Read The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Online
Authors: Ben Bova
The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (4 page)
Wells looked surprised, Albert curious. Kelvin smacked his lips and put his half-drained seidel down.
“Time machine?” asked young Albert.
“What’s he talking about?” Kelvin asked.
I explained, “I have taken the liberty of translating Mr. Wells’ story about a time machine, in the hope of attracting a German publisher.”
Wells said, “You never told me—”
But Kelvin asked, “Time machine? What on earth would a time machine be?”
Wells forced an embarrassed, self-deprecating little smile. “It is merely the subject of a tale I have written, m’lud: a machine that can travel through time. Into the past, you know. Or the, uh, future.”
Kelvin fixed him with a beady gaze. “Travel into the past or the future?”
“It is fiction, of course,” Wells said apologetically.
“Of course.”
Albert seemed fascinated. “But how could a machine travel through time? How do you explain it?”
Looking thoroughly uncomfortable under Kelvin’s wilting eye, Wells said hesitantly, “Well, if you consider time as a dimension—”
“A dimension?” asked Kelvin.
“Rather like the three dimensions of space.”
“Time as a fourth dimension?”
“Yes. Rather.”
Albert nodded eagerly as I translated. “Time as a dimension, yes! Whenever we move through space we move through time as well, do we not? Space and time! Four dimensions, all bound together!”
Kelvin mumbled something indecipherable and reached for his half-finished beer.
“And one could travel through this dimension?” Albert asked. “Into the past or the future?”
“Utter bilge,” Kelvin muttered, slamming his emptied seidel on the table. “Quite impossible.”
“It is merely fiction,” said Wells, almost whining. “Only an idea I toyed with in order to—”
“Fiction. Of course,” said Kelvin, with great finality. Quite abruptly, he pushed himself to his feet. “I’m afraid I must be going. Thank you for the beer.”
He left us sitting there and started back down the street, his face flushed. From the way his beard moved I could see that he was muttering to himself.
“I’m afraid we’ve offended him,” said Wells.
“But how could he become angry over an idea?” Albert wondered. The thought seemed to stun him. “Why should a new idea infuriate a man of science?”
The waitress bustled across the patio to our table. “When is this Jew leaving?” she hissed at me, eyes blazing with fury. “I won’t have him stinking up our café any longer!”
Obviously shaken, but with as much dignity as a seventeen-year-old could muster, Albert rose to his feet. “I will leave, Madame. I have imposed on your so-gracious hospitality long enough.”
“Wait,” I said, grabbing at his jacket sleeve. “Take this with you. Read it. I think you will enjoy it.”
He smiled at me, but I could see the sadness that would haunt his eyes forever. “Thank you, sir. You have been most kind to me.”
He took the manuscript and left us. I saw him already reading it as he walked slowly down the street toward the bridge back to Linz proper. I hoped he would not trip and break his neck as he ambled down the steep street, his nose stuck in the manuscript.
The waitress watched him too. “Filthy Jew. They’re everywhere! They get themselves into everything.”
“That will be quite enough from you,” I said as sternly as I could manage.
She glared at me and headed back for the bar.
Wells looked more puzzled than annoyed, even after I explained what had happened.
“It’s their country, after all,” he said, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. “If they don’t want to mingle with Jews, there’s not much we can do about it, is there?”
I took a sip of my warm flat beer, not trusting myself to come up with a properly polite response. There was only one time line in which Albert lived long enough to have an effect on the world. There were dozens where he languished in obscurity or was gassed in one of the death camps.
Wells’ expression turned curious. “I didn’t know you had translated my story.”
“To see if perhaps a German publisher would be interested in it,” I lied.
“But you gave the manuscript to that Jewish fellow.”
“I have another copy of the translation.”
“You do? Why would you—”
My time was almost up, I knew. I had a powerful urge to end the charade. “That young Jewish fellow might change the world, you know.”
Wells laughed.
“I mean it,” I said. “You think that your story is merely a piece of fiction. Let me tell you, it is much more than that.”
“Really?”
“Time travel will become possible one day.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” But I could see the sudden astonishment in his eyes. And the memory. It was I who had suggested the idea of time travel to him. We had discussed it for months back when he had been working for the newspapers. I had kept the idea in the forefront of his imagination until he finally sat down and dashed off his novel.
I hunched closer to him, leaned my elbows wearily on the table. “Suppose Kelvin is wrong? Suppose there is much more to physics than he suspects?”
“How could that be?” Wells asked.
“That lad is reading your story. It will open his eyes to new vistas, new possibilities.”
Wells cast a suspicious glance at me. “You’re pulling my leg.”
I forced a smile. “Not altogether. You would do well to pay attention to what the scientists discover over the coming years. You could build a career writing about it. You could become known as a prophet if you play your cards properly.”
His face took on the strangest expression I had ever seen: he did not want to believe me, and yet he did; he was suspicious, curious, doubtful and yearning—all at the same time. Above everything else he was ambitious; thirsting for fame. Like every writer, he wanted to have the world acknowledge his genius.
I told him as much as I dared. As the afternoon drifted on and the shadows lengthened, as the sun sank behind the distant mountains and the warmth of day slowly gave way to an uneasy deepening chill, I gave him carefully veiled hints of the future. A future. The one I wanted him to promote.
Wells could have no conception of the realities of time travel, of course. There was no frame of reference in his tidy nineteenth-century English mind of the infinite branchings of the future. He was incapable of imagining the horrors that lay in store. How could he be? Time branches endlessly and only a few, a precious handful of those branches, manage to avoid utter disaster.
Could I show him his beloved London obliterated by fusion bombs? Or the entire northern hemisphere of Earth depopulated by man-made plagues? Or a devastated world turned to a savagery that made his Morlocks seem compassionate?
Could I explain to him the energies involved in time travel or the damage they did to the human body? The fact that time travelers were volunteers sent on suicide missions, desperately trying to preserve a time line that saved at least a portion of the human race? The best future I could offer him was a twentieth century tortured by world wars and genocide. That was the best I could do.
So all I did was hint, as gently and subtly as I could, trying to guide him toward that best of all possible futures, horrible though it would seem to him. I could neither control nor coerce anyone; all I could do was to offer a bit of guidance. Until the radiation dose from my trip through time finally killed me.
Wells was happily oblivious to my pain. He did not even notice the perspiration that beaded my brow despite the chilling breeze that heralded nightfall.
“You appear to be telling me,” he said at last, “that my writings will have some sort of positive effect on the world.”
“They already have,” I replied, with a genuine smile.
His brows rose.
“That teenaged lad is reading your story. Your concept of time as a dimension has already started his fertile mind working.”
“That young student?”
“Will change the world,” I said. “For the better.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said, trying to sound confident. I knew there were still a thousand pitfalls in young Albert’s path. And I would not live long enough to help him past them. Perhaps others would, but there were no guarantees.
I knew that if Albert did not reach his full potential, if he were turned away by the university again or murdered in the coming holocaust, the future I was attempting to preserve would disappear in a global catastrophe that could end the human race forever. My task was to save as much of humanity as I could.
I had accomplished a feeble first step in saving some of humankind, but only a first step. Albert was reading the time-machine tale and starting to think that Kelvin was blind to the real world. But there was so much more to do. So very much more.
We sat there in the deepening shadows of the approaching twilight, Wells and I, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts about the future. Despite his best English self-control, Wells was smiling contentedly. He saw a future in which he would be hailed as a prophet. I hoped it would work out that way. It was an immense task that I had undertaken. I felt tired, gloomy, daunted by the immensity of it all. Worst of all, I would never know if I succeeded or not.
Then the waitress bustled over to our table. “Well, have you finished? Or are you going to stay here all night?”
Even without a translation Wells understood her tone. “Let’s go,” he said, scraping his chair across the flagstones.
I pushed myself to my feet and threw a few coins on the table. The waitress scooped them up immediately and called into the café, “Come here and scrub down this table! At once!”
The six-year-old boy came trudging across the patio, lugging the heavy wooden pail of water. He stumbled and almost dropped it; water sloshed onto his mother’s legs. She grabbed him by the ear and lifted him nearly off his feet. A faint tortured squeak issued from the boy’s gritted teeth.
“Be quiet and your do work properly,” she told her son, her voice murderously low. “If I let your father know how lazy you are . . .”
The six-year-old’s eyes went wide with terror as his mother let her threat dangle in the air between them.
“Scrub that table good, Adolph,” his mother told him. “Get rid of that damned Jew’s stink.”
I looked down at the boy. His eyes were burning with shame and rage and hatred. Save as much of the human race as you can, I told myself. But it was already too late to save him.
“Are you coming?” Wells called to me.
“Yes,” I said, tears in my eyes. “It’s getting dark, isn’t it?”
VINCE’S DRAGON
One of the little burdens I bear as gracefully as I can manage is the fact that of the six Hugo Awards decorating my office, none of them are for writing. My work as an editor, first at
Analog
and then at
Omni,
has greatly overshadowed my work as a writer. Like Orson Welles, who has always maintained that he is an amateur actor and a professional director, I have always considered editing a temporary part of my life. Writing
is
my life.
I was very flattered, then, to have one of the writers I “discovered” while editing
Analog—
Orson Scott Card
—
ask me to contribute an original story to an anthology he was creating. It was a pleasure to publish Scott’s first short stories and novelettes in
Analog.
But when he asked me to contribute to his planned anthology about dragons I was nonplussed. Dragons? In science fiction? No matter what my dear friend Anne McCaffrey might have said, dragons are the stuff of fantasy, not science fiction. They are aerodynamically impossible and biochemically illogical. A giant flying reptilian that breathes flame? Not science fiction of the kind I write! No sir!
On the other hand, there is more to the world than hard-and-fast literary categories, and I got this niggling idea of how a dragon might be useful to certain kinds of people I used to know when I was growing up in the narrow streets of South Philadelphia.
Writers are always told to write about what they know, so I invented the world’s first—and probably last—Mafia dragon.
* * *
The thing that worried Vince
about the dragon, of course, was that he was scared that it was out to capture his soul.
Vince was a typical young Family man. He had dropped out of South Philadelphia High School to start his career with the Family. He boosted cars, pilfered suits from local stores, even spent grueling and terrifying hours learning how to drive a big trailer rig so he could help out on hijackings.
But they wouldn’t let him in on the big stuff.
“You can run numbers for me, kid,” said Louie Bananas, the one-armed policy king of South Philly.
“I wanna do somethin’ big,” Vince said, with ill-disguised impatience. “1 wanna make somethin’ outta myself.”
Louie shook his bald, bullet-shaped head. “1 dunno, kid. You don’t look like you got th’ guts.”
“Try me! Lemme in on th’ sharks.”
So Louie let Vince follow Big Balls Falcone, the loan sharks’ enforcer, for one day. After watching Big Balls systematically break a guy’s fingers, one by one, because he was ten days late with his payment, Vince agreed that loan sharking was not the business for him.
Armed robbery? Vince had never held a gun, much less fired one. Besides, armed robbery was for the heads and zanies, the stupids and desperate ones.
Organized
crime didn’t go in for armed robbery. There was no need to. And a guy could get hurt.
After months of wheedling and groveling around Louie Bananas’ favorite restaurant, Vince finally got the break he wanted.
“Okay, kid, okay,” Louie said one evening as Vince stood in a corner of the restaurant watching him devour linguine with clams and white sauce. “I got an openin’ for you. Come here.”
Vince could scarcely believe his ears.
“What is it,
Padrone?
What? I’ll do anything!”
Burping politely into his checkered napkin, Louie leaned back in his chair and grabbed a handful of Vince’s curly dark hair, pulling Vince’s ear close to his mouth.
Vince, who had an unfortunate allergy to garlic, fought hard to suppress a sneeze as he listened to Louie whisper, “You know that ol’ B&O warehouse down aroun’ Front an’ Washington?”
“Yeah.” Vince nodded as vigorously as he could, considering his hair was still in Louie’s iron grip.
“Torch it.”
“Burn it down?” Vince squeaked.
“Not so loud,
chidrool!”
“Burn it down?” Vince whispered.
“Yeah.”
“But that’s arson.”
Louie laughed. “It’s a growth industry nowadays. Good opportunity for a kid who ain’t afraid t’ play with fire.”
Vince sneezed.
It wasn’t so much of a trick to burn down the rickety old warehouse, Vince knew. The place was ripe for the torch. But to burn it down without getting caught, that was different.
The Fire Department and Police and, worst of all, the insurance companies all had special arson squads who would be sniffing over the charred remains of the warehouse even before the smoke had cleared.
Vince didn’t know anything at all about arson. But, desperate for his big chance, he was willing to learn.
He tried to get in touch with Johnnie the Torch, the leading local expert. But Johnnie was too busy to see him, and besides Johnnie worked for a rival Family, ‘way up in Manayunk. Two other guys that Vince knew, who had something of a reputation in the field, had mysteriously disappeared within the past two nights.
Vince didn’t think the library would have any books on the subject that would help him. Besides, he didn’t read too good.
So, feeling very shaky about the whole business, very late the next night he drove a stolen station wagon filled with jerry cans of gasoline and big drums of industrial paint thinner out to Front Street.
He pushed his way through the loosely-nailed boards that covered the old warehouse’s main entrance, feeling little and scared in the darkness. The warehouse was empty and dusty, but as far as the insurance company knew, Louie’s fruit and vegetable firm had stocked the place up to the ceiling just a week ago.
Vince felt his hands shaking.
If I don’t do a good job, Louie’ll send Big
Balls Falcone after me.
Then he heard a snuffling sound.
He froze, trying to make himself invisible in the shadows.
Somebody was breathing. And it wasn’t Vince.
Kee-rist, they didn’t tell me there was a night watchman here!
“I am not a night watchman.”
Vince nearly jumped out of his jockey shorts.
“And I’m not a policeman, either, so relax.”
“Who—” His voice cracked. He swallowed and said again, deeper, “Who are you?”
“I am trying to get some sleep, but this place is getting to be a regular Stonehenge. People coming and going all the time!”
A bum,
Vince thought.
A bum who’s using this warehouse to flop
.
“And I am not a bum!” the voice said, sternly.
“I didn’t say you was!” Vince answered. Then he shuddered, because he realized he had only thought it.
A glow appeared, across the vast darkness of the empty warehouse. Vince stared at it, then realized it was an eye. A single glowing, baleful eye with a slit of a pupil, just like a cat’s. But this eye was the size of a bowling ball!
“Wh . . . wha . . .”
Another eye opened beside it. In the light from their twin smolderings, Vince could just make out a scaly head with a huge jaw full of fangs.
He did what any man would do. He fainted.
When he opened his eyes he wanted to faint again. In the eerie moonlight that was now filtering through the old warehouse’s broken windowpanes, he saw a dragon standing over him.
It had a long, sinuous body covered with glittering green and bluish scales, four big paws with talons on them the size of lumberjacks’ saws. Its tail coiled around and around, the end twitching slightly all the way over on the other side of the warehouse.
And right over him, grinning down toothily at him, was this huge fanged head with the giant glowing cat’s eyes.
“You’re cute,” the dragon said.
“Huh?”
“Not at all like those other bozos Louie sent over here the past couple of nights. They were older. Fat, blubbery men.”
“Other guys . . . ?”
The dragon flicked a forked tongue out between its glistening white fangs. “Do you think you’re the first arsonist Louie’s sent here? I mean, they’ve been clumping around here for the past several nights.”
Still flat on his back, Vince asked, “Wh . . . wh . . . what happened to them?”
The dragon hunkered down on its belly and seemed, incredibly, to
smile at
him. “Oh, don’t worry about them. They won’t bother us.” The tongue flicked out again and brushed Vince’s face. “Yes, you are
cute!”
Little by little, Vince’s scant supply of courage returned to him. He kept speaking with the dragon, still not believing this was really happening, and slowly got up to a sitting position.
“I can read your mind,” the dragon was saying. “So you might as well forget about trying to run away.”
“I . . . uh, I’m supposed to torch this place,” Vince confessed.
“I know,” said the dragon. Somehow, it sounded like a female dragon.
“Yes, you’re right,” she admitted. “I am a female dragon. As a matter of fact, all the dragons that you humans have ever had trouble with have been females.”
“You mean like St. George?” Vince blurted.
“That pansy! Him and his silly armor. Aunt Ssrishha could have broiled him alive inside that pressure cooker he was wearing. As it was, she got to laughing so hard at him that her flame went out.”
“And he killed her.”
“He did not!” She sounded really incensed, and a little wisp of smoke trickled out of her left nostril. “Aunt Ssrishha just made herself invisible and flew away. She was laughing so hard she got the hiccups.”
“But the legend . . .”
“A human legend. More like a human public relations story. Kill a dragon. The human who can kill a dragon hasn’t been born yet!”
“Hey, don’t get sore. I didn’t do nuthin.”
“No. Of course not.” Her voice softened. “You’re cute, Vince.” His mind was racing.
Either he was crazy or he was talking with a real, fire-breathing dragon.
“Uh, what’s your name?”
‘‘Ssrzzha,” she said. “I’m from the Polish branch of the dragon family.”
“Shh . . .
Zz,”
Vince tried to pronounce.
“You may call me ‘Sizzle,
’
” the dragon said, grandly.
“Sizzle. Hey, that’s a cute name.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
If I’m crazy, they’ll come and wake me up sooner or later,
Vince thought, and decided to at least keep the conversation going.
“You say all the dragons my people have ever fought were broads . . . I mean, females?”
“That’s right, Vince. So you can see how silly it is, all those human lies about our eating young virgins.”
“Uh, yeah. I guess so.”
“And the bigger lies they tell about slaying dragons. Utter falsehoods.”
“Really?”
“Have you ever seen a stuffed dragon in a museum? Or dragon bones? Or a dragon’s head mounted on a wall?”
“Well . . . I don’t go to museums much.”
“Whereas I could show you some very fascinating exhibits in certain caves, if you want to see bones and heads and—”
“Ah, no, thanks. I don’t think I really wanna see that,” Vince said hurriedly.
“No, you probably wouldn’t.”
“Where’s all the male dragons? They must be
really
big.”
Sizzle huffed haughtily and a double set of smoke rings wafted past Vince’s ear.
“The males of our species are tiny! Hardly bigger than you are. They all live out on some islands in the Indian Ocean. We have to fly there every hundred years or so for mating, or else our race would die out.”
“Every hundred years! You only get laid once a century?”
“Sex is not much fun for us, I’m afraid. Not as much as it is for you, but then you’re descended from monkeys, of course. Disgusting little things. Always chattering and making messes.”
“Uh, look . . . Sizzle. This’s been fun an’ it was great meetin’ you an’ all, but it’s gettin’ late and I gotta go now, and besides—”
“But aren’t you forgetting why you came here?”
Truth to tell, Vince had forgotten. But now he recalled, “I’m supposed t’ torch this warehouse.”
“That’s right. And from what 1 can see bubbling inside your cute little head, if you don’t burn this place down tonight, Louie’s going to be very upset with you.”
“Yeah, well, that’s my problem, right? I mean, you wanna stay here an’ get back t’ sleep, right? I don’t wanna bother you like them other guys did, ya know? I mean, like, I can come back when you go off to th’ Indian Ocean or something.”
“Don’t be silly, Vince,” Sizzle said, lifting herself ponderously to her four paws. “I can sleep anywhere. And I’m not due for another mating for several decades, thank the gods. As for those other fellows . . . well, they annoyed me. But you’re cute!”
Vince slowly got to his feet, surprised that his quaking knees held him upright. But Sizzle coiled her long, glittering body around him, and with a grin that looked like a forest made of sharp butcher knives, she said:
“I’m getting kind of tired of this old place, anyway. What do you say we belt it out?”
“Huh?”
“I can do a much better job of torching this firetrap than you can, Vince, cutie,” said Sizzle. “And
I
won’t leave any telltale gasoline fumes behind me.”
“But . . .”
“You’ll be completely in the clear. Anytime the police come near, I can always make myself invisible.”
“Invisible?”
“Sure. See?” And Sizzle disappeared.
“Hey, where are ya?”
“Right here, Vince.” The dragon reappeared in all its glittering hugeness.
Vince stared, his mind churning underneath his curly dark hair.
Sizzle smiled at him. “What do you say, cutie? A life of crime together? You and I could do wonderful things together, Vince. I could get you to the top of the Family in no time.”
A terrible thought oozed up to the surface of Vince’s slowly-simmering mind. “Uh, wait a minute. This is like I seen on TV, ain’t it? You help me, but you want me to sell my soul to you, right?”
“Your
soul?
What would I do with your soul?”
“You’re workin’ for th’ devil, an’ you gimme three wishes or somethin’ but in return I gotta let you take my soul down t’ hell when I die.”
Sizzle shook her ponderous head and managed to look slightly affronted. “Vince—I admit that dragons and humans haven’t been the best of friends over the millennia, but we do
not
work for the devil. I’m not even sure that he exists. I’ve never seen a devil, have you?”
