Alfred Bester: The Computer Connection

To the Three “B’s”

I tore down the Continental Shelf off the Bogue Bank while the pogo made periscope hops trying to track me. Endless plains of salt flats like the steppes of Central Russia (music by Borodin here); mounds of salts where the new breed of prospector was sieving for rare earths; towers of venomous vapors on the eastern horizon where the pumping stations were sucking up more of the Atlantic and extracting deuterium for energy transfer. Most of the fossil fuels were gone; the sea level had been lowered by two feet; progress.

I was headed for Herb Wells’ hideout. He’s perfected a technique for reclaiming gold (which nobody wants these plastic days) and is schlepping ingots back into the past with a demented time-dingbat which is why the Group has nicknamed him H.G. Wells. Herb is making gifts of gold to characters like Van Gogh and Mozart, trying to keep them healthy, wealthy, and wise so they’ll create more goodies for posterity. So far it’s never worked. No Son of Don Giovanni . Not even The Don Meets Dracula .

Following the Thieves Vagabonds road signs that Herb puts out for the Group, I went under a mound and tunneled through the salts, absorbing NaCl, MgCl 2, MgSO 4, calcium, potassium, bromides, and probably traces of Herb’s gold which he’d grudge me. I came out at the bunker hatch. Locked, of course. I hammered on it while the pogo bounced and thrummed overhead and it was six, two, and even they’d get me before Herb heard me, but he hear me.

“Quien dat? Quien dat?” he called in Black Spanglish.

“It’s Guig,” I hollered in XXth Century English. That’s the secret cant the Group uses. “I’m in a jam. Let me in.”

The hatch swung down and I fell in. “Freeze it, Herb. The fuzz may have spotted me.”

He slammed the hatch and froze the grommets. “What the hell have you been up to, Guig?”

“The usual stuff I killed another guy.”

“The fuzz making a fuss about murder? Don’t put me on.”

“He was the governor of the Corridor.”

“Oh. You shouldn’t kill the importants, Guig. People don’t understand.”

“I know, but they’re the only candidates worth killing.”

“How many failures have you had so far?”

“I’ve lost count.”

“And no success.” Herb meditated. “Maybe we ought to sit down and discuss it. The first question should be, is it a problem of perplexity or complexity? I think—”

A pounding made the hatch vibrate.

“There’s goody two-shoes,” I said without joy. “Can you shoot me timesome in your dingbat, Herb?”

“But you always refused to shoot a trip.” He gave me a mournful look. “You hurt my feelings.”

“I’ve got to disappear for a few hours. If they don’t find me here they won’t bother you. I apologize about the dingbat, Herb, but I was always scared of that thing. The whole Group is.”

“So am I. Come on.”

I followed him into the Chamber of Horrors and sat down in the insane machine which looks like a praying mantis. Herb handed me an ingot. “I was just going to give this to Thomas Chatterton. You deliver it for me.”

“Chatterton? The kid poet?”

“In the flesh. Committed suicide in 1770, greatly regretted. Arsenic. He was out of bread and out of hope. You’re going back to London. He’s holed up in an attic in Brook Street. Got it?”

“Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of—”

“I’ll put it on a three-hour snatch. That ought to give you enough time. I’ll shoot you to a prominent place so you can get your bearings. Don’t wander too far or the thing won’t be able to grab you.”

The pounding got louder and more peevish. Herb did things with calibrations and switches and there was a crackle of french-fried power (which I’ll bet he never pays for) and I was sitting in a mud-puddle in the rain and a George Washington type on a chestnut horse nearly rode me down and bawled hell out of me for obstructing a public road.

I got up, backed off the road, and someone kicked me in the brain. I jumped and turned around and it was a popeyed corpse hanging from a gibbet. Herb had shot me to a prominent place, all right — Tyburn. I hadn’t been in London in years (rotten with fallout residues) and certainly never in 1770, but that gave me my bearings. Tyburn had been turned into Marble Arch. I was on the outskirts of eighteenth-century London. No Bayswater Road, yet; no Hyde Park; just fields, trees, meadows, and the little Tyburn creek meandering. The city was on my left.

I walked down a path that would someday be Park Lane and turned left into the fringe of houses. They became thick and crowded when I reached a cow pasture that would become Grosvenor Square. A Saturday-night market was in progress. Hundreds of barrows and stalls illuminated by flaring torches, grease lamps with flags of flame, humble tallow candles. Roars of hucksters: “Eight a penny! Stunning pears!” “Chestnuts all ‘ot! Penny a score!” “Beautiful whelks, penny a lot!” “Fine warnuts, sixteen a penny!” I was hungry but I didn’t have any current coin; just two pounds of refined gold.

I remembered that Brook Street led off the north side of Grosvenor so I took that route asking for a writer named Chatterton. Nobody ever heard of him until I came across a Flying Stationer hung with broadsheets offering “The Life of the Hangman,” “Secret Doings in Soho,” “The Treacherous Servant,” that sort of thing. He said he knew Chatterton. The kid wrote long-song poems for him at a shilling ea., and he pointed out the house which had no business to be standing.

I ran up the crumbling stairs, convinced I’d fall through at every step, and burst into the attic with a merry, “Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold!” (Thomas Hood, 1799-1845) The kid was writhing on a pallet in the last agonies of arsenic poisoning. “Ah-ha!” I thought. “He’s dying. He knows he’s dead. If I can save him maybe we’ve got another Moleman for the Group.”

I did my best. The first thing to do is make them vomit. I pee’d into a tumbler and forced it down Chatterton’s throat. No nausea. Too far gone. I ran down the stairs and banged on a door. It was opened by Betsy Ross’ grandmother, complaining. I shoved past her, saw a jug of milk, took it and a clutch of charcoal from the cold fireplace. She had now graduated to screaming. I returned to my house call. Charcoal and milk. Nothing. He was gone, greatly regretted, and what the hell was I going to do with 24 oz. (troy) of gold which was dragging the butt pocket of my coveralls?

Well, I had to stall anyway until the Mantis put the snatch on me so I went for a walk in the rain. At Fleet Street I turned off and went into the Cheshire Cheese to see if I could parlay the ingot into a drink and maybe dry off in front of the fire, which was eclipsed by a snorting whale and a simpering dogfish. The Grand Cham and Boswell.

“What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a newborn babe?” dogfish was asking. The whale heaved and growled but before he could answer that monumental question I was yanked back to the dingbat, dripping all over the circuits to the anguish of Herb.

“OutOutOut!” he hollered. “They’ve left.”

I out.

“Why didn’t you give Thos. the gold?”

“Too late, man. He gone when I get.”

“Oh, drat.”

“Try again, a little earlier.”

“I can’t. The damn thing won’t shoot the same decade twice. To tell the truth, Guig, I think it’s a lemon.”

Maybe that’s why his Health, Education, and Welfare program never works. I thanked Herb, still using the Group XX English and returned to Spangland, the Gem of the Ocean. I know all this sounds kind of lunatic but I’m up against a tough proposition keeping these notes. I have to translate from Black Spanglish — Benny Diaz, gemmum, ah gone esplain any pagunta you ax — which is now the official language of the country, and then go on from there. It runs: Spanglish XX English Machine Language. It’s one hell of a job, especially when it’s compounded by sorting out centuries of memories. So I ax you to dispensar when I jumble. My damn diary won’t. How many times when I compile data for it has the print-out snapped, “090-N. READ.” which is machine language for, “I can’t understand a goddamn thing you’re saying.”