Part 5 (2/2)

Fortunately, that was no longer of much consequence, since a Californian lady whom I had met in Pensacola moved down to join me. Her name was Jackie-we'd been introduced in an Irish pub by a girlfriend of hers that I had gotten to know after walking in the wrong door of a restaurant and blundering into a private function of the Pensacola Press Club. Jackie was an extraordinary person who had studied things like philosophy, art, and electronics, spent four years in the Navy as a weapons instructor and then transferred to the Army to be a parachutist, and was now working in a bookstore. Like me she had been married twice. Jackie also seemed to have read everything in science fiction ever written, which was invaluable. So through the summer I retyped Giant's Star in the day while Jackie was at work, and we talked about it through the evenings and usually well into the early hours over endless pots of coffee at Perkins' twenty-four hour pancake restaurant across the street.

For the first time ever, I was able to work exclusively on things that I wanted to do, in my own time and at my own pace without distraction. I was getting to know better the colorful world of American fandom and science-fiction conventions, and there were TV and radio interviews, and guest-speaker invitations from universities and elsewhere to break the routine. I had kept in touch with my daughters and sent them plane tickets each summer to come and spend their vacation wherever I happened to be, and Jackie and I made lots of friends in central Florida. We started talking about buying a house there; in fact she was all set to manage a new store that Waldenbooks was about to open at Daytona. After all, it was obvious that we were going to be there for quite a while, wasn't it? n.o.body in their right minds would disturb a pleasant, comfortable, settled situation like that, would they? Of course not.

It happened like this.

I had always wanted to drive across the U.S. I'd flown to the West Coast several times on business, but sitting in an armchair up in the sky for a few hours wasn't the way to appreciate the immensity of this country. Well, while we were sitting around in Perkins' one night, trying to think of something new to talk about now that Giant's Star was finished, I suggested, ”Let's go to California.”

Part of Jackie's appeal has always been the iron hold that she keeps on her composure. ”Right now, you want to go to California?”

”Sure, why not? I feel like a drive.”

Thoughtful silence, then a shrug. ”Okay.”

So we paid the check, went home, tossed some things into a suitcase, and reached California four days later. We saw the mountains, Yosemite Valley, San Francisco, the Bay Area, and a lot of other places that I'd always wanted to visit. It was just a break-a couple of weeks of getting away before moving to Daytona, where Jackie would start her new job and I would begin the next book. Then we started talking to some people next to us in a bar. They said, ”You ought to spend a day seeing Route Forty-nine while you're here,” which turned out to be a scenic highway in the Sierra Nevada foothills, running through the towns of the gold-rush era. We drove into a town called Sonora, which was picturesque and quaint, with its small shopfronts, covered sidewalks, and people actually walking around on legs-unlike the spread-out automobile-scale towns you see everywhere, where all the places you want to go are separated by twenty-minute drives. It was a people-scale town. We got out and walked around.

Everyone was friendly. While I was browsing through the local paper in a coffee shop, I came across an ad for an apartment that sounded interesting. Jackie said, ”Let's have a look at it, just for fun.” So I called the number.

We took the apartment. Before we could move in, however, we had to drive back to Florida to tidy things up there, and then back once more to California-three times across the continent in a month, which got that bug out of my system. For the final trip we traded our cars in for a customized Chevy van, and I vividly remember spending the early hours of Christmas Day morning, 1980 changing a wheel in the middle of the Arizona desert.

People are always asking me how long it takes to write a book. Typing the words doesn't take all that long-with my way of working, anyway. That's just the final phase of a process that begins long before-usually years before. During a conversation that I'd had with some friends once in a pub back in England, someone had asked what I thought the solution was to the problem in Northern Ireland. I'd replied that there wasn't one; but then, after some reflection, I added, ”Unless you can find a way to separate the children from the adults for one generation.” Writers can't make a remark like that without it leading off into a new trail of thoughts. If children weren't to be raised by human adults, then what else would raise them? How about smart machines? Most people's immediate reaction to such a suggestion is concern and dismay at the cold, unemotional, somehow sinister relations.h.i.+p that they visualize would necessarily exist. But a lot of story ideas come from rejecting the obvious answers and thinking about the alternatives. Why should the relations.h.i.+p have to be cold and unemotional? As a visit to any school's sixth-grade computer club at ten in the evening will confirm, children love machines-closing the building is sometimes the only way to get them out. So why couldn't such a relations.h.i.+p be warm and friendly instead-even charming? What kind of a story might result from treating it that way? That was how Silver Shoes for a Princess came about. Later I extended the notion to cover a whole society descended from a machine-raised first generation, which became the basis for the next novel, Voyage from Yesteryear, published in 1982-at least six years after I began thinking about it. So that's my answer to how long it takes to write a book.

It seems that Jackie, who is now my third wife, and I are setting a tradition of doing something different to celebrate the occasion whenever we finish a new book. As soon as Voyage had been mailed off to New York, our first son, Alex, was born-at home in true mountain-country tradition, with no needles, bright lights, funny smells, or antiseptic people; instead, friends and family, beer and hamburgers, and smiling faces. It seems a much nicer way of welcoming new human beings into the world.

Thinking and talking about intelligent machines had made me want to write a story about a world with a naturally evolving machine biosphere, which eventually appeared in 1983 as Code of the Lifemaker.

Jackie and I bought a big, old, rambling house in the center of Sonora that had been empty for a year or so and needed a lot of fixing. So I found myself spending lots of time drilling, sawing, hammering, and digging, laying drains, pouring concrete . . . and, inevitably, fixing windows. Strange, isn't it, how life has this repet.i.tive flavor about it.

The next project was The Proteus Operation, eventually published by Bantam, which took a year and a half to research and write, and mixes science fiction with World War II history. It also features a procession of real people as guest characters, which made it a new and interesting experiment in writing.

While it was in progress, we had our second son, Michael. After that I wrote another book, Endgame Enigma, mixing science fiction with modern-day espionage and CIA-KGB antics this time-and to keep up the tradition, we had another son, Joe. (During both her previous marriages Jackie was told by various medical eminences that it was physically impossible for her to have children.) And so I find myself in a large house in a small, picturesque town near the mountains, with three young children. Strange, isn't it, how life has this . . .

Sometimes I claim that being an American is a state of mind and has nothing to do with where one comes from or how one speaks. As social evolution progresses, I believe that humanity as a whole will acquire and mix with its other attributes the confidence in itself and its abilities that I think of as characteristically American. The universe in which we live is limitless in every direction, and contains a greater abundance of energy and other resources, opportunity, and room to expand and grow than we could ever know what to do with. Nature imposes no limits on us as a species, either to what we can achieve or upon what we can become. The only limits that matter are those that people create in their minds. There are no finite resources, only finite thinking.

Although there will always be problems to be faced and risks to be taken, I feel optimistic about the future. Those are the sentiments that I try to project and share in the things I write. I hope I shall never find reason to feel otherwise.

Afterword, 1996 From the gist of the foregoing, it shouldn't really come as a surprise to learn that new things didn't suddenly stop happening and life become uneventful in 1988. It was readers who had asked for an autobiographical thread to be included in the first place, and from the reactions that I got it seems they weren't disappointed. So more anecdotes of right-angle turns and ensuing muddlings-through are contained in Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution. Among other things, it reveals how I personally toppled the Soviet empire and describes the restoration of large, old Irish houses as a sure cure for sanity.

THE PACIFIST.

Fifty meters below ground level in a secret, concrete-walled laboratory complex beneath the headquarters of the World Peace Foundation, the last hope for humanity and a sane, rational world stood on its steel supporting platform.

Its general form was a ten-foot-diameter torus, set horizontally and painted dull black to be inconspicuous at night. The outer ring contained the Tipler-field simulated ma.s.s circulators, Schwarzchild ring compensator, and boundary cut-off equalizers, and left just enough room in the center for the antimatter-fueled power generator and the cramped c.o.c.kpit enclosure containing the instrument panel and solitary operator's seat. After more than ten years of unrelenting effort and tenacity in the face of problems that many had thought insoluble, the time machine was complete. Flanked by the WPF scientists and technicians who had helped make it a reality, Professor Magnus Maximilian Magus, its conceiver and creator, stood gazing down at it from the gla.s.s-walled control room overlooking the floor.

Standing in the opened hatch above the c.o.c.kpit, his head held proudly erect, his eyes clear and s.h.i.+ning, and his jaw set solidly in resolve, the time commando listened as the final words of the professor's exhortation rang over the loudspeaker system.

”. . . that after three worldwide conflicts of increasing destructiveness, mankind would have learned. The First World War took us from cavalry to the warplane and the tank; the Second, from the heavy bomber to nuclear weapons; and the Third, from the ICBM to the orbiting gamma-ray-laser bombardment platform. But nothing had been learned. And today, barely more than a generation after rebuilding its cities from the rubble of the last conflagration, our race stands divided yet again, but this time by a line that runs between worlds-we, of the Terran League, and the offworld alliance. This time the weapons have interplanetary range capability. If they are ever used, it will surely mean the end of our existence as a species.”

Magus raised his hands in appeal behind the control room window. ”It did not have to be this way. The spiral into ever greater depths of insanity was not inevitable. For by right, the 'War to End Wars' of 1914 should have been, and could have been, just that-a sweeping away of the old power structure and social order before the final triumph of Reason toward which Europe had been moving for centuries.

. . .” Magus paused ominously, and his voice fell. ”But the promise was not fulfilled. Instead of welcoming the peaceful, scientifically planned society which we, the custodians of Reason stood ready to design”-the professor stretched out an arm to indicate the people around him-”the world turned its back on Reason, sacrificing itself to the vain ambitions and pretensions of lesser intellects.” Magus's fists clenched, and his face took on a pinker hue. ”Mediocrities! Ignoramuses! Uneducated charlatans and showmen posturing as thinkers! They abused the power that we had created for them, and they cheated us out of the-” He checked himself with a cough and regained his composure. ”But now the day has arrived that will allow us to correct the error. In so doing, we will eradicate the tragedies that have followed, and we will create in their place the Golden Age of peace and enlightenment that should have been.”

Magus pointed down at where the machine was standing. The time commando straightened to attention and thrust out his chin as the amplified voice boomed down over the floor, ”And you, Elmer Theodosius Ulysses Kunz, have been selected to carry out this supreme mission, unique in the annals of all history, to travel back and recast destiny. Go now to your duty, knowing that our cause is righteous, and a.s.sured that every one of us will be there with you in spirit.”

Time Commando Kunz extended his arm high in a final salute. ”May universal peace, brotherhood, and reason come to prevail among all men. I go, to destroy the archprototype of tyrants. Time will be rewritten, with harmony and goodwill between the worlds, and an end to intolerance.”

”Harmony between the worlds!” Magus led.

”Stamp out intolerance!” Kunz and the chorus chanted back in unison.

In a last dramatic gesture, Kunz pulled his heavy green cloak tight around himself with both hands before stepping down to disappear into the c.o.c.kpit. To avoid being conspicuous when he emerged, he was wearing the leather shorts and cross-braced suspenders, red stockings, loose white s.h.i.+rt, and feathered hat, which the limited research material available-few records had survived the Third Great War to End Wars-indicated had been the typical dress of central Europe in the early twentieth century. The mission planners had added the cloak because it would be winter there when he arrived. Also, it provided concealment for the high-power infantry a.s.sault laser; rapid-fire submachine cannon; .45 caliber solid-shot sidearm with silencer; close-range neurotoxin gas pistol; four fragmentation, two blast, and two incendiary grenades; dagger; garotte; and air-powered, cyanide-tipped dart gun, which the Peace Foundation's weapons experts had deemed minimum for the mission.

He checked that the larger items of equipment were in their places in the rack below the hatch, then squeezed himself down into the narrow seat. The panel lights indicated that all systems checks were completed and had registered positive. Then a whine came from just above his head as the hatch closed over the c.o.c.kpit, and a solid clunk signaled the latch engaging. The status summary light was showing orange, which meant that the executive computer had already synchronized its countdown to the control room, and the display next to it was showing less than a minute to zero. The system was now awaiting merely his confirmation to deactivate the final fail-safe override that would abort the launch command at the end of the sequence.

Kunz cast his eyes slowly around the tiny chamber and across the panel indicators one last time to impress upon himself the solemnity of the moment. Then, he licked his lips, drew in a long breath, and said into the stalk microphone projecting from one side of his seat, ”Checking positive at zero minus fifty seconds. Request permission to disengage final abort interlock.”

The supervisor's voice came through on a channel from the control room. ”Positive status confirmed on all circuits. You may proceed.”

Kunz felt the tension rising in his body. He unlocked the switch, closed his fingers around it, hesitated for one, maybe two, seconds, and then threw the switch from its Abort on Zero position to Launch. The status light changed to green, and more greens appeared lower down on the panel. Keeping his voice steady only with an effort, he reported, ”Interlock disengaged, positive function.” The countdown indicator was reading thirty-five seconds.

Then Magus's voice came through. ”At this fateful moment, the turning point of history, we of the Peace Foundation salute you, Kunz. Remember as you go forth that all our hopes, our aspirations, the very future for which we have labored over these years-everything depends on you now.”

”I shall remember. Have no fear, comrades. Your trust shall not prove misplaced,” Kunz promised, his voice rising.

”Go, fearlessly and with honor, for peace!” Magus's voice thundered.

”Ten seconds,” the supervisor's voice interjected.

”For peace!” Kunz cried.

A hum emanated from the ma.s.s recirculators, became louder, and rose to a shriek. The compensators started to whistle, and whoop. A red glow filled the s.p.a.ce surrounding the c.o.c.kpit, and patterns of lights flashed across the instrument panel, while in the center, the numerals of the countdown indicator read off the final seconds 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . 0!”

”Ayeiii! . . .”

Kunz's world exploded in a storm of color, sound, and chaotic tactile sensations as s.p.a.ce and time unraveled about him, and unfamiliar patterns of energy quanta overloaded all his sensory systems simultaneously. . . .

He was aware of the shapes surrounding him, but in an unreal kind of way, as if they were parts of a different world projecting out of other dimensions. They consisted only of iridescent outlines without substance-hollow-wire figures of light, s.h.i.+mmering in a void. His thoughts seemed to be running simultaneously in a thousand directions at once, yet at the same time to be frozen into immobility. He could see the entire networks of a.s.sociations, branching, repeating, reforming, and coalescing, but with all of the parts managing to coexist together without any impression of sequence. He was experiencing timelessness, he knew; but like an infant opening its eyes for the first time without any prior experience to interpret the sensations that his mind was registering.

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