Another question that writers are always being asked is where they get their ideas from. In my experience, the ideas that finally turn into books often result when thoughts that complement each other, but which have never connected together in your mind before, suddenly click together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. While I was writing Inherit the Stars, I found myself thinking from time to time about the “hyperdrives,” “warp drives,” and other exotic propulsion systems that we come across in science fiction. It seemed to me that they had become something of a cliche, tacitly accepted by writers and readers alike as merely a device to shortcut Einstein by moving characters from here to there fast to get on with the story. . . . But wait a minute. We’re talking about a capability that transcends not only any technology imaginable today, but also our most fundamental theoretical beliefs. Never mind getting across the galaxy to save the blonde or deliver the villain his comeuppances—how did they discover “hyperspace” to begin with? Surely, there’s a much more interesting story right here, which we were about to gloss over. What experiments in labs gave strange results? What body of new theory and speculation did this open up? How were the ideas tested? How did things progress from there to proven, working engineering? Nobody I talked to had seen a story about how hyperspace came to be discovered. I played around with some extrapolations of physics that provided a plausible theoretical framework, but that doesn’t make a novel.
Another subject that I talked about with friends sometimes was the interstellar warships that we saw in books and movies. As usual, I was complaining. It didn’t make sense for a vessel that could cross light-years of space in an instant, with the staggering level of technology that implied, to peel off into a dive when it got there, like a World War II Stuka—and usually with a pilot driving it from a World War II cockpit—and drop a bomb on something. After all, what does a bomb do? It concentrates a lot of energy on a target. Well, if you can send a spaceship there through hyperspace, why not just send the energy? Just imagine being able to materialize the equivalent of a fifty-megaton bang out of nowhere, instantaneously, without warning, and with no way for an enemy to know where it came from. That sounded more like a weapon worthy of a futuristic technology. By comparison, sending a spaceship to drop a bomb would be like inventing gunpowder to blow holes through castle walls, but trundling it up to the wall with a horse and cart instead of thinking to invent a cannon. But that doesn’t add up to a story either.
These two thoughts existed in separate compartments in my head for a long time. Then one day, the obvious eventually struck me: Perhaps the new physics that our characters stumble on isn’t recognized as the way to a hyperdrive at all, to begin with. Perhaps they could be investigating its promise of a revolutionary weapons system—which happens all the time in real life. And only later, maybe, the line of new discoveries takes an unexpected turn which leads to spacecraft drives. The two ideas fitted well together, and that was how The Genesis Machine came to be written. It’s the book that seems to generate the most questions about where the idea came from.
The apartment looked out from high above London’s fashionable Knightsbridge, across Hyde Park toward where the green sea of treetops washed against white cliffs of elegant Park Lane buildings that had not changed appreciably in the last hundred years. Spacious, light and airy, and opulently draped and furnished in contemporary style, the residence was not the kind that came with the income of the average Londoner of 2056; but then, the four people whom Harry had come from Las Vegas to meet there that morning were hardly average Londoners, and their income was what he had come all that way to talk about.
For tax purposes the apartment was owned by a nebulous entity registered as Zephyr Enterprises Limited, and described as a business property retained for the use and entertainment of clients and customers visiting the capital. The company rented it for ten months of the year at a nominal sum to Nigel Philiman and his wife Delia, who, it turned out, happened to be managing director and company secretary respectively of the holding company that had set up Zephyr. To comply with the minimum required by law, the Philimans spent two months of each year abroad or elsewhere while the apartment was being used by clients. The clients often turned out to be friends who needed somewhere to stay while mixing a considerable amount of pleasure with a modicum of business in the course of a visit to the city, but that was purely coincidental.
Nigel was in his late forties, suave, athletic, suntanned and silver-haired, and always immaculately groomed and dressed. Delia was only a few years younger, but she had a countess’s bearing and a movie star’s looks, and knew just how to choose slinky, body-clinging clothes that enhanced the latter without detracting from the former. The couple went well with the apartment’s image of luxury and high living, and Harry Stone was well aware that the image was no hollow sham.
Where their money came from was none of Harry Stone’s business. Being a professional, he had done some discreet checking on the side, however, and he knew that Zephyr had obscure links to a string of loan companies that seemed to specialize in financing such operations as escort agencies, various types of modeling agencies, an employment agency that hired waitresses and hostesses, and home or hotel visiting massage services—in short, anything to do with girls. The girls employed by such enterprises always worked according to a strict code of ethics written into their contracts, and they accepted payment only in the form of checks or credit cards that could be verified by accredited auditors. But like any man of the world, Harry knew that the girls were seldom averse to cultivating friendships further in their own free time, and that any additional such transactions were strictly cash. Where a portion of that cash might wind up and how it might get there were interesting questions.
Clive Philiman, Nigel’s younger brother by ten years or perhaps slightly more, ran a group of agencies that specialized in handling rented apartments on the west side of London. Out of curiosity Harry had purchased a selection of the kinds of magazines that younger, single women tended to read, and had found a number of Clive’s companies taking prominent advertising space in several of them. He could imagine that Clive, with his dark-brown eyes, classically Roman features, tight curls of short black hair, and sympathetic manner, might be just the kind of person that a girl just in from the country and looking for somewhere to live might find easy to talk to, especially when she learned that he just happened to have the right contacts to give her a job. And of course, making money might become her main problem when she discovered that the great bargain which had brought her into the office had been rented just an hour before she showed up.
Barbara Philiman, Clive’s slim and petite, auburn-haired wife, had a good as well as a pretty head on her shoulders; she was director of a personnel selection agency off Wigmore Street which procured managers and senior executives for a wide spectrum of companies and corporations ranging from manufacturers of plastic labels to builders of space stations. This position gave her numerous social contacts throughout the capital’s commercial world, and, Harry thought, were she so inclined, she would be the ideal person for somebody who perhaps was interested in arranging some entertainment for an important visitor to know. Furthermore, the agency would have been able to supply a tax-deductible invoice to cover the costs of screening a lot of nonexistent job applicants for positions that proved unsuitable. It was just a thought.
All Harry Stone knew officially was that the Philiman family wished to convert a substantial inflow of cash from sources they chose not to disclose into a legitimate form of income the British Inland Revenue would be obliged to accept—despite any suspicions they might harbor—as justifying a life-style built around diamonds, personal flymobiles, à la mode gowns from Paris, and jetliners chartered for mid-Atlantic orgies thinly disguised as parties. In the capacity of financial and legal consultant, he had spent the morning explaining how he thought an American institution known as Neighbors in Need, with which he happened to have “personal connections,” might be able to help solve their problem. Essentially, the organization managed the investment of large sums of money collected by charities of one kind or another, and distributed the proceeds among various worthy causes it was pledged to support. This service was rendered in return for a moderate commission on the amounts handled, plus expenses. Harry’s proposition involved setting up a British chapter of the operation.
The British subsidiary would be guaranteed to attract a massive response to the quite moderate program of advertising Harry had outlined. The response—mainly in the form of anonymous donations—was guaranteed because the so-called donations would be almost completely made up of the Philimans’ own hot money mailed to themselves after conversion into money orders and travelers’ checks bought with cash all over the country. The packages would be opened and the contents registered by certified accountants, thus providing unimpeachable proof of where every penny of the chapter’s assets had originated.
“Twenty percent stays here for salaries and expenses, which is the maximum allowed under British law,” he said when he summed up the main points. He was speaking easily and confidently as he sat in an armchair of padded purple and chrome that looked as if it belonged in some eccentric millionaire’s sculpture collection. The rings on his fingers glittered in the sunshine streaming through the window as he made an empty gesture in the air. “The remaining eighty is tax exempt and goes to the States as your gross contribution to the fund. Obviously you’re all charitable-minded people, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t add in a personal donation of your own or some deductible contributions from your companies’ profits. Four times a year they pay you back a commission that they list as foreign expenses, which brings your effective total revenue back up to fifty percent; you pay tax on only three-fifths—that is to say, the thirty that’s fed back. The remaining fifty covers the actual input to the fund, the parent company’s commission, and U.S. domestic expenses. I guess that’s about it.” He sat back in his chair, steepled his fingers below his chin, and studied the four faces before him.
* * *
Nigel, looking relaxed in the chair opposite, took a measured sip from the glass of sherry in his hand and savored the taste with an approving nod before replying. “You’re still talking about a full half of it,” he said. His voice was calm, registering curiosity rather than surprise or indignation. “Allowing for the portion that’s taxable over here, we’d end up with the minor share. That does seem rather overambitious, wouldn’t you agree?”
Harry knew Nigel knew better than that. He spread his arms expressively. “Most of their half has to go through to the fund. It’s a respectable fund management operation, and it’s got its payments to make. The rest helps them make a living, something we all have to do.”
“What percentage goes into the fund net at the end of it all?” Barbara asked from where she was sitting on the sofa to one side, next to Clive.
“What I’ve described is the deal,” Harry replied evenly, avoiding a direct answer. “They’re not asking where the donations would be coming from at this end.”
“It’s still a big chunk whichever way you look at it,” Clive said. He rubbed his nose dubiously, then looked across at his brother. “The money’s clean on their side from the moment it enters the country,” he pointed out. “We run all the risks over here. That’s a difference that should be reflected in the split. I’m for this scheme in principle, but not for settling as it stands.”
“Your money is also hot, and that’s another side to the same difference,” Harry countered smoothly. “It’s unspendable, and therefore might as well not be there. Half a loaf is better than no loaf. Your risk is balanced out by their doing you a favor that you need, which squares things back at fifty-fifty.”
A short silence fell. Delia walked back from the window where she had been listening and stopped behind Nigel’s chair. “I presume, Mr. Stone, that this matter would be subject to a written contract confirming all these figures and terms,” she said, speaking in a precise English society accent that was marred only by a slight tendency toward being shrill.
Harry’s brow furrowed into a pained look. “Of course,” he told her. “Everything would be legal and aboveboard. They wouldn’t do it any other way. They’ve got a valuable reputation to protect.”
Nigel sniffed pointedly, but made no comment. Harry smiled to himself and marveled at the mental gymnastics that enabled somebody in Nigel’s position to be capable of a gesture implying moral disapproval. Although the bargaining had been tough in places, his instinct made him confident the deal would go through. The Philimans had politely but firmly argued him down from his opening proposal of seventy-five/twenty-five, which he hadn’t expected them to accept for a moment, and declined his original suggestion of a one-year-deferred commission, which would have given the U.S. side of the organization the exclusive benefit of a substantial sum accrued as interest. But the negotiations had all been very gentlemanly and a refreshing change from the kind Harry was used to. Furthermore, everybody would be able to have dinner in a civilized manner afterward with all business matters forgotten.
Harry admired and envied the ability of these people to keep different parts of their lives in the proper compartments, and the tradition that enabled them to smile apologetically while they twisted the knife in deeper for the last ounce of flesh. This was the way of life he meant to become part of before much longer, and he recognized in the present situation not only the prospect of some lucrative business but also an opportunity for some social investment that could pay handsome dividends later. Anybody who was just smart could make money, but to really fly high in the circles that mattered, you needed something extra that people like this had. Harry Stone knew that he had it, too, and he was going to prove it.
Nigel kept his face expressionless as he turned toward Clive with an almost imperceptible raising of his eyebrows. Harry could feel a warm surge of jubilation inside as he read the signals, but kept his own face just as straight. Clive’s jaw stiffened a fraction, his eyebrows dropped, and he moved his head in a slight sideways motion.
“Sixty-forty,” Nigel said, looking back at Stone.
It was what Harry had been expecting, but he frowned intently at the floor in front of him and went through the motions of wrestling with figures in his head. “It’s scraping the bone,” he said dubiously when he finally looked up. “But since we’re talking pretty big dollars, I’d be prepared to try them for another three points. I’m sure we’d be wasting our time if I pushed for anything past that.”
“Not enough,” Nigel said flatly. “Make it another two. We’ll meet you at fifty-five.”
That gave Harry forty-five, which clinched the deal because his bottom limit had been forty-three. Nevertheless, he played through some more mental agonies and then asked guardedly, “Would we have a deal if I managed to get them to go for that? No more strings. You’ll okay a contract if they beam it through later today?”
Nigel looked over at his partners, and one by one they returned faint nods. “Very well, Mr. Stone,” he agreed. “You have a deal. Provided that the terms are as discussed and that our lawyer finds nothing amiss with the details, you may consider the matter settled.”
Harry waited for a couple of seconds and then nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I’ll probably be able to call you later this afternoon. Will you be at home?”
“Until about six,” Nigel told him. He looked around him to invite any final comments, but there were none. “Very well, we’ll consider the subject closed until I hear further from you.” The Englishman set his empty glass down and braced his arms along the side of his chair. “There was another matter that you wished to finalize today, I believe,” he said.
Stone nodded and reached inside the jacket pocket of his suit for an envelope containing a bank check for forty thousand pounds. He had purchased it two days before in Las Vegas with unlaundered cash bought at a substantial discount, and arranged for it to be wired on to London for collection on his way to the Philimans’ apartment that morning. “One hundred thousand dollars, less twenty percent for handling as agreed,” he said as he leaned forward to hand the envelope to Nigel. “It gives me a much better break than the standard rate. We’re throwing it in as a goodwill gesture.”
“We?” Nigel looked mildly surprised. “I thought you said this was a private matter.”
“A figure of speech,” Harry told him with a grin. “Okay, I’m throwing it in as a goodwill gesture. I think you’ll find everything in order.”
Nigel opened the envelope and took out the check, examined it briefly, and nodded. “Excuse me for a moment, please,” he said, and with that got up and left the room.
Clive stood up from the sofa and brought his arms up level with his shoulders to stretch gratefully, his action echoing the more relaxed atmosphere that had descended to mark the end of the day’s primary business. “It’s a beautiful day for seeing some of London if you’re not intending to return straightaway,” he remarked, glancing across at the window. “The weather must be the best we’ve had so far this year.”
“I am staying over tonight, but I’ve got other things to do,” Harry said. “I’ll have to schedule that in for some other time.”
“Perhaps you would care to join us for lunch,” Delia suggested. “A new French restaurant has opened in the plaza downstairs. I’m told the cuisine is excellent.”
Harry turned his hand palm upward and smiled regretfully. “I’d love to, but I only got in from Vegas this morning and it’s a full day. I promise I’ll allow for it next time.”
“You must live a very busy life,” Barbara murmured, leaning forward on the sofa and looking at him with a hint of intrigue that he felt she was not in the habit of displaying toward everyone. He was flattered, and he wondered for a moment if the look in her eyes might be an oblique invitation to get in touch sometime when his schedule was less crowded.
“Always busy, but never too busy,” he said, winking in a way he knew could be read as not completely playful, and pretending not to notice Clive’s stiffening posture out of the corner of his eye. “You know how it is with Americans—work hard, but play hard, too, huh? Who needs ulcers?”
“I presume you travel Arabee,” Clive said in a voice cooler than before. Though speaking to Harry, he glanced down at Barbara pointedly. “There were some things I was hoping to discuss, but I don’t think this would be a good time. Could we fix something for a day next week, perhaps?”
Harry realized he had been getting carried away. “Yes,” he replied, dropping his smile and producing a pocket vipad from his jacket as he turned to look up at Clive. He activated the unit and studied the information that appeared on its miniature screen. “Sure, I’ve got some free slots next week. When do you want to make it?”
“Before Thursday,” Delia said, looking at Clive. “Don’t forget we’re due for a long weekend with Maurice and Brigitte in Cannes.”
Clive took his own unit from his shirt pocket, compared his schedule with Harry’s, and eventually they settled for a Tuesday morning meeting to be followed by lunch. They had just finished dictating the details into the two vipads when Nigel returned with a flat leather briefcase. He set it down on the side table next to Harry, then opened it to reveal bundles of used one-hundred-pound notes.
“Fifty thousand,” Nigel announced, at the same time handing Harry a white envelope he had been carrying. “Here is the promissory note and some ID that you will have no trouble with.”
Harry checked the contents of the envelope and then leaned over the table to spend the next minute or two counting the cash. His canceled bank check plus a copy of the promissory note from Zephyr Enterprises to repay the “loan” would satisfy the British authorities that forty thousand pounds had been invested in the company from legitimate sources. Thus through the two transactions that he had made in two days, Harry had converted fifty thousand dollars he had borrowed on a short-term basis into the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars in illicitly obtained cash. That left him with the problem of translating the profit into personal assets that couldn’t be questioned, but he would take advantage of his visit to London as an opportunity to solve that.
At last he pronounced himself satisfied, closed the briefcase, and exchanged final farewells as he stood up to leave. Nigel and Clive began talking about some office space that was available in Piccadilly, leaving Delia and Barbara to escort Harry to the door. Just as she was about to close the door behind him, Barbara said in a low voice, “It might be fun to find out what you’re really like, Harry.”
“I’m planning on moving over permanently not long from now,” he murmured. “Maybe when I do, I’ll give you a call at the office. I still need somebody to show me this city.”
“Do that,” she whispered, smiling a promise, then eased the door shut. Harry tightened his grip on the briefcase and began whistling jubilantly through his teeth as he turned and walked in the direction of the elevators.
* * *
The first thing he did after he came out of the main entrance to the apartments was call the States and arrange for a contract to be beamed through to Nigel Philiman in accordance with the terms agreed. The terms were immediately accepted as Harry knew they would be, but not wanting to give the impression that things had been too easy, he postponed calling Nigel back until later. After that he had a snack lunch consisting of an unchilled beer and a ham sandwich in a pub at the top end of Sloane Street, and then took an autocab eastward toward the center of the city.
He found the premises of Melvin & Cooper, Dealers in Rare Stamps, Coins, and Curios, in a side street off Charing Cross Road. It was one of those quaint old London establishments that had barred windows guarding its displays, and solid brasswork its portal, and gave off the impression of having stood there since the street was first laid down way back in whatever century and of boasting the same venerable and dignified staff that had unlocked the doors on its opening day. Inside, Harry spent almost another hour discussing and examining postage stamps, eventually selecting a modest collection dating back twenty years. The complete purchase came to just short of fifty thousand pounds, and Harry paid in cash. The dealer dutifully recorded the details of the transaction and the date along with the name and address of the buyer, the latter of which he took from the document that Nigel Philiman had provided.
From there he took a cab to Marble Arch, where he locked the briefcase containing the collection in a bank deposit box rented for twenty-four hours under his assumed name, after which he called Nigel as promised and advised him that, after a lot of haggling and effort, he had persuaded his associates in the States to go with the figures that Nigel had asked for. That issue having been resolved satisfactorily, he spent thirty minutes in a corner house unwinding and congratulating himself over a cigarette and coffee. It had been a good day’s work, and the time was three-thirty, just right for him to get to Bayswater by four to meet Sandra. Now business was really over, and for the rest of the evening, not to mention the night, he would be able to abandon himself totally and with unashamed selfishness.
As he drained the last of his coffee he paused to check back over the day’s events for any last detail he might have forgotten. Then, finding nothing, he stubbed his cigarette, smiled to himself in satisfaction, rose from the table, paid the bill, and left.
* * *
Feeling ecstatically content, Harry Stone lay back against the silky softness of the pillows admiring the rear view of Sandra’s perfect body as she stooped provocatively in front of the vanity to straighten her hair in the mirror. “Wow!” he murmured approvingly.
Sandra smiled over her shoulder in the mirror. “Feeling better?”
“Fantastic! If this is only the beginning, hey, are we gonna have some good times. I never went much for that crap about people being made for each other, but you know something—it’s true.”
“You, a romantic? I’d never have believed it.” Sandra smirked wickedly. “I’m starting to get hungry, Alex. How about eating dinner early? Then maybe we could go on to a club for a couple of hours and still have plenty of night left. I have to be away early in the morning.”
“Oh, how come?”
“I promised I’d go to an art show with a couple of the girls from the health club I told you about.”
“The place with all the loaded man-hungry widows and debutantes on the prowl for rich husbands?”
“Uh-huh.”
Harry shrugged. “Sounds good to me . . . especially the last part. We could go to that place in the park again by the bridge.”
“Great.” Sandra moved over to the door and slipped on a robe she took off a peg on the back. “I need to shower,” she said. “Don’t run away, Alex.” She left the room, leaving the door open behind her, and disappeared into the bathroom in the hallway. The sounds of cabinet doors being opened and closed and bottles being set down trickled back into the bedroom. Harry stretched out an arm to pick up his cigarettes and lighter from the bedside table, lit one, tossed the pack and lighter down again, and settled back to relax.
There was nothing especially remarkable about bumping into a fellow American overseas, but to have decided for no particular reason to have lunch in the same restaurant as this American three months before had been a rare and unexpected stroke of good fortune, even for somebody like Harry, who made it his business to be lucky. Sandra had come to England three years ago as the wife of a vice-president of a Texas-based construction company who had moved over temporarily to set up a British division of the firm. Her husband had become infatuated with an English girl and taken her back to the States with him at the end of his stay after offering Sandra a generous settlement in return for an easy divorce. Since then she had continued living a life of ease and leisure in London, cultivating the circle of social acquaintances that her husband’s position had brought her into contact with, but always managing to be free when “Alex” was due to stay in town.
But what he liked most was that she was the same kind of person as he—a born winner. She knew what she wanted and played hard for it, and acknowledged the fact realistically without hiding behind apologies or pretense. Without doubt she was his kind of woman. They both understood the rules of the game and would play it together for as long as they both had something to gain; if that ever changed, then that would be it, with no dues, debts, or recriminations either way. So nothing was guaranteed, but his prospects were looking pretty good, and all the signs indicated that when Harry finally moved over to London as planned, he’d have everything set up and waiting for him. Success, in all its aspects, had never smelled sweeter.
The sounds of shower water were replaced by the low hum of the hot-air dryer system. “When are you going back home to Surrey, Alex?” Sandra called through the doorway.
“Not until later tomorrow,” he replied, making his tone not very enthusiastic. “I’ll let myself out if you have to get away. I’ve got to see a couple of guys from a broker’s in the city, but not until around lunchtime.”
“Which ones are those—the Australian nickel or the Brazilian coffee beans?”
“Something different. We tied up both those deals this morning,” he told her.
“So how many millions was that worth?”
“Oh, you know how it is,” he drawled carelessly. “A couple here and a couple there. I figure the commission on it should take care of the dinner check tonight.”
“So what is it? Tell me.”
“Ocean-ridge mining. A new treaty’s been drafted by the U.N. that’s pretty well bound to go through. It’s the right time to be taking out options.”
A short pause ensued. Then Sandra remarked in a more sober tone, “You didn’t sound too happy about going home tomorrow. Is she being a bitch again?”
Harry scowled and blew a stream of smoke across the bed. “Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it. Why spoil a nice evening? Anyhow, it’s not as if it was going to be for much longer.”
The hum of the dryer stopped, and Sandra reappeared through the doorway, her robe on again. For the first time that afternoon her expression was serious and her manner tense. “You are still sure you want to go through with it?” she said. “You haven’t changed your mind?”
Harry hesitated for just a second, then nodded once decisively. “I don’t change my mind,” he told her, stubbing the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray by the bed and looking up. “Did you get the . . . things?”
“Do you really want to talk about that now?” she asked. “Why not leave it until we get back?”
He shook his head. “Let’s get it over with and out of the way now. Then we’ll be able to enjoy dinner without it hanging around in the background. . . .” He grinned crookedly. “Not to mention afterward.”
Sandra nodded and, keeping her face cool and expressionless, walked over to the wall closet. She slid open the door and reached up to the shelf inside for a padded brown mailer. She drew out a small white package, replaced the mailer on the shelf, and came over and sat down on the edge of the bed. Harry watched as she opened the white package to reveal a preformed plastic container—flat and about two inches square—of the kind used for holding one-shot medical infusers. She flipped the lid open with her thumbnail and uncovered slender metal tubes lying side by side in three of the container’s slots, the remaining two slots being empty. Each tube was a little longer and slightly thicker than a match, and was tipped by a glass bead at one end. Two of them had a tiny dot of red paint on the outside about halfway along; the third was plain. Sandra selected the plain one and lifted it from the container. She handled it delicately but surely, her movements telegraphing a cool determination that Harry found momentarily chilling.
“Anyone would think you’re unwrapping candy or something,” he murmured. “Doesn’t this bother you at all?”
“Objective thinking,” she said, glancing up at him from under her long, curling eyelashes. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Alex. You could always walk out and get a divorce. I thought you wanted it this way.”
Harry inhaled deeply and was surprised to feel his breath coming shakily. “And get screwed out of every penny I’m worth to keep her in Scotch and hippie boyfriends who don’t have the brains to earn their own suppers?” The sound of the bitterness in his own voice steeled his resolve; he nodded curtly. “Yes, I do want it this way. Come on, explain it again and show me how this thing works.”
Sandra held up the tiny tube she had taken from the plastic container. “This is a standard medical infuser for injecting drugs as an atomized jet straight through the skin,” she said. Harry nodded. Though he was not on any course of medication that required their use, he knew about them, since such devices were not uncommon. Sandra indicated the container in her other hand. “Those other two, with the dots on, are not filled with anything prescribed by any doctor. They’re a special kind you can get if you know the right people, and they contain a volatile nerve toxin that’s lethal within seconds of becoming active. You’d use one of them like this.” She put the container with the two “special” infusers in it down on the bedside table and pulled a cigarette out of the pack lying beside it. Then she snapped the glass bead off the end of the tube she was still holding and touched it lightly against the side of the cigarette just below the end. Nothing happened for about a second, and then the tube began emitting a faint hissing sound. As soon as the hiss started, Sandra drew the tube smoothly and slowly along the length of the cigarette, timing her movement such that it just reached the filter as the sound died. “It takes four or five seconds,” she told him. “Make sure you get rid of the glass tip. A few people are doing long stretches because they got careless over that.”
Harry took the cigarette from her fingers and examined it curiously. There was nothing on its surface to indicate anything abnormal. Actually he did know about “squirts,” as the lethal brand of infusers were called in the underworld, which was where they were usually procured. In fact he could have obtained some himself from Max or Tony or a couple of his other less salubrious acquaintances in Vegas; but there had been no point in risking leaving a trail that might lead back to him there, where he was known, especially not after Sandra had suggested such a solution independently and offered to obtain the stuff for him. But too much familiarity with such matters would not have gone with the image of Alexander Moorfield, commodity broker and investment banker from Maryland, currently living in Surrey, England. So he pretended to be fascinated and just a little nervous.
“That’s all you have to do,” Sandra said, watching his face. “Then there’ll be no alimony to worry about, and you’ll be able to afford some nice flowers out of the life insurance.”
“Wouldn’t I taste anything funny when I smoked it?” he asked, looking up at her with a mild frown that was fitting to his role.
Sandra shook her head. “The poison enters the bloodstream though the lungs and doesn’t become active until about half a day,” she said. “Then, when it reaches a certain center in the brain, it works almost immediately. It’s quite painless. You get hit by a sudden feeling of tiredness that lasts maybe a couple of seconds, and then it’s all over. The molecules break down into residues that are indistinguishable from waste toxins produced naturally in the body, so there’s no way that anything could show up in an autopsy.”
“What about the butt?” Harry said. “Wouldn’t a lab be able to find traces in that?”
“That’s possible, but you’d have to be really unlucky,” Sandra replied. “Just remember to clean out all the ashtrays before anybody has a chance to think about getting suspicious.”
He met her eyes for a second. They were calm and unwavering, and seemed to be challenging him to prove he was everything he said he was by not backing down at the last minute. He drew a long breath to give the impression of a respectable citizen bracing himself to take an irrevocable plunge and found that the nervousness he tried to feign was coming naturally. “Okay,” he said from somewhere down in the back of his throat. “It looks simple enough.”
Sandra closed the plastic container and returned it to the white package, then took it across the room to the closet and slipped it into a jacket pocket of his suit. When she came back to the bedside table, she picked up the glass bead, the empty infuser, and the cigarette that she had treated, and carried them through to the kitchen where she dropped the lot into the garbage incinerator.
“Where the hell did you get those?” Harry asked as she came back into the bedroom.
“You don’t really expect me to answer that,” she said reproachfully. Her manner was becoming more teasing now that they had the worst of that particular subject out of the way. “Let’s just say I’ve got friends, and they’re not all pillars of virtuous society.”
“Did you have to go to bed with someone?” he asked. His voice was matter-of-fact, but his eyes were studying hers curiously as he spoke.
“If I did, would it bother you?”
“Aw, come on . . .” Harry spread his hands appealingly. “We’re both grown-up people. If that’s what you have to do, it’s what you have to do.”
Sandra hesitated for a split second, then said, “Yes, I did.”
With her chin raised a fraction, she was looking at him defiantly. Harry had the feeling that her answer was meant to test his reaction. “Hey, stop glaring at me as if that’s supposed to cut any ice,” he told her. “I’ve been around too much for that.” He lay back against the pillows and grinned. “Anyhow, what’s new? I already knew you were a bitch. That’s why we’re right for each other. Boy, are we gonna go places together when all this is over.”
“So when will that be?” Sandra asked, moving a step nearer. “Have you worked something out yet?”
Harry nodded. “I’ve got a business meeting scheduled at one of the banks in town for Tuesday morning,” he said. “I’ll take care of it sometime just before I leave. That’ll give her all day with me out of the way, and I could see you here in the afternoon to celebrate.”
“And after that, are you still planning on selling up the house in Surrey and moving into town?” He detected a trace of disappointment in her voice. “It sounds such a nice place.”
“Hell, I wouldn’t want you in there,” Harry said, pulling a face. “I could use a break in town for a while. After that—aw, there are plenty of nice places.”
Sandra nodded in resignation. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Who knows?” Harry spread his palms. “But there’s no reason why I couldn’t move out right away—the end of next week, maybe. So if you owe any outstanding payments on those little babies, you’d better get ‘em cleared up pretty quick.”
Sandra brought her hands up to her hips and stared down at him accusingly. “You really are a bastard,” she told him. “You don’t give a damn how I got them, do you?”
Harry clasped his hands behind his head and grinned up at her. “You said I shouldn’t ask about that, and I believe you. Anyhow, now tell me you don’t like bastards.”
“Mmm . . . maybe there are one or two around that I could find time for,” she said, breaking into a smile.
* * *
Sandra had been gone for a few hours by the time Harry emerged from the apartment late the next morning, the white package zipped securely in an inside pocket of his jacket. He went to Marble Arch and retrieved the briefcase from the deposit box, added the package to its contents, and then took the briefcase to a store in Edgware Road that handled a variety of lines including packaging materials. For a small fee one of the assistants boxed and wrapped the briefcase in a manner suitable for mailing, and Harry then took the parcel to the Marble Arch post office, where he consigned it to himself under a box number in Las Vegas. After that he walked half a block along Oxford Street and into the central London branch of Remote-Activated Biovehicles (U.K.), Limited.
The girl at the reception desk greeted him with a warm smile of recognition. “Good morning,” she said. “Was your trip enjoyable?”
“Very enjoyable, thanks,” Harry told her. “I need another reservation for Tuesday. Any problems?”
“The same model?” the girl inquired, activating the computer terminal beside her.
“Oh, yes. It’s very important.”
The girl scanned quickly down the table of information that appeared on the screen and began tapping a string of commands into the touchpad with deft motions of her fingers. “No problem,” she announced brightly. “The reservation is made, and you can pick up the confirmation in Las Vegas.” She looked up from the screen. “Are there any problems to report?”
“Maybe a few minor scratches and blemishes,” Harry said with a wry grin. “Nothing that some rest and a high-protein transfusion won’t cure by tomorrow. You might get some complaints about a few aches and pains if you let it out again today, though.”
The girl smiled knowingly. “We’ll take care of that, Mr. Stone. I’ll put it down for a full checkup, regeneration, and recuperation.” She entered some more instructions into the terminal. “Will you require the same accessories on Tuesday or will there be any changes?” she inquired.
Harry thought for a second. “Maybe a thinner suit now that the weather’s warming up. How about a light blue with a fine silver pinstripe? I’ll leave the matching of the necktie, cuff links, and tie clip to you.”
“Jewelry, wallet, cigarette lighter, pocket vipad, and cash?” she asked.
“Fine as they are. Make the cash five hundred pounds, one hundred of it in tens.”
“Is there any cash to be credited to the account?”
“It’s not worth the messing around. I’ll lock it up and pick it up again on Tuesday.”
“As you wish.” The girl completed her operations at the terminal and smiled over at him again. “If you’d like to go on through, cubicle number six is free. We’ll see you again on Tuesday, Mr. Stone.”
“Take care.”
Harry walked through a door at the back of the reception foyer and into a corridor flanked by a dozen or so doors on either side, all bearing numbers. He entered the one numbered “6” and found himself in a small, cheerfully decorated and warm room that contained little apart from a comfortable leather-upholstered recliner and a small table upon which was an open metal strongbox. He emptied the contents of his wallet onto the table, added the personal items from his pockets, and then placed them all in the box, after which he closed the lid and scrambled the combination lock. Just as he was finishing, a knock sounded on the door and an attendant in a light brown tunic entered.
“Good morning, sir,” he said cheerfully. “Lovely day for traveling. Is everything ready?”
Harry pushed the strongbox across the table toward him. “Hi, we’re all set. This is for the vault.”
“Anything to be forwarded on?”
“No, that’s it.”
“Very good, sir.” The attendant produced a vipad from a pocket of his tunic and activated it to display the format of a standard R.A.B. (U.K.) Ltd. deposit-box receipt already filled in with details that the girl had entered at the reception desk outside. He added the identification number of the strongbox in the space provided and passed the vipad to Harry, who verified the transaction by tapping in a memorized personal code. The attendant took back the vipad, picked up the box, and left the room. Harry made one last check of his pockets and person, then sat down in the recliner and allowed his body to sink back into its soft, enveloping contours.
“Everything is ready, Mr. Stone,” a pleasant voice said after a few seconds from a concealed speaker above the door. “Are you ready to leave?”
“All set,” Harry murmured absently.
“Thank you. Have a good day.”
* * *
The helmet that had been covering his head all the way around and down to the level of his chin slid smoothly away and retracted to its storage position above and behind him. He opened his eyes and lay waiting in the darkness. After a few seconds the lighting came on and increased to a low level revealing details of another small cubicle, this one including the usual wall of panels and electronics that he had never understood. He blinked a couple of times, then sat up slowly and sat for a moment on the edge of the couch to give his lungs and circulation time to adjust back to a normal level of activity. Then he stood up carefully, did his best to smooth two days worth of creases from the open-necked shirt and casual slacks that he was wearing, and moved toward the door. He felt cold and a little bit stiff, but that was nothing abnormal.
The first thing he did in the corridor outside was visit the men’s room, always first on the list of priorities after coming back. He emerged five minutes later and walked out the door at the end of the corridor that led through to the desk.
The young man at the desk had been expecting him. “Hello, Mr. Stone,” he said. “How was London?”
“Just fine. It’s been cold there, but it’s getting warmer. Do you have my charge made up?”
“Right here.” The clerk pivoted a flatscreen display around to face Harry, who ran a cursory eye down the details of the account, then verified the charge with his personal code. “And you have another reservation in London for next Tuesday morning.” The clerk handed across a white plastic document holder. Harry checked the details, grunted, closed the document holder, and slipped it into the back pocket of his slacks. Then he bade the clerk good day, walked out of the front entrance of the Las Vegas branch office of R.A.B. Inc., and went to have an early-morning breakfast at the all-night restaurant a short walk up the street.
All Harry really knew was that you walked into a cubicle in Las Vegas or somewhere, they put a thing on your head, and a few seconds later you were walking out of another cubicle in London or wherever, inside another body that was yours for the duration of the trip.
Somebody had explained to him once that the bodies rented out at the far end were not legally classified as people because they were grown under the control of synthetically manufactured DNA, designed to produce a physical human form complete with all the lower brain functions that took care of subconscious monitoring and regulating of respiration, circulation, and the like, but with no cerebral cortex or any of the higher faculties the law decreed to be essential ingredients of personality. The unused part of the skull contained instead a microelectronics package that collected the information coming in through the nervous system and transmitted it to the nearest R.A.B. office, from where it was relayed across the world by satellite and somehow injected into your brain by the thing they put on your head in a way that shut out the input from your own body. Also, the signals from your brain to control voluntary movements and so forth were short-circuited off from your own body and transmitted back in the reverse direction. So you could see, hear, feel, and move around by remote-controlling a body that was five thousand miles away while your own self stayed in Las Vegas. Harry wasn’t sure of the details, but traveling now took no time at all, and it sure beat the hell out of being jammed into tin cans for hours on end and having to fight to airports and back again. It was expensive, especially if you went for the deluxe models that came with best quality clothing and accessories, but the business community found it a much better investment than physically shipping executives around the world on short visits and having to handle all the accompanying problems.
Remote-Activated Biovehicles, or R.A.B., had the lion’s share of the world market and was referred to popularly as “RentABody,” or more frequently, “Arabee.” Breakdowns in the system were rare but did happen occasionally, in which case an Arabee walking around somewhere would usually tense up suddenly and keel over. The company had an efficient system for dispatching recovery teams swiftly to deal with such emergencies, and the public had come to accept an Arabee crash as just another part of living that they might have the privilege of witnessing and being amused by one day. In fact there had been a few unfortunate instances in the early days when a case of genuine illness had received less than prompt attention because somebody had misinterpreted the situation. Since then the company had installed warning systems that activated automatically in the event of a malfunction to enable anyone who happened to be nearby to recognize the true nature of the event. All in all the system worked well and proved popular, and problems were few.
Harry never relished the prospect of having to return to the particular brand of domestic bliss that came from being married to Lisa, so he had announced that he wouldn’t be back from New York until late that night, intending to spend the day in town. However, his mind had enjoyed little rest, even if his body had been immobile, and he realized over breakfast that he was sleepy. Thus he changed his plans and steeled himself to the dismal thought of confronting his wife early in the morning. So, dismissing fond memories of London from his mind for the time being, he took an elevator up to the roof and boarded a cab to fly the ten miles to his home on the north side of the city.
As the cab descended toward the house minutes later, Harry looked down and saw Max’s purple-and-pink flymobile parked in front of the garage. There were no lights showing in any of the windows of the house. Harry groaned to himself and decided he was in no mood for a fight. He told the driver to take the cab back up and head for the Holiday Inn a couple of miles back toward town.
* * *
“For Christ’s sake, I’ve got important business scheduled for today,” Harry fumed across the breakfast table in the kitchen. “I need a clear head. I can do without this kind of stupidity every time I have to take a trip someplace. Why don’t you give growing up a try sometime?”
Lisa stared back at him sourly over her coffee. The skin below her eyes was showing signs of getting dark and slack, and her hair hadn’t been touched since she got up. Women had no right bitching and whining when they let themselves turn into a mess like that, he told himself as he looked at her distastefully.
“What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Can’t wait to get back to your little pussycat in New York?” His expression darkened further, and she leered. “Oh, don’t tell me that isn’t what all this is about, Harry. It’s Tuesday and you have to go back to New York already when you were there only last Friday. And you have to stay over again? What do you think—my head’s full of rocks or something?”
“Take a look in the mirror and try listening to yourself, then tell me you’d be surprised if I was,” he retorted. He glowered down at his eggs, decided he wasn’t hungry, and tossed his fork down on the plate with a clatter. Indignation boiled up inside, and he threw out an arm to take in the whole of the house. “You get looked after okay. Isn’t a guy supposed to expect anything back the other way? What do you want—body, soul, and a checking account with no strings? If I fool around, it’s because I’ve got enough reasons.”
“All I wanted was a man,” she threw back. “But I ended up with a small-time slob who thinks he’s another Rockefeller.” Her face twisted into a sarcastic smile. “Is your pussycat in New York another little innocent who fell for the same line about Malaysian rubber deals and Zambian copper stocks that I did? Mister Big Wheel again, huh? Bah! Everything about you makes me sick.”
“At least that’s one honest thing you’ve said,” Harry grated. “Big money was all you ever did want. So, you’ve got it. Why is it a rough deal all of a sudden? I don’t remember you complaining when you were peeling your clothes off for five hundred a week and probably making it up with extras after hours.”
“I like money, sure,” she spat. “Who doesn’t? I don’t like where it comes from or the ‘friends’ that come with it.”
Something in Harry’s chest nudged close to boiling point. “What about my friends?” he hissed in a voice that was suddenly icily brittle.
“Is that what you call them? They’d gamble away their own mothers’ medical checks.”
Harry’s grip tightened on his coffee mug. “If that’s how you feel, what was Max’s flymo doing here at six in the morning?” he shot back. Lisa’s eyes blazed furiously, and her mouth tightened into a thin line. He leveled a finger across the table at her. “I came back early on Friday but changed my mind about coming in. So don’t you try any more of that crap on me, understand?” His eyes had narrowed, and his voice had taken on the mean note that said he had reached his limit.
Lisa slammed her mug down on the table, got up, and turned away toward the window. “Any attention is better than no attention,” she snarled without turning her head. “At least he doesn’t make me sound like dirt every day of the goddamn week.”
“Why should he? He’s making out okay.”
“Why don’t you just get out of here and on your way,” she seethed hatefully.
Harry’s knuckles whitened around the mug as he heard himself being ordered out of his own house, but he resisted the impulse to hurl it across the room. All he wanted to do was get out, but there was one more thing to be taken care of first and it needed a clear head. He looked down at the table and saw Lisa’s pack lying half open with three cigarettes in it. He knew they would be gone within the hour. He picked the pack up and threw it back down on the table with a loud slapping sound. “Don’t we have any of my brand in this goddamn house?” he raged. “Jesus, is that too much to ask as well?”
“There are some in the den,” Lisa told him coldly without looking around.
He waited, but she made no attempt to move. “I never know where in hell you hide anything,” he said, forcing a note of menace into his voice. He stayed put, and in seconds the tension rocketed to breaking point.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll get ‘em,” Lisa exploded, and stormed out of the room.
Harry waited a few seconds to make sure that her footsteps were fading away, then reached in his pocket and drew out an unsealed envelope containing an opened pack of Lisa’s brand with two missing, and the two that he had treated half an hour earlier, in the way that Sandra had shown him, wrapped separately in a piece of tissue. He unwrapped the treated cigarettes, switched them for two of the three in the pack on the table, put the two he had taken back in the envelope along with the tissue, and returned the envelope to his pocket.
The switch had taken only a few seconds but it had seemed like a slow-motion nightmare; in that short time his heart had started pounding and a sick, heavy feeling had formed in his throat and stomach. He clenched his fists and tried to force himself to calm down. There’s nothing to it, he told himself. It’s done now. Christ, why wouldn’t his hands stop shaking?
He heard the door of the bathroom along the hall outside the kitchen close and lock, and breathed a silent prayer of thanks for the extra minute or two it gave him to pull himself together. He wiped his palms on his thighs, forced himself to take a series of slow, deep breaths, then got up and switched on the wall terminal in TV mode. A blonde with disgustingly perfect teeth was talking about a space colony or something somewhere. It didn’t interest him, and he watched without hearing the words until the sound of flushing amplified suddenly by a door being opened jerked his attention away from the screen. Lisa came in and threw a pack down on the table.
“Only two?” Harry grumbled darkly as he fumbled one to his mouth and lit it. “What are we, destitute or something? Don’t we have any full ones left?”
“Well, I can’t find any,” Lisa told him irritably. “Get some more when you go out. I’ll put a carton on the grocery order when I send it off.”
“Why do you always have to wait until we run out?” Harry snapped. “Didn’t it ever occur to you to do something when they’re getting low? Why don’t you try thinking with your head for a change instead of giving it?”
The side of his jaw was still throbbing twenty minutes later as he looked down from a cab on his way to downtown Vegas. But by that time the air around him tasted fresh and free, and the feeling of everything he had just left being about to become a closed chapter in his life was exhilarating. When he next saw that house his troubles would all be over, and there would be only the formalities to attend to before he could begin the new life in London that was his by right because he had earned it. Sometimes making that decision to go for the jackpot and seeing it through was tough, but for the exclusive elite who had what it took, the reward was the moon. And Harry Stone had now proved he was one of them. It was a good feeling.
* * *
Sandra lay back in the bed with the sheet covering her up to her waist and beads of perspiration still dotting the skin around her navel.
“I’ve been keeping a little surprise for you,” Harry said. “What would you say to a bit extra on top of the insurance—like maybe a hundred grand, les the death taxes?”
“Sounds good,” she cooed. “Tell me about it.” Harry began sliding his hand down over her body toward the sheet. She caught his wrist and giggled. “I need to get my breath back, Alex. What’s the extra?”
“Well, our friends back home in Surrey will be surprised to learn that my wife has been a stamp collector for years,” he said. “I knew, naturally, but I was never that interested, and I don’t know much about it. So I’ll be as surprised as anybody when they tell me that she left some very valuable items among her collection. Maybe she never realized what they were worth either. Who knows?” He shrugged. “I guess we’ll never find out.”
Sandra emitted a delighted laugh. “Alex, you’re too much! So what did you do—plant them somewhere? Were they to soak up some cash you had lying around that you didn’t want anyone asking questions about?”
Harry brought a finger up to his face and tapped it meaningfully against the side of his nose. “Let’s just say that even if they do a lab test on the glue, they’ll find it’s genuine and has been there for years. It’s the little details like that that amateurs trip up over.”
“But not Alexander Moorfield, huh?” she said, turning her head and gazing at him admiringly.
Harry lay back and folded an elbow under his head. “How long will it take you to understand that I’m a real professional, baby? When I do things I do ‘em right, and I go for the big stakes. That’s what you have to do to survive in this world.”
“And you sure know how to survive.” She moved closer and rested her face on his chest.
“I guess so.”
Sandra nuzzled against his neck and nibbled playfully at the lobe of his ear. “You really are a bastard, Alex,” she teased softly. “And it’s just what a bitch like me needs.”
He thought to himself for a while and then asked casually, “What would you say if I told you I’ve been a real bastard?”
She moved her face back a short distance to peer at him curiously, but her eyes were still twinkling with laughter. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” she told him. “Why? What have you been doing?”
Harry hesitated for a moment, wondering if perhaps he had misjudged the moment, but the half smile dancing on her lips was disarming. He sighed and grinned apologetically. “Honey, I guess you have to know this sooner or later—I’m not really me. I’m an Arabee.”
Although he kept his voice relaxed and easy, inwardly he was prepared for her to be shocked, insulted, or indignant, to cry, sulk, throw a tantrum, or do any one of a dozen other things that would have made things difficult. But she didn’t do any of them. Instead she stared at him in disbelief for a second or two, then smiled, and then threw back her head and laughed. “You are a bastard!” she exclaimed. “All this time and you never told me? Christ, I admire the sheer balls of it!”
“You don’t mind?” he asked, not really believing that his luck could be holding out like this.
“You’re still the same to me,” she replied. “In fact it’s quite exciting. Meeting the real you will be like being seduced by a new lover all over again. I like the whole idea.”
“Suppose I turn out to be fat, bald, and fifty,” he said. “Wouldn’t you care about that? You’d better say you would; otherwise I might start thinking you’re only interested in the bread. I wouldn’t want that much of a bitch. I’ve only just finished getting rid of that particular brand of problem.”
“Of course not,” she said. “So now go ahead and tell me it’s just as well, because it was only a line anyway.”
“No,” Harry tossed out a hand carelessly. “It was straight, but I’m getting out of that business. I’ve got some personal enterprises that I want to develop.”
“I knew it,” Sandra said, sounding happier. “And I don’t believe you are fat, bald, and fifty. It wouldn’t go with your personality.” She sat up and turned toward him with an intrigued look on her face. “What are you like?”
“Oh, a year or two older than this, maybe, but just as handsome. I’ve got a little bit of gray at the temples, too. Does that sound okay?”
“Very distinguished,” Sandra pronounced. She traced her fingers lightly across his chest. “And what about all these beautiful muscles? Are you as good as that, too?”
“Better,” he told her. “I used to do a lot of athletics. And I’ve got a much deeper tan than this.” It was all too good to be true, and as the last shreds of apprehension flowed away, he found himself starting to laugh uncontrollably. His laughter triggered Sandra’s, and soon they were both writhing helplessly with tears pouring down their cheeks.
“What about those dimples on the sides of your face?” she asked between sobs.
“I’ve got one on my chin, and it’s just as cute.” They burst into another paroxysm of weeping. “And don’t worry about the rest,” he managed between heaves of his chest which was beginning to ache. “It’s best American stud.”
After a while Harry began to calm down, but Sandra was still clutching her stomach and laughing, if anything, more loudly than ever—almost insanely. He watched and grew puzzled, and as her laughter continued with no signs of abating, his puzzlement changed to concern. “Hey, Sandy, it’s not that funny,” he said. “Cool it, for heaven’s sake. You’ll get hysterical if you carry on like that.”
Sandra wiped her face with the sheet and shook her head as she fought for breath. “It’s okay, Alex. I’m not getting hysterical,” she gasped. “It’s just that you don’t—you don’t understand how funny this really is.”
She wasn’t making any sense. Harry frowned and shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Alex—you see, it’s—“ She erupted into another spasm of sobbing laughter and bunched part of the sheet to her mouth in a futile attempt to stifle it. Harry’s amusement turned to irritation as he began getting the feeling that he was being made a fool of somehow, and his mouth clamped tighter as he waited. “You see, Alex, it’s funny because—because—“ But she never finished the sentence. Her mouth froze half open, her eyes widened in sudden alarm, and she slumped weakly back against the pillows.
“Sandy, what is it?” Harry forgot his anger at once. “What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
“I . . . don’t know, Alex.” Her voice was a dreamy whisper. “Sleepy . . . just hit me . . . Can’t keep . . . my eyes . . . op—“
“Sandy? Sandy, say something!” Harry’s voice was close to panic. But Sandra made no further sound. She lay with her eyes glazed and her mouth gaping as it had stopped in mid-syllable, with every trace of life and movement gone from her body. Harry stared at her, horrified, and instinctively drew away and stood up. After a few seconds, a monotonous synthetic voice began speaking from somewhere in the region of her head.
Please do not be alarmed. This is a malfunction of a remotely animated, nonhuman surrogate owned by Remote-Activated Biovehicles (U.K.) Limited. We regret any inconvenience. A recovery team is already on its way to you. If you need further assistance, please call 01-376-8877. Thank you . . . Please to not be alarmed. This is a malfunction of . . .”
But Harry didn’t hear any more. He backed away in wide-eyed horror, unable to tear his eyes from the lifeless figure draped across the bed. It wasn’t the knowledge of what she was that was terrifying him; it was the way it had happened, and when.
Surely to God it was impossible. He gnawed at his knuckle and forced himself to calm down and think. There had to be some way of being sure. Then as his shoulder touched the closet door, he remembered the padded mailer.
He turned toward the closet, opened the door, and reached up to feel along the shelf. The mailer was still there. He took it down and read the address on the front: Sandra Parnell, 2754 Cunningham Court, Bayswater, London W.2, U.K. His hands started trembling when he saw that it had been stamped and mailed in the U.S.A. He turned the mailer over and read on the back:
Sender: Mrs. Lisa Stone
Box 3683
Las Vegas
Nevada 89109
A strangled moan escaped his lips as the mailer dropped to the floor. But his anguish was not due to remorse over Lisa or the realization that Sandra didn’t exist. It was due to pure terror.
For all of a sudden he knew why Sandra was always away, but always managed to be free when he himself was away from home, and he knew why she had needed to leave early on Friday, what Max’s flymobile had been doing outside the house, and where the infusers had come from. But what was worse, he knew now why Lisa had stopped off in the bathroom on her way back from getting his cigarettes from the den, and why there were only two left when he knew there had been some full packs around the night before.
“You bitch!” he breathed as it all became clear in its gruesomeness. And then a senseless rage welled up at his own predicament and helplessness, and he hurled himself across the room and began pounding furiously at the unfeeling face and body. “Bitch! Bitch! Bi—!” he screamed. But the words died in a gurgle in his throat as a wave of tiredness and heaviness swept suddenly over him. His body collapsed in a limp heap on top of the other. After a few seconds, another voice began speaking to fill the room with a macabre canon of out-of-phase intonations.
“. . . We regret any inconvenience. A recovery team is already on its way. . . . Please do not be alarmed. this is a malfunction of a remotely . . .”
* * *
Two lamps were flashing to accompany the emergency tone sounding from a monitor panel in the control room of the Las Vegas branch of Remote-Activated Biovehicles, Inc. “Hey, Al,” the operator called over his shoulder to the day manager, who was coming out of his office to investigate. “I’ve never even seen one crash all the time I’ve been here. We’ve got two at the same time, and in adjacent cubicles. What odds do you think the guys in town would give against the chances of something like that?
Afterword, 1996
“Till Death Us Do Part” first appeared in the sixth of Judy-Lynn Del Rey’s Stellar anthologies (1981). A second story based on the same premise, entitled “Identity Crisis,” was included in Stellar 7. Our thought was to produce a series of “Rentabody” stories over the ensuing years, and then bring them all together into a single volume. Some readers sensed this and asked if they could expect to see more. As things turned out, it ended up as one of those projects that was just filed away. But who knows? It could be revived again one day.
Preface
Sometimes ideas come from talking to people. The following is more a thought than a story, but it illustrates what sometimes happens. It resulted from a conversation over breakfast one morning with a computer wizard called Charles Curley, during a convention in Sacramento at which I was guest of honor.
It also cost me twenty dollars. I didn’t know how thick a postcard was for the example that I use in the opening sentence, and nobody I called on the phone could tell me. So I went into the hardware store next door to my office and bought a micrometer to measure one (it’s 0.013 inch to save anyone who’s insatiably curious twenty dollars). Perhaps this also says something about how science-fiction writers think. Ideas come from asking questions, and to ask questions you have to be curious.
One year is to 4.5 billion years as a cent is to 45 million dollars, or as the thickness of a postcard is to the distance between New York and the Mississippi.
That long ago, the earth formed as one of several accumulations of matter falling together in a spinning pancake of dust and gas that had condensed from the exploding debris of an earlier generation of stars. As the final meteorite bombardment died away and the planetary smelter processed and separated its rocky slags into mantle and crust, rain fell from the hot outgassings to become the first oceans.
There, in shallows and pools invigorated by young radionuclides and a raw, unshielded sun, a new chemistry began of molecules too elaborate to have come together in the rarified depths of space, and impossible in the plasma maelstroms of stars. Colliding, fragmenting, and recombining at quantum-mechanical speeds, billions of different combinations came and went during every second of hundreds of millions of years. Some of them proved stable and remained intact, and were able to grow into progressively more elaborate structures by further additions from the molecular constructor-kit soup. Eventually a few, or possibly only one, hit upon a configuration that would act as a template for parts to come together in the right way to form a copy of itself. Self-replication had appeared.
In their resource-rich primeval surroundings, the replicating molecules proliferated at an exponential rate and soon extinguished the feeble competition put up by their crude predecessors. The copies were not always accurate—mutations occurred, each yielding its own line of offspring, and the competition came to be between different designs of replicators, all experimenting with different survival strategies. A potent strategy came with the invention of chemical warfare, which some varieties used to physically dismantle their rivals—it reduced the competition and increased available resources at the same time. In reply to this, the replicators that survived learned to build themselves protective molecular coatings. Defense stimulated new methods of attack, which resulted in improved defenses. . . .
In the billions of years that followed, the primitive molecular coats evolved into huge, elaborate survival machines which the replicators continue to control by remote programming from secure command bunkers deep inside. When a particular survival-machine begins wearing out and slowing down, the replicators—virtually immortal experts at survival—copy themselves through into a new one. On their way down through the ages, acting through their progressively improving sequence of robot proxies, they have continued to invent new technologies that have opened up new realms of survival-enhancing resources. Early on, the blue-green algae freed themselves from dependency on food produced through slow, abiotic processes, by patenting the chlorophyll molecule and photosynthesis, which opened up the entire ocean surface as a resource. Even greater ingenuity turned the ensuing planetwide catastrophe—its inundation with the toxic, corrosive waste, oxygen—into an opportunity by evolving metabolisms which not only tolerated it, but thrived on it and harnessed it as fuel for better engines. Double-stranded instruction tapes enabled error-correction for accurate copying of the vast amounts of information necessary to build multicellular organisms; the sexual mixing of instructions from the growing information pool produced new combinations much faster than coincidences of mutations ever could; and the invention of the spacesuit in the form of the amphibian egg led to the colonization and exploitation by animals of a completely new, initially hostile, alien environment.
The progression led on through warm-blooded metabolisms, mammalian reproduction, and upright posture to binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and bigger brains. Eventually the species that represented the culmination of the process became self-aware, and learned to make tools and build artificial, inorganic survival-facilitating environments around the organic survival machines. That same self-awareness caused him to wonder where he had come from and why. He used his intelligence to construct enormous instruments, with which he scanned the remote reaches of the cosmos in search of a sign from his creator.
Eventually he found his creator in the opposite direction—at the other end of a proton microscope. And at last he decoded the sign he had been seeking, which had been written into the creation: HELP! I’M A PRISONER IN A DNA FACTORY!
* * *
Afterword, 1996
The thing that strikes me most on rereading the above years later is its tone of blithe certainty about things that happened billions of years ago, shrouded in mists of time so deep as to defy comprehension. I wasn’t around to know what went on, neither was anyone else, and the evidence to reconstruct it could fairly be called nonexistent. Speculation and conjecture abounds, of course (where else was what I wrote drawn from?), and there’s nothing wrong with that—as long as we remain mindful of what it is, and don’t begin confusing plausibility and pleasing self-consistency with proof of reality. Much of what I read in science these days comes across with the same oversure ring to it of expecting Nature to be somehow obliged to imitate the model, instead of the other way around. Maybe it reflects a necessity today of developing phony sales pitches to impress bureaucrats who allocate funding. This trend didn’t trouble me very much ten years ago, but it’s starting to now.
I mentioned earlier in Minds, Machines and Evolution that contemporary science is satisfied that such phenomena as the emergence of life and conscious mind can be adequately explained by the laws of physics and the principle of evolution, without needing any additional guiding powers. Given variability and selection, the rest follows mechanically. Thinking about this got me intrigued by the thought of a story involving a world inhabited by a naturally evolving biosphere made up of machines. The problem was, I couldn’t think of a way to get it started. We can see how abiotic molecules could assemble themselves into structures that eventually came to exhibit self-replication and life, but with machines it’s not so simple. As Taya insisted in Silver Shoes for a Princess, something had to make the first machine.
Then in 1982, Rodger Cliff, an AI scientist with NASA, invited me to take part in a one-week seminar at the Goddard Space Center which NASA was arranging to examine the role of computers in future space missions. The group included people from NASA, from the academic world, and from industry. One of the possibilities we talked about was an idea for a self-replicating lunar factory—an initial package of robots and machines to be landed on the Moon, which would grow exponentially and transform the entire lunar surface into an automated mass-production facility dedicated to supplying Earth’s needs for products and materials. The implications were staggering. From an initial one-hundred-ton “seed” system, the annual output after ten years of unrestricted, self-reproducing growth would be a million tons, and by twenty years it would exceed the entire yearly output of today’s human civilization!
I’m a rather slow thinker, which is perhaps why I chose to be a writer and not a talker. The connection didn’t occur to me until I was on the plane back to California. Of course! Here, possibly, was the means I’d been looking for to get a machine biosphere started. Suppose, for example, that long ago an alien civilization sent out seeds like that on an interstellar scale, and one of them had mutated and gone out of control for some reason.
This must have been genuine inspiration, because I began typing Code of the Lifemaker the very next day. Since then, a number of readers have written or told me that the prologue alone was worth the price of the book.
So, hoping among other things that it might sell a few more copies, I thought I’d include it here.
THE SEARCHER
1.1 Million Years B.C.;
1,000 Light-Years from the
Solar System
Had English-speaking humans existed, they would probably have translated the spacecraft’s designation as “searcher.” Unmanned, it was almost a mile long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it operated fully under the control of computers. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and the computers were very sophisticated.
The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was the fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race of alien gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn’t much to look at—an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of volcanic ash and dust—but the searcher’s orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich in titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, uranium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planet’s history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support large-scale production without extensive dependence on bulk nuclear transmutation processes—in other words, very economically—and that was precisely the kind of thing that the searcher had been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed and transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their intentions, and then activated the vessel’s descent routine.
Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the ship and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface features selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the ship and processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and wheeled mining, drilling and transportation robots went out to begin feeding ores and other materials back to where more machines had begun to build a fusion-powered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was constructed next, followed by a parts-assembly facility, and step by step the pilot plant grew itself into a fully equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own control. The master program from the ship’s computers were copied into the factory’s computers, which thereupon became self sufficient and assumed control of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.
Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the alien engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and routine wear and tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down causes of production rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots roamed the surface in search of wrecks, write-offs, discarded components, and any other likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.
Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number and variety. When the population had attained a critical size, a mixed workforce detached itself from the main center of activity and migrated a few miles away to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using materials supplied initially from Factory One. When Factory Two became self-sustaining, Factory One, its primary task accomplished, switched to mass-production mode, producing goods and materials for eventual shipment to the alien home planet.
While Factory Two was repeating the process by commencing work on Factory Three, the labor detail from Factory One picked up its tools and moved on to begin Factory Four. By the time Factory Four was up and running, Factories Five through Eight were already taking shape, Factory Two was in mass production mode, and Factory Three was building the first of a fleet of cargo vessels to carry home the products being stockpiled. This self-replicating pattern would spread rapidly to transform the entire surface of Zeus IV into a totally automated manufacturing complex dedicated to supplying the distant alien civilization from local resources.
From within the searcher’s control computers, the Supervisor program gazed out at the scene through its data input channels and saw that its work was good. After a thorough overhaul and systems checkout, the searcher ship reembarked its primary workforce and launched itself into space to seek more worlds on which to repeat the cycle.
FIFTY YEARS LATER
Not far—as galactic distances go—from Zeus was another star, a bluish white star with a mass over fifteen times that of the Sun. It had formed rapidly, and its life span—the temporary halt of its collapse under self-gravitation by thermonuclear radiation pressure—had demanded such a prodigious output of energy as to be a brief one. In only ten million years the star, which had converted all the hydrogen in its outer shell to helium, resumed its collapse until the core temperature was high enough to burn the helium into carbon, and then, when the helium was exhausted, repeated the process to begin burning carbon. The ignition of carbon raised the core temperature higher still, which induced a higher rate of carbon burning, which in turn heated the core even more, and a thermonuclear runaway set in, which in terms of stellar timescales was instantaneous. In mere days the star erupted into a supernova—radiating with a billion times the brightness of the Sun, exploding outward until its photosphere enclosed a radius greater than that of Uranus’s orbit, and devouring its tiny flock of planets in the process.
Those planets had been next on the searcher’s list to investigate, and it happened that the ship was heading into its final approach when the star exploded. The radiation blast hit it head-on at three billion miles out.
The searcher’s hull survived more-or-less intact, but secondary x-rays and high-energy subnuclear particles—things distinctly unhealthy for computers—flooded its interior. With most of its primary sensors burned out, its navigation system disrupted, and many of its programs obliterated or altered, the searcher veered away and disappeared back into the depths of interstellar space.
One of the faint specks lying in the direction now ahead of the ship was a yellow-white dwarf star, a thousand light-years away. It too possessed a family of planets, and on the third of those planets the descendants of a species of semi-intelligent ape had tamed fire and were beginning to experiment with tools chipped laboriously from thin flakes of stone.
Supernovas are comparatively rare events, occurring with a frequency of perhaps two or three per year in the average galaxy. But as with most generalizations, this has occasional exceptions. The supernova that almost enveloped the searcher turned out to be the first of a small chain that rippled through a localized cluster of massive stars formed at roughly the same time. Located in the middle of the cluster of was a normal, longer-lived star which happened to be the home star of the aliens. The aliens had never gotten round to extending their civilization much beyond the limits of their own planetary system, which was unfortunate because that was the end of them.
Everybody has a bad day sometimes.
ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.
One hundred thousand years after being scorched by the supernova, the searcher drifted into the outer regions of a planetary system. With its high-altitude surveillance instruments only partly functioning and its probes unable to deploy at all, the ship went directly into its descent routine over the first sizable body that it encountered, a frozen ball of ice-encrusted rock about three thousand miles in diameter, with seas of liquid methane and an atmosphere of nitrogen, hydrogen and methane vapor. The world came nowhere near meeting the criteria for worthwhile exploitation, but that was of no consequence since the computer programs responsible for surface analysis and evaluation weren’t working.
The programs to initiate surface activity did work, however, more or less, and Factory One, with all of its essential functions up and running to at least some degree, was duly built on a rocky shelf above an ice beach flanking an inlet of a shallow methane sea. The ship’s master programs were copied across into the newly installed factory computers, which identified the commencement of work on Factory Two as their first assignment. Accordingly, Factory One’s Supervisor program signaled the ship’s databank for a copy of the “How to Make a Factory” file, which included a set of subfiles on “How to Make the Machines Needed to Make a Factory,” i.e., robots. And that was where everything really started to go wrong.
The robots contained small internal processors that could be reprogrammed via radiolink from the factory computers for each new task to be accomplished. This allowed the robots to proceed with their various jobs under autonomous local control and freed up the central computers for other work while they were waiting for the next “Done that—what do I do now?” signal. Hence many software mechanisms existed for initiating data transfers between the factory computers and the remote processors inside the robots.
When the copying of the “How to Make a Factory” file from the ship to Factory One was attempted, the wrong software linkages were activated; instead of finding their way into the factory’s central system, the subfiles containing the manufacturing information for the various robots were merely relayed through the factory and beamed out into the local memories of the respective robot types to which they pertained. No copies at all were retained in the factory databank. And even worse, the originals inside the ship managed to self-destruct in the process and were irretrievably erased. The only copies of the “How to Make a Fred-type Robot” subfile were the ones contained inside the Fred-types out on the surface. And the same was true for all the other types as well.
So when the factory’s Supervisor program ordered the Scheduler program to schedule more robots for manufacture, and the Scheduler lodged a request with the Databank Manager for the relevant subfiles, the Databank Manager found that it couldn’t deliver. Neither could it obtain a copy from the ship. The Databank Manager reported the problem to the Scheduler; the Scheduler complained to the Supervisor; the Supervisor blamed the Communications Manager; the Communications Manager demanded an explanation from the Message handler; and after a lot of mutual electronic recriminations and accusations, the system logging and diagnostic programs determined that the missing subfiles had last been tracked streaming out through the transmission buffers on their way to the robots outside. Under a stern directive from the Supervisor, the Communications Manager selected a Fred from the first category of robots called for on the Scheduler’s list, and beamed it a message telling it to send its subfile back again.
But the Fred didn’t have a complete copy of the subfile; its local memory simply hadn’t been big enough to hold all of it. And for the same reason, none of the other Freds could return a full copy either. They had been sprayed in succession with the datastream like buckets being filled from a fire-hose, and all had ended up with different portions of the subfile; but they appeared to have preserved the whole subfile among them. So the Supervisor had to retrieve different pieces from different Freds and try to fit them together again in a way that made sense. And that was how it arrived at the version it eventually handed to the Scheduler for manufacture.
Unfortunately, the instruction to store the information for future reference got lost somewhere, and for each batch of Freds the relevant “How to Make” subfile was promptly erased as soon as the Manufacturing Manager had finished with it. Hence when Factory One had spent some time producing parts for Factory Two and needed to expand its robot workforce to begin surveying sites for Factory Three, the Supervisor had to go through the whole rigmarole again. And the same process was necessary whenever a new run was scheduled to provide replacements for robots that had broken down or were wearing out.
All of this took up excessive amounts of processor time, loaded up the communications channels, and was generally inefficient in the ways that cost accountants worry about. The alien programmers had been suitably indoctrinated by the alien cost accountants who ran the business—as always—and had written the Supervisor as a flexible, self-modifying learning program that would detect such inefficiencies, grow unhappy about them, and seek ways to improve things. After a few trials, the Supervisor found that some of the Freds contained about half their respective subfiles, which meant that a complete copy could be obtained by interrogating just two individuals instead of many. Accordingly it made a note of such “matching pairs” and began selecting them as its source for repeat requests from the Scheduler, ignoring the others.
Lost along with the original “How to Make a Fred” subfiles were the subsubfiles on “Programs to Write into a Fred to Start it Up After You’ve Made It.” To make up for the deficiency, the Supervisor copied through to the Scheduler the full set of programs that it found already existing in the Freds selected to provide reproduction information, and these programs, of course, included the ones on how to make Freds. Thus the robots began coming off the line with one half of their “genetic” information automatically built in, and a cycle asserted itself whereby they in turn became the source of information to be recombined later for producing more Freds. The method worked, and the Supervisor never figured out that it could have saved itself a lot of trouble by storing the blueprints away once and for all in the factory databank.
The program segments being recombined in this way frequently failed to copy faithfully, and the “genomes” formed from them were seldom identical, some having portions of code omitted while others had portions duplicated. Consequently, the Freds started taking on strange shapes and behaving in strange ways.
Some didn’t exhibit any behavior at all but simply fell over or failed during test, to be broken down into parts again and recycled. A lot were like that.
Some, from the earlier phase, were genetically incomplete—“sterile”—and never called upon by the Supervisor to furnish reproductive data. They lasted until they broke down or wore out, and then became extinct.
Some reproduced passively, i.e., by transmitting their half-subfiles to the factory when the Scheduler asked for them.
A few, however, had inherited from the ship’s software the program modules whose function was to lodge requests with the Scheduler to schedule more models of their own kind—program modules, moreover, which embodied a self-modifying priority structure capable of raising the urgency of their requests within the system until they were serviced. The robots in this category sought to reproduce actively: they behaved as if they experienced a compulsion to ensure that their half-subfiles were always included in the Scheduler’s schedule of “Things to Make Next.”
So when Factory One switched over to mass-production mode, the robots competing for slots in its product list soon grabbed all of the available memory space and caused the factory to become dedicated to churning out nothing else. When Factory Two went into operation under control of the programs copied from Factory One, the same thing happened there. And the same cycle would be propagated to Factory Three, construction of which had by that time begun.
More factories appeared in a pattern spreading inland from the rocky coastal shelf. The instability inherent in the original parent software continued to manifest itself in the copies of copies of copies passed on to later generations, and the new factories, along with their mixed populations of robot progeny, diverged further in form and function.
Material resources were scarce almost everywhere, which resulted in the emergence of competitive pressures that the alien system designers had never intended. The factory-robot communities that happened to include a balanced mix of surveyor, procurement, and scavenger robots with “appetites” appropriate to their factories’ needs, and which enjoyed favorable sites on the surface, usually managed to survive if not flourish. Factory Ten, for example, occupied the center of an ancient meteorite crater twelve miles across, where the heat and shock of the impact had exposed metal-bearing bedrock from below the ice; Factory Thirteen established itself inside a deep fissure where the ice beneath was relatively thin, and was able to melt a shaft down to the denser core material; and Factory Fifteen resorted to nuclear transmutation processes to build heavier nuclei from lighter ones frozen in solution in the ice crust. But many were like Factory Nineteen, which began to take shape on an ill-chosen spot far out on a bleak ice-field, and ground to a halt when its deep-drilling robots and transmutation reactors failed to function, and its supply of vital materials ran out.
The scavenger and parts-salvaging robots assumed a crucial role in shaping the strange metabolism that was coming into being. Regardless of what the Schedulers in the various factories would have liked to see made, the only things that could be assembled readily were the ones for which parts were available, and that depended to a large degree on the ability of the scavengers to locate them, or alternatively to locate assemblies suitable for breaking down—“digesting”—and rebuilding into something useful. Factory Twenty-four was an extreme case. Unable to “metabolize” parts directly from any source of raw materials because of the complete failure of its materials-procurement workforce, it relied totally on its scavengers. Factory Thirty-two, on the other hand, could acquire raw materials but couldn’t use them since it had been built without a processing facility at all. Its robots delivered instead to Forty-seven, which happened to produce parts for some of the scavengers being manufactured by Thirty-two, and the two factory-robot organisms managed to coexist happily in their bizarre form of symbiosis.
The piles of assorted junk, which shouldn’t have accumulated from the earlier phases of the process but had, were eaten up; the machines that broke down were eaten up; and the carcasses of defunct factories were eaten up. When those sources of materials had been exhausted, some of the machines began to eat each other.
The scavengers had been designed, as they had to be, to discriminate between properly functioning machines and desirable products on the one hand, and rejects in need of recycling on the other. However, as with everything else in the whole, messed-up project, this function worked well in some cases, not so well in others, and often not at all. Some of the models turned out to be as likely to attempt the dismantling of a live, walking-around Fred as of a dead, flat-on-its-back one. Many of the victims were indifferent to this kind of treatment and soon died out, but others succeeded in developing effective fight-or-flee responses to preserve themselves, thus marking the beginnings of specialized prey and predators in the form of “lithovores” and “artifactovores.”
This development was not always an advantage, especially when the loss of discrimination was total. Factory Fifty was consumed by its own offspring, who began dismantling it at its output end as soon as they came off the assembly line, and then proceeded proudly to deliver the pieces back to its input end. Its internal repair robots were unable to undo the undoings fast enough, and it ground to a halt to become plunder for marauders from Thirty-six and Fifty-three. The most successful factory-robot organisms protected themselves by evolving aggressive armies of “antibody” defenders, which would recognize their own factory and its “kind” and leave them alone, but attack and attempt to destroy any “foreign” models that ventured too close. This gradually became the dominant form of organism, usually associated with a distinct territory which its members cooperated in protecting collectively.
By this time only a few holes in the ground remained at opposite ends of the rocky shelf to mark where Factories One and Two had once stood. They had failed to keep up with the times, and the area had become the domain of Factory Sixty-five. The only trace left of the searcher spacecraft was a long, rounded depression in the ice beach below, on the shore of the liquid methane sea.
* * *
The alien engineers had designed the system to enjoy full planetary communications coverage by means of satellites and surface relays, but the idea hadn’t worked too well since nothing had been put into orbit and surface relays tended not to last very long. This enabled some of the organisms without strong defenses to remain protected, for a while, from the more metal-hungry empires by sheer distance. But, to allow for communications blackouts and interference, the aliens had also provided a backup method of program and data exchange between robots and factories, which took the form of direct, physical, electrical interconnection. This was a much slower process than using radiolinks, naturally, since it required that the robots travel physically to the factories for reprogramming and reporting, but in a self-sustaining operation far from home the method was a lot better than nothing. And it kept the accountants happy by protecting the return on the investment.
With defects and deficiencies of every description appearing somewhere or other, it was inevitable that some of the organisms would exhibit partial or total communications breakdowns. Factory Seventy-three, built without radio facilities, was started up by programs carried overland from Sixty-six. None of its robots ever used anything but backup mode, and the factories that it spawned continued the tradition. But this very fact meant that their operating ranges were extended dramatically.
So the “defect” turned out to be not so much of a defect after all. Foraging parties were able to roam farther afield, greatly enlarging their catchment areas, and they frequently picked up as prizes one or more of the territories previously protected by geographical remoteness. Furthermore, selective pressures steadily improved the autonomy of the robots that operated in this fashion. The autodirected types, relying on their comparatively small, local processors, tended to apply simple solutions to the problems they encountered, but their close-coupled mode of interaction with their environment meant that the solutions were applied quickly: they evolved efficient “reflexes.” The teledirected types, by contrast, tied to the larger but remote central computers, were inclined to attempt more comprehensive and sophisticated solutions, but—as often as not—too late to do any good. Autodirection thus conferred a behavioral superiority and gradually asserted itself as the norm, while teledirection declined and survived only in a few isolated areas.
The periodic instinct to communicate genetic half-subfiles back to their factories had long become a universal trait among the robots—there could be descendants only of ancestors who left descendants—and they responded to the decline of radio as a means of communication by evolving a compulsion to journey at intervals back to the places whence they had come, to return, as it were, to their “spawning grounds.” But this method of reproduction had its problems and posed new challenges to the evolutionary process.
The main problem was that an individual could deliver only half its genome to the factory, after which the Supervisor would have to store the information away until another robot of the same type as the first happened to show up with a matching half; only then could the Supervisor pass a complete copy to its Scheduler. If, as frequently happened, the Supervisor found itself saturated by a peak workload during the intervening period, it was quite likely to delete the half-subfile and allocate the memory space to other, more urgent things—bad news for the Fred that the data had come from, who would thus have enacted the whole reproductive ritual for nothing. The successful response to this problem came with the appearance of a new mode of genetic recombination, which, quite coincidentally, also provided the solution to an “information crisis” that had begun to restrict the pool of genetic variation available for competitive selection to draw on for further improvement.
Some mutant forms of robot knew they were supposed to output their half-subfiles somewhere, but weren’t all that sure, or perhaps weren’t too particular, about what they were supposed to output it into. Anything with the right electrical connections and compatible internal software was good enough, which usually meant other robots of the same basic type. And since a robot that had completed its assigned tasks was in a receptive state to external reprogramming, i.e., ready for fresh input that would normally come from the factory system, an aspiring donor had little trouble in finding a cooperative acceptor, provided the approach was made at the right time. So to begin with, the roles adopted were largely a matter of circumstance and accidental temperament.
Although the robots’ local memories were becoming larger than those contained in their earlier ancestors, the operating programs were growing in size and complexity, too, with the result that an acceptor still didn’t possess enough free space to hold an entire “How to Make a Fred” subfile. The donor’s half, therefore, could be accommodated only by overwriting some of the code already residing in the acceptor. How this was accomplished depended on the responses of the programs carried inside the various robot types.
In some cases the incoming code from the donor was allowed to overwrite entire program modules inside the acceptor, with the total loss to the acceptor of the functions which those modules controlled. This was usually fatal, and no descendants came into being to repeat such mistakes. The successful alternative was to create space by trimming nonessential code from many modules, which tended to leave the acceptor robot with some degradation in performance—usually manifesting itself as a reduction in agility, dexterity, and defensive abilities—but at least still functioning. The sacrifice was only temporary since the acceptor robot would be reprogrammed with replacement modules when it delivered its genetic package at the factory.
But in return for these complications and superficial penalties came the immense benefit that the subfiles presented at the factories were complete ones—suitable for dispatch to the Schedulers without delay and the attendant risk of being deleted by overworked Supervisors. The new method thus resolved the reliability problem that had plagued the formerly universal “asexual” mode of reproduction.
The information crisis that it also solved had developed through the “inbreeding” caused by the various Supervisors having only the gene pools of their respective “tribes” available to work with, which made recombination difficult because of the restrictive rules imposed by the alien programmers. But the robots swapping genes out on the surface were not always averse to adventuring beyond the tribal limits, knew nothing and cared less about programmers’ rules, since nothing approaching intelligence or awareness was operative yet in what was unfolding, and proceeded to bring half-subfiles together haphazardly in ways that the aliens’ rules didn’t permit and which the Supervisors would never have imagined. Most of the offspring resulting from these experiments didn’t work and were scrapped before leaving the factories; but the ones that did radiated functionally outward in all directions to launch a whole new, qualitatively distinct phase of the evolutionary process.
The demands of the two sexual roles reinforced minor initial physical differences and brought about a gradual polarization of behavioral traits. Since a female in a “pregnant” condition suffered the loss of some measure of self-sufficiency for the duration, her chances of delivering (literally!) were improved considerably if her mate happened to be of a disposition to stay around for a while and provide for the two of them generally, thus helping to protect their joint genetic investment. Selection tended, therefore, to favor the genes of this kind of male, and by the same token those of the females who mated preferentially with them. As a consequence a female trait emerged of being “choosy” in this respect, and in response the males evolved various repertoires of rituals, displays, and demonstrations to improve their eligibility.
* * *
The population had thus come to exhibit genetic variability and recombination, competition, selection, and adaptation—all the essentials for continuing evolution. The form of life—for it was, wasn’t it?—was admittedly somewhat strange by terrestrial standards, with the individuals that it comprised sharing common, external reproductive, digestive, and immune systems instead of separate, internal ones . . . and of course there were no chains of complicated carbon chemistry figuring anywhere in the scheme of things. . . . But then, after all, what is there apart from chauvinism to say it shouldn’t have been so?
* * *
Afterword, 1996
For those who read the book, we left Carl Zambendorf and his companions out on Saturn’s moon, Titan, waiting for the Japanese ship due in six months, and also for the possibility that a sequel to the book might follow—which a lot of readers spotted and asked for.
One of the most persistent requests was from Owen Lock, who succeeded Judy-Lynn as editor-in-chief at Del Rey Books. Owen liked the aliens that the Prologue talks about, who had built the robot factory ship, suffered from cost accountants, and who had conceived an alien counterpart of Murphy. “I want,” Owen said, “a sequel that shows us the aliens.”
I didn’t really want to write a book along those lines because it involved major difficulties that I assumed Owen appreciated. But he somehow talked me into it, and I signed a contract, still with no real idea of what form the story would take.
Then, one day, Owen and I had lunch in New York. “I reread ‘Code of the Lifemaker’ over the weekend,” he informed me. “I’d forgotten. Those aliens all got wiped out a million years ago.”
“Owen,” I said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. It makes it kind of difficult to tell a story about them today, doesn’t it?”
His reply was, “You’re a resourceful writer. I have confidence that you’ll come up with something.” And for the rest of the meal he refused steadfastly to return to the subject.
Now, to me, a “sequel” implies a story that follows from the one before and involves the same characters that the reader has come to know and wants to see more of. That meant it had to revolve around the central figures from “Code,” whom we’d left solidly in the twenty-first century. On the other hand it had also to feature the aliens, who were extinct before humans existed. How to reconcile two such irreconcilables? I didn’t want to resort to a cop-out like time travel, which hadn’t been anticipated in any way in the first book; nor was I happy with something weak, along the lines of, “Well, actually they weren’t all wiped out . . .” and so on.
And lo and behold, a way out suggested itself. As a hint, I’ll mention that a major help on this book was Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who has written a lot on uploading consciousness into computers or other non-organic hardware. The sequel is called The Immortality Option and was released by Del Rey as a hardback in February, 1995, mass-market paper edition a year later.
In connection with a creationist lawsuit that I read about awhile ago in California, the creationists’ lawyer was quoted as saying to a reporter, “They’d better be able to prove that evolution is right.” Thus, if evolution cannot be proved beyond question to be fact, the lawyer was saying, then it’s just as much a theory as creationism, and if one deserves to be called scientific, so does the other. Now, I certainly wouldn’t dispute the right of anyone to believe what they choose and to express those beliefs freely. But when attempts are made to pass those beliefs off as science, when they’re nothing of the kind, and to force them on the educational system as such, that’s another thing entirely.
The fallacy with the above claim is its assumption that all degrees of uncertainty are equal—by the same logic we could argue that since George Washington can’t be proved absolutely and conclusively to have existed, then the case for Santa Claus is just as solid. But more interesting is the cause this gives to reflect a little on the differences between science and other belief systems. For everything that I read of the public debate surrounding the case succeeded only in missing the point of the issue entirely, which has nothing to do with whether evolution or creationism—or neither, for that matter—is right or wrong. The issue is understanding what it is that makes a belief genuinely “scientific.”
Science never claims anything to be finally and absolutely proved. So in that sense every scientific belief is “just a theory.” A demand for evolution to be proved beyond a question to be fact is an absurdity that fails to comprehend what science is all about. Although we speak loosely of a theory being “proved by experiment,” philosophically this is impossible. The best that an experiment can hope to do for a theory is fail to falsify it. An experiment does this when all of the results agree with the theory, and not one observed, incontestable fact contradicts it. Even this doesn’t prove a theory true—the agreement could still be a coincidence due to other, perhaps totally unsuspected causes. All that can be said is that the theory wasn’t shown to be wrong.
The difference sounds like hairsplitting, but it’s crucial. It means that in science your theoretical boat must be watertight everywhere—one hole is enough to sink it. For example, experimental results and astronomical observations accumulated before the late nineteenth century all accorded with Newtonian mechanics. Later measurements, however, such as the speed of light in different directions and of the precession of Mercury’s orbit, contradicted its predictions and were sufficient to invalidate it as a general model. Since then, of course, relativity has accommodated the new facts while continuing to explain the old; but this no more proves relativity to be “true” than Newton’s unification of terrestrial and cosmic motion proved the earlier ideas true. As was the case with the Newtonian system for almost three centuries, relativity has so far survived all attempts to find a flaw. It skates on the same pond.
One of the most important criteria that science demands for a theory to be acceptable as a serious candidate for consideration is that it be falsifiable. It was precisely the fact that it could be tested and shown to be false that made Newton’s a genuinely scientific theory. Whether it ultimately survived or failed the tests is not the point. This is why the contention that “some UFOs might be alien spacecraft” is not answerable by scientific inquiry. Yes, some of them might be, and however many specific instances are shown not to be, the speculation can never be shown to be untrue. It is unfalsifiable. (The inverse theory—that no UFOs are alien spacecraft—can very simply be proved untrue, but not by any of the claims submitted to date as evidence.) And creationism is unfalsifiable, since every fact, every new discovery that might be made, any result of any test that might be imagined—can all be dismissed with the assertion that “it was created that way.” Hence, even before any debating or appeals to evidence, creationism fails the most basic test. It is not “scientific,” and no amount of legal semantic juggling can make it so.
Science has never made any claim to infallibility. What makes a belief scientific isn’t whether it turns out to be true or not, but the process by which it is arrived at. It seems ironic that those who preach knowledge of absolute truths tend to be the first to accuse scientists of being arrogant.
How does creationism measure up against other criteria by which a belief is judged as being scientific? Well, in the first place science seeks to be objective, which means having no preconceived notions about how things ought to be—no advance commitment to any holy book, sacred doctrine, or political, social, or economic ideology that has to be upheld as a first priority. Science is an open system based on skeptical appeal to evidence, and uses inductive logic to formulate general principles from specific observation. A pseudoscience—of which creationism is an example—is a closed system based on uncritical appeal to doctrine, and uses deductive logic to infer specific accounts of how the world must be to conform with its inviolate principles. The goal of science is to discover what the reality out there is. To this end its conclusions are always open to revision—or might even be abandoned completely—in the face of new evidence: the belief structure follows the facts. But a pseudoscience contrives to uphold a belief structure that exists before any evidence is considered, and to maintain itself subsequently, it must deny or distort any facts that it finds inconvenient. Darwin did not set out to prove evolution because it reflected any ideas he might have had about how societies should function, or because he found it emotionally appealing. He ended up proposing it because he found it best explained the facts available to him. Like an explorer, which it is, science charts new territory as it finds it, and while at times it might base its choice of direction on hunches, it draws its maps from the reality that it encounters. it accepts that whatever is true will remain so, with complete disregard for the intensity of human convictions or the number of people who can be persuaded to share them. Is this creationism?
When science has amassed it facts, it attempts to construct a theory to explain them. A successful theory must be consistent with all the facts, contradicted by none, and survive experiments aimed at proving it false. It sometimes happens that two or more rival theories meet all of these requirements, which poses the problem of having to choose between them. The guideline in a situation like this is “Occam’s razor,” which says, in effect, go for the simplest explanation—the one that accounts adequately for all the facts and requires the fewest assumptions. It won’t guarantee that we’ll never have to change our minds later, William of Occam warns . . . but it’s the way to bet.
This means explanations based on familiar, well-understood principles are to be preferred over far-out fancies—true, a poltergeist might have upset the cookie jar, but the presence of a three-year-old in the household suggests a more promising line of inquiry. Ideas which are compatible with existing, well-supported bodies of knowledge and experience take precedence over ones that aren’t. Thus, when a disciple of the maharishi shows a photograph of somebody allegedly levitating, the onus is on him to prove that the picture is genuine (easily done by staging a repeat performance before witnesses), not on us to accept it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Hence the skepticism of most scientists toward, for example, claims of ESP abilities—there is nothing in the realm of undisputed, demonstrable fact that can’t be accounted for more simply by such familiar mechanisms as carelessness, self-deception, or deliberate fraud, which we know happen. Introducing “paranormal” phenomena to explain any of it is neither necessary nor justified. A new, more elaborate theory is called for only when facts have been shown, incontestably, to be true, which cannot be reconciled with the simpler, already existing model. Relativity was accepted because it explained observations that Newton’s system couldn’t; quantum mechanics arose from the failure of measured results to support earlier models of thermal radiation.
Evolution does indeed offer a consistent and comprehensive interpretation of facts accumulated from a whole range of disciplines that include paleontology, geology, zoology, botany, embryology, biochemistry, comparative anatomy, anthropology, and behavioral psychology, to name just some. It establishes a common framework within which observations collected from many fields of investigation and tested independently all fit together and have reason for being the way they are—as geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” The facts are explained. But is the evolutionary explanation the simplest? Although the assertion may appear strange to some on first sight, yes, it is—it’s the simplest that can be offered for the facts available at the present time. Simplicity here has nothing to do with the shelves of books devoted to the theory of the years of study necessary to comprehend it. It has to do with assumptions—how much has to be taken on faith. The less that is assumed, the simpler the theory. And evolution requires very little: merely the laws of physics and probability—introduced, moreover, not on an ad hoc basis to prop the theory up, but as derived independently within the entire body of scientific knowledge.
What can be said in this respect of creationism? First, it offers no reason why—why the anatomy of different species should show any relatedness at all; why the fossil record should show its progressive accumulation of change; why embryos of different species should be more alike at earlier phases of growth, why isolated populations should diverge. . . . The inevitable rejoinder that “it was made that way” merely acquiesces to the fact; it explains nothing. We could say the same about anything and add not one scrap to our understanding of it. But on the other hand, creationist theory requires the assumption that a creator exists, that a supernatural judge of morals exists who is concerned about the day-to-day affairs of people on this planet, that both these being are one and the same, that it communicated its motives to chosen writers of ancient books, that those writers were correct, and honest, in interpreting the source of their inspiration, that later translators were equally infallible . . . and a long list of similar premises that no physicist would entertain for a moment as a basis for constructing a theory. The property insurance would be pretty expensive to cover an edifice built on foundations like that.
A scientific theory explains most and assumes least. Creationism explains nothing and assumes everything.
Lastly, the value of a scientific theory is judged by its power to predict—not in the sense of “psychic” predictions headlined by supermarket tabloids, but in the sense of predicting further experimental results. One failed prediction is enough to torpedo a theory. Success with every prediction, on the other hand, means only that it has survived everything thrown at it so far. So, if evolution is valid, the newer discoveries made since its inception ought to be consistent with it. Apart from some haggling among specialists over relatively minor details, this has turned out to be overwhelmingly the case. Darwin and others predicted the essential properties of inherited genetic units, even though genes and chromosomes were unknown at that time. From evolutionary theory, DNAs from different species should exhibit a branching pattern that reflects the same time sequence of divergence as it is deduced by other methods; they do. The primitive metabolic chemistry of ancestral organisms should be discernible in today’s organic cells; it is. There shouldn’t be much difference in the genetic code inherited by all organisms; there isn’t. And so it goes.
And of the predictive power of creationism? Can it predict which band in a series of tree rings should indicate the same age as a given mix of carbon isotopes? Or the tidal record that ought to be found written into fossil corals by the moon’s orbital motion of several hundred million years ago? Does it have anything to say about the composition of the early atmosphere and the kinds of minerals that would be formed as a consequence—their chemical nature, where they should be located, and at what depths we should expect to find them today? Can creationism, in fact, give a hint of any future finding? Not a one. It operates with hindsight only. Because of its built-in unfalsifiability it can cobble together an explanation of anything at all—but only after the fact as established by other means. As a method of prediction it is sterile.
In its demand to be recognized as a science, therefore, creationism not only fails all the basic tests, but from the credentials that it presents shows no comprehension of what constitutes a science. It should be taught in schools, certainly, to those who wish to study it—students of religion, of philosophy, of history, of the development of human thought. But there can be no trying to pass it off as a science. The suggestion of “scientific creationism” is a self-contradiction.
If one chooses to think in terms of the revealed word of a God, then surely whatever God has to say is written in the language of life, the world, and the physical universe around us. This is a form of scripture that comes direct from the source, leaving no room for doubts about authenticity, suspicions of forgery, or uncertainties over translation. And the Word that the processes of physics, biology, geology, astronomy, and cosmology are revealing is that the universe and everything in it have been evolving for as far back as it’s possible to track time. I think that EVOLUTION IS THE REVEALED WORD OF GOD would make a good bumper sticker.
Such thoughts lead to stories like Making Light. . . .
Afterword, 1997
Isn’t it interesting how the same facts and arguments can take on a different light when seen from an altered perspective. Ten years or so after writing the above, I found myself calling Jim Baen to suggest that perhaps it ought to be omitted from the rereleased version of this book. I explained that I was now a lot less persuaded by the orthodox theory than I had been. Specifically, I had reached the conclusion that evolution didn’t take place gradually but in huge leaps, and natural selection wasn’t adequate to explain it. Also, I thought the creationists had some good evidence to present for the notion of the Earth being a lot younger than conventionally taught—although not the 6,000 years that Biblical literalists insist on.
Jim was interested in this change of view and thought others would be too. Therefore, he suggested instead leaving the piece in as it was, and writing a further one to elaborate on the reasons. This we did, and it appears as “Evolution Revisited” in Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution—a late inclusion in that collection, which is why this afterword was written in 1997.
For those who are curious, the book that started me rethinking the subject, and which I’d recommend as a start for anyone else interested in taking a look at the other side, was Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by the molecular biologist Michael Denton, published by Adler & Adler, 1986.
In his spacious office atop the Headquarters Building of the Celestial Construction Company Inc., the General Operations Director hummed to himself as he sat at his desk and scanned over Contract 15,000,000,000 B.C. The contract document was brief and straightforward and called for the creation of a standard Mark IV universe—plenty of light; the usual suns, planets, and moons; a few firmaments here and there with birds and animals on the land; fish-filled waters around the land. There was an attached schedule for accessories, spares for renewable resources, and some supporting services. Deadline for the contract was seven days—a piece of cake, the GOD told himself. Design Engineering Department’s final proposal for the bid lay to one side of the desk in the form of a bulky folder that constituted the Works Order Review Document. Until final approvals were granted, the W.O.R.D. would be all that existed of the universe . . . but it was a beginning.
What promised to make this project a little different from the previous Mark IV’s, and somewhat more interesting, was the optional extra that Design Engineering had tagged on in the Appendix section of the proposal: people. Unlike the species that made up the usual mix of Mark IV animal forms, which simply consumed resources and multiplied until they achieved a balance with the environment, the people would have the capacity to harness fire, make tools, and generally think about how they could be better off. This would produce an awareness of needs and the motivation to do something about satisfying them. Eventually the people would discover that, as their numbers and their demands increased, they would no longer be able to satisfy their needs with the resources that came readily to hand. At that point, the computer simulations indicated, they could simply give up, they could fight over what they had until it ran out and then be obliged to give up anyway, or they could develop the intellectual potential inherent in their design and apply it to discovering the progression of new resources hidden around them like the successively more challenging, but at the same time more rewarding, clues of a treasure hunt. The way out of the maze lay in the third alternative.
Wood, growing all over the surface of the planets, would be the most obvious fuel following the taming of fire, but it would not prove adequate for long. It would, however, enable the more easily mined metal ores—conveniently scattered on top of the crusts or not very far below—to be smelted and exploited to make the tools necessary for digging deeper to the coal. Coal would enable an industrial base to be set up for producing machines suitable for drilling and processing oil, which in turn would yield the more highly concentrated fuels essential for aircraft and rudimentary space vehicles. The scientific expertise that would emerge during this phase would be the key to unlocking nuclear energy from crustal uranium, and the fission technologies thus brought into being would pave the way into fusion—initially using the deuterium from the special-formula oceans premixed for the purpose—and hence out to the stars and on to the advanced methods that would render resources effectively infinite for the lifetime of the universe. On planets set up for them in that way and with brains that ought to be capable of figuring the rest out for themselves, the people would have a fair chance of winning the game.
What the purpose of the game was, Design Engineering hadn’t said. The GOD suspected that it was more for their own amusement than anything else, but he hadn’t objected since he was quite curious himself to find out how the people would handle the situation. A modicum of applied precognition could no doubt have revealed that, but somehow it would have spoiled things.
He was still browsing over the last page of the contract when the phone rang with a peal of rising and falling chimes. It was Gabriel, the Vice President of Manufacturing. He sounded worried. “It’s proposal number fifteen billion B.C.,” he said. “I think we might have problems.”
The GOD frowned. “I was just going through it. Looks fine to me. What’s the problem?”
“Somebody from Equal Employment Opportunities Creation has been onto the Legal Department. They’re objecting to DE’s proposal for the people on the grounds that it would discriminate unfairly against the animals. I think we ought to get the department heads together to talk about it. How are you fixed?”
“Pretty clear for the next few millennia. When did you want to do it?”
“How about right now, while the large conference and congregation room’s free?”
“Sure. Get the others over and I’ll see you there in, say, ten minutes.”
“Leave it to me.”
The GOD replaced the phone, slipped the contract document inside the WORD folder, tucked the folder under his arm as he stood up from the desk, and began walking toward the door. Outside in the corridor he paused to pat the pockets of his suit and found he was out of holy smokes, so he made a slight detour to get a pack from the machine by the ascension and descension elevators.
* * *
“The EEOC says that we can’t endow one species with that kind of intelligence,” the Head of the Legal Department explained across the gilt-edged conference table a quarter of an hour later. “Doing so would confer such a devastating advantage that the animals would be guaranteed permanent second-class status with no opportunity to compete, which would constitute an infringement of rights.”
“And we’ve been looking into some of the other implications,” another of the lawyers added. “The people would eventually assume a uniquely dominant role. That could set us up for an antitrust suit.”
All heads turned toward the Chief Design Engineer. “Well, we can’t take the intelligence away from the people,” he objected. “The physiques that we’ve specified don’t give them any other means of survival. They’d have no chance. Then we’d still be in trouble with EEOC but with everything the other way around.” He threw his hands out impatiently. “And besides, it would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. It was the addition of intelligence that was going to make this project more interesting.”
“Why not make all the species equally intelligent?” somebody suggested.
The CDE shook his head. “We planned the ecology so that the animals would do most of the work for the people in the early phases and provide a lot of their food. If we made them equally intelligent, the situation would qualify as slavery and exploitation. We’d never get it past the Justice Department.”
“And on top of that they’d all become eligible for education, sickness benefits, and retirement pensions,” the CDE’s assistant pointed out. “HEW would never accept the commitment. They couldn’t handle the load.”
That was true, the GOD admitted as he thought about it. Already the Department of Harps, Eternity-pensions, and Wings had insisted that all guarantees of benefits be deleted from the proposal. And that had been just on account of the projected numbers of people, never mind all the animals. “So why can’t we change things so the people don’t have to depend on the animals at all?” he asked, at last looking up. “Let’s make them strong enough to do all the work themselves, and have them just eat plants.”
“Not that easy,” the CDE answered, shaking his head dubiously. “They’d have to be at least the size of elephants on an input of vegetable protein. Then food-gathering would become such a problem that they’d never have any time left over for mental development, which puts us back to square one.” He thought for a second or two, then added, “Though it might work if we redesigned the food chain somehow.”
The GOD looked over at the Head of Research. “What do you say to that?” he asked.
The scientist didn’t appear too happy as he pinched his nose and reflected upon the question. “We’d have to figure it out again all the way down to the bacteria,” he replied after a while. “You’re talking about a complete redesign, not just a few modifications. Setting up a whole new ecology and running it through the simulator is a long job. I don’t think we could finish before the closing date on the bid, and that doesn’t allow for having to rewrite the proposal from scratch. If we could use the new Infallible Biological Modeler we might have had a chance, but we can’t. It’s not up and running yet.”
“I thought the IBM was supposed to have been installed last week,” the GOD said, sounding surprised.
“It was, but the systems angelists haven’t handed it over yet,” the Research Chief replied. “They’re not through exorcizing the bugs.”
The GOD frowned down at the table in front of him. “Hell,” he muttered irritably.
“Er . . . we don’t say that here,” Gabriel reminded him politely.
“Oh, of course.” The GOD made an apologetic gesture and then cast his eyes around the table. “Does anyone else have any suggestions?” he invited. No one had. He sighed in resignation, then looked at the Chief Design Engineer. “I’m sorry, Chief, but it sounds as if we’re stuck. I guess there’s no choice but to drop the extras and revert to a standard Mark IV.”
“No people?” the CDE sounded disappointed.
“No people,” the GOD confirmed. “It was a nice thought, but it’s out of the question on the timescale of this contract. Keep working on it with Research, and maybe you’ll have it all figured out in time for the next bid, huh?” The CDE nodded glumly. The meeting ended shortly thereafter, and the Vice President of Sales went back to his office to begin drafting a revised Appendix section to be delivered to the customer by winged messenger. So the project wasn’t going to be so interesting after all, the GOD reflected with a pang of regret as he collected his papers. But at least that meant there was less risk of overrunning on time and incurring penance clauses.
* * *
The Chief Design Engineer was on the phone shortly after lunch on the following day. “Have you heard?” he asked. He sounded distressed.
“Heard what?” the GOD answered.
“Feathers, Aviation, and Aquatics have been onto our legal people. They’re trying to tell us that our birds and fish aren’t safe.”
“That’s ridiculous! They’re the same ones as we’ve always used. What’s wrong with our birds and fish?”
“According to FAA regulations, all flight-control and navigation systems have to be duplicated,” the CDE said. “Our birds only have a single nervous system. Also, we’re allowing them to fly over water without inflatable life jackets.”
The GOD was completely taken aback. “What’s gotten into them?” he demanded. “They’ve never complained about anything like that before.”
“They’ve never really bothered to check the regulations before, but the controversy over the people has attracted their attention to this project,” the CDE told him. “Our legal people think they’re all at it—all the angelcies are brushing the dust off manuals they’ve never looked at before and going through them with magnifying glasses. We could be in for some real hassles.”
The GOD groaned. “But what do they want us to do? We can’t go loading the birds up with all kinds of duplicated junk. Their power-weight ratios are critically balanced. They’d never get off the ground.”
“I know that. But all the same it’s regulations, and the FAA won’t budge. They also say we have to fit bad-weather landing aids.”
The GOD’s patience snapped abruptly. “They don’t fly in bad weather,” he yelled. “They just sit in the trees. If they don’t fly, why do they need aids for landing? It’d be like putting life jackets on the camels.”
“I know, I know, I know. But that’s what the book says, and that’s all the FAA’s interested in.”
“Can we do it?” the GOD asked when he had calmed down a little.
“Only with the penguins, the ostriches, and the others that walk. I called the FAA guy a couple of minutes ago and told him that the only way we could equip all the birds for bad-weather landing was by making them all walk. He said that sounded fine.”
“I’ve never heard of anything so stupid! What’s the point of having birds at all if they’re only allowed to walk? We can’t have planets with walking birds all over the place. The competition would die laughing.”
“I know all that. I’m just telling you what the guy said.”
A few seconds of silence went by. Then the GOD asked, “What’s wrong with the fish?”
“The shallow-water species don’t have coastal radar.”
Pause.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“I wish it were. They’re serious all right.”
The GOD shook his head in disbelief and slumped back in his chair. “Maybe we might just have to go along without birds and shallow-water fish this time,” he said at last. “Would the rest still work?”
“I’m not so sure it would,” the CDE replied. “The birds were supposed to spread seeds around to produce enough vegetation to support the herbivores. If we reduce the quotas of herbivores, we’d have to cut back on the carnivores, too. And without the birds to keep down the insects, we’d have the Forestry Cherubim on our backs for endangering the trees. With the trees in trouble and no shallow-water fish to clean up the garbage from the rivers, the whole ecosystem would break down. None of the animal species would be able to support themselves.”
The GOD sighed and wrestled with the problem in his head. The CDE himself had precipitated the current crisis by introducing the idea of the people in the first place, but there would be nothing to be gained by starting rounds of recriminations and accusations at this point, he thought. What was important was to get the proposal into an acceptable form before the closing date for the bid. “The only thing I can think of is that if the animals become unable to support themselves, we’ll have to put them all on welfare. If I call HEW and see if I can fix it, would that solve the problem?”
“Well . . . yeah, I guess it would . . . if you can fix it.” The CDE didn’t sound too hopeful.
The GOD phoned the HEW Director a few minutes later and explained the situation. Would HEW accept a commitment to supplying welfare support for the animals?
“No way!” was the emphatic reply.
“What in he—heaven’s name do you expect us to do?” the GOD demanded, shouting in exasperation. “How can we meet anybody’s regulations when they always conflict with somebody else’s?”
“That’s not our problem,” the HEW Director stated bluntly. “Sorry.”
Another meeting was called early the next morning to discuss the quandary. After all avenues had been explored, there seemed only one solution that would avoid all the conflicts: an azoic universe. All forms of living organisms would have to be deleted from the proposal. The meeting ended on a note of somber resignation.
* * *
The Environmental Protection Angel was on the line later that afternoon. Her voice was shrill and piercing, grating on the GOD’s nerves. “Without any plants at all, the levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur compounds from volcanic activity would exceed the permitted limits. The proposal as it stands is quite unacceptable. We would not be able to issue operating licenses for the volcanoes.”
“But the limits were set to safeguard only living organisms!” the GOD thundered. “We’ve scrapped them—all of them. There aren’t any living organisms to be safeguarded.”
“There is no clause in the regulations which specifically exempts lifeless planets,” the EPA told him primly. It was too much.
“What kind of lunatics are you?” the GOD raged into the phone. “You don’t need a specific exemption. What do you need protective regulations for when there isn’t anything to be protected? How stupid can you get? Any idiot could see that it doesn’t apply here—any of it. You’re out of your mind.”
“I’m simply doing my job, and I don’t expect personal insults,” came the reply. “The standards are quite clear, and they must be met. Good day.” The line went dead.
The GOD conveyed the news to Design Engineering, who discussed it with Research. Without the volcanoes there wouldn’t be enough planetary outgassing to form the atmospheres and oceans. Okay, the atmospheres and oceans would have to go. But the volcanoes were also intended to play a role in relieving the structural stresses and thermal buildups in the planetary crusts. How could that be taken care of without any volcanoes? Only by having more earthquakes to make up the difference, the CDE declared. The GOD told him to revise the proposal by deleting the volcanoes and making the crustal formations more earthquake-prone. Everybody agreed that the problem appeared at last to have been solved.
* * *
The Department of Highlands, Undulations, and Deserts called the GOD a day later with an objection. “I’m dreadfully sorry, old chap, but we seem to have run into a bit of a problem,” the man from HUD told him. “You see, the mountain ranges you’ve proposed don’t quite come up to the standards set out in our building codes for the increased level of seismic activity. We’d have no choice but to condemn them as unsafe, I’m afraid.”
“What if we do away with the mountains, then?” the GOD growled sullenly.
“That would be perfectly satisfactory as far as we’re concerned, but I rather suspect that you might still have a problem in getting it passed by the Occupational Safety and Health Angelcy. All those fissures opening up and landslides going on all over the place . . . it would be a bit hazardous for the animals, wouldn’t it?”
“But we’ve already gotten rid of the animals,” the GOD pointed out. “There won’t be any.”
“I see your point,” the man from HUD agreed amiably, “but it is still in the jolly old rules. You know how finicky those OSHA types can be. Just a friendly word in your ear. Frightfully sorry and all that.”
The GOD was past arguing.
Design Engineering’s response was to make the planets completely inactive. There would be no mountains, no fluid interiors, no mobile plates—in fact, no tectonic processes of any kind. The planets would be simply featureless balls of solid rock that could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered potentially hazardous to any living thing, whether one existed or not.
The Great Accounting Overseer didn’t like it. “What do you need them for?” a GAO minion challenged a day later. “They don’t serve any useful purpose at all. They’re just a needless additional expense on the cost budget. Why not get rid of them completely?”
“They’ve got a point,” the CDE admitted when the GOD went over to Engineering to talk about it. “I guess the only reason we put them in is because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Yeah . . . I reckon we should strike them out. No planets.”
But the Dispenser of Energy wasn’t happy about the idea of a universe consisting of nothing but stars. “It might be budgeted to last for billions of years, but it’s still finite nevertheless,” an assistant of the DOE declared in a call to the GOD. “We are trying to encourage a policy of conservation, you know. This idea of having billions of stars just pouring out all that energy into empty space with none of it being used for anything at all . . . well, it would be terribly wasteful and inefficient. I don’t think we could possibly approve something like that.”
“But it’s just as we’ve always done it,” the GOD protested. “The planets never used more than a drop in the ocean. The difference isn’t worth talking about.”
“Quantitatively, yes, but I’m talking about a difference in principle,” the DOE assistant replied. “The waste was high in the earlier projects, but at least there was a reason in principle. This time there isn’t any, and that does make a difference. We couldn’t give this universe an approval stamp. Sorry.”
A day later Design Engineering had come up with a way to conserve the energy: Instead of being concentrated into masses sufficiently dense to sustain fusion reactions and form stars, the stellar material would be dispersed evenly throughout space as clouds of dust and gas in which the small amount of free energy that remained would be conserved through an equilibrium exchange between radiation and matter. The DOE was satisfied with that. Unfortunately the EPA was not; the clouds of dust and gas would exceed the pollution limits.
With two days to go before the closing date for the bid, the GOD called all the department heads and senior technical staff members together to discuss the situation. The ensuing meeting went on all through the night. After running calculations through the computers several times, they at last came up with a solution they were sure had to be acceptable to everybody. Sales forwarded a revised final proposal to the customer, and the company waited nervously for the responses. Miraculously the phone on the GOD’s desk didn’t ring once all through the next day. The proposal was approved, and the final contract was awarded.
* * *
Out at the construction site, Gabriel watched despondently as the project at last got under way. All that was left of the original plan was a pinpoint of exotic particles of matter, radiation, space, and time, all compressed together at a temperature of billions of degrees. The bizarre particles fell apart into protons, neutrons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and photons, which after a while began clustering together through the radiation fluid as he watched. After the grandeur of the previous projects he had witnessed, the sight was depressing. “I guess we just write this one off, forget all about it, and file it away,” he murmured to the GOD, who was standing next to him. “It’s not much to look at, is it? I can’t see this even getting a mention in the report to the stockholders.” He turned his head to find that the GOD’s eyes were twinkling mischievously. “What’s funny?” he asked, puzzled.
The GOD tipped his yellow hard-hat to the back of his head and grinned in a conspiratorial kind of way as he scratched his forehead. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly. “We’ve worked out a new method. It’ll all come out just the way we planned . . . everything.”
Gabriel blinked at him in astonishment. “What are you talking about? How do you mean, everything? You don’t mean the stars, the planets, the oceans, the mountains . . .” His voice trailed away as he saw the GOD nodding.
“And the birds, and the fish, and the animals, all the way through to the people,” the GOD told him confidently. “It’ll turn out just the way we planned it in the original proposal.”
Gabriel shook his head, nonplussed. “But . . . how?” He gestured at the expanding fireball, in which traces of helium and a few other light nuclei were beginning to appear. “How could it all come out of that?”
The GOD chuckled. “The research people developed some things called ‘Laws of Physics’ that they buried inside it. The angelcies will never find them. But they’re in there, and they’ll make it all happen just the way we planned. We ran the numbers through the IBM last night, and they work. You wait and see.”
Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the site supervisor’s hut and then gazed back at the embryo universe with a new interest and respect. “I was going to go inside for a coffee,” he said. “But this sounds interesting. I think I’ll hang around a little longer. I don’t want to miss this.”
The GOD smiled. “Oh, that’s okay—you go get your coffee,” he said. “There’s plenty of time yet.”
Afterword, 1996
“Making Light” revolves around English-language puns and acronyms. Don’t ask me how they did it, but somehow it was translated into Japanese. Japanese language uses characters from three alphabets: kanji, which are ideographic symbols borrowed from the Chinese; and two phonetic systems: hiragana, a flowing script used along with kanji to conjugate verbs, write conjunctions, and to write Japanese words phonetically; and katakana, a more angular (but otherwise identical) script used for writing foreign words phonetically, and also for sound effect words (for instance, in comics). All of these they cheerfully intermingle with our own Western alphanumerics when it suits their purpose. The Japanese also love puns. A real expert will come up with one that’s a pun at both the kanji and kana levels simultaneously, and also in English.