The Steam-Driven Boy Read online

  He remembered only isolated facts about this trip: sending a change-of-address card to the Guzz; losing his ticket; not bringing enough paper (and so alighting from the train at Attica, where University officials were waiting to greet him, his hands so full of slips of toilet paper on which were pencilled notes toward a theory of history that he could not accept the handshakes of these venerables). Without comment he settled into his new life and went on working.

  From time to time he wondered what was in the sandwich that came with each lesson. A wonder drug that unlocked hidden knowledge that lay ‘sleeping’ within him? An intelligence accelerator? Whatever it was, it was essential to the process. The only time he’d tried studying without it, Claude had floundered among symbols that almost made sense.

  He wondered, too, about the Guzz. The little he learned about their planet and culture (in the final lesson) whetted his appetite for more. He longed to know everything about them, almost to become one of them: They alone would understand what he was doing. It was becoming clear that his colleagues at the university considered him some kind of freak – he would not wear a suit, he could not converse about departmental politics and he was inhumanly intelligent.

  Claude ordered all the information on the Guzz he could get. This proved to be a slim volume by a second-rate anthropologist who had interviewed a few of the aliens. Claude skimmed it and began a treatise of his own.

  ‘Despite the advanced “democracy” of the Guzz,’ he wrote, ‘they retain a few oddly “primitive”, even sacramental habits.’

  There was a knock at the door. The standard face of a Guzz looked around the frame, saw that he was alone and walked its standard body into the office. Without saying anything, it came over and struck him on the forehead. Twitching, Claude slipped to the floor. The visitor busied itself with a set of plastic bags.

  The fallen man was muttering. Bending lower, the man-shape heard: ‘… planarian worms? D.N.A. or …?’

  ‘Right you are!’ boomed the Guzz. ‘Yes, we are analogous to your planarian worms – so, of course, are you – and we can transmit behaviour genetically.’

  He fished a long knife from one bag and tested its blade against a false thumb. ‘Of course our genes need help. Obviously our – I mean to include your – children do not learn much from their parents’ genes. But these same genes, properly assimilated –’

  ‘I knew it!’ Claude croaked, getting up on one elbow. The blow had stunned him, but still the machinery of his mind ground on. With an ecstatic expression he said, ‘The old taboos against eating the king, eating the old man, the sage, the father, yes?’

  ‘Check.’ With a hearty chuckle the visitor kneeled by Claude’s side and felt for the carotid artery. ‘Those ridiculous taboos have kept your species back hundreds of thousands of years. We’re just now making up the lost time for you.’

  ‘The sandwich meat –’

  ‘Housewives, mechanics, professional people – all the people in that brochure you saw. Just think of it!’ He waved the knife oratorically, and the plastic face turned up, as if gazing at a vista. ‘One genius provides three thousand sandwiches, each capable of providing – with no wastage – part of the education for one more genius! Thus learning will transform your whole species – you will become as gods!’

  The Guzz returned his attention to the matter at hand. He poised the knife.

  ‘Superman,’ murmured the genius. ‘On white or rye.’

  THE STEAM-DRIVEN BOY

  Capt. Charles Conn was thinking so hard his feet hurt. It reminded him of his first days on the force, back in ’89, when walking a beat gave him headaches.

  Three time-patrolmen stood before his desk, treading awkwardly on the edges of their long red cloaks and fingering their helmets nervously. Capt. Coun wanted to snarl at them, but what was the point? They already understood his problems perfectly – they were, after all, Conn himself, doubling a shift.

  ‘Okay, Charlie, report.’

  The first patrolman straightened. ‘I went back to three separate periods, sir. One when the President was disbanding the House of Representatives, one when he proclaimed himself the Supreme Court, one when he was signing the pro-pollution bill. I gave him the whole business – statistics, pictures, news stories. All he would say was, “My mind’s made up.”’

  Chuck and Chas reported similar failures. There was no stopping the President. Not only had he usurped all the powers of federal, state and local government, but he used those powers deliberately to torment the population. It was a crime to eat ice cream, sing, whistle, swear or kiss. It was a capital offence to smile, or to use the words ‘Russia’ and ‘China’. Under the Safe Streets Act it was illegal to walk, loiter or converse in public. And of course Negroes and anyone else ‘conspicuous’ were by definition criminals, and under the jurisdiction of the Race Reaction Board.

  The Natural Food Act had seemed at first almost reasonable, a response to scientists’ warnings about depleting the soil and polluting the environment. But the fine print specified that henceforth no fertilizers were to be used but human or canine excrement, and all farm machinery was forbidden. In time the newspapers featured pictures of farmers trudging past their rusting tractors to poke holes in the soil with sharp sticks. And in time, the newspapers had their paper supply curtailed. Famine warnings were ignored until the government had to buy wheat from C****.

  ‘Gentlemen, we’ve tried everything else. It’s time to think about getting rid of President Ernie Barnes.’

  The men began murmuring among themselves. This was done with efficiency and dispatch, for Patrolman Charlie, knowing that Chuck was going to murmur to him first, withheld his own murmuring until it was his turn. And when Chuck had murmured to Charlie, he fell silent, and let Charlie and Chas get on with their murmuring before he murmured uneasily to Chas.

  The captain spoke again. ‘Getting rid of him in the past would be easier than getting rid of him now, but it’s only part of the problem. If we remove him from the past we have to make sure no one notices the big jagged hole in history we’ll leave. Since as the time police we have the only time-bikes around, the evidence is going to make us look bad. Remember the trouble we had getting rid of the pyramids? For months, everyone went around saying, “What’s that funny thing on the back of the dollar?” Remember that?’

  ‘Hey, Captain, what is that funny thing –?’

  ‘Shut up. The point is, you can change some of the times some of the time, and, uh, some of the – look at it this way: Ernie must have shaken hands with a million people. We rub him out, and all these people suddenly get back all the germs they rubbed off on him. Suddenly we have an epidemic.’

  ‘Yeah, but, Captain, did he ever shake any hands? He never does any more. Just sits there in the White Fort, all fat and nasty, behind all his FBI and CIA and individualized anti-personnel missiles and poison germ gas towers and – and that big, mean dog.’

  Capt. Conn glared the patrolman down, then continued: ‘My idea is, we kidnap Ernie Barnes from his childhood, back in 1937. And we leave a glass egg.’

  ‘A classic?’

  ‘A glass egg. Like they used to put under chickens when they took away their children. What I mean is, we substitute an artificial child for the real one. Wilbur Grafton says he can make a robot replica of Ernie as he looked in 1937.’

  Wilbur Grafton was a wealthy eccentric and amateur inventor well known to all members of the time patrol. Their father, James Conn, was an employee of Wilbur’s.

  ‘Another thing. Just in case somebody back in 1937 gets suspicious and takes him apart, we’ll have the robot built of pre-1937 junk. Steam-driven. No use giving away the secrets of molecular circuitry and peristaltic logic before their time.’

  The four of them, and a fifth patrolman (Carl) arrived one evening at the mansion of Wilbur Grafton. To the butler who admitted them, each man said ‘Hello, Dad,’ to which their unruffled father replied ‘Good evening, sir. You’ll find Mr Grafton in the drawing-room.�
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  The venerable millionaire, immaculate in evening clothes, welcomed them, then excused himself to prepare the demonstration. James poured generous drinks, and while some of the party admired the authentic 1950s appointments of the room – including a genuine ‘stereo’ phonograph – others watched television. It was almost curfew time, and the channels were massed with Presidential commercials:

  ‘Sleep well, America! Your President is safe! Yes, tanks to I.A.M. – individualized anti-personnel missiles – no one can harm our Leader. Think of it: over ten billion eternally vigilant little missiles all around the White Fort, guarding his sleep and yours. And don’t forget – there’s one with YOUR name on it.’

  Wilbur Grafton returned, and at curfew time, one of the men asked him to begin the demonstration. He wheezed with delight. His glasses twinkling, he replied: ‘My good man, the demonstration is already going on.’ Pressing one of his shirt studs, he added, ‘And here is – The Steam-Driven Boy!’

  His body parted down the middle and swung open in two half-shells, revealing a pudgy youngster in knitted swim trunks and striped T-shirt, who was determinedly working cranks and levers. The boy stopped operating the ‘Grafton wheeze-laugh’ bellows, climbed out of the casing, took two steps and froze.

  ‘Then where’s the real Wilbur Graf ton?’ asked Chuck.

  ‘Right here, sir.’ The butler put down a priceless Woolworth’s decanter and pulled his own nose, hard. Clanking and creaking, he parted like a mummy case to give up the living Grafton, once more flawlessly attired.

  ‘Must have my little japes,’ he wheezed, as the real James came in with more drinks. ‘Now, allow me to reanimate our little friend for you.’

  Lie inserted a crank in the boy’s ear and gave it several vigorous turns. With a light chuffing sound, and emitting only a hint of vapor, the small automaton came to life. That piggish nose, those wide-spaced eyes, that malicious grin were familiar to all present, from Your President Cares posters.

  As the white-haired inventor stooped to make some further adjustment at the back of its fat neck, ‘Ernie’ kicked him authentically in the knee.

  ‘Did you see that precision?’ Wilbur gloated, dancing on one leg.

  The robot was remarkably realistic, complete to a frayed strip of dirty adhesive tape on one shiny elbow. Charlie made the mistake of squatting down and offering Ernie some candy. Two other patrolmen helped their unfortunate comrade to a sofa, where he was able to get his head back to stop the bleeding. The little machine shrieked with delight until Wilbur managed to shut it off.

  ‘I am confident that his parents will never notice the switch,’ he said, leading the way to his workshop. ‘Let me show you the plans.’

  The robot had organs analogous to those of a living being, as Wilbur Grafton’s plans showed. The heart and veins were really an intricate hydraulic system; the liver a tiny distillery to volatilize eaten food and extract oil from it. Part of this oil replenished the veins, part was burned to feed the spleen’s miniature steam engine. From this, belts supplied power to the limbs.

  Digressing, Wilbur explained how his grandfather, Orville Grafton, had developed a peculiar substance, a plate of which varied in thickness according to the intensity of light striking it.

  ‘While grandfather could make nothing more useful of this “graftonite” than bas-relief photographs, I have used it (along with mechanical irises and gelatine lenses) to form the boy’s eyes,’ he said, and pointed to a detail. ‘When a tiny image has been focused on each graftonite ‘retina’, a pantographic scriber traces swiftly over it, translating these images to motions in the brain.’

  Similar levers conveyed motions from the gramophone ears, and from hundreds of tiny pistons all over the body – the sense of touch.

  The hydraulic fluid was a suspension of red particles like blood corpuscles. When it oozed to the surface, through pores, these were filtered out – it doubled as perspiration.

  The brain contained a number of springs, wound to various tensions. With the clockwork connecting them to various limbs, organs and facial features, these comprised Ernie’s ‘memory’.

  Grafton let the plans roll shut with a snap and ordered James to charge the glasses with champagne. ‘Gentlemen, I give you false Ernie Barnes – from his balloon lungs out to his skin of rubberized lawn, fine wig and dentures – an all-American boy, made in USA!’

  ‘One thing, though,’ said the captain. ‘Won’t his parents notice he doesn’t – well, grow?’

  Sighing, the inventor turned his back for a moment, and gripped the edge of his workbench to steady himself. A solemn silence descended upon the group as they saw him take off his glasses and rub his eyes.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said quietly, ‘I have taken care of everything. In one year’s time, this child will appear to be suddenly stricken with influenza. His fever will rise, he will weaken. Finally I see him call his mother’s name. She approaches the bedside.

  ‘“Mom,” he says, “I’m sorry I’ve been such a wicked kid. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me? For – for I’m going to be an angel from now on.” His eyes flutter closed. His mother bends and kisses the burning forehead. This triggers the final mechanism, and Ernie appears to – to –’

  They understood. One by one, the time patrol put down their glasses and slipped silently from the room. Carl was elected to take the robot back to 1937.

  ‘He was supposed to bring the kid here to headquarters,’ said Captain Charles Conn. ‘But he never showed up. And Ernie’s still in power. What went wrong?’ A worried frown puckered his somewhat bland features as he leafed through the appointment calendar.

  ‘Maybe his timeer went wrong,’ Chas suggested. ‘Maybe he got off his time-bike at the wrong place. Maybe he had a flat – who knows?’

  ‘He should have been back by now. How long can it take to travel fifty years? Well, no time to figure it out now. According to the calendar, we’ve all got to double again. I go back to become Charlie. Charlie, you go back to fill in as Chuck. Chuck becomes Chas, and Chas, you take over for Carl.’ He paused, as the men exchanged badges. ‘As for Carl – we’ll all be finding out what happens to him, soon enough. Let’s go!’

  And, singing the Time Patrol song (yes, they felt silly, but such was the President’s mandate) in deep bass voices, they climbed on their glittering time bicycles, set the egg-timers on their handlebars and sped away.

  Carl stepped out from behind a tree in 1937. The kid was kneeling in his sandpile, apparently trying to tie a tin can to a puppy’s tail. The gargoyle face looked up at Carl with interest.

  ‘GET OUTA MY YARD! GET OUT OR I’LL TELL ON YA! YOU HAFTA PAY ME ONE APPLE OR ELSE I’LL –’

  Still straddling the time-bike, Carl slipped forward to that Autumn, picked a particularly luscious apple, and bought a can of ether at the drugstore. Clearly it would take both to get this kid.

  ‘I spose,’ said the druggist, ‘I spose ya want me to ask ya why you’re wearing a gold football helmet with wings on it and a long red cape. But I won’t. Nossir, I seen all kinds…’

  In revenge, Carl shoplifted an object at random: a Mark Clubb Private Eye Secret Disguise Kit.

  Blending back into his fading-out self, Carl held out both hands to the boy. The right held a shiny apple. The left held an ether-soaked handkerchief.

  As Carl shoved off into the gray, windswept corridors of time, with the lumpy kid draped over his handlebars, it occurred to him he needed a better hiding place than Headquarters. The FBI would sweep down on them first, searching for their missing President. A better place would be the mansion of Wilbur Grafton. Or even … hmmm.

  ‘An excellent plan!’ Wilbur sat by the swimming pool, nursing his injured knee. ‘We’ll smuggle him into the White Fort itself – the one place no one will think of looking for him!’

  ‘One problem is, how to get him in, past all the guards and –’

  Wilbur pushed up his glasses and meditated. ‘You know the President’s dog –
that big ugly mongrel that appears with him in the Eat More Horsemeat commercials – Ralphie?’

  Compulsively Carl sang: ‘Ralphie loves it, every bite / Why don’t you try horse tonight?’

  ‘I’ve been working on a replica of that dog. It should be big enough to contain the boy. You dispose of the real dog tonight, after curfew, then we’ll disguise the boy and send him in.’

  When the dog came out of the White Fort to organically fertilize the lawn, Carl was waiting with the replica dog and an ether-soaked rag. Within a few minutes he had consigned the replica to a White Fort guard and dropped Ralphie in the dim, anonymous corridors of time. No one need fear Ernie’s discovery, for the constraints of the dog-shell were such that he could make only canine sounds and motions.

  Carl reported back to the mansion.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ said the old inventor. ‘I am not Wilbur Grafton, only a robot.

  ‘The real Wilbur Grafton invented a rejuvenator. Wishing to try it, without attracting attention, he decided to travel into the past – back to 1905, where he could work as an assistant to his grandfather, Orville Grafton.’

  ‘Travel back in time? But that takes a time-bike!’

  ‘Precisely. To that end, he agreed to cooperate with the time patrol. On the night he demonstrated the Steam-Driven Boy, you recall he left the room and returned wearing the James-shell? It was I in the shell. The real Wilbur slipped outside, borrowed one of your time-bikes, and went to 1905. He returned the bike on automatic control. I have taken his place ever since.’