My Name is Legion

by Roger Zelazny

  As the evening wore on, more and more absurdities seemed less and less preposterous, as is sometimes the case. We decided, I forget which of us suggested it, that the Hangman should really have a share in the festivities. After all, it was, in a very real sense, his party. Before too much longer, it sounded only fair and we were discussing how we could go about it ... You see, we were in Texas and the Hangman was at the Space Center in California. Getting together with him was out of the question. On the other hand, the teleoperator station was right up the hall from us. What we finally decided to do was to activate him and take turns working as operator. There was already a rudimentary consciousness there, and we felt it fitting that we each get in touch to share the good news. So that is what we did. He sighed, took another sip, glanced at me. Dave was the first operator, he continued. He activated the Hangman. Then, Well, as I said, we were all in high spirits. We had not originally intended to remove the Hangman from the lab where he was situated, but Dave decided to take him outside briefly, to show him the sky and to tell him he was going there, after all. Then Dave suddenly got enthusiastic about outwitting the guards and the alarm system. It was a game. We all went along with it. In fact, we were clamoring for a turn at the thing ourselves. But Dave stuck with it, and he wouldn't turn over control until he had actually gotten the Hangman off the premises, out into an uninhabited area next to the Center.

  By the time Leila persuaded him to give her a go at the controls, it was kind of anticlimactic. That game had already been played. So she thought up a new one: she took the Hangman into the next town. It was late, and the sensory equipment was superb. It was a challenge, passing through the town without being detected. By then, everyone had suggestions as to what to do next, progressively more outrageous suggestions. Then Manny took control, and he wouldn't say what he was doing, wouldn't let us monitor him. Said it would be more fun to surprise the next operator. Now, he was higher than the rest of us put together, I think, and he stayed on so damn long that we started to get nervous ... A certain amount of tension is partly sobering, and I guess we all began to think what a stupid-assed thing it was we were doing. It wasn't just that it would wreck our careers, which it would, but it could blow the entire project if we got caught playing games with such expensive hardware. At least, I was thinking that way, and I was also thinking that Manny was no doubt operating under the very human wish to go the others one better.

  I started to sweat. I suddenly just wanted to get the Hangman back where he belonged, turn him off, you could still do that, before the final circuits went in, shut down the station, and start forgetting it had ever happened. I began leaning on Manny to wind up his diversion and turn the controls over to me. Finally, he agreed.

  He finished his drink and held out the glass.

  Would you freshen this a bit?

  Surely.

  I went and got him some more, added a touch to my own, returned to my chair and waited.

  So I took over, he said. I took over, and where do you think that idiot had left me? I was inside a building, and it didn't take but an eyeblink to realize it was a bank. The Hangman carries a lot of tools, and Manny had apparently been able to guide him through the doors without setting anything off. I was standing right in front of the main vault. Obviously, he thought that should be my challenge. I fought down a desire to turn and make my own exit in the nearest wall and start running. But I went back to the doors and looked outside.

  I didn't see anyone. I started to let myself out. The light hit me as I emerged. It was a hand flash. The guard had been standing out of sight. He'd a gun in his other hand. I panicked. I hit him ... Reflex. If I am going to hit someone, I hit him as hard as I can. Only I hit him with the strength of the Hangman. He must have died instantly. I started to run and I didn't stop till I was back in the little park area near the Center. Then I stopped and the others had to take me out of the harness.

  They monitored all this? I asked.

  Yes, someone cut the visual in on a side viewscreen again a few seconds after I took over. Dave, I think.

  Did they try to stop you at any time while you were running away?

  No. Well, I wasn't aware of anything but what I was doing at the time. But afterwards they said they were too shocked to do anything but watch, until I gave out.

  I see.

  Dave took over then, ran his initial route in reverse, got the Hangman back into the lab, cleaned him up, turned him off. We shut down the operator station. We were suddenly very sober.

  He sighed and leaned back, and was silent for a long while.

  Then, You are the only person I've ever told this to, he said.

  I tasted my own drink.

  We went over to Leila's place then, he continued, and the rest is pretty much predictable. Nothing we could do would bring the guy back, we decided, but if we told what had happened it could wreck an expensive, important program. It wasn't as if we were criminals in need of rehabilitation. It was a once-in-a-lifetime lark that happened to end tragically. What would you have done?

  I don't know. Maybe the same thing. I'd have been scared, too.

  He nodded.

  Exactly. And that's the story.

  Not all of it, is it?

  What do you mean?

  What about the Hangman? You said there was already a detectable consciousness there. You were aware of it, and it was aware of you. It must have had some reaction to the whole business. What was that like?

  Damn you, he said flatly.

  I'm sorry.

  Are you a family man? he asked.

  No.

  Did you ever take a small child to a zoo?

  Yes.

  Then maybe you know the experience. When my son was around four I took him to the Washington Zoo one afternoon. We must have walked past every cage in the place. He made appreciative comments every now and then, asked a few questions, giggled at the monkeys, thought the bears were very nice, probably because they made him think of oversized toys. But do you know what the finest thing of all was? The thing that made him jump up and down and point and say, 'Look, Daddy! Look!'?

  I shook my head.

  A squirrel looking down from the limb of a tree, he said, and he chuckled briefly. Ignorance of what's important and what isn't. Inappropriate responses. Innocence. The Hangman was a child, and up until the time I took over, the only thing he had gotten from us was the idea that it was a game: he was playing with us, that's all. Then something horrible happened ... I hope you never know what it feels like to do something totally rotten to a child, while he is holding your hand and laughing ... He felt all my reactions, and all of Dave's as he guided him back.

  We sat there for a long while then.

  So we had, traumatized him, he said finally, or whatever other fancy terminology you might want to give it. That is what happened that night. It took a while for it to take effect, but there is no doubt in my mind that that is the cause of the Hangman's finally breaking down.

  I nodded. I see. And you believe it wants to kill you for this?

  Wouldn't you? he said. If you had started out as a thing and we had turned you into a person and then used you as a thing again, wouldn't you?

  Leila left a lot out of her diagnosis.

  No, she just omitted it in talking to you. It was all there. But she read it wrong. She wasn't afraid. It was just a game it had played, with the others. Its memories of that part might not be as bad. I was the one that really marked it. As I see it, Leila was betting that I was the only one it was after. Obviously, she read it wrong.

  Then what I do not understand, I said, is why the Burns killing did not bother her more. There was no way of telling immediately that it had been a panicky hoodlum rather than the Hangman.

  The only thing that I can see is that, being a very proud woman, which she was, she was willing to hold with her diagnosis in the face of the apparent evidence.

  I don't like it. But you know her and I don't, and as it tamed out her estimate of that pa
rt was correct. Something else bothers me just as much, though: the helmet. It looks as if the Hangman killed Dave, then took the 'trouble to bear the helmet in his watertight compartment all the way to St. Louis, solely for purposes of dropping it at the scene of his next killing. That makes no sense whatsoever.

  It does, actually, he said. I was going to get to that shortly, but I might as well cover it now. You see, the Hangman possessed no vocal mechanism. We communicated by means of the equipment. Don says you know something about electronics ... ?

  Yes.

  Well, shortly, I want you to start checking over that helmet, to see whether it has been tampered with.

  That is going to be difficult, I said. I don't know just how it was wired originally, and I'm not such a genius on the theory that I can just look at a thing and say whether it will function as a teleoperator unit.

  He bit his lower lip.

  You will have to try, anyhow. There may be physical signs, scratches, breaks, new connections ... I don't know. That's your department. Look for them.

  I just nodded and waited for him to go on.

  I think that the Hangman wanted to talk to Leila, he said, either because she was a psychiatrist and he knew he was functioning badly at a level that transcended the mechanical, or because he might think of her in terms of a mother. After all, she was the only woman involved, and he had the concept of mother, with all the comforting associations that go with it, from all of our minds. Or maybe for both of these reasons. I feel he might have taken the helmet along for -that purpose. He would have realized what it was from a direct monitoring of Dave's brain while he was with him. I want you to check it over because it would seem possible that the Hangman disconnected the control circuits and left the communication circuits intact. I think he might have taken the helmet to Leila in that condition and attempted to induce her to put it on. She got scared, tried to run away, fight, or call for help, and he killed her. The helmet was no longer of any use to him, so he discarded it and departed. Obviously, he does not have anything to say to me.

  I thought about it, nodded again.

  Okay, broken circuits I can spot, I said. If you will tell me where a tool kit is, I had better get right to it.

  He made a stay-put gesture with his left hand.

  Afterwards, I found out the identity of the guard, he went on. We all contributed to an anonymous gift for his widow. I have done things for his family, taken care of them, the same way, ever since ...

  I did not look at him as he spoke.

  ... There was nothing else that I could do, he finished.

  I remained silent.

  He finished his drink and gave me a weak smile.

  The kitchen is back there, he told me, showing me a thumb. There is a utility room right behind it. Tools are in there.

  Okay.

  I got to my feet. I retrieved the helmet and started toward the doorway, passing near the area where I had stood earlier, back when he had fitted me into the proper box and tightened a screw.

  Wait a minute! he said.

  I stopped.

  Why did you go over there before? What's so strategic about that part of the room?

  What do you mean?

  You know what I mean.

  I shrugged.

  Had to go someplace.

  You seem the sort of person who has better reasons than that.

  I glanced at the wall.

  Not then, I said.

  I insist.

  You really don't want to know, I told him.

  I really do.

  All right. I wanted to see what sort of flowers you liked. After all, you're a client, and I went on back through the kitchen into the utility room and started looking for tools.

  I sat in a chair turned sidewise from the table to face the door. In the main room of the lodge the only sounds were the occasional hiss and sputter of the logs turning to ashes on the grate.

  Just a cold, steady whiteness drifting down outside the window and a silence confirmed by gunfire, driven deeper now that it had ceased ... Not a sigh or a whimper, though. And I never count them as storms unless there is wind.

  Big fat flakes down the night, silent night, windless night ...

  Considerable time had passed since my arrival. The Senator had sat up for a long time talking with me. He was disappointed that I could not tell him too much about a nonperson subculture which he believed existed. I really was not certain about it myself, though I had occasionally encountered what might have been its fringes. I am not much of a joiner of anything anymore, however, and I was not about to mention those things I might have guessed about this. I gave him my opinions on the Central Data Bank when he asked for them, and there were some that he did not like. He had accused me, then, of wanting to tear things down without offering anything better in their place.

  My mind had drifted back, through fatigue and time and faces and snow and a lot of space, to the previous evening in Baltimore. How long ago? It made me think of Mencken's The Cult of Hope. I could not give him the pat answer, the workable alternative that he wanted, because there might not be one. The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform. But if a grass-roots resistance was building up, with an underground movement bent on finding ways to circumvent the record keepers, it might well be that much of the enterprise would eventually prove about as effective and beneficial as, say, Prohibition once had. I tried to get him to see this, but I could not tell how much he bought of anything that I said. Eventually, he flaked out and went upstairs to take a pill and lock himself in for the night. If it had troubled him that I'd not been able to find anything wrong with the helmet, he did not show it.

  So I sat there, the helmet, the walkie-talkie, the gun on the table, the tool kit on me floor beside my chair, the black glove on my left hand.

  The Hangman was coming. I did not doubt it.

  Bert, Larry, Tom, Clay, the helmet, might or might not be able to stop him. Something bothered me about the whole case, but I was too tired to think of anything but the immediate situation, to try to remain alert while I waited. I was afraid to take a stimulant or a drink or to light a cigarette, since my central nervous system itself was to be a part of the weapon. I watched the big fat flakes fly by.

  I called out to Bert and Larry when I heard the click.

  I picked up the helmet and rose to my feet as its light began to blink.

  But it was already too late.

  As I raised the helmet, I heard a shot from outside, and with that shot I felt a premonition of doom. They did not seem the sort of men who would fire until they had a target.

  Dave had told me that the helmet's range was approximately a quarter of a mile. Then, given the time lag between the helmet's activation and the Hangman's sighting by the near guards, the Hangman had to be moving very rapidly. To this add the possibility that the Hangman's range on brainwaves might well be greater than the helmet's range on the Hangman. And then grant the possibility that he had utilized this factor while Senator Brockden was still lying awake, worrying. Conclusion: the Hangman might well be aware that I was where I was with the helmet, realize that it was the most dangerous weapon waiting for him, and be moving for a lightning strike at me before I could come to terms with the mechanism.

  I lowered it over my head and tried to throw all of my faculties into neutral.

  Again, the sensation of viewing the world through a sniperscope, with all the concomitant side-sensations. Except that world consisted of the front of the lodge;

  Bert, before the door, rifle at his shoulder; Larry, off to the left, arm already fallen from the act of having thrown a grenade. The grenade, we instantly realized, was an overshot; the flamer, at which he now groped, would prove useless before he could utilize it.

  Bert's next round ricocheted off our breastplate toward the left. The impact staggered us momentarily. The third was a miss. There was no fourth, for we tore the rifle from his grasp and cast it aside as we swept by, crashing into
the front door.

  The Hangman entered the room as the door splintered and collapsed.

  My mind was filled to the splitting point with the double vision of the sleek, gunmetal body of the advancing telefactor and the erect, crazy-crowned image of myself, left hand extended, laser pistol in my right, that arm pressed close against my side. I recalled the face and the scream and the tingle, knew again that awareness of strength and exotic sensation, and I moved to control it all as if it were my own, to make it my own, to bring it to a halt, while the image of myself was frozen to snapshot stillness across the room ...

  The Hangman slowed, stumbled. Such inertia is not canceled in an instant, but I felt the body responses pass as they should. I had him hooked. It was just a matter of reeling him in.

  Then came the explosion, a thunderous, groundshaking eruption right outside, followed by a hail of pebbles and debris. The grenade, of course. But awareness of its nature did not destroy its ability to distract.

  During that moment, the Hangman recovered and was upon me. I triggered the laser as I reverted to pure self-preservation, foregoing any chance to regain control of his circuits. With my left hand I sought for a strike at the midsection, where his brain was housed.

  He blocked my hand with his arm as he pushed the helmet from my head. Then he removed from my fingers the gun that had turned half of his left side red hot, crumpled it, and dropped it to the ground. At that moment, he jerked with the impacts of two heavy-caliber slugs. Bert, rifle recovered, stood in the doorway.

  The Hangman pivoted and was away before I could slap him with the smother charge.

  Bert hit him with one more round before he took the rifle and bent its barrel in half. Two steps and he had hold of Bert. One quick movement and Bert fell. Then the Hangman turned again and took several steps to the right, passing out of sight.

  I made it to the doorway in time to see him engulfed in flames, which streamed at him from a point near the comer of the lodge. He advanced through them. I heard the crunch of metal as he destroyed the unit. I was outside in time to see Larry fall and lie sprawled in the snow.