With thee conversing I forget all time.
All seasons and their change; all please alike.—John Milton, Paradise Lost
"What the hell kind of gun was that?"
It wasn't the first thing I asked. The first was, "How is Arethusa?" and I couldn't get a really good breath into my chest until I heard the answer, "She'll be just fine, I promise." But it was the second question.
We were alone in Doctor Kate's surgery at the time. Nonetheless Lady Sally McGee took time answering. "A hand laser," she admitted finally.
"Bullshit," I snarled, knowing it was not. My side was hurting a great deal, and it was my own fault for refusing the painkiller she had offered me when I woke, and I was giving consideration to becoming as violently pissed off as a post-op patient can be. I had a lot of anger built up, and what seemed like a perfectly good reason to take some of it out on her. She had been instrumental in risking and then saving my life; I wasn't sure just then which was more unforgivable. "I know a lot more about weapons than some mercs, especially esoteric weapons. Call it a hobby. And I am absolutely certain not even the Joint Chiefs or the Politburo could build a laser powerful enough to boil a man's brain in under a second, that would fit in anything smaller than a van."
"But you saw it with your own eyes, did you not? Didn't I promise to believe in a damned ghost on the same evidence? If it wasn't a laser pistol, what was it?"
"I never said it wasn't," I told her. "What I said was 'Bullshit,' and maybe I did get that wrong. Maybe what I meant to say was 'Chickenshit.'"
Did you ever see somebody who wanted to frown but wasn't sure she should? It's an expression only a Raffalli could really enjoy. But I didn't hate it, as I should have. I was steamed. "Speak plainly, Joe."
"I will if you will," I taunted. "After what I've been through in your service, don't you think maybe you owe me the truth?"
Maybe it had been a long time since anybody had caught her on a spot that raw. I started to lose steam when I saw her expression. But I couldn't quite make myself take the question back.
Finally she reached her decision. "It is not a kind of truth that can be 'owed' to someone—in the way that I can now give you my solemn oath that I will never tell another living soul your birth name. It is not a kind of truth that is mine, to give as a gift to anyone, no matter how great a favor they do me. In the military sense, you do not have adequate Need To Know." She sighed. "But I find I have adequate need, and justification, to tell you—and now is as good a time as any, I suppose." She got up from her chair and began to pace. "But I do owe you this much: I will warn you first. If I tell you the truth you want, I will be recruiting you—irrevocably—into a war that will make this last skirmish with Raffalli seem as insignificant as any other knife fight."
"Why does this not surprise me?" I said bitterly. "Come on, spit it out!"
"You sure you won't wait until you're more than a few hours out of abdominal surgery? Your judgment is legally impaired."
"Who says I'm going to pull through?"
"Doctor Kate, who is rarely wrong—but I take your point," she agreed. "All right. If worse comes to worst, I . . . well, we'll leave it at 'all right.' Joe, I am—"
"—a time traveler," I said before she could.
She stopped pacing. For the second time in twenty-four hours I had succeeded in making her gape like an accident witness. It may be a record; I'd have to ask Mike.
"You knew?" she finally managed to say.
"Oh Christ, Lady, I've suspected ever since the mention of the words 'time machine' made all your circuits short out. It seemed a little whacky even for me, I'll grant you: for once in my life I refused to believe what my intuition told me. But that fucking laser pistol was like a neon sign. In more ways than one. There's only one time in history when they made laser hand weapons—and it hasn't happened yet. Do I look stupid?"
"Yes, actually, a little. It's one of your greatest professional assets. People underrate you easily. I did myself for a short while."
I was beginning to be mollified. "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Well? Do I get to hear what you're doing here? I mean 'now'? And Mike too?"
She looked embarrassed. "I'm through lying to you, Joe. We don't know why Mike is here/now . . . exactly. Only that it will soon turn out to be terribly necessary that he is, and has been. But I'll tell you what he does here, while he waits for the Call, if you like. And more important, I'll tell you why I'm here, and what I am doing—and how you can help, if you're willing."
"Attagirl," I said.
"But Joe, listen to me. You are only hours out of OR. I would like you to pull through. If you have the bad grace to die on me now, Doctor Kate will have my hide for a skirt, and it will take me the better part of a year to put Arethusa back together again. What I'm asking you is: do you truly need to hear all of this right now?"
I thought about it. Hell, I hadn't even gotten past number two on my original list of questions, and now there was a newer and longer list.
So I listened to my body. Now that my bubble of anger was belched, there was no question at all that I was in absolutely last-class shape. My wound hurt brightly. Maybe what a certified superdick like me should do was take a nice nap, and then tackle the idea of something that made Christian Raffalli look like a cheap shiv artist.
"Fair enough," I said. "Your gird is solid wold, and I think I stopped being in a hurry permanently sometime back there while I was hanging on the cross, waiting for that clown to butt my calls off." Something about that didn't sound right. "And I am just a tittle bit liared. Tell Arethusa I said—"
"Tell her yourself," Lady Sally said, smiling. "At this moment she is right outside that door on matching gurneys, waiting with immense patience for me to shut the hell up and let Kate and Priscilla wheel her in so you two can start recovering together."
Halfway through her sentence my vision started to grey out, but I managed a smile of my own. Doctors recommend them for postsurgical patients. "The family that heals together—" I began . . . and could not think of a rhyme for "heal." Oh, I was in good shape.
"I do not believe," Lady Sally murmured, putting a tablet on my tongue, "that you will often encounter Arethusa with her heels together." She headed for the door.
"Wait," I called feebly. "Look, I don't know, maybe I talk in my sleep. Does Arethusa know about you?"
"She's the one who first advised me to recruit you," Lady Sally said. "She can start filling you in when you both wake, if you like."
"I'd rather year it from who," I told her.
"As you wish."
I held on long enough to feel Arethusa take both of my hands in one of hers from either side. Hey, I'm a tough guy.
I wanted to thank her for saving my life. But there's only one good way to do that—and I simply wasn't strong enough. No hurry. We didn't exchange a single word, as a matter of fact. There was no need.
To this day, we don't need many.
I hadn't had narcotics for years.
No one who's had medically administered morphine—or any of its derivatives or substitutes—can ever again truly despise junkies. Or marvel quite as much at the incredible prodigies of creativity junk can sometimes induce in a Ray Charles or a James Taylor. Someone, that is, who was already that talented before they ever got high. The average human in the best of circumstances spends a hell of a lot of attention and energy on monitoring the body's thousand and one aches and pains and twinges and other sudden small alarms. At least as much energy and time goes into constantly combing the environment for immediate dangers or enemies. And as much again is spent on worry about impending or chronic problems, the struggle to stay afloat, the need to be loved, and the underlying awareness of mortality.
A man on a morphine high has none of these worries. All he has to do is grin, and bask, and think. If he happens to be predisposed to thinking, he can do a hell of a lot of it, very well, very fast, with better concentration than a Zen archer.
(I'm not recommending this, understand. For one thing, you'd waste at least half your thinking on the question where will I get my next fix? For another, you'd probably die young. I'm very glad both the celebrity ex-junkies I mentioned have opted to spread their sharp observation and creative insights over a long and healthy life. There's no such thing as a free lunch.)
Under normal conditions, logical deductions appear on my mental computer screen in largish chunks, paragraphs at a time. But shoot me full of enough dope to submerge the memory of recent abdominal surgery, and I can grasp pages at a time, skip ahead whole chapters with a sureness that may be intuitive or may just be hyperrational. If there's a difference. It's fun to experience.
Thank God there's just enough masochist in me that all four times I've been on morphine, or one of its analogs like Demerol or Percodan, I got to missing pain and aggravation, just about the time the doctors wanted to wean me off the drug. I guess that retired sewer worker Murph told me about would say life has "gotten good to me." Or maybe I'm just too square to enjoy life unless I pay for it as I go. I understand junkies better now—but I don't think I'll ever become one voluntarily.
Having had it forced on me temporarily again, I took advantage.
One other thing junk does, it plays tricks with time . . . the exact opposite of the kind Raffalli had enjoyed. Hours sprinted by like greyhounds, too fast to leave tracks.
The next time I saw Lady Sally come in, resplendent in lime-colored evening dress and pearl necklace, I was feeling so mellow that I chose to break her chops in a friendly rather than a wounded tone. "Liable to give a fellow a complex," I said, keeping my voice down so we wouldn't wake Arethusa, who was sleeping. (Both of her, breathing in unison.) It wasn't really necessary. I had learned that Arethusa slept like she did everything else: wholeheartedly. But I kept my voice low anyway.
"I beg your pardon?" Lady Sally said, matching her volume to mine. She came from darkness into the small pool of soft light that spilled around my upper body, and sat by my bedside, on my right.
"Kate tells me I've been out of surgery three days now. About time you came by for a visit."
She stared at me—and got that funny strained expression you get when you're trying not to crack up. She got it under control before I could begin to resent it. "Joe, now you know why they call it dope."
"Huh?"
"I have been here every day. For hours at a time."
"Huh?"
"At least two hours each day. As many as four. In between keeping this Bedlam running, or more accurately, lurching."
I really hate saying "Huh?" "Where was I?"
"Right there. Wide awake. Large as life and twice as natural. Witty, charming, and personable. We have had scintillating conversations on several topics. You narrated the plots of each of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder novels—brilliantly, in some cases. Your comparison of the book and film versions of The Hot Rock was particularly trenchant, although I'm not certain you've entirely persuaded me that Goldman was right to cut the train-to-the-nuthouse sequence from the screenplay."
"He had no choice," I insisted automatically. "Well, this is really something else. I wonder where I was while all this was going on. I wonder who that was minding the store for me. I wonder where he is now."
"Oh, he was you," Lady Sally said positively. "Ask Arethusa when she wakes up if you don't believe me: she'd know you from your own twin brother."
"How is Arethusa?" I asked suddenly, trying to glance to both sides at once. "I must have been told, but I can't remember."
"Calm yourself, Joe—she's perfectly all right. Doctor Kate discharged her this morning: she's still sleeping here in Recovery only because you are. Her second body came out of coma shortly after the first one left overdrive, just as she'd hoped. As a matter of fact, knocking herself unconscious against Raffalli's skull actually helped: from force of habit her consciousness jumped bodies again. Her worst problem was total exhaustion, and she's recovered most of her strength now."
"No matter how loopy I was the last few days, I should have heard that," I said, angry at myself.
"You did. But there were no capstans turning up in your Snoop Room. You were making memories, you simply weren't saving any. Like a RAM disk in a computer: every time you cut power by going to sleep, all the data vanished."
"I never heard a better reason to get off narcotics," I said. "Memories are the only real treasures a man has."
"Do you know the story about Steve Wosniak's plane crash?" she asked.
"The guy that invented the Apple computer?"
"And the disk drive. The Great Woz was practicing touch-and-go landings in his plane. He and his passenger walked away from the wreckage, so it wasn't a bad landing, but it shook him up a good deal. When he got a phone call from Apple, asking when he would be returning to work, he said, in essence, 'For God's sake, I just crashed my damn plane yesterday, give me a break, will you?' After a pause, they told him the crash had occurred nearly a month before. Like you, he had somehow severed the link between short-term and long-term memory. Armed with this information, the Woz rebuilt the link, in a matter of days, from the inside. He was quoted as saying that he 'consciously thought my brain from the zero to the one state.' If you like, I could call him and ask if he has any further technical advice."
"I'd be honored to speak with him. But I'd never understand his advice. I think 'cut back on the narcotics' is a good basic strategy to start with. If that doesn't work, we'll see."
"Sound," she agreed.
"Is Mary recording what we say?"
She shook her head. "This room's bugs are switched off—since I couldn't be sure what you might say while drugged. You can speak freely."
(A shame, that was: if Mary had heard that conversation, she'd have been spared a lot of heartache down the line. But that's another story . . . one I didn't learn myself for months.)*
"Uh, while I was off with the fairies, did we . . ." I cleared my throat. "Did we discuss Topic A? Why you're here? Or rather, why you're now?"
"Not at all," she said. "I tried to introduce it into the conversation from time to time, but you kept wanting to analyze John Dortmunder's fatalism in the face of disaster in terms of Buddhist acceptance of suffering, instead."
"I don't know anything about Buddhism!" I said.
"I know," she said drily. "You did, however, raise some interesting points concerning Christian imagery in Good Behavior."
"Christian imagery in what?"
"Good Behavior. The new Dortmunder novel."
"I haven't read it."
She pointed silently. On the bedside table was the new Donald Westlake hardcover. I'd never seen it before in my life, hadn't known there was a new Westlake out, let alone a Dortmunder. I picked it up. There was a bookmark. I opened to page 181, read the first sentence of Chapter 35. "Wilbur Howey came out of the men's room with Scandinavian Marriage Secrets under his arm and deep gray circles under his eyes." I knew who Wilbur Howey was, and why it was funny that he was carrying the magazine Scandinavian Marriage Secrets, and every detail of the complicated caper in which he and Dortmunder and Kelp and Murch and Tiny Bulcher were trying to rob an entire building, and the whole goofy subplot about Dortmunder being forced to steal a nun.
I was quite sure I'd never read a word of this book. I just knew things about it, as if I'd always known them.
"Holy shit," I breathed.
"Not a bad alternate title," she agreed. "But somewhat impractical from a sales point of view."
I found that I was dying to know how the Westlake came out. Dortmunder had just stumbled into a meeting of bloodthirsty mercenaries, and they were becoming suspicious of him. But I forced it from my mind. "Obviously Kate has reduced my dosage of Demerol or whatever. I can tell because my side hurts. So there's a good chance I'll remember this conversation in half an hour. Would you be willing to discuss Topic A now, on that assumption? Or would you rather wait until tomorrow and be sure you're not wasting your time?"
She handed me a hat. I recognized it as my own fedora. "Hit the floor with that," she directed.
I did so. Successfully.
"Glib as you've been the last few days," she said, "that would have given you trouble, I think. You resembled in manner and coordination a man with ten stiff drinks in him. Now, on the other hand, you look like a man who could use ten stiff drinks. You have proven you can hit the floor with your hat. I therefore pronounce you competent to manage your affairs, subject to outbreaks of Spoonerism. Do you wish to take on or discharge fluids before I tell you why I'm here/now?"
I made myself as comfortable as I could, moving slowly and carefully. Did you know that every single muscle, tendon, and ligament in your body is directly connected to your left side? "No, and no, and since I've had a little time to think, why don't I tell you why you're here/now?"
She raised her eyebrows slightly and then smiled. "You know, I wish I knew someone foolish enough to bet me that you can't. All right, Joe: why am I here?"
"To save the world."
"Right in one," she said, immensely pleased.
"May I ask how you figured it out?" she went on.
"You're ethical, and you're a time traveler," I said. "So there's no other possibility. I'm no sci-fi fan, but I've seen enough movies to know how dangerous it is to monkey with history: only that motive could justify the risk of making the universe collapse and disappear."
"Correct again. And thank you. Keep going. What am I trying to save the world from?"
"This part is just a hunch. But it's a strong one."
"A hunch is often a conclusion based on data you don't know you possess," she said, seeming to be quoting someone. "Go on."
"I think you're trying to prevent the Last World War."
Her eyes were sparkling. "Joe Quigley, with a head full of Demerol you are the equal of Holmes himself. Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's smarter brother. Have you considered that intuition like yours might actually be a genuine paranormal ability, on a par with Arethusa's telepathy or Amos Garrett's guitar solos? Never mind; can I ask what led you to that hunch?"
"Well, I've noticed a high percentage of foreigners in your parlor and even on your staff. And it occurs to me that out of all the planet, you chose to locate about as close as you can get to the United Nations headquarters without actually having to be in Manhattan. It's just across the Bridge. Damned if I can think of any other reason you'd pick Brooklyn."
"Providence has surely sent you to me, Joe," she said. "Because until you joined my team, you were probably the most significant threat to me alive." Suddenly she looked troubled. "I'm compelled to wonder if there are any more of you out there."
"Me too."
"You present me with a problem. I had intended to exact from you, as the price of revealing my mission, something like a formal oath of loyalty and obedience. Now I cannot do that. According to doctrine, I should perform major memory deletion on you at once, for security's sake." Could that be where my memories of the last three days had gone? No, as she went on to explain: "But deletion sufficient to prevent you from simply reaching the same conclusions a second time would have the side effect of using you up. You're far too potentially valuable to me. A waste is a terrible thing to mind, and vice versa. Will you take me off the hook by giving me such an oath voluntarily?"
"No," I said at once. Before I could chicken out and say yes. "I give my loyalty and obedience to one person—me! And I made that oath a long time ago, irrevocably—the day I got out of the service. I have no reason to suppose that your interests and mine will always coincide." I waited to see if she would kill me, or mindwipe me, almost wishing I had the kind of faith (or is it courage?) it takes to surrender command to another. It's so much simpler to just be one of the grunts. But look how that had turned out the last time . . .
"Understood," she said reluctantly. "You make it as hard as possible for me to accept you into my army, Joe."
"I can't help that."
"No, you can't. And you are uniquely valuable to me. All right, I accept you formally into my conspiracy without requiring either loyalty or obedience. You're a loose cannon—but a helluva cannon. Still, you must accept in turn that I might some day find it essential to kill you. Or worse."
"You're welcome to try," I said.
"That seems fair enough," she agreed. We both relaxed the barest trifle. "Onward. Do you have any questions before we get to the question of your specific work assignment?"
"Yeah. What I can't understand is, why do you need me? I can't see that you need anybody at all. If you're crazy enough to try and tamper with history, I don't see what's to stop you. Given time travel, and technology including laser pistols, you ought to be able to deal with just about any problem I can imagine. You weren't even tempted to appropriate Raffalli's watch for your own use. What could give you trouble?"
"Ignorance," she said. "And the cussedness of nature, human and otherwise. You see, Joe, we're not trying to change history. We're trying to make it have happened, just the way it did. And we don't know quite how to do that."
I waited.
She sighed. "This will take some background. If you notice any holes in the background, you may assume I left them there."
"Fire away," I told her.
"When I come from, Joe, it is possible to do something like a detailed systems analysis of history. James Burke does a primitive version of it today, if you have seen his TV series Connections. A simple example might be: if someone invents the plough, the invention of trade and thus of arithmetic must soon follow. The plough allows production of more food than the tribe can eat: it becomes necessary to dispose of the excess, and keep track of the resulting commerce."
"I follow," I said.
"The process is capable of nearly infinite refinement," she went on, "given enough accurate data, sufficiently advanced mathematics of chaos and adequate computer power. The more modern the era one examines, the better the data, and the more accurately one can explain precisely why things turned out as they did. Of course, it makes weather prediction look easy. Many experts maintain this sort of analysis will never be useful for predicting future events, as some factors can only be identified as 'significant' in retrospect—and personally, I hope that's true. Still, we try, in the hope of lessening human misery by our efforts.
"We kept refining our techniques until we could retroactively 'predict' any portion of existing history from its preceding events—almost. But we kept finding anomalies, places where historical events had failed to come about as theory said they should have. Not many, but fairly major disjunctions. It was like Einstein finding a single small village within which E equals mc. Attempts to revise the theory failed utterly. One day one of our greatest geniuses made the intuitive leap to the idea that something must be perturbing history at such cusps.
"One classic example thereof is the mysterious failure of human civilization to end by thermonuclear suicide in the late twentieth century. All indications say it should have . . . yet it didn't. The genius historician I spoke of hypothesized that some outside agency must have prevented it from happening. He then realized that said agency must necessarily turn out to have been either him, or else someone he trusted less than himself . . . there being no third category. So he assigned himself—and me—the job."
"Mike?" I said.
"The same. The celebrated Mick of Time—me darlin' spouse Michael Callahan."
"Sure an' Gomorrah—the saints add preservatives to us! Do you seriously mean to tell me that the fate of the human race lies in the hands of a couple of historical micks?"
"Yes," she said. "But don't worry: we Irish have been a lot easier to live with since we annexed Great Britain back in the early twenty-first century."
Huh. I should imagine so. "All right: so tell about why you two can't just solve all your problems with a time machine and a brace of laser pistols."
She sighed. "Because we're fighting with a blindfold on and one foot in a bucket. Whatever steps we're supposed to take, the one thing we know for certain is that history didn't . . . won't . . . record them."
"Surely history offers clues. Hints. Your systems analysis—"
"—says that nuclear war should occur, anytime now. In fact, without me and my husband it would have happened by now. As you surmised, I have for several decades been facilitating informal diplomacy between UN delegates and staff here, of a kind which by all the rules should not occur—and that has had a subtle but salutary effect. But according to our 'systems analysis,' it should not be enough to forestall holocaust indefinitely. There is something else that needs to be done if we are all to survive the Eighties. Urgently."
"What's that?"
She looked very unhappy. "I wish to Christ I knew. And the clock is ticking."
I was surprised. "Can that matter to you?"
"It certainly can. Joe, there are few 'Laws of Nature' that my contemporaries and I have not learned to rewrite to suit our convenience—but one of them is this: as far as we know, no one can inhabit the same space/time twice. My time-travel gear will take me only to loci in which I do not already exist. If I miss my window of opportunity this time, someone else must hit it for me . . . and there are no other candidates known to me."
"Doesn't mean no one will come along after you and get it right," I pointed out.
"No—but as I mentioned earlier, any such person would be someone I trust less than I do myself. So I'm still working on it."
"Mike too, I assume."
"No, actually," she said. "Mike's specific project is different."
"Can you tell me what it is?"
She hesitated, debating with herself. "Well, in for a penny, in for another penny. It could conceivably become relevant. Do I have your word that you will not divulge this information to anyone else—including members of my own task force?"
I thought about it. Curiosity won. "Okay."
"Mike is here to forestall alien invasion."
I could feel the blood leaving my head. I clutched at a straw. "By whom, the Chinese?"
She shook her head. "No, I'm afraid. I mean the science-fiction sort of aliens. Creatures from another star. Powerful and paranoid."
"I was pretty sure that was what you meant," I said sadly. Only a few days ago, I had thought sassing a mayor was exciting . . .
"They should have arrived here by this decade and exterminated the human race without effort . . . but history doesn't record any such contact for several centuries yet. Mike intends to find out why, and make sure things turn out that way."
"What kind of operation does he have out there on the Island?" I pictured something like the stupendous Wardenclyffe power tower that Nikola Tesla—the discoverer of alternating current—built out at Shoreham back in 1901, ready to hurl fire at the heavens. They'd torn Wardenclyffe down before it was finished. But maybe Mike Callahan had hopped in his time machine and gotten the demolition-and-salvage contract . . .
"A tavern," she said.
''A . . ."
"A bar, out in Suffolk County. Callahan's Place, it's called."
Jesus Christ. I'd heard about that joint all the way in Manhattan. A guy told me once if you couldn't have a good time at Callahan's Place it was your own damned fault. But I couldn't recall him mentioning anything about power towers or banks of laser cannon.
I swallowed with some difficulty. Was I sure this was not all a Demerol dream?
Yes. My side hurt. And my head was starting to. "How's he doing?"
"Rather well," she said. "He managed to place himself in the kharmic path of the first scout to reach us—a slave of the creatures we're worried about—and has manumitted him. Meanwhile he's been training combat troops. Things look promising on that front* . . . but only provided we humans don't blow ourselves up before the aliens arrive."
"Look," I said, "if you don't mind, let's just put this whole space monster subplot on the back burner for now, okay?"
"You asked," she pointed out.
"My mistake. Let's return to the comparatively trivial problem of World War Three. Here's what I want to know: given your level of technology . . . why can't you just whomp up a magic thingamajig that keeps us dumb primitives from lobbing ICBMs at each other? A planet-wide Star Wars, that doesn't answer to the Pentagon?"
"If by 'Star Wars' you ignorantly refer to the Strategic Defense Initiative," she said without quite sniffing, "I could design, build, and install such a shield without difficulty. But it would solve nothing."
"I see what you mean—" I began.
"Perhaps not," Lady Sally said. "If you're thinking that such a shield would be noticed, that's not true. I could easily put one in place without anyone else on Earth being the wiser. And I could turn it off on a moment's notice if Mike turns out to need assistance from NORAD. But don't you see: if, as we believe they must, the forces of history will shortly cause a general or a politician to push his figurative red button, he is bound to notice when nothing happens. And the consequences of that could scarcely help but leave their mark on history—perhaps in the form of an all-out conventional war almost as destructive as a nuclear exchange. What we must do is so manipulate the forces of history that the politician I've postulated never triggers his missiles. And that is an infinitely more complex task than simply disarming the world. I'm having difficulty at the moment defusing Russian paranoia fast enough. Through off-the-record diplomacy, I've managed to keep the United States propping up the Soviet Union for a long time now, but very shortly the USSR is simply going to collapse of terminal rot, and then there'll be a—what's the matter, Joe, are you in pain?"
I was slow in answering. When I did, my voice sounded funny. The whole Universe had just clicked into place, a degree to the left of where it had been, and I was reeling from the dislocation. "No. That was the expression of a man having the revelation of his life." I took a deep breath. "God damn. That was like a five-second acid trip."
Lady Sally sat up straight. Straighter, I mean. She looked alarmed. "Jesus Christ on a bicycle," she breathed. "You have just had the revelation of your life? Yes, I see you have. Wait just one moment, please." She got up from her chair, opened one of Kate's cabinets, took out a flask labeled Disinfectant, and removed the stopper. At once I could smell the whiskey the flask contained. She took a long pull, replaced the stopper, and put the flask away. "All right," she said, sitting down again. "In the words of a dear departed friend of mine, Dick Buckley, 'Straighten me—'cause I'm ready.'"
So she'd known Lord Buckley, eh? It figured. "I think I may have just figured out what's perturbing history. And why history doesn't record it. And why a secret Star W . . . a secret SDI shield would be worse than useless. And I've even got a couple of ideas about what you might be able to do about all of this. It all depends on how much technological magic you have up your sleeve."
She looked as awed as I felt. "Joe, if you can answer those questions, you can have anything that is within my power to grant. As to the limits of my technology . . . well, perhaps it will help to say that I could with some strain turn off the nearest dozen stars, or create a few new ones. Not that I would—but I have the capability, and more."
"Then we may be okay," I said. I shook my head slightly. "Christ, for a while there I thought we had a problem."
"I will not throttle information out of a convalescent," Lady Sally said. "I will not. Arethusa would be annoyed with me."
"Like many flashes of insight, it began in a misunderstanding," I said. "You said an SDI shield would solve nothing, and I started to say I understood your reasoning, and you interrupted and explained your reasoning. But it wasn't the reason I'd been thinking about. I was thinking about something else. Something that's been on my mind since I was about fifteen years old, something I've never told anyone about before. The gods have such a twisted sense of humor I didn't want to give them any ideas."
"But you do want to give me your idea, because you don't want me to forget myself and throttle you," she suggested softly.
"Sorry. Okay, simple question and answer. Question: what's the basic flaw in even a perfect SDI shield? Answer: it only works on missiles."
She blinked.
"And other satellites, I guess."
She thought. As I saw her starting to get it, I went on:
"Question: so what's wrong with that? Answer: missiles and satellites are not the only way to deliver nuclear weapons."
"You mean nuclear cannon? But they—"
"Not cannon either. Why does everybody always think hi tech? What's wrong with air freight? Or a cigarette boat?"
It was as if her puppeteer had cut all the strings. She slumped all over, went as limp as she could get without falling out of her chair. Her eyes were wide and staring at nothing. She murmured something in a language unknown to me. I had no trouble at all translating it as, "Holy shit!"
"Missiles are a lousy delivery system, when you think about it," I went on. "There are only three good things about building ICBMs to place your warheads. It can be done quickly, it makes jobs for a lot of voters, and it's gaudy as hell. But if you're not in a hurry, and you're not in a race, and you don't want to spend money like water, and you don't care whether the results are phallic and photogenic or not, there's a much better way."
"Nuclear mines," she whispered. "Triggered by radio."
I nodded. "I've been waiting for that other shoe to drop for years now," I agreed. "It just seemed to make too much sense not to happen, sooner or later. Every year millions of pounds of illegal drugs enter this country with no trouble at all: what's so hard about a few hundred pounds of plutonium? Even in lead boxes?"
"So you think the USSR has mined the United States?" Her eyes got even wider. "Or the other way 'round?" Her shoulders twitched. "Oh my God—or both of them! Oh, Joe, things are even worse than I'd imagined—"
"Whoa," I said. "You're thinking like a cheap thriller writer. I don't think either country has placed a single mine. I just told you why not, a couple of seconds ago."
"Why not?"
"'It makes too much sense,' I said. Can you recall a time since Hiroshima when either the US or the Soviet Union has acted sensibly?"
She frowned. "Now that you mention it, no."
"Think it through. The United States can't undertake such a scheme for one simple reason: the Constitution. Specifically the First Amendment. There's just too much openness in this country, and much too much freedom of the press, for something as elephantine as the US government to keep a scheme like that under wraps. Hell, if the government couldn't get away with U-2 overflights, or even a simple thing like invading Cambodia, how long do you think they'd last sowing nukes around the world? Some clown would smear it across the front page of the Times in 72-point type, long before you had enough mines planted in the USSR to do more than enrage them."
"The Soviet Union does not share that weakness," Lady Sally said. "This is exactly the sort of scheme that would appeal to them."
"And how do we know that?" I riposted. "Because they've screwed up so many of them! Secrecy they have plenty of. What they are crucially short of are competence and reliability. If a Soviet Premier were to order a nuclear mine built, he'd be delivered something the size of a Sherman tank, that worked one time out of four . . . and sure as God made little green horseflies, somebody on the very first penetration team would defect. That's the problem they'll never crack: if a man is intelligent enough to be worth sending abroad, they don't dare let him out of the country."
"They build very good missiles," she argued. "That suggests they can produce good technology if they want to badly enough."
"Says who? How often do they ever fire one at a target anyone else can monitor? I told you: esoteric weapons are one of my hobbies."
"Well, very good spaceships—that's the same thing."
"They build shitty spaceships. Ever seen the inside of one? They look like something out of Flash Gordon, or the cab of a steam locomotive. Big knife-switches and levers and dials that'd look natural in a Nikola Tesla exhibit. No computers worth mentioning. After the Apollo-Soyuz linkup, our guys came back raving at the courage of anyone who would ride a piece of junk like that into space."
"The Soviet space program is much more substantial than America's! It has been since long before Apollo."
"With shitty spaceships. It's just that they don't stop building them, the way this stupid country has. Did you ever hear the story about the first Soviet space station crew?"
"Died on reentry, didn't they? Something about an air leak?"
"Leonov, the first man ever to walk in space, has been in the identical model reentry vehicle many times. He's been quoted as saying that the crew of that mission had to have heard the air whistling out, and that any of the three of them could easily have reached out and plugged the leak with a finger. They died of a combination of bad technology and lousy education. You wait and see: if the Soviets ever open the books and let us compare duds and destructs, you'll find out they had a failure rate much higher than ours. You know those rockets they've got now, that everybody admires so much, the 'big dumb boosters'? They could have beat us to the Moon with those. But of the first eight to leave the launch pad, the most successful survived for seventeen seconds. So they used a different booster for the Moon project, and it didn't make the nut."
Arethusa woke just then. Don't ask me how I knew. She didn't move, open any of her four eyes, or alter the rhythm of her breathing. But one minute she was asleep, and the next minute she was lying there with her eyes closed, listening to us, and I knew it when it happened. I didn't say anything, because she liked to take her time waking up—and don't ask me how I knew that either. She knew I knew she was awake; she'd join the conversation when she was ready.
For decades I had wondered what it would feel like to fall in love. Some indeterminate time back, without discussing it with myself, I had given up waiting. Now I knew. Even if they didn't open an eye or make a sound, everything was different when they were awake.
Better . . .
Lady Sally was looking confused. "If I'm not mistaken, we've returned to Go, and I don't see my two hundred dollars anywhere. You seem to have proven that there are no nuclear mines after all. Oh my stars and garters, wait a half! China—"
I shook my head. "I don't think so. It's just barely possible. China's got the secrecy, and it's got good technology when it decides to spend the money, and like Russia it's got a history of mass murder of innocent civilians. Even more recently. Ask any one of a million Tibetans—and don't hold your breath waiting for an answer. But China's crucially short of one essential resource for a scam like this."
Lady Sally was nodding. "Caucasian agents they can trust absolutely. I see the problem. Chinese tend to stand out in both countries—especially in the Soviet Union, which is the first place they'd want to mine. China's own xenophobia keeps it from getting friendly enough with barbarians to have any great number of barbarian friends. They can't mine us because not enough of us love them. God's teeth. Joe, is your head starting to hurt, or is it just me?"
"Your Ladyship," I said, "barring a few intervals of unconsciousness, orgasm, or drugged stupor, my head has hurt since an hour after I first walked into your House. I'm not complaining . . . but you asked."
"I'm not much surprised, considering the outlandish things that seem to go on inside there." She held up a hand. "All right—take a break for a moment and let me see if I can work this out for myself. Without consulting my computer, or Mike. There's a certain amount of pride involved. This is after all my life-work." She stared down at her pearl necklace, and toyed with it as she thought aloud. I marveled as I watched her. She was old enough to be my mom, and she could make fingering a couple of pearls look lewd without even trying. "Let me see, now: significant nuclear capability dating back at least a decade . . . access to fissionable material . . . not saddled with either too much openness or too much tyranny . . . lots of Caucasian natives . . . major espionage skills . . . and an ability to hide fairly large expenditures somewhere in the national budget without attracting notice—that lets out Israel, they're already pushing their limits in that direction . . ." Her fingers stopped moving. She was silent, still, frowning fiercely to herself, for nearly half a minute. I passed the time by watching Arethusa's chest rise and fall. At last Lady Sally looked up at me, still frowning. "Damn it!" she said. "I can't make it work. Joe, there is no nation that answers that description."
There aren't many things a man can do as noble as passing up a chance to show how smart he is. "No," I agreed, and shut up.
"Israelis would have major difficulty getting into, and especially out of, the USSR. India comes closest after Israel . . . and I just don't buy them for it. Their fanatics tend to be the wrong kind of fanatics."
"Me either. And I hope it doesn't turn out to be diehard Nazis trying for a Fourth Reich. I can just hear it now: 'Throw another Ken on Klaus Barbie!'"
A triple pun—this place was getting to me. She ignored me magnificently. "It can't be time travelers from the future," she mused. "Time travel was discovered and abandoned three separate times before my people perfected it . . . but those primitive methods all leave unmistakable tracks in the matrix, I'd have seen them. And none of the three was ever used by anyone stupid enough to meddle with history on a planetary scale—as conclusively proven by the fact that reality still exists. I am utterly certain that no one from my era could be capable of such a plan—just as I knew Raffalli could not be a contemporary of mine. I could be wrong, but I'm certain. So it has to be someone from this space/time . . . and I just can't make myself believe in an extranational conspiracy of private individuals out to conquer the world. For one thing it's difficult for me to imagine competent nuclear physicists being sufficiently tempted by power or money—and they aren't prone to religious fanaticism as a rule. It would require patriotism . . . or something like it . . ."
I waited, and let her worry at it. Arethusa looked edible. Watching her was better for my aching side than narcotics. And I saw her whichever direction I looked in. Did you ever have a woman who was so beautiful, it made you sad you could only see one side of her at a time? Arethusa solved that problem better than any mirror. I could tell somehow that she was nearly ready to admit she was awake.
All at once Lady Sally managed to look happy and dismayed at the same time. "God's golden gonads! Could it really be? Oh, even for the Universe this is excessive irony!"
I knew she'd get it. "As Mycroft's brother once said, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains . . .'"
"Do you mean to stand there—lie there—with your bare face hanging out and tell me that all of reality has been placed in mortal jeopardy by—"
"Pacifists," I agreed. "Peace terrorists. That's the way I'd bet, anyway. It can't be anarchists—they'd never get organized enough."
The better she absorbed the idea, the less she liked it. "You've hit it, I think. It makes psychological sense, at least. There are still a lot of physicists alive from the Manhattan Project days—on both sides of the Iron Curtain—and some of them may well repent. But what rotten luck. Cowards make the deadliest opponents—and pacifists never fight fair: they can't. I was hoping for some sort of warriors."
"That's the worst thing about any kind of terrorist," I said. "They're so weak, they have to be monstrous to accomplish anything. And who could be weaker than a pacifist?"
"Hey," Arethusa said from my right, just past Sally. "What's wrong with pacifists? Look at Buddhists: they're nice people."
I gave her my best smile, and got a much better one in trade. Arethusa can smile like a long-distance kiss. I poured her two plastic cups of peach juice from the flask on my bedside table. Lady Sally started to adjust her chair so she could see us both . . . then left it as it was and spoke past me, to Arethusa's other body, which opened its eyes politely.
"They're different," Lady Sally conceded. "They're honest pacifists. You don't have to worry about them fighting dirty, because they never fight: they don't have Jihads or Crusades. The strongest weapon they use is reason; the strongest protest they allow themselves is suicide, and they're always careful not to let the flames spread. Pacifism of that sort is no more objectionable than belief in astrology or membership in the Flat Earth Society. I was speaking of the kind of pacifists we grew like hothouse flowers in this country fifteen or twenty years ago, and still have all too many of. Pacifist terrorists. The kind who want all wars everywhere to cease and everyone to live in peace . . . and are prepared to keep blowing up wealthier and less enlightened fellow citizens until that day comes. There's nothing wrong with wanting wars to stop—but the moment a pacifist uses any weapon but calm speech, he's a hypocrite. If he's willing to kill, he's a psychotic. The only good thing about them as opponents is that it isn't murder to kill one."
She hadn't said it like a joke or hyperbole. "In this country it is," Arethusa replied seriously, and reached to take the peach juice I gave her, one of her after the other. She smiled at me.
"I don't see why," Lady Sally said. "Pacifists—and anarchists, and libertarians—specifically repudiate the right of the state to employ armed agents—to protect them from murder, for instance. So shooting one ought to be no worse than a misdemeanor. 'Disturbing the peace,' say, or 'frivolous discharge of a firearm.'"
"'Unlicensed hunting,' maybe," I suggested.
"They're not restricted," she pointed out. "As long as you eat the meat, and clean up after . . ."
"I'm particular about what I eat," I said. "But I will kill this bunch. If you can help me track 'em."
"Joseph," Arethusa said plaintively, "when I decided to love you, I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty. Do you realize we've never gone an entire day without you announcing your intention to murder someone?"
"People who plant nuclear mines in major population centers?" I said. "You bet I'll kill them if I get a chance."
"No allowances for good intentions?"
"None," I said firmly. "Even if I stipulate that a world of enforced peace run by something like Weathermen with nukes is a good intention—and I don't—nobody elected these clowns to do the job. They don't have the right. Even a tyrant rules by consent of his people, no matter how difficult he makes it for them to withhold it. He rules openly, a fair target for any assassin. But these vermin are worse than a well-poisoner."
She bit her lip. Then she shrugged. "You're right," she said, "but I want you to promise me that you'll give up murdering people once we're married."
I forgot all about thermonuclear mines and alien invasion and the collapse of space and time through failure of the logic of history. My side stopped hurting. Everything in the Universe stopped hurting for a moment. You must have noticed it.
"You'll marry me, Arethusa?"
She cocked her head and smiled at me. "What else do you give a man who saves the world?"
Lady Sally obligingly got up and moved out of the way, stepping back out of the pool of light until all I could see of her was Cheshire grin and sparkling eyes. "Don't mind me, children," she murmured.
I sighed. "Darling? Have you ever heard about the mule who was placed equidistant between two piles of hay—and starved? I'm too sore to get up off this bed more than once—"
Bedsprings creaked on either side of me, "Brace yourself, my love," she said in stereo. "You're about to become a hero sandwich."
One disadvantage of having a stereo lover: morning breath from two directions is more than doubled, more like squared. A small thing . . . but I cherished that small imperfection.