“By all means, figure skating,” I’d replied without hesitation. “I’m sure Professor Wilhelmsohn has a great deal to tell us, and we have a lot of skull-sweating to do. That should be less distracting than trying to talk about this case and watch a game at the same time, shouldn’t it?”
So here we were, with our drinks, sitting around a table again, waiting for food to come. I’d forced myself to order crayfish, in honor of our guest.
But I’d been wrong about the distraction factor. Almost unable to look away, I watched in awe as a tiny, pixie-faced girlchild in an electric blue velvet dress and her straight golden hair in a ponytail, did something complicated and dangerous that involved skating very fast around the rink, then jumping at least four feet off the ice, turning two or three times in the air, and landing gracefully on only one skate, with the other leg extended and her arms upraised. I’d seen stuff like that on the’Com, but never in person, and never by anybody under sixteen.
“I managed to avoid involvement in the first bombing,” Wilhelmsohn was telling us. I forced myself to pay attention. “I had just arrived in the Confederacy and they didn’t trust me. In a way, I don’t think they ever did.”
He poured himself a half-glass of the red wine that Clarissa was drinking, took a sip, then a gulp, and poured himself another glass, full this time.
He sighed. “As well, it pains me to confess that I was … well, I suppose in kindness you could call it ‘socially disoriented’ for a good, long while. Just imagine my surprise! Chimpanzees? Gorillas? Porpoises? Eleven thousand worlds like mine but different? One of the Bennetts told me that he’d escaped from a bizarre universe where the people without any pigmentation at all form a political elite—they call it ‘albinocracy.’”
That was another new one on me.
“Regrettably, I was present when they wrecked that underground train, although I swear that I didn’t know what they were doing until it’d been done. From where I sat, in the back of one of these wheelless cars of yours, it looked like they were drilling for some reason in the highway median—I had no idea there was a tunnel in it—and left the drill in.”
“So that’s how it was done. You left that money from your version of Texas?” Will asked.
Wilhelmsohn nodded. “I left it to communicate with whoever would be investigating these atrocities. I know it wasn’t much of a clue, but it was all I had.”
“How about their other crimes?” I asked. “And who the hell are ‘they,’ for that matter?”
“Well, I wasn’t aboard the City of Calgary. I almost wish I had been—I’ve never flown on a dirigible before. I did help them drop that car on you the other night, but I managed to ‘slip’ at the last moment, and made sure it didn’t hit you. They were angry at me, but I talked my way out of it.”
“How about the grocery store poisonings?” Mary-Beth asked. So Will had revealed a state secret to his wives. I would have done—and did—exactly the same thing.
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about any grocery store poisonings—how very strange—do you suppose that might have been somebody else?”
“What about the guy at None of the Above Park,” I asked, feeling the small pistol he’d abandoned in my left front pocket. “In that denim clown suit?”
He shrugged. “I’d wondered where those clothes went. I’ll have you know that they’re the height of gentlemen’s fashion in East Texas just now. I was always known on the faculty for my sartorial refinement. I’d no idea what had become of them. But I think you should know that I risked escaping from Bennett Williams’s house because the next thing they’re planning to blow up is the dam at something called Pistol Sight Mountain.”
“Pistol Sight Mountain!” several of us exclaimed at once.
“Swell!” Will was suddenly angry. He slammed a fist on the table. “Another regrettable tragedy for west central LaPorte—only this time hundreds of thousands will die—and we’ll all end up with a goddamned government crammed down our throats whether any of us want a government or not!”
“Now hold your horses!” Lucy declared, fingering Wilhelmsohn’s coin. “Before this goes on another nanosecond, how did New Orleans wind up part of Texas?”
Wilhelmsohn chuckled. In the relative security of this room, he’d taken off his hat and veil, also his gloves and jersey dress. Under it, he’d been wearing sweats. The Japanese running shoes on his feet (he’d shucked out of his high heeled ladies’ shoes immediately) when they’d been hanging by their laces around his neck, had given him his girlish figure.
I’d noticed that his accent sounded substantially different from Lucy’s, softer, and at the same time, thicker somehow. She was from San Antonio. Later, I tried to write down what his explanation to her sounded like to me.
“You must undahstand, ma‘am, that the Texas in which I was bohn was nevah a paht of the Yewnited States. We nevah even came close. Durin’ the Wah between the States, the Nawth offahed us any South’n land we wanted, up t‘the Mississippi Rivah, if Texas would othahwise stay outa the conflict. Need I say, we accepted. At that point, I b’lieve most of the folks in the states we took wah simply grateful to be out of the wah, and what ouah “conquest” consisted of, in the main, was sendin’ out … well, a species of Welcome Wagon, y’might say. The only real fightin’ the Texas Ahmy had t’do was against Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Cape Girardeau.”
You get the idea.
“But what you all have to understand,” he went on in the same accent, “what I despaired of telling you, is of the vile conspiracy that’s underway in your otherwise wonderful continuum. Not only are people going to die—why, this place we’re in would be washed away!—but the survivors will all end up in chains, if you don’t do something soon!”
IT SEEMED THAT Will and I had been on the right track, after all, and that we’d already spoken at length with the evil-doer behind all of the atrocities.
At least one of him, anyway.
Benjamin Wilhelmsohn told us the story, at least as much as he knew of it. On a fateful day two years before the Sanders-Bear investigation had been forced into existence, an outworld political refugee named Arlington Panghurst discovered a hologram of himself staring back at him from the online pages of The Postman, the opinion magazine of the Franklinite Faction of the Gallatinist Party. It was accompanied by a cutline claiming that it was a picture of the magazine’s longtime editor, Bennett Williams.
Naturally curious—and with the sketchy beginnings of a truly evil idea already simmering in his head—Panghurst had looked Bennett up.
The two men had discovered that they were otherworld counterparts down to their very fingerprints. They also dicovered that they had virtually identical opinions on the issues of the day, and more importantly, identical ambitions. Neither of them aspired to be a great leader. Each preferred that some “worthier” individual be groomed to take up the scepter—and the high political profile that went with it.
Much closer than identical twins—for they were virtually the same individual—they both wanted to be the “man behind the throne,” to enjoy all of the prerogatives of great power, while taking none of the attendant risks. Also, the “original” Bennett wanted out from under his brother Buckley’s thumb.
By now, it had occurred to each of them independently that North American Confederate science was overlooking an unprecedented—and breathtakingly limitless—source of power. Together, they began to cook up a thoroughly ethically deficient scheme designed to correct this oversight. And since each of them was the only individual in existence that the other felt he could trust, their first agenda item was obvious.
They’d acquire more of themselves!
25: POISONING PIGEONS IN THE PARK
She never said a word to him during labor, but four and a half years later, as they stood in their daughter’s bedroom, hip-deep in toys and trying to clean the place up, his wife glared at him and said, “You did this to me, you sonofabitch!”
—Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin
Bennett Williams and Arlington Panghurst’s first move (Willhelmsohn continued as I ate my creole—and watched skaters doing things I’d have thought impossible in a one-gravity field) was to lease their very own probability broach.
Only a few years previously, that wouldn’t have been possible. The one the Hamiltonians had tried to use had been cobbled together out of stolen parts. Even now the devices were hideously expensive to obtain, and worse to operate. Any of the booths at LaPorte Interworld used enough power to land the Great Pyramid on the Moon and bring it back. The best the two conspirators could afford was a small academic survey device, rented from a scientific supply company, barely capable of creating an interworld orifice only about an inch in diameter. Williams and Panghurst told each other gleefully and repeatedly that it was through this aperture—however tiny—that whole worlds were about to be changed beyond all recognition.
Panghurst, it developed, was the unique individual Wilhelmsohn had already mentioned, the one who’d escaped from a continuum where, for as long as anybody could remember, the pursuit and maintenance of power had been the exclusive purview of a hereditary ruling class of pure albinos. Political activity of any kind was absolutely forbidden to pigmented commoners, be they yellow, brown, black, or pink. As a consequence, unlike his Confederate counterpart, he’d chosen to pursue a technical career. Now, with a wide-angle lens, fiberoptic cables, and computer image-enhancing software, Panghurst and Williams began to set a record as the ultimate Peeping Toms, exploring as many other worlds of alternative probability as they could, peering over the shoulders of unsuspecting individuals reading newspapers, watching local television and movies, “listening” with the aid of a computer program capable of reading lips (their cut-rate system wasn’t capable of conveying sound), observing various phenomena occur sometimes with milkmen, little blond secretaries, Senate pages, or farm animals—that nobody else was ever meant to see. Later on, they planned to make some highly profitable uses of the secrets they’d learned this way. It could all be done at a cosmic arm’s length, by remote control. What blackmail victim actually needed to know that his blackmailer lived on another “plane of existence”?
But for now, the plan was simpler.
Money was the problem.
The two “Bennetts” had only an inch of broach diameter to work through, although they could put their aperture anywhere they wanted, including the most tightly secured vault in any universe. But what should they take? Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sunstones, sapphires—otherwise the obvious target for interworld pilferage—were of no particular value to them, being easily synthesized here in the Confederacy. Paper money was laughably out of the question as anything but a bathroom novelty. Platinum, gold, and silver, monetary metals in general, were usually stringently controlled (and therefore only available in bars too large to get throught the broach) or out of circulation altogether in most of the worlds they reached, although there were occasional exceptions.
In one version of the United States, however, they got lucky and stumbled onto “subcompact disks.” A little smaller than a quarter, but otherwise identical to laser disks or DVDs in other worlds, they carried on their quasimetallic surfaces samples of that culture’s amusements—plays, motion pictures—some going back more than a century. Many even featured otherworld versions of Confederate stars like Marion “Mike” Morrison, Archie Leach, Bettie Page, Clark Gable, and Carole Lombard.
“Now HOLD ON just a damned minute!” As interesting as it had been, I interrupted Wilhelmsohn’s story with a sinking feeling in the pit of my crawdad-filled stomach. “Do you mean to tell me that we haven’t found the source of the Gables’ cinematic grievances and stopped it up for them, even temporarily?”
Will had exactly the same pained expression on his face that I felt on my own, while Lucy pretended to try valiantly not to gloat. She’d warned me—just before I’d called my clients—that the Gone with the Wind case might not quite be closed completely. Naturally, I’d argued with her. Now, she leaned my way and simply whispered, “It’s good to be Queen.”
“You’re absolutely right.” I waggled my cigar and tried to look at her as blandly as I could. “Freddy Mercury thought well of it.”
I tend to forget, from day to day and moment to moment, that as similar as we seem sometimes in outlook and approach to our work, Will comes, nevertheless, from a slightly different continuum than I do. Slightly, but different. “Who the hell is Freddy Mercury?” he asked.
“Was.” It was Clarissa who spoke. “He was one of the first people in Win’s world to die of AZT poisoning.”
Wilhelmson shook his head, and I realized that he didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. No “slightly different” to it with him. Earlier, he’d told us that he came from a place where, legend had it, Davy Crockett had eighty-sixed General Santa Anna with a six-hundred-yard Kentucky rifle shot. So I explained, as briefly as I could, about the Clark Gable and Carole Lombard who lived here and what they’d hired me to accomplish.
“Sir Robert Cummings is an actor?” The expression of shock on Wilhelmson’s face was incredulous. “In my homeworld, Sir Robert is a great aviator and inventor—he headed the effort that put Charlie Lindbergh, Junior, on the Moon—and almost as famous as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or Hedy Lamar!”
I had to bite my tongue to keep from shouting, “‘Hedley!’”
ALTERNATIVE CULTURES OF every kind were all the rage just now in the Confederacy. With the aid of a long pair of paratronically insulated tweezers (to avoid the high-energy slicery and dicery that occurs at the margin of the broach locus) and a computer program to scan and rerecord the microscopic pits in the tiny disks onto media more familiar in the Confederacy, William and Panghurst began peddling previously unseen entertainments to a hungry worldwide audience through several dummy corporations, free at last of what Bennett perceived as his brother Buckley’s fiscal tyranny.
At the same time, they continued combing the sands of infinity for other Bennett Williamses—by whatever name they were called—and to their surprise, this proved even easier than finding an independent source of income.
They started by writing newspaper advertisements (or their local technological equivalent), accompanied by a flat-printed duplicate of the hologram that had attracted Panghurst’s attention to Williams in the first place. They popped this material through their one-inch broach when nobody was around to see it arriving—for example, straight into the IN basket of that great metropolitan newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s classified advertising office in the middle of the night.
Payment for the ad space was invariably made in cash—in—variably appropriated with the same pair of insulated tweezers—invariably from the locked cash drawer of the same great metropolitan newspaper’s classified advertising office. Nobody ever seemed to notice that (or connect it with the ad submission), or that it never appeared to be necessary to deliver the replies:
DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?
DO YOU HAPPEN TO LOOK LIKE HIM?
REPLY DIRECT TO THIS NEWSPAPER, BOX 2323A
UNIMAGINABLE REWARDS!!
William and Panghurst knew that their advertising would prove effective—they were trying to communicate wih an extremely narrow segment of the newspaper-reading public—because it would have worked on them.
More often than not the reply they received from their counterpart in that portion of reality was the same that Han Solo had given to Luke Skywalker: “Unimaginable rewards? I don’t know—I can imagine quite a lot.”
The whole thing became routine.
Whenever they discovered a likely prospect, they stopped dealing with the newspaper immediately and steered a hovertruck with their rented probability broach in the back directly to the spot “coextant” with his home. The hovertruck was necessary at their end, because, like larger apertures, “dirigible broaches”—those that could be directed anywhere from a stationary location—were presently beyond t
heir means to command. They hoped to change that.
One of the sadder facts of human existence is that power will get you through times of no brains better than brains will get you through times of no power. They were out to conquer universes, but sometimes it looked more like they were searching for a third Stooge.
Once, pretending to be maintenance men, Panghurst and Williams had been forced to run their fiberoptic cable to the bottom of a swimming pool at a girl’s school to reach the coextant basement apartment of another Bennett Williams who was interested in their proposition. He didn’t appreciate the small but steady leak on his carpet. Slowly, they established contact with several counterparts in other universes, explained what was at stake, and issued certain instructions.
The rest was simple and required no further contribution on their part. For some time, there had been a lively “underground railroad,” a well-established infrastructure for rescuing willing refugees from the otherworld tyranny. LaPorte boasted several respectable organizations, like the Erisian Rescue Brigade and the Gallatinite Rescue Society, to do the work, and there was plenty of financial support available for such a humane, charitable, politically attractive undertaking. Williams and Panghurst, unable to afford a man-sized probability broach of their own, instead anonymously transmitted the coordinates of their potential new partners to the charitable groups who operated through the LaPorte Interworld Terminal and waited for their latest associate to appear.
Always, the newcomer was instructed to disguise himself, and to give a false name, so that no one at LaPorte Interworld would notice the arrival of so many “repeaters.” (Wilhelmsohn, for example, had arrived in the dress and floppy hat that now lay discarded on an unused chair in the rinkside party room and had claimed to be Miss Bessie May Mucho.) It might not have raised suspicions—and the hackers among their number usually managed to clear the computer records afterward in any case—but the two original conspirators were unwilling to take chances.