A Borrowed Man Read online

  “It won’t go on forever. I can’t believe it does.”

  Dr. Roglich nodded. “In that case, space must have existed previous to the Big Bang. The Big Bang can hardly have constructed distant walls at the moment of the explosion. Any such walls, any such boundaries, must have preexisted. How did they get there?”

  I said, “I don’t think there are any.”

  “The universe extends to infinity in every direction? At no time did it not exist?”

  I nodded. “Precisely.”

  “If that is true, and if mere vacuity somehow calls matter into being—thus violating the familiar maxim that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed—there should have been an infinite number of Big Bangs, whereas we see evidence of only one.” Wetting his lips with his tongue, Dr. Roglich gave the bookcase a worried glance. “The night sky ought to be an almost uniform blaze of light. Will you agree?”

  I said, “I suppose I must.”

  The pained smile returned. “There remains another question, little noted but more difficult than the first. Where did all that space come from? All that emptiness? It can hardly have summoned itself into being. Let us say that in the beginning there was nothing. Nothing at all, anywhere. Had there been nothing forever? Endless ages of nothing stretching infinitely into the past? If that were so, what prompted creation after endless ages of infinite and utterly empty intergalactic space? Notice that space is something we generally have to create. You ask your friend how she likes her new apartment. She tells you she loves it, but there isn’t enough closet space. If space somehow created itself, wouldn’t her closets grow bigger and bigger?”

  Colette laughed, shaking her head.

  “You offer her a solution. Build a new wall here, making the living room a trifle smaller. Doors here and here. Presto change-o! Additional closet space has been created.”

  I said, “Not without losing space elsewhere.”

  “Exactly. Space has been moved from the living room to the new closets. Now suppose I had some means of moving space without employing walls and similar indirect methods. I open my window. Let us say my apartment is on the fifth floor. There is plenty of space out there, I decide. No one will notice if I take a few cubic meters. I will move a little of it into my apartment. My lounge, let us say, is ten meters long, six meters wide, and four meters high. I set the controls for three meters, three meters, and five meters. I activate my equipment, moving forty-five cubic meters of space into my lounge. When I turn around, I discover that my lounge has become pleasantly larger. It is ten meters sixty centimeters long and six meters thirty-six centimeters wide now. Nor is that all. It has a four meter twenty-four centimeter ceiling. My wife will buy new pictures. Big ones.” Dr. Roglich mopped his forehead with his handkerchief.

  Colette asked, “What about the carpet?”

  “A penetrating question, Ms. Coldbrook. It occurred to me as well, and solving it required a good deal of investigation. It became longer and wider, just as the walls grew higher. The temperature of the room plummeted abruptly. The architecture of the building became somewhat odd, and possibly weaker; but all that had to happen if my lounge was to contain the additional space that had been thrust into it.

  “Nor is that all. If I have not frozen to death, I will eventually discover that the building across the street is nearer my own. How could it be otherwise when space between the two buildings has been removed?”

  “It sounds crazy,” Colette murmured.

  “Believe me, Ms. Coldbrook, far crazier facts are met with every day in astrophysics. I’m no particle physicist, but I know enough about the field to tell you that the same thing is true in that discipline. Could we but reclone him, Lewis Carroll would be delighted.”

  “You can’t actually do this?”

  Briefly the ghost of a smile appeared on Dr. Roglich’s perspiring face. “No, Ms. Coldbrook, I cannot. Nor could the equipment that would permit such an operation ever be constructed, in my opinion. Still, it is theoretically feasible. I—I … C-could you bring me a copy of my book, Mr. Smithe?” Dr. Roglich pointed to the bookcase. “A th-thin book in a b-b-blue binding. If you would be so kind. There are s-s-several copies in there.”

  I rose, went to the bookcase, and ran my fingers along the underside of the top.

  “N-not th-there. Second shelf. On the s-second shelf!”

  The thing my fingers found was round, smooth, and black. I tore it off, and discovered, as I had expected, that it had been mounted with double-sided tape. I dropped it to floor and crushed it under my heel, picked up its broken pieces, tore them apart, and dropped the fragments into the wastebasket beside Dr. Roglich’s desk.

  Colette said, “Was that—” and fell silent.

  “You’re right,” I told her. “That was one of their listening devices. Dr. Roglich knew it was there, and his eyes and voice told me. They must have frightened him badly, then let him see them plant it.” I dropped back into my chair.

  “They won’t like this,” Dr. Roglich said. He looked relieved.

  “Tell them the truth. Tell them I did it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. But they probably know already.” Rising again, I took a slender blue book from the second shelf of the bookcase and flipped through its pages. They were filled with equations.

  “You may keep that copy, if you wish,” Dr. Roglich told me.

  I thanked him.

  Colette said, “Are you going to read it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know enough math to follow this, but eventually we’ll find somebody who can.” I tried to make that sound more confident than I felt.

  Back in my chair I said, “Describe them to me. You saw them. What did they look like?”

  “I’d really rather not.”

  “You allowed their listening device to be destroyed,” I told him, “and they may try to kill you for it. They can’t hear you now, and Colette and I are fighting them. What did they look like?”

  It took a while to get descriptions, but we did. The men sounded like the two who had tied us up. The third was a woman.

  When my watch struck five, Colette rose. “You’ve been extremely helpful. You must have billed my father at his home. That’s where he worked.”

  Dr. Roglich nodded.

  “You may bill me at the same address.”

  Outside, Colette said, “You want them to show themselves.”

  “Yes. That’s the idea. I wanted to find out why your father had consulted Dr. Roglich, and I believe we did. I also want to get our opponents out into the light. If this doesn’t do it, we’ll try something else.”

  “Apparently they got here before we did.”

  I was too busy with my thoughts to reply.

  “Either that, or they’ve got a branch office here. Somebody in New Delphi may have voiced them and told them we were coming.”

  “A branch office?”

  Colette grinned. “All right, I was just joking. But it could be a secret society, couldn’t it? Something like that?”

  “That’s certainly possible. Not as likely as the first possibility, I would say, but entirely possible. It’s also possible that they’re simply watching Dr. Roglich because your father consulted him.”

  “What do you think?” Colette was looking up, hoping to hail a hovercab.

  “The first—that they learned what we planned and preceded us. When we see them, we’ll know.”

  “Is that why you want to stay here overnight?”

  “That’s part of it. Yes.”

  “What’s the rest?” Colette was waving.

  “I want to give them a chance to break into your father’s house. We won’t go straight in—in fact, we may not go in at all. We’ll look for a strange vehicle and have a talk with those ’bots in the barn you mentioned. If they cut the grass and so on they should have noticed any strangers. If it appears that the people we’re talking about are in the house, we’ll call the police. I assume you have an eephone?”


  Colette nodded.

  “Fine. Or we could use the screen on your flitter.”

  “It might work,” Colette said thoughtfully.

  “‘Might work’ is good enough for me.” A hovercab was settling onto a lawn to our right. Seeing it, I said, “Now we’d better watch our tongues.”

  On my advice, Colette declined the first hotel the cab suggested and took the second, renting us a small suite with a lounge, two bedrooms, and two baths. We left her overnight bag on the bed that was to become hers and went shopping for clothes for me—underclothes, socks, pajamas, shirts, and slacks. It was generous of her, and I thanked her most sincerely.

  Back at the hotel, we decided to change before dinner. I went into my bedroom and she went into hers. I took off the clothes I had worn, bagged them for the hotel laundry, showered, and dressed again.

  When I left my bedroom, Colette was gone. Naturally I thought that she was simply in her own bedroom or bathroom. I waited for about an hour listening for some sound—for bathwater running, a toilet flushing, drawers opened and closed … Anything.

  There was nothing.

  Finally I knocked on her door. By then I didn’t expect her to answer.

  I called, “Colette! Colette!” There was no reply.

  Finally I opened the door. Her bedroom was empty and her overnight bag was gone. A lamp had been knocked over, and her bed was rumpled, although it had never been turned down. When I saw those things, I knew that she had been taken, probably while I was in the shower.

  Two things hit me straight off. The first was that I had better screen the police. The second was that I could not check out of the hotel, since I could not pay.

  I got the police on the hotel’s screen, talking to a sim in police uniform who looked intelligent but let me down with a thud.

  “You need to understand first, sir, that the lamp proves nothing and the bed proves nothing. Second, that we do not investigate missing persons until the person has been missing for twenty-four hours or more. When your friend Ms. Coldbrook has been missing for that length of time, a relative or other family member may report the fact. We will keep an eye out for an additional twenty-four hours and then, provided that the missing person has not turned up, we begin our investigation.”

  The sim paused until I began to speak, then started up again. “As I understand, you are neither a relative nor a family member. You’re a library reclone? A borrowed man? Is that correct? Not fully human?”

  “Ms. Coldbrook is fully human,” I insisted.

  “Her status does not concern us at the moment. Yours does. A relative or family member must report her missing after the passing of twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours from when?”

  The simulation stared at me for several seconds. “I’m not sure. From when she went missing, perhaps. Or from when someone saw she was missing. Or now, from the time of your first try to get us to look for her. I think that’s probably it. You ought to have tried sooner.”

  I agreed.

  “Only I’m not sure this counts, because of you being a reclone and not a family member.”

  “They’re dead,” I told it. “Father, mother, brother—all dead.”

  “That doesn’t matter, any of them will do.”

  I terminated.

  The people who had taken Colette had left her shaping bag. There was zero chance that I could go around with a woman’s bag like that, so I took out everything that looked valuable, putting it into various pockets and leaving the bag hardly more than a leathery envelope. I had taken her money, to start with, a card to her apartment in Spice Grove, another for the house in New Delphi, two pairs of diamond nipple rings, and some other stuff.

  When I left the hotel, I wanted to take the clothes I had bagged for the laundry, but I did not. For one thing, there had been no wardrobe on my shelf in which to store additional clothes. When the lights are about to go out, our clothes are collected by ’bots for laundry or dry cleaning, and robes and slippers are passed out. We wear those until we go to bed, and wear them when we get up, too, until our day clothing is issued to us just before the library opens at ten. I knew things would work about the same way in another library.

  As I walked, I looked at all the tangled ways I could try to find Colette. I could hire private investigators, but they would want a lot of money upfront. I should at least notify the executor, the attorney she had talked about; but I was not in New Delphi, and I did not know his name. I could tell the school in Spice Grove where she had taught, but what could a school do? The people who worked there were no more relatives or family members than I was. All these black thoughts were interrupted five or six times by short pauses while I asked strangers for directions to the Owenbright Public Library. Usually they did not know.

  Discouraged and dead tired, I eventually found it. I showed my card—July thirtieth—and explained what I was and why I had come, first to a ’bot and afterward to an unsmiling librarian.

  “We’ll have to send you back when the truck comes,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “There’s an empty shelf in the fiction section, I believe. Two, perhaps. I’ll shelve you in there until something can be arranged. No checkouts, of course. You may be consulted but not checked out.”

  I told her I understood.

  Our shelves were three high in Owenbright, each shelf being 190 centimeters high—high enough for me to stand up, though there were a few of us who could not. As you can imagine, the lowest shelf is always the best and the highest shelf the worst; shelves are numbered down from the uppermost. In Spice Grove, the shelves are four high, so that my pretty nice shelf had been a three. In Owenbright I got a one, which was what I had expected. You get into all these high shelves by climbing narrow ladders.

  I climbed, reached my shelf, waited for half an hour or so for the library to close, stripped, and slept. Once, as if I were dreaming, I heard what seemed like a familiar voice. For a while I lay awake, listening. It did not come again.

  Eventually I turned over and slept once more.

  7

  “WHERE’S E. A. SMITHE?”

  Next morning a watchbot woke me by poking me with a light pole. With its legs extended like stilts it was a pretty tall ’bot, but not tall enough to reach that shelf in Owenlight. “Get up and get dressed! Open in half an hour!”

  It did not have to tell me I had almost missed breakfast. I yawned, got my new clothes back on (it was clean stuff now, since it had been taken up for washing and dry cleaning the night before), brushed my teeth, shaved, and so forth. You know. After that, following my nose took me to breakfast, a pretty long table in a wide aisle of the reclone section; I was late but not too late to get a bite to eat.

  Most of us do not fancy creamed chipped beef on toast or cheese grits. I am lucky there. I like creamed chipped beef and I love good cheese grits. I was helping myself to my second ladle of grits when I heard a woman’s voice at the far end of the table say, “Is that newbie Ern Smithe?”

  All right, I ought to have recognized her voice, but I did not. I just said, “Here!” and went back to eating.

  Pretty soon I smelled perfume, felt a little hand on my shoulder, and turned to look. I said something, I know, but it did not make much sense. I stammered, too, and that did not help.

  I believe it must have been the stammering that got me kissed long and hard.

  “I was just getting up.” That was Johnston Biddle, the historian.

  Then he was gone and Arabella was slipping into his place. “You,” she announced in her iron lady voice, “are the world’s most irritating man.”

  “And you have the sweetest voice in the world,” I told her. “Goes with your face.”

  “You mean in poetry.” She knew darned well exactly what I meant. “I could write terrifying poetry, too. I just don’t choose to. Or not mostly.”

  “In poetry,” I told her, “and also in conversation, but especially conversation. No matter what you
say, your voice is always music.”

  “You’ll be bringing me chocolates next.”

  “I’ve apologized a thousand times for those stupid sucking chocolates. I’ll do it a thousand more, if you want me to.”

  She looked pensive. “Actually, I enjoyed them. They just ruined my diet. Greased the skid to hell, as a matter of fact. I put on eight kilos.”

  “One lousy box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day couldn’t possibly make a woman gain eight kilos.” Nobody else at the table was talking, and I was so conscious of it that it hurt.

  “Well, it did. It started me eating horrible junk that I should never have touched. Candied watermelon rind, macaroni and cheese, devil’s food cake, preserved turnips. Every kind of awful stuff.”

  Preserved turnips? “I don’t believe you.”

  “More chocolates that I bought for myself. Lovely chocolates as dark as sin, and saltwater taffy. I remember the saltwater taffy vividly—the seascape on the box, the red, blue, and green wrappers, everything. If you still imagine my voice is sweet, you should taste that taffy. I…” Arabella shut up.

  I leaned nearer, lowering my voice and wishing I could risk a kiss. “What is it, darling?”

  “I was just thinking.…” She let it trail off, looked at me, and looked away.

  “Yes? Tell me.”

  “You can’t buy me chocolates here, can you?”

  “Here in the library? It certainly wouldn’t be easy, but it might not be impossible.”

  “We don’t have any money.” Her hand found mine. “No money at all, Ern. And it’s against the rules and we can’t leave the library.”

  Somebody ought to do a study on how long a man can talk to a woman without having to lie. I said, “Certainly I don’t have any money now, but I might get some. If I did, I might be able to buy your chocolates while I was checked out.”

  “You get checked out? Really?” Arabella turned to stare at me.

  “Sometimes.” The terror that had befallen Colette filled my mind and, I am afraid, my voice, too. “Sometimes I do. Recently I was checked out for forty days and forty nights, but I’ve become separated from my patron. That’s why I came here.”