by Ben Bova
“I saved a piece of cherry pie for you, Mike,” the waitress said. Polchik looked up from his uneaten hot (now cold) roast beef sandwich and french fries. He shook his head.
“Thanks anyway. Just another cuppa coffee.”
The waitress had lost her way somewhere beyond twenty-seven. She was a nice person. She went home to her husband every morning. She didn’t fool around. Extra mates under the new lottery were not her interest; she just didn’t fool around. But she liked Mike Polchik. He, like she, was a very nice person.
“What’s the matter, Mike?”
Polchik looked out the window of the diner. Brillo was standing directly under a neon streetlamp. He couldn’t hear it from here, but he was sure the thing was buzzing softly to itself (with the sort of sound an electric watch makes).
“Him.”
“That?” The waitress looked past him.
“Uh-uh. Him.”
“What is it?”
“My shadow.”
“Mike, you okay? Try the pie, huh? Maybe a scoop of nice vanilla ice cream on top.”
“Onita, please. Just a cuppa coffee. I’m fine. I got problems.” He stared down at his plate again.
She looked at him for a moment longer, worried, then turned and returned the pie on its plate to the empty space behind the smudged glass of the display case. “You want fresh?” she asked.
When he didn’t answer, she shrugged and came back, using the coffee siphon on the portable cart to refill his cup.
She lounged behind the counter, watching her friend, Mike Polchik, as he slowly drank his coffee; and every few minutes he’d look out at that metal thing on the corner under the streetlamp. She was a nice person.
When he rose from the booth and came to the counter, she thought he was going to apologize, or speak to her, or something, but all he said was, “You got my check?”
“What check?”
“Come on.”
“Oh, Mike, for Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with you?”
“I want to pay the check, you mind?”
“Mike, almost—what—five years you been eating here, you ever been asked to pay a check?”
Polchik looked very tired. “Tonight I pay the check. Come on . . . I gotta get back on the street. He’s waiting.”
There was a strange look in his eyes and she didn’t want to ask which “he” Polchik meant. She was afraid he meant the metal thing out there. Onita, a very nice person, didn’t like strange, new things that waited under neon streetlamps. She hastily wrote out a check and slid it across the plasteel to him. He pulled change from a pocket, paid her, turned, seemed to remember something, turned back, added a tip, then swiftly left the diner.
She watched through the glass as he went up to the metal thing. Then the two of them walked away, Mike leading, the thing following.
Onita made fresh. It was a good thing she had done it so many times she could do it by reflex, without thinking. Hot coffee scalds are very painful.
At the corner, Polchik saw a car weaving toward the intersection. A Ford Electric; convertible, four years old. Still looked flashy. Top down. He could see a bunch of long-haired kids inside. He couldn’t tell the girls from the boys. It bothered him.
Polchik stopped. They weren’t going fast, but the car was definitely weaving as it approached the intersection. The warrior-lizard, he thought. It was almost an unconscious directive. He’d been a cop long enough to react to the little hints, the flutters, the inclinations. The hunches.
Polchik stepped out from the curb, unshipped his gumball from the bandolier and flashed the red light at the driver. The car slowed even more; now it was crawling.
“Pull it over, kid!” he shouted.
For a moment he thought they were ignoring him, that the driver might not have heard him, that they’d try and make a break for it . . . that they’d speed up and sideswipe him. But the driver eased the car to the curb and stopped.
Then he slid-sidewise, pulled up his legs and crossed them neatly at the ankles. On the top of the dashboard.
Polchik walked around to the driver’s side. “Turn it off. Everybody out.”
There were six of them. None of them moved. The driver closed his eyes slowly, then tipped his Irkutsk fur hat over his eyes till it rested on the bridge of his nose. Polchik reached into the car and turned it off. He pulled the keys.
“Hey! Whuzzis allabout?” one of the kids in the back seat—a boy with terminal acne—complained. His voice began and ended on a whine. Polchik re-stuck the gumball.
The driver looked up from under the fur. “Wasn’t breaking any laws.” He said each word very slowly, very distinctly, as though each one was on a printout.
And Polchik knew he’d been right. They were on the lizard.
He opened the door, free hand hanging at the needler. “Out. All of you, out.”
Then he sensed Brillo lurking behind him, in the middle of the street. Good. Hope a damned garbage truck hits him.
He was getting mad. That wasn’t smart. Carefully, he said, “Don’t make me say it again. Move it!”
He lined them up on the sidewalk beside the car, in plain sight. Three girls, three guys. Two of the guys with long, stringy hair and the third with a scalplock. The three girls wearing tammy cuts. All six sullen-faced, drawn, dark smudges under the eyes. The lizard. But good clothes, fairly new. He couldn’t just hustle them, he had to be careful.
“Okay, one at a time, empty your pockets and pouches onto the hood of the car.”
“Hey, we don’t haveta do that just because . . .”
“Do it!”
“Don’t argue with the pig,” one of the girls said, lizard-spacing her words carefully. “He’s probably trigger happy.”
Brillo rolled up to Polchik. “It is necessary to have a probable cause clearance from the precinct in order to search, sir.”
“Not on a stop’n’frisk,” Polchik snapped, not taking his eyes off them. He had no time for nonsense with the can of cogs. He kept his eyes on the growing collection of chits, change, code-keys, combs, nail files, toke pipes and miscellania being dumped on the Ford’s hood.
“There must be grounds for suspicion even in a spot search action, sir,” Brillo said.
“There’s grounds. Narcotics.”
“Nar . . . you must be outtayer mind,” said the one boy who slurred his words. He was working something other than the lizard.
“That’s a pig for you,” said the girl who had made the trigger happy remark.
“Look,” Polchik said, “you snots aren’t from around here. Odds are good if I run b&b tests on you, we’ll find you’re under the influence of the lizard.”
“Heyyyy!” the driver said. “The what?”
“Warrior-lizard,” Polchik said.
“Oh, ain’t he the jive thug,” the smartmouth girl said. “He’s a word user. I’ll bet he knows all the current rage phrases. A philologist. I’ll bet he knows all the solecisms and colloquialisms, catch phrases, catachreses, nicknames and vulgarisms. The ‘warrior-lizard,’ indeed.”
Damned college kids, Polchik fumed inwardly. They always try to make you feel stupid; I coulda gone to college—if I didn’t have to work. Money, they probably always had money. The little bitch.
The driver giggled. “Are you trying to tell me, Mella, my dear, that this Peace Officer is accusing us of being under the influence of the illegal Bolivian drug commonly called Guerrera-Tuera?” He said it with pinpointed scorn, pronouncing the Spanish broadly: gwuh-rare-uh too-err-uh.
Brillo said, “Reviewing my semantic tapes, sir, I find no analogs for ‘Guerrera-Tuera’ as ‘warrior-lizard.’ True, guerrero in Spanish means warrior, but the closest spelling I find is the feminine noun guerra, which translates as war. Neither guerrera nor tuera appear in the Spanish language. If tuera is a species of lizard, I don’t seem to find it—”
Polchik had listened dumbly. The weight on his shoulders was monstrous. All of them were on him. The kids, that lousy stinking
robot—they were making fun, such fun, such damned fun of him! “Keep digging,” he directed them. He was surprised to hear his words emerge as a series of croaks.
“And blood and breath tests must be administered, sir—”
“Stay the hell outta this!”
“We’re on our way home from a party,” said the boy with the scalplock, who had been silent till then. “We took a shortcut and got lost.”
“Sure,” Polchik said. “In the middle of Manhattan, you got lost.” He saw a small green bottle dumped out of the last girl’s pouch. She was trying to push it under other items. “What’s that?”
“Medicine,” she said. Quickly. Very quickly. Everyone tensed.
“Let me see it.” His voice was even.
He put out his hand for the bottle, but all six watched his other hand, hanging beside the needler. Hesitantly, the girl picked the bottle out of the mass of goods on the car’s hood, and handed him the plastic container.
Brillo said, “I am equipped with chemical sensors and reference tapes in my memory bank enumerating common narcotics. I can analyze the suspected medicine.”
The six stared wordlessly at the robot. They seemed almost afraid to acknowledge its presence.
Polchik handed the plastic bottle to the robot.
Brillo depressed a color-coded key on a bank set flush into his left forearm, and a panel that hadn’t seemed to be there a moment before slid down in the robot’s chest. He dropped the plastic bottle into the opening and the panel slid up. He stood and buzzed.
“You don’t have to open the bottle?” Polchik asked.
“No, sir.”
“Oh.”
The robot continued buzzing. Polchik felt stupid, just standing and watching. After a few moments the kids began to smirk, then to grin, then to chuckle openly, whispering among themselves. The smartmouthed girl giggled viciously. Polchik felt fifteen years old again; awkward, pimply, the butt of secret jokes among the long-legged high school girls in their miniskirts who had been so terrifyingly aloof he had never even considered asking them out. He realized with some shame that he despised these kids with their money, their cars, their flashy clothes, their dope. And most of all, their assurance. He, Mike Polchik, had been working hauling sides of beef from the delivery trucks to his old man’s butcher shop while others were tooling around in their Electrics. He forced the memories from his mind and took out his anger and frustration on the metal idiot still buzzing beside him.
“Okay, okay, how long does it take you?”
“Tsk, tsk,” said the driver, and went cross-eyed. Polchik ignored him. But not very well.
“I am a mobile unit, sir. Experimental model 44. My parent mechanism—the Master Unit AA—at Universal Electronics laboratories is equipped to perform this function in under one minute.”
“Well, hurry it up. I wanna run these hairies in.”
“Gwuh-rare-uh too-err-uh,” the scalplock said in a nasty undertone.
There was a soft musical tone from inside the chest compartment, the plate slid down again, and the robot withdrew the plastic bottle. He handed it to the girl.
“Now whaddaya think you’re doing?”
“Analysis confirms what the young lady attested, sir. This is a commonly prescribed nosedrop for nasal congestion and certain primary allergies.”
Polchik was speechless.
“You are free to go,” the robot said. “With our apologies. We are merely doing our jobs. Thank you.”
Polchik started to protest—he knew he was right—but the kids were already gathering up their belongings. He hadn’t even ripped the car, which was probably where they had it locked away. But he knew it was useless. He was the guinea pig in this experiment, not the robot. It was all painfully clear. He knew if he interfered, if he overrode the robot’s decision, it would only add to the cloud under which the robot had put him: short temper, taking a gift from a neighborhood merchant, letting the robot out-maneuver him in the apartment, false stop on Kyser . . . and now this. Suddenly, all Mike Polchik wanted was to go back, get out of harness, sign out, and go home to bed. Wet carpets and all. Just to bed.
Because if these metal things were what was coming, he was simply too tired to buck it.
He watched as the kids—hooting and ridiculing his impotency—piled back in the car, the girls showing their legs as they clambered over the side. The driver burned polyglas speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. In a moment they were gone.
“You see, Officer Polchik,” Brillo said, “false arrest would make us both liable for serious—” But Polchik was already walking away, his shoulders slumped, the weight of his bandolier and five years on the Force too much for him.
The robot (making the sort of sound an electric watch makes) hummed after him, keeping stern vigil on the darkened neighborhood in the encroaching dawn. He could not compute despair. But he had been built to serve. He was programmed to protect, and he did it, all the way back to the precinct house.
Polchik was sitting at a scarred desk in the squad room, laboriously typing out his report on a weary IBM Selectric afflicted with grand mal. Across the room Reardon poked at the now-inert metal bulk of Brillo, using some sort of power tool with a teardrop-shaped lamp on top of it. The Mayor’s whiz kid definitely looked sandbagged. He don’t go without sleep very often , Polchik thought with grim satisfaction.
The door to Captain Summit’s office opened, and the Captain, looking oceanic and faraway, waved him in.
“Here it comes,” Polchik whispered to himself.
Summit let Polchik pass him in the doorway. He closed the door and indicated the worn plastic chair in front of the desk. Polchik sat down. “I’m not done typin’ the beat report yet, Capt’n.”
Summit ignored the comment. He moved over to the desk, picked up a yellow printout flimsy, and stood silently for a moment in front of Polchik, considering it.
“Accident report out of the 86th precinct uptown. Six kids in a Ford Electric convertible went out of control, smashed down a pedestrian and totaled against the bridge abutment. Three dead, three critical—not expected to live. Fifteen minutes after you let them go.”
Dust.
Dried out.
Ashes.
Gray. Final.
Polchik couldn’t think. Tired. Confused. Sick. Six kids. Now they were kids, just kids, nothing else made out of old bad memories.
“One of the girls went through the windshield, D.O.A. Driver got the steering column punched out through his back. Another girl with a snapped neck. Another girl—”
He couldn’t hear him. He was somewhere else, faraway. Kids. Laughing, smartmouth kids having a good time. Benjy would be that age some day. The carpets were all wet.
“Mike!”
He didn’t hear.
“Mike! Polchik!”
He looked up. There was a stranger standing in front of him holding a yellow flimsy.
“Well, don’t just sit there, Polchik. You had them! Why’d you let them go?”
“The . . . lizard . . .”
“That’s right, that’s what five of them were using. Three beakers of it in the car. And a dead cat on the floor and all the makings wrapped in foam-bead bags. You’d have had to be blind to miss it all!”
“The robot . .”
Summit turned away with disgust, slamming the report onto the desk top. He thumbed the call-button. When Desk Sergeant Loyo came in, he said, “Take him upstairs and give him a breather of straightener, let him lie down for half an hour, then bring him back to me.”
Loyo got Polchik under the arms and took him out.
Then the Captain turned off the office lights and sat silently in his desk chair, watching the night die just beyond the filthy windows.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah; thank you, Capt’n. I’m fine.”
“You’re back with me all the way? You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, sure, I’m just fine, sir. It was just . . . those kids . . . I felt.”
“So why’d you let them go? I’ve got no time to baby you, Polchik. You’re five years a cop and I’ve got all the brass in town outside that door waiting. So get right.”
“I’m right, Capt’n. I let them go because the robot took the stuff the girl was carrying, and he dumped it in his thing there, and told me it was nosedrops.”
“Not good enough, Mike.”
“What can I say besides that?”
“Well, dammit Officer Polchik, you damned well better say something besides that. You know they run that stuff right into the skull, you’ve been a cop long enough to see it, to hear it the way they talk! Why’d you let them custer you?”
“What was I going to run them in for? Carrying nosedrops? With that motherin’ robot reciting civil rights chapter-an’-verse at me every step of the way? Okay, so I tell the robot to go screw off, and I bust ’em and bring ’em in. In an hour they’re out again and I’ve got a false arrest lug dropped on me. Even if it ain’t nosedrops. And they can use the robot’s goddam tapes to hang me up by the thumbs!”
Summit dropped back into his chair, sack weight. His face was a burned-out building. “So we’ve got three, maybe six kids dead. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” He shook his head.
Polchik wanted to make him feel better. But how did you do that? “Listen, Capt’n, you know I would of had those kids in here so fast it’d’of made their heads swim . . . if I’d’ve been on my own. That damned robot . . . well, it just didn’t work out. Capt’n, listen, I’m not trying to alibi, it was godawful out there, but you were a beat cop . . . you know a cop ain’t a set of rules and a pile of wires. Guys like me just can’t work with things like that Brillo. It won’t work, Capt’n. A guy’s gotta be free to use his judgment, to feel like he’s worth something’, not just a piece of sh—”
Summit’s head came up sharply. “Judgment?!” He looked as though he wanted to vomit. “What kind of judgment are you showing with that Rico over at the Amsterdam Inn? And all of it on the tapes, sound, pictures, everything?”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes, that. You’re damned lucky I insisted those tapes get held strictly private, for the use of the Force only. I had to invoke privileged data. Do you have any idea how many strings that puts on me, on this office now, with the Chief, with the Commissioner, with the goddam Mayor? Do you have any idea, Polchik?”