Collected Short Fiction, page 591
He chuckled, thinking of the way old baldy had made him cross his heart. Maybe the tallow-gutted fool had really thought that would make him keep his promises. Or was there some kind of funny business about the package that was supposed to be a gun?
He ripped it open. There in the carton was the automatic he had demanded, a .45, with an extra cartridge clip and two boxes of ammunition. It looked all right, flat and black and deadly in his hand. He loaded it and stepped out of the car to test it.
He was aiming at an empty whisky bottle beside the pavement when he heard a mockingbird singing in the nearest cottonwood. He shot at the bird instead, and grinned when it dissolved into a puff of brown feathers.
“That’ll be Gabe.” His hard lips curled sardonically. “Coming at me like a mad dog, if anybody ever wants to know, and I had to stop him to save my own hide.”
He drove on across the river bridge into Las Verdades. The outsiders had been here, he knew, because the dirt streets were all swept clean, and the wooden parts of all the low adobe buildings were bright with new paint, and all he could smell was the fragrances of coffee and hot bread, when he passed the Esperanza Cafe.
Those good odors wet his dry mouth with saliva, but he didn’t stop to eat. With the automatic lying ready beside him on the seat, he pulled into the Oasis. The place looked empty at first and he thought for a moment that everybody was hiding from him.
As he sat waiting watchfully, crouched down under the wheel, he had time to notice that all the shattered glass had been neatly replaced. Even the marks of his bullets on the walls had been covered with new plaster, and the whole station was shining with fresh paint, like everything else in town.
He reached for the gun when he saw the slight dark boy coming from the grease rack, wiping his hands on a rag. It was Carmen’s brother Tony, smiling with an envious adoration at the yellow Cadillac. Tony had always been wild about cars.
“Yes, sir! Fill her up?” Tony recognized him then, and dropped the greasy rag. “Casey James!” He ran out across the driveway. “Carmen told us you’d be home!”
He was raising the gun to shoot when he saw that the boy only wanted to shake his hand. He hid the gun hastily; it wasn’t Tony that he had come to kill.
“We read all about your pardon.” Tony stood grinning at him, caressing the side of the shining car lovingly. “A shame the way you were framed, but we’ll all try to make it up to you now.” The boy’s glowing eyes swept the long car. “Want me to fill her up?”
“No!” he muttered hoarsely. “Gabe Meléndez—don’t he still work here?”
“Sure, Mr. James,” Tony drew back quickly, as if the car had somehow burned his delicate brown hands. “Eight to five, but he isn’t here yet. His home is that white stucco beyond the acequia madre——”
“I know.”
He gunned the car. It lurched back into the street, roared across the acequia bridge, skidded to a screaming stop in front of the white stucco. He dropped the gun into the side pocket of his coat and ran to the door, grinning expectantly.
Gabe would be taken by surprise. The outsiders had set it up for him very cleverly, with all their manufactured evidences that he had been innocent of any crime at all, and Gabe wasn’t likely to be armed.
The door opened before he could touch the bell, but it was only Carmen. Carmen, pale without her makeup but beautiful anyhow, yawning sleepily in sheer pink pajamas that were half unbuttoned. She gasped when she saw him.
“Casey!” Strangely, she was smiling. “I knew you’d come!”
She swayed toward him eagerly, as if she expected him to take her in his arms, but he stood still, thinking of how she had watched him in the courtroom, all through his trial for killing her father, with pitiless hate in her dark eyes. He didn’t understand it, but old puffy-guts had somehow changed her.
“Oh!” She turned pink and buttoned her pajamas hastily. “No wonder you were staring, but I’m so excited. I’ve been longing for you so. Come on in, darling. I’ll get something on and make us some breakfast.”
“Wait a minute!”
He shook his head, scowling at her, annoyed at the outsiders. They had somehow cheated him. He wanted Carmen, but not this way. He wanted to fight Gabe to take her. He wanted her to go on hating him, so that he would have to beat and frighten her. Old blubber-belly had been too clever and done too much.
“Where’s Gabe?” He reached in his pocket to grip the cold gun. “I gotta see Gabe.”
“Don’t worry, darling.” Her tawny shoulders shrugged becomingly. “Gabriel isn’t here. He won’t be here any more. You see, dear, the state cops talked to me a lot while they were here digging up the evidence to clear you. It came over me then that you had always been the one I loved. When I told Gabriel, he moved out. He’s living down at the hotel now, and we’re getting a divorce right away, so you don’t have to worry about him.”
“I gotta see him, anyhow.”
“Don’t be mean about it, darling.” Her pajamas were coming open again, but she didn’t seem to care. “Come on in, and let’s forget about Gabriel. He has been so good about everything, and I know he won’t make us any trouble.”
“I’ll make the trouble.” He seized her bare arm. “Come along.”
“Darling, don’t!” She hung back, squirming. “You’re hurting me!”
He made her shut up, and dragged her out of the house. She wanted to go back for a robe, but he threw her into the car and climbed over her to the wheel. He waited for her to try to get out, so that he could slap her down, but she only whimpered for a Kleenex and sat there sniffling.
Old balloon-belly had ruined everything.
He tried angrily to clash the gears, as he started off, as if that would damage the outsiders, but the Hydramatic transmission wouldn’t clash, and anyhow the saucer ship was probably somewhere out beyond the moon by now.
“There’s Gabriel,” Carmen sobbed. “There, crossing the street, going to work. Don’t hurt him, please!”
He gunned the car and veered across the pavement to run him down, but Carmen screamed and twisted at the wheel. Gabriel managed to scramble out of the way. He stopped on the sidewalk, hatless and breathless but grinning stupidly.
“Sorry, mister. Guess I wasn’t looking—” Then Gabriel saw who he was. “Why, Casey! We’ve been expecting you back. Seems you’re the lucky one, after all.” Gabriel had started toward the car, but he stopped when he saw the gun. His voice went shrill as a child’s. “What are you doing?”
“Just gut-shooting another dirty greaser, that’s all.”
“Darling!” Carmen snatched at the gun. “Don’t——”
He slapped her down.
“Don’t strike her!” Gabriel stood gripping the door of the car with both hands. He looked sick. His twitching face was bright with sweat, and he was gasping hoarsely for his breath. He was staring at the gun, his wide eyes dull with horror.
“Stop me!”
He smashed the flat of the gun into Carmen’s face, and grinned at the way Gabriel flinched when she screamed.
This was more the way he wanted everything to be. “Just try and stop me!”
“I—I won’t fight you,” Gabriel croaked faintly. “After all, we’re not animals. We’re civilized humans. I know Carmen loves you. I’m stepping out of the way. But you can’t make me fight——”
The gun stopped Gabriel.
Queerly, though, he didn’t fall. He just stood there like some kind of rundown machine, with his stiffened hands clutching the side of the car.
“Die, damn you!”
Casey James shot again; he kept on shooting till the gun was empty. The bullets hammered into the body, but somehow it wouldn’t fall. He leaned to look at the wounds, at the broken metal beneath the simulated flesh of the face and the hot yellow hydraulic fluid running out of the belly, and recoiled from what he saw, shaking his head, shuddering like any trapped and frightened beast.
“That—thing!”
With a wild burst of animal ferocity, he hurled the gun into what was left of its plastic face. It toppled stiffly backward then, and something jangled faintly inside when it struck the pavement.
“It—it ain’t human!”
“But it was an excellent replica.” The other thing, the one he had thought was Carmen, gathered itself up from the bottom of the car, speaking gently to him with what now seemed queerly like the voice of old barrel-belly. “We had taken a great deal of trouble to make you the happiest one of your breed.” It looked at him sadly with, Carmen’s limpid dark eyes. “If you had only kept your word.”
“Don’t——” He cowered back from it, shivering. “Don’t k-k-kill me!”
“We never kill,” it murmured. “You need never be afraid of that.”
While he sat trembling, it climbed out of the car and picked up the ruined thing that had looked like Gabe and carried it easily away toward the Oasis garage.
Now he knew that this place was only a copy of Las Verdades, somewhere not on Earth. When he looked up at the blue crystal sky, he knew that it was only some kind of screen. He felt the millions of strange eyes beyond it, watching him like some queer monster in a cage.
He tried to run away.
He gunned the Cadillac back across the acequia bridge and drove wildly back the way he had come in, on the Alburquerque highway. A dozen miles out, an imitation construction crewman tried to flag him down, pointing at a sign that said the road was closed for repairs. He whipped around the barriers and drove the pitching car on across the imitation desert until he crashed into the bars.
1954
Guinevere for Everybody
Count the science-fiction novels you have most enjoyed over the past quarter-century, and see how many of them—The Humanoids, Dragon’s Island, Darker Than You Think, and many more—were written by a friendly and unassuming New Mexican named Jack Williamson. It is a pity that so few Williamsons appear in the science-fiction magazines these days. Perhaps New Mexico is too easy-going an environment to keep a writer chained to his typewriter, or perhaps it is only that his excursions into other areas of the science-fiction field (item, the comic strip Beyond Mars, which brightens the weekends of five million or so readers of the New York Sunday News; and item, the juvenile novel Undersea Quest, written in collaboration with your editor), don’t leave him enough time. But though the quantity of new Williamson stories is low, the quality is high; see for yourself in——
The girl stood chained in the vending machine.
“Hi, there!” Her plaintive hail whispered wistfully back from the empty corners of the gloomy waiting room. “Won’t somebody buy me?”
Most of the sleepy passengers trailing through the warm desert night from the Kansas City jet gaped at her and hurried on uneasily, as if she had been a tigress inadequately caged, but Pip Chimberley stopped, jolted wide awake.
“Hullo, mister.” The girl smiled at him, with disturbingly huge blue eyes. The chains tinkled as her hands came up hopefully, to fluff and smooth her copper-blond hair. Her long tan body flowed into a pose that filled her sheer chemistic halter to the bursting point. “You like me, huh?”
Chimberley gulped. He was an angular young man, with a meat-cleaver nose, an undernourished mouse-colored mustache, and three degrees in cybernetic engineering. His brown, murky eyes fled from the girl and fluttered back again, fascinated.
“Won’t you buy me?” She caressed him with her coaxing drawl. “You’d never miss the change, and I know you’d like me. I like you.”
He caught his breath, with a strangled sound.
“No!” He was hoarse with incipient panic. “I’m not a customer. My interest is—uh—professional.”
He sidled hastily away from the shallow display space where she stood framed in light, and resolutely shifted his eyes from her to the vending machine. He knew machines, and it was lovely to him, with the seductive sweep of its streamlined contours and the exciting gleam of its blinding red enamel. He backed away, looking raptly up at the blazing allure of the 3-D sign:
GUINEVERE
THE VITAL APPLIANCE!
NOT A ROBOT—WHAT IS SHE?
The glowing letters exploded into galaxies of dancing light, that condensed again into words of fire. Guinevere, the ultimate appliance, was patented and guaranteed by Solar Chemistics, Inc. Her exquisite body had been manufactured by automatic machinery, untouched by human beings. Educated by psionic processes, she was warranted sweet-tempered and quarrel-free. Her special introductory price, for a strictly limited time, was only four ninety-five.
“Whatever your profession is, I’m very sure you need me.” She was leaning out of the narrow display space, and her low voice followed him melodiously. “I have everything, for everybody.”
Chimberley turned uncertainly back.
“That might be,” he muttered reluctantly. “But all I want is a little information. You see, I’m a cybernetics engineer.” He told her his name.
“I’m Guinevere.” She smiled, with a flash of precise white teeth. “Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456. I’d be delighted to help you, but I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for me first. You do want me, don’t you?”
Chimberley’s long equine countenance turned the color of a wet brick. The sorry truth was, he had never wholeheartedly wanted any woman. His best friends were digital computers; human beings had always bored him. He couldn’t understand the sudden pounding in his ears, or the way his knobby fists had clenched.
“I’m here on business,” he said stiffly. “That’s why I stopped. You see, I’m a trouble-shooter for General Cybernetics.”
“A shooter?” Psionic educational processes evidently had their limits, but the puzzled quirk of her eyebrows was somehow still entrancing. “What’s a shooter?”
“My company builds the managerial computers that are replacing human management in most of the big corporations,” he informed her patiently. “I’m supposed to keep them going. Actually, the machines are designed to adjust and repair themselves. They never really go wrong. The usual trouble is that people just don’t try to understand them.”
He snapped his bony fingers at human stupidity.
“Anyhow, when I got back to my hotel tonight, there was this wire from Schenectady. First I’d heard about any trouble out here in the sun country. I still don’t get it.” He blinked at her hopefully. “Maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”
“Perhaps I can,” she agreed sweetly. “When I’m paid for.”
“You’re the trouble, yourself,” he snapped back accusingly. “That’s what I gather, though the wire was a little too concise—our own management is mechanized, of course, and sometimes it fails to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of the human employee.”
“But I’m no trouble,” she protested gaily. “Just try me.”
A cold sweat burst into the palms of his hands. Spots danced in front of his eyes. He scowled bleakly past her at the enormous vending machine, trying angrily to insulate himself from all her disturbing effects.
“Just four hours since I got the wire. Drop everything. Fly out here to trouble-shoot Athena Sue—she’s the installation we made to run Solar Chemistics. I barely caught the jet, and I just got here. Now I’ve got to find out what the score is.”
“Score?” She frowned charmingly. “Is there a game?”
He shrugged impatiently.
“Seems the directors of Solar Chemistics are unhappy because Athena Sue is manufacturing and merchandising human beings. They’re threatening to throw out our managerial system, unless we discover and repair the damage at once.”
He glowered at the shackled girl.
“But the wire failed to make it clear why the directors object. Athena Sue was set to seek the greatest possible financial return from the processing and sale of solar synthetics, so it couldn’t very well be a matter of profits. There’s apparently no question of any legal difficulty. I can’t see anything for the big wheels to clash their gears about.”
Guinevere was rearranging her flame-tinted hair, smiling with a radiance he couldn’t entirely ignore.
“Matter of fact, the whole project looks pretty wonderful to me.” He grinned at her and the beautiful vending machine with a momentary admiration. “Something human management would never have had the brains or the vision to accomplish. It took one of our Athena-type computers to see the possibility, and to tackle all the technical and merchandising problems that must have stood in the way of making it a commercial reality.”
“Then you do like me?”
“The directors don’t, evidently.” He tried not to see her hurt expression. “I can’t understand why, but the first part of my job here will be to find the reason. If you can help——”
He paused expectantly.
“I’m only four ninety-five,” Guinevere reminded him. “You put the money right here in this slot——”
“I don’t want you,” he interrupted harshly. “Just the background facts about you. To begin with—just what’s the difference between a vital appliance and an ordinary human being?”
He tried not to hear her muffled sob.
“What’s the plant investment?” He raised his voice, and ticked the questions off on his skinny fingers. “What’s the production rate? The profit margin? Under what circumstances was the manufacture of—uh—vital appliances first considered by Athena Sue? When were you put on the market? What sort of consumer acceptance are you getting now? Or don’t you know?”
Guinevere nodded brightly.
“But can’t we go somewhere else to talk about it?” She blinked bravely through her tears. “Your room, maybe?”
Chimberley squirmed uncomfortably.
“If you don’t take me,” she added innocently, “I can’t tell you anything.”
He stalked away, angry at himself for the way his knees trembled. He could probably find out all he had to know from the memory tapes of the computer, after he got out to the plant. Anyhow, he shouldn’t let her upset him. After all, she was only an interesting product of chemistic engineering.
