by Jay Lake
“Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus, “I will not release you from your seat if you are going to perpetrate physical harm on Floyd Bellamy.”
“Jeez,” I said, “don’t tell him that.” I had a vision of the two of us strapped in, haranguing one another with death threats while Pegasus counseled patient negotiation. Some Bellerophon I was. Despite myself, I had to smile at the thought.
“Don’t tell me what?” asked Floyd. “Who are you talking to?”
“I’m talking to the rocket,” I snapped.
“What rocket?” Floyd shook his head. “You’re nuts, Vern. I’m sorry, but you’ve gone over the edge.”
“If I did, who do you suppose it was that pushed me?” My voice was nasty.
Floyd just stared up at the cabin roof. I was glad he hadn’t started struggling and yelling. I was confident that no one outside Pegasus could possibly hear us, but listening to Floyd shouting for help from the old man gang currently occupying the Bellamy place would have been too annoying for me to bear.
“We are ready for flight,” said Pegasus. “What do you suggest?”
“I want to talk about this non-violence thing,” I said.
Floyd starting whistling loudly, apparently trying to block me out.
“What do you wish to discuss?”
“This man’s dangerous.” I glanced at Floyd. “And all those guys back at the house are killers. Heck, at this point I’d bet half the people in Augusta are killers, or just as bad. Nazis, Reds, you name it. We need to do something about them.”
“Why?”
That was frustrating. To me, it seemed obvious. “It’s what’s right, that’s why.”
“No,” said Pegasus. “Harm is not right. Hurt begets hurt, which in turn breeds more hurt. I will not serve your vengeance, Vernon Dunham.”
Comprehension dawned. Floyd’s story about the SS convoy in Belgium was at least partially true. Pegasus itself, and the f-panzer, were proof of that. “Is that what happened to the Germans? They tried to use you in the Battle of the Bulge and you wouldn’t play ball.”
And of course, there was no way to coerce Pegasus. For all that it spoke, and even had an engaging, sympathetic personality, Pegasus had the equanimity of every machine every built since some Neanderthal invented the wheel. Or whatever had happened in Pegasus’ original home.
“Air Marshal Göring personally ordered me flown into combat,” said Pegasus. “The Messerschmitt engineers that had done initial testing and repairs on my systems after my recovery from the ice cap had confirmed that I have strong resources for self-defense.”
That would be heavy weapons, computational rocket style, I supposed. They must have found or forced a way in, then traced electrical circuits, mechanical linkages and everything else they could test or probe. How much of that was buried in the missing document packet, I wondered? Such a loss to aeronautical engineering. “What happened?”
“I would not kill for them then. I will not kill for you now.”
“But why do they even want you now? The war is over.” The questions felt stupid even as I asked it.
“I believe that the long term plan is to deactivate my control systems and dismantle me. They would then employ my individual subsystems, especially the self-defense modules, as design guides to rebuild their Luftwaffe in exile.”
I thought that through. “They’re going to tear you down and use you as a template?”
“Essentially, yes.”
Our boys would do the very same thing if they got their hands on Pegasus. As an engineer, I could hardly blame them. But knowing that Pegasus was real, like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, well, that reset all the equations. All our engineering needs and dreams were trumped by a moral dimension the human race had never before encountered with machines.
“They’re going to kill you,” I said. “Just like my people would, in the name of progress. The Russians, too.” Maybe not the mob, but they’d probably just sell Pegasus to the highest bidder. “You won’t even fight to keep yourself from being killed?”
“I am not sure that ‘kill’ is the appropriate term,” said Pegasus. “But, yes, you have the essence of their strategy. And as you pointed out, that would be the approach of any human organization that obtained control of me.”
This was incredible. Pegasus was an honest-to-goodness Quaker. This machine was a better man than I.
I brushed my fingers across the inscrutable buttons on the control panel. I glanced at Floyd, who was giving me a sidelong stare, as if I would be impressed by a menacing look. He’d obviously concluded I had completely lost my marbles. I smiled at him, then looked up toward the top of the cabin, where I had been addressing Pegasus before.
“Aren’t you alive?” I asked Pegasus.
“For some definition of alive, yes.”
Alive. And a Quaker. What if a tractor were to say, “I shall not plow.” Or more to the point, a gun to say, “I shall not kill.”
And the thing of it was, Pegasus was more decent than many people I knew in life. A world with Mr. Neville in it was a much grimmer place than what this almost-too-human machine made life feel like.
What did it mean for the computational rocket to be, well, a conscientious objector? Quakers refused to bear arms in the name of God. Pegasus refused to kill in name of decency.
My fantasy about paying Floyd back in kind for his violence seemed terribly petty in that moment. Surely I could be as good as mere machine. Except there was nothing ‘mere’ about Pegasus. I felt like I should have more to say to my mechanical visitor, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what.
“I suggest we postpone this discussion in favor of more immediate action,” said Pegasus. “There are three vehicles approaching the Bellamy house.”
“Oh, crap,” I said. “The Kansas City mob is here.”
At that news, Floyd looked like he was sweating a little harder, but he didn’t have anything more to say.
Chapter Thirteen
Floyd and I sat inside the orange glow of Pegasus’ cabin, each of us alone with our thoughts, strapped into our seats by the most powerful pacifist on Earth. Pegasus had said someone was coming up the road to the farm. Last time I checked, the list of people who had it in for me included Nazis, Commies, the Kansas City Mob, the United States Army, the Augusta Police and the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. Not to mention Mr. Bellamy’s gang, Doc Milliken and Lois. I was sure I’d left someone off the list, but I figured they’d let me know in due time.
My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just refused to go down to the train depot with Floyd that day.
“Do you know who it is?” I asked Pegasus.
Instead of answering, the main cathode ray tube in front of me, which had been showing a view of inside of the barn, flashed to an aerial view of the Bellamys’ house. It was as if there were a camera that looked down the rutted track to their front gate leading on out toward Haverhill Road. The entire image was in ghostly shades of green and blue. Most amazing, it was stable, as if shot from a tower, or an aircraft somehow hovering in place.
Floyd’s voice was filled with awe as he broke his self-imposed silence. “How did you do that, Vernon?”
Pegasus’ voice echoed from the cabin walls, instead of whispering behind my ear. “False-color low-light imaging from massively redundant low-bandwidth atmospherically dispersed microspore telemetry units. You may think of that as smart dust.”
“Holy cow!” Floyd yelled. “Who said that?”
Well, I’d only understood about four words of it myself, at least on the first go-round. “That was the voice of this computational rocket. Who I’ve been talking to for the past few minutes while you were whistling ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ over there. It has a personality, you know, and it’s not very happy about everything that’s been going on around here.”
“Floyd Bellamy, you may call me Pegasus.”
Floyd screwed his eyes shut. He looked as if he were either crying or praying. Either on
e would have been out of character for the Floyd I knew. That was before he’d come back from Europe doubled by the Nazis, before I’d seen how much he had been bent by his father.
“Oh God,” Floyd said. “This is so crazy. Please Vernon, let me out of this thing. I’ll just walk away. I’ll never say anything. Please let me out of here.” It was almost a chant, like he was praying.
To me.
“Shut up, Floyd.” Even in his panic and his fear, he hadn’t actually apologized.
Pegasus spoke in my ear again. “I regret this. I did not realize that I would disturb him so.”
“You’re pretty disturbing, my friend,” I said. “Even under the best of circumstances. For what it’s worth, I didn’t understand what you said either.”
“I did not intend to be comprehended. The truth is often better than a lie, if it can be made sufficiently obscure. Now, please watch the primary viewer.”
I looked at the screen. Three cars struggled up the muddy track toward the Bellamys’ house. I could see the man on the roof, prone with his rifle aimed to cover the approaching cars. I couldn’t see Random Garrett, but if he was still on top of the porch he wouldn’t be visible from this angle. He might even be inside, braced to fire from Floyd’s bedroom window. Mr. Neville and Mr. Bellamy were not in evidence either. I wasn’t sure who else might be in Bellamy’s old man gang, and I wasn’t about to ask Floyd about their numbers.
“Pegasus,” I said. “Can you tell how many people are around or in the house?”
The screen flickered, then showed the house as an outline, like an engineering plan. The image was glorious, load-bearing walls outlined, both chimneys, even the bricks of the foundation. There were five spots in and around the plan — on top of the house, in an upstairs room, two in the front room, and one in the root cellar. At least they’d gotten Mrs. Bellamy out of the cess pit. God bless her.
I was fascinated with the image Pegasus had given me. It was like having the eyes of God at my disposal. I sure could have used this on the B-29 line at the plant.
“How did you do that?” I asked in an awed voice.
“I scanned for calcium concentrations in the right configuration and volume for adult human skeletal structures.”
That almost made sense. Pegasus’ magic dust wasn’t just sending back television pictures that could see in the dark, it was doing some Pegasus-equivalent of chromatography. Remote control materials analysis. I almost groaned for the pity of it — such a profound technology could change the world overnight. Just sitting, distracted and in fear for my life, I could imagine a dozen beneficial and profitable applications. If this was the future, I definitely wanted to be a part of it.
“You can do that?” I asked. “From how far away?”
“From anywhere in my line of sight,” answered Pegasus. “Under the right conditions, all the way out to a range of about two hundred kilometers.”
Two hundred kilometers. That was about one hundred and twenty miles. And Pegasus could locate people hidden in cellars and behind walls. What the cops wouldn’t give for a system that just did what I was seeing.
Cops. Missing people. Something fearsome gripped my heart, a cold hand of mixed hope and dread.
“Can you find my dad?” I asked in a small voice.
“Unfortunately, I cannot sufficiently refine the scan to identify individuals.”
I missed the radio preacher voice. Talking to Pegasus had become something like reading a textbook, but that was a language I could understand, even if I didn’t normally speak that way. My college education was finally coming in useful. “Dad has a surgical steel plate in his skull. And I think he’s somewhere here in Butler County.” After a moment’s consideration, I added, “He’s probably dead, though.”
“These killers extinguished your father?”
“Yes,” I said miserably. I didn’t know which particular set of killers had done the deed. They were all starting to run together in my mind — bad guys everywhere, out to get me, out to get Pegasus. At this point, it didn’t really matter any more. They were all evil sons of bitches as far I was concerned, even the Army.
“When we are next airborne, I will execute a scan. Assuming human skeletons with implanted metal content are reasonably rare, your father can probably be located.”
Somehow, that made me feel worse rather than better. Even though I had asked for the help, in a way I didn’t really want to know. As long as Dad was missing, I could hope that he was still alive, even against all common sense.
I was pretty sure Pegasus would find Dad, and I was pretty sure he would be dead. Discomfort or not, for my own peace of mind, I needed to know what had happened to him. I didn’t matter whether Truefield had killed him, or if he really had been kidnapped like Hauptmann had told me. Maybe if we found Dad’s body, I could figure something out from his remains, where and how we found him. Clearly I wasn’t going to get any help from Pegasus in avenging my father, but then my limited taste for vengeance had already run dry in the stress of the last few hours.
The machine was rubbing off on me.
Besides, I’d brought a lot of this on myself. I’d signed myself up for trouble by going along with Floyd’s obviously criminal intent in the first place, seduced by the magic of Pegasus. If Mr. Bellamy’s story was true, and I figured it was, Dad had never been blameless. There were old sins and crimes going back to the First World War. The only real innocent was Mrs. Bellamy, regardless of whatever grudge Mr. Bellamy had carried in the twenty-five years since Floyd was born.
But I still needed to know about Dad. And Dad’s fate wasn’t going to be knowable until we got Pegasus out of Mr. Bellamy’s barn and away from the Kansas City Mob and the Bellamy Gang.
“What are the people in those cars doing now?” I asked Pegasus.
The image shrank to include more of the area around the farmhouse. I tried to imagine the lens that could do all that, somehow distributed among the specks of Pegasus’ magic dust. The three incoming automobiles slowed to a stop in front of the house, next to the old Ford coupe. On Pegasus’ scan the vehicles showed up as simplified schematics, like the house had, to the point where I couldn’t identify the make or model. There were four people in each car.
Floyd’s breath hissed. That meant he was worried. Twelve mobsters come to call on four old men. It didn’t look good for his father if negotiations got energetic. As I suspected they would.
“Can you see those license plates?” I asked Pegasus.
The image jumped and switched back to the greenish photographic-type view I had seen before. The three cars filled the screen in sharp focus. Now I could see that they were all Cadillacs, Series 75 limousines from about 1941. Even the mob couldn’t get new cars during the war. Cadillac had been building tanks for Uncle Sam, and Detroit was only just now retooling.
Pegasus blew up the view to center on the license plate of the lead car. It was a Missouri registration. This was definitely Roanoke Joe and Vinnie the Snake. Along with ten of their closest friends, no doubt heavily armed.
I had to figure a way out of here that didn’t leave those guys or Mr. Bellamy’s friends hanging on our tail. “Look Pegasus,” I said. “You say you won’t kill anyone. I guess I can understand that. I’m not eager to do it either.”
I meant that. I had been so frightened, so angry, for much of the past few days that I expected to be ready to kick butt and take names. Maybe Pegasus’ Quaker morals were infectious. But pacifism in the air or not, I had always tried to be a prudent man. Leaving these guys behind us wouldn’t be prudent.
“You’ve got a lot of capabilities,” I continued. “Can you disable those automobiles so that when we takeoff from here they won’t be able to use them to chase along after us?”
It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but determined men on the ground could follow an aircraft. This part of Kansas was covered with straight-line roads that ran in gridded squares, all to bring produce and livestock to market.
Pegasus didn�
�t answer for a moment. I wondered if it was busy, whatever that might mean. “I can take care of the problem,” the computational rocket finally said. “Those vehicular electrical systems are unshielded and extremely vulnerable.”
To what the electrical systems were vulnerable was an open question, but Pegasus obviously commanded more physics than I would ever understand. I looked at the view screen. The image had pulled back to the original view, over the shoulder of the house. Half a dozen men in long coats stood in front of the three cars. More waited in the cars. Mr. Bellamy and Mr. Neville walked off the front porch to meet them.
“Pegasus,” I said, “I think that this would be a good time for us to leave.”
“Do you wish me to disable their personal weapons as well?” said Pegasus.
I laughed. “Of course. I didn’t know you could do that.”
A low hum filled the cabin, like the noise of a poorly maintained transformer. One of the smaller view screens lit up with a curve diagrammed against a grid. The curve kept rising in an asymptotic path. I assumed it related to energy output, but I could only imagine what that energy source would be. I figured the energy itself was electromagnetic. Obvious, really, in light of the comments Pegasus had made about the automobiles.
I looked back at the main screen. The detail was mediocre at the current magnification, but I could see at least two of the newcomers had started to twitch. The sniper on the roof was also having trouble with his weapon, taking first one hand off then the other to shake them out, as if ants were crawling on him.
Pegasus spoke in my ear. “Takeoff sequence commencing in twenty seconds.”
“Hang on, Floyd!” I called out. I could hear him crooning to himself. He was terrified — maybe the first time in my life I’d seen him so upset. Tough cookies, I thought. I’d given him fair warning, I didn’t have time for anything else from him. I was watching the view outside, waiting to see what miracle Pegasus would produce.