The Steam-Driven Boy (25 page)

‘Good heavens!’

‘Ha ha ha – maybe now you’ll stop scoffing at my “crazy” ideas, eh, Kalendorf? Ha ha ha!’ Laughing strangely, he began to flip the Moon in the air, asking for ‘heads or tails’.

Then he threw it to the unprepared Kalendorf. It slipped through his fingers and vanished from view in the sand.

The astronomer was horrified. ‘Good heavens, what have you done?’

‘Never mind.’ Porteus took a sixpence from his pocket and pasted it among the stars. ‘You chaps will be quite as happy exploring this, come
A.D
. 2120.’

Just then Bowler trudged up, out of breath. ‘You wouldn’t believe where I’ve been,’ he said. ‘I fell off –‘

’Yes, so Dr Porteus has been telling me. He’s just been demonstrating that space is not spatially – er – as roomy as we had thought. You know what this means to your professional standing, Bowler, if such a theory becomes generally known?’

The assistant nodded. Without a further word, the two fell upon their scientific colleague and strangled him.

‘We’ll bury the body in the desert. Bowler.’

‘I’ve a better idea, sir. Let me throw it off the edge of the universe.’

‘Good thinking. While you’re gone, I’ll search his hotel room and burn any notes. We must hide all traces of this terrible secret – forever!’

Forever? No, only until a desert urchin tries to spend the strange ‘coin’ he finds … only until a numismatic expert gets a good look at the Sixpence … and even now a waiter is studying the equations on the tablecloth, murmuring to himself:

‘Then triangles
are
impossible, after all … hmm …’

B
Y
C
HIPDIP
K. K
ILL

I

Stan Houseman, shoe-salesman, punched a cupee of Kaff from the kitchen and scanned the footlines of his morning newsper:

OLYMPIC FINALS AT CARMODY STADIUM

POLICE BREAK UP HATTONITE RIOT

The stock market report listed only two corporations – the two which had between them divided the world – North American Boot & Shoe (Nabs) and Eurasian Footwear. Nabs was up two points, Eurafoot down the same, inevitably. In this two-person, zero-sum game, one side could only profit at the expense of the other.
Like Karen and me,
he thought grimly.

The corner of his eye caught movement – the racing figure of an autistic child. When he looked right at it, it was gone.

Karen came into the kitchen.

‘Let’s not start anything, for God’s sake,’ he said.

‘I’m getting a divorce, Stan. I’m seeing the lawster this afternoon.’

Suddenly the coffee-substitute tasted very bitter.

II

Ed Pagon gazed into the camera face of ‘Mel’, the robot interviewer for KHBT-TV. ‘Somehow I feel this is more than just a game I’m playing here today,’ he said. ‘I think a lot more is at stake here today than the Olympics jacks championship.’

‘Tell me, Ed,’ said the robot, ‘How does it feel, being the only male contestant in this jacks tournament?’

How do you think it feels? Like being castrated,
he thought. Forcing a smile, he replied, ‘Frankly, I’ve always thought of jacks as a man’s game, Mel. It’s an art as well as a sport, and men traditionally excel in the arts …’

When the interview was over, Ed went into his dressing-room to warm up. He seated himself on the floor with the regulation red rubber ball and steel jacks, and tried to empty his mind for Zen exercises. The idea was to pick up jacks without picking them up mentally.

Onesies without thinking about it. Twosies without thinking about it. Threesies …

Ed felt sudden pain, a band of it, squeezing his guts. Pain blurred his
vision as he looked down at the jack on the floor. This was no jack. It was a tiny metal man with his arms outstretched, fastened by magnets to a steel cross.

III

Joe Feegle stopped Stan Houseman outside the sales cubicle. ‘The word is, we’re on the brink of war, Stan. The two company presidents are having a summit meeting this afternoon – they’ll be playing one round of The Game – and if they tie, we’ll have war.’

‘But they always tie.’

‘Right. Hey, look!’

Both men turned to stare at a figure at the other end of the corridor, a figure in the official gold-and-black uniform of an Armourer. President Moniter was calling in an Armourer to design new weapons for the company – a bad omen.

Another was the unrest caused, or exploited, by the barefoot fanatic sect who called themselves the Hattonites. As Stan unlocked his cubicle and prepared for work, he thought of Herkimer Hatton’s strange and fascinating cult.

Little was known of the late Herkimer Hatton himself, except that he’d lived twenty years before, and had been accident-prone in the extreme. In a series of over a thousand small accidents, Hatton had lost limbs and other bits and pieces of his body, and replaced them with synthetics. Finally he was (except to his followers) an android. Legend had it that he’d finished up on an iron cross, and that he would return when the world needed him.

And now the world needed something, and fast. Stan cleared his mind of Hatton and other worries, and turned the energy of his psychic influence upon a million potential customers. His influence spread over the city, giving a million men and women this imperceptible nudge. For some it might come as a moment of reflection:
I do need new shoes …
For others it might be a slight hesitation as they passed a Nabs window display. Still others would be in the stores, trying shoes on, when suddenly they’d find something …

IV

Ferris Moniter, president of Nabs, glimpsed what looked like an autistic child out of the corner of his eye. He bumped his head as he stepped into his private autogyro.

‘Ow. Second time I’ve bumped my head on that doorframe.’

His bodyguard, Truit, stiffened. ‘Yes? Don’t close that door just yet, sir. I want a look at that frame.’ His expert fingers sought and found a tiny hairlike wire. ‘Just as I thought, Mr Monitor. An animal magnet, set there to attract your head. Looks like the work of Nexus Brill.’

‘Eurafoot’s Armourer? But assassination’s against the rules!’

The bodyguard laughed. ‘Armourers have no rules, sir. My guess is, he meant to stun you, just before the Game. Probably had a side bet on it.
They say Brill is rich from betting on the Game. Owns Paris, Rome, Antwerp, a dozen such cities. They say he’s had some of them miniaturized and made into charms for his wife’s charm bracelet. By the way, it might interest you to know that
our
Armourer, Amos Honks, visited the office this morning, while you were out. He may have had access to the autogyro …’

Ferris Monitor blinked. ‘You can’t mean that, Truit! Why, Amos Honks is our only hope. Think of all the weaponry he’s designed for us! How can you suspect him?’

Truit thought of the aerial battleship, filled with hydrogen and surrounded with heavy armor. ‘I know, sir – but I can’t help feeling that the two Armourers are in cahoots, somehow.’

Moniter sighed. ‘Anyway, are there any more assassination attempts in the cards today?’

‘Not
cards,
sir.’ Truit sounded pained. ‘
Tiles.
Let’s have a look.’ He laid out the traditional tiles of the eleventh-century Chinese game of prophecy,
Mah-Jongg.
‘I’m afraid it’s the East Wind, sir. And the Four of Bamboos.’

‘Oh? Is that bad? What’s the reading?’

Truit opened the book and read:

‘Many small greatnesses deny.

No same.

It does not further to discover several gifts only.

The wise king avoids fried foods.’

He closed the book. ‘Sir, I think it’s dangerous to continue this trip to Chicago.’

‘Nonsense, Truit. I must go on. I must play and win. To give up now would mean economic collapse, the resurgence of the old, corrupt U.N., and slavery for most of the human race. The tiles must be wrong for once.’

But he knew the tiles were never wrong.

V

At Carmody stadium, the robot doctorator was examining Ed Pagon after his collapse. He lay on the dressing-room floor, doubled up with pain. The robot’s probes moved to check his respiration, pulse, heart, temperature …

‘What is it, doc?’ asked an official. ‘Appendicitis?’

The doctorator peered at him over its square-rimmed glasses. ‘Don’t quote me on this, boys,’ it said, rubbing its iron chin. ‘But it ‘pears as if this here fella is fixing to have a baby!’

VI

Amos Honks, Armourer, awoke to a sense of danger. Karen Houseman was still asleep beside him.

He remembered the whole nightmarish episode at Nabs: Ferris Monitor telling him to arm the corporation for AOW, All-Out War. Ferris Monitor telling him he’d have to do better than hay-fever bombs, better even than
Herpes simplex,
the cold-sore virus, dropped in drinking water
supplies.

‘You’ll have to do a lot better,’ Monitor had said. ‘Don’t forget, you’re up against Nexus Brill … by the way, did you know your wife’s been seen with Brill?’

And later, she couldn’t deny it. The world had come to a sickening halt then, this afternoon at the lawster’s office, when they obtained their punched card decree. There he’d met Karen Houseman, and the two new divorced people had just naturally clung together … so here he was, still sensing danger like a smell of fear.

Outside he could hear the sound of muffled rotors – a police gyro trying to land quietly in the yard. He sensed, rather than heard, the faceless lawman creeping toward the house, the sound of a weapon being eased from its plastic holster and aimed through the wall at his brainwaves … the trigger being squeezed …

Amos rolled across the bed and hit the floor just as the humming green beam of a stupidifier flicked through the wall. It caught Karen and she slumped sideways, babbling and drooling.

Before the cop could fire again, Amos snatched a charm off his wife’s charm bracelet, flung open the door and pitched it into the yard. It was a miniaturized city. He counted to ten and breathed, ‘Goodbye, Paris.’

With a thunder of cobblestones, the minicity sprang to full size in the yard. He heard the cop’s scream, cut off by a shriek of tires and the blare of a taxi horn.

Amos smashed a window, gashing his arm, and raced across the Place de la Bastille to the empty police autogyro. He climbed in, took off and headed for Chicago. There had to be some way to stop the Game – before the Game stopped everything else.

If only he could design some weapon Nexus Brill could not counter. He played the stream of ideas across the porcelain surfaces of his mind:

How about mad dogs? A nullitron beam? Unconscious mines? Fire-cabbages … even an Earth-mover, which could shift the entire planet during an aerial battle, thus leaving enemy aircraft stranded in outer space.

Why was it Nexus Brill always had his ideas first? As he wondered, the aura began. The perimeter of his vision was filled with autistic children; his ears jangled with flashing lightmares, and he felt the deep molecular and genetic shift begin.

He was, as usual, turning into Nexus Brill.

VII

The autistic child pointed to a picture of Stan Houseman and said, ‘Nice mans.’

The Hattonite elders looked at one another. Why ‘mans’? Could Houseman be, after all, the discalced prophet promised by Herkimer Hatton?

VIII

The data-scan footline flickered upon the instrument panel of the autogyro:

LABORS OF HERCULES?

Athlete to give birth!

‘I don’t understand that,’ said Ferris Monitor, looking away to the still blue waters of the Americ Ocean. An hour remained before they reached the finger-shaped Isle of Michigan, with Chicago glittering at its tip like a bright hangnail. Far to the east lay the dark continent of Atlantica, broken only by the British Lakes; beyond that, the Europic Sea.

‘In this novel I’m reading,’ he said, taking the foilback from his pockette, ‘the author pretends that Lucifer
lost
his war against Heaven, so that all the world is reversed, see?’

Truit, his bodyguard, laughed. ‘Science fiction eh? Don’t believe everything you see in white on black. What’s the name of this book?’

‘Autogyro Ace,’ said the president. ‘An Autogyro Novel, by Killhip D. Pick.’

At that moment a dot appeared above the horizon, far behind them. It grew rapidly to another autogyro.

‘Who is it, Truit?’

‘Too far to see, sir. Might be friendly …’ The bodyguard trained his electric binoculars on the strange craft, then gasped. ‘No! It can’t be!’

In a moment the stranger was close enough for Monitor to see, too.
The other autogyro contained another Ferris Monitor and another Truit.
As he watched, it came closer, passed through his own craft and sped on toward Chicago.