Harry had already decided against the selfish, grasping approach. He just wasn’t sure how he was going to handle the alternative.
“We both know it can never be the same as it was,” he said. And with that, he turned his back on Victoria and headed for the front door. Then he thought twice.
He walked instead through the main dining room, into a smaller banquet room, then into the kitchen. He ducked out the back of the restaurant into a narrow snow-packed alley, which led down the block to the parking garage and Dunster Street.
This conspiracy game could be fun, he thought as he maneuvered around overflowing trash cans. Fun until one considered the hazards. And being a conspiracy of one had its own drawbacks.
Finally, once he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he doubled back and headed towards Harvard.
Harry slipped through the back door of the Harvard Science Center and slip-stepped down the stairs under the big fire door that hung over the basement entryway like the sword of Damocles. He headed straight for the Museum of Scientific Artifacts.
It was a small room, but behind the glass stood large displays that included a six-foot-long brass telescope, Galileo’s military compass and quadrant, ivory orreries, and row upon row of brass and varnished wood devices whose purposes he could only guess.
The museum was closed now, but he’d had a part-time job here last semester and knew the master code for the door lock.
In a locked chamber behind Galileo’s instruments sat a lacquered wooden case with brass fittings that he’d selected himself. No one would ever have known that the box labeled “1891 Voltage Phase Rectifier” actually contained the alien machine.
It was still there. At the last minute, it had occurred to Harry that it might be possible for someone to activate the thing from a distance and spirit it away from its hiding place, but his momentary fear was unfounded.
Earlier in the day, he’d talked to Arleigh, who told him that the boys in the MIT lab had learned much more about the device’s control program.
Now it was ready to use as its makers had intended—tied into the think-man network. Harry could go anywhere he wanted to at the push of a button.
He turned on his think-man and logged back on-line. It had been only a couple of days since he’d felt the virtual mouse in his hand, seen the sparkle of the menu in his eye, and heard the voice in his ear, but it seemed like years.
Professor Epstein was right, he realized. With this device plugged into his head, he had given up thinking for himself. Otherwise, he knew, he would have questioned Victoria’s request more deeply. He might never have gone to Naverly Tol if he’d been thinking more clearly. He might never have taken up with Victoria in the first place.
He rolled the mouse up, clicked it, and came up with a menu custom-designed for the transit device. He dialed up Quincy Market, and doubleclicked the mouse.
When the darkness faded back to light, he stood in the cobblestoned courtyard between the Market and Fa-neuil Hall. An inch of ice caked the ground, with narrow paths cut through it for pedestrians. The exposed stones were still slippery, though, and Harry almost lost his balance more than once as he crossed the yard to the building.
The smell of hot cooking oil, fried meats, and fresh-baked bread and pastries filled the air, and hundreds of hungry Bostonians filled the space between the rows of restaurants, delis, bakeries, raw bars, and rotisseries.
It occurred to Harry as he worked his way through the mass of diners that if everyone had one of the transit devices, Quincy Market would be impossible to negotiate. It was hard enough as it was, with everyone trying to make up their minds what to eat. But only so many people could be here at once. All that would change with the Rik device.
When things changed, all of Boston would become one vast Quincy Market.
Everyone would be everywhere all the time. It would all be as crowded as this madhouse.
Harry bought himself a skewer of scallops wrapped in bacon and a fresh-baked walnut brownie, then worked his way back outside. He didn’t dare linger here for long, not while he was still on-line. Victoria and her dad would be after him before he could finish eating.
So a moment later, he was in Ken-more Square, under the big Citgo Electric sign. The traffic roared past in both directions, and pedestrians clustered on the corner waiting to make their break for the far side of Commonwealth Avenue. With the transit device all that would be gone, he realized wistfully, nostalgic for a past that had not yet departed the present.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?” he asked himself. “Because its transit device was on the other side.”
He ate his supper. The scallops were rich, but the bacon was undercooked. He needed something to wash it down, so he stepped into a convenience store and pulled a single bottle of Sam Adams out of the cooler.
Then in a moment of devilishness, he leaped straight across the Charles River to the park along Memorial Drive in front of MIT.
That would be something society would have to work hard to cope with, he told himself as he twisted the top off the beer bottle. He had never stolen anything in his life, but with the transit device the temptation was irresistible. It was just too easy.
He drank some beer and looked across the Charles at the city—the high shafts of the Prudential and the Hancock buildings, the jumbled pile of brownstone houses on Beacon Hill, the long span of Harvard Bridge across the river.
The Sun was down, but it still painted the sky pale yellow to the west. The lights were on all over the city, giving the buildings a transparent, insubstantial look. Boston seemed to shimmer in the cold winter air like a mirage. It was an illusion, a momentary confluence of time and space and matter that would all be swept away once humanity had the power to be anywhere it wanted in the blink of an eye.
The pile of old brownstones on Beacon Hill contrasted with the steel and glass towers of Back Bay. How little time had passed between the building of one and the other. Humanity was moving so quickly up the line of progress. But thanks to the Rik, they were about to experience an unprecedented acceleration.
Are we really ready for that? he asked himself.
For a moment, he felt small and immaterial, like he did under the rich Tolian sky. Only now he felt the entire human race joining him in its tiny insignificance. There was so much to know and so little time to know it.
For a moment, be was seized with the impulse to hurl the transit device into the Charles River and settle the question for good. Except that it wouldn’t be settled—that much he knew.
Thinking for yourself was difficult, Harry decided at long last. Of course it was easier to dial up the right menu and listen to a soothing voice in your ear. But where was the menu for Difficult Moral Choices?
There was none, of course, but Harry realized suddenly that he knew a good alternative. And it wasn’t online.
He jumped again, across Cambridge to a Harvard office. A moment later, he made a final jump, then logged off, turned off his think-man, and began jogging down the street towards his destination, hoping that Victoria’s father wouldn’t be able to track him down.
When Professor Epstein answered the door, Harry allowed himself a momentary sigh of relief. He’d worried that she wouldn’t be home. She had a puzzled look on her face, but she invited him into the kitchen and offered him a cup of coffee.
The place was filled with a confused mixture of decorating styles. The kitchen was outfitted with an enameled table and matching appliances that looked nearly a century old—much like the house itself. The hallway was done in a Southwestern motif with woven Navajo blankets on the wall and a cactus garden beneath the window. What he saw of the living room contained personal relics—photos, posters, books, awards. It was as if the professor had collected layers of design throughout her long life and gathered them together in this small frame house on a Cambridge side street.