A new thought came, and he laughed sardonically. Suppose he were to be convicted of murder and gassed? If he died in the present, his future corpse would instantly vanish — naturally. No corpus delicti. Inevitably — oh, very inevitably — he would be vindicated after he died.
The prospect failed to cheer him.
Reminded of the need for action, Gallegher yelled for the Lybblas. They had got into the cookie jar, but responded guiltily to his summons, brushing crumbs from their whiskers with furry paws. “We want milk,” the fattest one said. “The world is ours.”
“Yes,” said another, “we’ll destroy all the cities and then hold pretty girls for—”
“Leave it,” Gallegher told them tiredly. “The world will wait. I can’t, I’ve got to invent something in a hurry so I can get some money and hire a lawyer. I can’t spend the rest of my life being indicted for my future corpses’ murders.”
“You talk like a madman,” Grandpa said helpfully.
“Go away. Far away. I’m busy.”
Grandpa shrugged, donned a topcoat, and went out. Gallegher returned to his cross-questioning of the three Lybblas.
They were, he found, singularly unhelpful. It wasn’t that they were recalcitrant; on the contrary, they were only too glad to oblige. But they had little idea of what Gallegher wanted. Moreover, their small minds were filled, to the exclusion of all else, with their own fond delusion. The world was theirs. It was difficult for them to realize that other problems existed.
Nevertheless, Gallegher persevered. Finally he got a clue to what he wanted, after the Lybblas had again referred to a mental hookup. Such devices, he learned, were fairly common in the world of the future. They had been invented by a man named Gallegher, long ago, the fat Lybbla said stupidly, not grasping the obvious implication.
Gallegher gulped. He had to make a mental hookup machine now, apparently, since that was in the cards. On the other hand, what if he didn’t? The future would be changed again. How was it, he wondered, that the Lybblas hadn’t vanished with the first corpse — when pattern a had switched to variable b?
Well, the question wasn’t unanswerable. Whether or not Gallegher lived his life, the Lybblas, in their Martian valley, would be unaffected. When a musician strikes a false note, he may have to transpose for a few bars, but will drift back into the original key as soon as possible. Time, it seemed, trended toward the norm. Heigh-ho.
“What is this mental hookup business?” he demanded.
They told him. He pieced it out from their scatterbrained remarks, and discovered that the device was strange but practical. Gallegher said something about wild talents under his breath. It amounted to that.
With the mental hookup, a dolt could learn mathematics in a few moments. The application, of course, would require practice — mental dexterity must be developed. A stiff-fingered bricklayer could learn to be an expert pianist, but it would take time before his hands could be limbered up and made sufficiently responsive. However, the important point was that talents could be transferred from one brain to another.
It was a matter of induction, through charts of the electrical impulses emitted by the brain. The pattern varies. When a man is asleep, the curve levels out. When he is dancing, for example, his subconscious automatically guides his feet — if he’s a sufficiently good dancer. That pattern is distinctive. Once recorded and recognized, it can be traced later — and the factors that go to make up a good dancer traced, as by a pantograph, on another brain.
Whew!
There was a lot more, involving memory centers and so forth, but Gallegher got the gist of it. He was impatient to begin work. It fitted a certain plan he had—
“Eventually you learn to recognize the chart lines at a glance,” one of the Lybblas told him. “It — the device — is used a great deal in our time. People who don’t want to study get the knowledge pumped into their minds from the brains of noted savants. There was an Earthman in the Valley once who wanted to be a famous singer, but he was tone-deaf. Couldn’t carry a note. He used the mental hookup, and after six months he could sing anything.”
“Why six months?”
“His voice wasn’t trained. That took time. But after he’d got in the groove he—”
“Make us a mental hookup,” the fat Lybblas suggested. “Maybe we can use it to conquer the Earth.”
“That,” Gallegher said, “is exactly what I’m going to do. With a few reservations—” Gallegher televised Rufus Hellwig, on the chance that he might induce the tycoon to part with some of his fortune, but without success. Hellwig was recalcitrant. “Show me,” he said. “Then I’ll give you a blank check.”
“But I need the money now,” Gallegher insisted. “I can’t give you what you want if I’m gassed for murder.”
“Murder? Who’d you kill?” Hellwig wanted to know.
“I didn’t kill anybody, I’m being framed—”
“So am I. But I’m not falling, this time. Show me results. I make you no more advances, Gallegher.”
“Look. Wouldn’t you like to be able to sing like a Caruso? Dance like Nijinsky? Swim like Weissmuller? Make speeches like Secretary Parkinson? Make like Houdini?”
“Have you got a snootful!” Hellwig said ruminatively and broke the beam. Gallegher glared at the screen. It looked as though he’d have to go to work, after all.
So he did. His trained, expert fingers flew, keeping pace with his keen brain. Liquor helped, liberating his demon subconscious. When in doubt, he questioned the Lybblas. Nevertheless the job took time.
He didn’t have all the equipment he needed, and vised a supply company, managing to wangle sufficient credit to swing the deal on the cuff. He kept working. Once he was interrupted by a mild little man in a derby who brought a subpoena, and once Grandpa wandered in to borrow five credits. The circus was in town, and Grandpa, as an old big top enthusiast, couldn’t miss it.
“Want to come along?” he inquired. “I might get in a crap game with some of the boys. Always got on well with circus people, somehow. Won five hundred once from a bearded lady. Nope? Well, good luck.”
He went away, and Gallegher returned to his mental hookup device. The Lybblas contentedly stole cookies and squabbled amicably about the division of the world after they’d conquered it. The machine grew slowly but inevitably.
As for the time machine itself, occasional attempts to turn it off proved only one thing: it had frozen into stasis. It seemed to be fixed in a certain definite pattern, from which it was impossible to budge it. It had been set to bring back Gallegher’s variable corpses. Until it had fulfilled that task, it stubbornly refused to obey additional orders. “There was an old maid from Vancouver,” Gallegher murmured absently.
“Let’s see. I need a tight beam here — Yeah. She jumped on his knee with a chortle of glee—If I vary the receptor sensibly on the electro-magnetic current — Hm-m-m—And nothing on earth could remove ’er. Yeah, that does it.”
It was night. Gallegher hadn’t been conscious of the passing of hours. The Lybblas, bulging with filched cookies, had made no complaint, except occasional demands for more milk. Gallegher had drunk steadily as he worked, keeping his subconscious to the fore. He hadn’t realized till now that he was hungry. Sighing, he looked at the completed mental hookup device, shook his head, and opened the door. The back yard lay empty before him.
Or—
No, it was empty. No more corpses just yet. Time-variable pattern b was still in operation. He stepped out and let the cool night air blow on his hot cheeks. The blazing towers of Manhattan made ramparts against the night around him. Above, the lights of air traffic flickered like devil fireflies.