Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (19 page)

One day he made a slip and got his leg caught in a massive roller. It was
not a serious accident, because the fail-safe systems turned off the
machine before his body or head could be damaged, but it hurt terribly and
completely 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.

"They're ready to take the picture whenever you are," she said.

He waved her off.

"Don't bother me," he said, loudly. "This is getting interesting. So if
what you say is true," he went on to Hans, getting up and pacing intently
back and forth, this time inside the line of barriers, "maybe I ought to
look into this myself. You really like being cyborged better than being
human?"

"Infinitely so," the bomb said. He sounded enthusiastic. "I need no sleep
now, and I no longer have to bother with elimination or eating. I have a
tank for nutrients, which are fed into the housing where my brain and
central nervous system are located." He paused. "I tried to eliminate the
ups and downs of hormone flow and the emotional reactions that followed,"
he confided.

"No dice, huh?"

"No. Something always distracted me. So when I heard of this place where
they would cyborg me and get rid of all that, I jumped at the chance."

Inactivity was making Bach impulsive. She
had
to say or do
something.

"Where did you get the work done, Hans?" she ventured.

The bomb started to say something, but Birkson laughed loudly and slapped
Bach hard on the back. "Oh, no, Chief. That's pretty tricky, right, Hans?
She's trying to get you to rat. That's not done, Chief. There's a point of
honor involved."

"Who is that?" the bomb asked, suspiciously.

"Let me introduce Chief Anna-Louise Bach, of the New Dresden Police. Ann,
meet Hans."

"Police?" Hans asked, and Bach felt goose-pimples when she detected a note
of fright in the voice. What was this maniac trying to do, frightening the
guy like that? She was close to pulling Birkson off the case. She held off
because she thought she could see a familiar pattern in it, something she
could use as a way to participate, even if ignominiously. It was the good
guy-bad guy routine, one of the oldest police maneuvers in the book.

"Aw, don't be like that," Birkson said to Hans. "Not all cops are brutes.
Ann here, she's a nice person. Give her a chance. She's only doing her
job."

"Oh, I have no objection to police," the bomb said. "They are necessary to
keep the social machine functioning. Law and order is a basic precept of
the coming new Mechanical Society. I'm pleased to meet you, Chief Bach. I
wish the circumstances didn't make us enemies."

"Pleased to meet you, Hans." She thought carefully before she phrased her
next question. She wouldn't have to take the hard-line approach to
contrast herself with affable, buddy-buddy Birkson. She needn't be an
antagonist, but it wouldn't hurt if she asked questions that probed at his
motives.

"Tell me, Hans. You say you're not a Luddite. You say you like machines.
Do you know how many machines you'll destroy if you set yourself off? And
even more important, what you'll do to this social machine you've been
talking about? You'll wipe out the whole city."

The bomb seemed to be groping for words. He hesitated, and Bach felt the
first glimmer of hope since this insanity began.

"You don't understand. You're speaking from an organic viewpoint. Life is
important to you. A machine is not concerned with life. Damage to a
machine, even the social machine, is simply something to be repaired. In a
way, I hope to set an example. I wanted to become a machine—"

"And the best, the very ultimate machine," Birkson put in, "is the atomic
bomb. It's the end point of all mechanical thinking."

"Exactly," said the bomb, sounding very pleased. It was nice to be
understood. "I wanted to be the very best machine I could possibly be, and
it had to be this."

"Beautiful, Hans," Birkson breathed. "I see what you're talking about. So
if we go on with that line of thought, we logically come to the conclusion
…" and he was off into an exploration of the fine points of the new
Mechanistic worldview.

Bach was trying to decide which was the crazier of the two, when she was
handed another message. She read it, then tried to find a place to break
into the conversation. But there was no convenient place. Birkson was more
and more animated, almost frothing at the mouth as he discovered points of
agreement between the two of them. Bach noticed her officers standing
around nervously, following the conversation. It was clear from their
expressions that they feared they were being sold out, that when zero hour
arrived they would still be here watching intellectual ping-pong. But long
before that, she could have a mutiny on her hands. Several of them were
fingering their weapons, probably without even knowing it.

She touched Birkson on the sleeve, but he waved her away. Damn it, this
was too much. She grabbed him and nearly pulled him from his feet, swung
him around until her mouth was close to his ear and growled.

"Listen to me, you idiot. They're going to take the picture. You'll have
to stand back some. It's better if we're all shielded."

"Leave me
alone,
" he shot back and pulled from her grasp. But he
was still smiling. "This is just getting interesting," he said, in a
normal tone of voice.

Birkson came near to dying in that moment. Three guns were trained on him
from the circle of officers, awaiting only the order to fire. They didn't
like seeing their Chief treated that way.

Bach herself was damn near to giving the order. The only thing that stayed
her hand was the knowledge that with Birkson dead, the machine might go
off ahead of schedule. The only thing to do now was to get him out of the
way and go on as best she could, knowing that she was doomed to failure.
No one could say she hadn't given the expert a chance.

"But what I was wondering about," Birkson was saying, "was why today? What
happened today? Is this the day Cyrus McCormick invented the combine
harvester or something?"

"It's my birthday," Hans said, somewhat shyly.

"Your
birthday?
" Birkson managed to look totally amazed to learn
what he already knew. "Your birthday. That's
great,
Hans. Many
happy returns of the day, my friend." He turned and took in all of the
officers with an expansive sweep of his hands. "Let's sing, people. Come
on, it's his birthday, for heaven's sake.
Happy birthday to you, happy
birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Hans …
"

He bellowed, he was off-key, he swept his hands in grand circles with no
sense of rhythm. But so infectious was his mania that several of the
officers found themselves joining in. He ran around the circle, pulling
the words out of them with great scooping motions of his hands.

Bach bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep herself steady.
She
had been singing, too.
The scene was so ridiculous, so blackly
improbable …

She was not the only one who was struck the same way. One of her officers,
a brave man who she knew personally to have shown courage under fire, fell
on his face in a dead faint. A woman officer covered her face with her
hands and fled down the corridor, making helpless coughing sounds. She
found an alcove and vomited.

And still Birkson capered. Bach had her gun halfway out of the shoulder
holster, when he shouted.

"What's a birthday without a party?" he asked. "Let's have a big party."
He looked around, fixed on the flower shop. He started for it, and as he
passed Bach he whispered, "Take the picture
now.
"

It galvanized her. She desperately wanted to believe he knew what he was
doing, and just at the moment when his madness seemed total he had shown
her the method.
A distraction.
Please, let it be a distraction. She
turned and gave the prearranged signal to the officer standing at the edge
of Prosperity Plaza.

She turned back in time to see Birkson smash in the window of the flower
shop with his putter. It made a deafening crash.

"Goodness," said Hans, who sounded truly shocked. "Did you have to do
that? That's private property."

"What does it matter?" Birkson yelled. "Hell, man, you're going to do much
worse real soon. I'm just getting things started." He reached in and
pulled out an armload of flowers, signaling to others to give him a hand.
The police didn't like it, but soon were looting the shop and building a
huge wreath just outside the line of barriers.

"I guess you're right," said Hans, a little breathlessly. A taste of
violence had excited him, whetted his appetite for more to come. "But you
startled me. I felt a real thrill, like I haven't felt since I was human."

"Then let's do it some more." And Birkson ran up and down one side of the
street, breaking out every window he could reach. He picked up small
articles he found inside the shops and threw them. Some of them shattered
when they hit.

He finally stopped. Leystrasse had been transformed. No longer the
scrubbed and air-conditioned Lunar environment, it had become as
shattered, as chaotic and uncertain, as the tension-filled emotional
atmosphere it contained. Bach shuddered and swallowed the rising taste of
bile. It was a precursor of things to come, she was sure. It hit her
deeply to see the staid and respectable Leystrasse ravaged.

"A cake," Birkson said. "We have to have a cake. Hold on a minute, I'll be
right back." He strode quickly toward Bach, took her elbow and turned her,
pulled her insistently away with him.

"You have to get those officers away from here," he said,
conversationally. "They're tense. They could explode at any minute. In
fact," and he favored her with his imbecile grin, "they're probably more
dangerous right now than the bomb."

"You mean you think it's a fake?"

"No. It's for real. I know the psychological pattern. After this much
trouble, he won't want to be a dud. Other types, they're in it for the
attention and they'd just as soon fake it. Not Hans. But what I mean is, I
have him. I can get him. But I can't count on your officers. Pull them
back and leave only two or three of your most trusted people."

"All right." She had decided again, more from a sense of helpless futility
than anything else, to trust him. He
had
pulled a neat diversion
with the flower shop and the X-ray.

"We may have him already," he went on, as they reached the end of the
street and turned the corner. "Often, the X-ray is enough. It cooks some
of the circuitry and makes it unreliable. I'd hoped to kill him outright,
but he's shielded. Oh, he's probably got a lethal dosage, but it'd take
him days to die. That doesn't do us any good. And if his circuitry
is
knocked out, the only way to find out is to wait. We have to do better
than that. Here's what I want you to do."