Michaelmas (2 page)

What a universe of chitterings, Laurent Michaelmas thought. What a cheeping basketry was woven for the world. He thought of Domino, who had begun as a device for talking to his wife without charge. It leaks, he thought wryly. But it doesn't matter if it leaks. The container is so complex it enwraps its own drains. It leaks into itself.

He thought of Nils Hannes Limberg, whose clinic served the severely traumatized of half the world, its free schedule quietly known to be adapted to ability to pay. Rather well known, as of course it had to be. Nils Hannes Limberg, proprietor not only of a massive image of rectitude and research, but also of the more spacious wing of his sana-torium, with its refurbishment and dermal tissue and revital-ization of muscle tone in the great and public. A crusty old man in a shabby suit, bluntly tolerating the gratitude in first wives of shipping cartel owners, grumpily declaring: "I never watch it," when asked if he felt special pride in the long-running élan of Dusty Haverman.
"Warbirds of Time?
A start of a series? Ah, he is the leading player in an enter-tainment! No, I never realized that — on my tables, you know, they do not speak lines."

It was approximately ten minutes since Nils Hannes Limberg, who was a gaunt old man full of liver spots and blue veins, had spoken to the Reuters man in whatever language was most convenient for them. And now 2,000,000,000 waking people had had the opportunity to know what he had said, with more due to awaken to it. No one knew how many computers knew what he had said; no one knew how many microliths strained with it, how many teleprinters shook with it. Who in his right mind would say that something which had spat through so many electron valves, had shaken the hearts of so many junction-junction couplings, so many laser jewels, so many cans of carbon fluids —so many lowly carbon granules, for that matter — was not a colossal factor in the day?

Somewhere in those two billions, torture and ecstasy could be traced directly to those particular vibrations of a speaker cone, to that special dance of electrons through focusing lens and electrostat. Good spirits and bad had been let loose within the systems of those who had heard the news and then left on previous errands, which were now done differ-ently from the way they might have been. The prices of a thousand things went up; everyone's dollar shrank, but the dollars of some were multiplied. Women cried, and intended loves went unconsummated.

Women smiled, and strangers met. Men thrilled, and who knows what happens when a man thrills? Laurent Michaelmas looked out his window, with only a million people or so in his direct line of vision, and the fine hairs were standing up on his arms.

He shook his head and turned back to his terminal. "Disregard all Norwood data beginning with the Reuters item. Do you think Norwood is alive?"

"No. All hope of finding him, alive or dead, is irrational. Every study of the shuttle accident concludes that the fuel explosion raised the temperature of the system well above the flash point of all organic and most inorganic compon-ents. All studies indicate there was no warning before the explosion. All studies indicate no object could have acceler-ated away from the explosion fast enough to outrun it. All of this specifically agrees with UNAC's studies of the escape capsule's acceleration capabilities. Finally, it agrees with my own evaluations for you at the time."

"Norwood became part of an expanding ball of high-temperature gases, correct?"

"Yes."

"So your present estimate that Norwood lives is based purely on the Reuters item."

"Right."

"Why?"

"Common sense."

"Reuters doesn't usually get its facts wrong and never lies. Dr. Limberg did make the statement, and he can't afford to lie. Right?"

"Correct."

Laurent Michaelmas smiled fondly at the machine. The smile was gentle, and genuinely tender.

It was exactly like what can be seen on the faces of two very young children awakening with each other in the morning, not yet out on the nursery floor and wanting the same thing.

"How do you envision Norwood's marvellous resurrection? What has happened to him?"

"I believe his trajectory in the capsule did end somewhere near Limberg's sanatorium. I assume he was gravely injured, if it has taken him all these months to recover even at Dr.

Limberg's hands. Limberg's two prizes are after all for breakthroughs in controlled artificial cellular reproduction and for theoretical work on cellular memory mechanisms. It wouldn't surprise me to learn he practically had to grow Norwood a new body. That sort of reconstitution, based on Limberg's publications over the years, is now nearly within reach of any properly managed medical centre. I would expect Limberg himself to be able to do it now, given his facilities and a patient in high popular esteem. His ego would rise to the occasion like a butterfly to the sun."

"Is Norwood still the same man?"

"Assuming his brain is undamaged, certainly."

"Perfectly capable of leading the Outer Planets expedition after all?"

"Capable, but not likely to. He has missed three months of the countdown. Major Papashvilly must remain in com-mand, so I imagine Colonel Norwood cannot go at all. It would be against Russian practice to promote their cos-monaut to the necessary higher rank until after his success-ful completion of the mission."

"What if something happened to Papashvilly?"

"Essentially the same thing has happened
vis-à-vis
Nor-wood. UNAC would assign the next back-up man, and ..."

Laurent Michaelmas grinned. "Horsefeathers."

There was a moment's pause, and the voice said slowly, consideredly: "You may be right. The popular dynamic would very likely assure Norwood's re-appointment."

Michaelmas smiled coldly. He rubbed the top of his head. "Tell me, are you still confident that no one had deduced our—ah—personal dynamic?"

"Perfectly confident." Domino was shocked at the sugges-tion. "That would require a practically impossible order of integration. And I keep a running check. No one knows that you and I run the world."

"Does anyone know the world is being run?"

"Now, that's another formulation. No one knows what's in the hearts of men. But if anyone's thinking that way, it's never been communicated. Except, just possibly, face to face."

"Which is meaningless until concerted action results. And that would require communication, and you'd pick it up. That's one comfort, anyway." He was again looking out at night-softened Manhattan, which rose like a crystallo-grapher's dream of Atlantis out of a lighted haze. "Probably meaningless," Michaelmas said softly.

There was another silence from the machine. "Tell me..."

"Anything."

"Why do you ask that in connection with your previous set of questions?"

Michaelmas's eyes twinkled as they often did when he found Domino trying to grapple with intuition. But not all of his customary insouciance endured through his reply. "Because we have just discovered that the very great Nils Hannes Limberg is a fraud and a henchman. That is a sad and significant thing. And because Norwood was as dead as yesterday. He was a nice young man with high, special-ized qualifications no higher than those of the man who replaced him, and there was never anything secret or mar-vellous about him or you would have told me long ago. If we could have saved him, we would have. But there's nothing either you or I can do about a stuck valve over the Mediterranean, and frankly I'm just as glad there's some responsibility I don't have to take. If we could have gotten him back at the time, I would have been delighted. But he had a fatal accident, and the world has gone on."

Michaelmas was not smiling at all. "It's no longer Colonel Norwood's time. The dead must not rise—they undermine everything their dying created. Resurrecting Norwood is an attempt to cancel history. I can't allow that, any more than any other human being would. And so all of this is a chal-lenge to me. I was concerned that it might be a deliberate trap."

He turned his face upwards. That brought stars and several planets into his line of vision.

"Something out there's unhappy with history. That means it's unhappy with what I've done.

Something out there is trying to change history. That means it's groping towards me."

Michaelmas scratched his head. "Of course, you say it doesn't know it's got one specific man to contend with. It may think it only has some seven billion people to push around. But one of these days, it'll realize. I'm afraid it's smarter than you and I."

With asperity, Domino said : "Would you like a critique of the nonsequential assumptions in that set? As one example, you have no basis for that final evaluation. Your and my combined intellectual resources—"

"Domino, never try to reason with a man who can see the blade swinging for his head." He cocked that head again, Michaelmas did, and his wide, ugly face was quite elfin. "I'll have to think of something. Afterwards, you can make common sense of it." He began to walk around, his square torso tilted forward from his broad hips. He made funny, soft, explosive humming noises with his mouth and throat, his cheeks throbbing, and the sound of a drum and recorder followed wherever he strolled.

"Well, I think I should be frightened," Michaelmas told Domino as he moved about the kitchen premises preparing his evening meal. The chopped onions simmering in their wine sauce were softening towards a nice degree of tender-ness, but the sauce itself was bubbling too urgently, and might turn gluey. He picked up the pan and shook it gently while passing it back and forth six inches above the flame. The fillet of beef was browning quite well in its own skillet, yielding sensuously as he nudged it with his fork.

"You don't grow an established personality from scratch," Michaelmas said. "An artificial infant, now ... why not? I'll give Limberg that; he could do it. Or he could grow a clone identical with an adult Norwood. But he's never had occa-sion to get tissue from the original, has he? And there's no way to create a grown man with thirty-odd years behind him. Oh, no. That I won't give him. And I tell you he would have had to do it from scratch because Norwood never crashed anywhere near that sanatorium. Strictly speaking, he never crashed at all — he vaporized. So Limberg would have had to build this entire person by retrieving data alone. But I don't think there's any recording system complete enough, or one with Norwood entered in it if there were."

"Norwood and Limberg never met. There is no record of any transmission of Norwood cell samples to any deposi-tory. No present system will permit complete biological and experimental reconstruction from data alone."

"And there you are," Michaelmas said. "Simplest thing in the world." He worked a dab of sauce between thumb and forefinger and then tasted them with satisfaction. He set the pan down on the shut-off burner, put a lid on it, and turned towards the table where the little machine lay with its pilot lamps mostly quiescent but sparkling with reflected room light.

"You don't fake an astronaut," he said to it. "Even in this culture they're unique for the degree to which their response characteristics are known and studied. Limberg wouldn't try to get away with it. He's brought the real Colonel Norwood back to life.
But
he hasn't done it using any of the techniques and discoveries he's announced over the years. Limberg's career, his public image, everything — it's all reduced simply to something useful as a cover for the type of action he's taken now. It really is all very clear, Domino, if you disregard that balderdash about Norwood's surviving the explosion. Think about it, now."

He was patient and encouraging. In the same way, he had often led the tongue-tied and confused through hun-dreds of vivacious interviews, making and wrecking policies and careers before huge audiences.

The reply through the machine was equally patient but without forbearance:

"Doctor Limberg is a first-rate genius —"

Michaelmas smiled shyly and mercilessly but did not in-terrupt.

" — who could not possibly be living a double life. Even given a rate of progress so phenomenal that he could de-velop his overt reputation and still secretly pursue some entirely different line, there are insurmountable practical objections."

"Oh, yeah? Name some." The sauce hissed ebulliently as it made contact with the beef skillet.

A few dextrous turns of Michaelmas's fork enveloped the fillet in just properly glutin-ous flavouring, and then he was able to place his dinner on its warmed, waiting dish and bring it to the place he had laid in the dining aspect. He poured a glassful of wine that had been breathing in its wicker server, and sat down to partake of his meal.

"One," Domino said. "He is a gruff saint, in the manner developed by many world intellectual figures since the communications revolution. The more fiercely he objects to intrusions on his elevated processes of thought and his working methods, the more persistently the news media attempt to discover what he's doing now. One of the stan-dard methods of information tap is to keep careful account of everything shipped to him. You'll recall this is how Science News Service deduced his interest in plasmids from his purchase of olephages. As a direct result, several wise investors in the appropriate manufacturing concerns were rewarded when Limberg made the announcements leading to his earlier prize. Since then, naturally, there are scores of inferential inventories being run on his purchases and wastage. His overt researches account for all of it."

"One of the inventories being yours." Michaelmas chuckled over his fork. "Go on."

"Two. All analyses of the genius personality, however it may be masked, show that this sort of individual cannot be other-directed over any significant period of time. You're hypothesizing that this excellent mind has been participating for years in a gross deception upon the world. This cannot be true. If that had been his original purpose, he would have grown away from it and rebelled catastrophically as his cover career began to assume genuine importance and direction.

You can't oppose a dynamic —and I shouldn't be quoting your own basics back to you," Domino chided, and then went on remorselessly: