Robert Silverberg: Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine

Belfast, Northern Ireland, May 28—Six people were killed early today in a big bomb explosion in Short Strand, a Roman Catholic section of Belfast.

Three of the dead, all men, were identified later as members of the Irish Republican Army. Security forces said they believed the bomb blew up accidentally while it was being taken to another part of the city.

One of the dead was identified as a well-known IRA explosives expert who had been high on the British Army’s wanted list for some time. The three other victims, two men and a woman, could not be identified immediately.

Seventeen persons, including several children, were injured by the explosion, and twenty houses in the narrow street were so badly damaged that they will have to be demolished.

One day I woke up and could not breathe. All that day and through the days after, in the green parks and in the rooms of friends and even beside the sea, I could not breathe. The air was used up. Each thing I saw that was ugly was ugly because of man—man-made or man-touched. And so I left my friends and lived alone.

Eugene, Ore. (UPI)—A retired chef and his dog were buried together recently as per the master’s wish.

Horace Lee Edwards, seventy-one years old, had lived alone with his dog for twenty-two years, since it was a pup. He expressed the wish that when he died the dog be buried with him.

Members of Mr. Edwards’s family put the dog to death after Mr. Edwards’s illness. It was placed at its master’s feet in his coffin.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.

A memo to the Actualizer.

Dear Machine:

We need more assassins. The system itself is fundamentally violent and we have tried to transform it through love. That didn’t work. We gave them flowers and they gave us bullets. All right. We’ve reached such a miserable point that the only way we can fight their violence is with violence of our own. The time has come to rip off the rippers-off. Therefore, old machine, your assignment for today is to turn out a corps of capable assassins, a cadre of convincing-looking artificial human beings who will serve the needs of the Movement. Killer androids, that’s what we want.

These are the specs:

AGE—between nineteen and twenty-five years old.

HEIGHT—from five feet to five feet nine.

WEIGHT—on the low side, or else very heavy.

RACE—white, more or less.

RELIGION—Former Christian, now agnostic or atheist. Ex-Fundamentalist will do nicely.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE—intense, weird, a loner, a loser. A bad sexual history: impotence, premature ejaculation, inability to find willing partners. A bad relationship with siblings (if any) and parents. Subject should be a hobbyist (stamp or coin collecting, trap-shooting, cross-country running, etc.) but not an “intellectual.” A touch of paranoia is desirable. Also free-floating ambitions impossible to fulfil.

POLITICAL CONVICTIONS—any. Preferably highly flexible. Willing to call himself a libertarian anarchist on Tuesday and a dedicated Marxist on Thursday if he thinks it’ll get him somewhere to make the switch. Willing to shoot with equal enthusiasm at presidential candidates, incumbent senators, baseball players, rock stars, traffic cops, or any other components of the mysterious “they” that hog the glory and keep him from attaining his true place in the universe.

Okay. You can supply the trimmings yourself, machine. Any color eyes so long as the eyes are a little bit on the glassy hyperthyroid side. Any color hair, although it will help if the hair is prematurely thinning and our man blames his lack of success with women in part on that. Any marital history (single, divorced, widowed, married) provided whatever liaison may have existed was unsatisfactory. The rest is up to you. Get with the job and use your creativity. Start stamping them out in quantity:

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Oswald Sirhan Bremer Ray Czolgosz Guiteau

Give us the men. We’ll find uses for them. And when they’ve done their filthy thing we’ll throw them back into the karmic hopper to be recycled, and God help us all.

Every day thousands of ships routinely stain the sea with oily wastes. When an oil tanker has discharged its cargo, it might add weight of some other kind to remain stable; this is usually done by filling some of the ship’s storage tanks with seawater. Before it can take on a new load of oil, the tanker must flush this watery ballast from its tanks; and as the water is pumped out, it takes with it the oily scum that had remained in the tanks when the last cargo was unloaded. Until 1964 each such flushing of an average 40,000-ton tanker sent eighty-three tons of oil into the sea. Improved flushing procedures have cut the usual oil discharge to about three tons. But there are so many tankers afloat—more than 4,000 of them—that they nevertheless release several million tons of oil a year in this fashion. The 44,000 passenger, cargo, military, and pleasure ships now in service add an equal amount of pollution by flushing oily wastes from their bilges. All told, according to one scientific estimate, man may be putting as much as ten million tons of oil a year into the sea. When the explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a 3,200-mile voyage from North Africa to the West Indies in a boat of papyrus reeds in the summer of 1970, he saw “a continuous stretch of at least 1,400 miles of open Atlantic polluted by floating lumps of solidified, asphalt-like oil.” French oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau estimates that forty percent of the world’s sea life has disappeared in the present century. The beaches near Boston Harbor have an average oil accumulation of 21.8 pounds of oil per mile, a figure that climbs to 1,750 pounds per mile on one stretch on Cape Cod. The Scientific Centre of Monaco reports: “On the Mediterranean seaboard practically all the beaches are soiled by the petroleum refineries, and the sea bottom, which serves as a food reserve for marine fauna, is rendered barren by the same factors.”

It’s a coolish spring day and here I am in Washington, DC. That’s the Capitol down there, and there’s the White House. I can’t see the Washington Monument, because they haven’t finished it yet, and of course there isn’t any Lincoln Memorial, because Honest Abe is alive and well on Pennsylvania Avenue. Today is Friday, April 14, 1865. And here I am. Far out!

—We hold the power to effect change. Very well, what shall we change? The whole ugly racial thing?

—That’s cool. But how do we go about it?

—Well, what about uprooting the entire institution of slavery by going back to the sixteenth century and blocking it at the outset?

—No, too many ramifications. We’d have to alter the dynamics of the entire imperialist-colonial thrust, and that’s just too big a job even for a bunch of gods. Omnipotent we may be, but not indefatigable. If we blocked that impulse there, it would only crop up somewhere else along the time-line; no force that powerful can be stifled altogether.

—What we need is a pinpoint way of reversing the racial mess. Let us find a single event that lies at a crucial nexus in the history of black-white relations in the United States and unhappen it. Any suggestions?

—Sure, Thomas. The Lincoln assassination.

—Far out! Run it through the machine; see what the consequences would be.

So we do the simulations and twenty times out of twenty they come out with a recommend that we de-assassinate Lincoln. Groovy. Any baboon with a rifle can do an assassination, but only we can do a de-assassination. Alors : Lincoln goes on to complete his second term. The weak, ineffectual Andrew Johnson remains Vice President, and the Radical Republican faction in Congress doesn’t succeed in enacting its “humble the proud traitors” screw-the-South policies. Under Lincoln’s even-handed guidance the South will be rebuilt sanely and welcomed back into the Union; there won’t be any vindictive Reconstruction era, and there won’t be the equally vindictive Jim Crow reaction against the carpetbaggers that led to all the lynchings and restrictive laws, and maybe we can blot out a century of racial bitterness. Maybe.