The Steam-Driven Boy (18 page)

‘What would I get?’

‘If we accepted you, you’d be tested. Then we’d know.’

‘What do you mean, if?’ Claude felt he had just been offered a million dollars, but at the word ‘if’ it had shrunk to about a nickel.

The stranger, sensing his anxiety, spoke soothingly. ‘Don’t worry too much about that. We won’t be testing your I.Q. or previous knowledge. In fact, the less of either, the better. We want people who haven’t had a chance, people who feel useless because the sleeping genius within them has never been awakened. What do you say?’

‘I don’t know. What would it cost me?’

‘All the money in the world couldn’t buy you a better education, pal. But all it costs is your signature.’

‘Well – oh hell, why not?’

‘Why not?’ echoed the salesman, handing him a pen. Claude signed a few forms in various colours and the salesman gave him a copy of each.

‘Claude,’ he said, ‘you’ve just made your first intelligent decision.’

The Guzz had pretty well taken over Earth, in every way. Guzz-developed gadgets were in every home. Clergymen thanked the Lord from their pulpits that the Guzz were not warlike or vicious but a truly democratic – ah – people. The government made daily announcements of new Guzz gifts to humanity.

They quietly disarmed the nuclear powers, they made efficient clean-air and sewage-disposal systems for our cities, they introduced new food sources and birth-control plans in Asia. Hardly a government bureau in the world had not been approached by the Guzz with a suggestion or a gift – and these aliens used no stronger forces than tact and kindly persuasion.

The only disagreeable thing about them was the way they looked – both at home and in Earth-drag.

On their own planet (or so it was said, for no one had yet visited them) the Guzz were disagreeably vermiform. Here, so as not to spook the natives, they wore human forms of plastic. Their movements in these were natural enough, but they all looked alike. As far as most people, including Claude, were concerned, the Guzz were just so many talking
store-window dummies.

The first box that arrived was a table-top computer equipped with keyboard, microphone, speaker and visual display screen. That night when he returned from Stan’s Chili Bowl, Claude lay awake looking at all that gleaming, complicated junk and wondering if he might have made a mistake in even hoping …

Next day three packages arrived. The first contained books and a sheaf of documents: a certification that Claude Mabry was eligible for this correspondence course, more copies of the various forms he’d signed – and a booklet entitled:
Welcome, Future Genius!

‘The government of Guzz and your own government wish to take this opportunity to welcome you … conditions and by-laws … You may not always see the reasons for instructions given you in this course, but they are necessary to ensure efficient use of your time.

‘The enclosed books are for Lesson One. The books required for each lesson will be provided with the lesson. At various points in the program you will be asked to study them thoroughly.’

Claude glanced at the titles of the books:
The Interpretation of Dreams
, Sigmund Freud;
Verbal Behavior
, B. F. Skinner;
Towards Information Retrieval
, Fairthorne; were only a few.

The dream book looked interesting but inside, like all the others, it was full of long-winded sentences that didn’t mean anything.

The second package contained a tape cassette titled:
Program for Lesson One
and simple instructions for loading it into the teaching computer.

As soon as Claude could do so, he switched on the machine. He might have expected it to give him a problem, to register the fact that it was turned on, or at least to ask his name, but it did none of these things.

Instead, it politely requested him to eat a sandwich.

Claude scratched his head. The Gun had to be joking. He could imagine them watching him right now, laughing at his stupidity. So this was the big learning course! So this …

He remembered the third package and tore it open. Inside was a cellophane-wrapped sandwich. Though Claude turned it over and over, he could see only one difference between this and any other cellophane-wrapped sandwich: Inside the wrapper was a plain printed name slip. But instead of ‘ham and cheese’ or ‘peanut butter and grape jelly’ it simply read: Eat me.

The bread was a little stale but he enjoyed the salami or para-salami inside.

An hour later he correctly answered a request to explain how and why dreams were subject to syntactical rules. The answer was obvious.

Two hours later he had read Ayer’s
The Problem of Knowledge
, read it at skimming speed because it was already perfectly familiar to him.

A lesson or two later Claude had gone through about fifty difficult
books without any trouble. He progressed rapidly through the programs, though it did not seem like progress at all: he simply knew what he was doing. Using Fourier analysis to solve problems in electronics seemed something he had always known, just as he had always realized the gross truth of Newtonian mechanics and the finer truth of quantum mechanics, the position of Hubert Van Eyck in Flemish painting, the syllogistic properties of an Andrew Marvell poem, the flaws in the historical theories of Spengler and Toynbee – or for that matter, how to prepare
sauce ozéne
with seven ingredients. Scraps of learning, areas of learning, even whole complex structures of learning were suddenly his.

Having learned, he worked. By the fourth lesson Claude had gone through Gödel’s proof of the necessary incompleteness of mathematical theorems and picked holes in Lucas’s application of this to mechanical devices. He had also put forth an aesthetic theory understandable by perhaps ten men, refutable by no more than one. He had nearly destroyed mathematical economics, and devised a tentative translating machine. He was hardly aware that these things had not been done before, nor was he really aware of the transition from his job at the Chili Bowl to a research fellowship at a prominent university.

The transition came about from his publication of various monographs in journals, the names of which he knew only from footnotes in the books he was skimming. Some of the monographs came back. He had sent them to wrong addresses, or to journals long out of print.

Others, like his ‘Queueing Theory Applied to Neural Activity’ and ‘On Poetic Diction’, became classics. Men with tweedy manners but sharp suits and clean attaché cases came to see him. They sat in the steamy, oily kitchen of Stan’s Chili Bowl and talked with him about quasar explanations, new codes of international law and logic mechanisms. True, many prodigies were springing up now that the Guzz offered their massive home study program. But for the time being, genius was still something universities fought over. And so, almost without knowing it (he was thinking of other things), Claude Mabry gave Stan his notice, packed his T-shirts and blue jeans and entrained for Attica University.

He remembered only isolated facts about this trip: sending a change-of-address card to the Guzz; losing his ticket; not bringing enough paper (and so alighting from the train at Attica, where University officials were waiting to greet him, his hands so full of slips of toilet paper on which were pencilled notes toward a theory of history that he could not accept the handshakes of these venerables). Without comment he settled into his new life and went on working.

From time to time he wondered what was in the sandwich that came with each lesson. A wonder drug that unlocked hidden knowledge that lay ‘sleeping’ within him? An intelligence accelerator? Whatever it was, it was essential to the process. The only time he’d tried studying without it, Claude had floundered among symbols that
almost
made sense.

He wondered, too, about the Guzz. The little he learned about their
planet and culture (in the final lesson) whetted his appetite for more. He longed to know everything about them, almost to become one of them: They alone would understand what he was doing. It was becoming clear that his colleagues at the university considered him some kind of freak – he would not wear a suit, he could not converse about departmental politics and he was inhumanly intelligent.

Claude ordered all the information on the Guzz he could get. This proved to be a slim volume by a second-rate anthropologist who had interviewed a few of the aliens. Claude skimmed it and began a treatise of his own.

‘Despite the advanced “democracy” of the Guzz,’ he wrote, ‘they retain a few oddly “primitive”, even sacramental habits.’

There was a knock at the door. The standard face of a Guzz looked around the frame, saw that he was alone and walked its standard body into the office. Without saying anything, it came over and struck him on the forehead. Twitching, Claude slipped to the floor. The visitor busied itself with a set of plastic bags.

The fallen man was muttering. Bending lower, the man-shape heard: ‘… planarian worms? D.N.A. or …?’

‘Right you are!’ boomed the Guzz. ‘Yes, we
are
analogous to your planarian worms – so, of course, are you – and we can transmit behaviour genetically.’

He fished a long knife from one bag and tested its blade against a false thumb. ‘Of course our genes need help. Obviously our – I mean to include your – children do not learn much from their parents’ genes. But these same genes, properly assimilated –’

‘I knew it!’ Claude croaked, getting up on one elbow. The blow had stunned him, but still the machinery of his mind ground on. With an ecstatic expression he said, ‘The old taboos against eating the king, eating the old man, the sage, the father, yes?’

‘Check.’ With a hearty chuckle the visitor kneeled by Claude’s side and felt for the carotid artery. ‘Those ridiculous taboos have kept your species back hundreds of thousands of years. We’re just now making up the lost time for you.’

‘The sandwich meat –’

‘Housewives, mechanics, professional people – all the people in that brochure you saw. Just think of it!’ He waved the knife oratorically, and the plastic face turned up, as if gazing at a vista. ‘One genius provides three thousand sandwiches, each capable of providing – with no wastage – part of the education for one more genius! Thus learning will transform your whole species – you will become as gods!’

The Guzz returned his attention to the matter at hand. He poised the knife.

‘Superman,’ murmured the genius. ‘On white or rye.’

Capt. Charles Conn was thinking so hard his feet hurt. It reminded him of his first days on the force, back in ’89, when walking a beat gave him headaches.

Three time-patrolmen stood before his desk, treading awkwardly on the edges of their long red cloaks and fingering their helmets nervously. Capt. Coun wanted to snarl at them, but what was the point? They already understood his problems perfectly – they were, after all, Conn himself, doubling a shift.

‘Okay, Charlie, report.’

The first patrolman straightened. ‘I went back to three separate periods, sir. One when the President was disbanding the House of Representatives, one when he proclaimed himself the Supreme Court, one when he was signing the pro-pollution bill. I gave him the whole business – statistics, pictures, news stories. All he would say was, “My mind’s made up.”’

Chuck and Chas reported similar failures. There was no stopping the President. Not only had he usurped all the powers of federal, state and local government, but he used those powers deliberately to torment the population. It was a crime to eat ice cream, sing, whistle, swear or kiss. It was a capital offence to smile, or to use the words ‘Russia’ and ‘China’. Under the Safe Streets Act it was illegal to walk, loiter or converse in public. And of course Negroes and anyone else ‘conspicuous’ were by definition criminals, and under the jurisdiction of the Race Reaction Board.

The Natural Food Act had seemed at first almost reasonable, a response to scientists’ warnings about depleting the soil and polluting the environment. But the fine print specified that henceforth no fertilizers were to be used but human or canine excrement, and all farm machinery was forbidden. In time the newspapers featured pictures of farmers trudging past their rusting tractors to poke holes in the soil with sharp sticks. And in time, the newspapers had their paper supply curtailed. Famine warnings were ignored until the government had to buy wheat from C****.

‘Gentlemen, we’ve tried everything else.
It’s time to think about getting rid of President Ernie Barnes
.’

The men began murmuring among themselves. This was done with efficiency and dispatch, for Patrolman Charlie, knowing that Chuck was going to murmur to him first, withheld his own murmuring until it was his turn. And when Chuck had murmured to Charlie, he fell silent, and let Charlie and Chas get on with their murmuring before he murmured uneasily to Chas.

The captain spoke again. ‘Getting rid of him in the past would be easier than getting rid of him now, but it’s only part of the problem. If we remove him from the past we have to make sure no one notices the big jagged hole in history we’ll leave. Since as the time police we have the only time-bikes around, the evidence is going to make us look bad. Remember the trouble we had getting rid of the pyramids? For months, everyone went around saying, “What’s that funny thing on the back of the dollar?” Remember that?’