The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (55 page)

“Take me back,” Slade said. “Just take me back.”

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you enjoy your inspiring?”

“I just want to go back to my own time,” Slade said.

“Okay,” the operator said, raising an eyebrow. He strapped Slade into his seat and then took his own beside him.

When they reached Muse Enterprises, Mr. Manville was waiting for them. “Slade,” he said, “come inside.” His face was dark. “I have a few words to say to you.”

When they were alone in Manville’s office, Slade began, “He was in a bad mood, Mr. Manville. Don’t blame me.” He hung his head, feeling empty and futile.

“You—” Manville stared down at him in disbelief.
“You failed
to inspire him! That’s never happened before!”

“Maybe I can go back again,” Slade said.

“My God,” Manville said, “you not only didn’t inspire him—you turned him
against
science fiction.”

“How did you find this out?” Slade said. He had hoped to keep it quiet, make it his own secret to carry with him to the grave.

Manville said bitingly, “All I had to do was keep my eye on the reference books dealing with literature of the twentieth century. Half an hour after you left, the entire texts on Jack Dowland, including the half-page devoted to his biography in the Britannica—vanished.”

Slade said nothing; he stared at the floor.

“So I researched it,” Manville said. “I had the computers at the University of California look up all extant citations on Jack Dowland.”

“Were there any?” Slade mumbled.

“Yes,” Manville said. “There were a couple. Minute, in rarified technical articles dealing comprehensively and exhaustively with that period. Because of you, Jack Dowland is now completely unknown to the public—
and was so even during his own day.”
He waved a finger at Slade, panting with wrath. “Because of you, Jack Dowland never wrote his epic future history of mankind. Because of your so-called ‘inspiration’ he continued to write scripts for TV westerns—and died at forty-six an utterly anonymous hack.”

“No science fiction at
all?”
Slade asked, incredulous. Had he done that badly? He couldn’t believe it; true, Dowland had bitterly repulsed every suggestion Slade had made—true, he had gone back up to his attic in a peculiar frame of mind after Slade had made his point. But—

“All right,” Manville said, “there exists
one
science fiction work by Jack Dowland. Tiny, mediocre and totally unknown.” Reaching into his desk drawer he grabbed out a yellowed, ancient magazine which he tossed to Slade. “One short story called ORPHEUS WITH CLAY FEET, under the pen name Philip K. Dick. Nobody read it then, nobody reads it now—it was an account of a visit to Dowland by—” He glared furiously at Slade. “By a well-intentioned idiot from the future with deranged visions of
inspiring him
to write a mythological history of the world to come. Well, Slade? What do you say?”

Slade said heavily, “He used my visit as the basis for the story. Obviously.”

“And it made him the only money he ever earned as a science fiction writer—dissapointingly little, barely enough to justify his effort and time. You’re in the story, I’m in the story—Lord, Slade, you must have told him everything.”

“I did,” Slade said. “To convince him.”

“Well, he wasn’t convinced; he thought you were a nut of some kind. He wrote the story obviously in a bitter frame of mind. Let me ask you this: was he busy working when you arrived?”

“Yes,” Slade said, “but Mrs. Dowland said—”

“There is—was—no Mrs. Dowland! Dowland never married! That must have been a neighbor’s wife whom Dowland was having an affair with. No wonder he was furious; you broke in on his assignation with that girl, whoever she was. She’s in the story, too; he put everything in and then gave up his house in Purpleblossom, Nevada and moved to Dodge City, Kansas.” There was silence.

“Um,” Slade said at last, “well, could I try again? With someone else? I was thinking on the way back about Paul Ehrlich and his magic bullet, his discovery of the cure for—”

“Listen,” Manville said. “I’ve been thinking, too. You’re going back but not to inspire Doctor Ehrlich or Beethoven or Dowland or anybody like that, anybody useful to society.”

With dread, Slade glanced up.

“You’re going back,” Manville said between his teeth, “to
uninspire
people like Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx and Sanrome Clinger—”

“You mean you think I’m so ineffectual…” Slade mumbled.

“Exactly. We’ll start with Hitler in his period of imprisonment after his first abortive attempt to seize power in Bavaria. The period in which he dictated
Mein Kampf to
Rudolf Hess. I’ve discussed this with my superiors and it’s all worked out; you’ll be there as a fellow prisoner, you understand? And you’ll recommend to Adolf Hitler, just as you recommended to Jack Dowland, that he write. In this case, a detailed autobiography laying out in detail his political program for the world. And if everything goes right—”

“I understand,” Slade murmured, staring at the floor again. “It’s a—I’d say an inspired idea, but I’m afraid I’ve given onus to that word by now.”

“Don’t credit me with the idea,” Manville said. “I got it out of Dowland’s wretched story, ORPHEUS WITH CLAY FEET; that’s how he resolved it at the end.” He turned the pages of the ancient magazine until he came to the part he wanted. “Read that, Slade. You’ll find that it carries you up to your encounter with me, and then you go off to do research on the Nazi Party so that you can best uninspire Adolf Hitler not to write his autobiography and hence possibly prevent World War Two. And if you fail to uninspire Hitler, we’ll try you on Stalin, and if you fail to uninspire Stalin, then—”

“All right,” Slade muttered, “I understand; you don’t have to spell it out to me.”

“And you’ll do it,” Manville said, “because in ORPHEUS WITH CLAY FEET you agree. So it’s all decided already.”

Slade nodded. “Anything. To make amends.”

To him Manville said, “You idiot. How could you have done so badly?”

“It was an off-day for me,” Slade said. “I’m sure I could do better the next time.” Maybe with Hitler, he thought. Maybe I can do a terrific job of uninspiring him, better than anyone else ever did in uninspiring anyone in history.

“We’ll call you the null-muse,” Manville said.

“Clever idea,” Slade said.

Wearily, Manville said, “Don’t compliment me; compliment Jack Dowland. It was in his story, too. At the very last.”

“And that’s how it ends?” Slade asked.

“No,” Manville said, “it ends with me presenting you with a bill—the costs of sending you back to uninspire Adolf Hitler. Five hundred dollars, in advance.” He held out his hand. “Just in case you never get back here.”

Resignedly, in misery, Jesse Slade reached as slowly as possible into his twentieth century coat pocket for his wallet.

At ten in the morning a terrific horn, familiar to him, hooted Sam Regan out of his sleep, and he cursed the careboy upstairs; he knew the racket was deliberate. The careboy, circling, wanted to be certain that flukers—and not merely wild animals—got the care parcels that were to be dropped.

We’ll get them, we’ll get them, Sam Regan said to himself as he zipped his dust-proof overalls, put his feet into boots and then grumpily sauntered as slowly as possible toward the ramp. Several other flukers joined him, all showing similar irritation.

“He’s early today,” Tod Morrison complained. “And I’ll bet it’s all staples, sugar and flour and lard—nothing interesting like say candy.”

“We ought to be grateful,” Norman Schein said.

“Grateful!” Tod halted to stare at him. “GRATEFUL?”

“Yes,” Schein said. “What do you think we’d be eating without them: If they hadn’t seen the clouds ten years ago.”

“Well,” Tod said sullenly, “I just don’t like them to come
early;
I actually don’t exactly mind their coming, as such.”

As he put his shoulders against the lid at the top of the ramp, Schein said genially, “That’s mighty tolerant of you, Tod boy. I’m sure the careboys would be pleased to hear your sentiments.”

Of the three of them, Sam Regan was the last to reach the surface; he did not like the upstairs at all, and he did not care who knew it. And anyhow, no one could compel him to leave the safety of the Pinole Fluke-pit; it was entirely his business, and he noted now that a number of his fellow flukers had elected to remain below in their quarters, confident that those who did answer the horn would bring them back something.

“It’s bright,” Tod murmured, blinking in the sun.

The care ship sparkled close overhead, set against the gray sky as if hanging from an uneasy thread. Good pilot, this drop, Tod decided. He, or rather
it,
just lazily handles it, in no hurry. Tod waved at the care ship, and once more the huge horn burst out its din, making him clap his hands to his ears. Hey, a joke’s a joke, he said to himself. And then the horn ceased; the careboy had relented.

“Wave to him to drop,” Norm Schein said to Tod. “You’ve got the wigwag.”

“Sure,” Tod said, and began laboriously flapping the red flag, which the Martian creatures had long ago provided, back and forth, back and forth.

A projectile slid from the underpart of the ship, tossed out stabilizers, spiraled toward the ground.

“Sheoot,” Sam Regan said with disgust. “It is staples; they don’t have the parachute.” He turned away, not interested.

How miserable the upstairs looked today, he thought as he surveyed the scene surrounding him. There, to the right, the uncompleted house which someone—not far from their pit—had begun to build out of lumber salvaged from Vallejo, ten miles to the north. Animals or radiation dust had gotten the builder, and so his work remained where it was; it would never be put to use. And, Sam Regan saw, an unusually heavy precipitate had formed since last he had been up here, Thursday morning or perhaps Friday; he had lost exact track. The darn dust, he thought. Just rocks, pieces of rubble, and the dust. World’s becoming a dusty object with no one to whisk it off regularly. How about you? he asked silently of the Martian careboy flying in slow circles overhead. Isn’t your technology limitless? Can’t you appear some morning with a dust rag a million miles in surface area and restore our planet to pristine newness?

Or rather, he thought, to pristine
oldness,
the way it was in the “ol-days,” as the children call it. We’d like that. While you’re looking for something to give to us in the way of further aid, try that.

The careboy circled once more, searching for signs of writing in the dust: a message from the flukers below. I’ll write that, Sam thought. BRING DUST RAG, RESTORE OUR CIVILIZATION. Okay, careboy?

All at once the care ship shot off, no doubt on its way back home to its base on Luna or perhaps all the way to Mars.

From the open fluke-pit hole, up which the three of them had come, a further head poked, a woman. Jean Regan, Sam’s wife, appeared, shielded by a bonnet against the gray, blinding sun, frowning and saying, “Anything important? Anything
new?”

“ ‘Fraid not,” Sam said. The care parcel projectile had landed and he walked toward it, scuffing his boots in the dust. The hull of the projectile had cracked open from the impact and he could see the canisters already. It looked to be five thousand pounds of salt—might as well leave it up here so the animals wouldn’t starve, he decided. He felt despondent.

How peculiarly anxious the careboys were. Concerned all the time that the mainstays of existence be ferried from their own planet to Earth. They must think we eat all day long, Sam thought. My God… the pit was filled to capacity with stored foods. But of course it had been one of the smallest public shelters in Northern California.

“Hey,” Schein said, stooping down by the projectile and peering into the crack opened along its side. “I believe I see something we can use.” He found a rusted metal pole—once it had helped reinforce the concrete side of an ol-days public building—and poked at the projectile, stirring its release mechanism into action. The mechanism, triggered off, popped the rear half of the projectile open… and there lay the contents.

“Looks like radios in that box,” Tod said. “Transistor radios.” Thoughtfully stroking his short black beard he said, “Maybe we can use them for something new in our layouts.”

“Mine’s already got a radio,” Schein pointed out.

“Well, build an electronic self-directing lawn mower with the parts,” Tod said. “You don’t have that, do you?” He knew the Scheins’ Perky Pat layout fairly well; the two couples, he and his wife with Schein and his, had played together a good deal, being almost evenly matched.

Sam Regan said, “Dibs on the radios, because I can use them.” His layout lacked the automatic garage-door opener that both Schein and Tod had; he was considerably behind them.

“Let’s get to work,” Schein agreed. “We’ll leave the staples here and just cart back the radios. If anybody wants the staples, let them come here and get them. Before the do-cats do.”

Nodding, the other two men fell to the job of carting the useful contents of the projectile to the entrance of their fluke-pit ramp. For use in their precious, elaborate Perky Pat layouts.

Seated cross-legged with his whetstone, Timothy Schein, ten years old and aware of his many responsibilities, sharpened his knife, slowly and expertly. Meanwhile, disturbing him, his mother and father noisily quarreled with Mr. and Mrs. Morrison, on the far side of the partition. They were playing Perky Pat again. As usual.

How many times today they have to play that dumb game? Timothy asked himself. Forever, I guess. He could see nothing in it, but his parents played on anyhow. And they weren’t the only ones; he knew from what other kids said, even from other fluke-pits, that their parents, too, played Perky Pat most of the day, and sometimes even on into the night.