Return to Otherness (1962) SSC

by Henry Kuttner

  “But I don’t - you mean you knew, all along? Wallinger, what are you?”

  “The story mustn’t get out,” Wallinger went on calmly, ignoring the question. “Of course I knew. But we’ve got to keep it quiet.”

  “Are you on their side or ours?” Bradley’s throat felt raw with the harshness of his voice. “Are you a man or - or -”

  “If they find out how much we know about them, don’t you suppose they’ll act? Somehow we’ve got to dispose of the Court mechanism, in a way they won’t be able to trace. I’m sorry for this officer here, but he’ll have to think he was drunk and dreamed what we all saw. I tell you, Bradley, we don’t dare let them suspect we know!” Bradley let his emptied cup fall to the carpet. He walked forward six deliberate steps and put his hands heavily on Wallinger’s shoulders. The flesh felt like flesh; the bone beneath was firm and hard. It could be bone - or steel. You couldn’t tell by looking at them. But surely you could tell by the way they behaved, by their reactions, by their thinking. By the things they put first in value -

  “The children!” Bradley said urgently. “No - machine - would think first of children the way you do. Would it, Wallinger? Even though they aren’t yours, you put them first. Why did you tell me they weren’t yours? Did you mean - what did you mean, Wallinger? How do you really feel about those children?”

  Wallinger smiled. His voice was mild and amused.

  “‘Hath not an android eyes?’” he paraphrased with gentle irony. “‘Hath not an android hands - senses - affections? If you prick us, do we not bleed?’”

  Bradley let his grip fall. He stepped back, staring as if he could pierce the too-perfect illusion of flesh and see whether bone or steel lay behind that gently smiling face.

  “There was one android made,” Wallinger said, “in the perfect replica of the human. Everything that went into its mental and physical make-up was as close as their finest arts could come to human thinking.” He paused, grimaced. “Well,” he said, “they came too close. They succeeded. I - I’m rather afraid they made - a man.”

  “You?”

  Wallinger smiled.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bradley told him wildly. “It isn’t possible.”

  Wallinger gave him a speculative look. Then he opened another drawer, fumbled in it and pulled out a penknife. He flicked the blade open and with almost the same gesture drew its edge across the back of his hand.

  Bradley caught his breath. He didn’t want to look, but he could not stop himself.

  Wallinger, still smiling, held out his arm.

  “I can stop the bleeding, you see,” he said. “That’s how Court kept from giving his injury away, at first. We can always control that, if necessary.”

  There was no blood. The edges of the synthetic skin were clean and smooth as pale rubber, and beneath them steel tendons moved, transparant tubes as fine as hairs pulsed with bubbling red liquid. It was a hand of living metal. It was an android’s hand.

  “Satisfied?” Wallinger withdrew his arm. With the other hand he smoothed the cut flesh together. It sealed like wax and was whole again as Bradley still gasped his incredulous protest.

  “Here, you’d better have another drink,” Wallinger’s amused voice seemed to be saying from a long way off, above the ringing in his ears.

  “But - why didn’t you tell me? Are you sure they don’t suspect? Can we really get away with this - with destroying Court? I don’t understand, Wallinger! If you’re really an android, and working against androids - what are we going to do? There must be ways they have to check up on what happens to every separate one. What about Court? Wallinger, if this is all true, why didn’t you help me against Court? You could have -”

  “Hold on! One question at a time!” Wallinger’s voice broke into the almost hysterical babble of Bradley’s released tension. “First, about Court. I couldn’t work against him, Bradley. I’m a very imperfect mechanism myself, considering what I was made for, and they’ll destroy me if they find out what I’m about to do - but there are rules even I have to follow. They’re built in. I can’t injure another android. I can’t. That’s the way we’re made. I couldn’t any more than you could stop your blood from flowing if you were cut. I may be an imperfect machine, but I’m not that imperfect.”

  “Then what shall we do? Why not call the police - the newspapers -”

  “No! Don’t talk like a fool. Once the androids know their secret’s out, don’t you think they’ll strike hard and fast? They’ve got their plans all laid. Don’t make any mistake about that. Our only hope’s to work in the dark until we have plans too.”

  “You could have told me sooner,” Bradley said with reproach. “When I first came -”

  “How could I have told you? I didn’t know who you were, in that mask. You could have been from them, for all I knew. And today - I didn’t dare speak in front of Court. I had to act like a normal man - call the police - show the right reactions. It wasn’t until you attacked Court that I was sure about you.”

  “Okay. We’re wasting time, then. They’ll know Court’s - smashed. They’ll look for him. What are we going to do?”

  “I wish I knew.” Wallinger got up abruptly and began to pace up and down the room with quick, nervous steps. It was incredible that wires, not nerves, steel springs instead of muscles, activated that perfect replica of a human. Even in his mind, the likeness was so uncannily perfect …

  “Full circle,” Bradley thought, with confused triumph. “If this is true, they’ve overreached themselves. They’ve made such a perfect android - if this is true - that it’ll mean the finish of their whole kind. They can’t let him live. Once they suspect him, they’ll have to destroy him. It works both ways. When the first successful android was made, the human race was doomed - until the first successful humanoid was produced by the robots. He’s as dangerous to them as they are to us.” He looked at Wallinger thoughtfully.

  “How do you feel about them - about the androids?” he asked.

  “Confused.” Wallinger’s smile was wry. “This has been coming on for a long while, of course, but I’ve never had to take definite sides until now. I don’t know how I feel. Lost. Not really belonging to either side. I suppose I feel exactly as you do about the human race - part of it. I am part of it. They made me too well. But how many humans would accept me if they knew the truth? And I could never go back to the androids once I’ve failed them. I don’t belong on either side. I only know that I -” He paused, grinned suddenly and said with deliberation, “I speak as a man, I think as a man, I have put away android things. You see? When I try to tell you how a humanoid feels I put it automatically into Shakespeare’s words, or St. Paul’s. Men’s words, telling how men feel. But I still see through a glass -” He touched his eyes, which Bradley knew were lenses, not flesh. “I see through glass, darkly …”

  There was a long silence between them after that.

  “Well,” Wallinger said heavily, “it’s up to me. I know them. You don’t.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Go home. Leave me your number, and stay there until I call you. Okay? I have an idea about getting rid of - this -” He gestured at the man-shaped heap of wires and steel and flesh on the floor. “I’ve got to do that alone. Afterward, tomorrow, I’ll phone you. But whatever you do, Bradley, don’t leave your place until you hear from me. Don’t even open the door! And above everything, don’t go spreading the word about what’s happened. If you do -”

  “If I do, I’ll wind up in a padded cell,” Bradley said. “I know. Nobody would believe me except the androids, and they’d be only too glad to get me committed. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my mouth shut. But don’t make me wait too long, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Wallinger promised.

  Bradley glanced up as he descended the steps toward the street. In the hall the two children stood watching him. The girl was smiling. She pointed to her brother and then waved at Bradley, nodding. He had a curious feeling that
she was trying to convey something. But it was a child’s knowledge behind her smile, esoteric, not communicable to the adult mind.

  Bradley waved in answer and went on down the path.

  When he woke it was still dark. He lay quiet, wondering for a confused instant where he was and why he should be awake. He could not see his watch, but there was a pre-dawn stillness in the air.

  Then he saw the light beneath the door and heard the voices talking quietly beyond it. He lay in his own bed, and that was his own living room, but why the light burned and whose the voices were he could not guess.

  He got up and went barefooted across the floor. He opened the door a narrow crack. There were five men in the room beyond. They sat comfortably there, talking softly, like men waiting for something - or someone.

  The first face he saw was Arthur Court’s.

  “All right, Bradley,” the Director’s familiar voice said in the very instant of recognition. “All right, it’s time now. Come in.”

  Bradley never knew whether the android could actually see through the spinning atoms of the door, or whether some sound had given his own presence away. It didn’t matter. He was beyond help now. He and the race of man …

  He crossed the threshold quietly and closed the door behind him. He stood there looking at the five men in his living room. They sat perfectly motionless, then: eyes on his. None of them had been smoking. None of them moved. None of them lived by the tight-strung nerves of imperfect humans, so they had no need for aimless motions. None of them was a man.

  When the silence had reached a pitch just this side of being unbearable, Bradley spoke.

  “What happened to Wallinger?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Court smiled at him.

  “Nothing? But -”

  “We needed a little extra time. Wallinger got it for us. That’s all.”

  A sudden upward flood of bitterness made Bradley’s vision swim for an instant. How easily Wallinger had deceived him, then! How pitiably gullible was the illogical human brain before the resourceful logic of the machine! Wallinger had known exactly what lines of reasoning would most certainly soothe Bradley’s fears to rest. And the quiet machine mind had not even lied when it spoke, for how can a machine deal in falsehood or in truth?

  They needed time - for what? To repair the shattered Court, to assemble their forces, to close in. Most of all, they had needed to keep Bradley silent while they went about the business of destroying him. How? What would they do? Was there any way at all, even in this last moment, for him to outwit them? He thought there was not, but a desperate cunning made him say, “All right, I can’t stop you. Do what you like. But please, Court - please! We’ve worked together - you can’t blame me for doing what I had to do, but we’ve worked together a long while. Do me one favor. Please don’t let them put me in an insane asylum! It would be better if you shot me - safer for you! Anything’s better than the asylum!”

  He almost choked when he had to say it. No man should plead with a machine. But if it were for man’s final salvation - yes, he could bring himself even to beg favors of this thing made of steel and wire. And this was his last weapon against them, this peculiarly inverted human logic which was part of folk-lore. The logic that saved Br’er Rabbit from his foes. Don’t throw me into the briar-patch! If they committed him to an asylum, at least he would still be alive, at least he could still work against them. And the children knew. In time, someone would listen, if he could only stay alive.

  “Please, Court, anything but the asylum!”

  The android smiled. It was curious to think of the intricate little springs and wiring that drew up his face when it moved. It was appalling to realize that when Arthur Court spoke, the mind which dictated the words lay in the gleaming hollow of his chest where something made up of lights that twinkled was the essence and the soul of the machine.

  “Forget it, Bradley,” the android said. “It won’t be the asylum.”

  Bradley braced himself against the door. There was one thing left to do, then. He had tried cunning, and cunning failed. He had tried everything a man could try, and everywhere he had failed.

  But they should not kill him. That final choice still lay in his own hands, and he would not submit to this last indignity. If he must die, let it be of his own will, freely.

  He measured the distance to the window, gathering his muscles for this final leap. There was so much he would never know, he thought despairingly. The fate of the race of man itself, for which he had fought so vainly, was beyond his knowledge now. He thought of Wallinger, so nearly human in his reactions, so convincingly human in his speech, despite this final betrayal. Perhaps, after all, Wallinger had spoken more truthfully than he knew. Perhaps they had made an android too nearly human …

  But it was too late. Wallinger’s voice came back to his mind briefly, and the magnificent words of St. Paul’s that begin, “Though I speak with the tongues of men …” Wallinger had spoken with the tongue of man, but for man’s destruction. There was something terrifying in the aptness of that chapter from Corinthians.

  “Whether there be tongues, they shall cease, whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away -”

  Blindly he thrust himself away from the door in a last desperate leap. The nearest android moved too late to intercept him. He swept the curtains aside, drew back his fist and shattered the glass that was all that parted them from the humming street twenty stories down. Man’s streets, which would so soon be man’s no longer …

  He lunged through the glass. He hung vertiginously over the spinning depths below. He could see the wall of the building straight downward beneath his own knees, its lines swooping dizzily inward as he swayed.

  It was Arthur Court’s voice that halted him.

  “Wait, Bradley, wait! Not until you hear the truth!”

  It stopped him on the brink, and beyond the brink, of the window. He would have thought no power on earth could reverse the terrible suction of gravity that had already laid hands on him and was swinging him out and down with the very swing of the earth’s rotation. But he found he was stronger than he knew …

  Court’s face was stern. Bradley stood braced against the shattered window, his knees strengthless, his head still spinning with the pull of the street below. Blank-eyed, he stared at the android across the room.

  “You fool!” Arthur Court said. “Are you trying to ruin us all?”

  “But I -”

  “You still don’t understand? You still don’t know Wallinger told you the truth?”

  “Wallinger - told the truth?”

  “Yes - in part. Think, Bradley, think!”

  He could not think. His mind had suffered too many stunning shocks for reasoning now. But he did not need to think. He had had the clue many hours ago, and until this moment he had not known. The memory came back and he heard Sue Wallinger’s small voice speaking again in the quiet library. He saw her at the door as he went down the path. He remembered her gesture and her smile.

  “I can tell you how many of the real kind of men in this room - one, one!”

  And she had smiled at him and touched her brother’s shoulder.

  She had not meant anyone in that room except the human male child. He had asked about men - she touched her brother’s shoulder. All the children knew - all the androids knew. Only the humans were blind - and James Bradley.

  “Look down,” Court’s voice said, almost gently.

  Bradley looked. There was blood on the floor. He felt a stinging in his hand, and dully lifted his arm to see why. He had put his fist through the window. It had not mattered, then, whether he slashed his own flesh or not. It didn’t matter now …

  He saw, without surprise, without shock, only with a numbness of the mind, how the edges of his skin had parted cleanly. The slow blood welled into his cupped palm. He looked down with utter silence at the uncovered tendons of his hand, gleaming mirror-bright from every steel surface. He saw the fine, tiny, tight-curled springs draw up in per
fect response when he clenched his fingers.

  “We made you too well,” Arthur Court was saying. “We made you so well you’re imperfect. You must be changed, Bradley. No android must be able to attack his own kind. Our survival depends on that law. Do you see now what Wallinger was trying to tell you? The danger of a perfect humanoid is too great. And you’re perfect. Answer me, Bradley - do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He could not answer. He knew the truth now, but he felt exactly as he had felt before. He was a man still. His whole loyalty lay with the human kind of which he was so merciless a duplicate. Until they made that change that would alter his imperfection, he must continue this fight he had taken up for man against machine. Until they changed him from imperfect android to the perfection of the race of the machine …

  When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. St. Paul had put it all with such terrifying clarity. Though I speak with the tongues of men … I am become as sounding brass …

  “We don’t want to waste you, Bradley,” Court said. “You’re a fine machine. We need you badly. There’s so much work to be done, and we need your help.” “No,” Bradley said. “No.” And this time they could not stop him. He didn’t pause to brush the curtain aside, and the glass was already shattered. He saw again the inward-leaning wall that dropped straight for twenty stories toward the street. His knee was on the sill.

  Down there would be men to see. Down there in the street they must see and they might perhaps understand the meaning of this paradox that was the android body, the steel ribs and the intricate wiring by which this flesh-clad body once had moved …

  Somewhere deep in his chest the little sparkling thing that at this moment thought as a man thinks knew an instant’s wonder. “Is this the way a man feels who gives up his life for his own kind?” Bradley asked himself the futile question. “Or am I moving only as a machine moves, in bund obedience to the orders that were given me when I was made? They must have set me the problem of behaving like a human. And this is a thing men do … not machines. Never machines.”