"We carry no accounts for a Dovetonsils, Percy," the machine said.
"How about Harold Bissonette? Double S, double T."
"We carry no accounts for a Bissonette, Harold."
"Try Flywheel, Wolf J."
The machine had never heard of old Wolf, either, and I broke the connection. I marked off two more possibilities on the grid I had made on a page of creamy-white hotel stationery, and called the next bank on my list.
Long ago I had read a biography of W. C. Fields, the great film comedian from the dawn of the talking-picture era. Fields was not a very nice man, but he was a quirky one. When he traveled, and when he had money, he would stop in small towns and open accounts in local banks. He seemed to enjoy the thought of having emergency stashes squirreled away all over the country. His had been a harsh childhood, he trusted no one very far. If he kept any list of these accounts, no one ever found it, and it was assumed at his death that he had long since lost track of most of them. Their location died with him.
Well, I thought that was just a wonderfully eccentric thing to do. I decided to follow in his footsteps, back in the days when I had more money than I knew what to do with. Everywhere I went I opened small accounts, almost none of them in my own name. I was going to be different from Fields, though. I was going to remember where they all were.
I did remember a few. Those were all long gone.
Sometimes it seems to me that my younger self spent most of his time dreaming up things he could do to make my older self miserable. You ever feel that way? You were twenty, you had the world by the tail. Outlooks were all rosy. It would never occur to you that, by the time you were eighty or ninety or, ahem, one hundred, your worldview would have changed dramatically. That you need not be senile to forget things you did seventy years before. That, in all that time, you would have ample chance to lose your careful notes, both written and mental. At twenty, there is simply no imagining the slings and arrows of outrageous vicissitude.
Or maybe I'm unusual. Maybe I'm a grasshopper and you are all ants, or most of you, anyway. Perhaps your life is in perfect order, everything cataloged, pigeonholed, in its proper place. I used to sneer at that sort of life, and I probably am temperamentally incapable of leading such a life, but it does have its attractions. But how was I to learn frugality, caution, temperance, moderation—all those things so beloved of poor Richard Almanack—the way I was brought up? I never had what you'd call a home until I moved in with Polly and Melina.
In any event, my one attempt at being a good little ant, storing up acorns for a rainy day, was by now far in the past. Most, if not all, of those caches had been plundered years ago. I no longer knew where, or even if, those piles of acorns existed. My careful accounting had come to naught.
I did have one thing going for me, though. I had used a limited number of names, twenty-five in all. I'd chosen them carefully as names unlikely to be inflicted on anyone ever again, yet names I would not forget because they were all old friends of mine.
So now when I first arrive at a place I have not visited in a long time, I spend a few hours idly paging through the listings of financial institutions on the Yellow Screen.
You never know. One day twenty years ago I stumbled onto an account in the name of William Claude Dukenfield. It was one of "my" names, but the money had been deposited in 1935. Somehow, through mergers, takeovers, booms and busts, devaluations, failures and holidays, through the very Invasion of the earth itself, this little account was still tucked away in a bank on Mars that might have been the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the little Poughkeepsie neighborhood bank where old W.C. had left it, in the midst of a great depression. Still gathering interest. I had no way to get at it, probably wouldn't have tried, anyway. Ironic fact: the original deposit had been two hundred United States dollars. When I found it, inflation and other exigencies had allowed the money to grow to the princely sum of L$239.14. About enough for two days in the hotel I was making my calls from.
"How may I help you?"
The voice was practically identical to the machine voice at the first bank I'd called.
"Is this the computerized answering service of Hamlet Savings and Loan?"
"Yes, it is."
"I'm searching for accounts in the name of Otis Criblecoblis."
"I'm sorry, we carry no accounts in that name."
"How about J. Cheever Loophole?"
"I'm sorry, we carry no—
"Try Eustace McGargle."
"I'm sorry, we—" I hung up. Two down, about sixty or seventy to go.
Why three names? you may be asking. Why not just read off the list of twenty-five names at each bank you call? There was actually no completely logical reason, since I was pretty sure I was doing nothing illegal. But when you have as many outstanding warrants or persons pursuing you as I do, you learn to be cautious. Asking for nonexistent bank accounts was almost sure to raise a red flag somewhere in the bank computer's programming, the electronic equivalent of a teller calling the bank president over to frown dubiously at the check you're trying to kite. I much prefer wide-eyed innocence to the professionally jaundiced eye. Nothing is more wide-eyed than a computer. It does what it is told, and never asks the next logical question. Four was a common number of events to trigger programmed alarms, possibly based on what is known as the Bellman Principle: What I tell you three times is true. Ergo, what I tell you four times might be a load of shit.
That, plus the fact that three is my lucky number.
"How may I help you?"
"Bank of Oberon? I'm searching for accounts in the name of Egbert Souse."
"You're out of luck there." Great. A user-friendly program.
"Then surely you've heard of Hugo Z. Hackenbush."
"Not during this lifetime." Did this bank cater to comedians?
"One last try, shithead. A. Pismo Clam."
"Does the A stand for Ambrose, or Albert?" I sat up straighter. Was I getting a bite?
"Which one do you have?" I asked, cautiously.
"Neither one. I have a William Clam, and a Jake's Clams, though."
"Yeah, well, stick it—" I broke the connection. No use trying to get the last word with a computer. I stood up and stretched, took a sip from the rum and Coke on the telephone desk, then walked to the window and looked out.
Oberon. The Bard's World. My God, what a place.
Just about everything on Oberon is worthy of a postcard. So where does one start? At the beginning, I guess. Actually, a little bit before.
What we call Oberon today is not what we called Oberon when I was a boy. Oberon is the most distant of the Uranian moons, and the second largest. It's smaller than Titania by a few dozen miles, and about a hundred thousand miles farther away from Uranus. It used to be an unremarkable little ball of rock, faintly orange in color.
Like all the outer-planet habitats, it didn't have enough gravity to be of much use other than as a nuisance. Not enough gravity to make a curtain fall properly, to stage a decent sword fight, or to perform classical ballet. This was naturally a cause of some concern to the Oberoni, so they set about finding a way to provide enough gravity for the theater.
Actually, they had a few other reasons that may have counted more heavily than falling theater curtains. But I can dream, can't I?
Research has shown, so I'm told, that the healthiest environment for humans and other Earth-evolved animals is somewhere between Luna's one sixth and Mars's one third. Anything lighter caused Lowgrav Syndrome, which wouldn't kill you but could certainly annoy you a lot, and which was expensive to treat and hold in remission. Anything higher... well, humans were no longer living anywhere with more than 0.5 gravity, and good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. I experienced one gravity in the Trip to Earth centrifuge at Armstrong Park when I was six. We've all seen the effects of one gee in old movies and television. People plod like elephants in molasses. Things fall at a frightening rate. Bodies are bulked up by fighting gravity while the flesh is dragged down from giving in to it. Every inch of skin sags. Some of it is painful, and I left the centrifuge wondering how they could face threescore and ten years of that. Not for me, thank you very much.