The Book Of Ian Watson, page 20
The meeting broke up in some turmoil.
Eight weeks later, Sam Dexter and all the department heads gathered in a large, fluorescent-lit chamber in the sub-basement, into which cables—as fat as pythons—snaked, feeding equipment bristling with mirrors and lenses which looked rather like the glass skeleton of some dinosaur attempting to eat its own tail. Or like a set of interlocking geometrical theorems arranged as a crystal mobile.
“The Museum of Modern Art are going to love this,” said Bernstein ironically.
In the center of the array stood an open-top perspex box with a small white rat sniffing and pawing. It was a white rat—but the whole left-hand side of its body had been painted black. So maybe it could be better described as a black-and-white rat …
Paul hoisted the rat out by its tail, mumbling soothing apologies to it, and conveyed it to one of Psychology’s best mazes, on a nearby bench. A video display unit flashed up the trained rat’s choices of left or right turns, till it reached its reward: a chunk of stinking gorgonzola cheese. Paul hastily retrieved the rat before it could spoil its appetite, and dumped it back into the perspex box.
“I see you’ve converted a mouse into a rat already,” remarked Ritsos.
“Uh? Oh. Rats remember mazes better,” said Paul. “Okay. Stand back beyond the white line. Ready? Here goes.”
All the mirrors and lenses seemed to flash at once, full of momentary images of rats, too fleeting to focus on. Something tugged briefly at the spectators’ guts. There was a sensation of sea sickness, of butterflies in the stomach. Then it was all over.
Inside the perspex box a puzzled rat was still sniffing at the pong of gorgonzola in the air, whiskers bristling. Its whole right-hand side was black.
Triumphantly, Paul hoisted the rat and rushed it to the maze.
Its choices were the exact opposite of its earlier choices. Try as it might, it got nowhere near the cheese.
Sam smiled grimly.
“Now for the Big Cheese,” he said, rubbing his hands. “We’ll describe this to the White House as a mock-up for, oh, a particle beam weapon satellite detector—based on new mathematical principles. No, wait a minute, I’ve got a better idea: a super-image intensifier, so you can spy on what’s happening a thousand miles below you by capturing single photons of light. Think of a name for it.”
“How about Project Gorgonzola?” suggested Bernstein with a gleam in his eye.
“I like it.”
Secret Service agents had swarmed all over the building, then stationed themselves at doorways and by coffee machines prior to the Presidential visit, that morning.
As Sam led the Presidential entourage down to the sub-basement, he decided that he had orchestrated the flying visit rather well. The department heads, wreathed in smiles, had been servilely supportive of all the President’s statements about spending cutbacks.
Some ten heads of department followed in the wake of Sam and Paul and the President, and his aides and agents.
The apparatus had been successfully rejigged to allow a much larger space at the center of focus of the dimension-rotation field.
“If you’ll step over here, Sir,” said Sam to the President, “we have a full-scale model of a device which can revolutionize remote geological surveillance over poor-weather terrain—even with permanent overcast—if it was put into orbit a thousand miles up …”
The President smiled appreciatively.
“A lot of you fellows, all over this great country, are showing me their goodies. But you know, we’ve only got so much cake to share out—and the dough for that cake comes from the taxpayers—”
Sam wasn’t sure whether the President was making an awful pun, or simply betraying his ignorance of cookery.
Then the President caught up with what Sam had said.
“Surveillance, did you say? From orbit? Do you mean it can see through clouds?”
“Certainly. It gathers up the little bitty bit of light reflected through the clouds off the ground, or through dense jungle cover—”
“It can see through jungle from a thousand miles up?” The President smiled at the naïveté of scientists. “This thing could be, uh, adapted to photograph troop movements in dense jungle?”
“You could take somebody’s photo close-up at midnight in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle,” admitted Sam. “I mean, if you wanted to. Step over here, Sir. I’ll show you.”
There was a brief, confusing flash, a shimmering of images, a tug at the guts of all present in the laboratory. But even as the Secret Service agents started forward, it was obvious that no harm had been done. The President still stood scrutinising the apparatus.
He turned.
To Sam’s eye, he was only subtly altered—and his suit jacket now buttoned on the opposite side. One of the more perceptive aides blinked, rubbed his eyes, shook his head—then quickly gave up wondering about the moment of strangeness which had just touched him, since the President was evidently the same man as a moment ago.
The President himself knitted his brows in a frown. He touched a suit button. He peered at the faces of his aides. He looked about to ask a question, but stopped himself in time. He noted the Air Force officer with the nuclear Go-codes chained to his wrist, and nodded to himself—ruefully, it seemed.
“Okay, fellas, let’s go,” said the President. “It’s time to make the big speech.”
“What are you mumbling about, Paul? You ought to be delighted.”
“I just thought of another solution to the equation, Sam.” Spying a blackboard, he wandered over to it and started chalking. “There’s a false infinity here, so I kind of ignored it. But it collapses back into a finite solution if you introduce this lambda here …”
Paul wrote a new equation, humming to himself like a refrigerator.
“So what does it add up to?” asked Carr impatiently.
“Oh, just another interpretation. You see, instead of merely rotating our subject through a higher dimension, so that he’s reversed left to right, conceivably you could say that there’s a whole mirror-image universe next door to ours—where everything is much the same, but different in value—and the rotating really involves swapping our subject here, with the mirror image of our subject over there. They’d mass the same, so you wouldn’t be subtracting any matter, or adding it.”
“Rubbish,” said Xerxes Ritsos. “If everything’s different in value, it would have to be an anti-matter universe. So anything brought over here would annihilate. I didn’t notice the President exploding.”
“No, it isn’t a question of the charges on particles,” Paul insisted, tapping the blackboard. “It’s—”
“But look,” Carr cut in. “The events in your mirror universe would need to be exactly the same as the events over here. Right?”
“No, no. They wouldn’t have to correspond exactly. I mean, obviously the President would have been visiting us, in the mirror universe—but for a different reason. And the apparatus in this room would have had a different purpose, even though it looked roughly the same.”
“Nonsense!” snorted Carr.
The three men went on arguing, till Sam called a halt.
“I say we should go upstairs and open some champagne. Let’s get all the gang together. I imagine we can afford champagne now.”
The celebration that followed developed into a full-scale party in Sam Dexter’s office.
At the height of the party, Marion Kurtz switched on the wall TV set.
The President appeared, standing at a podium in Pasadena. His reversed face peered at the audience. Nearby him, sat the Secretary of State.
“Boo!” shouted Xerxes Ritsos, tipsily.
Others started up a slow hand clap.
“Shut up, you guys! called out Sam Dexter. “Let’s hear how much money he’s pumping into research.”
The room fell silent. Marion turned the volume up.
“… prepared a speech, but I’m not gonna read it, fellow citizens. I’m gonna speak about something much more vital—our sexuality.”
“Holy heck,” said Lara Davis, softly.
“I thought we’d got our world all sorted out, as regards the population problem—and all the macho aggression stuff—under my leadership. But here I can see another bunch of you all sitting, acting out the same old reactionary caveman roles.”
A buzz of bemusement and outrage rose from the TV audience. The row of Secret Service agents, trained to pay no attention to what was going on behind them, leaned forward alertly, hands moving closer to their inside pockets.
“It must just be this area,” the President went on. “I’ve been noting the warning signs since about noon, and they’ve only gotten worse since. So I’m gonna speak out with a warning that I know’s gonna be heard all over this great country.
“The days when men were men, and women were women, are gone for good. I’m saying this as your elected President: the first gay President of this land, and certainly not the last.
“As you oughta all be well aware, all my cabinet are Gays too.
“But just in case a few old-fashioned souls have forgotten this simple fact, Fm gonna remind you all graphically right now.”
The President turned from the podium, wearing a shy smile on his face. Crooking his finger, he beckoned coyly to the Secretary of State—who was on his feet, in any case, with a look of appal on his face which might, just might, have been mistaken for an expression of wondering love.
“There’s no hate possible,” said the President, “in a world where all men love each other.”
Stepping over, he kissed the Secretary of State lustily on the lips.
The Secretary of State’s automatic reflex was to punch the President in the pit of the stomach.
The babel of outrage from the audience intensified as the President doubled up. Hastily the agents drew their guns, pointing them this way and that, as one person leapt up, then another.
Now the President was on his knees, bowing and unbending like a Moslem at prayer.
The Secretary stared at what he had just done, then at his fist, non-plussed.
“Gee, Sir, I’m … well, I’m … Well, I mean …”
Painfully, the President pulled himself up and stood erect.
“You’re straight, Mr. Secretary,” gasped the Presidential voice. “I’ve been suspecting this. You aren’t gay at all! You ain’t like the rest of us. You’ve never made love to a man in your life. You’re sacked!”
The Secretary of State recoiled.
“You can’t be the President!” he shouted back. “No way are you him. You look twisted about. As soon as you got here, I thought you looked a bit twisted. You’re a double. You’ve been switched. You’ve been substituted for the President! To make us think the President has gone mad. Maybe so they can sneak in a nuclear attack!”
“I am the elected President of the United States,” said the President, more firmly. “And I’m gay, and I’m proud of it.”
Sam Dexter strode to the TV set and cut the sound. He faced the silent little crowd.
After swearing briefly, he said, “I don’t think any of us need to be a hot-shot futurologist to predict what’s going to happen now. Pretty soon people are going to start asking where precisely the President got switched. We should be so lucky if it takes them ten minutes to come up with the right answer.”
MacDonald Carr grabbed Paul by the lapel.
“Okay, smartass, you got us into this!”
“Couldn’t we come clean right now and offer to switch the President back?” asked Marion, intervening.
“Oh, sure,” said Mark Bernstein. “It’s just the twenty years in jail afterwards, that I’m thinking about.”
“I mean,” said Marion, “this could demonstrate to the whole country the desperate straits that respectable scientists are being reduced to.”
Bernstein sighed. “Do you really think they would ever believe a hundred per cent that it was the real President—even if our dimensional friend here did rotate the man back out of wherever he is right now?”
“Mark has a point there,” said Paul.
“Right,” said Sam Dexter. “They couldn’t trust it.” He cocked his head. “Sorry—I thought I heard a siren … No, it’s too soon. Right. As I was saying. Now, we’re supposed to be a roomful of crack brains. We’re supposed to be able to think nimbly—and I’ll remind you once again: together we stand, divided we fall. So: no recriminations. The one remaining question seems to me to be this: Paul, how many people could pack into the center of focus of the dimension field, if we all stand really close together?”
“I guess … thirty, maybe.”
“I thought so. All of us. That’s about the only way we can escape some pretty long jail sentences for conspiracy. You’ll rotate us out of here. I want two things quickly. I want a remote control to switch the field on. And I want something to disable the apparatus—fuse it, melt it down—as soon as it’s been used. But without hurting our gay doubles from the other America, who’ll be taking our place. That way, nobody can switch us back again, to stand trial.”
“You want us all to transfer over into a gay America?” cried Xerxes Ritsos.
“It sounds like a more peaceful place than here. Whatever else it is! Surely we can all fit in. We can pass. We arrive forewarned. And if we all stick together, we can act, er, normal—in private. We’ll survive.”
“And what about our poor old doubles?” asked Marion.
“We have to apply the principle of triage,” said Mark crisply. “We shall escape. They’ll have to look after themselves. Though perhaps,” he added as a mellow afterthought, “we could leave them a note or something, explaining.”
Half an hour later, all the heads of department were crammed into a white circle on the floor of the sub-basement. They held tightly to each other, like sardines, so that no one would fall out.
Paul de Leuw held a small radio transmitter clear of the mass of shoulders, his finger poised.
“I can hear sirens now,” said Sam. “Just faintly, outside. So they must be really screaming. They’re coming.”
“Okay, everyone?” called Paul.
“Yes, yes, get on with it!”
“Okay … go.”
There was a brief flash of light …
But unfortunately, they had all forgotten that the real President had arrived in the alternative America a few hours before them.
The people on the other side were waiting.
They were not appreciative.
HYPOTHETICAL
Something is rotten in the State of Denmark, alias the SF publishing scene, which simultaneously develops anorexia nervosa and elephantiasis …
Hype Hype Hoorah!
In a recent issue of ‘Vector’ my eye was caught by a handsome full-page advertisement by Pan Books for Lord Valentine’s Castle.
How pleasant, in these straitened days, that a publisher is paying for a full page in ‘Vector’! One’s joy turnes to ashes, though, when one learns that Pan Books were spending the majority of their SF advertising budget on promoting this one book. And very little on promoting anybody else.
In a way, this ad is a collector’s item. After explaining that Bob Silverberg has made a fortune from writing, and how a frantic publishers’ auction took place as soon as he had scribbled the idea for this book on the back of an envelope, and how the opening sentence subsequently came to him like the lines of Kubla Khan to Coleridge—lucky for him that California is far from Porlock!—the ad then presents some quotes hailing this book as a magnificent Behemoth, et cetera. (Funnily, this particular quote is from the supposedly left wing Labour Party newspaper Tribune, who regularly leave their political acumen at home whenever it comes to reviewing SF; Lord Valentine’s Castle, of course, is a book in praise of the Divine Right of Kings.)
Yes indeed, it is the Day of the Behemoth—and the lesser animals get trampled.
And it is the day of hype … which can indeed be hilariously funny, if one has a black sense of comedy.
Essential to the best grand hype is an array of ecstatic pre-publication quotes from one’s authorial peers, destined for the cover of the brand new book; and thus publishers are currently turning authors—whose specialty is supposed to be freshness, sincerity and originality in thought and utterance—into a new breed of hectic copywriters, determined to persuade you, with glowing fervour, that this book washes whiter.
At which point I might toss out a proposal for the Non-Book of the Year: namely, The Book of Hype, which will gather within its pages all the best examples of this species from the book covers of the last five years. There will also be a Do-It-Yourself section, with multiple choice lists of suitable syntactic structures, comparisons and superlatives—to save authors some trouble, yet not to offend the publishers who may also issue their own books, or may do so in future. Really, this proposal should save authors quite a bit of time, and rescue them from being forced to think like copywriters every few weeks; and probably no one would notice the difference.
This could even become something of a game, instead of what it is now becoming: an embarrassment, and a periodic degradation of a creative artist’s brain. (In the good old days, this is what critics were for.) ‘Hey, how did you rate Fred’s new book?’ ‘Gee, I tossed the dice and came up with a sixteen, an eighty-four and seventy-niner.’ Those possessing word processors could simply slot in a tape of The Book of Hype with instructions to print out a randomised letter of appreciation.
For it is getting embarassing, as one’s author-peers grope for new and decorative, heartfelt metaphors and similes to describe the overwhelming readerly experience they have just undergone staying up two nights running to finish the book, shocked and exalted, slavering with frustrated appetite for the sequel.
