The Very Best of F & SF v1 (21 page)

It has been
unwinding for years, he decided.

Getting his
clothes, he redressed, seated himself in his big armchair—a luxury imported
into his apartment from Tri-Plan’s main offices—and lit a tobacco cigarette.
His hands shook as he laid down his initialed lighter; leaning back, he blew smoke
before himself, creating a nimbus of gray.

I have to go
slowly, he said to himself. What am I trying to do? Bypass my programming? But
the computer found no programming circuit. Do I want to interfere with the
reality tape? And if so,
why?

Because, he
thought, if I control that, I control reality. At least so far as I’m
concerned. My subjective reality... but that’s all there is. Objective reality
is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a
multitude of subjective realities.

My universe is
lying within my fingers, he realized. If l can just figure out how the damn
thing works. All I set out to do originally was to search for and locate my
programming circuits so I could gain true homeostatic functioning: control of
myself. But with this—

With this he did
not merely gain control of himself; he gained control over everything.

And this sets me
apart from every human who ever lived and died, he thought somberly.

Going over to
the fone, he dialed his office. When he had Danceman on the screen he said
briskly, “I want you to send a complete set of microtools and enlarging screen
over to my apartment. I have some micro-circuitry to work on.” Then he broke
the connection, not wanting to discuss it.

A half hour
later a knock sounded on his door. When he opened up he found himself facing
one of the shop foremen, loaded down with microtools of every sort. “You didn’t
say exactly what you wanted,” the foreman said, entering the apartment. “So Mr.
Danceman had me bring everything.”

“And the
enlarging-lens system?”

“In the truck,
up on the roof.”

Maybe what I
want to do, Poole thought, is die. He lit a cigarette, stood smoking and
waiting as the shop foreman lugged the heavy enlarging screen, with its
power-supply and control panel, into the apartment. This is suicide, what I’m
doing here. He shuddered.

“Anything wrong,
Mr. Poole?” the shop foreman said as he rose to his feet, relieved of the
burden of the enlarging-lens system. “You must still be rickety on your pins
from your accident.”

“Yes,” Poole
said quietly. He stood tautly waiting until the foreman left.

Under the
enlarging-lens system the plastic tape assumed a new shape, a wide track along
which hundreds of thousands of punch-holes worked their way. I thought so,
Poole thought. Not recorded as charges on a ferrous oxide layer but actually
punched-free slots.

Under the lens
the strip of tape visibly oozed forward. Very slowly, but it did, at uniform
velocity, move in the direction of the scanner.

The way I figure
it, he thought, is that the punched holes are
on
gates. It functions like
a player piano; solid is no, punch-hole is yes. How can I test this?

Obviously by
filling in a number of holes.

He measured the
amount of tape left on the delivery spool, calculated—at great effort—the velocity
of the tape’s movement, and then came up with a figure. If he altered the tape
visible at the in-going edge of the scanner, five to seven hours would pass
before that particular time period arrived. He would in effect be painting out
stimuli due a few hours from now.

With a
microbrush he swabbed a large—relatively large—section of tape with opaque
varnish... obtained from the supply kit accompanying the microtools. I have
smeared out stimuli for about half an hour, he pondered. Have covered at least
a thousand punches.

It would be
interesting to see what change, if any, overcame his environment, six hours
from now.

Five and a half
hours later he sat at Krackter’s, a superb bar in Manhattan, having a drink
with Danceman.

“You look bad,” Danceman
said.

“I am bad,” Poole
said. He finished his drink, a Scotch sour, and ordered another.

“From the
accident?”

“In a sense, yes.”

Danceman said, “Is
it—something you found out about yourself?”

Raising his
head, Poole eyed him in the murky light of the bar. “Then you know.”

“I know,” Danceman
said, “that I should call you ‘Poole’ instead of ‘Mr. Poole.’ But I prefer the
latter, and will continue to do so.”

“How long have
you known?” Poole said.

“Since you took
over the firm. I was told that the actual owners of Tri-Plan, who are located
in the Prox System, wanted Tri-Plan run by an electric ant whom they could
control. They wanted a brilliant and forceful—”

“The real
owners?” This was the first he had heard about that. “We have two thousand
stockholders. Scattered everywhere.”

“Marvis Bey and
her husband, Ernan, on Prox 4, control fifty-one percent of the voting stock.
This has been true from the start.”

“Why didn’t I
know?”

“I was told not
to tell you. You were to think that you yourself made all company policy. With
my help. But actually I was feeding you what the Beys fed to me.”

“I’m a
figurehead,” Poole said.

“In a sense, yes.”
Danceman nodded. “But you’ll always be ‘Mr. Poole’ to me.

A section of the
far wall vanished. And with it, several people at tables nearby. And—

Through the big
glass side of the bar, the skyline of New York City flickered out of existence.

Seeing his face,
Danceman said, “What is it?”

Poole said
hoarsely, “Look around. Do you see any changes?”

After looking
around the room, Danceman said, “No. What like?”

“You still see
the skyline?”

“Sure. Smoggy as
it is. The lights wink—”

“Now I know,” Poole
said. He had been right; every punch-hole covered up meant the disappearance of
some object in his reality world. Standing, he said, “I’ll see you later,
Danceman. I have to get back to my apartment; there’s some work I’m doing.
Goodnight.” He strode from the bar and out onto the street, searching for a
cab.

No cabs.

Those, too, he
thought. I wonder what else I painted over. Prostitutes? Flowers? Prisons?

There, in the
bar’s parking lot, Danceman’s squib. I’ll take that, he decided. There are
still cabs in Danceman’s world; he can get one later. Anyhow it’s a company
car, and I hold a copy of the key.

Presently he was
in the air, turning toward his apartment.

New York City
had not returned. To the left and right vehicles and buildings, streets,
ped-runners, signs... and in the center nothing. How can I fly into that? he
asked himself. I’d disappear.

Or would I? He
flew toward the nothingness.

Smoking one
cigarette after another he flew in a circle for fifteen minutes... and then,
soundlessly, New York reappeared. He could finish his trip. He stubbed out his
cigarette (a waste of something so valuable) and shot off in the direction of
his apartment.

If I insert a
narrow opaque strip, he pondered as he unlocked his apartment door, I can—

His thoughts
ceased. Someone sat in his living room chair, watching a captain kirk on the
TV. “Sarah,” he said, nettled.

She rose,
well-padded but graceful. “You weren’t at the hospital, so I came here. I still
have that key you gave me back in March after we had that argument. Oh... you
look so depressed.” She came up to him, peeped into his face anxiously. “Does
your injury hurt that badly?”

“It’s not that.”
He removed his coat, tie, shirt, and then his chest panel; kneeling down he
began inserting his hands into the microtool gloves. Pausing, he looked up at
her and said, “I found out I’m an electric ant. Which from one standpoint opens
up certain possibilities, which I am exploring now.” He flexed his fingers and,
at the far end of the left waldo, a micro-screwdriver moved, magnified into
visibility by the enlarging-lens system. “You can watch,” he informed her. “If
you so desire.”

She had begun to
cry.

“What’s the matter?”
he demanded savagely, without looking up from his work.

“I—it’s just so
sad. You’ve been such a good employer to all of us at Tri-Plan. We respect you
so. And now it’s all changed.”

The plastic tape
had an unpunched margin at top and bottom; he cut a horizontal strip, very
narrow, then, after a moment of great concentration, cut the tape itself four
hours away from the scanning head. He then rotated the cut strip into a
right-angle piece in relation to the scanner, fused it in place with a micro
heat element, then reattached the tape reel to its left and right sides. He
had, in effect, inserted a dead twenty minutes into the unfolding flow of his
reality. It would take effect—according to his calculations—a few minutes after
midnight.

“Are you fixing
yourself?” Sarah asked timidly.

Poole said, “I’m
freeing myself.” Beyond this he had several alterations in mind. But first he
had to test his theory; blank, unpunched tape meant no stimuli, in which case
the
lack
of tape...

“That look on
your face,” Sarah said. She began gathering up her purse, coat, rolled-up
aud-vid magazine. “I’ll go; I can see how you feel about finding me here.”

“Stay,” he said.
“I’ll watch the captain kirk with you.” He got into his shirt. “Remember years
ago when there were—what was it?—twenty or twenty-two TV channels? Before the
government shut down the independents?”

She nodded.

“What would it
have looked like,” he said, “if this TV set projected all channels onto the
cathode ray screen
at the same
time?
Could we have distinguished anything, in
the mixture?”

“I don’t think
so.”

“Maybe we could
learn to. Learn to be selective; do our own job of perceiving what we wanted to
and what we didn’t. Think of the possibilities, if our brains could handle
twenty images at once; think of the amount of knowledge which could be stored
during a given period. I wonder if the brain, the human brain—” He broke off. “The
human brain couldn’t do it,” he said, presently, reflecting to himself. “But in
theory a quasi-organic brain might.”

“Is that what you
have?” Sarah asked.

“Yes,” Poole
said.

They watched the
captain kirk to its end, and then they went to bed. But Poole sat up against
his pillows, smoking and brooding. Beside him, Sarah stirred restlessly,
wondering why he did not turn off the light.

Eleven-fifty. It
would happen anytime, now.

“Sarah,” he
said. “I want your help. In a very few minutes something strange will happen to
me. It won’t last long, but I want you to watch me carefully. See if I—” He
gestured. “Show any changes. If I seem to go to sleep, or if I talk nonsense,
or—” He wanted to say, if I disappear. But he did not. “I won’t do you any
harm, but I think it might be a good idea if you armed yourself. Do you have
your anti-mugging gun with you?”

“In my purse.” She
had become fully awake now; sitting up in bed, she gazed at him with wild
fright, her ample shoulders tanned and freckled in the light of the room.

He got her gun
for her.

The room
stiffened into paralyzed immobility. Then the colors began to drain away.
Objects diminished until, smoke-like, they flitted away into shadows. Darkness
filmed everything as the objects in the room became weaker and weaker.

The last stimuli
are dying out, Poole realized. He squinted, trying to see. He made out Sarah
Benton, sitting in the bed: a two-dimensional figure that doll-like had been
propped up, there to fade and dwindle. Random gusts of dematerialized substance
eddied about in unstable clouds; the elements collected, fell apart, then
collected once again. And then the last heat, energy, and light dissipated; the
room closed over and fell into itself, as if sealed off
from
reality. And at that point absolute blackness replaced everything, space
without depth, not nocturnal but rather stiff and unyielding. And in addition
he heard nothing.

Reaching, he
tried to touch something. But he had nothing to reach with. Awareness of his
own body had departed along with everything else in the universe. He had no
hands, and even if he had, there would be nothing for them to feel.

I am still right
about the way the damn tape works, he said to himself, using a nonexistent
mouth to communicate an invisible message.

Will this pass
in ten minutes? he asked himself. Am I right about that, too? He waited... but
knew intuitively that his time sense had departed with everything else. I can
only wait, he realized. And hope it won’t be long.