Divine Intervention Read online

  Turning to his chief scientist, the King said, “You have deceived me! You said you could predict everything! And now look at what has happened!”

  “My Lord,” the Chief Scientist said, “I regret this as much as you do. But you must not blame science for what has so unexpectedly taken place. There is a word in science, my Lord, to describe what has taken place here.”

  “And what is that?”

  “This sort of thing is generally referred to as an anomaly. An anomaly is something perfectly natural which could not have been predicted on the basis of what has gone before.”

  “You never told me about anomalies,” the King said.

  “Why should I burden you with the unknowable, O King, when so much of the knowable is available to us?”

  By now the barbarians were drawing near. The King and his scientists turned to their horses in order to take flight.

  “It is the end of the world,” the King said sadly, mounting.

  “Not at all, sire,” the Chief Scientist said, also mounting. “It is a sad thing to lose a kingdom. But it may be of some comfort to you to know that you have reigned during the beginning of something new and unprecedented in the history of Atlantis.”

  “And what is that?” asked the King.

  “That white substance,” the scientist said, “we are now tentatively naming ‘ice.’ And unless I miss my guess, we have witnessed the beginning of Earth’s very first Ice Age.”

  “Small comfort,” said the King, and galloped off in search of a new kingdom and better weather.

  Dial-A-Death

  You never think it can happen, do you? You’re going along fine in the middle of your life. Time stretches endlessly ahead of you, and a serious matter such as dying will just have to wait because you haven’t time now even to consider it.

  And then it happens. The glitch in the system. The little pain in your head becomes piercing. Whammo, cerebral hemorrhage. The car, out of control, mounts the curb and carries you screaming through the plate glass window. The guy behind you on the subway platform gives a nervous little twitch and a push and there you are, dancing on air under the thunderous headlight of the Broad- way-7th Avenue Express. I don’t mean to be morbid, but these things happen. Then it’s too late to think of Dial-a-Death.

  Jack Stanton made page 3 of the Times when a furniture sling parted and a grand piano landed on him from ten stories up. Jack didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t even know what happened. There was a sudden rush of air blowing straight down, and then whammo—a fast, clean death, and not unmusical.

  You may have thought the transition between living and death would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong. Latest research shows that once the body realizes that it’s outward bound on a one-way trip to whatever comes next, it goes into its own special time. A few seconds can elongate and stretch into the feeling of hours. That’s the time when you really need Dial-a-Death.

  Jack Stanton never felt a thing. One minute he was walking down 57th Street in Manhattan thinking about how he could raise ten million dollars for a merger (he was a lawyer specializing in corporate finances) when there was something like a puff of air above his head and he found himself somewhere else.

  He was standing on a landscaped lawn near a big gracious old house, like his parents used to have when he was a kid. A party was going on inside. He could hear the music, and through the windows he could see people dancing. Somebody waved to him from the house. A pretty redhaired girl was beckoning to him.

  He went in. It looked like a really good party. There were a lot of people there and they all seemed to be having fun. They were square dancing inside. Jack hadn’t seen square dancing in twenty years. He joined in. Unexpectedly, he found that he was an expert at it. The crowd moved back to give him and his partner room. The girl he was dancing with was buxom and pretty and light on her feet. They were great together. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! They finished with a flourish and went hand in hand upstairs.

  The girl led him into one of the back rooms. There were coats stacked two feet high on the big double bed. They got up on top of them. The girl was so astonishingly pretty that it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been cold, indifferent, or even blew a pink chewing gum bubble at the moment of supreme ecstasy. With her looks she couldn’t do anything wrong, not the first time, anyhow. And in fact she was amazingly responsive, tender, fiery, unfathomably and endlessly delicious. She was what you’d have to call a peak experience anyway you slice it.

  Jack floated upward through the intensities of mounting excitement. His orgasm was tremendous, gargantuan, exemplary, incomparable, and he fell back on the bed exhausted, sated, pleased beyond telling, dropping into that delicious time when exhaustion steals over you like a gift from Psyche and there is nothing ahead but a sweet floating fall through endless layers of soft-scented sleep.

  Maybe he did sleep for a while. When he opened his eyes the girl was gone. The party was gone, even the house had vanished. Now he was standing alone in a long corridor, facing a closed door, and he was stark mother naked.

  A voice came from nowhere: “Jack—go through the door.”

  “Who is this?” Jack says. “Where am I?”

  “Don’t ask questions. Just go through the door. Everything will be all right.”

  Still drowsy and happy, Jack had an impulse to obey the voice. But he resisted. He had always been cantankerous, cross-grained, self-directed. He hadn’t gotten to where he was by taking orders from people. He was Jack Stanton. People did what he told them to do, not the other way around.

  “Whoever you are,” Jack said, “quit kidding around and come out here and tell me what’s going on.”

  “Mr. Stanton, please—”

  “Who are you? What is all this?”

  “I am Doctor Gustaffson from the Institute. Do you remember now?”

  Jack nodded slowly. It was coming back to him. “The guy with the new medical thing. What was it?”

  “Dial-a-Death. The Institute for Harmonious Dying.”

  “I hired you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “To arrange my death?”

  “To arrange your dying, Mr. Stanton, not your death. We had nothing to do with that grand piano falling on you. What a shame that was, cut off in your prime like that! On the part of myself and all the staff at Dial-a-Death I want to offer you our condolences. But we did all right by you, didn’t we? When the time came, Dial-a-Death was right there. Our operators picked up your neural web within milliseconds of the piano pulping you. The computer implants worked just right. The girl was something, eh? With programming like that it’s almost a pleasure to die, eh?”

  “What are you talking about, dying? I’m in a hospital somewhere, right?”

  “Mr. Stanton, be realistic. I hate to mention what must be a painful subject, but they could have put most of what they found of you in a gallon jar and still have room left for a wax seal. Face it, Mr. Stanton, the body’s gone, you’re dead.”

  Jack Stanton had a moment of sickening panic. Death! He had tried to make it nice for himself. Sure, he’d signed up for Dial-a-Death, and it had cost plenty. A man owes it to himself to try to make his dying nice. But that was for some time in the future. Dying had always been for later.

  “What you have to do now,” the doctor said, “is open that door in front of you and walk through.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “We don’t know. Nobody’s ever come back. Our job is to try to keep you in a good frame of mind until you reach the door. After that, you’re on your own.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Jack said. “I’m staying right here.”

  “Mr. Stanton, I’m very much afraid that won’t do.”

  “I’m not going through that door!”

  “Well, it’s up to you, Jack,” the doctor said. “This is the limit of Dial-a-Death’s service area.”

  Jack Stanton stood alone in the corridor. To hell with them, he wasn’t goin
g anywhere. He looked at the door. He was sort of curious to see what was on the other side. But that was probably what all dead people thought. They wanted to see what was on the other side of the door, and no one ever heard of them again.

  To hell with that, Jack thought. I’m staying right here.

  He waited. After a while the door opened all by itself. On the other side he could see another long corridor.

  All right, now he knew what was on the other side. But he still didn’t move. They’d have to drag him through that door kicking and screaming.

  It didn’t happen that way. The door waited for a while. When he still didn’t move it came for him. There was nothing to struggle against, nothing to resist. Suddenly he was on the other side. And then the next thing began.

  Divine Intervention

  There is a planet called Atalla. On this planet there is a stupendous mountain. It is called Sanito. Civilizations flourish in the temperate regions at the mountain’s base. The mountain, its upper half sheathed in eternal ice, is the dominant feature of all the lands thereabouts. Avalanches continually rain down its sides. Where it is not steep, it is sheer; where it is not sheer, it is precipitous.

  No man has ever climbed this mountain. It is deemed unclimbable. Even its foothills are a formidable challenge. Nevertheless, legend has it that once long ago a holy man, elevated to a state of godhood through his many years of one-pointed concentration, rose, through his own self-created power, to the ultimate heights of the unscalable mountain.

  The god, who had been known locally as Shelmo before his ascension, carved a cave for himself out of the solid rock of Sanito’s summit. He made himself a pallet of ice, and a meditation cushion of lichen. These were more than sufficient for a deity who could generate his own internal heat.

  Shelmo had decided to spend some æons here on the top of Sanito practicing his one-pointed concentration. Although it had been good enough to win him godhood, he wasn’t really satisfied with it. He thought he could still refine it some.

  Centuries passed. Civilizations rose and fell, and Shelmo paid no attention to them: it takes a lot of time to get one-pointed. Shelmo knew that it was perhaps a little selfish of him, devoting all his time to this, since gods were, after all, supposed to look after the humans in their vicinity. But Shelmo figured that the gods made their own rules. Besides, there was plenty of time to become an ethical deity after he had solved the one-pointed concentration problem.

  For a god who wants to get away from it all, Mount Sanito was an ideal place. Windstorms and avalanches filled the air continually, producing a monotonous roaring background. The whipping clouds of white and gray were excellent meditation objects. So high up was Shelmo’s cave that even the prayers of the people rarely reached him. Battered by hailstorms, choked by snowfalls, the prayers became mere dolorous sounds, plaintive and without moral significance.

  However, even a god can’t be spared all hassles all of the time. It may take a while, but the world finally gets through.

  One day, Shelmo was surprised to find that a human being had made his way up the unscalable mountain and into his cave. (Shelmo wasn’t really surprised, of course; gods are never surprised. But he hadn’t expected it.)

  The human fell on his knees and began to recite a lengthy prayer.

  “Yes, thank you very much,” Shelmo said, interrupting him. “But how did you get up here? The mountain is supposed to be impassable except to gods. You wouldn’t be a god disguised as a human, by any chance?”

  “No,” the human said. “I am a human being. My name is Dan. I was able to ascend to this height partially due to my own virtue and piety, and partially by the combined prayer-power of the people below, who worship you.”

  “I see,” Shelmo said. “Won’t you have a seat? There’s a block of ice over there. I suppose you can regulate your own body heat?”

  “Of course, Lord,” Dan said. “It’s one of the easier steps on the path to spirituality.”

  “Yes, quite so,” Shelmo said. “Now, what brings you here?”

  Dan sat down upon the block of ice and arranged his robes. “Oh Lord, your people pray to you for divine assistance. Without your help we will be overwhelmed and perish from the face of the Earth.”

  “Well, what’s gone wrong?” Shelmo asked. “It had better be important. I don’t like being disturbed for trifles.”

  “It’s the steel crabs,” Dan said. “The self-programming mechanical vampire bats are also a great problem. And of course, there are the copper scorpions with explosive tails, but mainly it’s the crabs. They’re machines, but they’ve learned how to reproduce themselves. For each crab factory we destroy, ten more spring up. The crabs infest our homes, our streets, even our places of worship. They’re killers, and we’re losing the battle against them.”

  “There was nothing like that when I was on Earth,” Shelmo said. “Where did they come from?”

  “Well,” Dan said, “as perhaps you know, the various countries are at peace now. But in the recent past several were in a state of belligerency. The steel crabs were one of the weapons invented.”

  “And they launched them at some other country?”

  “Oh, no, Lord, nothing like that,” Dan said. “It was an accident. The steel crabs escaped. They spread, first over the country where they were invented, then over the whole world. The crabs multiplied faster than we could wipe them out. It was all a silly accident, but now we perish, Lord, unless you step in and do something.”

  Despite his self-imposed isolation, Shelmo did feel he owed these people—his people, as they said —something.

  “If I handle this,” he said to Dan, “can you humans take care of yourselves after that and leave me alone?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Dan said. “We humans believe in ruling ourselves. We want to create our own destiny. We believe in the separation of church and state. It’s just that this crab thing has gotten out of hand.”

  Shelmo looked into the crab thing there and then, using his omniscience. Yes, it was a mess down there.

  He could have simply made all the crabs disappear by a miracle—gods can do that—but the Council on Ethics for Deities didn’t approve of direct intervention. That sort of thing tended to make people superstitious. So Shelmo created a bacterium—nobody knows where they come from, anyhow—which attacked the microcircuits, not only of the steel crabs, but also of the copper scorpions and mechanical vampire bats. By clever genetic manipulation, Shelmo was able to cause the bacteria to destroy only what it was supposed to destroy and then destroy itself.

  When the job was done, Shelmo cut short Dan’s hosannas and praisegivings. “I don’t mind doing it once,” he said. “After all, I was a human once myself. But now I’d really like a little peace and quiet so I can get on with my one-pointed concentration.”

  Dan made his way down the mountain back to the lands of men, and Shelmo settled down to some good, solid meditating.

  Years came and went. But to Shelmo it seemed like no time at all before Dan was in his cave once again.

  “Back so soon?” Shelmo asked. “What’s the matter? Didn’t I get all the crabs?”

  “Oh, yes, Lord,” Dan said.

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  “Well, we did manage to live in peace for quite some time. But then there were troubles again.”

  “Troubles? You fought each other?”

  “No, we managed to avoid that. But we had a serious accident. There were many huge concrete lakes, where obsolete radioactive and chemical weapons were stored. Informed opinion said that they would be all right. But then something within those lakes began to change, to mutate, to become alive and malevolent.”

  “So you created living things,” Shelmo said. “Accidentally, but still, you did. It takes a god to handle that sort of thing properly. I suppose it went badly?”

  Dan nodded. “The living, semi-liquid substance in the lakes oozed out, feeding on everything it encountered, spreading over the countryside.
It sent out spores and infected people in all countries. It is slowly covering the world, and we have no way of stopping it. Unless you help us, O Lord, we are doomed.”

  Shelmo said, “You humans keep on making silly mistakes. Don’t you learn from what’s already happened?”

  “I think we’ve learned our lesson this time,” Dan said. “At last there is a world-wide consciousness about these matters. If we are not destroyed by our past mistakes, if you can help us, I think we can go ahead now and build a better world.”

  Shelmo inspected the situation through his omniscience. The chemical creature really was an ugly sight—orange and black blotches against the blue and green of the Earth.

  There were many ways for a god to handle this situation. Shelmo caused the chemical creature to be sensitive to a lack of nobelium, an unstable radioactive isotope of the actinide series. Then, by a miracle, Shelmo extracted all the nobelium from the Earth. (He was not without a sense of humor. And he planned to replace it later.)

  The chemical creature died. Dan said, “Thank you, Lord.” It was difficult to find an adequate means of thanking a being who had just saved his race from destruction for the second time.

  Dan returned to his people. Shelmo settled down again to his meditation.

  It felt as though he had barely begun, when, lo and behold, Dan was standing in front of him again.

  “Weren’t you just here?” said Shelmo.

  “That was fifty years ago,” Dan said.

  “But that’s hardly any time at all!”

  “Yes, Lord,” Dan said. “And I do beg forgiveness for this intrusion. I come, not for myself, but for the people—your people, Lord, they are helpless and suffering.”

  “What happened this time? Did another of your inventions get out of hand?”

  Dan shook his head. “This time it’s the Paratids. I know you don’t bother to keep up on local politics, so permit me to fill you in. The Paratids are one of the major political parties in my country. They stand for liberty, equality, and a fair deal for everyone irrespective of race, gender, or religion. Or so we thought. When they came to power, however, we found that they had deceived us and were, in fact, unprincipled, authoritarian, fanatical, cynical—”