IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROBOT

by Frank Belknap Long

  “He’s been stabbed! They were arguing about the races, and he whipped out a knife. The other one wrenched it from him and stabbed him twice. They were both standing right next to me.”

  “Where is he?” a man’s voice shouted. “Why didn’t somebody grab him?”

  “He leapt off the bus!” the woman replied, her voice still raised in a shout.

  “There’s nothing much we can do for this one!” a third voice called out. “He’s dead!”

  “That could get us all in trouble!” The woman almost screamed the words. “The Security Police don’t pay any attention to dead men in the streets. But a stabbing on a bicycle race bus is different. It has a socio-political look —”

  “In the ruins? Don’t be a fool, girl.”

  “I’m not a girl. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen the Security Police stop every bus at the track, to make sure the passengers aren’t socio-political troublemakers, and didn’t just come here to get themselves killed over a woman. I tell you, it could happen. It wouldn’t be the first time, and not one of us would escape suspicion.”

  “The Security Police don’t often come to the ruins,” the man who had spoken first protested. “They’re afraid to risk it. They know what could happen to them.”

  “Where are your eyes? We passed two of them a minute ago.”

  “She’s right!” another passenger called out. “I saw them. We’d better toss him out right now, to be on the safe side.”

  “Are you sure he’s dead?” someone else called out.

  “We haven’t time to make sure!” the woman shouted. “If there are more police at the track we may all be facing the death penalty, so why should we have any scruples about it, one way or the other? It makes no sense to me.”

  “We may as well make sure.”

  “Well … it won’t take us long to make it official, if a few of you are that crazy. You there — and you. Take a look. See if his heart is still beating. Clear a space now. Let them get to him.”

  It all seemed like a mad nightmare. But in a nightmare you’re often obscurely aware that you’ll wake up before it is too late to find that the frightfulness could not have harmed you. But reality is never that merciful. Even when it takes on a nightmarish aspect you never get the feeling that you’re going to wake up bathed in cold sweat, but with a wild gratefulness sweeping over you.

  I wasn’t sure I could hear the thud of the slain man’s body hitting the pavement as the bus careened. But I could tell he was no longer on the bus by the abrupt silence which had followed the shouting a moment after they’d made sure that he was dead.

  It was a callously brutal way of erasing all evidence of a crime. But it was a relief to know that the victim was beyond caring. If the man had not been dead and a few of the passengers had not been swayed by pity it would have been the kind of atrocity that can keep you awake nights, shaken and tormented by a depth of evil you don’t like to think about.

  I could almost hear the Big Brain mocking me, telling me what a fool I was. “Don’t you know what human nature is like? Haven’t you learned yet? When a man has ceased to follow my guidance there is no crime that he will not commit. Only my wisdom protects him, the scientific accuracy of every answer he receives to the questions he asks about himself. Without my wisdom to control him, waking and sleeping, he would become wholly a brute. If there were no tape recordings Society would become a jungle and every man would be forced to resort to violence solely to stay alive.”

  I had only one answer to that. It was not the kind of answer the monitor would have liked to hear, but I would have staked my life on its accuracy.

  “A mechanical brain cannot think as a man does, or feel compassion for human suffering or understand the tragedy of unfulfilled desire. Thwart a man’s basic impulses, deny him the right to love and be loved, and live his life to the full, and he will cease to stand upright in the sunlight and think of himself as man.

  “But even when his spirit has been broken, his self-respect shattered by a frustration beyond his capacity to endure, the flame of pity still remains unextinguished. It may dwindle to a spark and seem to disappear, but it never completely goes out. And that is Man’s glory, and his triumph. Remember this. They did not hurl a cruelly wounded man from the bus to die alone in torment. They made sure that he was dead first. In only a few was compassion more than a spark. But the spark was in all of them, or the few could not have made their will prevail.”

  “How sure are you that the few will prevail if your own life is threatened,” the Big Brain might have replied. “Turn and look behind you. Look into the eyes of a man who hates you for no sane reason. There is no spark of pity in him at all.”

  That, too, would have been a lie, for I had already started to turn and the Big Brain could not have known that I was completely aware of the man’s malicious thoughts beating in upon me, and knew exactly why he hated me. When hate becomes that intense a telepath isn’t likely to be deceived.

  The man standing directly behind me hated me because he had seen Claire and knew that she was my woman, and her great beauty had filled him with envy and savage rage.

  CHAPTER 10

  I turned slowly. I wasn’t sure he was one of the men who had tried their best to clear a space for us when we’d ascended into the bus, because the commotion had shuffled the passengers about a bit at our end of the guardrail.

  The instant our eyes met I still wasn’t sure. I only knew that I hadn’t really taken him in before, because he had the kind of face you can’t look at steadily for half a minute and ever completely forget.

  His nose was blunt, almost snoutlike, and his entire face had the kind of elongated look that you’ll see occasionally in men whose simian ancestry seems open to dispute. Piggish was the word for it. But a pig, as a rule, is a docile, good-natured animal and the gimlet eyes that bored into mine were blazing with animosity.

  It could have been just an accident of nature, for I’d once known a gifted poet who had very much the same cast of countenance. But I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything poetic about Gimlet Eyes. A poet can be filled with just as much animosity as the next man, if frustration rides him too hard. But imagination and sensitivity can usually keep animosity from boiling over. If I was any judge of character … sensitivity couldn’t do for Gimlet Eyes what it could do for a poet, because I didn’t think he had an apothecary’s grain of it in him.

  I wasn’t so sure about imagination, because the first words he spoke seemed to indicate that he had covered all the angles.

  “I saw those two Security Policemen too,” he said. “They were just coming out of a between-building alley when you climbed on the bus. They couldn’t have been more than fifty feet behind you. Maybe nobody else noticed how close they were to you. But I’m good at noticing things.”

  He continued to regard me steadily, a mocking smile on his lips. There was no need for me to probe deeply in a telepathic way to know what he was going to say next, because luck had dealt him a royal flush, or, at the very least, three aces.

  He was about to turn the cards face up, so that everyone on the bus could see what kind of hand he was holding. But first he was going to threaten me, to prolong his moment of triumph a little and gloat over the way he hoped I’d look when he denounced me and started another commotion.

  I didn’t give him a chance to threaten me. “If you’re smart you’ll keep what you think you saw to yourself,” I said. “They’ll turn on you if they believe what I’ll tell them — that you’re a Security Guard. I’ll say I saw you in the computer vault a few days ago. They won’t stop to ask themselves whether it’s true or not.”

  I paused an instant to let that sink in, then went on quickly: “There’s something else I’ll tell them. I’ll say we were waiting for a bus to pass and when we saw that this one was overcrowded and wasn’t going to slow down for us we decided to board it anyway. We didn’t want to miss the first race, and were afraid the next bus would be just as crowded. I’
m sure they’ll believe that — after I’ve tagged you with a Security Guard label. Think it over.”

  I didn’t believe that there was much likelihood that he would, because the Security Police had been as close to us as he’d said, and a dozen or more passengers would leap to his defense the instant he jogged their memories. But it was important to find out how credulous he was, because what I had in mind if he refused to take the Security Guard threat seriously would call for steady nerves and the most difficult kind of bluffing.

  He was the opposite of credulous. “What sort of a fool do you take me for?” he sneered. “If this bus wasn’t on the way to the races you’d be lying in the street right now, as dead as you’ll be five minutes after I tell them what I saw. Men on their way to the races don’t use their heads much. They can see something that could get them killed — like two people leaping on a bus with Security Police right on their heels — and just go right on shouting their lungs out and thinking about what they’ll see when they get to the track. But it will come back to them quickly enough, when once I’ve jolted some sense into them and told them why you climbed on board.”

  He was one hundred percent right, of course. The stabbing had made at least a few of them remember that the bus had gone careening past two Security Policemen emerging from an alley and that it wouldn’t take much to make them remember how close we’d been to the alley when we’d ascended into the bus at the risk of our lives.

  There was still a chance that our ascent over the guardrail had passed almost unnoticed amidst the tumult and the shouting, for crowded buses were often boarded in that way. But the instant Gimlet Eyes started denouncing me there was no doubt in my mind as to what the outcome would be.

  All I had to do was prevent him from denouncing me.

  My small, experimental bluff had failed. But it was the big one I was counting on most and I told myself that it must not be allowed to fail.

  I kept my voice low, because I didn’t want the passengers who were standing on close to him to hear me.

  “Have you a knife?” I asked.

  The question must have startled him, because his pupils dilated until Gimlet Eyes no longer seemed a very apt name for him.

  “What makes you think I haven’t?” he demanded.

  “I was just curious,” I said. “There’s no percentage in carrying a knife if it isn’t right in your hand when you’re in danger.”

  I contracted my forefinger and jabbed the knuckle into his stomach just above his belly-button, just firmly enough to make him think it was the blunt edge of a knife blade I was prodding him with.

  “You’re in danger now,” I said. “If you shout or say one word that will carry I’ll slash you up and down and straight across. Is that clear?”

  Being forced to put it to him that brutally went against the grain, but I had no choice. It was no time for squeamishness.

  He was standing so close to me there was no way he could have looked down to see the glint of a blade if it hadn’t been just my knuckle I was prodding him with.

  I could tell by his sudden pallor and the terror that flamed in his eyes that I didn’t have to worry about his not believing me.

  “All right,” I said. “Now suppose you just ease yourself over toward the guardrail. I’ll go with you. If you move as much as a half-inch away from me you’ll end up dead. You’re going to jump right off the bus when I tell you to make the leap. Do you understand?”

  His lips moved but I couldn’t catch what he said. It didn’t matter, because he was so scared he nodded vigorously and the nod told me all I needed to know.

  “Go about it in a calm way,” I warned. “You’ve suddenly de­cided you don’t want to go to the track. You’re fed up with the races. You’ve seen too many of them and you can no longer stand watch­ing me die. But be careful not to look as if you were afraid of dying yourself. I’m not holding a knife pressed against your stomach. I’m just a close friend who is in sympathy with you but who feels that jumping off a speeding bus might be a little risky. He’s doing his best to talk you out of it. Have you got that all straight in your mind?”

  He nodded again, just as vigorously.

  “All right, start moving toward the rail. One wrong move, and you won’t live long enough to do any talking.”

  We moved together toward the rail and I was careful not to let the pressure of my knuckle become less than firm. But that didn’t prevent him from trying just once to save himself. He was clearly too frightened to risk getting himself stabbed by shouting or deliberately attempting to break away from me. But just as we reached the guardrail he drew his stomach in quickly, in a desperate effort to outwit me by widening the gap between his flesh and a knife that wasn’t there.

  If the gap had widened enough he would have probably swung about and grappled with me, counting on the suddenness of the move to swing the odds in his favor. But I thrust my knuckles so swiftly into the pit of his stomach that he grunted in alarm. He couldn’t have looked more terrified if he’d felt the knife slicing into his flesh. Maybe he did, for the mind can play strange tricks on a wildly terrified man.

  “Don’t try that again!” I warned. “The bus will slow down a little before it turns the corner that’s right up ahead. Jump when I tell you — and not before. I’m giving you every chance to stay alive.”

  I didn’t think the other passengers would be too startled when he made the leap. Men on their way to the races behave in strange ways at times, jettisoning reason in a half-demented gamble with Death. Men had leapt off speeding buses before and sometimes for the very reason I’d impressed on Gimlet Eyes when I’d given him his cue. Quite suddenly the races lose their appeal. The death toll appalls them, and their only desire is to widen the gap between themselves and Death. Even the passengers on a bicycle race bus seem like accomplices of Death to them and they are seized with an uncontrollable impulse to escape, by hiding themselves in the anonymity of the ruins again. The instant they’ve leapt off the bus, they may experience a change of heart. But by then the bus will have passed out of sight.

  The beetle was rapidly approaching the corner where I’d told Gimlet Eyes it would slow a little, but I was far from sure that its speed would decrease. I was only sure that he’d be getting off, whether it slowed or not, because I couldn’t risk giving him a chance to outwit me a second time.

  Just before it reached the corner it swerved a little and that retarded it just enough.

  “All right,” I said. “Leap. You’ll never get a better chance and I’m not giving you one.”

  He leapt straight out over the guardrail and I saw him land on his feet at the edge of the curb. He went reeling backwards, collided with a rusty spiral of metal that had once been a street lamp and was hurled still farther backward by the graystone wall of the building on the corner.

  I had no way of knowing whether he was seriously injured or not, because the last glimpse I had of him was too brief. He was just sagging to his knees when the beetle careened around the corner and I never set eyes on him again.

  I didn’t feel guilty about it, because it had been his life or ours. If he had denounced me, Claire wouldn’t have been spared. I was sure of that. He’d been hoping to get me killed and claim her as his woman, but that only went to show how dumb he was.

  I elbowed my way back between the passengers at the rear of the beetle, found Claire and put my arm about her waist and held her firmly.

  “We’re safe now,” I whispered. “Just trust me and don’t become frightened. When we get to the track we’ll disappear in the crowd.”

  “A bicycle race,” she whispered. “What is a bicycle race like?”

  I’d hesitated to tell her before the trouble with Gimlet Eyes had started, and I was still afraid to bring it right out into the open and try to explain it to her without window dressing.

  What were the bicycle races like? You had to see one to really understand the depths to which human nature could descend and how terrible an unmasked, totally un
inhibited glorification of barbarity could be.

  What were the bicycle races like? What was the sadism of the ancient world you read about on punched metaltapes like … when the Big Brain was giving research historians the answer to questions they seldom asked? What was the ancient Roman Colosseum like?

  Men and women by the thousands thrown to wild beasts. Gladiators, bloody-thewed, battling to the death solely to provide entertainment for an entire society turned decadent and accepting such brutality as a matter of course, without blinking an eyelash.

  What was Attila the Hun’s mountain of corpses like? And his wild horsemen of the plains? What would they have seemed like if you had been there and witnessed such horrors with your own eyes?

  How could I tell her the full truth — or even a part of the truth?

  A six-day bicycle race was supposed to be a sport, the sole surviving remnant of the great Age of Sports which had reached its apex two centuries ago. But it was no longer a sport in a strict sense, because it had been transformed into a carnival of death.

  It was another safety valve, permitted by the monitors and ignored by the Big Brain in a row of stippled dots when it was asked how Society could best protect itself from men and women who were driven by frustration to glorify death. The men who participated wanted to die, unconsciously at least, and the spectators could watch them die with the feeling that they were venting their hatred of life on sacrificial victims who were powerless to save themselves.

  Technological brilliance is not confined to men in the good graces of Society. The most desperate and despised of outcasts may be a mechanical genius, and the bicycle races were the outgrowth of human inventiveness criminally applied. The changes that had been made in the bicycles alone —

  I shuddered and shut my eyes for a moment and when I opened them again the stadium was just coming into view. But I saw Venus Base again before the careening beetle left the area of narrow streets and crumbling buildings through which it had been traveling and emerged on the wide stone highway which led directly to the track.