiculous! Any government public health department, faced with such a question, would set up a blue-ribbon study group, insist on ample research funds, and schedule a reasonable time—five years or more—for orderly scientific investigation.) I answered at once, “Explode them.”

“The space colonies? That seems a drastic solution.”

“No, the fleas. Back during the global wars of the twentieth century somebody discovered that you could kill off fleas and lice by taking them up to high altitude. They explode. About five kilometers as I recall but it can be looked up and checked by experiment. I thought of it because I noticed that Beanstalk Station on Mount Kenya was above the critical altitude—and almost all space traffic these days goes up the Beanstalk. Then there is the simple method of heat and dryness—works but not as fast. But the key to it, Boss, is
absolutely no exceptions
. Just one case of diplomatic immunity or one VIP allowed to skip the routines and you’ve had it. One lapdog. One gerbil. One shipment of laboratory mice. If it took the pneumonic form, Ell-Five would be a ghost town in a week. Or Luna City.”

“If I did not have other work for you, I would put you in charge. How about rats?”

“I don’t want the job; I’m sick of the subject. Boss, killing a rat is no problem. Stuff it into a sack. Beat the sack with an ax. Then shoot it. Then drown it. Burn the sack with the dead rat in it. Meanwhile its mate has raised another litter of pups and you now have a dozen rats to replace it. Boss, all we’ve ever been able to do with rats is fight them to a draw. We never win. If we let up for a moment the rats pull ahead.” I added sourly, “I think they’re the second team.” This plague assignment had depressed me.

“Elucidate.”

“If
Homo sapiens
doesn’t make it—he keeps trying to kill himself off—there are the rats, ready to take over.”

“Piffle. Soft-headed nonsense. Friday, you overstress the human will to die. We have had the means to commit racial suicide for generations now and those means are and have been in many hands. We have not done so. In the second place, to replace us, rats would have to grow enormously larger skulls, develop bodies to support them, learn to walk on two feet, develop their front paws into delicate manipulative organs—and grow more cortex to control all this. To
replace
man another breed must
become
man. Bah. Forget it. Before we leave the subject of plague, what conclusions did you reach concerning the conspiracy theory?”

“The notion is silly. You specified sixth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries…and that means sailing ships or caravans and no knowledge of bacteriology. So here we have the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu in his hideaway raising a million rats and the rats are infested with fleas—easy. Rats and fleas are infected with the bacillus—possible even without theory. But how does he hit his target city? By ship? In a few days all the million rats will be dead and so would be the crew. Even harder to do it overland. To make such a conspiracy work in those centuries would require modern science and a largish time machine. Boss, who thought up that silly question?”

“I did.”

“I thought it had your skid to it. Why?”

“It caused you to study the subject with a much wider approach than you otherwise would have given it, did it not?”

“Uh…” I had spent much more time studying relevant political history than I had spent studying the disease itself. “I suppose so.”

“You know so.”

“Well, yes. Boss, there ain’t no such animal as a well-documented conspiracy. Or sometimes too well documented but the documents contradict each other. If a conspiracy happened quite some time ago, a generation or longer, it becomes impossible to establish the truth. Have you ever heard of a man named John F. Kennedy?”

“Yes. Chief of state in the middle twentieth century of the Federation then occupying the land between Canada—British Canada and Québec—and the Kingdom of Mexico. He was assassinated.”

“That’s the man. Killed in front of hundreds of witnesses and every aspect, before, during, and after, heavily documented. All that mountain of evidence adds up to is this: Nobody knows who shot him, how many shot him, how many times he was shot, who did it, why it was done, and who was involved in the conspiracy if there was a conspiracy. It isn’t even possible to say whether the murder plot was foreign or domestic. Boss, if it is impossible to untangle one that recent and that thoroughly investigated, what chance is there of figuring out the details of the conspiracy that did in Gaius Iulius Caesar? Or Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot? All that can truthfully be said is that the people who come out on top write the official versions found in the history books, history that is no more honest than is autobiography.”

“Friday, autobiography is usually honest.”

“Huh! Boss, what have you been smoking?”

“That will do. Autobiography is usually honest but it is never truthful.”

“I missed a turn.”

“Think about it. Friday, I can’t spend more time on you today; you chatter too much and change the subject. Hold your tongue while I say some things. You are now permanently on staff work. You are getting older; no doubt your reflexes are a touch slower. I will not again risk you in field work—”

“I’m not complaining!”

“Pipe down. —But you must not get swivel-chair spread. Spend less time at the console, more time in exercise; the day will come when your enhanced reflexes will again save your life. And possibly the lives of others. In the meantime give thought to the day when you will have to shape your life unassisted. You should leave this planet; for you there is nothing here. The Balkanization of North America ended the last chance of reversing the decay of the Renaissance Civilization. So you should think about off-planet possibilities not only in the solar system but elsewhere—planets ranging from extremely primitive to well developed. Investigate for each the cost and the advantages of migrating there. You will need money; do you want my agents to collect the money of which you were cheated in New Zealand?”