One of the uniformed maintenance men said, “You’ve been playing around with your reality tape.”
“Yes,” Poole said. Why deny it? Obviously they had found the inserted solid strip. “I shouldn’t have been out that long,” he said. “I inserted a ten minute strip only.”
“It shut off the tape transport,” the technician explained. “The tape stopped moving forward; your insertion jammed it, and it automatically shut down to avoid tearing the tape. Why would you want to fiddle around with that? Don’t you know what you could do?”
“I’m not sure,” Poole said.
“But you have a good idea.”
Poole said acridly, “That’s why I’m doing it.”
“Your bill,” the maintenance man said, “is going to be ninety-five frogs. Payable in installments, if you so desire.”
“Okay,” he said; he sat up groggily, rubbed his eyes and grimaced. His head ached and his stomach felt totally empty.
“Shave the tape next time,” the primary technician told him. “That way it won’t jam. Didn’t it occur to you that it had a safety factor built into it? So it would stop rather than—”
“What happens,” Poole interrupted, his voice low and intently careful, “if no tape passed under the scanner? No tape—nothing at all. The photocell shining upward without impedance?”
The technicians glanced at each other. One said, “All the neuro circuits jump their gaps and short out.”
“Meaning what?” Poole said.
“Meaning it’s the end of the mechanism.”
Poole said, “I’ve examined the circuit. It doesn’t carry enough voltage to do that. Metal won’t fuse under such slight loads of current, even if the terminals are touching. We’re talking about a millionth of a watt along a cesium channel perhaps a sixteenth of an inch in length. Let’s assume there are a billion possible combinations at one instant arising from the punch-outs on the tape. The total output isn’t cumulative; the amount of current depends on what the battery details for that module, and it’s not much. With all gates open and going.”
“Would we lie?” one of the technicians asked wearily.
“Why not?” Poole said. “Here I have an opportunity to experience everything. Simultaneously. To know the universe and its entirety, to be momentarily in contact with all reality. Something that no human can do. A symphonic score entering my brain outside of time, all notes, all instruments sounding at once. And all symphonies. Do you see?”
“It’ll burn you out,” both technicians said, together.
“I don’t think so,” Poole said.
Sarah said, “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Poole?”
“Yes,” he said; he lowered his legs, pressed his cold feet against the floor, shuddered. He then stood up. His body ached. They had me lying all night on the couch, he realized. All things considered, they could have done better than that.
At the kitchen table in the far corner of the room, Garson Poole sat sipping coffee across from Sarah. The technicians had long since gone.
“You’re not going to try any more experiments on yourself, are you?” Sarah asked wistfully.
Poole grated, “I would like to control time. To reverse it.” I will cut a segment of tape out, he thought, and fuse it in upside down. The causal sequences will then flow the other way. Thereupon I will walk backward down the steps from the roof field, back up to my door, push a locked door open, walk backward to the sink, where I will get out a stack of dirty dishes. I will seat myself at this table before the stack, fill each dish with food produced from my stomach… I will then transfer the food to the refrigerator. The next day I will take the food out of the refrigerator, pack it in bags, carry the bags to a supermarket, distribute the food here and there in the store. And at last, at the front counter, they will pay me money for this, from their cash register. The food will be packed with other food in big plastic boxes, shipped out of the city into the hydroponic plants on the Atlantic, there to be joined back to trees and bushes or the bodies of dead animals or pushed deep into the ground. But what would all that prove? A video tape running backward… I would know no more than I know now, which is not enough.
What I want, he realized, is ultimate and absolute reality, for one microsecond. After that it doesn’t matter, because all will be known; nothing will be left to understand or see.
I might try one other change, he said to himself. Before I try cutting the tape. I will prick new punch-holes in the tape and see what presently emerges. It will be interesting because I will not know what the holes I make mean.
Using the tip of a microtool, he punched several holes, at random, on the tape. As close to the scanner as he could manage… he did not want to wait.
“I wonder if you’ll see it,” he said to Sarah. Apparently not, insofar as he could extrapolate. “Something may show up,” he said to her. “I just want to warn you; I don’t want you to be afraid.”
“Oh dear,” Sarah said tinnily.
He examined his wristwatch. One minute passed, then a second, a third.
And then—
In the center of the room appeared a flock of green and black ducks. They quacked excitedly, rose from the floor, fluttered against the ceiling in a dithering mass of feathers and wings and frantic in their vast urge, their instinct, to get away.
“Ducks,” Poole said, marveling. “I punched a hole for a flight of wild ducks.”
Now something else appeared. A park bench with an elderly, tattered man seated on it, reading a torn, bent newspaper. He looked up, dimly made out Poole, smiled briefly at him with badly made dentures, and then returned to his folded-back newspaper. He read on.
“Do you see him?” Poole asked Sarah. “And the ducks.” At that moment the ducks and the park bum disappeared. Nothing remained of them. The interval of their punch-holes had quickly passed.
“They weren’t real,” Sarah said. “Were they? So how—”
“You’re not real,” he told Sarah. “You’re a stimulus-factor on my reality tape. A punch-hole that can be glazed over. Do you also have an existence in another reality tape, or one in an objective reality?” He did not know; he couldn’t tell. Perhaps Sarah did not know, either. Perhaps she existed in a thousand reality tapes; perhaps on every reality tape ever manufactured. “If I cut the tape,” he said, “you will be everywhere and nowhere. Like everything else in the universe. At least as far as I am aware of it.”
Sarah faltered, “I am real.”
“I want to know you completely,” Poole said. “To do that I must cut the tape. If I don’t do it now, I’ll do it some other time; it’s inevitable that eventually I’ll do it.” So why wait? he asked himself. And there is always the possibility that Danceman has reported back to my maker, that they will be making moves to head me off. Because, perhaps, I’m endangering their property—myself.
“You make me wish I had gone to the office after all,” Sarah said, her mouth turned down with dimpled gloom.
“Go,” Poole said.
“I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” Poole said.
“No, you’re not going to be fine. You’re going to unplug yourself or something, kill yourself because you’ve found out you’re just an electric ant and not a human being.”
He said, presently, “Maybe so.” Maybe it boiled down to that.
“And I can’t stop you,” she said.
“No.” He nodded in agreement.
“But I’m going to stay,” Sarah said. “Even if I can’t stop you. Because if I do leave and you do kill yourself, I’ll always ask myself for the rest of my life what would have happened if I had stayed. You see?”
Again he nodded.
“Go ahead,” Sarah said.
He rose to his feet. “It’s not pain I’m going to feel,” he told her. “Although it may look like that to you. Keep in mind the fact that organic robots have minimal pain-circuits in them. I will be experiencing the most intense—”
/> “Don’t tell me any more,” she broke in. “Just do it if you’re going to, or don’t do it if you’re not.”
Clumsily—because he was frightened—he wriggled his hands into the microglove assembly, reached to pick up a tiny tool: a sharp cutting blade. “I am going to cut a tape mounted inside my chest panel,” he said, as he gazed through the enlarging-lens system. “That’s all.” His hand shook as it lifted the cutting blade. In a second it can be done, he realized. All over. And—I will have time to fuse the cut ends of the tape back together, he realized. A half hour at least. If I change my mind.
He cut the tape.
Staring at him, cowering, Sarah whispered, “Nothing happened.”
“I have thirty or forty minutes.” He reseated himself at the table, having drawn his hands from the gloves. His voice, he noticed, shook; undoubtedly Sarah was aware of it, and he felt anger at himself, knowing that he had alarmed her. “I’m sorry,” he said, irrationally; he wanted to apologize to her. “Maybe you ought to leave,” he said in panic; again he stood up. So did she, reflexively, as if imitating him; bloated and nervous she stood there palpitating. “Go away,” he said thickly. “Back to the office where you ought to be. Where we both ought to be.” I’m going to fuse the tape-ends together, he told himself; the tension is too great for me to stand.
Reaching his hands toward the gloves he groped to pull them over his straining fingers. Peering into the enlarging screen, he saw the beam from the photoelectric gleam upward, pointed directly into the scanner; at the same time he saw the end of the tape disappearing under the scanner… he saw this, understood it; I’m too late, he realized. It has passed through. God, he thought, help me. It has begun winding at a rate greater than I calculated. So it’s now that—
He saw apples, and cobblestones and zebras. He felt warmth, the silky texture of cloth; he felt the ocean lapping at him and a great wind, from the north, plucking at him as if to lead him somewhere. Sarah was all around him, so was Danceman. New York glowed in the night, and the squibs about him scuttled and bounced through night skies and daytime and flooding and drought. Butter relaxed into liquid on his tongue, and at the same time hideous odors and tastes assailed him: the bitter presence of poisons and lemons and blades of summer grass. He drowned; he fell; he lay in the arms of a woman in a vast white bed which at the same time dinned shrilly in his ear: the warning noise of a defective elevator in one of the ancient, ruined downtown hotels. I am living, I have lived, I will never live, he said to himself, and with his thoughts came every word, every sound; insects squeaked and raced, and he half sank into a complex body of homeostatic machinery located somewhere in Tri-Plan’s labs.
He wanted to say something to Sarah. Opening his mouth he tried to bring forth words—a specific string of them out of the enormous mass of them brilliantly lighting his mind, scorching him with their utter meaning.
His mouth burned. He wondered why.
Frozen against the wall, Sarah Benton opened her eyes and saw the curl of smoke ascending from Poole’s half-opened mouth. Then the roby sank down, knelt on elbows and knees, then slowly spread out in a broken, crumpled heap. She knew without examining it that it had “died.”
Poole did it to itself, she realized. And it couldn’t feel pain; it said so itself. Or at least not very much pain; maybe a little. Anyhow, now it is over.
I had better call Mr. Danceman and tell him what’s happened, she decided. Still shaky, she made her way across the room to the fone; picking it up, she dialed from memory.
It thought I was a stimulus-factor on its reality tape, she said to herself. So it thought I would die when it “died.” How strange, she thought. Why did it imagine that? It had never been plugged into the real world; it had “lived” in an electronic world of its own. How bizarre.
“Mr. Danceman,” she said when the circuit to his office had been put through. “Poole is gone. It destroyed itself right in front of my eyes. You’d better come over.”
“So we’re finally free of it.”
“Yes, won’t it be nice?”
Danceman said, “I’ll send a couple of men over from the shop.” He saw past her, made out the sight of Poole lying by the kitchen table. “You go home and rest,” he instructed Sarah. “You must be worn out by all this.”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Danceman.” She hung up and stood, aimlessly.
And then she noticed something.
My hands, she thought. She held them up. Why is it I can see through them?
The walls of the room, too, had become ill-defined.
Trembling, she walked back to the inert roby, stood by it, not knowing what to do. Through her legs the carpet showed, and then the carpet became dim, and she saw, through it, farther layers of disintegrating matter beyond.
Maybe if I can fuse the tape-ends back together, she thought. But she did not know how. And already Poole had become vague.
The wind of early morning blew about her. She did not feel it; she had begun, now, to cease to feel.
The winds blew on.
Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked
Once, long ago, before money had been invented, a certain male beaver named Cadbury lived within a meager dam which he had constructed with his own teeth and feet, earning his living by gnawing down shrubs, trees and other growth in exchange for poker chips of several colors. The blue chips he liked best, but they came rarely, generally only due in payment for some uniquely huge gnawing-assignment. In all the passing years of work he had owned only three such chips, but he knew by inference that more must exist, and every now and then during the day’s gnawing he paused a moment, fixed a cup of instant coffee, and meditated on chips of all hues, the blues included.
His wife Hilda offered unasked-for advice whenever the opportunity presented itself. “Look at you,” she customarily would declare. “You really ought to see a psychiatrist. Your stack of white chips is only approximately half that of Ralf, Peter, Tom, Bob, Jack and Earl, all who live and gnaw around here, because you’re so busy woolgathering about your goddam blue chips which you’ll never get anyhow because frankly if the blunt truth were known you lack the talent, energy and drive.”
“Energy and drive,” Cadbury would moodily retort, “mean the same thing.” But nevertheless he perceived how right she was. This constituted his wife’s main fault: she invariably had truth on her side, whereas he had nothing but hot air. And truth, when pitted against hot air in the arena of life, generally carries the day.
Since Hilda was right, Cadbury dug up eight white chips from his secret chip-concealing place—a shallow depression under a minor rock—and walked two and three-quarters miles to the nearest psychiatrist, a mellow, do-nothing rabbit shaped like a bowling pin who, according to his wife, made fifteen thousand a year and so what about it.
“Clever sort of day,” Dr. Drat said amiably, unrolling two Tums for his tummy and leaning back in his extra-heavily padded swivel chair.
“Not so very darn clever,” Cadbury answered, “when you know you don’t have it in you ever to catch sight of a blue chip again, even though you work your ass off day in and day out, and what for? She spends it faster than I make it. Even if I did get my teeth in a blue chip it’d be gone overnight for something expensive and useless on the installment plan, such as for instance a twelve million candle-power self-recharging flashlight. With a lifetime guarantee.”
“Those are darn clever,” Dr. Drat said, “those what you said there, those self-recharging flashlights.”
“The only reason I came to you,” Cadbury said, “is because my wife made me. She can get me to do anything. If she said, ‘Swim out into the middle of the creek and drown,’ do you know what I’d do?”
“You’d rebel,” Dr. Drat said in his amiable voice, his hoppers up on the surface of his burled walnut desk.
“I’d kick in her fucking face,” Cadbury said. “I’d gnaw her to bits; I’d gnaw her right in half, right through the middle. You’re damn right. I mean, I’
m not kidding; it’s a fact. I hate her.”
“How much,” Dr. Drat asked, “is your wife like your mother?”
“I never had a mother,” Cadbury said in a grumpy way—a way which he adopted from time to time: a regular characteristic with him, as Hilda had pointed out. “I was found floating in the Napa Slough in a shoebox with a handwritten note reading ‘FINDERS KEEPERS.’ ”
“What was your last dream?” Dr. Drat inquired.
“My last dream,” Cadbury said, “is—was—the same as all the others. I always dream I buy a two-cent mint at the drugstore, one of the flat chocolate-covered mints wrapped in green foil, and when I remove the foil it isn’t a mint. You know what it is?”
“Suppose you tell me what it is,” Dr. Drat said, in a voice suggesting that he really knew but no one was paying him to say it.
Cadbury said fiercely, “It’s a blue chip. Or rather it looks like a blue chip. It’s blue and it’s flat and round and the same size. But in the dream I always say ‘Maybe it’s just a blue mint.’ I mean, there must be such a thing as blue mints. I’d hate like to hell to store it in my secret chip-concealing place—a shallow depression under an ordinary-looking rock—and then there’d be this hot day, see, and afterwards when I went to get my blue chip—or rather supposed blue chip—I found it all melted because it really was a mint after all and not a blue chip. And who’d I sue? The manufacturer? Christ; he never claimed it was a blue chip; it clearly said, in my dream, on the green foil wrapper—”
“I think,” Dr. Drat broke in mildly, “that our time is up for today. We might well do some exploring of this aspect of your inner psyche next week because it appears to be leading us somewhere.”