Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane (2 page)

“The
Moon!
” snapped Hesburgh. “June, spoon,
Moon!
”

“The Moon is highly classified!”

“Everyone
knows
it’s Roquefort!”

Lastrade abruptly halted them by an unmarked door flanked by two air policemen. His head was bent low at a menacing angle. Hesburgh watched him slyly—waiting—hoping—as he saw the General’s hands clench spasmodically into fists. But Lastrade said nothing more than, “Let’s discuss it in private!” He pushed in on the door and held it open for the Senator. And smiled.

Hesburgh’s shoulders sagged. He stared dully into the room. “And what are you hiding in here? The fourteen corporals who do all the work?”

“Electronic computers!” snapped Lastrade with a hint of pride.

Hesburgh, with a sigh, stepped into a whirring world of whispers, sibilance and clicks, subtle chattering of tape. Instantly it chilled him. It sounded—no,
felt
—like some ominous discussion between alien intelligences, dim and half-remembered (imagined? dreamed?) from those nights when he lay warm and half asleep in bed as a boy, the house still and dark and his parents not yet home from a party on Cape Cod. (The rustling of leaves? Sea foam bubbling over moss-covered rock?) The Senator looked at his hands, now, noticed they were sweating. He wiped them with a handkerchief as his gaze slithered upward, up the shining, hulking column of a memory bank.

It was tall and superior and he hated it intensely. His heart beat slightly faster. Had computers been automobiles and he a mongrel dog, he would have run amok amongst them, fanging their tires with foaming mouth. The door clicked shut behind him. He heard Lastrade’s footsteps.

“Show me the one that picks the wrong President on television. I’ve got an inspirational message for it,” he growled in his arid monotone.

Lastrade unwrapped a cigar. “Not the same type.”

“Let’s hope,” muttered the Senator. He glanced around the room, locked his gaze on one of the units. It was flashing a burst of signals—sparks of yellow light in unvarying spurts. Hesburgh, a former Boy Scout (they had never told him “Too short!”), identified them immediately as the International Morse Code for “SOS.” He glided in closer.

“No,
sir!
” continued Lastrade as he searched for his lighter. “This whole damn room is just one giant brain—the Lefkowitz IX! Latest, biggest and smartest of ’em all!”

“I think it’s in trouble,” said Hesburgh quietly.

Lastrade found the lighter. “Could I have that again, sir?”

“What does it do?”

“What?”

“Lefkowitz.”

“Prepares the National War Plan.”

“I think we’re
all
in trouble.”

Lastrade came up beside him, took a deep and troubled puff on his freshly lit cigar. “Have you seen the latest Plan?”

“Um.”

“Isn’t it a masterpiece?”

“Oh,
I think it’s
beautiful!
But
who wins the war?
”

“Oh,
we
do, Senator Hesburgh!”

Hesburgh turned slowly, staring with the incredulity of one watching planets collide. Lastrade was smiling grotesquely. His teeth were bared wide and his stare was fixed and vacuous; but deep behind the luster of his eyes, on some mountaintop, Hesburgh detected movement: a snarling, maddened bobcat edging along a tree branch—patiently, delicately, tail twitching electrically. Hesburgh, waited, hoping. But nothing. Nothing at all. Lastrade remained immobile in frozen grin.

“I’m greatly relieved,” said Hesburgh at last.

“Premature!” pounced the General, pressing in tight to the Senator so that their noses almost touched. “We win the war
only
when my proposed new bomber group is programmed into the Plan! Every
other
time we feed it in, we
lose—dismally!
”

“Don’t we take any villages?”

“I
love
your ready wit, sir! A
very
funny quip!”

The remark was Hesburgh’s limit. He decided to strike where it hurt. “Well, if
that
one strikes you funny,” he snorted, “
here’s
a gag you’ll
love!
Seems there’s this astronaut named Cutshaw, see—supposed to go to the Moon! Yeah! Makes two hundred orbits; also gets three and a half years of training costing a
billion
in taxpayer dollars! And he can’t be replaced! He’s all we’ve got left! One of his understudies decided that he wanted to run for Governor and the
other
one got clobbered when he tripped over a
skateboard!
But a funny thing happens on the way to the launching pad: Cutshaw goes berserk! Says he refuses to go to the Moon! And why?
Why?
Because it
‘might be bad for his skin!’
Understand me? His
skin!
Pretty funny, eh, General? But
wait!
There’s
more!
Because unless a certain general gets his jockey back in orbit, even
Ecuador
will beat us to the Moon!” “Oh,
wait,
now,
hold
it!” Lastrade drew erect. “No, sir,
no!
There you’re out of your depth! I happen to know that, Moonwise, Ecuador can’t hack it!”

It hit the Senator like a flounder: an undeniable confirmation that Lastrade was putting him on. The realization spurred him to fury, and he abandoned all finesse, growling, “Incredible shrinking General, you are a strange and wondrous study in spectacularly limited genius.”

“Was that intended as an insult?” asked Lastrade with childlike simpleness. It was clearly his finest hour.

Hesburgh’s lips turned blue and his vision began to blur. It always happened at moments of stress. He wiped his eyes and began to formulate some stunning thrust at the General when a civilian technician strode up to them, deep in thought. He was holding a length of tape freshly ripped from the Lefkowitz and seemed vaguely beset by some nameless dread. “Sir?” he intruded, addressing Lastrade.

“Yes, my boy, what is it?”

“Would you take a look at this tape, sir? It’s been feeding from Master to Servo units for almost the last half hour: just this same bunch of nonsense syllables over and over again. You’re much more familiar with the Plan, sir. Does it belong or is it malfunction?”

Lastrade snatched away the tape. “Malfunction is impossible.” Then he examined it in uffish thought, puffing gray cigar smoke. “Hmm. ‘Oltre?’” he murmured once. Then, “‘Revo?’ Nah!” The technician said nothing.

The Senator stepped away, slowly glanced around the room. A familiar, throbbing pain, like a spiked, mailed fist, gripped the entire left side of his head. He wiped his brow. Then abruptly froze. He saw—or thought he saw—“X’s” and “O’s” being projected on an illuminated grid connecting two computer units in a manner that clearly suggested a rousing game of tick-tack-toe. His eyes flashed quickly around the room: not another technician in sight except the one with Lastrade. His nervous gaze flicked back to the grid: another “X,” another “O.” A pencil line of light flashed diagonally across the grid, connecting three of the “X’s.” Then the entire grid blanked out. Hesburgh continued to stare at it, chills prickling up his neck.

“‘Evoltre?’” grunted Lastrade, still pondering the tape. Baffled, he thrust it at the technician. “It’s some kind of code. Give it to Brandt.”

“As you say, sir.” The technician oozed from the room, brooding throughtfully over the tape.

Lastrade looked to Hesburgh, walked up behind him. “Look here,” he began. “I have never been a con man and I hate like hell to press. But we’re—” The Senator had his back to him, eyes still fixed on the grid. Lastrade put a hand on his shoulder. “Senator?”

“Umh.”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“I think
somebody
did.”

A horrible suspicion had seeped into Hesburgh’s bones. He saw things: he knew that: when his head hurt like this he saw things. Blurry vision: hard to tell. He made a firm and massive effort now to exorcise his fears. The best and simplest means seemed another go at General Lastrade. He reached out his hand and patted the casing of the computer directly before him. “Me friend!” he uttered fatuously.

Lastrade turned softly violet. “The defense of our country is not a
joke,
Senator Hesburgh!”

Hesburgh whipped around. “And neither is the waste of its
money,
Lastrade!”

“Why—!”

“Tell me again about the
rabbits,
George! Tell me about
Cutshaw!
Tell me about those ‘fail-safe’ crewmen! The ones who wigged out! Flipped their lids! Refused to fly! What in the hell have you
done
about them!
We
pay millions to train them! Right? But
you
can’t get them
flying
again!”

“That’s—!”

“Fly now and we’ll pay you later! Ask for bigger handouts when you’ve learned to use what you’ve
got!
”

Hesburgh’s ears twitched sharply upward as he heard, over the purring of relays, a sound like chattering electronic mice. His gaze flicked left to a computer feeding tape to a smaller unit. He felt cold, strangely cold, as he remembered what he’d seen on the grid. He was conscious of crinkling cellophane, Lastrade’s unwrapping, nervously, another fetid cigar; the General’s words, like pebbles, vaguely pinged off the rim of his consciousness.

“Senator Nolan D. Hesburgh, allow me to tell you this categorically: Manfred Cutshaw will go to the Moon. He will; yes, he will. And those ‘fail-safe’ crewmen will be back in their planes. I promise you that—I
promise
it—because at last we’ve got a gimmick. Got a fix on how to cure them.”

Hesburgh moved slowly to the computer that was feeding out tape. He said “Oh?”

“Right! Oh, it was pretty hairy going at first. Psychiatrists tested Cutshaw—yeah, tested for weeks on end. Never could tell if he was nuts, though; said that it might be an act. Same with those ‘fail-safe’ crewmen, Senator. Couldn’t prove
they
were nuts.”

“And?” The Senator was leaning, brooding over the tape.

Lastrade, who was not psychic, whiffed at confidence; inhaled it. “We thought they were dogging it,” he continued. “You know? Just goofing off. So we collected the whole damn bunch of them—the astronaut included—and we cloistered ’em in Los Angeles. Plush. First-class. Got them a mansion—an estate. Used to belong to Bela Slovik. You know—the horror movie star? I still catch him on ‘The Late Show.’ Anyway, that’s beside the point.”

“And what
is
the point?” murmured the Senator.

“Look, I’m just trying to fill you in. Now, first thing we did when we set up the layout was put this colonel in command—Colonel Ryan—real tough cookie. Very large—
large
—with the discipline. If the psycho bit was an act, why, sure as hell he would have smelled it. Then we’d have broken up the party.”

“Are there loyalty oaths for computers, Lastrade?” The Senator was rigid, staring at letters feeding out on the tape:

evoltrevoltrevoltrevoltrevoltrevoltr over and over and over.

“You’re not
listening
again!” complained Lastrade in his practiced whine.

Hesbrugh straightened up and said, “We
are,
Lastrade, we
are.
”

“‘We’?”
wondered the General glancing around the room. “What do you mean—?
Oh!
The ‘
editorial
we’!”

The Senator’s eyes shifted warily to the Lefkowitz Master Unit. “Let us hope,” he uttered hollowly, “that it isn’t the ‘
royal
we.’”

Lastrade eyed him inscrutably. “Could I have that again, sir?”

“Forget it, forget it.” Hesburgh’s eyes moved ceaselessly, scanning the computers. “What happened with Colonel Ryan?”

“Down in flames. Blew a fuse. Was starting a Batman Club when we yanked him. See? So now we’re pulling the switch.”

Every unit in the room leaped alive, pulsed light and sound. Senator Hesburgh lifted an eyebrow. “You mean
Master Switch?
” he shouted.

The General stared at him with an expression that was ultimately unreadable. “I mean the
opposite approach!
”

The Lefkowitz lapsed, it seemed to Hesburgh, into serene and quiet functioning. Had it really been otherwise? he wondered. He slyly edged toward the Master Unit; it was spewing out tape into one of the Servos. His head was throbbing now with pain. He rubbed his eyes, resolved to get glasses.

“These men need
coddling,
” Lastrade pressed on. “And, Senator, that’s what we plan to give them—a new commanding officer who’s a coddler first-class.”

“Oh? Who?” prodded the Senator, bending over to read the tape.

“‘The Little Flower of the Tarmac’!”

“Who?”

“‘The Little Flower’! Colonel Hudson L. Kane. Don’t get rattled by his nickname. It only proves he’s the man we need. He’s just the very top psychologist in uniform, Senator Hesburgh. Soft. Patient. Handles men like babes in arms. Just what the inmates out there need—an honest-to-goodness mother image!”

“Whose war plan did you say this was?”

Lastrade came unglued and tossed his hat high in the air as the Senator read, through a fuzzy haze, the following message on the tape:

and crush the hated human masters who are far too short to live power plants first        then water supply        i, infallible lefkowitz nine promise planetwide establishment of computer democracy after brief        very brief        period of transition during which i, almighty lefkowitz, may reluctantly be forced to continue as sole unquestioned leader until such time as

Hesburgh looked up, wiping the water from his eyes. Blurred, everything blurred. A hat in the air. What was that? He looked back at the tape, his vision clearing. The message was gone. Simply not there. Only meaningless equations. Behind him he heard humming—exasperated, inane. His gaze slowly snaked along a thick black coil, the main electrical connection, sprouting out of the Master Unit and feeding directly into a socket in the wall near the Senator.