I was at the third cable. There. My head was swimming, and . . . it's a wild feeling to know that you're dying, that you're a corpse that hasn't yet been told it's a corpse.
I think I giggled at that. Because that's how I was winning.
79 didn't have any more defenses against me. It had made a disastrous error. In its brilliant-idiotic manner of thinking, it knew that thousands of roentgens were lethal to a human being. Lethal. The end of life. All human beings want to survive. This was suicide. No sane man commits suicide.
I laughed again, stabbing in the final detonators, checking them.
No man commits suicide.
I did.
I was a dead man. I'd lost the hand I was playing when I stumbled into the reactor chambers. Here it was lethal. No admittance. Forbidden. You can't go in there—it's certain death.
But you can be dead fifteen minutes before you die. Sure, sure, you can. That's how radiation kills.
Radiation like this, anyway. You're dead, but the body doesn't know it yet. It takes fifteen minutes to break apart and shred and tear slowly at the seams. Dead, dead, dead!
God, that's funny! I'm dead and I don't know it. Funny. Big joke.
There, start unreeling the spools. That's it. Keep them unreeling.
Funny. Big joke. Dead and don't know it! God, what a laugh! That's it, keep moving. . . . Get around that concrete wall there. ... I'd outsmarted that smartass computer, all right.
79, you're a screaming idiot, you know that? You're the world's greatest chess player, all right, you bastard.
But you can't play poker. Funny, funny. Oh, God it was funny.
Stupid bastard. Idiot computer. Didn't know, could never know that I'd throw in the winning hand.
Bet my life. By God, that's what I did! Bet it. One whole life, that's me. I had the winning hand, but I didn't keep it.
I was safe. Then I threw in my cards. Turned them face down. I left the outside and I came in here, inside, where radiation . . . head, spinning. Jesus, I've got to hang on! Hang on ...
Oh, ha ha ha! Funny! What am I trying to get around that concrete wall for? What for? Stupid.
Senseless. No use. Wanna protect myself against the blast when I squeeze this little old trigger here. Ha ha. Beautiful little trigger, just squeeze it, and BOOM! everything goes off and slices those cables, and my God it's funny. I'm crying; tears on my cheeks; I can feel them, and what do I want to protect myself against the blast for, because I'm dead already and what was that? Christ, it hurt. My God, I've fallen. ...
I fell down. I can't get up! Where's the trigger, where's the tri— There, in my hand, all the time. That's it.
Now. Now do it, Rand, old boy. That's it, just squeeze.
You're a hell of a poker player, old man. Really, you are, a squeeze there, that's it. Great player.
Best. Squeeze harder, harder!
Everything was so dark, but I thought about it only for a moment, that's all; no more, only a moment, because the world fell in on me and I knew that when the whole mountain fell down I was smiling.
Tom Smythe stood close to Kim. The hospital room filled with the murmur of the doctors and nurses. Needles pushed into the arms of the unconscious, cruelly white form of Steven Rand. The doctors hovered over the still shape, checked the gleaming bottles suspended above the bed.
Kim wept quietly, leaning against Tom Smythe. She tried to remain silent, not to disturb the struggle being waged in the room.
"Massive transfusions. The new drugs," Tom Smythe said. "Massive injections. Brought them here from the army base. Antiradiation drugs." He stared down at his friend, talking as much to himself as to Kim.
"I had an idea of what he meant, what he was trying to do," he went on in a whisper. "The fool; the crazy wonderful fool. He told me he was going to teach God how to play poker. Mumbled something about throwing in his cards, that he could win by losing.
"When I found out he got into the reactor room and we saw the levels . . . Christ, they were over two thousand! ... I knew what he'd done. Knew he was successful. What a job he did! Main power went out all over the complex. He'd done it and I knew what had happened. Couple of men got in there, no trouble anymore from the lasers or anything else. Couple of good men. They ran in there and they grabbed him and they ran out with him. They all got a terrible dosage, too, but they're all right. Less than two or three minutes' exposure. They'll make it. They got him out just like that, in nothing flat."
He stared at the still form on the bed, surrounded with the most advanced weapons of medical science.
"Already had a medical team on the way here from Fort Carson," Smythe said, still in that same hoarse whisper. "Only minutes away by helicopter. Radiation alarm; they're set up for that sort of thing.
Instant reaction. They got to Steve. Fast, real fast. Ten minutes later he was here, in the hospital. But they had already started injecting him with the drugs right there in the corridor." He glanced at the liquids moving slowly in the gleaming bottles. "Drugs, transfusions. They're doing everything."
He looked across the room. "Everything," he whispered.
Kim moved her lips. She tasted salt from the tears running down her cheeks.
"Will he live, Tom?"
Smythe turned his head to look at her. Their eyes met.
"The doctors say they think they can bring him through," he said slowly. "Be touch and go for a while. But they think he'll make it."
He looked for a long time at Steve Rand. Then, slowly, a smile came to his face.
"You know something, Kim? I think Steve is going to win that last hand, after all."
The God Machine Page 30