Vyrko allowed the expected laugh to come forth. “But since,” he said, gladly accepting the explanation that was so much more credible than the truth, “I haven’t any idea who I am, where I live, or what my profession is—”
“Can’t remember anything? Don’t know if you can take shorthand, for instance? Or play the bull fiddle?”
“Not a thing.” Vyrko felt it hardly worth while to point out his one manual accomplishment, the operation of the as yet uninvented electronic typewriter.
“Behold,” he thought, “the Man of the Future. I’ve read all the time travel stories. I know what should happen. I teach them everything Kirth-Labbery knew and I’m the greatest man in the world. Only the time travel never happens to a poor dope who took for granted all the science around him, who pushed a button or turned a knob and never gave a damn what happened, or why, between that action and the end result. Here they’re just beginning to get two-dimensional black-and-white short-range television. We had (will have?) stereoscopic full-color wo rid-wide video— which I’m about as capable of constructing here as my friend the doctor would be of installing an electric light in Ancient Rome. The Mouse of the Future . . .”
The doctor had been thinking too. He said, “Notice you’re a great reader. Librarian’s been telling me about you—went through the whole damn hospital library like a bookworm with a tapeworm!”
Vyrko laughed dutifully. “I like to read,” he admitted.
“Ever try writing?” the doctor asked abruptly, almost in the tone in which he might reluctantly advise a girl that her logical future lay in Port Said.
This time Vyrko really laughed. “That does seem to ring a bell, you know . . . It might be worth trying. But at that, what do I live on until I get started?”
“Hospital trustees here administer a rehabilitation fund. Might wangle a loan. Won’t be much, of course; but I always say a single man’s got only one mouth to feed—and if he feeds more, he won’t be single long!”
“A little,” said Vyrko with a glance at the newspaper headlines, “might go a long way.
It did. There was the loan itself, which gave him a bank account on which in turn he could acquire other short-term loans—at exorbitant interest. And there was the election.
He had finally reconstructed what he should know about it. There had been a brilliant Wheel-of-If story in one of the much later pulps, on If the Republicans had won the 1948 election. Which meant that in fact they had lost; and here, in October of 1948, all newspapers, all commentators, and most important, all gamblers, were convinced that they must infallibly win.
On Wednesday, November third, Vyrko repaid his debts and settled down to his writing career, comfortably guaranteed against immediate starvation.
A half dozen attempts at standard fiction failed wretchedly. A matter of “tone,” editors remarked vaguely, on the rare occasions when they did not confine themselves to the even vaguer phrases of printed rejection forms. A little poetry sold—“if you can call that selling,” Vyrko thought bitterly, comparing the financial position of the poet with his own world.
His failures were beginning to bring back the bitterness of boredom, and his thoughts turned more and more to that future to which he could never know the answer.
Twins. It had to be twins—of opposite sexes, of course. The only hope of the continuance of the race lay in a matter of odds and genetics.
Odds . . . He began to think of the election bet, to figure other angles with which he could turn foreknowledge to profit. But his pulp-reading had filled his mind with fears of the paradoxes involved. He had calculated the election bets carefully; they could not affect the outcome of the election, they could not even, in their proportionately small size, affect the odds. But any further step . . .
Vyrko was, like most conceited men, fond of self-contempt, which he felt he could occasionally afford to indulge in. Possibly his strongest access of self-contempt came when he realized the simplicity of the solution to all his problems.
He could write for the science fiction pulps.
The one thing that he could handle convincingly and skillfully, with the proper “tone,” was the future. Possibly start off with a story on the Religious Wars; he’d done all that research on his novel. Then . . .
It was not until he was about to mail the manuscript that the full pattern of the truth struck him.
Soberly, yet half-grinning, he crossed out Kirth Vyrko on the first page and wrote Norbert Holt.
Manning Stern rejoiced loudly in this fresh discovery. “This boy’s got it! He makes it sound so real that . . .” The business office was instructed to pay the highest bonus rate (unheard of for a first story), and an intensely cordial letter went to the author outlining immediate needs and offering certain story suggestions.
The editor of Surprising was no little surprised at the answer:
. . . I regret to say that all my stories will be based on one consistent scheme of future events and that you must allow me to stick to my own choice of material . . .
“And who the hell,” Manning Stern demanded, “is editing this magazine?” and dictated a somewhat peremptory suggestion for a personal interview.
The features were small and sharp, and the face had a sort of dark aliveness. It was a different beauty from Lavra’s, and an infinitely different beauty from the curious standards set by the 1949 films; but it was beauty and it spoke to Norbert Holt.
“You’ll forgive a certain surprise, Miss Stern,” he ventured. “I’ve read Surprising for so many years and never thought . . .”
Manning Stern grinned. “That the editor was a surprise? I’m used to it—your reaction, I mean. I don’t think I’ll ever be quite used to being a woman . . . or a human being, for that matter.”
“Isn’t
