Marty nodded. “I liked to sit here and read. It was a good feeling, to be with the best people their times could produce.”
“Get a DNA cheek swab from him,” Ursula said. “Imply that he’s got this job because he’s the most diligent organizer willing to do it. That’ll make him feel better.”
“Martin,” Early said, “they need orderly minds to sort their memories out. How would you like to have any good genes you carry added to the mix of every general they’re made into?”
“I think I’d like it a lot.”
Back in the elevator, Early murmured, “That was a damn nice thing to do.”
“I like when I can combine that with doing a good job,” Ursula said. “I also like when someone displays intelligence. You picked up on the idea right away.”
“Thanks,” Early said, keeping his own counsel.
It didn’t help. “I see. You got the purpose and the method, but you thought I was just being considerate. Two out of three.”
“Two out of three-”
“-Is a D, Buford.”
He was fuming by the time he got back to his apartment. Ursula became visible again, and he went over to his desk and gave the nearest leg a vicious kick. It broke off, bounced against the wall, and rebounded where he could grab it. He turned and aimed the stub at her. “You missed one,” he said.
“And you missed my companion,” she said.
“Are you serious? ‘There’s someone behind you’? That’s the oldest trick in the book.”
A huge, gloved feline hand reached over his head and plucked the puncher out of his grasp.
“Actually, the oldest trick in the book is kidnapping a couple of teenagers, brainwiping them, waking them up in a prepared habitat, and saying, ‘I made you out of dust and I made her out of one of your ribs,’” said Ursula.
Early turned carefully and looked at the indubitable kzin in his apartment. His suit looked like it was made out of balloons. “Oh, hell,” Early said.
“I thought it was ‘hello,’” said the kzin. “Human languages are weird.”
“I need to recreate the roast I ate earlier. Stun him and put him back to bed, then we have to get moving to arrange the supposed wreck of the ship with the bodies.”
As the kzin brought up his other hand-the one with the stunner-the only thing Buford Early could think of was, I am the very model of a modern major general-
He saw the room tilt, then stop as he was caught. The rest was silence.
Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.
He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.
Certainly not by a group of stern-faced guards. He checked his weapons by reflex, but left them; he’d spent his entire career doing what he believed was right, and however someone had disagreed on what that might have been, shooting his way through his fellow ARMs wasn’t it. He opened the ’doc and said, “Do I get to eat?”
“You’re not under arrest,” said Smith. The Marsborn agent was the only man he recognized. “But we really do want to ask you an awful lot of questions. The ship you sent off last night has disappeared.”
“Ship?”
Smith squinted, then said, “Aw, tanj, he’s had an erasure. Assume lethal traps and search the place.”
“I can point things out if you like,” Early said, utterly at a loss. Why would he have an erasure?
“You might have had some things erased,” Smith said.
Early got up, went into the bathroom, showered, dressed-he’d apparently remembered to run the laundry last night, all his clothes were in the cabinet-and went to the kitchen to start the roast.
After a while he heard an exclamation and came to the doorway to see who’d made what mistake. They were all standing at the desk looking at the screen. Smith looked at him and said, “Where the fuck did you get this crystal?”
Early spread his hands, shook his head, and went over to see what it was.
It was in kzin script, with a running translation down the side of the screen.
If it was genuine, it was the entire kzin order of battle, including the target schedule for the current war. They were making copies already.
He must have had an erasure to protect the identity of one king-hell insider in the Patriarch’s Palace.
“If this checks out,” Smith said, “that funny business last night isn’t going to cause you much trouble. You’ll probably be promoted to a directorship to keep you out of trouble, but I imagine you’d find it difficult to get out from behind your desk under the weight of all the medals anyway. Marshall, you’re either the smartest man alive, or the luckiest.”
The copying was done, and the screen reverted to a desktop that wasn’t his: a reclining woman he’d never seen before, almost entirely Caucasian, nude, built like he liked ’em, and smiling at the camera with what looked much very like love in her eyes. Below it was perhaps the most unnecessary caption imaginable:
HOT.
THE WHITE COLUMN
by Hal Colebatch
The lift took me deep underground, past five decks of steel and concrete, the guard glaring at me and my own escort, and apparently deciding he hadn’t quite got an excuse to shoot us. The site was well hardened.
General Burkholtz greeted me at Level 5 and took me through the second retinal identification. Then our far-seer was to be presented to me.
“We’ve tested him at short range, sir. To show us, under top secrecy of course, headlines of newspapers from different parts of the world, from a few weeks ahead. In each case the newspapers, when they were printed, were exactly as he had pictured them. It works for sounds as well-he recorded a new symphony before it was written. It was just a matter of fitting phones on the opti-encephalograph.”
“Why not just have him read all the future documents, then?”
“He can’t see to that degree of visual detail. And also because in every previous case where such an ability has been present in some degree, it very rapidly burns itself out. It did with Basil Shackleton. Already we are starting to get flickerings in the pictures he ‘transmits.’ Once the ability has gone, it doesn’t come back. We don’t want to waste it, sir. He’s the best we’ve ever had, but judging from the rate of ‘flickering’ we have recorded, which is increasing exponentially, he probably has only one session left in him. We don’t want to waste it.”
“Is he aware of this?”
“That he’s nearly finished as a far-seer? Yes. I think he’s rather pleased at the prospect of becoming normal.”
“Can you tell what the headlines of the newspapers he saw say, at least?”
“The usual stuff, sir. Things going from bad to worse. Nuclear proliferation. Environmental decay. The blow-up getting nearer. We’ve photographs of them here.”
“It reminds me of a science fiction story I once read,” I said. “Someone else who could see the future, just like this. The military, for obvious reasons, asked him to draw the most advanced weapon he could see from a century hence. They puzzled over the picture he brought back, turned it over to the best teams of scientists. Someone eventually recognized it as a crossbow.”
There was a very mirthless laugh from these, our own best team of scientists. They brought Richard Billings, the far-seer, forward and presented me to him. A very ordinary name, I thought.
He was a somewhat shabby, unkempt-looking man, despite the major’s uniform someone had put him into, not unpleasant-looking, but undistinguished and, apart from the pallor they all shared from living underground, out of place in this company of high-domed heads and spectacles. Like many people, he seemed somewhat shy at meeting me. I told him we all appreciated the patriotic thing he was doing. The pallor threw up his blushes and he stammered something.