“The Variable Man” July 1953

The year is 2136. Terra and Centaurus are locked in a perpetual cold war. Each offensive plan is overcome by a defensive plan so quickly that the actual offensive and defensive devices are never even completed before being rendered obsolete. SRB machines constantly calculate and recalculate the odds of one side winning a war. The odds shift ceaselessly. But the situation changes when a Polish scientist named Sherikov comes up with a plan for a new missile based on a failed attempt to master faster-than-the-speed-of-light travel by a man named Hedge, who was killed when his FTL ship returned from another dimension into space already occupied by matter. This gives Sherikov the idea for the FTL missile, Icarus. This puts the odds in Terra’s favor, so they mobilize for war as Icarus nears completion. Meanwhile, a research time bubble is manually called back from 1913 and it brings a fix-it man named Thomas Cole from the past. He is the variable man and this variable throws the SRB machines into confusion. They cannot account for this variable in their analysis of the odds for victory. Cole’s hands can run over things and give him a kind of intuitive, tactile understanding, not of how they work so much as how they should work. He “repairs” a broken children’s toy so that it actually can send messages light years away. Sherikov needs Cole to wire the control turret globe for Icarus. So far, no one has been able to do so. Reinhart and Sherikov have been engaged in a power struggle and Reinhart wants Cole dead. But Sherikov keeps him alive and he fixes the globe. Reinhart attacks Sherikov’s lab in the Urals, and Cole is badly injured by a phosphorous bomb. Icarus is launched but does not explode near Centaurus. Cole actually fixed it to its original specifications as a means of FTL travel, a tool that shifts Terra from war to exploration and an escape from empire. Reinhart is deposed, and Cole will be sent back to his own time, as Sherikov promised, but not before working with Sherikov’s schematics for a clever device that eliminates the chance for overly powerful people like Reinhart by enabling instantaneous direct democracy on all issues, by enacting the will of the majority as it forms. The story ends on this optimistic note.