Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Some people get off there.”

  “There’s that reception clerk. She takes care of solicitors. Come to think of it, peddlers and agents aren’t allowed in this building.”

  ‘“Cleaning women are.”

  “Right. Maybe they don’t get past the outer office. I’m going to see the girl tonight, the receptionist.”

  Vaneman leered significantly. “I get it.” But Jerrold didn’t trouble to reply. He drank his sidecar, a queer, troubled worry moving at the back of his brain.

  He arrived an hour early for his appointment, and spent the time standing in the foyer, watching the elevator indicator dials. The ring of lights glowed in quick progression as the cars rose and fell. A panel would slide open; people would enter the car; the door would shut. Jerrold’s eyes would lift to the dial. One. Two. Three. It paused at three. Then four. Five. A pause at seven. Eight. Nine—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Stop at sixteen. Stop at fourteen. Stop at any floor but the fifteenth.

  Nobody, in that hour, got on or off at the fifteenth floor.

  Jerrold kept a record in his notebook, intending later to check the variables against the names of the firms on the various floors. Then he realized that that didn’t matter. It was only the fact that no elevator stopped at the fifteenth that mattered.

  He told the starter vaguely that he was making a survey, but the man kept watching him from time to time. Jerrold was relieved at five thirty when he saw the indicator button, for the first time, light up at fifteen. As he expected, Betty Andrews got out of the elevator. Jerrold put his notebook away.

  “Hello,” she said at sight of him. “Been waiting long?”

  “Not long. How about that drink?”

  “Swell.” She led the way into the cocktail bar. “Old-fashion for me.”

  Later, he looked at her across the dimness, wondering what lay behind the maskless mask of her face.

  She set down her glass, ran the tip of a pointed tongue across her lips, and said, “Well, Mr. Mike Jerrold?”

  “Well?”

  “Question. Are you trying to make me?”

  He said, “No,” with a frankness that was disarmingly inoffensive.

  “That’s good. You see, Mr. Mike Jerrold, I’m hoping I’ll get a taxi ride home. I live in Brooklyn. If you’ve ever been on the Brighton Express at the rush hour—”

  “Taxi it is. Drinks, dinner, and a ride home. Does that suit?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  It was a cool, dim hideaway place, Jerrold reflected, sipping his sidecar and feeling the tingling warmth move slowly through his body. Seldom was it possible to get out of the world. At times these moments came. Outside was New York; here was nothing but the moment. There was—as yet, anyway—

  nothing sexual about the situation, nothing to stimulate Jerrold; rather it was the delicious feeling of being able to stop, to rest on his oars and drift. The girl’s presence was subtly effective; she, too, had stopped. For the moment, the driving force that makes up life had ceased. They relaxed in the twilight.

  Then Jerrold began to talk. He tried to do it casually, but he sensed that Betty wasn’t deceived. She wasn’t loath to answer his disguised questions, either. As a practicing psychiatrist, Jerrold had learned tact and diplomacy, but the sidewise approach was not necessary now.

  How long had she been in New York? Oh, about five years. She’d been lucky to land a good job almost immediately. Yes, with William Scott & Co., on the fifteenth floor. “He’s an engineer, isn’t he?”

  “He doesn’t exist. How did you know there were robots up there?”

  “I . . . I walked in. You weren’t there.”

  “Oh.”

  “They didn’t notice me.”

  “They will,” Betty chuckled. “They have more senses than we have, but not quite the same ones. They don’t know what happens in the same room with them; they don’t care. It’s what happens outside the fifteenth floor that they know all about.”

  Jerrold said slowly, “I’m interested, naturally. If you don’t think I’m prying into secrets—”

  “It’s not that sort of secret. They don’t care how many people find out, because not many can find out.”

  “That door wasn’t even locked. I walked right in. Betty, do you realize what we’re talking about? Are you handing me a line?” She shook her head, green eyes serious. “No, I’m not, not at all. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you all about it, if you want to know. They don’t care.”

  “The robots? Why don’t they?”

  “You won’t do anything about it.”

  “I might tell someone else.”

  “He wouldn’t do anything about it.”

  “He might tell the chief of police.”

  “The chief wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s like a stone thrown into a pond. I’ve seen it happen before. The ripples go out—and then they stop. The robots have all the power in the world, Mr. Mike Jerrold.”

  Unthinking impulse made the man look up. “Eh?”

  “They run things. They make people do what they want. They’ve done it to me, too. When I found out first about them, I was scared. They processed me. It’s painless—” She smiled a little. “You don’t even realize it’s happening. You think you’ve made your own decision. Your relative values simply shift. I was going to quit. I was processed. I realized that it was a good job, paying well, that I wouldn’t be harmed, and that nothing I could do would alter things. So here I am.”

  “What are they?” Jerrold said in a tight voice. “I won’t believe you—” He paused. “No. I saw them. They were intelligent, weren’t they?”

  “Sure. And they’ve been around for quite a while. History’s full of attempts to make robots. The Golem, the homunculi—I had a good liberal education. For ages people have tried to make intelligent robots. Not too long ago someone succeeded. Or a number of technicians succeeded; I’m not sure. But the world never heard about it. Can you guess why?”

  “Wait a minute.” Jerrold rubbed his jaw. “You mean the perfect solvent?”

  “Of course. Suppose you make the perfect solvent. What would happen? It would dissolve anything you put it in. You could make it, but you couldn’t keep it. Intelligent robots are like that. If they’re successful at all, it’s because they have the right sort of brain—one that can think. And necessarily it’s also unlimited in its scope. It’s far more intelligent than we are. Look”—Betty tapped the table—“let’s say, Dr. Jones makes a robot. The robot can think faster than light, a lot faster. From its creation it’s brainier than its creator. What would it do?”

  “It wouldn’t remain a laboratory subject.”

  “Course not. It didn’t. It processed the scientist, so Dr. Jones thought he’d failed; it left another, useless robot in its place, and it went out and hid. It didn’t like this world. It wanted something different. So it simply set out to change the world, through the tools at hand.”

  “Tools. People?”

  “Uh-huh. I think there’ve been lots of successful robots made, and I’ve an idea that they’ve made others, to help them change the world. The office upstairs isn’t the only one, you know. It only handles a section of New York. There are other robot offices, in Washington, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, in Europe and Asia, too. And Africa. Wherever there’s a natural social control center, the robots have an office.”

  “That’s plain crazy,” Jerrold said. “How could a secret like that be kept?”

  Betty’s eyes were very serious. “Mr. Mike Jerrold, listen to me. The robots don’t even try to keep their secret. They don’t have to. You’re not the first man to walk into the office and see them. There are plenty of people going around today who know there are robots on the fifteenth floor here. The same goes for Washington and Frisco—everywhere.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why don’t they talk?”

  “They’ve been processed. When the robots get around to it, they do something to the guy’s mind. It doesn’t hurt. He nev
er knows it’s happened. He still realizes that there are intelligent robots, and pretty often he knows what they’re doing. But that’s locked in his mind. He can never tell anyone, never pass on what he knows.”

  Jerrold pounced on a flaw. “You’re telling me about it.”

  She gestured wearily. “I tell you, they don’t care. They just never bothered in my case. It doesn’t matter who I talk to. Eventually that person will come under the robots’ observation, and he’ll be processed. The same goes for anybody he might talk to—anybody he might convince.”

  “It’s no way to keep a secret. Damn it! It . . . it seems as if those devils are so selfconfident that they don’t even bother to . . . to—”

  Betty finished her drink. “Another, please. Thanks. Why talk about it, Mike? It’ll only upset you, until you’re processed.”

  “They won’t process me,” Jerrold said grimly.

  “Hm-m-m.” Betty looked unconvinced. “I told you they can control minds at a distance.”

  “Telepathy? Impossible. Selectivity—”

  “It’s not telepathy. They use a mechanism. Look, suppose you wanted to check up on a lot of people. What would you do? No detectives.”

  “Dictaphones—eh?”

  “Call it that. And suppose you wanted to give them orders, too. Just vocal orders—limit it to humanity, for the example.”

  “A two-way radio.”

  “And suppose you didn’t want those people to know what you were doing. You’d hide the radio, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where would you hide it?”

  Jerrold started to answer, paused, and looked sharply at the girl. She nodded.

  “The Purloined Letter. In plain sight, but disguised. And disguised so no one could possibly discover it was a radio.”

  “What?”

  Betty smiled crookedly. “If you were clever enough, you could disguise it as a vacuum tube and put it in a radio. You’d sell it openly—as a vacuum tube. People would buy it for one purpose, but it’d really serve two.”

  “It’s not a radio—”

  “No, it’s not. But it’s something everybody uses, and uses often. Built into it is a device that seems to serve a perfectly natural mechanical purpose. It does serve that purpose. But it also keeps open a connection with the robots. It keeps them in mental touch with anyone who uses that particular device.”

  “What is it?”

  “Telephone,” Betty said. “Some time ago a certain improvement was made on phones, and almost all of them have it now. The robots saw to that. Humans make the . . . the gadget, of course, and they make it to fulfill one obvious mechanical purpose. They don’t know that the structure of the gadget makes it also a tool for the robots. That’s right, Mike. All over the world there are control offices, manned by robots. They listen in on telephone conversations—not the oral ones, but the mental. They read thoughts, through that little gadget in the phone, the gadget that really belongs there to make the phone work. They issue orders through it. They process minds. They make people do what they want. They manipulate stocks, swing business deals, start wars and stop them. They run the earth, Mr. Mike Jerrold. You know that now, and they don’t care if you know, because you can’t stop them.”

  Jerrold said, “What are they trying to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Betty told him. “I couldn’t understand. They don’t think the way we do. They want the world different, but I don’t know how. But they’re getting it the way they want. It may be swell for humans, and then again it may not. It doesn’t matter a hell of a lot, does it?”

  Jerrold didn’t say anything. Something within him rose up in furious revolt against the thought of irrevocable future, the negation of free will. It was like driving beasts into a trap. Some would break for freedom, some would balk, some would fight. But eventually the trappers would get what they wanted. It was the sum total that counted, and Jerrold knew that telepathic control, at the right points and places, would affect the whole of humanity.

  He looked at Betty again. Her skin had a pearly pallor in the dimness, and her eyes were shadowy, strange. There was an incongruity about the scene.

  Jerrold said, “Excuse me,” and got up. He ordered another round of drinks on his way out. In the lobby, he entered an elevator and got off at the fifteenth floor.

  The receptionist’s window was closed now. But the door was still unlocked.

  Jerrold went into the adjoining room. The robot was wheeling itself smoothly about the table, its wire-fingered hands manipulating the lights on the relief map of midtown Manhattan. Jerrold’s stomach dropped, and a band of coldness circumscribed his middle. He stood there, waiting for the thing to notice him.

  It ignored him completely.

  It was man-size, but with a horrible functionalism man did not possess. It was alien. It went about its business, with sublime self-confidence, and its intelligence was obvious. The cilia touched the lights; sometimes they lingered, and Jerrold knew why. Processing—He skirted the robot at last and went into the next room. It was identical with the first, though the robot was dissimilar. Its head was a gleaming ball, featureless, and it moved on three jointed legs. It worked on a relief map of the lower tip of Manhattan, from the Battery to Wall Street.

  Wall Street—

  There were many rooms; there were robots in all of them, each somewhat different, each working on a different sector of the five boroughs. Jerrold had a feeling that they never stopped; that they would stop only when they had achieved their goal. He had a brief, perverse hope that one of them would notice him. It was discomforting to be ignored, like a . . . gnat.

  He went back to the first office and gingerly touched the map. Nothing happened. He gripped the tower of the Empire State and tried to snap it off; it was impossible. The plastic was unbreakable.

  Jerrold, sweat beads on his face, took hold of the robot’s arm. He tried to move that, too. He was dragged around in the creature’s wake, quite unable to force the arm into the slightest deviation from its course.

  They worked; they were invulnerable. That was the sum total of Jerrold’s findings. Whether or not they would be invulnerable to a really powerful weapon, or to acid—

  Betty was waiting when he got back to the bar. Jerrold sat down, and they drank in silence.

  “It doesn’t do any good, really,” she said at last. “I know you can’t help feeling as you do. But after you’re processed, you’ll be much happier about all this.”

  “I had to find out,” he said. “Convince myself.”

  “And you’re convinced.”

  “Yeah. Damn those things! They—”

  “It was our own mistake, trying to build intelligent robots. Quite as silly as having a contest to see who can stay longest under water without breathing. The one who wins—drowns.”

  Jerrold held out his hand; it was trembling slightly. He made a grimace of worried uneasiness.

  “The bottom’s dropped out.”

  “You thought the ice was solid all the way down. That’s why. But it doesn’t matter, Mike. It doesn’t matter, really.”

  “Those inhuman devils, forcing humanity into a social pattern to suit their own needs—No!”

  Betty moved her shoulders, settling herself like a cat. “We might have followed that pattern anyway, without the robots. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I’ve got to think this out.” Jerrold tried to focus his mind; it was curiously difficult. As he had said, the bottom had dropped out. He’d discovered that he had an incurable disease, and the psychological result was the same.

  In a way it was odd how convinced he was of the robots’ invulnerability. Their self-confidence was sublime. They did not try to protect themselves. Protection was automatically a part of their plan to remold the world into—into what?

  Jerrold didn’t want to find out. He didn’t much care. Humanity has developed on a belief in free will. Men know they can make their own ultimate decisions, and they feel tha
t those decisions may be important. For want of a nail—

  The part influences the whole. Otherwise, there was futility. It was not pleasant to feel that the part had no slightest influence upon the whole, that, inevitably, the herd would be driven into the predestined trap, that, no matter how the fish might flop and wriggle, the net was unalterably lifting and closing. A man might aim at a star—well and good. If his motives coincided with the aims of the robots, he’d be allowed to fulfill his plan. On the other hand—Jerrold met Betty’s quiet gaze.

  “ ‘Nor all your tears wash out a word of it,’ ” she said. “It’s no use, Mr. Mike Jerrold.”

  “The moving finger’s anthropomorphic. We wouldn’t object so much to that. Man made God in his own image. It’s the reason men are willing to obey kings—they know that kings are flesh and blood like themselves, and want much the same things. There’s the same common denominator. There isn’t with those damned creatures upstairs.”

  “They’re not made in our own image. If you’d only realize that in a little while you won’t care—”

  Jerrold set down his glass with a bang. He stood up, face strained, lips tight. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I don’t like the feeling of being watched.”

  Betty went out with him, a rather quizzical smile on her lips. They hailed a taxi and found a restaurant. Jerrold didn’t eat much. His mind went like a squirrel in a cage.

  Afterward, they danced at a roof garden. Beneath them lay New York. Jerrold guided Betty to a terrace, and they stood alone, looking out into the dim city below.

  “We’re on top,” he said at last. “Like humanity. But it’s a long way down.”

  She drew the wrap closer about her shoulders. “We won’t know it. It may not even be down.”

  “Guided. No, not even that. Led. Driven. Without realizing that we’re not the masters.” He searched for the faint lights of Brooklyn. “All over the world, people making plans, struggling and suffering and being crucified, because they think it’s worth while. Fighting for what they think they want. And if they eventually get it, it’ll only be because the robots want the same thing. We’re blind in darkness. Blinder than the blind. If only—” His gaze went up to the empty sky, seeking an answer where there was none.