Chester sighed and tilted the heli in a long slant toward the open lot behind the side-show top, settled it in beside a heavy, old-model machine featuring paisley print curtains at the small square windows lining the clumsy fuselage. He climbed out, squelched across wet turf, and thumped at the door set in the side of the converted cargo heli. Somewhere, a calliope groaned out a dismal tune.
“Hey,” someone called. Chester turned. A man in wet coveralls thrust his head from a nearby vehicle. “If you’re looking for Mr. Mulvihill, he’s over on the front door.”
Chester grunted and turned up the collar of his conservatively cut pale lavender sports jacket, thumbing the heat control up to medium. He made his way across the lot, bucking the gusty wind, wrinkling his nose at the heavy animal stink from the menagerie, and squeezed past a plastic panel into the midway. On a low stand under a striped canopy, a broad, tall man with fierce red hair, a gigantic mustache and a checkered suit leaned against a supporting pole, picking his teeth. At sight of Chester, he straightened, flipped up a gold-headed cane and boomed, “You’re just in time, friend. Plenty of seating on the inside for the most astounding, amazing, fantastic, weird and startling galaxy of fantasy and—”
“Don’t waste the spiel, Case,” Chester cut in, coming up. “It’s just me.”
“Chester!” the redheaded man called. He stepped down, grinning widely, and slapped Chester heartily on the back. “What brings you out to the lot?” He gripped Chester’s flaccid hand and pumped it. “By golly, why didn’t you let me know?”
“Case, I—”
“Sorry about this weather; Southwestern Control gave me to understand they were holding this rain off until four a.m. tomorrow.”
“Case, there’s something—”
“I called them and raised hell; they say they’ll shut it down about three. Meanwhile—well, things are pretty slow, I’m afraid, Chester. The marks aren’t what they used to be. A little drizzle and they sit home huddled up to their Tri-D sets.”
“Yes, the place isn’t precisely milling with customers,” Chester agreed. “But what I—”
“I’d even welcome a few lot lice standing around today,” Case said, “just to relieve the deserted look.”
“Hey, Case,” a hoarse voice bellowed. “We got troubles over at the cookhouse. Looks like a blow-down if we don’t get her guyed-out in a hurry.”
“Oh-oh. Come on, Chester.” Case set off at a run.
“But, Case,” Chester called, then followed, splashing through the rain that was now driving hard, drumming against the tops with a sound like rolling thunder.
Half an hour later, in the warmth of Case’s quarters, Chester cupped a mug of hot coffee in his hands and edged closer to the electronic logs in the artificial fireplace.
“Sorry about those blisters, Chester,” Case said, pulling off his wet shirt and detaching the sodden false mustache. “Not much of a welcome for a visiting owner—” He broke off, following Chester’s gaze to the tiger-striped single shoulder strap crossing his chest.
“Oh, this,” Case said, fingering the hairy material. “This isn’t my usual underwear, Chester. I’ve been filling in for the strong man the last few days.”
Chester nodded toward a corner of the room. “Duck-pins,” he said. “Fire-juggling gear. Whatchamacallum shoes for wire-walking. A balancing pole.” He dipped his fingers into a pot of greasy paste. “Clown white,” he said. “What is this, Case, a one-man show? It looks as though you’re handling half the acts personally.”
“Well, Chester, I’ve been helping out here and there—”
“Even driving your own tent pegs. I take it the big break you were predicting last time I saw you didn’t materialize.”
“Just wait till spring,” Case said, toweling his head vigorously. “We’ll come back strong, Chester.”
Chester shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Case.”
Case froze in mid-stroke. “What do you mean, Chester? Why, the Wowser Wonder Shows are still the greatest old-fashioned outdoor attraction on earth.”
“The only outdoor attraction, you mean. And I’m dubious about the word ‘attraction.’ But what I came to talk to you about is Great-grandfather’s will.”
“Why, Chester, you know folks are still fascinated by the traditional lure of the circus. As soon as the novelty of Tri-D wears off—”
“Case,” Chester said gently, “my middle name is Wowser, remember? You don’t have to sell me. And color Tri-D has been around for a long, long time. But Great-grandfather’s will changes things.”
Case brightened. “Did the old boy leave you anything?”
Chester nodded. “I’m the sole heir.”
Case gaped, then let out a whoop. “Chester, you old son-of-a-gun! You know, you almost had me worried with that glum act you were putting on. And you a guy that’s just inherited a fortune!”
Chester sighed and lit up a Chanel dope stick. “The bequest consists of a hundred acres of rolling green lawn surrounding a fifty-room neo-Victorian eyesore overflowing with Great-grandfather’s idea of stylish décor. Some fortune.”
“Your great-grandpop must have been quite a boy, Chester. I guess he owned half of Winchester County a hundred years ago. Now you can bail out the show, and—”
“Great-grandfather was an eccentric of the worst stripe,” Chester said shortly. “He never invested a cent in the welfare of his descendants.”
“His descendant, you mean. Namely, Chester W. Chester IV. Still, even if you don’t admire the place, Chester, you can always sell it for enough to put the show on its feet.”
Chester shook his head. “He was too clever for us—which is the only reason the place still remains in the family, more or less. The estate was so snarled up that, with the backlog in the courts, it’s taken four generations to straighten it out.”
“Still, now that they’ve decided you’re the legal heir—”
“There’s the little matter of back taxes—about a million credits worth, give or take a few hundred thousand. I don’t get possession until I pay—in full.”
“You, Chester? Except for the circus, you haven’t got the proverbial pot or a disposal unit to throw it into.”
“True.” Chester sighed. “Therefore, the old place will be auctioned off to the local junk dealers. It’s built of genuine natural wood and actual metallic steel, you know. Scrapping it will cover the bulk of the tax bill.”
“Well, it’s too bad you won’t get rich—but at least we won’t be any worse off then we were. We’ve still got the show—”
Chester shook his head. “I said the bulk of the tax bill, not all of it. By selling off the circus stock and equipment, I can just about cover the rest.”
“Chester! You’re not serious . . . ?”
“What else can I do? It’s pay up or off to solitary confinement.”
“But the circus, Chester: it’s at least been paying you a living—until lately, anyway. And what about Jo-Jo and Paddy and Madam Baloon and all the rest of the crowd? What about tradition?”
“It’s an old Chester family tradition that we never go to jail if we can help it—even for a harmless prank like income-tax fraud. I’m sorry, Case, but it looks as though the Wowser Wonder Shows fold.”
“Hold on, Chester. I’ll bet the antiques in the house alone would bring in the kind of money we need. Neo-Victorian is pretty rare stuff.”
“I wonder if you’ve ever seen any neo-Victorian? Items like a TV set in the shape of a crouching vulture, or a water closet built to look like a skull with gaping jaws. Not what you’d call aesthetic. And I can’t sell so much as a single patented combination nose-picker and pimple-popper till I’ve paid every credit of that tax bill.”
“Is that all there is in the place?” Case eased a squat bottle and two glasses from a cupboard.
“Unhappily, no. Half the rooms and all the cellars are filled with my revered ancestor’s invention.”
The bottle gurgled. Case capped it and pushed a glass across to Chester. “What invention?”
“The old gentleman called it a Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator. G.N.E. for short. He made his money in computer components, you know. He was fascinated by computers, and he felt they had tremendous unrealized possibilities. Of course, that was before Crmblznski’s Limit was discovered. Great-grandfather was convinced that a machine with sufficiently extensive memory banks, adequately cross-connected and supplied with a vast store of data, would be capable of performing prodigious intellectual feats simply by discovering and exploring relationships among apparently unrelated facts.”
“This Crmblznski’s Limit. That’s where it says if you go beyond a certain point with complications, you blow your transistors, right?”
“Yes. But of course Great-grandfather was unaware of the limitations. He felt that if you fed to the machine all known data—say, on human taste reactions to food, for example—then added all existing recipes, complete specifications on edible substances, the cooking techniques of the chefs of all nations, then the computer would produce unique recipes, superior to anything ever devised before. Or you could introduce all available data on a subject which has baffled science—such as magnetism, or Psi-functions, or the trans-Pluto distress signal—and the computer would evolve the likeliest hypothesis to cover the facts.”