He had another little drink—really a short one this time—less than two ounces.
“Enough,” Three said. “Now run.” Hanley took two steps and fell flat on his face. He rolled over on his back and lay there, a blissful smile on his face.
“Incredible!” Three said. “Perhaps he is attempting to fool us. Check him, Nine.”
Nine checked. “Incredible!” he said. “Indeed incredible after so little exertion but he is completely unconscious —unconscious to the degree of being insensible to pain. And he is not faking. His type is completely useless to Dar. Set the controls and we shall report back. And take him, according to our subsidiary orders, as a specimen for the zoological gardens. He’ll be worth having there. Physically he is the strangest specimen we have discovered on any of several million planets.”
Three wrapped himself around the controls and used both ends to -manipulate mechanisms. A hundred and sixty-three thousand light , years and 1,630 centuries passed, cancelling each other out so completely and perfectly that’ neither time nor distance seemed to have been traversed.
In the capital city of Dar, which rules thousands of useful planets, and has visited millions of useless ones—like Earth—Al Hanley occupies a large glass cage in a place of honor, as a truly amazing specimen.
There is a pool in the middle of it, from which he drinks often and in which he has been known to bathe. It is filled with a constantly flowing supply of a beverage that is delicious beyond all deliciousness, that is to the best whiskey of Earth as the best whiskey of Earth is to bathtub gin made in a dirty bathtub! Moreover it is fortified —tastelessly—with every vitamin and mineral his metabolism requires.
It causes no hangovers or other unpleasant consequences. It is a drink as delightful to Hanley as the amazing conformation of Hanley is delightful to the frequenters of the zoo, who stare at him in bewilderment and then read the sign on his cage, which leads off in what looks ‘to be Latin with the designation of his species as Al told it to Three and Nine:
Lives on diet of C2H5OH, slightly fortified with vitamins and minerals. Occasionally brilliant but completely illogical. Extent of stamina—able to take only a few steps without falling. Utterly without value commercially but a fascinating specimen of the strangest form of life yet discovered in the Galaxy. Habitat—Planet 3 bf Sun JX6547-HG908.
So strange, in fact, that they have given him a treatment that makes him practically immortal. And a good thing that is, because he’s so interesting as a zoological specimen that if he ever dies they might come back to Earth for another one. And they might happen to pick up you or me—and you or I, as the case might be, might happen to be sober. And that would be bad for all of us.
Paradox Lost
A BLUE bottle fly had got in through the screen, somehow, and it droned in monotonous circles around the ceiling of the classroom. Even as Professor Dolohan droned in monotonous circles of logic up at the front of the class. Shorty McCabe, seated in the back row, glanced from one to another of them and finally settled on the bluebottle fly as the more interesting of the two.
“The negative absolute,” said the professor, “is, in a manner of speaking, not absolutely negative. This is only seemingly contradictory. Reversed in order, the two words acquire new connotations. Therefore—”
Shorty McCabe sighed inaudibly and watched the bluebottle fly, and wished that he could fly around in circles like that, and with such a soul-satisfying buzz. In comparative sizes and decibels, a fly made more noise than an airplane.
More noise, in comparison to size, than a buzz saw. Would a buzz saw saw metal? Say, a saw. Then one could say he saw a buzz saw saw a saw. Or leave out the buzz and that would be better: I saw a saw saw a saw. Or, better yet: Sue saw a saw saw a saw.
“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
“Yeah,” thought Shorty McCabe, “one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache?” Anyway, the bluebottle fly was becoming more interesting. It was flying down now, toward the front of the classroom, and maybe it would light on Professor Dolohan’s head. And buzz.
No, but it lighted somewhere out of sight behind the professor’s desk. Without the fly for solace, Shorty looked around the classroom for something else to look at or think about. Only the backs of heads; he was alone in the back row, and— well, he could concentrate on how the hair grew on the backs of people’s necks, but it seemed a subject of limited fascination.
He wondered how many of the students ahead of him were asleep, and decided that half of them were; and he wished he could go to sleep himself, but he couldn’t. He’d made the silly mistake of going to bed early the night before and as a result he was now wide awake and miserable.
“But,” said Professor Dolohan, “if we disregard the contravention of probability arising in the statement that the positive absolute is less than absolutely positive, we are led to—” Hooray! The bluebottle fly was back again, rising from its temporary concealment back of the desk. It droned upward to the ceiling, paused there a moment to preen its wings, and then flew down again, this time toward the back of the room.
And if it kept that spiral course, it would go past within an inch of Shorty’s nose. It did. He went cross-eyed watching it and turned his head to keep it in sight. It flew past and—
It just wasn’t there any more. At a point about twelve inches to the left of Shorty McCabe, it had suddenly quit flying and suddenly quit buzzing, and it wasn’t there. It hadn’t died and hadn’t fallen into the aisle. It had just—
Disappeared. In midair, four feet above the aisle, it had simply ceased to be there. The sound it had made seemed to have stopped in midbuzz, and in the sudden silence the professor’s voice seemed louder, if not funnier.
“By creating, through an assumption contrary to fact, we create a pseudo-real set of axioms which are, in a measure, the reversal of existing—”
Shorty McCabe, staring at the point where the fly had vanished, said “Gaw!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, professor. I didn’t speak,” said Shorty. “I… I just cleared my throat.”
“—by the reversal of existing—What was I saying? Oh, yes. We create an axiomatic basis of a pseudo-logic which would yield different answers to all problem. I mean—”
Seeing that the professor’s eyes had left him, Shorty turned his head again to look at the point where the fly had ceased to fly. Had ceased, maybe, to be a fly? Nuts; it must have been an optical illusion. A fly went pretty fast. If he’s suddenly lost sight of it—
He shot a look out of the comer of his eye at Professor Dolohan, and made sure that the professor’s attention was focused elsewhere. Then Shorty reached out a tentative hand toward the point, or the approximate point where he’d seen the fly vanish.
He didn’t know what he expected to find there, but he didn’t feel anything at all. Well, that was logical enough. If the fly had flown into nothing and he, Shorty, had reached out and felt nothing, that proved nothing. But, somehow, he was vaguely disappointed. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find; hardly to touch the fly that wasn’t there, or to encounter a solid but invisible obstacle, or anything. But—what had happened to the fly?
Shorty put his hands on the desk and, for a full minute, tried to forget the fly by listening to the professor. But that was worse than wondering about the fly.