Alternating Currents by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

library of tape-effect strips? It is very much like being God.
     
    All that the machine does is take the stored videotapes that are in its files and play them back. But it also manipulates size and perspective or superimposes one over another ... so that you can, as I in fact have done, put the living person of someone you don’t like in a position embarrassing to him, and project it on a montage screen so that only a studio tech can find the dots on the pattern where the override betrays its presence.
     
    Obviously, this is a way out of almost any propaganda difficulty, since it is child’s play to make up any event you like and give it the seeming of reality.
     
    Of course, everybody knows it can be done. So the evidence of one’s own eyes is no longer quite enough, even for a voter. And the laws can cut you down. I had thought of whomping up some frightful shame around Connick, for example. But it wouldn’t work; no matter when I did it there would still be time for the other side to spread the word of an electoral fraud, and a hoax of this magnitude would make its own way on to the front pages. So I used the machine for something much more interesting to me. I used it as a toy.
     
    I started by dialling the lunar base at Aristarchus for background, found a corps of Rocketmen marching off in the long lunar step, patched my own face on to one of the helmeted figures and zoomed in and out with the imaginary camera, watching R3/C Odin Gunnarsen as a boy of nineteen, scared witless but doing his job. He was a pretty nice boy, I thought objectively, and wondered what had gone wrong with him later. I abandoned that and sought for other amusements. I found Candace’s images on tape in the files and pleasured myself with her for a time. Her open, friendly face gave some dignity to the fantastic bodies of half a dozen 3-V strippers in the files; but I stopped that child’s game.
     
    I looked for a larger scope. I spread the whole panoply of the heavens across the screen of die tape machine. I sought out the crook of the Big Dipper’s handle, traced its arc across half the heavens until I located orange Arcturus. Then I zoomed in on the star, as littler stars grew larger and hurtled out of range around it, sought its seventy grey-green planets and located number five among them, the watery world that Knafti had spawned upon. I bade the computing mind inside the tape machine reconstruct the events of the orbit bombing for me, and watched hell-bombs splash enormous mushrooms of poisonous foam into the Arcturan sky, whipping the island cities with tidal waves and drowning them in death.
     
    Then I destroyed the whole planet. I turned Arcturus into a nova and watched the hot driven gases sphere out to embrace the planet, boil its seas, slag its cities ... and found myself sweating. I ordered another drink from die dispenser and switched the machine off. And then I became aware that the pale blue light over the door to Haber’s office was glowing insistently. It was time; my visitors had arrived.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Connick had brought his kids along, three of them; the lover from Donnegan General had brought two more; Knafti and Colonel Peyroles had Timmy Brown. ‘Welcome to Romper Room,’ I said. ‘They’re making lynch mobs young this year.’
     
    They all yelled at me at once - or all but Knafti, whose tweeting chitter just didn’t have the volume to compete. I listened, and when they showed signs of calming down I reached into fat-cat Haber’s booze drawer and poured myself a stiff one and said, ‘All right, which of you creeps wants first crack?’ And they boiled up again while I drank my drink. All of them, except Candace Harmon, who only stood by the door and looked at me.
     
    So I said, ‘All right, Connick, you first. Are you going to make me spread it all over the newscasts that you had a dishonourable discharge? ... And by the way, maybe you’d like to meet my assistant blackmailer; Miss Harmon over there