Picnic on Nearside (2 page)

“‘This thing . . .’ How can you think of something like that . . .?”

“At a time like this. I know. I’ve heard it. Bombs get me horny, is all. So okay, so I’ll leave you alone.” He grinned again. “But maybe you’ll feel different when this is over.”

For a moment she thought she was going to throw up from a combination of revulsion and fear. Fear of the bomb, not this awful man. Her stomach was twisted into a pretzel, and here he sat, thinking of sex. What was he, anyway?

The capsule lurched again, and they were on their way.

*   *   *

The deserted Leystrasse made a gleaming frame of stainless steel storefronts and fluorescent ceiling for the improbable pair hurrying from the tube station in the Plaza: Birkson in his anachronistic golf togs, cleats rasping on the polished rock floor, and Bach, half a meter taller than him, thin like a Lunarian. She wore the regulation uniform of the Municipal Police, which was a blue armband and cap with her rank of chief emblazoned on them, a shoulder holster, an equipment belt around her waist from which dangled the shining and lethal-looking tools of her trade, cloth
slippers, and a few scraps of clothing in arbitrary places. In the benign environment of Lunar corridors, modesty had died out ages ago.

They reached the cordon which had been established around the bomb, and Bach conferred with the officer in charge. The hall was echoing with off-key music.

“What’s that?” Birkson asked.

Officer Walters, the man to whom Bach had been speaking, looked Birkson over, weighing just how far he had to go in deference to this grinning weirdo. He was obviously the bomb expert Bach had referred to in an earlier call, but he was a Terran, and not a member of the force. Should he be addressed as ‘sir’? He couldn’t decide.

“It’s the bomb. It’s been singing to us for the last five minutes. Ran out of things to say, I guess.”

“Interesting.” Swinging the putter lazily from side to side, he walked to the barrier of painted steel crowd-control sections. He started sliding one of them to the side.

“Hold it . . . ah, sir,” Walters said.

“Wait a minute, Birkson,” Bach confirmed, running to the man and almost grabbing his sleeve. She backed away at the last moment.

“It said no one’s to cross that barrier,” Walters supplied to Bach’s questioning glance. “Says it’ll blow us all to the Farside.”

“What is that damn thing, anyway?” Bach asked, plaintively.

Birkson withdrew from the barrier and took Bach aside with a tactful touch on the arm. He spoke to her with his voice just low enough for Walters to hear.

“It’s a cyborged human connected to a bomb, probably a uranium device,” he said. “I’ve seen the design. It’s just like one that went off in Johannesburg three years ago. I didn’t know they were still making them.”

“I heard about it,” Bach said, feeling cold and alone. “Then you think it’s really a bomb? How do you know it’s a cyborg? Couldn’t it be tape recordings, or a computer?”

Birkson rolled his eyes slightly, and Bach reddened. Damn it, they were reasonable questions. And to her surprise, he could not defend his opinion logically. She wondered what she was stuck
with. Was this man really the expert she took him to be, or a plaid-sweatered imposter?

“You can call it a hunch. I’m going to talk to this fellow, and I want you to roll up an industrial X-ray unit on the level below this while I’m doing it. On the level above, photographic film. You get the idea?”

“You want to take a picture of the inside of this thing. Won’t that be dangerous?”

“Yeah. Are your insurance premiums paid up?”

Bach said nothing, but gave the orders. A million questions were spinning through her head, but she didn’t want to make a fool of herself by asking a stupid one. Such as: how much radiation did a big industrial X-ray machine produce when beamed through a rock and steel floor? She had a feeling she wouldn’t like the answer. She sighed, and decided to let Birkson have his head until she felt he couldn’t handle it. He was about the only hope she had.

And he was strolling casually around the perimeter, swinging his goddamn putter behind him, whistling bad harmony with the tune coming from the bomb. What was a career police officer to do? Back him up on the harmonica?

The scanning cameras atop the bomb stopped their back and forth motion. One of them began to track Birkson. He grinned his flashiest, and waved to it. The music stopped.

“I am a fifty kiloton nuclear bomb of the uranium-235 type,” it said. “You must stay behind the perimeter I have caused to be erected here. You must not disobey this order.”

Birkson held up his hands, still grinning, and splayed out his fingers.

“You got me, bud. I won’t bother you. I was just admiring your casing. Pretty nice job, there. It seems a shame to blow it up.”

“Thank you,” the bomb said, cordially. “But that is my purpose. You cannot divert me from it.”

“Never entered my mind. Promise.”

“Very well. You may continue to admire me, if you wish, but from a safe distance. Do not attempt to rush me. All my vital wiring is safely protected, and I have a response time of three
milliseconds. I can ignite long before you can reach me, but I do not wish to do so until the alloted time has come.”

Birkson whistled. “That’s pretty fast, brother. Much faster than me, I’m sure. It must be nice, being able to move like that after blundering along all your life with neural speeds.”

“Yes, I find it very gratifying. It was a quite unexpected benefit of becoming a bomb.”

This was more like it, Bach thought. Her dislike of Birkson had not blinded her to the fact that he had been checking out his hunch. And her questions had been answered: no tape array could answer questions like that, and the machine had as much as admitted that it had been a human being at one time.

Birkson completed a circuit, back to where Bach and Walters were standing. He paused, and said in a low voice, “Check out that time.”

“What time?”

“What time did you say you were going to explode?” he yelled.

“In three hours, twenty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds,” the bomb supplied.

“That time,” he whispered. “Get your computers to work on it. See if it’s the anniversary of any political group, or the time something happened that someone might have a grudge about.” He started to turn away, then thought of something. “But most important, check the birth records.”

“May I ask why?”

He seemed to be dreaming, but came back to them. “I’m just feeling this character out. I’ve got a feeling this might be his birthday. Find out who was born at that time—it can’t be too many, down to the second—and try to locate them all. The one you can’t find will be our guy. I’m betting on it.”

“What are you betting? And how do you know for sure it’s a man?”

That look again, and again she blushed. But, damn it, she had to ask questions. Why should he make her feel defensive about it?

“Because he’s chosen a male voice to put over his speakers. I know that’s not conclusive, but you get hunches after a while. As to what I’m betting . . . no, it’s not my life. I’m sure I can get this one. How about dinner tonight if I’m right?” The smile was
ingenuous, without the trace of lechery she thought she had seen before. But her stomach was still crawling. She turned away without answering.

For the next twenty minutes, nothing much happened. Birkson continued his slow stroll around the machine, stopping from time to time to shake his head in admiration. The thirty men and women of Chief Bach’s police detail stood around nervously with nothing to do, as far away from the machine as pride would allow. There was no sense in taking cover.

Bach herself was kept busy coordinating the behind-the-scenes maneuvering from a command post that had been set up around the corner, in the Elysian Travel Agency. It had phones and a computer output printer. She sensed the dropping morale among her officers, who could see nothing going on. Had they known that surveying lasers were poking their noses around trees in the Plaza, taking bearings to within a thousandth of a millimeter, they might have felt a little better. And on the floor below, the X-ray had arrived.

Ten minutes later, the output began to chatter. Bach could hear it in the silent, echoing corridor from her position halfway between the travel agency and the bomb. She turned, and met a young officer with the green armband of a rookie. The woman’s hand was ice-cold as she handed Bach the sheet of yellow printout paper. There were three names printed on it, and below that, some dates and events listed.

“This bottom information was from the fourth expansion of the problem,” the officer explained. “Very low probability stuff. The three people were all born either on the second or within a three-second margin of error, in three different years. Everyone else has been contacted.”

“Keep looking for these three, too,” Bach said. As she turned away, she noticed that the young officer was pregnant, about in her fifth month. She thought briefly of sending her away from the scene, but what was the use?

Birkson saw her coming, and broke off his slow circuits of the bomb. He took the paper from her and scanned it. He tore off the bottom part without being told it was low probability, crumpled it, and let it drop to the floor. Scratching his head, he walked slowly back to the bomb.

“Hans?” he called out.

“How did you know my name?” the bomb asked.

“Ah, Hans, my boy, credit us with some sense. You can’t have got into this without knowing that the MuniPol can do very fast investigations. Unless I’ve been underestimating you. Have I?”

“No,” the bomb conceded. “I knew you would find out who I was. But it doesn’t alter the situation.”

“Of course not. But it makes for easier conversation. How has life been treating you, my friend?”

“Terrible,” mourned the man who had become a fifty kiloton nuclear weapon.

*   *   *

Every morning Hans Leiter rolled out of bed and padded into his cozy water closet. It was not the standard model for residential apartment modules, but a special one he had installed after he moved in. Hans lived alone, and it was the one luxury he allowed himself. In his little palace, he sat in a chair that massaged him into wakefulness, washed him, shaved him, powdered him, cleaned his nails, splashed him with scent, them made love to him with a rubber imitation that was a good facsimile of the real thing. Hans was awkward with women.

He would dress, walk down three hundred meters of corridor, and surrender himself to a pedestrian slideway which took him as far as the Cross-Crisium Tube. There, he allowed himself to be fired like a projectile through a tunnel below the Lunar surface.

Hans worked in the Crisium Heavy Machinery Foundry. His job there was repairing almost anything that broke down. He was good at it; he was much more comfortable with machines than with people.

One day he made a slip and got his leg caught in a massive roller. It was not a serious accident, because the failsafe systems turned off the machine before his body or head could be damaged, but it hurt terribly and completed ruined the leg. It had to be taken off. While he was waiting for the cloned replacement limb to be grown, Hans had been fitted with a prosthetic.

It had been a revelation to him. It worked like a dream, as good as his old leg and perhaps better. It was connected to his severed leg nerve, but was equipped with a threshold cut-off circuit, and one day when he barked his artificial shin he saw that
it had caused him no pain. He recalled the way that same injury had felt with his flesh and blood leg, and again he was impressed. He thought, too, of the agony when his leg had been caught in the machine.

When the new leg was ready for transplanting, Hans had elected to retain the prosthetic. It was unusual, but not unprecedented.

From that time on, Hans, who had never been known to his co-workers as talkative or social, withdrew even more from his fellow humans. He would speak only when spoken to. But people had observed him talking to the stamping press, and the water cooler, and the robot sweeper.

At night, it was Hans’ habit to sit on his vibrating bed and watch the holovision until one o’clock. At that time, his kitchen would prepare him a late snack, roll it to him in his bed, and he would retire for the night.

For the last three years Hans had been neglecting to turn the set on before getting into bed. Nevertheless, he continued to sit quietly on the bed staring at the empty screen.

*   *   *

When she finished reading the personal data printout, Bach was struck once more at the efficiency of the machines in her control. This man was almost a cipher, yet there were nine thousand words in storage concerning his uneventful life, ready to be called up and printed into an excruciatingly boring biography.

“. . . so you came to feel that you were being controlled at every step in your life by machines,” Birkson was saying. He was sitting on one of the barriers, swinging his legs back and forth. Bach joined him and offered the long sheet of printout. He waved it away. She could hardly blame him.

“But it’s true!” the bomb said. “We all are, you know. We’re part of this huge machine that’s called New Dresden. It moves us around like parts on an assembly line, washes us, feeds us, puts us to bed and sings us to sleep.”

“Ah,” Birkson said, agreeably. “Are you a Luddite, Hans?”

“No!” the bomb said in a shocked voice. “Roger, you’ve missed the whole point. I don’t want to destroy the machines. I want to serve them better. I wanted to become a machine, like my new leg. Don’t you see? We’re part of the machine, but we’re the most inefficient part.”

The two talked on, and Bach wiped the sweat from her palms. She couldn’t see where all this was going, unless Birkson seriously hoped to talk Hans Leiter out of what he was going to do in—she glanced at the clock—two hours and forty-three minutes. It was maddening. On the one hand, she recognized the skill he was using in establishing a rapport with the cyborg. They were on a first-name basis, and at least the damn machine cared enough to argue its position. On the other hand, so what? What good was it doing?

Walters approached and whispered into her ear. She nodded, and tapped Birkson on the shoulder.