Collected Short Fiction, page 593
A wave of sickness broke over him as the guard escorted him past an empty reception desk and back into the idle silence of the mechanized administrative section. A sleek, feline brunette, who must have been a close runner-up in the Miss Chemistics contest, sat behind the chrome railing at the dead programming panel, intently brushing crimson lacquer on her talons. She glanced up at him with a spark of interest that instantly died.
“The hot shot from Schenectady,” the guard said. “Here to Overhaul the big tin brain.”
“Shoulda made it quicker.” She flexed her claws, frowning critically at the fresh enamel. “Word just came out of the board room. They’re doing away with the brain. High time, too, if anybody wants to know.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you see ’em?” She blew on her nails. “Those horrible synthetic monsters it was turning loose everywhere.”
He remembered that she must have been a runner-up.
“Anyhow,” he muttered stubbornly, “I want to check the computer.”
With a bored nod, she reached to unlatch the little gate that let him through the railing into the metal-paneled, air-conditioned maze that had been the brain of Athena Sue. He stopped between the neat banks of pastel-painted units, saddened by their silence.
The exciting sounds of mechanized thought should have been whispering all around him. The germanium pentodes, cells of the cybernetic mind, had always been as silent as his own, but punched cards should have been riffling through the whirring sorters, as Athena Sue remembered. Perforators should have been munching chemistic tape, as she recorded new data. Relays should have been clicking as she reached her quick decisions, and automatic typewriters murmuring with her many voices.
But Athena Sue was dead.
She could be revived, he told himself hopefully. Her permanent memories were all still intact, punched in tough chemistic film. He could set her swift electronic pulse to beating again, through her discharged tubes, if he could find the impossible flaw that had somehow led to her death.
He set to work.
Three hours later he was bent over a high-speed scanner, reading a spool of tape, when a hearty shout startled him.
“Well, Chimberley! Found anything?”
He snatched the spool off the scanner and shrank uneasily back from the muscular giant stalking past the programming desk. It took him a moment to recognize Matt Skane, without the watchman’s clock. Clutching the tape, he nodded stiffly.
“Yes.” He glanced around him. The billowy brunette and the guard had disappeared. He wet his lips and gulped. “I—I’ve found out what happened to the computer.”
“So?”
Skane waited, towering over him, a big, red, weatherbeaten man with horny hands shaped as if to fit a hammer or the handles of a plow, a clumsy misfit in this new world where machines had replaced both his muscles and his mind. He was obsolete—but dangerous.
“It was sabotaged.” Chimberley’s knobby fist tightened on the spool of tape, in sweaty defiance.
“How do you know?”
“Here’s the whole story.” He brandished the chemistic reel. “Somebody programmed Athena Sue to search for a project that would result in her destruction. Being an efficient computer, she did what she was programmed to do. She invented vital appliances, and supplied a correct prediction that the unfavorable consumer reaction to them would completely discredit mechanized equipment. So the saboteur re-programmed her to ignore the consequences and put them on the market.”
“I see.” Skane’s bright blue eyes narrowed ominously. “And who was this cunning saboteur?”
Chimberley caught a rasping, uneven breath. “I know that he was somebody who had access to the programming panel at certain times, which are recorded on the input log. So far as I’ve been able to determine, the only company employee who should have been here at those times was a watchman—named Matt Skane.”
The big man snorted.
“Do you call that evidence?”
“It’s good enough for me. With a little further investigation, I think I can uncover enough supporting facts to interest the directors.”
Skane shifted abruptly on his feet, and his hard lips twitched as Chimberley flinched. “The directors are gone,” he drawled softly. “And there isn’t going to be any further investigation. Because we’ve already gone back to human management. We’re junking your big tin brain. I’m the general manager now. And I want that tape.”
He reached for the chemistic spool.
“Take it.” Chimberley crouched back from his long bronze arm, and ignominiously gave up the tape. “See what good it does you. Maybe I can’t prove much of anything without it. But you’re in for trouble, anyhow.”
Skane grunted contemptuously.
“You can’t turn the clock back,” Chimberley told him bitterly. “Your competitors won’t go back to human management. You’ll still have all their computers to fight. They had you against the wall once, and they will again.”
“Don’t bet on it.” Skane grinned. “Because we’ve learned a thing or two. We’re going to use machines, instead of trying to fight them. We’re putting in a new battery of the smaller sort of auxiliary computers—the kind that will let us keep a man at the top. I think we’ll do all right, with no further help from you.”
Chimberley hastily retreated from the smoldering blue eyes. He felt sick with humiliation. His own future was no serious problem; a good cybernetics engineer could always find an opening. What hurt was the way he had failed Athena Sue.
But there was Guinevere, waiting in his room.
His narrow shoulders lifted, when he thought of her. Most women irked and bored him, with all their fantastic irrationalities and their insufferable stupidities, but Guinevere was different. She was more like Athena Sue, cool and comprehensible, free of all the human flaws that he detested.
He ran from the bus stop back to the seedy motel, and his heart was fluttering when he rapped at the door of their room.
“Guinevere!”
He listened breathlessly. The latch clicked. The door creaked. He heard her husky-throated voice.
“Oh, Pip! I thought you’d never come.”
“Guin——”
Shock stopped him, when he saw the woman in the doorway. She was hideous with old age. She felt feebly for him with thin blue claws, peering toward him blindly.
“Pip?” Her voice was somehow Guinevere’s. “Isn’t it you?”
“Where——” Fright caught his throat. His glance fled into the empty room beyond, and came back to her stooped and tottering frame, her wasted, faded face. He saw a dreadful likeness there, but his mind rejected it. “Where’s Guinevere?”
“Darling, don’t you even know me?”
“You couldn’t be——” He shuddered. “But still—your voice——”
“Yes, dear, I’m yours.” Her white head nodded calmly. “The same vital appliance you bought last night. Guinevere Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456.”
He clutched weakly at the door frame.
“The difference you have just discovered is our rapid obsolescence.” A strange pride lifted her gaunt head. “That’s something we’re not supposed to talk about, but you’re an engineer. You can see how essential it is, to insure a continuous replacement demand. A wonderful feature, don’t you think, darling?”
He shook his head, with a grimace of pain.
“I suppose I don’t look very lovely to you any longer, but that’s all right.” Her withered smile brightened again. “That’s the way the computer planned it. Just take me back to the vending machine where you bought me. You’ll get a generous trade-in allowance, on tomorrow’s model.”
“Not any more,” he muttered hoarsely. “Because our computer’s out. Skane’s back in, and I don’t think he’ll be making vital appliances.”
“Oh, Pip!” She sank down on the sagging bed, staring up at him with a blind bewilderment. “I’m so sorry for you!”
He sat down beside her, with tears in his murky eyes. For one bitter instant, he hated all computers, and the mobs—and Matt Skane as well.
But then he began to get hold of himself.
After all, Athena Sue was not to blame for anything. She had merely been betrayed. Machines were never evil, except when men used them wrongly.
He turned slowly back to Guinevere, and gravely kissed her shriveled lips.
“I’ll make out,” he whispered. “And now I’ve got to call Schenectady.”
The Hitch-Hiker’s Package
Both were on their way home. And Jason Garvie was sorry for the thin little man with the package of paper under his arm.
Ever-reliant and always-popular Jack Williamson has once again given us a distinctly different story in his freshly-minted version of an old tale. When you’ve finished with the frighteningly uncanny experience of Jason Garvie you’re sure to wonder about it for a long, long time. As we did.
THE PASSING CAR, a long black roadster, had cut sharply in ahead of his sedan, and for a moment Jason Garvie had been sick and faint with anticipation of catastrophe for a crash was surely unavoidable. Indeed, there had been a sharp and sudden sound like the harsh snapping of a steel spring as the two machines touched fenders.
But the low-slung roadster was drawing swiftly ahead of him now, on the glistening black pavement and Jason put his foot back on the accelerator, and the sedan purred smoothly forward again.
Queer how upset he felt! His legs weak and trembling, and a feeling of nausea in the pit of his stomach. He ought to have something done for his nerves if every little tight place in traffic was to make him feel this way.
He pressed harder on the accelerator. Half a state to cross yet before he got home. He must hold out to make it. The nervous strain of this long trip had worn him down. But soon he would be home, where he could rest. Home. . . . He whispered the word, with a feeling of quiet satisfaction.
“Pretty close scrape, eh?” he said to the man at his side.
There was no answer and he turned his head to glance at his companion, wondering if he had been frightened by the narrow escape from disaster.
Jason did not often pick up hitch-hikers. There had been so many stories of hitch-hikers robbing their casual benefactors that he had abandoned the practise. But something about this young man as he stood with a package under his arm near the roadside filling station, had made Jason Garvie break his habitual rule.
The man was meek looking, thin and he wore a smudged and battered hat and coat that had evidently been slept in. Unpressed trousers worn and soiled about the cuffs, unpolished shoes broken at the sides added up to a forlorn picture. The newspaper-wrapped parcel was clutched tightly under his thin arm.
But his face, haggard and unshaven though it might be, was somehow firm with determination. The thin shoulder straight with purpose. Dark, sunken eyes gleamed with fixed resolve. It was his attitude, somehow expressive of calm, unflinching determination that had made Jason stop beside him and open the door.
“A pretty close shave, wasn’t it?” Jason repeated now as he turned to the hitch-hiker.
Then his mouth dropped open in astonishment, and he felt suddenly foolish.
The man was gone! The seat beside him was empty!
He had been there beside him on the seat a moment before the black roadster cut in front of them. Sitting motionless, holding the package in his lap, his determined, sunken eyes staring straight ahead. Jason had glanced at the man out of the corner of his eyes once or twice although the fellow had not uttered a dozen words since he got into the car back by the filling station.
Now the hitch-hiker was gone. But the parcel, neatly wrapped in newspaper, lay on the seat where he had sat.
Jason’s weary brain struggled now for an explanation. Queer that the fellow had got out of the car without his noticing. Must have become frightened when the black roadster swung in against them and Jason jammed his foot on the brake. Certainly he had slowed enough for the man to leave the car. He had been so preoccupied with avoiding collision that he had not seen him open the door and leap out. That must be the answer. . . .
He wondered what was in the package. A lunch, probably; possibly spare shirt and socks. Nothing, he hoped, that the fellow would greatly miss.
Then it occurred to him that the man might have been hurt as he leaped from the car. Jason had not been able to stop completely before the black roadster had drawn past with that queer, abrupt snapping sound.
For a moment he considered turning back to find the man and give him the package. But he was now more eager than ever to reach home. He must be home by night. He was unused to driving such a long distance as he had done on this trip and the strain of it was becoming intolerable.
The man had probably got out quietly because he was nervous about Jason’s driving and didn’t want to embarrass him by saying so. He would get another ride easily.
So Jason’s mind turned again to home, where he would soon stroll about the garden, eat his supper comfortably. Yes, he would take a hot bath, lie back in it and free himself from this depressing strain of the long trip. . . .
But after a while he remembered the package and began to muse about his responsibility concerning it. At the next stop for gas he would open it. If there was identification in it he would mail it to the fellow. If not, he would leave it at the filling station with a description of its owner, in case he stopped there in another car.
Two hours he drove on before he turned in at a filling station for gas.
As he had seen the station rise out of the horizon ahead of him he automatically slowed, turned off the highway and upon the graded dirt road that led to the station. A road dry under the blazing summer sun, dust rising from it in stifling clouds that filled the air chokingly and settled in a white film on the weeds beside the road.
The gas station seemed to be farther from the highway than it had appeared at a distance. He rode along the dusty country road, passing a bright field of emerald-green cotton, a patch of corn with drooping, withered leaves. And somehow it all looked very familiar although he had not passed this way before.
Even as he wondered about this he drove swiftly on through the swirling dust, gripping the wheel with fierce eagerness as he remembered that he was going home. Home was not far away now. . . .
Then, abruptly he remembered that his home was not near here; it was in another state. But the sense of nearness to home remained, became overwhelmingly stronger; the resisting element in his mind surrendered and he stopped trying to reason away the illusion.
A clear image of the village where he lived came to his mind. Clustered dingy buildings of red brick, behind straggling dustladen trees, along white-hot, dusty streets. The bank was the building that seemed most familiar, as if he had been in it many times. An ugly structure of concrete blocks, with a sign of glass and gilt.
“Lanesboro . . . Lanesboro . . .” The name of the village throbbed through his mind.
But one part of Jason’s mind knew that he had never been in a Lanesboro; he could not recall that he had even heard of it.
He drove along the streets of the village now among scattered wooden residences with lawns of sere and dusty grass, through a little cluster of business houses. It was all just as he had imagined it.
The bank, a black, ugly building of concrete blocks, was closed, and had the atmosphere of desolation that clings to a building long deserted. But the sign of glass and gilt was still distinct:
STATE BANK OF LANESBORO
Capital and Surplus, $150,000
Peter Catlin, President
A curious feeling of relief and elation filled Jason; the pleasure of returning to a spot he had known well and for long years . . . though he had never been in this town before. And a sharp pang of regret pierced him when he saw that the bank was closed and deserted.
Jason drove through the town without stopping. A mile beyond it he left the dusty, graded roadway, and turned into the faint, parallel ruts of a little used road.
He drove automatically, seeming to sense the bumps before the car reached them. Eager exultation overflowed in him. He was near home . . . very near. . . .
He stopped before a two-story house that stood alone beside a field of dusty cotton. A thrill had come into him at first sight of its time-faded shingles. With a poignant, almost painful satisfaction he surveyed its weather-boarded walls, showing gray beneath peeling white paint. Mingled feelings of joy and sorrow surged up in him as he gazed across the wide, bare yard, unkept and littered with rubbish, scattered with the grim, spreading skeletons of a few dead fruit-trees. Vague, fleeting images rose in his mind now, like memories of memories of many years spent here—yet he had not seen the house before this day!
He stopped the engine, took up the package wrapped in newspaper as he got out of the car. It was an automatic gesture, but somehow natural. With the package in his hand he ran up the walk of worn red bricks, onto the sagging porch. Eager and insistent yearning hastened his footsteps. He was trembling with mingled anticipation and anxiety.
He rapped hard upon the weather-stained door. There was no sound from within. He waited a moment, then flung open the door and entered a long room, dark and dingily furnished. A wrinkled, white-haired Negro woman in faded blue calico was tottering across the floor, coming toward him.
She stopped, smiled a sudden, toothless but joyous smile, and cried in shrill, eager tones: “Davy! David Catlin! You done come home!”
Jason knew that David Catlin was not his name. But the sound of it brought suddenly to his mind a thousand memories, all connected with this house and the village he had just passed.
A curious tenderness filled him at sight of the aged negress. He ran to her, reached for her hand. Her skinny arms embraced him wildly; then she turned and ran out of the room, screaming shrilly:
“Miss Jane! Miss Jane! Davy’s done come back! Miss Jane!”
Jason followed her across the room, holding the newspaper parcel in his hand. It didn’t occur to him to put it down even as he passed a table.
