The Number of the Beast Read online

  My inquiry of “Swim, anybody?” was greeted with silence. Then Pop said, “Zeb, your wife is too energetic. Deety, later the water will be warmer and the trees will give us shade. Then we can walk slowly down to the pool. Zeb?”

  “I agree, Jake. I need to conserve ergs.”

  “Nap?”

  “I don’t have the energy to take one. What were you saying this morning about reengineering the system?”

  Aunt Hilda looked startled. “I thought Miss Gay Deceiver was already engineered? Are you thinking of changing everything?”

  “Take it easy, Sharpie darlin’. Gay Deceiver is finished. A few things to stow that have been weighed and their moment arms calculated.”

  I could have told her. In the course of figuring what could be stowed in every nook and cranny and what that would do to Gay’s balance, I had discovered that my husband had a highly illegal laser cannon. I said nothing, merely included its mass and distance from optimum center of weight in my calculations. I sometimes wonder which of us is the outlaw: Zebadiah or I? Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws. But that concealed L-cannon made me wonder.

  “Why not leave well enough alone?” Aunt Hilda demanded. “Jacob and God know I’m happy here… But You All Know Why We Should Not Stay Here Longer Than We Must.”

  “We weren’t talking about Gay Deceiver; Jake and I were discussing reengineering the Solar System.”

  “The Solar System! What’s wrong with it the way it is?”

  “Lots of things,” Zebadiah told Aunt Hilda. “It’s untidy. Real estate going to waste. This tired old planet is crowded and sort o’ worn in spots. True, industry in orbit and power from orbit have helped, and both Lagrange-Four and -Five have self-supporting populations; anybody who invested in space stations early enough made a pile.” (Including Pop, Zebadiah!) “But these are minor compared with what can be done—and this planet is in worse shape each year. Jake’s six-dimensional principle can change that.”

  “Move people into another universe? Would they go?”

  “We weren’t thinking of that, Hilda. We’re trying to apply Clarke’s Law.”

  “I don’t recall it. Maybe it was while I was out with mumps.”

  “Arthur C. Clarke,” Pop told her. “Great man—too bad he was liquidated in The Purge. Clarke defined how to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done—then do it. My continua craft is a godchild of Clarke via his Law. His insight inspired my treatment of six-dimensional continua. But this morning Zeb added corollaries.”

  “Jake, don’t kid the ladies. I asked a question; you grabbed the ball and ran.”

  “Uh, we heterodyned. Hilda, you know that the time-space traveler doesn’t require power.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, darling man. Why were you installing power packs in Gay Deceiver?”

  “Auxiliary uses. So that you won’t have to cook over an open fire, for example.”

  “But the pretzel bender doesn’t use power,” agreed Zebadiah. “Don’t ask why. I did, and Jake started writing equations in Sanskrit and I got a headache.”

  “It doesn’t use power, Aunt Hilda,” I agreed. “Just parasitic power. A few microwatts so that the gyros never slow down, milliwatts for instrument readouts and for controls—but the widget itself uses none.”

  “What happened to the law of conservation of energy?”

  “Sharpie,” my husband answered, “as a fairish mechanic, an amateur electron pusher, and as a bloke who has herded unlikely junk through the sky, I never worry about theory as long as machinery does what it is supposed to do. I worry when a machine turns and bites me. That’s why I specialize in fail-safes and backups and triple redundancy. I try never to get a machine sore at me. There’s no theory for that but every engineer knows it.”

  “Hilda my beloved, the law of conservation of mass-energy is not broken by our continua craft; it is simply not relevant to it. Once Zeb understood that—”

  “I didn’t say I understood it.”

  “Well…once Zeb stipulated that, he raised interesting questions. For example: Jupiter doesn’t need Ganymede—”

  “Whereas Venus does. Although Titan might be better.”

  “Mmm…possible.”

  “Yes. Make an inhabitable base more quickly. But the urgent problem, Jake, is to seed Venus, move atmosphere to Mars, put both of them through forced aging. Then respot them. Earth-Sol Trojan points?”

  “Certainly. We’ve had millions of years of evolution this distance from the Sun. We had best plan on living neither closer nor farther. With careful attention to stratospheric protection. But I still have doubts about anchoring in the Venerian crust. We wouldn’t want to lose the planet on Tau axis.”

  “Mere R. & D., Jake. Calculate pressures and temperatures; beef up the vehicle accordingly—spherical, save for exterior anchors—then apply a jigger factor of four. With automatic controls quintuply redundant. Catch it when it comes out and steady it down in Earth’s orbit, sixty degrees trailing—and start selling subdivisions the size of old Spanish Land Grants. Jake, we should gather enough mass to create new earths at all Trojan points, a hexagon around the Sun. Five brand-new earths would give the race room enough to breed. On this maiden voyage let’s keep our eyes open.”

  Aunt Hilda looked at Zebadiah with horror. “Zebbie! Creating planets indeed! Who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?”

  “I’m not that junior. That’s the Holy Ghost over there, scratching his belly, The Supreme Inseminator. I’m the other one, the Maker and Shaper. But in setting up a pantheon for the Celestial Age, we’re going to respect women’s rights, Hilda. Deety is Earth Mother; she’s perfect for the job. You are Moon Goddess, Selene. Good job, dear—more moons than earths. It fits you. You’re little and silvery and you wax and wane and you’re beautiful in all your phases. How about it? Us four and no more.”

  “Quit pulling my leg!”

  My husband answered, “I haven’t been pulling your leg. Come closer and I will; you have pretty legs, Step-Mother-in-Law. These things Jake and I have been discussing are practical—once we thought about the fact that the space-time twister uses no power. Move anything anywhere—all spaces, all times. I add the plural because at first I could not see what Jake had in mind when he spoke of forced aging of a planet. Rotate Venus into the Tau axis, fetch it back along Teh axis, reinsert it centuries—or millennia—older at this point in ‘t’ axis. Perhaps translate it a year or so into the future—our future—so as to be ready for it when it returns, all sweet and green and beautiful and ready to grow children and puppies and butterflies. Terraformed but virginal.”

  Aunt Hilda looked frightened. “Jacob? Would one highball do any harm to this peanut inside me? I need a bracer.”

  “I don’t think so. Jane often had a drink with me while she was pregnant. Her doctor did not have her stop until her third trimester. Can’t see that it hurt Deety. Deety was so healthy she drove Jane home from the hospital.”

  “Pop, that’s a fib. I didn’t learn to drive until I was three months old. But I need one, too,” I added. “Zebadiah?”

  “Certainly, Princess. A medicinal drink should be by body mass. That’s half a jigger for you, Sharpie dear, a jigger for Deety, a jigger and a half for Jake—two jiggers for me.”

  “Oh, how unfair!”

  “It certainly is,” I agreed. “I outweigh Pop—he’s been losing, I’ve been gaining. Pick us up and see!”

  My husband took us each around the waist, crouched, then straightened and lifted us.

  “Close to a standoff,” he announced. “Pop may be a trifle heavier, but you’re more cuddly”—kissed me and put us down.

  “There is no one more cuddly than Jacob!”

  “Hilda, you’re prejudiced. Let’s each mix our own drinks, at the strength required for our emotional and physical conditions.”

  So we did—it wound up with Hilda and me each taking a jigger with soda, P
op taking a jigger and a half over ice—and Zebadiah taking a half jigger of vodka and drowning it with Coke.

  While we were sipping our “medicine,” Zebadiah, sprawled out, looked up over the fireplace. “Pop, you were in the Navy?”

  “No—Army. If you count ‘chair-borne infantry.’ They handed me a commission for having a doctorate in mathematics, told me they needed me for ballistics. Then I spent my whole tour as a personnel officer, signing papers.”

  “Standard Operating Procedure. That’s a Navy sword and belt up there. Thought it might be yours.”

  “It’s Deety’s—belonged to Jane’s Grandfather Rodgers. I have a dress saber. Belonged to my Dad, who gave it to me when the Army took me. Dress blues, too. I took them with me, never had occasion to wear either.” Pop got up and went into his-their bedroom, calling back, “I’ll show you the saber.”

  My husband said to me, “Deety, would you mind my handling your sword?”

  “My Captain, that sword is yours.”

  “Heavens, dear, I can’t accept an heirloom.”

  “If my warlord will not permit his princess to gift him with a sword, he can leave it where it is! I’ve been wanting to give you a wedding present—and did not realize that I had the perfect gift for Captain John Carter.”

  “My apologies, Dejah Thoris. I accept and will keep it bright. I will defend my princess with it against all enemies.”

  “Helium is proud to accept. If you make a cradle of your hands, I can stand in them and reach it down.”

  Zebadiah grasped me, a hand above each knee, and I was suddenly three meters tall. Sword and belt were on hooks; I lifted them down, and myself was placed down. My husband stood straight while I buckled it around him—then he dropped to one knee and kissed my hand.

  My husband is mad north-northwest but his madness suits me. I got tears in my eyes which Deety doesn’t do much but Dejah Thoris seems prone to, since John Carter made her his.

  Pop and Aunt Hilda watched—then imitated, including (I saw!) tears in Hilda’s eyes after she buckled on Pop’s saber, when he knelt and kissed her hand.

  Zebadiah drew sword, tried its balance, sighted along its blade. “Handmade and balanced close to the hilt. Deety, your great-grandfather paid a pretty penny for this. It’s an honest weapon.”

  “I don’t think he knew what it cost. It was presented to him.”

  “For good reason, I feel certain.” Zebadiah stood back, went into hanging guard, made fast moulinets vertically, left and right, then horizontally clockwise and counterclockwise—suddenly dropped into swordsman’s guard—lunged and recovered, fast as a striking cat.

  I said softly to Pop, “Did you notice?”

  Pop answered quietly. “Know saber. Sword, too.”

  Hilda said loudly, “Zebbie! You never told me you went to Heidelberg.”

  “You never asked, Sharpie. Around the Red Ox they called me ‘The Scourge of the Neckar.’”

  “What happened to your scars?”

  “Never got any, dear. I hung around an extra year, hoping for one. But no one got through my guard—ever. Hate to think about how many German faces I carved into checkerboards.”

  “Zebadiah, was that where you took your doctorate?”

  My husband grinned and sat down, still wearing sword. “No, another school.”

  “M.I.T.?” inquired Pop.

  “Hardly. Pop, this should stay in the family. I undertook to prove that a man can get a doctorate from a major university without knowing anything and without adding anything whatever to human knowledge.”

  “I think you have a degree in aerospace engineering,” Pop said flatly.

  “I’ll concede that I have the requisite hours. I hold two degrees—a baccalaureate in humane arts…meaning I squeaked through…and a doctorate from an old and prestigious school—a Ph.D. in education.”

  “Zebadiah! You wouldn’t!” (I was horrified.)

  “But I did, Deety. To prove that degrees per se are worthless. Often they are honorifics of true scientists or learned scholars or inspired teachers. Much more frequently they are false faces for overeducated jackasses.”

  Pop said, “You’ll get no argument from me, Zeb. A doctorate is a union card to get a tenured job. It does not mean that the holder thereof is wise or learned.”

  “Yes, sir. I was taught it at my grandfather’s knee—my Grandfather Zachariah, the man responsible for the initial ‘Z’ in the names of his male descendants. Deety, his influence on me was so strong that I must explain him—no, that’s impossible; I must tell about him in order to explain me…and how I happened to take a worthless degree.”

  Hilda said, “Deety, he’s pulling a long bow again.”

  “Quiet, woman. ‘Get thee to a nunnery, go!’”

  “I don’t take orders from my step-son-in-law. Make that a monastery and I’ll consider it.”

  I kept my blinkin’ mouf shut. My husband’s fibs entertain me. (If they are fibs.)

  “Grandpa Zach was as cantankerous an old coot as you’ll ever meet. Hated government, hated lawyers, hated civil servants, hated preachers, hated automobiles, public schools, and telephones, was contemptuous of most editors, most writers, most professors, most of almost anything. But he overtipped waitresses and porters and would go out of his way to avoid stepping on an insect.

  “Grandpa had three doctorates: biochemistry, medicine, and law—and he regarded anyone who couldn’t read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German as illiterate.”

  “Zebbie, can you read all those?”

  “Fortunately for me, my grandfather had a stroke while filling out a tax form before he could ask me that question. I don’t know Hebrew. I can read Latin, puzzle out Greek, speak and read French, read technical German, understand it in some accents, swear in Russian—very useful!—and speak an ungrammatical smattering of Spanish picked up in cantinas and from horizontal dictionaries.

  “Grandpa would have classed me as subliterate as I don’t do any of these well—and I sometimes split infinitives which would have infuriated him. He practiced forensic medicine, medical jurisprudence, was an expert witness in toxicology, pathology, and traumatology, bullied judges, terrorized lawyers, medical students, and law students. He once threw a tax assessor out of his office and required him to return with a search warrant setting forth in detail its constitutional limitations, He regarded the income tax and the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct primary as signs of the decay of the Republic.”

  “How did he feel about the Nineteenth?”

  “Hilda, Grandpa Zach supported female suffrage. I remember hearing him say that if women were so dad-burned foolish as to want to assume the burden, they should be allowed to—they couldn’t do the country more harm than men had. ‘Votes for Women’ didn’t annoy him but nine thousand other things did. He lived at a slow simmer, always ready to break into a rolling boil.

  “He had one hobby: collecting steel engravings.”

  “‘Steel engravings’?” I repeated.

  “Of dead presidents, my Princess. Especially of McKinley, Cleveland, and Madison—but he didn’t scorn those of Washington. He had that instinct for timing so necessary to a collector. In 1929 on Black Thursday he held not one share of common stock; instead he had sold short. When the 1933 Bank Holiday came along every old-dollar he owned, except current cash, was in Zurich in Swiss money. Eventually U.S. citizens were forbidden by ‘emergency’ decree to own gold even abroad.

  “Grandpa Zach ducked into Canada, applied for Swiss citizenship, got it, and thereafter split his time between Europe and America, immune to inflation and the confiscatory laws that eventually caused us to knock three zeros off the old-dollar in creating the newdollar.

  “So he died rich, in Locarno—beautiful place; I stayed with him two summers as a boy. His will was probated in Switzerland and the U.S. Revenue Service could not touch it.

  “Most of it was a trust with its nature known to his offspring before his death or I would not have been named
Zebadiah.

  “Female descendants got pro-rata shares of income with no strings attached but males had to have first names starting with ‘Z’—and even that got them not one Swiss franc; there was a ‘Root, hog, or die!’ clause. Zachariah believed in taking care of daughters, but sons and grandsons had to go out and scratch, with no help from their fathers, until they had earned and saved on their own—or accumulated without going to jail—assets equal to one pro-rata share of the capital sum of the trust before they shared in the trust’s income.”

  “Sexism,” said Aunt Hilda. “Raw, unadulterated sexism. Any FemLib gal would sneer at his dirty old money, on those terms.”

  “Would you have refused it, Sharpie?”

  “Me? Zebbie dear, are you feverish? I would have both greedy hands out. I’m strong for women’s rights but no fanatic. Sharpie wants to be pampered and that’s what men are best at—their natural function.”

  “Pop, do you need help in coping with her?”

  “No, Son. I like pampering Hilda. I don’t see you abusing my daughter.”

  “I don’t dare; you told me she’s vicious at karate.” (I am good at karate; Pop made sure that I learned all the dirty fighting possible. But not against Zebadiah! If I ever do—Heaven forbid!—find myself opposed to my husband, I’ll quiver my chin and cry.)

  “On my graduation from high school my father had a talk with me. ‘Zeb,’ he told me. ‘The time has come. I’ll put you through any school you choose. Or you can take what you have saved, strike out on your own, and try to qualify for a share in your grandfather’s will. Suit yourself, I shan’t influence you.’

  “Folks, I had to think. My father’s younger brother was past forty and still hadn’t qualified. The size of the trust made a pro-rata of its assets amount to a requirement that a male descendant had to get rich on his own—well-to-do at least—whereupon he was suddenly twice as rich. But with over half of this country’s population living on the taxes of the lesser number it is not as easy to get rich as it was in Grandpa’s day.

  “Turn down a paid-for education at Princeton, or M.I.T.? Or go out and try to get rich with nothing but a high school education?—I hadn’t learned much in high school; I had majored in girls.