The Computer Connection Page 2

  “Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of—”

  “I’ll put it on a three-hour snatch. That ought to give you enough time. I’ll shoot you to a prominent place so you can get your bearings. Don’t wander too far or the thing won’t be able to grab you.”

  The pounding got louder and more peevish. Herb did things with calibrations and switches and there was a crackle of french-fried power (which I’ll bet he never pays for) and I was sitting in a mudpuddle in the rain and a George Washington type on a chestnut horse nearly rode me down and bawled hell out of me for obstructing a public road.

  I got up, backed off the road, and someone kicked me in the brain. I jumped and turned around and it was a pop-eyed corpse hanging from a gibbet. Herb had shot me to a prominent place, all right—Tyburn. I hadn’t been in London in years (rotten with fallout residues) and certainly never in 1770, but that gave me my bearings. Tyburn had been turned into Marble Arch. I was on the outskirts of eighteenth-century London. No Bayswater Road, yet; no Hyde Park; just fields, trees, meadows, and the little Tyburn creek meandering. The city was on my left.

  I walked down a path that would someday be Park Lane and turned left into the fringe of houses. They became thick and crowded when I reached a cow pasture that would become Grosvenor Square. A Saturday-night market was in progress. Hundreds of barrows and stalls illuminated by flaring torches, grease lamps with flags of flame, humble tallow candles. Roars of hucksters: “Eight a penny! Stunning pears!” “Chestnuts all ‘ot! Penny a score!” “Beautiful whelks, penny a lot!” “Fine walnuts, sixteen a penny!” I was hungry but I didn’t have any current coin; just two pounds of refined gold.

  I remembered that Brook Street led off the north side of Grosvenor so I took that route asking for a writer named Chatterton. Nobody ever heard of him until I came across a Flying Stationer hung with broadsheets offering “The Life of the Hangman,” “Secret Doings in Soho,” “The Treacherous Servant,” that sort of thing. He said he knew Chatterton. The kid wrote long-song poems for him at shilling ea., and he pointed out the house which had no business to be standing.

  I ran up the crumbling stairs, convinced I’d fall through at every step, and burst into the attic with a merry, “Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold!” (Thomas Hood, 1799-1845) The kid was writhing on a pallet in the last agonies of arsenic poisoning. “Ah-ha!” I thought.

  “He’s dying. He knows he’s dead. If I can save him maybe we’ve got another Moleman for the Group.”

  I did my best. The first thing to do is make them vomit. I pee’d into a tumbler and forced it down Chatterton’s throat. No nausea. Too far gone. I ran down the stairs and banged on a door. It was opened by Betsy Ross’ grandmother, complaining. I shoved past her, saw a jug of milk, took it and a clutch of charcoal from the cold fireplace. She had now graduated to screaming. I returned to my house call. Charcoal and milk. Nothing. He was gone, greatly regretted, and what the hell was I going to do with 24 oz. (troy) of gold which was dragging the butt pocket of my coveralls?

  Well, I had to stall anyway until the Mantis put the snatch on me so I went for a walk in the rain. At Fleet Street I turned off and went into the Cheshire Cheese to see if I could parlay the ingot into a drink and maybe dry off in front of the fire, which was eclipsed by a snorting whale and a simpering dogfish. The Grand Cham and Boswell.

  “What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a newborn babe?” dogfish was asking. The whale heaved and growled but before he could answer that monumental question I was yanked back to the dingbat, dripping all over the circuits to the anguish of Herb.

  “OutOutOut!” he hollered. “They’ve left.”

  I out.

  “Why didn’t you give Thos, the gold?”

  “Too late, man. He gone when I get.”

  “Oh, drat.”

  “Try again, a little earlier.”

  “I can’t. The damn thing won’t shoot the same decade twice. To tell the truth, Guig, I think it’s a lemon.”

  Maybe that’s why his Health, Education, and Welfare program never works. I thanked Herb, still using the Group XX English and returned to Spangland, the Gem of the Ocean. I know all this sounds kind of lunatic but I’m up against a tough proposition keeping these notes. I have to translate from Black Spanglish—Benny Diaz, gemmum, ah gone esplain any pagunta you ax—which is now the official language of the country, and then go on from there. It runs: Spanglish XX English Machine Language. It’s one hell of a job, especially when it’s compounded by sorting out centuries of memories. So I ax you to dispensar when I jumble. My damn diary won’t. How many times when I compile data for it has the print-out snapped, “090-N. READ.” which is machine language for, “I can’t understand a goddamn thing you’re saying.”

  We all have this trouble. Not remembering—our memories stick like graffiti—but placing events in their proper sequence. I have to compile notes and diaries because I worry about this. I’m the baby of the Group and I’m still trying to train myself to develop an organic filing system. I’ve often wondered how Sam Pepys manages. He’s the Group historian and diarist and he tries to explain his system to me. It’s perfectly simple for Sam. Like: A 1/4 + (1/2B)2 = The breakfast I ate on Sept. 16, 1936, and Good Luck to Sam.

  I’ve only been around since Klakatoa blew up in 1883. All the others have been on the scene much longer. Beau Brummel survived the Calcutta earthquake of 1737 in which 300,000 were killed. Beau says nobody back then would ever believe the mortality figures, and he’s still sore because the honkies didn’t give a damn about how many quote niggers unquote died. I’m with him on that. He—Oh, I’d better esplain about our names.

  The famous names I mention aren’t the realsies. We have to move on and change our names so often—the Shorties begin to wonder about us—that nobody can keep track. So we stay with our nicknames in the Group, and we pinch them from real people. They reflect our crotchets and main interests. I’ve mentioned H. G. Wells and his time-dingbat. There’s Tosca, an actress type; Beau, the epitome of the beautiful people; Sam Pepys, the historian; the Greek Syndicate, our financier; Bathsheba, the femme fatale; und so weiter. I’m nicknamed Grand Guignol, Guig for short, and I don’t like it. I don’t think of myself as a Theater of Horrors. I’m sincerely trying to do good, through horror, yes, but it’s a small price to pay for what I’m offering. Wouldn’t you pay an hour of agony for eternal life?

  But about our ages: Oliver Cromwell was buried alive in a mass grave during the Black Death and still doesn’t want to talk about it. He says dying by suffocation is something to forget forever. Scented Song escaped the sack of Tientsin by the Mongols when they piled 100,000 severed heads into pyramids. Her description makes Dachau sound like a picnic. The Wandering Jew is Christ, of course. You can pick up the clue in Luke 24:3. A writer—D. H. Lawrence, I think—smelled the truth when he met Jacy in 1900 and turned it into a fantastic story about how Jacy might have lived a normal life if he’d only balled a bod. He didn’t know Jace. We call Christ Jacy because if you use his real name it sounds like you’re swearing.

  There are many others whom you’ll meet later on. The oldest, by far, is Hic-Haec-Hoc. He got that nickname because that’s what his grunts sound like; he’s never learned to speak any language although he can unnerstan simple signs. We think Hic may be from the late Pleistocene or early Holocene and got his charge in some cataclysm that was dramatic enough to make a Neanderthal aware. Who knows? Maybe he got clobbered by a meteor or trampled by a Hairy Mastodon.

  We don’t see much of Hic these days; people scare him and he’s always pulling back from the edge of civilization. We used to wonder how he was going to adapt to the population explosion but the space explosion solved that. He’s probably homesteading in a crater on Mars, Mother of Men; a Moleman can live on anything except nothing. Pepys, who keeps track of all of us, like Celebrity Service, claims that Hic was spotted once, mousing around the snows of the Himalayas, and he swears that Hic started the legen
d of the Abominable Snowman.

  I use the word “charge” advisedly when I try to esplain our immortality. They call it “nerve-firing” nowadays. As near as I’ve researched, we all underwent identical traumas which destroyed or discharged the lethal secretions that are the crux of old age and death. If your cells accumulate lethal secretions you’re not forever for this world, and all creatures have been endowed with this metabolic suicide. Maybe that’s nature’s way of wiping the slate clean and trying again. I’m intensely anthropomorphic and I can see nature getting disgusted and closing the show on the road.

  But our Group has proven that death doesn’t have to be inevitable. Of course we did it the hard way. Each of us knew we were going to die and received a psychogalvanic shock that wiped out our lethal cell products and turned us into Molecular Men; Molemen for short. I’ll explain that later. It’s a sort of updating of Cuvier’s “Catastrophism” theory of evolution. In case you’ve forgotten, he argued that periodic catastrophes destroyed all life and God started it all over again on a higher level. He was wrong about the God bit, of course, but catastrophes do alter creatures.

  As described in each case (with the exception of Hic-Haec-Hoc, who can’t describe anything) the circumstances were almost identical. We were trapped in some natural or man-made catastrophe that gave us no chance of survival; we were aware of it; a psychogalvanic charge ripped through us as we toppled into extinction; then some miracle aborted the death and so here the Group is forever. The odds against this sort of freak are fantastic, but the Greek Syndicate says that even the longest odds are bound to come in sooner or later. The Greek ought to know. He’s been a professional gambler ever since Aristotle kicked him out of the Peripatetic School in Athens.

  Jacy often describes the wild surprise of death that shocked through him on the cross when he finally realized that he was not going to be rescued by the U.S. Marines. He wonders why the same thing didn’t happen to the two thieves who were busted along with him on Golgotha. I keep telling him, “Because they weren’t epileptics, Jacy,” and he keeps answering, “Oh, hush. You’re obsessed with that epileptic delusion, Guig. I wish you’d take a lifetime off and learn to respect the mysteries of God.”

  He may be right. I am obsessed with the belief that our Group is epileptic-prone and that there’s an historic linkage between epilepsy and the unique. I suffer from it myself, and when that aura hits me I can encompass the universe. That’s why we scream and spasm; it’s too magnificent for the microcosm to endure. I’ve trained myself to recognize the epileptic type and every time I spot one I try to recruit him (or her) for the Group by killing them horribly, which is why they call me Grand Guignol. Bathsheba always sends me a Christmas card with a picture of an Iron Maiden.

  That’s not fair. I torture and kill from the best of motives, and if I describe my own experience with death you may understand. Back in 1883 I was an export factor, it says here, on Krakatoa, a volcanic island in the Sunda Straight. Krakatoa was listed officially as uninhabited and that was the swindle. I’d been established there secretly by a San Francisco firm in an attempt to muscle in on the Dutch trading monopoly. Did they say “muscle” back then? Wait a minute; I’ll ask my goddamn diary.

  TERMINAL. READY?

  READY. ENTER PROGRAM NUMBER.

  001

  SLANG PROGRAM HAS BEEN LOADED.

  LOC. + NAME. START COUNT 2000 N.P

  SLANG HAS FINISHED RUN.

  MCS, PRINT. W.H. END.

  NO.

  So all right, they didn’t say “muscle” back then, and happy birthday to IBM.

  Now only an idiot would have taken the job, but I was a twenty-year-old kid intoxicated by the Discovery Mystique and mad to make a name for myself. Headline: NED CURZON DISCOVERS NORTH POLE!!! Like it was missing. Or, NED CURZON, THE AFRICAN EXPLORER. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Only M’bantu says Stanley never said that, and I take M’bantu’s word; he was there with a bindle on his head. Bindle? Bundle? McBee was there with a crate of four-buckle arctics on his head.

  I was alone on the island in a bamboo warehouse with nothing but a terrier for company, but the locals sailed over to trade. They asked for the damndest things and offered me the damndest things, including their women, who would bounce into bed for a gill of trade whiskey. Ah! Those fabulous tropical beauties immortalized by Stanley! Not Sir Henry Morton Stanley of Africa; Darryl F. Stanley of Hollywood. Their skins were crocodiled with ceremonial scars and they cackled when you balled them, displaying teeth blackened by betel nut. Bring back Dorothy Lamour.

  The natives knew that Krakatoa’s Mt. Rakata was an active volcano, but it was so small, compared to the boss jobs on Java and Sumatra, that it never prevented them from visiting. Rakata would complain and steam up pumice occasionally but you got used to it. There were earthquake grumbles now and then, so slight that I could hardly distinguish them from the pounding of the surf. Even my idiot dog didn’t have the sense to be alarmed. You know, the dumb friend barking to give warning of the unseen menace.

  The big blowup came on August 26 and I did receive a rather odd warning. The day before, old Markoloua sailed over with his young men and women and a boatload of beche-de-mer, which I loathe, but the Inscrutables love. They cook with ‘em. The locals were all chattering excitedly about fish. When I asked Markoloua what the fuss was, he told me that there were devils in the deep blue sea; when they landed on Krakatoa they were chased by great shoals of fish. I laughed at this but he led me to the beach and pointed. By God, he was telling the truth. The shore was littered with fish, gasping and flopping, and every comber brought in hundreds more, all of them bursting out of the water as though they were pursued by the devil.

  Many years later I discussed this phenomenon with a vulcanologist at the Mt. Etna station. He explained that the heat building up at the base of Rakata must have spread across the ocean floor and raised the temperature so high that the fish were driven onto the land in their attempts to escape. That was much later. At the time I thought it was some sort of pollution.

  Markoloua left, having traded the beche-de-mer for ten (10) tin mirrors. Next morning the first blowups came, four of them in succession, and it was the ending of the world. I didn’t hear the noise, it was too loud to hear, I felt it, an accoustical battering that made me scream. The entire north end of the island went up in a mushroom of lava. The main cone of Rakata was split down the middle, exposing the central shaft. The sea poured into the molten interior, was instantly transformed into live steam, and blew up in another series of explosions that crumbled the rest of the cone.

  I was hammered by the noise, blinded by the smoke, suffocated by the livid vapors, slammed out of my senses, and there came that tidal wave of lava creeping toward me like a swarm of red-hot caterpillars. I could feel nothing but the wild incredulity of death shocking through my body. I knew. I knew what nobody believes until the extreme moment. I knew I was dead. And so I died.

  Actually it was the vibrations of the explosions that produced the miracle. They burst the withes that bound the bamboo walls of my warehouse and twisted the stems into a birdcage, a logjam with myself inside incorporated with wooden debris; and then the quakes must have blasted me out into the ocean. I was not aware of it at the time; I only realized it later when I was reborn, floating in a caul of bamboo on the surface of the sea.

  Krakatoa was gone. Everything was gone. There were new reefs thrusting up, black and stinking of sea bottom. There were black clouds of volcanic smoke and dust rumbling with thunder and lightning. I was in shock for five days, which might have been five eternities, until I was picked up by a Dutch freighter. They were sore as hell about the disaster, which had delayed them by three days and acted as though it were all my fault, like I’d been playing with matches. That’s the history of my death and the miracle that saved me. That’s what turned me into a Molecular Man.

  Now the hell of it is that it’s pretty tough to arrange a volcano or a Black Death or a Hairy Mastodon when you
want to recruit a man into immortality, and it’s even tougher staging a miraculous save from the catastrophe. I’m pretty good at cruel killing but when it comes to the rescue I keep failing no matter how carefully I prepare. I did succeed with Sequoya, but I have to be honest and admit that the miracle was an accident.

  Jacy is always pained when I call it a miracle. He spent a few months with me in Mexifornia and when I repeated my theory about what happened to the Group (the hell of longevity is that you get garrulous and repetitious) he said, “No. Miracles are the constituent elements in the divine revelation, deeds which display the divine character and purpose.”

  “Yes, yes, I know, Jace, and what could be the divine purpose in keeping the likes of me alive forever? All right, I’m the product of nineteenth-century rationalism. Would you buy a rare coincidence of improbability and biochemistry?”

  “You sound like Spinoza, Guig.”

  “Now that’s a compliment. You ever meet him, Jace?”

  “I bought a pair of spectacles from him in Amsterdam.”

  “What kind of a guy was he?”

  “Splendid. He was the first to refuse to worship gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. That took courage in the 1600s.”

  At this point my own servant came in with refreshments; cognac for me, Romanee-Conti for Jacy, who’s been a wino ever since the Jerusalem days. The urchin was wearing a classic French Maid’s costume, something out of a movie from the archives. God knows where she dug it up. And then she had the impudence to wink at Jacy and say, “Hello. I’m your Bunny.”

  She flounced out. Jacy stared at me.

  “She’s always springing surprises on me,” I said. “She tries to crunch my cool.”

  “She speaks XX.”

  “I taught her.”