Galactic Dreams

They had no physical resemblance. Torrence was a bear, though a small one, a black bear with hair sprouting thickly on his knuckles, twisting out of his white cuffs and lining his ears. His beard was full and thick rising high up on his cheekbones and dropping low on his chest.

Where Torrence was dark Numen was fair, where short he was tall, thick, thin. A thin bow of a man, bent forward with a scholar’s stoop and, though balding now, his hair was still curled and blond and very much like the golden ringlets of the boy asleep upstairs. Now he took the toy animal and led the way to the shielded room deep in the house where Eigg was waiting.

“Give it here-here!” Eigg snapped when they came in, reaching for the toy. Eigg was always like that, in a hurry, surly, square and solid with his width of jaw and spotless white laboratory smock. But they needed him.

“Gently,” Numen said, but Eigg had already pulled it from his grasp. “It won’t like it, I know …”

“Let me go … let me go…!” the teddy bear said with a hopeless shrill.

“It is just a machine,” Eigg said coldly, putting in face down on the table and reaching for a scalpel. “You are a grown man, you should be more logical, have your emotions under greater control. You are speaking with your childhood memories, seeing your own boyhood teddy who was your friend and companion. This is only a machine.”

With a quick slash he opened the fabric over the seam seal and touched it: the plastic-fur back gaped open like a mouth.

“Let me go … let me go …” the teddy bear wailed while its stumpy arms and legs waved back and forth. Both of the onlookers went white.

“Must we…?”

“Emotions. Control them,” Eigg said and probed with a screwdriver. There was a click and the toy went limp. He began to unscrew a plate in the mechanism.

Numen turned away and found that he had to touch a handkerchief to his face. Eigg was right. He was being emotional. This was just a machine. It was singularly stupid of him to get emotional over it. Particularly with what they had in mind.

“How long will it take?”

He looked at his watch; it was a little past 2100.

“We have been over this before and discussing it again will not change any of the factors.”

Eigg’s voice was distant as he removed the tiny plate and began to examine the machine’s interior with a magnifying probe. “I have experimented on the two stolen teddy tapes, carefully timing myself at every step. I do not count removal or restoration of the tape, that is just a few minutes for each. The tracking and altering of the tape in both instances took me under ten hours. My best time differed from my worst time by less than fifteen minutes, which is not significant. We can therefore safely say — ahh.” He was silent for a moment while he removed the capsule of the memory spools. “… We can safely say that this is a ten-hour operation.”

“That is too long. The boy is usually awake by seven, we must have the teddy back by then. He must never suspect that it has been away.”

“There is little risk, you can give him some excuse for the time. I will not rush and spoil the work. Now be silent.”

The two government specialists could only sit back and watch while Eigg inserted the capsule into the bulky machine that he had assembled in the room. This was not their speciality.

“Let me go …” the tiny voice said from the wall speaker, then was interrupted by a burst of static. “Let me go … bzzzzzzt … no, no Davy, Mummy wouldn’t like you to do that … fork in left, knife in right … if you do you’ll have to wipe … good boy good boy good boy …”

The voice squeaked and whispered and went on and on, while the hours on the clock went by, one by one. Numen brought in coffee more than once. Towards dawn Torrence fell asleep up in the chair, only to awake with a guilty start. Of them all Eigg showed no strain or fatigue, working the controls with fingers regular as a metronome. The reedy voice from the capsule shrilled thinly through the night like the memory of a ghost.

“It is done,” Eigg said, sealing the fabric with quick surgeon’s stitches.

“Your fastest time ever,” Numen sighed with relief. He glared at the nursery viewscreen that showed his son sleeping soundly, starkly clear in the harsh infrared light. “And the boy is still asleep. There will be no problem getting the teddy back to him after all. But is the tape…?”

“It is right, perfect, you heard that. You asked the questions and heard the answers. I have concealed all traces of my work. Unless you know what to look for in the alterations you would never find the changes. In every other way the memory and instructions are like all the others. There has just been this single change made.”

“Pray God we never have to use it,” Numen said.

“I did not know that you were religious,” Eigg said, turning to look at him, his face expressionless. The magnifying loupe was still in his eye and it stared coldly at him. Five times the size of its fellow, a large and probing questioner.

“I’m not,” Numen said, flushing.