“And the printings work?”
Beisnor tapped his jacket pocket. “The pen I’m using is a print. But–” He lifted out the pen and extended it toward Seth Morley. “See the decay?” The surface of the pen had a furry texture, much like dust. “They decompose very rapidly. This’ll be good for another few days, and then I can have another print made from the original pen.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re short on pens. And the ones we have are running out of ink.”
“What about the writing of one of these print-pens? Does the ink fade out after a few days?”
“No,” Belsnor said, but he looked uncomfortable.
“You’re not sure.”
Standing, Belsnor dug into his back pocket and got out his wallet. For a time he examined small, folded pieces of paper and then he placed one in front of Seth. The writing was clear and distinct.
Maggie Walsh entered the briefing chamber, saw the two of them, and came over. “May I join you?”
“Sure,” Belsnor said remotely. “Pull up a chair.” He glanced at Seth Morley, then said to her in a leisurely, hard voice, “Susie Smart’s toy building tried to shoot Morley’s wife a little while ago. It missed, and Morley poured a plate of water over it.”
“I warned her,” Maggie said, “that those things are unsafe.”
“It was safe enough,” Belsnor said. “It’s Susie that isn’t safe . . . as I was explaining to Morley.”
“We should pray for her,” Maggie said.
“You see?” Belsnor said to Seth Morley. “We do have concern for one another. Maggie wants to save Susie Smart’s immortal soul.”
“Pray,” Seth Morley said, “that she doesn’t capture another replica and begin teaching that one, too.”
“Morley,” Beisnor said, “I’ve been thinking about your thoughts on the whole bunch of us. In a way you’re right: there is something the matter with each of us. But not what you think. The thing we have in common is that we’re failures. Take Tallchief. Couldn’t you tell he’s a wino? And Susie– all she can think about is sexual conquests. I can make a guess about you, too. You’re overweight; obviously you eat too much. Do you live to eat, Morley? Or had you never asked yourself that? Babble is a hypochondriac. Betty Jo Berm is a compulsive pill-taker: her life is in those little plastic bottles. That kid, Tony Dunkelwelt; he lives for his mystical insights, his schizophrenic trances . . . which both Babble and Frazer call catatonic stupor. Maggie, here–” He gestured toward her. “She lives in an illusory world of prayer and fasting, doing service to a deity which isn’t interested in her.” To Maggie he said, “Have you ever seen the Intercessor, Maggie?”
She shook her head no.
“Or the Walker-on-Earth?”
“No,” she said.
“Nor the Mentufacturer either,” Beisnor said. “Now take Wade Frazer. His world–”
“How about you?” Seth asked him.
Beisnor shrugged. “I have my own world.”
“He invents,” Maggie Walsh said.
“But I’ve never invented anything,” Beisnor said. “Everything developed during the last two centuries has come from a composite lab, where hundreds, even thousands of research workers work. There is no such thing as an inventor in this century. Maybe I just like to play private games with electronic components. Anyhow, I enjoy it. I get most if not all of my pleasure in this world from creating circuits that ultimately do nothing.”
“A dream of fame,” Maggie said.
“No.” Beisnor shook his head. “I want to contribute something; I don’t want to be just a consumer, like the rest of you.” His tone was hard and flat and very earnest. “We live in a world created and manufactured from the results of the work of millions of men, most of them dead, virtually none of them known or given any credit. I don’t care if I’m known for what I create; all I care about is having it be worthwhile and useful, with people able to depend on it as something they take for granted in their lives. Like the safety pin. Who knows who created that? But everyone in the goddam galaxy makes use of safety pins, and the inventor–”
“Safety pins were invented on Crete,” Seth Morley said. “In the fourth or fifth century B.C.”
Beisnor glared at him. “About one thousand B.C.”
“So it matters to you when and where they were invented,” Seth Morley said.
“I came close to producing something one time,” Belsnor said. “A silencing circuit. It would have interrupted the flow of electrons in any given conductor for a range of about fifty feet. As a weapon of defense it would have been valuable. But I couldn’t get the field to propagate for fifty feet; I could only get it functional for one-and-a-half feet. So that was that.” He lapsed into silence, then. Brooding, baleful silence. Withdrawn into himself.
“We love you anyway,” Maggie said.
Belsnor raised his head and glared at her.
“The Deity accepts even that,” Maggie said. “Even an attempt which led nowhere. The Deity knows your motive, and motive is everything.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Belsnor said, “if this whole colony, everybody in it, died. None of us contribute anything. We’re nothing more than parasites, feeding off the galaxy. ‘The world will little note or long remember what we do here.'”
Seth Morley said to Maggie, “Our leader. The man who’s going to keep us alive.”
“I’ll keep you alive,” Belsnor said. “As best I can. That could be my contribution: inventing a device made out of fluid-state circuitry that’ll save us. That’ll spike all the toy cannons.”
“I don’t think you’re very bright to call something a toy simply because it’s small,” Maggie Walsh said. “That would mean that the Toxilax artificial kidney is a toy.”
“You would have to call eighty percent of all Interplan ship circuitry toys,” Seth Morley said.
“Maybe that’s my problem,” Beisnor said wryly. “I can’t tell what’s a toy and what isn’t . . . which means I can’t tell what’s real. A toy ship is not a real ship. A toy cannon is not a real cannon. But I guess if it can kill–” He pondered. “Perhaps tomorrow I should require everyone to go systematically through the settlement, collecting all the toy buildings, in fact everything from outside, and then we’ll ignite the whole pile and be done with it.”
“What else has come into the settlement from outside?” Seth Morley inquired.
“Artificial flies,” Beisnor said. “For one thing.”
“They take pictures?” Seth asked.
“No. That’s the artificial bees. The artificial flies fly around and sing.”
“‘Sing’?” He thought he must have heard wrong.
“I have one here.” Belsnor rummaged in his pockets and at last brought out a small plastic box. “Hold it to your ear. There’s one in there.”
“What sort of thing do they sing?” Seth Morley held the box to his ear, listened. He heard it, then, a far-off sweet sound, like divided strings. And, he thought, like many distant wings. “I know that music,” he said, “but I can’t place it.” An indistinct favorite of mine, he realized. From some ancient era.
“They play what you like,” Maggie Walsh said.
He recognized it, now. _Granada_. “I’ll be goddamed,” he said aloud. “Are you sure it’s a fly that’s doing that?”
“Look in the box,” Belsnor said. “But be careful–don’t let it out. They’re rare and hard to catch.”
With great care Seth Morley slid back the lid of the box. He saw within it a dark fly, like a Proxima 6 tape-fly, large and hairy, with beating wings and eyes protruding, composite eyes, such as true flies had. He shut the box, convinced. “Amazing,” he said. “Is it acting as a receiver? Picking up a signal from a central transmitter somewhere on the planet? It’s a radio–is that it?”
“I took one apart,” Belsnor said. “It’s not a receiver; the music is emitted by a speaker but it emanates from the fly’s works. The signal is created by a miniature generator in the form of an electrical impulse, not unlike a nerve impulse in an organic living creature. There’s a moist element ahead of the generator which alters a complex pattern of conductivity, so a very complex signal can be created. What’s it singing for you?”
“_Granada_,” Seth Morley said. He wished he could keep it. The fly would be company for him. “Will you sell it?” he asked.
“Catch your own.” Belsnor retrieved his fly and placed the box back in his pocket.
“Is there anything else from outside the settlement?” Seth Morley asked. “Besides the bees, flies, printers and miniature buildings?”
Maggie Walsh said, “A sort of flea-sized printer. But it can only print one thing; it does it over and over again, grinding out a flood that seems endless.”
“A print of what?”
“Of Specktowsky’s Book,” Maggie Walsh said.
“And that’s it?”
“That’s all we know about,” Maggie amended. “There may be others unknown to us.” She shot a sharp glance at Belsnor.