The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

THE CARSON EFFECT Richard Wilson

Andrew Grey sat tensely at the national news desk of The New York Times, remembering the last time he had been asked to write an impossible story.

He had been, then, in New York, and therefore North American, correspondent for an overseas wire service, European Press. A celebrated case at the time was that of Zeb Speed, a convicted killer who had spent a dozen years in the death house at Utah’s state prison while he prepared appeal after appeal based on his careful research in the prison library. Finally Speed’s resources appeared to be exhausted and the governor set the next day, a Friday, for Speed’s execution.

But Speed spent Thursday addressing last-ditch appeals to the Vatican, the White House, to every senator and to each of the Supreme Court justices. There were new developments every hour. Grey was trying frantically to keep up with the story, swallowing aspirin and black coffee as he revised and re-topped, when Paris sent him a service message requesting a forward-looking story under Friday’s date.

This request reached Grey at six p.m. He was in New York, covering the story from the machines of the American press services, making an occasional long-distance telephone call, and drawing on his knowledge of Utah’s death house, seen a year ago when he had covered a riot at the prison.

He knew the kind of story Paris wanted: a simple, straightforward piece with “today” in the first sentence. It might read:

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 4 (EP)—Zeb Speed, his last appeal denied, was due to choose whether he would die today by the hangman’s noose or by a squad of riflemen aiming at a tag pinned over his heart.

Speed, part-Indian convicted killer of 12 whose claim that his trial was unconstitutional, bolstered by appeals researched in the prison library . . .

That was what Euro wanted. The only trouble was that midnight, European time, being six p.m. New York time, was only four p.m. Utah time. There were Still eight hours of Thursday remaining for Zeb Speed. Anything Andy Grey wrote as a Friday story before midnight Utah time (eight a.m., Paris time) would be science fiction.

Not being a writer in that genre, he sent Euro a service message which read: “Regret fast-breaking developments in Utah, where it only four p.m. make tomorrow-dated story out of question. Propose cabling spot developments, leaving rewrite desk do forward-throwing piece as feel warranted.”

It was exactly this sense of caution which got Andrew Grey fired from his European Press job (Speed’s last appeal was denied and he was executed on Friday, choosing the firing squad) and hired by The New York Times.

Now Andy Grey sat hunched over his portion of the Times’ national news desk, trying to write, as responsibly as he could, a story far more difficult. A copy boy dropped the latest fragment of the story in front of him. He already had more facts than he needed. There were bits and pieces from all over.

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 10:26 a.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Douglas Roche tried to walk casually from the door of the bank to the waist-high tables where the deposit and withdrawal slips were kept.

He’d never done anything like this before. He took a deep breath, wiped his sweating palms on the sides of his coat and picked up a pen. He printed on the back of a withdrawal slip: “Give me $10,000 in medium size bills. Don’t do anything crazy, this bottle is full of nitro.”

Roche was thirty-four years old, married, with three kids. He had a job that paid him $127 a week before deductions. He also had a mortgage, a second mortgage, a car, a deepfreeze, a new TV, a power lawn mower, a revolving charge account with three-figure balance, new storm windows and a bill three months overdue at the high-priced grocery store that delivered and gave credit.

He had two dollars and eighteen cents and a subway token in his pocket and his wife had just gone to the hospital to have an operation. They had let her in without payment in advance only because he promised to bring $200 at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. He didn’t have hospitalization; that had been one of the things he’d economized on. He’d also heard that surgeons charged up to a thousand dollars for a laminectomy. He hadn’t yet discussed fees with doctors. Oh, yes, there was the bookmaker. Roche owed him fifty bucks.

Doug Roche was no bank robber. He was just a man driven to the wall. But now he was a bank robber.

He got into the shortest line; only one person was ahead of him at the teller’s window. But the person was a woman with a wad of books and papers in her hand which she handed to the teller one by one: a deposit in the checking account; a payment on the personal loan; a deposit in the savings account; a money order to be cashed; a dollar in the Christmas Club. Finally she was finished.

Doug Roche thought for the last time of walking away. But there was nowhere to walk to. He shoved the note across the counter and opened his fist to show the little bottle containing a colorless liquid. It was only water, of course.

The teller looked up from the note and Roche made a small threatening motion with the bottle. At the same time he began to regret that he had demanded so much. Two thousand dollars would have got him out of his immediate troubles. Ten thousand might get him a bullet in the back from some hidden guard.

But the teller said: “Sure. Don’t worry; I won’t do anything foolish.” He began taking bills out of the drawer and stuffing them in a big manila envelope. Roche saw the wrappers on the wads of bills: $1,000; $5,000; $3,000; $50,000.

Almost hysterically, he said in a strangled voice: “That’s enough!”

“One more,” the teller said, and shoved in a thin stack whose wrapper said $100,000.

Roche tried to keep his voice steady as he said: “Okay. Don’t ring the alarm till I’m out the door or I throw the bottle right at you.

“Don’t worry,” the teller said again. Then he said: “God bless you.”

Roche, perspiring, so nervous that he nearly dropped the manila envelope, turned and walked toward the door. It took all his determination not to run. He went out into the shopping crowds, turned a corner and walked fast. He went into a department store and out the exit on the far end and took the subway out to Queens. But nobody chased him.

He got home and locked the door and pulled down the the shades. He put the manila envelope on the kitchen table and got a can of beer from the refrigerator and peeled it open. He took a big swig and lit a cigarette and counted his money.

. . . two hundred and twenty-three thousand six hundred and fifty dollars. $223,650.

By the time he had finished a second can of beer he had counted the money five times. It always came to the same amount. Just under a quarter of a million dollars. He felt numb.

After a while he took a ten-dollar bill from one of the stacks and put the rest in a paper bag, which he hid under the sink among other paper bags containing potatoes and onions.

He went out intending to buy a bottle of whiskey and get drunk. Instead he came back with a take-out order from a Chinese restaurant and ate his first full meal in days.

Later he took out the money and counted it again. Minus the ten dollars, it came to $223,640. He began to laugh and couldn’t stop himself. For a long time he laughed hysterically, lying on the bed and muffling his face in the pillow.

Finally he got up, washed, shaved and put on a clean shirt. He took $200, put the rest back under the sink and went to see his wife in the hospital.

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 2:17 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Freida Barring—some of the older women in the office called her Theda Bara in fun, as she was anything but a glamor girl—went hesitantly to the head bookkeeper’s cubicle. She was nervous because the expense money she wanted to collect was a whole $3.65 and the man who’d authorized it had quit a month ago. He had forgotten to sign a petty-cash slip. It would be Freida’s word against the company’s.

What happened was that the assistant sales manager, the man who’d quit, had asked her to take a cab downtown and pick up some papers he needed right away. He’d told her to have the cab wait and it had waited what seemed to Freida a long time.

It was a complicated story to have to explain and she dreaded the ordeal she faced with the head bookkeeper of Schlarf & Son, a man notoriously reluctant to part with a nickel.

But today the head bookkeeper, a gray-haired man in his fifties, was almost jovial. “Ah, Miss Barring,” he said. “What can we do for you? Sit down, sit down.”

Freida sat on the edge of the chair and said: “It’s about a petty-cash slip. I had to take a cab for Mr. Westfall— this was before he left—and it’s $3.65. That includes a 35-cent tip and I laid it out, but if you don’t think I should have tipped the driver, then it’s only $3.30. I mean Mr. Westfall didn’t specifically say to tip him and maybe Schlarf & Son don’t authorize—”

The head bookkeeper held up a hand. “The tip is authorized, Miss Barring, of course. Here.” He opened a drawer and lifted the lid of a metal box filled with bills and change. “Three dollars and sixty-five cents even. Just sign this slip.”

Freida signed and took the money. She got up to go, tremendously relieved. This was wonderful. Now she could pay the electric-light bill before next payday, by which time they would have shut off the electricity.

“Don’t go, Miss Barring,” the head bookkeeper said. “There’s another little matter we can settle as long as you’re here.” He smiled in a sad-kind way which filled Freida with dread. Were they going to fire her for her audacity in demanding the cab fare? Had they found out about the half dozen boxes of paper clips she’d taken home to make that stupid mobile hanging from the ceiling of her kitchenette?

But the head bookkeeper was saying: “. . . your pension plan. We find you’ve overpaid your share by $34 a year. And since you’ve been with Schlarf & Son a trifle over 12 years, we owe you $414.80. Plus interest, of course.”

He began counting out the money in twenties and tens. It made quite a pile on the desk.

“I hope you don’t mind taking it in cash, Miss Barring,” he said. “You see, our check-writing machine has broken down.”

In a daze, Freida took the money and put it in her bag.

“And now, Miss Barring, Mr. Schlarf has asked me if you’ll show that you forgive him by taking the rest of the day off.”

Freida stammered: “But it’s only two-thirty . ..”

“To be sure. But Mr. Schlarf thought you might have some shopping to do. A new hat, maybe. You have a beautiful day for it.”

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 3:49 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Billy Boyce, aged six, was going shopping. He had saved up seventy-four cents to buy his mother a birthday present. His sister, aged fourteen, gave him twenty-six cents more, which made it an even dollar, and said she’d pay the sales tax.

They were on Fifth Avenue and had walked past many fascinating windows. There was a five-and-ten around the corner.

“Do I hafta go to the five-and-ten?” Billy asked. “Do I hafta?”

“You’ve only got a dollar,” his big sister said. “Where do you want to go—to Tiffany’s?”

“Sure, Tiffany’s,” Billy said. It sounded nice.

Eunice, his sister, thought why not? She was going to be fifteen soon and in a few years she’d be eighteen and maybe by then somebody would have proposed. She’d never been to Tiffany’s or anywhere like it. It would be a good idea to see what they had, just in case. She could always tell the clerk that she was just humoring her little brother.

“As a special favor to you, Billy,” Eunice said, “we’ll go to Tiffany’s. But don’t be disappointed if you don’t have enough money. They’re expensive in there.”

“Okay,” Billy said, “but I got a whole dollar.”

Such nice things they had! Rings and necklaces and brooches (Eunice called them broaches) and earrings and pendants and lockets and especially rings and necklaces.

“I want that one for mommy,” Billy said, pointing to a glittering diamond necklace resting in a velvet box. There was a discreet price tag: $6,760 plus F. T.

Eunice smiled at the clerk to show she was humoring her little brother. The clerk smiled back. “It is nice, isn’t it?” he said. “We’re having a special on that one today.”

She could imagine. Even at 10% off it would be . . . 6,760 minus 676 equaled whatever it equaled, plus 10% back on for the federal tax.

“Do you have anything a little . . . you know, not quite so gaudy?” she asked, to show him that it was a question of taste, not price.

“This is, if I may say so, not gaudy,” the clerk said. “And if the young man really wants it for his mother...”

“I want it,” Billy said. “I got a whole dollar.”

The clerk smiled and Eunice was mortified.

“That’s not quite enough,” the clerk said. “You see, there’s the ten percent federal tax and the four percent sales tax. I’m afraid this necklace comes to one dollar and fourteen cents.”

“But I only got a dollar,” Billy said. Eunice was glaring at the clerk.

“Perhaps,” he said, “the young man would care to have us spread the payments over three months—say forty cents down and forty cents a month for the next two months? That would include the credit charge.”

“Don’t kid him, mister,” Eunice said. “He’s just a little boy.” She was so embarrassed. “Don’t you have a nice...sweater clasp or something?”

“No, miss,” the clerk said, smiling. “We have nothing like that in my section. And I am anxious to make this sale. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pay the federal tax myself. That leaves it at a dollar four. Do you have four cents you might lend him?”

Eunice was a woman of the world, as she had often told herself. There are times when you must seize the opportunity or call the bluff. She took a nickel out of her pocket-book and put it on the counter. “There,” she said. “We’ll take it, Mr. Smarty Pants. Give him your dollar, Billy.”

Billy dutifully took the crumpled bill out of his pocket and put it on the counter. “Could you wrap it up nice?” he asked.

“It will be the nicest package you ever took home, Billy,” the clerk said.

“My mother’s birthday’s tomorrow but we’re giving her her presents tonight,” Billy said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” the clerk said. “That’s really the best way.”

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 4:03 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Orion Newcastle, who had fought hard for his party’s top nomination and then, heartbreakingly, had seen it go to a much less capable man, hurried to the office of that man, now the President of the United States.

Vice-President Newcastle, who had not attended the secret National Security Council meeting that morning, had no idea what the urgent summons to him could mean.

Orion Newcastle had missed other N.S.C. meetings, sometimes by his own choice. After all, his role there was usually limited to telling a few stories to the early-comers before the President arrived and, later, replying, “Certainly, Mr. President” whenever the other man said “Don’t you agree, Orion?”

Since the convention he had always agreed. After all, there was the President’s second term to be considered. Orion had no wish to be dumped, as Roosevelt had dumped Henry Wallace for Harry Truman. Orion sincerely hoped he bore no ill will toward the President. It certainly was his devout wish that the President should live to complete two full terms. But no one could read the future and man was mortal, as had been confirmed several times in Newcastle’s own lifetime. Thus it was wise not to jeopardize one’s position by thought or deed. And the Honorable Orion Newcastle, Vice-President of the United States, walked a little faster toward the President’s office.

When he got there, he found not only the President but the Secretary of State, the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, the top leadership of both parties in Congress, the diplomatic correspondents of the Washington newspapers and the chief Washington correspondents of the nation’s other leading papers and of the world’s ‘press services.

Orion knew all these men by their first names. They had drunk each other’s liquor and told each other bawdy stories. One or two of them, he knew, were responsible for spreading the so-called Orion Stories which had become a national fad, and which held him up to ridicule because of the Down-East accent which he had never lost. But all of them, it seemed to him, were now looking at him with new, and in some cases unprecedented, respect. He could not imagine what was in their minds.

So he said, grinning and broadening his accent slightly: “Well, Mr. President and gentlemen—Mr. President and other gentlemen, I should say—what solemn occasion is this?”

But none of them laughed at his quip. The others looked to the President, who said finally, after gazing out the window and then at each of them in turn:

“Gentlemen, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America, I am resigning in favor of the Vice-President.”

Although he must have hinted at this in some way before Orion came in, there was a murmur of dissent which the President stilled by holding up his hand.

“It’s all been decided, gentlemen. I have drawn up the necessary papers—which I now sign.” He scratched his name quickly several times. “They require only the signatures of some of you to make them official and binding. Then in your presence, Mr. Newcastle will be sworn by the Chief Justice as the next President of the United States.”

“But why, sir?” the Secretary of State asked. “What possible reason can you have?”

“One of the very best,” the President said with a wry smile. “The reason is simply that I have learned, gentlemen, on the highest authority, that I have only a few more hours to live.”

And within the quarter-hour the shocked assemblage had signed their names and watched Orion Newcastle, whom two or three of them considered to be nothing more than an aging buffoon, be sworn in as President of the United States.

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 7:10 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Andrew Grey wasn’t the only newsman trying to write the impossible story, of course. Fully 15 others in the huge newsroom were assigned to various angles. But his was to be the main story, the one which would appear in the right-hand column of page one under the eight-column, three-bank headline.

The final editions of the evening papers had already had a bash at it. To them it was a straightforward, if hopeless, story to be told. Perhaps the Post told it more simply than its rivals, with the one-word headline: “DOOMSDAY.”

Actually it was the penultimate day, the day before doom. This was what the President had been leading up to when he said shortly after four p.m. that he had only a few more hours to live. What he meant, and what he said a few minutes later, was that everybody was going to die. The end was due at midnight, Eastern Standard Time (nine p.m. Pacific Standard Time, five a.m. the next day London time, six a.m. Paris time, seven a.m. Mecca time, eight a.m. Moscow time) and so on around the poor doomed world.

The President had known for some weeks that the end was approaching. So had the State Department and, abroad, 10 Downing Street, the Quai D’Orsay, the Vatican and the Kremlin. Computers in all the capitals had been working at top speed, 24 hours a day, looking for a flaw, a way out, anything. The computers—Communist, neutral and Western—agreed there was no way out. There was nothing Earth could do to save itself.

Had it been a meteor, this extraterrestrial menace, something might have been done. Even a good-sized asteroid, having strayed out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth, could have been broken up into relatively small, harmless chunks that would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere if the world powers cooperated in firing their space-age weapons at it.

But there was no way known of dispelling a cloud of noxious gas so huge it would envelop the Earth for 37 days, poisoning every breathing thing.

The evening papers put out their final editions and their staffs went home to their loved ones, went out to get drunk, went to holy places to pray. The Journal-American said:

WORLD ENDING

President, Pope,

Kremlin

Confirm Holocaust

NO WAY OUT FOR EARTH

Moon Flight Couple Also Doomed

The World-Telegram revealed the reasons behind the President’s resignation in favor of Orion Newcastle—the fact that during World War II, when both were unknown noncoms, the older man, though wounded, had dragged the younger one inch by inch through a minefield to an aid station and to the treatment there which had saved his life; and the fact that Newcastle had never again mentioned that incident, publicly or privately, in all the years since the war. A man of such courage and unselfishness, who, moreover, had been elected by the people to the second-highest office in the land, surely was entitled to be President, if at all possible, during the last several hours of his and the world’s existence—even if he was an incompetent buffoon.

The World-Telegram also found room for half a dozen human-interest stories. There was the one about the bank president who had been told confidentially by his friend the Secretary of the Treasury about the imminent end, and who had amused himself by taking a teller’s place and giving away vast sums of money, including a quarter million or so to a bank robber who had threatened to blow up the place with nitroglycerine but who obviously was an amateur with a little jar of water. There were the stories of the publisher who had given the beatnik poet a $15,000 advance on an impossible sheaf of nonverses, and of the partner in Tiffany’s who, pretending to be a clerk, had sold a little boy a seven-thousand-dollar necklace for a dollar fourteen.

Only an elite few had known the truth before the President’s announcement but the truth had trickled down among the influential, moneyed group, enabling many who had never before considered playing the role to become philanthropists in various ways, either for the honest fun of it, or because of the good will this presumably would lay up for them in the next world, if any.

Oh, about that moon flight couple. They were a cosmonaut and a cosmonette, so-called, Russian. They were doomed like the rest of humanity, Tass explained unhappily, because the killer cloud would envelop the moon as well as the Earth and the space between them.

Let’s get back to our man on the Times, Andy Grey, struggling with syntax in his attempt to write today’s story from tomorrow’s mythical (because nonexistent) point of view. To put it another way, he was trying to manipulate the language so his story would look back as honestly as possible, from a day that wouldn’t exist, on the events of Earth’s last day.

Yet his story could not be 100% positive.

The first edition appeared at ten p.m. and there was always the possibility, however slight, that something might happen between press time and midnight to change everything. Theoretically it was an impossible story to write. Actually, though, it could be done if it were sufficiently hedged, with enough loopholes left.

Andy Grey rolled another sheet of copy paper into his typewriter, lit another cigarette (at least lung cancer would never touch him now) and tried again to write a lead that would, as they say, “stand up” through all editions, both those that came out tonight and those printed, or due to be printed, tomorrow.

The world came to an end yesterday. Of course you couldn’t say that. If it had, there’d be no one left to write such a sentence.

The Earth was due to be destroyed last night, the top international scientists agreed. Said when? Last night, presumably. But the concept of “last night” cannot exist unless there is a “today” to look back from. Thus, if the world had ended last night, there could be no today and the sentence, designed to be read by today-people, was nonsense.

There will be no today, despite the date on this newspaper. Never in The New York Times—too whimsical!

It could have been done entirely with out-of-town datelines like Washington, London and Moscow—there were plenty of such stories already in type under “yesterday’s” date—but the publisher and president of the paper had decided that the overall lead had to be an undated one, so-called, written from the point of view of the date of the newspaper: “today,” meaning tomorrow.

Andy Grey crumpled up his umpteenth piece of copy paper and lit his next cigarette, reflecting that the problems posed by European Press in bygone days were pikers compared to his present dilemma.

A copy boy brought Andy the first editions of “tomorrow’s” tabloid, the Daily News, which came out two hours earlier than the Times.

“END NIGH,” the Daily News said in its biggest, thickest headline type. Before pursuing this to p. 3, where the story was, Grey turned to the center fold minus one, to see what the editorial said. Typically colloquial, it was headed “SO LONG, EVERYBODY,” and went on:

We hear we’re wasting our time writing this editorial for a paper that won’t hit the stands today (which is really tomorrow to us—that is, the man writing this), but there’s an old show-business adage which, adapted to our business, applies here: the paper must come out if it’s at all possible.

We naturally greet the news of our impending doom, and yours, as so dramatically described by our Washington man on page 3, with mixed emotions . . .

Grey envied the News its easy, colloquial approach to doomsday. Inside was a sidebar under these encouraging words: “RELIGIOUS LEADERS PLEDGE HEREAFTER.”

None of this was of any help to Grey. He was well into his fourth pack when the boy came up with the Herald Tribune, which had obviously advanced its publication time. The Trib, which had been livelying itself up these many years, much to the Times’ annoyance, had put all its columnists on the front page, as if to assuage the grief of its readership by showing them that Walter Lippmann, John Crosby, David Lawrence, Judith Crist and Art Buchwald were going, too. Each had something wise, funny, wry or profound to say about the putative end of the world. Donald I. Rogers, the financial editor, was not on the front page but his comment was summarized there, in the Topic A column. He said, in part, “If these words are read today, I predict the biggest, best, bull-est day Wall Street has ever had!!!” (Exclamation points his.)

The Trib’s headline, all-encompassing in its simplicity, said: “NO TOMORROW?”

That question mark, after the word which so magnificently ignored the petty journalistic fetish of yesterday-today-tomorrow by transmuting itself into its metaphorical sense—meaning, loosely, the future—was the despair of every other newspaper editor in New York and, eventually, the world.

Because, of course, the world did not end.

There had been a mistake by the computers, which had been operating on old data, fed to them by old programmers, who had got their stuff from old scientists.

Had it been 1900 when the noxious cloud touched Earth, or even 1930, mankind, not to speak of animalkind, bird-kind, fishkind and insectkind, would have perished instanter. But, in the years between, Earthmen had contaminated their atmosphere with radiation, automobile exhaust, DDT and other anti-insect sprays, smokestack exhaust, cigarette, cigar and pipe smoke, autumn weed smoke from the proliferating suburbs and multifarious miscellaneous contaminants. It was this unwholesome combination, called by some the “Rachel Carson effect,” which saved Earth.

The whole shemozzle, as Buchwald later called it, was far more poisonous than the petty little toxic-cloud menace alleged to have been threatening the planet.

What had happened was that humanity, little by little over the decades, had built up immunities to the various poisons it was forced to live with and ingest. The cumulative immunity was a fantastically powerful one which it would have taken a real hoopdinger of a menace, as Earl Wilson was to put it, to outdo.

Thus Earth lived—as recorded in an Associated Press flash sent (by who knows what group of dedicated newsmen) at 12:01 a.m. EST. It said, simply, “FLASH—EARTH LIVES,” and there were an awful lot of bells ringing on the teletype machines. UPI was only about half a minute behind with its own realization that another day had begun.

Consternation reigned, of course. There was a bull market, as the Trib’s Don Rogers predicted.

There was also a lot of panic in high places as the bosses who had given it away went crazy trying to get it back. And an awful lot of people, from President Orion Newcastle to little Billy Boyce, weren’t giving up a thing.