Read Online The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith - Free Book Online
Authors: L. Neil Smith
Ads: Link
society had pulled through it, recovered without a scar. Hey! People are on Mars!
But where did that leave me? All my friends must be dead. I was my folks’ only kid. I had no close relatives or descendants I was aware of. Jesus, with Denver gone, did anyone I know have any descendants? Maybe the local cops could recommend a nice rubber room for my declining years.
Wait a minute! This was no way for Sergeant Billy Bear’s son Winnie to be thinking! There must be something I could do, if only looking up Otis Bealls’s great-grandson to punch him in the nose.
Maybe that wasn’t such a screwy idea: Bealls might be long dead. That explosion might not have been in Meiss’s lab, but IT—the opening remarks of World War III! On the other hand, he could have lived long enough to pinch the nurses in some postwar wrinkle-ranch. One way or another, my explosion would surely rate some footnote in his family history.
I typed out BEALLS, OTIS. The screen displayed something like a regular phonebook page with a glowing orange cursor dot wiggling up and down the margin. Beallses, about sixty of them, but no Otis. I stared at the list, wondering how to ask someone, “Pardon me, did you have an ancestor named Otis, back before the End of the World?” The cursor dot slide-whistled up and down the page uncertainly.
Then, in the right-hand column across from the Beallses, it caught me, right between the eyes:
BEAR, EDWARD W., Consulting Detective
626 E. Genêt PI.
ACMe 9-4223
I wouldn’t have taken a million “metric ounces” not to dial that number. Seeing your own distinctive name and more-or-less correct profession in a strange city’s directory is interesting, but not that rare: five years after he was killed, my Dad was still getting mail for another Tech Sergeant Bill Bear. But on a Picturephone, possibly decades in the future?
Perhaps this wasn’t the time for idle curiosity, sitting in a futuristic phone booth, torn and filthy, still disoriented and getting more that way every minute. I’m not sure what was called for. Catatonic schizophrenia, maybe.
PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE
I rummaged through my pockets: ball-point, notebook, badge holder and wallet, empty cartridges, felt-tip, two dimes, a quarter, four pennies. How much is a tenth-ounce of copper? Those little watch-pockets they put in trousers are good for something: I pulled out the Lysander Spooner coin from Meiss’s desk. Half an ounce of silver ought to do it. Do polite phone companies give change?
The coin! I hadn’t associated the numbers—dates—with the university sign until now. To hell with it, time enough for going batty later. I inserted the silver coin, the machine started hiccuping into its coin return. I didn’t have time to examine the result, because:
WE’RE SORRY, YOUR PARTY IS BUSY. IF YOU’D LIKE TO WAIT, PLEASE ENTER H FOR HOLD. TO CANCEL THE CALL, ENTER C —YOUR MONEY WILL BE REFUNDED. THANK YOU.
I said, “You’re welcome,” and punched H, fidgeting nervously. Is there another way to travel through time besides starting at birth and plodding on to Social Security, collecting varicose veins along the way? Meiss had to have gotten that coin from here. Was it time travel he’d been working on? It wasn’t any crazier an idea than amnesia, and I could see how the government might be interested.
But who was this gink with my name? Let’s see, if I hadn’t gone through Meiss’s machine, I might have survived World War III or whatever, eventually moving to Fort Collins. But I did go through, so I couldn’t have … anyway, I’d be at least 165 by now! Not that I didn’t feel it. Of course, I could have had a kid after 1987 … but no, the same objection applies: after 1987, I was—am—already here. This is where my lifeline and Meiss’s confounded gadgetry had carried me, not through Armageddon to Father’s Day.
Impatiently, I fiddled with the coin return and found a copper tenth-piece
But where did that leave me? All my friends must be dead. I was my folks’ only kid. I had no close relatives or descendants I was aware of. Jesus, with Denver gone, did anyone I know have any descendants? Maybe the local cops could recommend a nice rubber room for my declining years.
Wait a minute! This was no way for Sergeant Billy Bear’s son Winnie to be thinking! There must be something I could do, if only looking up Otis Bealls’s great-grandson to punch him in the nose.
Maybe that wasn’t such a screwy idea: Bealls might be long dead. That explosion might not have been in Meiss’s lab, but IT—the opening remarks of World War III! On the other hand, he could have lived long enough to pinch the nurses in some postwar wrinkle-ranch. One way or another, my explosion would surely rate some footnote in his family history.
I typed out BEALLS, OTIS. The screen displayed something like a regular phonebook page with a glowing orange cursor dot wiggling up and down the margin. Beallses, about sixty of them, but no Otis. I stared at the list, wondering how to ask someone, “Pardon me, did you have an ancestor named Otis, back before the End of the World?” The cursor dot slide-whistled up and down the page uncertainly.
Then, in the right-hand column across from the Beallses, it caught me, right between the eyes:
BEAR, EDWARD W., Consulting Detective
626 E. Genêt PI.
ACMe 9-4223
I wouldn’t have taken a million “metric ounces” not to dial that number. Seeing your own distinctive name and more-or-less correct profession in a strange city’s directory is interesting, but not that rare: five years after he was killed, my Dad was still getting mail for another Tech Sergeant Bill Bear. But on a Picturephone, possibly decades in the future?
Perhaps this wasn’t the time for idle curiosity, sitting in a futuristic phone booth, torn and filthy, still disoriented and getting more that way every minute. I’m not sure what was called for. Catatonic schizophrenia, maybe.
PLEASE INSERT ONE TENTH COPPER OUNCE
I rummaged through my pockets: ball-point, notebook, badge holder and wallet, empty cartridges, felt-tip, two dimes, a quarter, four pennies. How much is a tenth-ounce of copper? Those little watch-pockets they put in trousers are good for something: I pulled out the Lysander Spooner coin from Meiss’s desk. Half an ounce of silver ought to do it. Do polite phone companies give change?
The coin! I hadn’t associated the numbers—dates—with the university sign until now. To hell with it, time enough for going batty later. I inserted the silver coin, the machine started hiccuping into its coin return. I didn’t have time to examine the result, because:
WE’RE SORRY, YOUR PARTY IS BUSY. IF YOU’D LIKE TO WAIT, PLEASE ENTER H FOR HOLD. TO CANCEL THE CALL, ENTER C —YOUR MONEY WILL BE REFUNDED. THANK YOU.
I said, “You’re welcome,” and punched H, fidgeting nervously. Is there another way to travel through time besides starting at birth and plodding on to Social Security, collecting varicose veins along the way? Meiss had to have gotten that coin from here. Was it time travel he’d been working on? It wasn’t any crazier an idea than amnesia, and I could see how the government might be interested.
But who was this gink with my name? Let’s see, if I hadn’t gone through Meiss’s machine, I might have survived World War III or whatever, eventually moving to Fort Collins. But I did go through, so I couldn’t have … anyway, I’d be at least 165 by now! Not that I didn’t feel it. Of course, I could have had a kid after 1987 … but no, the same objection applies: after 1987, I was—am—already here. This is where my lifeline and Meiss’s confounded gadgetry had carried me, not through Armageddon to Father’s Day.
Impatiently, I fiddled with the coin return and found a copper tenth-piece
Similar Books
