Preston Sanders was on his side in the lower bunk, with his feet hanging over the edge. He’d lost weight since Lunan had seen him in a courtroom, but he was still heavy. They lifted him and Rand slid down through the hole again, leaving Lunan to lower Sanders down like a sack of potatoes, with Rand to catch him and let him down onto the mattresses.
Now they had to work fast. Rand smeared the concrete plug with epoxy and lowered it into place. Then he filled the periscope holes. While he did that, Lunan manhandled Sanders into the cabin of the machine, and thought about the origins of that picturesque verb. Man-handled. Yep.
“Got it,” Rand said.
“Won’t they be able to see the hole?”
“Yeah, sure, I couldn’t make the join perfect, especially working from the bottom—but they’ll never get that plug out without jackhammers and such. Let’s get out of here.”
“Get your shirt,” Lunan said.
“Shit, oh dear. What else have we forgotten?”
“The ladder, and the mattresses, and—”
“That’s okay,” Rand said. “They can’t be traced.” He chuckled. “Well, not profitably, anyway.”
“Hey, I’m supposed to get the whole story.”
“You’ve got all the story,” Rand said. “My instructions are to see you off before Pres wakes up. I make that to be about ten more minutes.”
“Yeah. All right,” Lunan said. So. The adventure was coming to an end. Ye gods, what he’d seen! The top brass—the TOP BRASS—of Todos Santos involved in felony jailbreak. Not that he could tell anyone, or even hint that he had certain knowledge. Rumor. All rumors…Lunan sighed. It was a hell of a story. Now all he had to do was figure out the best way to use it.
“Renn? He’s Fromate, isn’t he?” Pres started to laugh.
“Art says he was the advisor to the Planchet kid,” Rand said.
“Oh.” Sanders was silent a moment, then laughed. “Hey, they’ll think the Fromates got me!”
“Not for long they won’t, but it might slow down the opposition.”
Sanders stopped. “Tony, I don’t like this much. I mean—you broke me out of jail. We’re both wanted by the law. Where can we go?”
“We’re going home, I hope.”
“Yeah, but—look, Tony, Art must have put you up to this, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but dammit, Art doesn’t own Todos Santos! He can’t hide me forever, the management council has to know, and some of them don’t like me. Somebody’ll turn me in, for sure…”
His voice trailed off when he realized that Rand was only half listening. Tony was trying to orient himself. Where the hell was the street? Where the hell was anything? They stumbled onward. Then, ahead, car lights flashed twice and went dark.
“Thank God,” Tony said. “Come on, Pres, just a little farther. Ah. Good, they remembered to cut the fence. Here, through right here, and we go the rest of the way by taxi. Swallow your pride and climb in.”
An ordinary Yellow Cab stood waiting for them. The driver didn’t speak.
Sanders tumbled into the back seat, still rubber-limbed, and thrashed to right himself as Tony tumbled in beside him and the taxi took off. Pres complained, “Hey! The speed limit! My pride wouldn’t take it if we got pulled in for reckless driving.”
The cab slowed at once. Tony asked, “How do you feel?”
“Fine. No more headache. No hangover.” Sanders settled back in his seat. “I feel great! Of course they’ll find us—”
“Maybe not,” Rand said.
The cabbie said, “Where to, sir?” and turned around.
“Mead? Frank Mead?”
“Did you think we’d leave you for the eaters? Welcome home. In a half hour you’ll be wolfing a midnight snack and drinking genuine Scotch. No, brandy’s your drink, right? Remy Martin, then.”
“Frank Mead. Sheeit! I thought…never mind what I thought. Listen, Tony, if I’m awake now, so is anyone else you dosed, right?”
“It’ll take them awhile to get their act together,” Tony said. “They won’t know how you got out or where you went. I sealed up the hole. It’s a locked-room mystery, secret passage and all.”
“That’s all right, then.” Sanders started laughing.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I set a slogan running through OATH OF FEALTY, it evolved like a life form escaped from the lab…
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
He did not bother to look up. But people were talking.
“I don’t know, Tony. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. But I swear they looked like they were going to blow up the hydrogen lines.”
“I was there. I came dawn to see the equipment they carried. It’s not in here? Oh. Who’s he?” Voices grew clearer as heads looked into the room.
“Him? Oh, he’s a leaper we pulled off your high board.”
“Jeez, Patterson, we’ve got worse problems than him! They’ve got Mr. Sanders doped to the eyes. Mr. Rand, what do we do if the Angelino cops come for him?”
“Nothing. Pres killed two saboteurs and captured a third. That third one was lucky. Pres had every right to kill him too. Los Angeles isn’t going to do a thing to him.”
“Yes, sir—but the kids weren’t carrying dynamite, dammit! It was just a box of sand. How will that look to a Grand Jury?”
He looked up to see “Tony” shrug and say, “Blake, those three did their damndest to convince us they were ready to wreck Todos Santos. I’d say they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Think of it as evolution in action.”
A bark of laughter, and a sober voice: “It won’t stop there, Tony. God, I’m glad I’m not Banner.”
Answering laughter. “So is everyone else tonight.”
They closed the door. They had forgotten him again. He resented it. He resented their laughter; it mocked his coming death.
They remembered him an hour later. The stubby-fingered guard led him back to the elevator and took him down and put him in a subway car and said things he didn’t bother to hear. He had already made his decision.
• • •
He searched his pockets for a Magic Marker until he found it. He stood before the wall (not caring if anyone was watching) and presently inspiration came. He printed in large letters, over a message that had almost been washed away:
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION
Now, that was good. It was not too proud. It was the statement of a man who had done one last service to the human race, by ridding it of a chronic loser. He would scrawl it on the parapet, or wherever, just before he jumped. And this man, Tony, would recognize it for his own words…
• • •
Broad lines in blue ink, a freshly printed message among the other messages, less obscene than most:
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION
“If that’s a dying message, it’s not likely to name his murderer,” said Donovan. “You’re right, though. It matches the marker. He probably wrote it.” Another reason to talk to the TS tunnel crew. Maybe they saw him writing on their door.
“I wonder what he meant?”
“We can’t ask him,” said Donovan, and forgot it. Or thought he had.
• • •
“…and an ugly mood has developed lately,” Lunan said. “Typified by a phrase that seems to have caught on in Todos Santos.” The camera zoomed down on a sticker attached to an elevator door. “THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION.”
“Since nothing happens in Todos Santos without at least tacit approval by Bonner and his people,” Lunan said, “we may assume that the TS managers agree with this sentiment. I haven’t been able to trace the origin of the phrase—”
Ye gods, Tony thought. I have seen that stuck up here and there. Lunan makes it look universal, but it’s not, not really. And dammit, where did I hear it first? Somewhere. The night Pres had to kill those kids—Yeah, that night, but no
t then, earlier. The leaper. Hell, I said it! How’d it get out to the public?
• • •
Harris considered going into deep knee bends; but by damn, he’d finally got Sanders talking, and he wasn’t going to stop. “What I saw was a bumper sticker. ‘RAISE THE SPEED LIMIT. THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION.’”
Sanders smiled. “I can guess who said that first. It had to be Tony Rand.”
• • •
He was sitting upright, naked as a peeled egg. There were others around him, all naked, painted like so many Easter eggs. Six plus Vinnie. Some still sleeping; some staring about them in terror.
Where are we? He sat up and looked around. Green shrubbery to one side. On the other—
On the other, Todos Santos was a wall across the sky. The windows blazed like tens of thousands of eyes.
Run. He had to run. He sprang to his feet and everything went blurry; he hardly felt the jar as he fell back. “How was I to know?” he shouted. “How did I know it was you people in the subway?”
A voice from the distance mocked him. “THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION,” the voice called.
• • •
• • •
The Grad gulped and nodded. Teardrops broke loose and floated away, the size of tuftberries. He cleared his throat and said in a creditably crisp voice, “Prikazyvat Record. The tree has been torn in half. Seven of us survive, plus a refugee from the outer tuft. Marriage between Minya Dalton-Quinn and Gavving Quinn exists as of now. No children are yet born. Terminate.” He pulled the box from the mirror and said, “You’re married.”
THE INTEGRAL TREES, 1983
VIGNETTES
Vignettes should be easy. Little stories fill any slot in a magazine. You can sandwich them between the advertisements. Right?
Wrong. A vignette has to be a complete story! It took me forever, ten years anyway, before I understood enough to write valid vignettes.
UNFINISHED STORY
As he left the blazing summer heat outside the Warlock’s cave, the visiting sorcerer sighed with pleasure. “Warlock, how can you keep the place so cool? The mana in this region has decreased to the point where magic is nearly impossible.”
The Warlock smiled—and so did the unnoticeable young man who was sorting the Warlock’s parchments in a corner of the cave. The Warlock said, “I used a very small demon, Harlaz. He was generated by a simple, trivial spell. His intelligence is low—fortunately, for his task is a dull one. He sits at the entrance to this cave and prevents the fast-moving molecules of air from entering and the slow-moving molecules from leaving. The rest he lets pass. Thus the cave remains cool.”
“That’s marvelous, Warlock! I suppose the process can be reversed in winter?”
“Of course.”
“Ingenious.”
“Oh, I didn’t think of it,” the Warlock said hastily. “Have you met my clerk? It was his idea.” The Warlock raised his voice. “Oh, Maxwell
Academics cannot think like capitalists, because their funding depends on dominance games. That’s hindsight. In the 1970s the Science Fiction Writers of America was still trying to train its members to demand fees from the academic community.
So when the American Journal of Physics wanted “Unfinished Story,” I told the editor he should offer money. He explained that he didn’t have an editorial budget. I explained that it would be unprofessional for me to give a story away to a professional source, and suggested he get an editorial budget. He sent me ten dollars: a decent word rate. Probably came out of his wallet.
Explaining the pun to my mother wasn’t easy either.
• • •
• • •
CAUTIONARY TALES
Taller than a man, thinner than a man, with a long neck and eyes set wide apart in his head, the creature still resembled a man; and he had aged like a man. Cosmic rays had robbed his fur of color, leaving a gray-white ruff along the base of his skull and over both ears. His pastel-pink skin was deeply wrinkled and marked with darker blotches. He carried himself like something precious and fragile. He was coming across the balcony toward Gordon.
Gordon had brought a packaged lunch from the Embassy. He ate alone. The bubble-world’s landscape curled up and over his head: yellow-and-scarlet parkland, slate-colored buildings that bulged at the top. Below the balcony, patterned stars streamed beneath several square miles of window. There were a dozen breeds of alien on the public balcony, at least two of which had to be pets or symbiotes of other aliens; and no humans but for Gordon. Gordon wondered if the ancient humanoid resented his staring…then stared in earnest as the creature stopped before his table. The alien said, “May I break your privacy?”
Gordon nodded; but that could be misinterpreted, so he said, “I’m glad of the company.”
The alien carefully lowered himself until he sat cross-legged across the table. He said, “I seek never to die.”
Gordon’s heart jumped into his throat. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said cautiously. “The Fountain of Youth?”
“I do not care what form it takes.” The alien spoke the Trade Language well, but his strange throat added a castanet-like clicking. “Our own legend holds no fountain. When we learned to cross between stars we found the legend of immortality wherever there were thinking beings. Whatever their shape or size or intelligence, whether they make their own worlds or make only clay pots, they all tell the tales of people who live forever.”
“It’s hard not to wonder if they have some basis,” Gordon encouraged him.
The alien’s head snapped around, fast enough and far enough to break a man’s neck. The prominent lumps bobbing in his throat were of alien shape: not Adam’s Apple, but someone else’s. “It must be so. I have searched too long for it to be false. You, have you ever found clues to the secret of living forever?”
Gordon searched when he could, when his Embassy job permitted it. There had been rumors about the Ftokteek. Gordon had followed the rumors out of human space, toward the galactic core and the Ftokteek Empire, to this Ftokteek-dominated meeting place of disparate life forms, this cloud of bubble-worlds of varying gravities and atmospheres. Gordon was middle-aged now, and Sol was invisible even to orbiting telescopes, and the Ftokteek died like anyone else.
He said, “We’ve got the legends. Look them up in the Human Embassy library. Ponce de Leon, and Gilgamesh, and Orpheus, and Tithonus, and…every god we ever had lived forever, if he didn’t die by violence, and some could heal from that. Some religions say that some part of us lives on after we die.”
“I will go to your library tomorrow,” the alien said without enthusiasm. “Do you have no more than legends?”
“No, but…do other species tell cautionary tales?”
“I do not understand.”
Gordon said, “Some of our legends say you wouldn’t want to live forever. Tithonus, for instance. A goddess gave him the gift of living forever, but she forgot to keep him young. He withered into a lizard. Adam and Eve were exiled by God; He was afraid they’d learn the secret of immortality and think they were as good as Him. Orpheus tried to bring a woman back from the dead. Some of the stories say you can’t get immortality, and some say you’d go insane with boredom.”
The alien pondered. “The tale tellers disdain immortality because they cannot have it. Jealousy? Could immortal beings have walked among you once?”
Gordon laughed. “I doubt it. Was that what made you come to me?”
“I go to the worlds where many species meet. When I see a creature new to me, then I ask. Sometimes I can sense others like me, who want never to die.”
Gordon looked down past the edge of the balcony, down through the great window at the banded Jovian planet that held this swarm of bubble-worlds in their orbits. He came here every day; small wonder that the alien had picked him out. He came because he would not eat with the others. They thought he was crazy. He thought of them as mayflies, with their attention always on the passing moment, and no thought fo
r the future. He thought of himself as an ambitious mayfly; and he ate alone.
The alien was saying, “When I was young I looked for the secret among the most advanced species. The great interstellar empires, the makers of artificial worlds, the creatures who mine stars for elements and send ships through the universe seeking ever more knowledge, would build their own immortality. But they die as you and I die. Some races live longer than mine, but they all die.”
“The Ftokteek have a computerized library the size of a small planet,” Gordon said. He meant to get there someday, if he lived. “It must know damn near everything.”
The alien answered with a whispery chuckle. “No bigger than a moon is the Ftokteek library. It told me nothing I could use.”
The banded world passed from view.
“Then I looked among primitives,” the alien said, “who live closer to their legends. They die. When I thought to talk to their ghosts, there was nothing, though I used their own techniques. Afterward I searched the vicinities of the black holes and other strange pockets of the universe, hoping that there may be places where entropy reverses itself. I found nothing. I examined the mathematics that describe the universe. I have learned a score of mathematical systems, and none hold any hope of entropy reversal, natural or created.”
Gordon watched stars pass below his feet. He said, “Relativity. We used to think that if you traveled faster than light, time would reverse itself.”
“I know eight systems of traveling faster than light—”
“Eight? What is there besides ours and the Ftokteek drive?”
“Six others. I rode them all, and always I arrived older. My time runs short. I never examined the quasars, and now I would not live to reach them. What else is left? I have been searching for fourteen thousand years—” The alien didn’t notice when Gordon made a peculiar hissing sound “—in our counting. Less in yours, perhaps. Our world huddles closer to a cooler sun than this. Our year is twenty-one million standard seconds.”