Catastrophes! Isaac Asimov

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went home. Three dunning robots were camped outside his
door, and each one began to croak its cry of doom as he ap-
proached. "Sorry," Mueller said, "I can't remember a thing
about any of this stuff," and he went inside and sat down on
the bare floor, angry, thinking of the brilliant pieces he could
be turning out if he could only get his hands on the tools of
his trade. He made sketches instead. At least the ghouls had
left him with pencil and paper. Not as efficient as a computer
screen and a light-pen, maybe, but Michelangelo and Ben-
venuto Cellini had managed to make out all right without
computer screens and light-pens.
At four o'clock the doorbell rang.
"Go away," Mueller said through the speaker. "See my
accountant! I don't want to hear any more dunnings, and the
next time I catch one of you idiot robots by my door I'm going
to "
"It's me, Paul," a nonmeehanical voice said.
Carole.
He rushed to the door. There were seven robots out there,
surrounding her, and they tried to get in; but he pushed them
back so she could enter. A robot didn't dare lay a paw on a
human being. He slammed the door in their metal faces and
locked it.
Carole looked fine. Her hair was longer than he remem-
bered it, and she had gained about eight pounds in all the
right places, and she wore an iridescent peekaboo wrap that
he had never seen before, and which was really inappropriate
for afternoon wear, but which looked splendid on her. She
seemed at least five years younger than she really was; ev-
idently a month and a half of marriage to Pete Castine had
done more for her than nine years of marriage to Paul Muel-
ler. She glowed. She also looked strained and tense, but that
seemed superficial, the product of some distress of the last
few hours.
"I seem to have lost my key," she said.
"What are you doing here?"
"I don't understand you, Paul."
"I mean, why'd you come here?"
"I live here."
"Do you?" He laughed harshly. "Very funny,"
"You always did have a weird sense of humor, Paul." She
stepped past him. "Only this isn't any joke. Where is every-
thing? The furniture, Paul. My things." Suddenly she was
crying. "I must be breaking up. I wake up this morning in
a completely strange apartment, all alone, and 1 spend the
whole day wandering ia a sort of daze that I don't understand
at all, and now I finally come home and I find that you've
pawned every damn thing we own, or something, and " She
bit her knuckles. "Paul?"
She's got it too, he thought. The amnesia epidemic.
He said quietly, "This is a funny thing to ask, Carole, but
will you tell me what today's date is?"
"Why the fourteenth of September or is it the fif-
teenth "
"2002?"
"What do you think? 1776?"
She's got it worse than I have, Mueller told himself. She's
lost a whole extra month. She doesn't remember my business
venture. She doesn't remember my losing all the money. She
doesn't remember divorcing me. She thinks she's still my wife.
"Come in here," he said, and led her to the bedroom. He
pointed to the cot that stood where their bed had been. "Sit
down, Carole. I'll try to explain. It won't make much sense,
but I'll try to explain."
Under the circumstances, the concert by the visiting New
York Philharmonic for Thursday evening was canceled.
Nevertheless the orchestra assembled for its rehearsal at half
past two in the afternoon. The union required so many re-
hearsals with pay a week; therefore the orchestra re-
hearsed, regardless of external cataclysms. But there were
problems. Maestro Alvarez, who used an electronic baton and
proudly conducted without a score, thumbed the button for
a downbeat and realized abruptly, with a sensation as of
dropping through a trapdoor, that the Brahms Fourth was
wholly gone from his mind. The orchestra responded raggedly
to his faltering leadership; some of the musicians had no
difficulties, but the concertmaster stared in horror at his left
hand, wondering how to finger the strings for the notes his
violin was supposed to be yielding, and the second oboe could
not find the proper keys, and the first bassoon had not yet
even managed to remember how to put his instrument to-
gether.
By nightfall, Tim Bryce had managed to assemble enough
of the story so that he understood what had happened, not
only to himself and to Lisa, but to the entire city. A drug, or
drugs, almost certainly distributed through the municipal
water supply, had leached away nearly everyone's memory.
The trouble with modern life, Bryce thought, is that tech-
nology gives us the potential for newer and more intricate
disasters every year, but doesn't seem to give us the ability
to ward them off. Memory drugs were old stuff, going back
thirty, forty years. He had studied several types of them him-
self. Memory is partly a chemical and partly an electrical
process; some drugs went after the electrical end, jamming
the snyapses over which brain transmissions travel, and some
went after the molecular substrata in which long-term mem-
ories are locked up. Bryce knew ways of destroying short-
term memories by inhibiting synapse transmission, and he
knew ways of destroying the deep long-term memories by
washing out the complex chains of ribonucleic acid, brain-
RNA, by which they are inscribed in the brain. But such
drugs were experimental, tricky, unpredictable; he had hes-
itated to use them on human subjects; he certainly had never
imagined that anyone would simply dump them into an aq-
ueduct and give an entire city a simultaneous lobotomy.
His office at Fletcher Memorial had become an improvised
center of operations for San Francisco. The mayor was there,
pale and shrunken; the chief of police, exhausted and con-
fused, periodically turned his back and popped a pill; a dazed-
looking representative of the communications net hovered in
a corner, nervously monitoring the hastily rigged system
through which the committee of public safety that Bryce had
summoned could make its orders known throughout the city.
The mayor was no use at all. He couldn't even remember
having run for office. The chief of police was in even worse
shape; he had been up all night because he had forgotten,
among other things, his home address, and he had been afraid
to query a computer about it for fear he'd lose his job for
drunkenness. By now the chief of police was aware that he
wasn't the only one in the city having memory problems
today, and he had looked up his address in the files and even
telephoned his wife, but he was close to collapse. Bryce had
insisted that both men stay here as symbols of order; he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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