The Lighter Side (36 page)

He nodded. "I see." That's all he said. Then he left.

Now I'm just sitting here. I don't know what to do next—what to say. There's a lot to this—and in a way, there's nothing. I got to think about it, dope it out. There's got to be something I can do—but what?

The machine didn't say much; they took me down to the sub-vault where the big voice panel is, where the primary data's fed in, and let me hear for myself. It didn't give any explanations; it just told me.

Funny; in a way it was like something I've always known, but when you hear FATE come right out and say it, it's different:

When I die, the world ends.

A light rain spattered against the bubble-canopy of the helicar, obscuring the view of the terrain below. Chester W. Chester IV set the controls on HOVER and pressed his nose against the cold plastic, peering down at the brown tents and yellow-painted vehicles of the Intercontinental Wowser Wonder Shows, drab against the spread of gray-green meadow. To the left, the big top bellied wetly under a gusty wind; next to it, Chester could make out the tiny figures of roustabouts double-pegging the long menagerie tent. Along the deserted midway, sodden pennants dangled cheerlessly.

Chester sighed and tilted the heli in a long slant toward the open lot behind the side-show top, settled it in beside a heavy, old-model machine featuring paisley print curtains at the small square windows lining the clumsy fuselage. He climbed out, squelched across wet turf, and thumped at the door set in the side of the converted cargo heli. Somewhere, a calliope groaned out a dismal tune.

"Hey," someone called. Chester turned. A man in wet coveralls thrust his head from a nearby vehicle. "If you're looking for Mr. Mulvihill, he's over on the front door."

Chester grunted and turned up the collar of his conservatively cut pale lavender sports jacket, thumbing the heat control up to medium. He made his way across the lot, bucking the gusty wind, wrinkling his nose at the heavy animal stink from the menagerie, and squeezed past a plastic panel into the midway. On a low stand under a striped canopy, a broad, tall man with fierce red hair, a gigantic mustache and a checkered suit leaned against a supporting pole, picking his teeth. At sight of Chester, he straightened, flipped up a gold-headed cane and boomed, "You're just in time, friend. Plenty of seating on the inside for the most astounding, amazing, fantastic, weird and startling galaxy of fantasy and—"

"Don't waste the spiel, Case," Chester cut in, coming up. "It's just me."

"Chester!" the redheaded man called. He stepped down, grinning widely, and slapped Chester heartily on the back. "What brings you out to the lot?" He gripped Chester's flaccid hand and pumped it. "By golly, why didn't you let me know?"

"Case, I—"

"Sorry about this weather; Southwestern Control gave me to understand they were holding this rain off until four a.m. tomorrow."

"Case, there's something—"

"I called them and raised hell; they say they'll shut it down about three. Meanwhile—well, things are pretty slow, I'm afraid, Chester. The marks aren't what they used to be. A little drizzle and they sit home huddled up to their Tri-D sets."

"Yes, the place isn't precisely milling with customers," Chester agreed. "But what I—"

"I'd even welcome a few lot lice standing around today," Case said, "just to relieve the deserted look."

"Hey, Case," a hoarse voice bellowed. "We got troubles over at the cookhouse. Looks like a blow-down if we don't get her guyed-out in a hurry."

"Oh-oh. Come on, Chester." Case set off at a run.

"But, Case," Chester called, then followed, splashing through the rain that was now driving hard, drumming against the tops with a sound like rolling thunder.

Half an hour later, in the warmth of Case's quarters, Chester cupped a mug of hot coffee in his hands and edged closer to the electronic logs in the artificial fireplace.

"Sorry about those blisters, Chester," Case said, pulling off his wet shirt and detaching the sodden false mustache. "Not much of a welcome for a visiting owner—" He broke off, following Chester's gaze to the tiger-striped single shoulder strap crossing his chest.

"Oh, this," Case said, fingering the hairy material. "This isn't my usual underwear, Chester. I've been filling in for the strong man the last few days."

Chester nodded toward a corner of the room. "Duck-pins," he said. "Fire-juggling gear. Whatchamacallum shoes for wire-walking. A balancing pole." He dipped his fingers into a pot of greasy paste. "Clown white," he said. "What is this, Case, a one-man show? It looks as though you're handling half the acts personally."

"Well, Chester, I've been helping out here and there—"

"Even driving your own tent pegs. I take it the big break you were predicting last time I saw you didn't materialize."

"Just wait till spring," Case said, toweling his head vigorously. "We'll come back strong, Chester."

Chester shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Case."

Case froze in mid-stroke. "What do you mean, Chester? Why, the Wowser Wonder Shows are still the greatest old-fashioned outdoor attraction on earth."

"The
only
outdoor attraction, you mean. And I'm dubious about the word 'attraction.' But what I came to talk to you about is Great-grandfather's will."

"Why, Chester, you know folks are still fascinated by the traditional lure of the circus. As soon as the novelty of Tri-D wears off—"

"Case," Chester said gently, "my middle name is Wowser, remember? You don't have to sell me. And color Tri-D has been around for a long, long time. But Great-grandfather's will changes things."

Case brightened. "Did the old boy leave you anything?"

Chester nodded. "I'm the sole heir."

Case gaped, then let out a whoop. "Chester, you old son-of-a-gun! You know, you almost had me worried with that glum act you were putting on. And you a guy that's just inherited a fortune!"

Chester sighed and lit up a Chanel dope stick. "The bequest consists of a hundred acres of rolling green lawn surrounding a fifty-room neo-Victorian eyesore overflowing with Great-grandfather's idea of stylish décor. Some fortune."

"Your great-grandpop must have been quite a boy, Chester. I guess he owned half of Winchester County a hundred years ago. Now you can bail out the show, and—"

"Great-grandfather was an eccentric of the worst stripe," Chester said shortly. "He never invested a cent in the welfare of his descendants."

"His descendant, you mean. Namely, Chester W. Chester IV. Still, even if you don't admire the place, Chester, you can always sell it for enough to put the show on its feet."

Chester shook his head. "He was too clever for us—which is the only reason the place still remains in the family, more or less. The estate was so snarled up that, with the backlog in the courts, it's taken four generations to straighten it out."

"Still, now that they've decided you're the legal heir—"

"There's the little matter of back taxes—about a million credits worth, give or take a few hundred thousand. I don't get possession until I pay—in full."

"You, Chester? Except for the circus, you haven't got the proverbial pot or a disposal unit to throw it into."

"True." Chester sighed. "Therefore, the old place will be auctioned off to the local junk dealers. It's built of genuine natural wood and actual metallic steel, you know. Scrapping it will cover the bulk of the tax bill."

"Well, it's too bad you won't get rich—but at least we won't be any worse off then we were. We've still got the show—"

Chester shook his head. "I said the
bulk
of the tax bill, not all of it. By selling off the circus stock and equipment, I can just about cover the rest."

"Chester! You're not serious . . . ?"

"What else can I do? It's pay up or off to solitary confinement."

"But the circus, Chester: it's at least been paying you a living—until lately, anyway. And what about Jo-Jo and Paddy and Madam Baloon and all the rest of the crowd? What about tradition?"

"It's an old Chester family tradition that we never go to jail if we can help it—even for a harmless prank like income-tax fraud. I'm sorry, Case, but it looks as though the Wowser Wonder Shows fold."

"Hold on, Chester. I'll bet the antiques in the house alone would bring in the kind of money we need. Neo-Victorian is pretty rare stuff."

"I wonder if you've ever seen any neo-Victorian? Items like a TV set in the shape of a crouching vulture, or a water closet built to look like a skull with gaping jaws. Not what you'd call aesthetic. And I can't sell so much as a single patented combination nose-picker and pimple-popper till I've paid every credit of that tax bill."

"Is that all there is in the place?" Case eased a squat bottle and two glasses from a cupboard.

"Unhappily, no. Half the rooms and all the cellars are filled with my revered ancestor's invention."

The bottle gurgled. Case capped it and pushed a glass across to Chester. "What invention?"

"The old gentleman called it a Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator. G.N.E. for short. He made his money in computer components, you know. He was fascinated by computers, and he felt they had tremendous unrealized possibilities. Of course, that was before Crmblznski's Limit was discovered. Great-grandfather was convinced that a machine with sufficiently extensive memory banks, adequately cross-connected and supplied with a vast store of data, would be capable of performing prodigious intellectual feats simply by discovering and exploring relationships among apparently unrelated facts."

"This Crmblznski's Limit. That's where it says if you go beyond a certain point with complications, you blow your transistors, right?"

"Yes. But of course Great-grandfather was unaware of the limitations. He felt that if you fed to the machine all known data—say, on human taste reactions to food, for example—then added all existing recipes, complete specifications on edible substances, the cooking techniques of the chefs of all nations, then the computer would produce unique recipes, superior to anything ever devised before. Or you could introduce all available data on a subject which has baffled science—such as magnetism, or Psi-functions, or the trans-Pluto distress signal—and the computer would evolve the likeliest hypothesis to cover the facts."

"Ummm. Didn't he ever try it out and discover Crmblznski's Limit for himself?"

"Oh, he never progressed that far. First, you see, it was necessary to set up the memory banks, then to work out a method of coding types of information that no one had ever coded before—for example, smells and emotions and subjective judgments. Methods had to be worked out for the acquisition of tapes of everything ever recorded—in every field. He worked with the Library of Congress and the British Museum and with newspapers and book publishers and universities. Unhappily he overlooked the time element. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life at the task of coding. He spent all the cash he'd ever made on reducing all human knowledge to coded tapes and feeding them to the memory banks."

"Say," Case said, "there might be something in that. We could run a reference service. Ask the machine anything, it answers."

"You can do that in the public library."

"Yeah," Case admitted. "Anyway, the whole thing's probably rusted out by now."

"No, Great-grandfather did set up a trust fund to keep the information flowing in. The Government has kept it in working order; it's Government property in a way. Since it was running when they took it over—digesting daily newspapers, novels, scientific journals and what not—they've allowed it to continue."

Chester sighed. "Yes," he went on, "the old computer should be fully up to date. All the latest facts on the Martian ruins, the
Homo Protanthropus
remains the Mediterranean Drainage Commission turned up, new finds in biogenics, nucleonics, geriatrics, hypnotics, everything." Chester sighed again. "Biggest idiot savant in the world. It knows everything and doesn't know what to do with it."

"How long since you saw it work, Chester?"

"Work? Why, never. Coding and storing information is one thing, Case; performing the feats that Great-grandfather expected is another."

"You mean nobody's ever really tried it?"

"In view of Crmblznski's Limit, why should anyone bother?"

Case finished his drink and rose. "Things are going to be quiet around here for the rest of the afternoon. Let's you and me take a run out to the place, Chester. I think we ought to take a look at this thing. There's got to be some way to save the show."

Two hours later, under a bright sun, Chester settled the heli gently onto a patch of velvety grass surrounded by varicolored tulips directly before the ornately decorated portico of the old house. The two men rode the balustraded escalator to the broad verandah, stepped off under a carved dinosaur with fluorescent eyes. The porter chimed softly as the door slid open. Inside, light filtering through stained-plastic panels depicting traditional service-station and supermarket scenes bathed the cavernous entry hall in an amber glow.

Case looked around at the plastic alligator-hide hangings, the beaded glass floor, the ostrich-feather chandeliers, the zircon doorknobs.

"I see why neo-Victorian stuff is rare," he said. "It was all burned by enraged mobs as soon as they got a look at it."

"Great-grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled
Rush Hour at the Insemomat
. "I told you he was eccentric."

"Where's the invention?"

"The central panel's down in the wine cellar. The old gentleman used to spend a lot of time down there."

Case followed Chester along a dark red corridor lighted by a green glare strip, into a small elevator. "I haven't been down here since I was a child," Chester said. "The Internal Revenue people occasionally permitted the family in to look around. My pater always brought me down here to look at the computer, while he inspected the wine stocks."