The Number of the Beast Read online

  The whiff of danger sharpened the joy. Jacob seemed unworried, and Zebbie has hunches, like a horseplayer. Seeing that Zebbie was relaxed, Deety got over being jumpy—and I never was, as I hope to end like a firecracker, not linger on, ugly, helpless, useless…

  A spice of danger adds zest to life. Even during a honeymoon—especially during a honeymoon.

  An odd honeymoon—We worked hard but our husbands seemed never too busy for pat fanny, squeeze titty, and unhurried kisses. Not a group marriage but two twosomes that were one family, comfortable each with the others. I dropped most of my own sparky-bitch ways, and Zebbie sometimes called me “Hilda” rather than “Sharpie.”

  Jacob and I moved into marriage like ham and eggs. Jacob is not tall (178 centimeters) (but tall compared with my scant one fifty-two) and his hairline recedes and he has a paunch from years at a desk—but he looks just right to me. If I wanted to look at male beauty, I could always look at Deety’s giant—appreciate him without lusting: my own loving goat kept Sharpie quite blunted.

  I did not decide, when Zebbie came on campus, to make a pet of him for his looks but for his veering sense of humor. But if there was ever a man who could have played the role of John Carter, Warlord of Mars, it was Zebadiah Carter whose middle name just happens to be “John.” Indoors with clothes and wearing his fake horn-rims he looks awkward, too big, clumsy. I did not realize that he was beautiful and graceful until the first time he used my pool. (That afternoon I was tempted to seduce him. But, as little dignity as I have, I had resolved to stick to older men, so I shut off the thought.)

  Outdoors at Snug Harbor, wearing little or no clothes, Zebbie looked at home—a mountain lion in grace and muscle. An incident one later afternoon showed me how much he was like the Warlord of Mars. A sword—Those old stories were familiar to me. My father had acquired the Ballantine Del Rey paperback reissues; they were around the house when I was a little girl. Once I learned to read, I read everything, and vastly preferred Barsoom stories to “girls” books given to me for birthdays and Christmas. Thuvia was the heroine I identified with—“toy” of the cruel priests of Issus, then with virginity miraculously restored in the next book: Thuvia, Maid of Mars. I resolved to change my name to Thuvia when I was old enough. When I was eighteen, I did not consider it; I had always been “Hilda,” a new name held no attraction.

  I was responsible in part for Deety’s name, one that embarrassed her until she discovered that her husband liked it. Jacob had wanted to name his daughter “Dejah Thoris” (Jacob looks like and is a professor, but he is incurably romantic). Jane had misgivings. I told her, “Don’t be a chump, Janie. If your man wants something, and you can accommodate him with no grief, give it to him! Do you want him to love this child or to resent her?” Jane looked thoughtful and “Doris Anne” became “Dejah Thoris” at christening, then “Deety” before she could talk—which satisfied everyone.

  We settled into a routine: Up early every day; our men worked on instruments and wires and things and installing the time-space widget into Gay Deceiver’s gizzard—while Deety and I gave the housework a lick and a promise (our mountain home needed little attention—more of Jacob’s genius), then Deety and I got busy on a technical matter that Deety could do with some help from me.

  I’m not much use for technical work, biology being the only thing I studied in depth and never finished my degree. This was amplified by almost six thousand hours as volunteer nurse’s aid in our campus medical center and I took courses that make me an uncertified nurse or medical tech or even jackleg paramedic—I don’t shriek at the sight of blood and can clean up vomit without a qualm and would not hesitate to fill in as scrub nurse. Being a campus widow with too much money is fun but not soul filling. I like to feel that I’ve paid rent on the piece of earth I’m using.

  Besides that, I have a smattering of everything from addiction to the printed page, plus attending campus lectures that sound intriguing…then sometimes auditing a related course. I audited descriptive astronomy, took the final as if for credit—got an “A.” I had even figured a cometary orbit correctly, to my surprise (and the professor’s).

  I can wire a doorbell or clean out a stopped-up soil pipe with a plumber’s “snake”—but if it’s really technical, I hire specialists.

  So Hilda can help but usually can’t do the job alone. Gay Deceiver had to be reprogrammed—and Deety, who does not look like a genius, is one. Jacob’s daughter should be a genius and her mother had an I.Q. that startled even me, her closest friend. I ran across it while helping poor grief-stricken Jacob to decide what to save, what to burn. (I burned unflattering pictures, useless papers, and clothes. A dead person’s clothes should be given away or burned; nothing should be kept that does not inspire happy memories. I cried a bit and that saved Jacob and Deety from having to cry later.)

  We all held private duo licenses; Zebbie, as Captain Z. J. Carter, U.S.A.S.R., held “command” rating as well—he told us that his space rating was largely honorary, just some free-fall time and one landing of a shuttle. Zebbie is mendacious, untruthful, and tells fibs; I got a chance to sneak a look at his aerospace log and shamelessly took it. He had logged more than he claimed in one exchange tour with Australia. Someday I’m going to sit on his chest and make him tell Mama Hilda the truth. Should be interesting…if I can sort out fact from fiction. I do not believe his story about intimate relations with a female kangaroo.

  Zebbie and Jacob decided that we all must be able to control Gay Deceiver all four ways, on the road, in the air, in trajectory (she’s not a spaceship but can make high-trajectory jumps), and in space-time, i.e. among the universes to the Number of the Beast, plus variants impossible to count.

  I had fingers crossed about being able to learn that, but both men assured me that they had worked out a fail-safe that would get me out of a crunch if I ever had to do it alone.

  Part of the problem lay in the fact that Gay Deceiver was a one-man girl; her doors unlocked only to her master’s voice or to his thumbprint, or to a tapping code if he were shy both voice and right thumb; Zeb tended to plan ahead—“Outwitting Murphy’s Law,” he called it, “‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’” (Grandma called it “The Butter-Side Down Rule.”)

  First priority was to introduce us to Gay Deceiver—teach her that all four voices and right thumbprints were acceptable.

  That took a couple of hours, with Deety helping Zebbie. The tapping code took even less, it being based on an old military cadence—its trickiness being that a thief would be unlikely to guess that this car would open if tapped a certain way and in guessing the correct cadence. Zebbie called the cadence “Drunken Soldier.” Jacob said that it was “Bumboat.” Deety claimed that its title was “Pay Day,” because she had heard it from Jane’s grandfather.

  Our men conceded that she must be right, as she had words for it. Her words included “Drunken Sailor” instead of “Drunken Soldier”—plus both “Pay Day” and “Bumboat.”

  Introductions taken care of, Zeb dug out Gay’s anatomy, one volume her body, one her brain. He handed the latter to Deety, took the other into our basement. The next two days were easy for me, hard for Deety. I held lights and made notes on a clip board while she studied that book and frowned and got smudged and sweaty getting herself into impossible positions and once she cursed in a fashion that would have caused Jane to scold. She added, “Aunt Nanny Goat, your step-son-in-law has done things to this mass of spaghetti that no decent computer should put up with! It’s a bastard hybrid.”

  “You shouldn’t call Gay ‘it,’ Deety. And she’s not a bastard.”

  “She can’t hear us; I’ve got her ears unhooked—except that piece that is monitoring news retrieval programs—and that goes through this wire to that jack in the wall; she can talk with Zebadiah only in the basement now. Oh, I’m sure she was a nice girl until that big ape of mine raped her. Aunt Hilda, don’t worry about hurting Gay’s feelings; she hasn’t any. This is an idiot as computers go. Any o
ne-horse college and most high schools own or share time in computers much more complex. This one is primarily cybernetics, an autopilot plus limited digital capacity and limited storage. But the mods Zebadiah has tacked on make it more than an autopilot but not a general-purpose computer. A misbegotten hybrid. It has far more random-number options than it needs and it has extra functions that IBM never dreamed of.”

  “Deety, why are you taking off cover plates? I thought you were strictly a programmer? Software. Not a mechanic.”

  “I am strictly a software mathematician. I wouldn’t attempt to modify this monster even on written orders from my lovable but sneaky husband. But how in the name of Allah can a software hack think about simplification analysis for program if she doesn’t know the circuitry? The first half of this book shows what this autopilot was manufactured to do…and the second half, the Xeroxed pages, show the follies Zebadiah has seduced her into. This bleedin’ bundle of chips now speaks three logic languages, interfaced—when it was built to use only one. But it won’t accept any of them until it has been wheedled with Zebadiah’s double talk. Even then it rarely answers a code phrase with the same answer twice in a row. What does it say in answer to: ‘You’re a smart girl, Gay.’?”

  “I remember. ‘Boss, I bet you tell that to all the girls. Over.’”

  “Sometimes. Oftenest, as that answer is weighted to come up three times as often as any of the others. But listen to this:

  “‘Zeb, I’m so smart I scare myself.’

  “‘Then why did you turn me down for that raise?’

  “‘Never mind the compliments! Take your hand off my knee!’

  “‘Not so loud, dear. I don’t want my boyfriend to hear.’

  “—and there are more. There are at least four answers to any of Zebadiah’s code phrases. He uses just one list, but the autopilot answers several ways for each of his phrases—and all any of them mean is either ‘Roger’ or ‘Null program; rephrase.’”

  “I like the idea. Fun.”

  “Well… I do myself. I animize a computer; I think of them as people…and this semirandom answer list makes Gay Deceiver feel much more alive…when she isn’t. Not even versatile compared with a ground-based computer. But—” Deety gave a quick smile. “I’m going to hand my husband some surprises.”

  “How, Deety?”

  “You know how he says, ‘Good morning, Gay. How are you?’ when we sit down for breakfast.”

  “Yes. I like it. Friendly. She usually answers, ‘I’m fine, Zeb.’”

  “Yes. It’s a test code. It orders the autopilot to run a self-check throughout and to report any running instruction. Which takes less than a millisecond. If he didn’t get that or an equivalent answer, he would rush straight here to find out what’s wrong. But I’m going to add another answer. Or more.”

  “I thought you refused to modify anything.”

  “Aunt Hillbilly, this is software, not hardware. I’m authorized and directed to amplify the answers to include all of us, by name for each of our voices. That is programming, elementary. You say good morning to this gadget and it will—when I’m finished—answer you and call you either ‘Hilda’ or ‘Mrs. Burroughs.’”

  “Oh, let her call me ‘Hilda.’”

  “All right, but let her call you ‘Mrs. Burroughs’ now and then for variety.”

  “Well…all right. Keep her a personality.”

  “I could even have her call you—low weighting!—‘Nanny Goat.’”

  I guffawed. “Do, Deety, please do. But I want to be around to see Jacob’s face.”

  “You will be; it won’t be programmed to answer that way to any voice but yours. Just don’t say, ‘Good morning, Gay’ unless Pop is listening. But here’s one for my husband: Zebadiah says, ‘Good morning, Gay. How are you?’—and the speaker answers, ‘I’m fine, Zeb. But your fly is unzipped and your eyes are bloodshot. Are you hung over again?’”

  Deety is so solemn and yet playful. “Do it, dear! Poor Zebbie—who drinks least of any of us. But he might not be wearing anything zippered.”

  “Zebadiah always wears something at meals. Even his underwear shorts are zippered. He dislikes elastic.”

  “But he’ll recognize your voice, Deety.”

  “Nope. Because it will be your voice—modified.”

  And it was. I’m contralto about the range of the actress—or girl friend—who recorded Gay Deceiver’s voice originally. I don’t think my voice has her sultry, bedroom quality but I’m a natural mimic. Deety borrowed a wigglescope—oscilloscope?—from her father, my Jacob, and I practiced until my patterns for Gay Deceiver’s original repertoire matched hers well enough—Deety said she could not tell them apart without close checking.

  I got into the spirit of it, such as having Deety cause Gay Deceiver occasionally to say to my husband, “Fine—except for my back ache, you wicked old Billy Goat!”—and Jacob tripped that reply one morning when I did have a back ache, and I feel sure he had one, too.

  We didn’t put in answers that Deety felt might be too bawdy for Jacob’s “innocent” mind—I didn’t even hint how her father actually talked, to me in private. Let us all preserve our illusions; it lubricates social relations. Possibly Deety and Zebbie talked the same way to each other in private—and regarded us “old folks” as hopelessly square.

  IX

  Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

  Deety:

  Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler—which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had been pulled out to place the widget abaft the bulkhead and weld it to the shell. The precessing controls and triple verniers were remoted to the driver’s instrument board—with one voice control for the widget, all others manual:

  If any of our voices said, “Gay Deceiver, take us home!” car and passengers would instantly return to Snug Harbor.

  I don’t know but I trust my Pop. He brought us home safe twice, doing it with no fail-safes and no dead-man switch. The latter paralleled the “Take us home!” voice order, was normally clamped closed and covered—but could be uncovered and held in a fist, closed. There were other fail-safes for temperature, pressure, air, radar collision course, and other dangers. If we wound up inside a star or planet, none of this could save us, but it is easy to prove that the chances of falling downstairs and breaking your neck are enormously higher than the chance of co-occupying space with other matter in our native universe—space is plentiful, mass is scarce. We hoped that this would be true of other universes.

  No way ahead of time to check on the Number-of-the-Beast spaces—but “The cowards never started and the weaklings died on the way.” None of us ever mentioned not trying to travel the universes. Besides, our home planet had turned unfriendly. We didn’t discuss “Black Hats” but we all knew that they were still here, and that we remained alive by lying doggo and letting the world think we were dead.

  We ate breakfast better each morning after hearing Gay Deceiver offer “null report” on news retrievals. Zebadiah, I am fairly certain, had given up his cousin for dead. I feel sure Zebadiah would have gone to Sumatra to follow a lost hope, were it not that he had acquired a wife and a prospective child. I missed my next period, so did Hilda. Our men toasted our not-yet bulging bellies; Hilda and I smugly resolved to be good girls, yes, sir!—and careful. Hilda joined my morning toning up, and the men joined us the first time they caught us at it.

  Zebadiah did not need it but seemed to enjoy it. Pop brought his waistline down five centimeters in one week.

  Shortly after that toast Zebadiah pressure-tested Gay Deceiver’s shell—four atmospheres inside her and a pressure gauge sticking out through a fitting in her shell.

  There being little we could do while our space-time rover was sealed, we knocked off early. “Swim, anybod
y?” I asked. Snug Harbor doesn’t have a city-type pool, and a mountain stream is too cooold. Pop had fixed that when he concealed our spring. Overflow was piped underground to a clump of bushes and thereby created a “natural” mountain rivulet that passed near the house; then Pop had made use of a huge fallen boulder, plus biggish ones, to create a pool, one that filled and spilled. He had done work with pigments in concrete to make this look like an accident of water flow.

  This makes Pop sound like Paul Bunyan. Pop could have built Snug Harbor with his own hands. But Spanish-speaking labor from Nogales built the underground and assembled the prefab shell of the cabin. An air crane fetched parts and materials from an Albuquerque engineering company Jane had bought for Pop through a front—lawyers in Dallas. The company’s manager drove the air crane himself, having had it impressed on him that this was for a rich client of the law firm, and that it would be prudent to do the job and forget it. Pop bossed the work in TexMex, with help from his secretary—me—Spanish being one language I had picked for my doctorate.

  Laborers and mechanics never got a chance to pinpoint where they were, but they were well paid, well fed, comfortably housed in prefabs brought in by crane, and the backbreaking labor was done by power—who cares what “locos gringos” do? Two pilots had to know where we were building, but they homed in on a radar beacon that is no longer there.

  “Blokes in Black Hats” had nothing to do with this secrecy; it was jungle caution I had learned from Mama: Never let the revenooers know anything. Pay cash, keep your lips closed, put nothing through banks that does not appear later in tax returns—pay taxes greater than your apparent standard of living and declare income accordingly. We had been audited three times since Mama died; each time the government returned a small “overpayment”—I was building a reputation of being stupid and honest.