The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories

Then he threw them, at first tensely, and then with growing confidence, and the black hole flashed—and flashed—and flashed.

It seemed to him that the target became steadily easier to hit and that the black hole was growing madly with each impact and that soon it would reach out and suck him and the ship into its never-sated maw.

It was his imagination, of course, and nothing more. Finally all the rocks were gone and he felt he could throw nothing more in any case. He had been out there, it seemed, for hours.

When he was within the ship again he said, as soon as Funarelli had helped him off with his helmet, “That’s it. I can’t do anything more.”

“You had plenty of flashes there,” said Funarelli.

“Plenty, and they should surely be recorded. We’ll just have to wait now. They’ve got to come.”

Funarelli helped him off with the rest of his suit as best his muscle-torn body would allow. Then he stood, grunting and gasping, and said, “Do you really think they’ll come, Ben?”

“I think they’ve got to,” said Estes, almost as though he were trying to force the event by the sheer power of wishing. “I think they’ve got to.”

“Why do you think they’ve got to?” said Funarelli, sounding like a man who wanted to grasp at straws but didn’t dare.

“Because I communicated,” said Estes. “We’re not only the first people to encounter a black hole, we’re the first to use it to communicate; we’re the first to use the ultimate communication system of the future, the one that might send messages from star to star and galaxy to galaxy, and that might be the ultimate energy source as well —” He was panting, and he sounded a little wild.

“What are you talking about?” said Funarelli.

“I threw those rocks in rhythm, Harv,” said Estes, “and the X-ray bursts came in rhythm. It was flash-flash- flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash, and so on.”

“Yes?”

“It’s old-fashioned; old-fashioned, but that’s one thing everyone remembers from the days when people communicated by electric currents running through wires.”

“You mean the photograph—phonograph—”

“The telegraph, Harv. Those flashes I produced will be recorded and the first time someone looks at that record, all hell will break loose. It’s not just that they’ll be spotting an X-ray source; it’s not just that it will be an X- ray source moving very slowly against the stars so that it has to be within our Solar System. What it is, is that they’ll be seeing an X-ray source going on and off and producing the signal sos—sos—And when an X-ray Source is shouting for help, you’ll bet they’ll come—as fast as they can—if only to see—what’s—there—that—”

He was asleep.

— And five days later, a drone ship arrived.

***

Incidentally, it may occur to some of my Gentle Readers that there is a certain similarity between the story and my very first published story, MAROONED OFF VESTA, which appeared in print thirty-seven years earlier. In each story, two men are trapped on a spaceship wrecked in the asteroid belt and must use their ingenuity to devise a way of escaping what looked like certain death.

Of course, the resolutions are completely different, and it was in my mind to demonstrate some of the changes in our outlook on the Universe that took place in those thirty-seven years by producing in 1976 a resolution that would have been inconceivable in 1939.

In the fall of 1975, Fred Dannay (better known as Ellery Queen) approached me with a very intriguing idea for the August 1976 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which would be on the stands at the time of the Bicentennial. He planned to publish a mystery dealing with the Bicentennial itself, and another dealing with the Centennial in 1876. What he needed now was one for the Tricentennial in 2076 and, of course, that meant a science fiction story.

Since I have been writing numerous mystery stories for the magazine in recent years, he thought of me and proposed that I tackle the job. I agreed and got to work on November 1, 1975. I ended with uncompromising science fiction which I feared might make a little heavy going for mystery readers. Fred thought otherwise, apparently, for he took the story and was even kind enough to pay me a bonus.

The Tercentenary Incident

July 4, 2076—and for the third time the accident of the conventional system of numeration, based on powers of ten, had brought the last two digits of the year back to the fateful 76 that had seen the birth of the nation.

It was no longer a nation in the old sense; it was rather a geographic expression; part of a greater whole that made up the Federation of all of humanity on Earth, together with its offshoots on the Moon and in the space colonies. By culture and heritage, however, the name and the idea lived on, and that portion of the planet signified by the old name was still the most prosperous and advanced region of the world. . . . And the President of the United States was still the most powerful single figure in the Planetary Council.

Lawrence Edwards watched the small figure of the President from his height of two hundred feet. He drifted lazily above the crowd, his flotron motor making a barely heard chuckle on his back, and what he saw looked exactly like what anyone would see on a holovision scene. How many times had he seen little figures like that in his living room, little figures in a cube of sunlight, looking as real as though they were living homunculi, except that you could put your hand through them.

You couldn’t put your hand through those spreading out in their tens of thousands over the open spaces surrounding the Washington Monument. And you couldn’t put your hand through the President. You could reach out to him instead, touch him, and shake his hand.

Edwards thought sardonically of the uselessness of that added element of tangibility and wished himself a hundred miles away, floating in air over some isolated wilderness, instead of here where he had to watch for any sign of disorder. There wouldn’t be any necessity for his being here but for the mythology of the value of “pressing the flesh.”

Edwards was not an admirer of the President—Hugo Allen Winkler, fifty-seventh of the line.

To Edwards, President Winkler seemed an empty man, a charmer, a vote grabber, a promiser. He was a disappointing man to have in office now after all the hopes of those first months of his administration. The World Federation was in danger of breaking up long before its job had been completed and Winkler could do nothing about it. One needed a strong hand now, not a glad hand; a hard voice, not a honey voice.

There he was now, shaking hands—a space forced around him by the Service, with Edwards himself, plus a few others of the Service, watching from above.

The President would be running for re-election certainly, and there seemed a good chance he might be defeated. That would just make things worse, since the opposition party was dedicated to the destruction of the Federation.

Edwards sighed. It would be a miserable four years coming up—maybe a miserable forty—and all he could do was float in the air, ready to reach every Service agent on the ground by laser-phone if there was the slightest—

He didn’t see the slightest. There was no sign of disturbance. Just a little puff of white dust, hardly visible; just a momentary glitter in the sunlight, up and away, gone as soon as he was aware of it.

Where was the President? He had lost sight of him in the dust. He looked about in the vicinity of where he had seen him last. The President could not have moved far.

Then he became aware of disturbance. First it was among the Service agents themselves, who seemed to have gone off their heads and to be moving this way and that jerkily. Then those among the crowd near them caught the contagion and then those farther off. The noise rose and became a thunder.

Edwards didn’t have to hear the words that made up the rising roar. It seemed to carry the news to him by nothing more than its mass clamorous urgency. President Winkler had disappeared! He had been there one moment and had turned into a handful of vanishing dust the next.