Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

I got the same answer backÄi.e., none.

I fiddled for most of a day, waiting, and proving to myself that I could retrieve a group picture from any year and, through looking only at male faces and female legs, make close guesses concerning the price of gold (falling or rising), the time of that picture relative to the double sunspot cycle, andÄshortly and most surprisingÄ whether the political structure was falling apart or consolidating.

My terminal chimed. No face. No pat on the back. Just a displayed message: “Operations requests soonest depth analysis of possibility that plague epidemics of sixth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries resulted from political conspiracy.”

Fooey! I had wandered into a funny farm and was locked up with the inmates.

Oh, well! The question was so complex that I might be left alone a long time while I studied it. That suited me; I had grown addicted to the possibilities of a terminal of a major computer hooked into a world research netÄI felt like Little Jack Homer.

I started by listing as many subjects as possible by free association:

plague, epidemiology, fleas, rats, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Newton, conspiracies, Guy Fawkes, Freemasonry, Illuminati, OTO, Rosicrucians, Kennedy, Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Pearl Harbor, Green Bowlers, Spanish influenza, pest control, etc.

In three days my list of possibly related subjects was ten times as long.

In a week I knew that one lifetime was not nearly long enough to study in depth all of my list. But I had been told to tackle the subject

so I started inÄbut I placed my own meaning on “soonest”Äi.e., I would study conscientiously at least fifty hours per week but when and how I wished and with no cramming or rawhiding. . . unless somebody came along and explained to me why I should work harder or differently.

This went on for weeks.

I was wakened in the middle of the night by my terminalÄoverride alarm; I had shut it off as usual when I went to bed (alone, I don’t recall why). I answered sleepily, “All right, all right! Speak up, and it had better be good.”

No picture. Boss’s voice said, “Friday, when will the next major Black Death epidemic occur?”

I answered, “Three years from now. April. Starting in Bombay and spreading worldwide at once. Spreading off planet at first transport.

“Thank you. Good night.”

I dropped my head to the pillow and went right back to sleep.

I woke up at seven hundred as usual, held still for several moments and thought, while I grew colder and colderÄdecided that I really had heard from Boss in the night and really had given him that preposterous answer.

So bite the bullet, Friday, and climb the Thirteen Steps. I punched “local one.” “Friday here, Boss. About what I told you in the night. I plead temporary insanity.”

“Nonsense. See me at ten-fifteen.”

I was tempted to spend the next three hours in lotus, chanting my beads. But I have a deep conviction that one should not attend even the End of the World without a good breakfast. . . and my decision was justified as the special that morning was fresh figs with cream, corned-beef hash with poached eggs, and English muffins with Knott’s Berry Farm orange marmalade. Fresh milk. Colombian high-altitude coffee. That so improved things that I spent an hour trying to find a mathematical relationship between the past history of plague and the date that had popped into my sleep-drenched mind. I did not find one but was beginning to see some shape to the curve when the terminal gave me a three-minute warning I had punched in.

I had refrained from having my hair cut and my neck shaved but otherwise I was ready. I walked in on the tick. “Friday reporting,

sir. –

“Sit down. Why Bombay? I would think that Calcutta would be a more likely center.”

“It might have something to do with long-range weather forecasts and the monsoons. Fleas can’t stand hot, dry weather. Eighty percent of a flea’s body mass is water and, if the percentage drops below sixty, the flea dies. So hot, dry weather will stop or prevent an epidemic. But, Boss, the whole thing is nonsense. You woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me a silly question and I gave you a silly answer without really waking up. I probably pulled it out of a dream. I’ve been having nightmares about the Black Death and there really was a bad epidemic that started in Bombay. Eighteen ninety-six and following.”