Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester by Alfred Bester Read Free Book Online

angel?” Johansen asked.
    And Migg told them all about Oddy Gaul.
    “But how does he do it?” Bellanby persisted. “How does he do it?”
    “I don’t know,” Migg repeated again. “Tell me how Espers do it.”
    “What!” Bellanby exclaimed. “Are you prepared to deny the telepathic pattern of thought? Do you—”
    “I do nothing of the sort. I merely illustrate one possible explanation. Man produces events. The threatening War of Resources may be thought to be a result of the natural exhaustion of Terran resources. We know it is not. It is a result of centuries of thriftless waste by man. Natural phenomena are less often produced by nature and more often produced by man.”
    “And?”
    “Who knows? Gaul is producing phenomena. Perhaps he’s unconsciously broadcasting on a telepathic wave band. Broadcasting and getting results. He wants heroin. The broadcast goes out—”
    “But Espers can’t pick up any telepathic pattern further than the horizon. It’s direct wave transmission. Even large objects cannot be penetrated. A building, say, or a—”
    “I’m not saying this is on the Esper level,” Migg shouted. “I’m trying to imagine something bigger. Something tremendous. He wants heroin. His broadcast goes out to the world. All men unconsciously fall into a pattern of activity which will produce that heroin as quickly as possible. That Austrian chemist—”
    “No. Australian.”
    “That Australian chemist may have been debating between half a dozen different syntheses. Five of them could never have produced heroin; but Gaul’s impulse made him select the sixth.”
    “And if he did not anyway?”
    “Then who knows what parallel chains were also started? A boy playing Robin Hood in Montreal is impelled to explore an abandoned cabin where he finds the drug, hidden there centuries ago by smugglers. A woman in California collects old apothecary jars. She finds a pound of heroin. A child in Berlin, playing with a defective Radar-Chem Set, manufactures it. Name the most improbable sequence of events, and Gaul can bring it about, logically and certainly. I tell you, that boy is an angel!”
    And he produced his documented evidence and convinced them.
    It was then that four scholars of various but indisputable intellects elected themselves an executive committee for Fate and took Oddy Gaul in hand. To understand what they attempted to do, you must first understand the situation the world found itself in during that particular era.
    It is a known fact that all wars are founded in economic conflict, or to put it another way, a trial by arms is merely the last battle of an economic war. In the pre-Christian centuries, the Punic Wars were the final outcome of a financial struggle between Rome and Carthage for economic control of the Mediterranean. Three thousand years later, the impending War of Resources loomed as the finale of a struggle between the two Independent Welfare States controlling most of the known economic world.
    What petroleum oil was to the twentieth century, FO (the nickname for Fissionable Ore) was to the thirtieth; and the situation was peculiarly similar to the Asia Minor crisis that ultimately wrecked the United Nations a thousand years before. Triton, a backward semibar-baric satellite, previously unwanted and ignored, had suddenly discovered it possessed enormous resources of FO. Financially and technologically incapable of self-development, Triton was peddling concessions to both Welfare States.
    The difference between a Welfare State and a Benevolent Despot is slight. In times of crisis, either can be traduced by the sincerest motives into the most abominable conduct. Both the Comity of Nations (bitterly nicknamed “The Con Men” by Der Realpolitik aus Terra) and Der Realpolitik aus Terra (sardonically called “The Rats” by the Comity of Nations) were desperately in need of natural resources, meaning FO. They were bidding against each other hysterically, and elbowing each other