The Nail and the Oracle (25 page)

The civilian, as if unconsciously, hitched his chair a half inch away from the colonel. The admiral trained a firing-squad kind of look at him.

“Admiral,” said Jones, and the man twitched, “I’d like to call your attention to the colonel’s use of the word ‘eliminate’ in his query. You don’t, you know, you just
don’t
eliminate a live President.” He let that sink in, and then said, “I mention it because you, too, used it, and it’s a fair conjecture that it means the same thing. Listen: ‘WHAT SINGLE MAN CAN I ELIMINATE TO BECOME PRESIDENT?’ ”

“There could hardly be any
one
man,” said the civilian thoughtfully,
gaining Jones’ great respect for his composure. Jones said, “ORACLE thinks so. It wrote your name, sir.”

Slowly the civilian turned to the admiral. “Why, you sleek old son of a bitch,” he enunciated carefully, “I do believe you could have made it.”

“Purely a hypothetical question,” explained the admiral, but no one paid the least attention.

“As for you,” said Jones, rather surprised that his voice expressed so much of the regret he felt, “I do believe that you asked your question with a genuine desire to see a world at peace before you passed on. But, sir—it’s like you said when you walked in here just now—and the colonel said it, too: ‘I didn’t think …’ You are sitting next to two certifiable first-degree murderers; no matter what their overriding considerations, that’s what they are. But what you planned is infinitely worse.”

He read, “ ‘CAN MY SUPPORT OF HENNY BRING PEACE?’ You’ll be pleased to know—oh, you already know; you were just checking, right?—that the answer is Yes. Henny’s position is such right now that your support would bring him in. But—you didn’t
think
. That demagogue can’t do what he wants to do without a species of thought-policing the like of which the ant-heap experts in China never even dreamed of. Unilateral disarmament and high morality scorched-earth! Why, as a nation we couldn’t do that unless we meant it, and we couldn’t mean it unless every man, woman and child thought alike—and with Henny running things, they would. Peace? Sure we’d have peace! I’d rather take on a Kodiak bear with boxing gloves than take my chances in that kind of a world. These guys,” he said carelessly, “are prepared to murder one or two or a few thousand. You,” said Jones, his voice suddenly shaking with scorn, “are prepared to murder every decent free thing this country ever stood for.”

Jones rose. “I’m going now. All your answers are in the package there. Up to now it’s been an integral part of ORACLE—it was placed exactly in line with the reader, and has therefore been a part of everything the machine has ever done. My recommendation is that you replace it, or ORACLE will be just another computer,
answering questions in terms of themselves. I suggest that you make similar installations in your own environment … and quit asking questions that must be answered in terms of
your
selves. Questions which in the larger sense would be unthinkable.”

The civilian rose, and did something that Jones would always remember as a decent thing. He put out his hand and said, “You are right. I needed this, and you’ve stopped me. What will stop
them?
”

Jones took the hand. “They’re stopped. I know, because I asked ORACLE and ORACLE said this was the way to do it.” He smiled briefly and went out. His last glimpse of the office was the rigid backs of the two officers, and the civilian behind his desk, slowly unwrapping the package. He walked down the endless Pentagon corridors, the skin between his shoulder blades tight all the way: ORACLE or no, there might be overriding considerations. But he made it, and got to the first outside phone booth still alive. Marvelously, wonderfully alive.

He heard Ann’s voice and said, “It’s a real wonderful world, you know that?”

“Jones, darling! … you certainly have changed your tune. Last time I talked to you it was a horrible place full of evil intentions and smelling like feet.”

“I just found out for sure three lousy kinds of world it’s not going to be,” Jones said. Ann would not have been what she was to him if she had not been able to divine which questions not to ask. She said, “Well, good,” and he said he was coming home.

“Oh, darling! You fix that gadget?”

“Nothing to it,” Jones said. “I just took down the

The Sun went Nova in the Year 33 A.E. “A.E.” means “After the Exodus.” You might say the Exodus was a century and a half or so A.D. if “A.D.” means “After the Drive.” The Drive, to avoid technicalities, was a device somewhat simpler than Woman and considerably more complicated than sex, which caused its vessel to cease to exist
here
while simultaneously appearing
there
, bypassing the limitations imposed by the speed of light. One might compose a quite impressive account of astrogation involving the Drive, with all the details of orientation
here
and
there
and the somewhat philosophical difficulties of establishing the relationships between them, but this is not that kind of a science fiction story.

It suits our purposes rather to state that the Sun went Nova with plenty of warning, that the first fifty years A.D. were spent in improving the Drive and exploring with unmanned vehicles which located many planets suitable for human settlement, and that the next hundred years were spent in getting humanity ready to leave. Naturally there developed a number of ideological groups with a most interesting assortment of plans for one Perfect Culture or another, most of which were at bitter odds with all the rest. The Drive, however, had presented Earth with so copious a supply of new worlds, with insignificant subjective distances between them and the parent, that dissidents need not make much of their dissent, but need merely file for another world and they would get it. The comparisons between the various cultural theories are pretty fascinating, but this is not that kind of a science fiction story either. Not quite.

Anyway, what happened was that, with a margin of a little more than three decades, Terra depopulated itself by its many thousands
of ships to its hundreds of worlds (leaving behind, of course, certain die-hards who died, of course, certainly) and the new worlds were established with varying degrees of bravery and a pretty wide representation across the success scale.

It happened, however (in ways much too recondite to be described in this kind of a science fiction story), that Drive Central on Earth, a computer central, was not only the sole means of keeping track of all the worlds; it was their only means of keeping track with one another; and when this installation added its bright brief speck to the ocean of Nova-glare, there simply was no way for all the worlds to find one another without the arduous process of unmanned Drive-ships and search. It took a long while for any of the new worlds to develop the necessary technology, and an even longer while for it to be productively operational, but at length, on a planet which called itself Terratu (the suffix meaning both “too” and “2”) because it happened to be the third planet of a GO-type sun, there appeared something called the Archives, a sort of index and clearinghouse for all known inhabited worlds, which made this planet the communications central and general dispatcher for trade with them all and their trade with one another—a great convenience for everyone. A side result, of course, was the conviction on Terratu that, being a communications central, it was also central to the universe and therefore should control it, but then, that is the occupational hazard of all conscious entities.

We are now in a position to determine just what sort of a science fiction story this really is.

“Charli Bux,” snapped Charli Bux, “to see the Archive Master.”

“Certainly,” said the pretty girl at the desk, in the cool tones reserved by pretty girls for use on hurried and indignant visitors who are clearly unaware, or uncaring, that the girl is pretty. “Have you an appointment?”

He seemed like such a nice young man in spite of his hurry and his indignation. The way, however, in which he concealed all his niceness by bringing his narrowed eyes finally to rest on her upturned face, and still showed no signs of appreciating her pretty-girlhood,
made her quite as not-pretty as he was not-nice.

“Have you,” he asked coldly, “an appointment book?”

She had no response to that, because she had such a book; it lay open in front of her. She put a golden and escaloped fingernail on his name therein inscribed, compared it and his face with negative enthusiasm, and ran the fingernail across the time noted. She glanced at the clockface set into her desk, passed her hand over a stud, and said, “A Mr. Charli, uh, Bux to see you, Archive Master.”

“Send him in,” said the stud.

“You may go in now.”

“I know,” he said shortly.

“I don’t like you.”

“What?” he said, but he was thinking about something else, and before she could repeat the remark he had disappeared through the inner door.

The Archive Master had been around long enough to expect courtesy, respect, and submission, to get these things, and to like them. Charli Bux slammed into the room, banged a folio down on the desk, sat down uninvited, leaned forward, and roared redly, “Goddamnit—”

The Archive Master was not surprised because he had been warned. He had planned exactly what he would do to handle this brash young man, but faced with the size of the Bux temper, he found his plans somewhat less useful than worthless. Now he was surprised, because a single glance at his gaping mouth and feebly fluttering hands—a gesture he thought he had lost and forgotten long ago—accomplished what no amount of planning could have done.

“Oh-h-h … bitchballs,” growled Bux, his anger visibly deflating. “Buggerly bangin’ bumpkin’
bitch
balls.” He looked across at the old man’s horrified eyebrows and grinned blindingly. “I guess it’s not your fault.” The grin disappeared. “But of all the hydrocephalous, drool-toothed, cretinoid runarounds I have ever seen, this was the stupidest. Do you know how many offices I’ve been into and out of with this”—he banged the heavy folio—“since I got back?”

The Archive Master did, but, “How many?” he asked.

“Too many, but only half as many as I went to before I went to
Vexvelt.” With which he shut his lips with a snap and leaned forward again, beginning his bright penetrating gaze at the old man like twin lasers. The Archive Master found himself striving not to be the first to turn away, but the effort made him lean slowly back and back, until he brought up against his chair cushions with his chin up a little high. He began to feel a little ridiculous, as if he had been bamboozled into Indian wrestling with some stranger’s valet.

It was Charli Bux who turned away first, but it was not the old man’s victory, for the gaze came off his eyes as tangibly as a pressing palm might have come off his chest, and he literally slumped forward as the pressure came off. Yet if it was Charli Bux’s victory, he seemed utterly unaware of it. “I think,” he said after his long, concentrated pause, “that I’m going to tell you about that—about how I happened to get to Vexvelt. I wasn’t going to—or at least, I was ready to tell you only as much as I thought you needed to know. But I remember what I had to go through to get there, and I know what I’ve been going through since I got back, and it looks like the same thing. Well, it’s not going to be the same thing. Here and now, the runaround stops. What takes its place I don’t know, but by all the horns of all the owls in Hell’s northeast, I have been pushed around my last push. All right?”

If this was a plea for agreement, the Archive Master did not know what he would be agreeing to. He said diplomatically, “I think you’d better begin
somewhere
.” Then he added, not raising his voice, but with immense authority, “And quietly.”

Charli Bux gave him a boom of laughter. “I never yet spent upwards of three minutes with anybody that they didn’t shush me. Welcome to the Shush Charli Club, membership half the universe, potential membership, everybody else. And I’m sorry. I was born and brought up on Biluly where there’s nothing but trade wind and split-rock ravines and surf, and the only way to whisper is to shout.” He went on more quietly, “But what I’m talking about isn’t that sort of shushing. I’m talking about a little thing here and a little thing there and adding them up and getting the idea that there’s a planet nobody knows anything about.”

“There are thousands—”

“I mean a planet nobody
wants
you to know anything about.”

“I suppose you’ve heard of Magdilla.”

“Yes, with fourteen kinds of hallucinogenic microspores spread through the atmosphere, and carcinogens in the water. Nobody wants to go there, nobody wants anybody to go—but nobody stops you from getting information about it. No, I mean a planet not ninety-nine percent Terran Optimum, or ninety-nine point ninety-nine, but so many nines that you might just as well shift your base reference and call Terra about ninety-seven percent in comparison.”

“That would be a little like saying ‘one hundred and two percent normal,’ ” said the Master smugly.

“If you like statistical scales better than the truth,” Bux growled. “Air, water, climate, indigenous flora and fauna, and natural resources six nines or better, just as easy to get to as any place else—and nobody knows anything about it. Or if they do, they pretend they don’t. And if you pin them down, they send you to another department.”

The Archive Master spread his hands. “I would say the circumstances prove themselves. If there is no trade with this, uh, remarkable place, it indicates that whatever it has is just as easily secured through established routes.”

Bux shouted, “In a pig’s bloody and protruding—” and then checked himself and wagged his head ruefully. “Sorry again, Archive Master, but I just been too mad about this for too long. What you just said is like a couple troglodytes sitting around saying there’s no use building a house because everybody’s living in caves.” Seeing the closed eyes, the long white fingers tender on the white temples, Bux said, “I said I was sorry I yelled like that.”