It was not until the ninth hour when but half an inch of candle remained and darkness began to gather in the farther corners of the room and to creep closer, that he screamed, and beat and clawed at the door until his hands were a raw and bloody pulp.
SECOND CHANCE
Jay and I were in the stands at New Comiskey Field in Chicago to watch the replay of the October 9, 1959, game of the World Series, and play was about to start.
In the original game just exactly five hundred years ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers had won, nine to three, which had ended the series in six games and had given them the championship. Of course it could come out differently this time, although conditions at the start were as near as possible to those of the original game.
The Chicago White Sox were out on the field and the starting players were tossing the ball around the infield a few times before throwing it to Wynn, the starting pitcher, to take his warm-up pitches. Kluszewski was on first, Fox on second, Goodman on third, and Aparicio was playing short. Gilliam was coming up to bat first for the Dodgers, with Neal on deck. Podres would be their starting pitcher.
They were not the original players of those names, of course. They were androids, artificial men who differ from robots in that they are made not of metal but of flexible plastics, powered by laboratory-grown muscles, and designed as exact simulacrums of human beings. These were as nearly exact replicas as possible of the original players of half a millennium ago. As with all reproduced athletes of ancient games and contests, early records, pictures, television films, and other sources had been exhaustively studied; each android not only looked like and played like the ancient player he represented, but was adjusted to be just as skillful as and no more skillful than his prototype. He hadn’t played over an entire season—baseball is now limited to the set of World Series games played once a year on the semimillennial anniversaries of the original games—but if he had played for the whole season his batting and fielding averages would have been identical to those of the player he imitated; so would the earned-run average of the pitchers.
In theory the scores should come out the same as those of the individual games, but of course there are the breaks, and the fact that the respective managers—also androids—may choose to issue different instructions and make different substitutions. The same team usually wins the Series that originally won it, but not always in the same number of games, and the scores of individual games sometimes vary widely from the original scores.
This particular game kept the same score, nothing to nothing, for two innings, as the original, but it varied widely in the third; that had been the big inning for the Dodgers with six runs. This time Wynn let three men get on base with only one out, but managed to put out the fire and hold the Dodgers scoreless.
The stands and bleachers started roaring. And Jay, who favors the White Sox, made me a bet; he’d been afraid to offer even odds till that half inning was over.
In the sixth inning—but the game is on record, so why go into details? The White Sox did win, by a one-run margin, and stayed in the Series. It was three games apiece, and the Sox would have a chance tomorrow to make it a complete upset and win the championship.
Jay (his real name is J with twelve digits after it) and I stood up to leave, as did the rest of the spectators. There was a wave of bright steel throughout the stands.
«I wonder,» Jay said, «what it would be like to see a game really played by human beings, as it used to be.»
«I wonder,» I said, «what it would be like just to see a real human being. I’m less than two hundred and there haven’t been any alive for at least four hundred years. How’d you like to go with me for a lube job? If I don’t get one today I’ll start getting rusty. And how do you want to bet on tomorrow’s game? The White Sox have a second chance, even if the human race hasn’t. Well, we keep their traditions alive as much as we can.»
GREAT LOST DISCOVERIES I – Invisibility
Three great discoveries were made, and tragically lost, during the twentieth century. The first of these was the secret of invisibility.
The secret of invisibility was discovered in 1909 by Archibald Praeter, emissary from the court of Edward VII to the court of Sultan Abd el Krim, ruler of a small state loosely allied to the Ottoman Empire.
Praeter, an amateur but enthusiastic biologist, was injecting mice with various serums for the purpose of finding an injection which would cause mutations. When he injected his 3019th mouse, the mouse disappeared. It was still there; he could feel it in his hand, but he could not see a hair or claw of it. He put it carefully in a cage and two hours later it appeared again, unharmed.
He experimented with increasing dosages and found that he could make a mouse invisible for up to twenty-four hours. Larger doses made it ill or torpid. He also learned that a mouse killed while invisible reappeared instantly at the moment of death.
Realizing the importance of his discovery, he wired his resignation to England, dismissed his servants and locked himself in his quarters, and began to experiment with himself. Starting with a small injection that made him invisible for only a few minutes, he worked up until he found his tolerance was equal to that of mice; an injection that made him invisible for more than twenty-four bows also made him ill. He also found that although nothing of his body was visible, not even his dentures if he kept his lips closed, nudity was essential; clothing did not become invisible with him.
Praeter was an honest and fairly well-to-do man, so he did not think of crime. He decided to return to England and offer his discovery to His Majesty’s government for use in espionage or war.
But he decided first to allow himself one indulgence. He had always been curious about the closely guarded harem of the Sultan to whose court he had been attached. Why not have a close look at it from inside?
Besides, something—some nagging thought that he couldn’t quite isolate—bothered him about his discovery. There was some circumstance under which… He couldn’t get beyond that point in his mind. An experiment was definitely in order.
He stripped and made himself invisible for the maximum period. It proved simple to walk past the armed eunuchs and enter the harem. He spent an interesting afternoon watching the fifty-odd beauties at their daytime occupation of keeping themselves beautiful, bathing and anointing their bodies with scented oils and perfumes.
One, a Circassian, especially attracted him. It occurred to him, just as it would have occurred to any man, that if he stayed the night—perfectly safe since he would be invisible until the following noon—he could keep her in sight to learn which room she slept in and, after the lights were out, join her; she would think the Sultan was favoring her with a visit.
He kept her in sight and noticed the room she entered. An armed eunuch took his post at the curtained doorway, others at each of the other doorways to the sleeping rooms. He waited until he was sure she would be asleep and then, at a moment when the eunuch was looking down the hall and would not see the movement of the curtain, he slipped through it. The light had been dim in the hallway; here the darkness was utter. But he groped carefully and managed to find the sleeping couch. Carefully he put out a hand and touched the sleeping woman. She screamed. (What he had not known was that the Sultan never visited the harem by night but sent for one, or sometimes several, of his wives to visit his own quarters.)
And suddenly the eunuch who had been outside was inside and had hold of him by the arm. The last thing he thought was that he now knew the one worrisome circumstance of invisibility: it was completely useless in pitch darkness. And the last thing he heard was the swish of the scimitar.