by neetha Napew
Duty. Murder. Duty.
I sighted on the lead man, wrapped a finger around the trigger, and promptly put the gun down without shooting. I had lost the battle with myself. Or, perhaps, I had won it. After fifteen years of living and breathing the code of a physician, after eight years of practicing that code, I could not fire at the man. The incident last night had been a freak. I had acted by reflex, under pressure. That was not the same as cold-blooded murder. Not the same at all.
The troops were crossing the open space quickly, hunched and running, guns held out to their sides, obviously expecting a bullet in the shoulder or face at any minute. I turned and ran to the cellar door, went down the steps two at a time . . .
“Jacob!”
It was an excuse to go down, and I knew it. There was danger, yes, but I had confronted Him now chiefly because my curiosity needed salving.
“Jacob, you shouldn’t have!”
And, truly, maybe I shouldn’t have. I stopped and moved back against the wall, unable to speak. He had changed more than I had guessed. I knew that He was not human, but I had not been prepared for this. He filled half the cellar, a great pulsing mass of hideous, veined flesh, reddish-brown in color with patches of black cancer-like cells pocketing Him. He was attached to the walls with pseudopods that bored away into the stone, anchoring Him. To my left, a tangle of fleshy membranes and tubes formed his vocal apparatus. A deformed, overlarge mouth was set in a fold of flesh. There were no teeth in it and no evidence of the rest of His face anywhere around it. It was obviously just for communicating with me. I sensed, without being told, that He no longer consumed His food as a man would, but more like an amoeba, engulfing it whole.
Frankenstein! my mind screamed.
That strange, horrid laughter came again, freezing me even more solidly to the floor. I choked down my terror and concentrated on remembering Him as He had been—and remembering the promises He had made, the promises to help mankind if only I could gain Him some time, time enough. Well, now was the moment when I would discover His true nature and the value of all promises. “They’re coming,” I said. “I was going to shoot some of them to hold them up—but I can’t.”
“I know,” He said. His voice was one of compassion and friendship. He was silent a moment. The vocal apparatus writhed, enlarged, grew into a many-petaled flower. When He spoke again, it was with His old voice. “I’ve been meaning to work on that all along,” He said apologetically, referring to the ominous voice He had used before. “Just didn’t have the time.”
“What will you do?” I asked.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I leaped, my heart pounding. He laughed.
I turned, expecting the WA police with guns, handcuffs, and nasty faces. Instead, I stood looking at an android, an exact copy of Him as He had been back at the laboratory. “It’s you!” I managed to say.
“I made it,” He said. “It is a different facet of the same jewel, another me, not just another android. It has all the abilities I have gathered through the steps of my transformation, but has them without making those same transformations itself.”
“But what purpose—“
Frankenstein, Frankenstein!
“To help mankind, as I told you, Jacob. Forget your Frankensteins. Yes, I have known what you’ve been thinking. Another ability of mine. But I certainly don’t hold anything against you. I couldn’t even if I should, because I have developed above the level of revenge and vendetta. Jacob, believe me, I only want to help mankind. I can use my powers to liberate each man’s brain so that it is one hundred percent operable as is mine. Every man can become a superman.”
“And develop into what you’ve become?”
“No, no, no. This is only a stage, Jacob, that a few android facets of me will have to undergo in order to produce more androids—a highly sophisticated form of budding. That’s how I created this other me. Man will always look like Man, but will now have abilities far beyond anything he ever dreamed of.”
I believed Him now. There was nothing else for me to do. “Then we’ll explain it to the police—“
“No, Jacob,” He said. “There will be a long, drawn-out fight before I am accepted by mankind. We have to play for more time.”
“How, for God’s sake!” I thought of the advancing troops.
“You’ll take this one with you and let them kill him. They’ll think they have finished off the menace of the Android-Who-Wouldn’t-Take-Orders. That will give me time enough.”
I stood, looking at the android who would die, the part of Him that was to be sacrificed. “One thing,” I said.
“What is that, Jacob?” He could read my mind and find out, but He was being polite and letting me have my speeches.
“What will we do for room? You’ll not only be making Man nearly immortal, but you’ll be flooding the world with replicas of yourself, with Doppelgängers. Where will we put everyone?”
“With his entire intellect at hand, with all of his brain open to use, Man will move out into the stars, Jacob. There are no limits any longer. There is more than enough room, Jacob. I saw to that.”
“You saw to it?”
“When I formed it, Jacob. When I created the universe.”
I choked, almost fell. The new android gripped me and grinned His old grin. I looked back to the blob of tissue pulsing before me. “You are trying to say that—“
“You had no idea how unusual my flesh was, did you, Jacob? It’s the flesh, Jacob. Sorry to break it to you so suddenly, but—as you know—there is so very little time. The soldiers are almost at the front door, by the way. You had better get my other self upstairs and let them kill him. I won’t let them do anything to you, Jacob. As soon as things are straightened out here, I’ll send one of my selves to you. I’ll always be with you.”
I turned and started up the stairs behind the android. My mind was spinning wildly, unable to settle on any orderly thought progression.
“And Jacob,” He said behind me. I turned. “Man will not be nearly immortal. He will be completely immortal. The time has come. There will soon be an end to death.”
We went upstairs into the living room. We walked to the door and threw it open, stepping onto the porch overlooking all that grand scenery. He walked down the steps into the snow, His arms outstretched, and they shot Him. Half a dozen marksmen opened fire. He jerked spasmodically, danced across the white carpet, and crashed to His face, blood pouring out of His body in twenty different places.
I raised my hands and stepped outside. It was Him they wanted to kill. They would take me prisoner and decide my fate later. Two WA policemen flanked me, cuffed my hands together, and led me across the frozen earth toward the copter on the far hill.
It was not snowing at all now. The wind had ceased to blow.
Once, I looked back at the bloody corpse. He had said there would soon be an end to death. I realized that this could not be called death. Not really. They had merely shot a husk. He lived on in the amoeboid flesh in the old ice cellar. And there would be thousands of other husks shortly. He was with us at last. He. And, of course, His name had always been spelled with a capital letter. He . . . Man was moving out. Man was immortal. The mystery of His flesh wrapped us like a blanket and carried us into the New World.
TWO: The enemy is self . . .
X
New York City is a weird conglomeration of old, new and experimental that staggers the mind of anyone who has not lived in a city its size. Harboring approximately eighty-five million souls, it is the second largest metropolis in the world. Size alone would be enough to awe men from urban areas (which comprise sixty percent of North America) where only a few hundred thousand live in small communities, for his neighborhood still supports individual houses (though even there they are beginning to dwindle in number), still has streets open to the air and paved of concrete and macadam, still permits automobiles on roads other than the mammoth freeways. New York City, of course, has none of these things.
/> All of New York City’s inhabitants live in high-rise apartment buildings, some as long as three and four blocks, the newest ones towering to two-hundred stories in some places. You can get a one-bedroom apartment or anything up to eight bedrooms, living room, dining room, two dens, playroom, reception room, two kitchens, and a library. These last suites are few and far between, for even in our Great Democracy, there are just not that many citizens able to shell out four thousand poscreds a month for a place to live. And to buy it—make certain you’ve just hit the first new oil well in the last ten years, have found a way to triple the life of a car battery between rechargings, or have discovered the answer to the food problem so that all the synthetic meats will taste as juicy and tender as the real thing.
And New York, of course, no longer has conventional streets, and would not allow an automobile into its great, throbbing mass of humanity even if it did. There is just no more room for individual vehicles in a metropolis of this size. Imagine eighty-five million people out on the roads of one city, and you’ll have some idea of the sort of traffic jam that the city fathers used to have nightmares about before the Renovation.
Renovation . . . That period of the city’s history was a landmark not only for the city and the nation, but for the entire world. There was a time when New York City was a part of New York State. During this time, the mayor could get little if any aid from the state government in Albany. The state was glad to take sales tax and state income tax from the metropolis’ citizens, but was reluctant to pay back on an equal basis. Finally, when the situation became critical, when the city had an unbearable population of fifty-seven million, the mayor and the council arranged to bring before the people of the city a proposal that they seek to become another state. This was shortly before World Authority began to function as a valid international organization. The vote was cast and returned in favor of the proposal. The mayor proceeded to declare the city independent of the state.
The Governor, a rather stupid man who had been elected because of his appearance and his family name, who had been nominated for his faithful party work for thirty years, and who had been allowed into party politics in the first place simply because his family was a large contributor to candidate funds, thought the city’s proclamation could be laughed off. He cut off all state funds to the city and sat back to wait them out.
He never finished waiting. The city leveled its own income tax, now that it did not have to worry about state levies at a percentage just above what they would need to start renovating the metropolis, and just below what the citizens would accept without revolution. There followed a ten-year building program wherein the city was restructured to accommodate its people. Space previously given over to streets was done away with. Instead, a series of underground tubes, much faster and more extensive than the subways, was installed. The existing buildings were connected with new sections of new buildings, until most of the city was one structure. Then, shoved through these structures, other transportation facilities were constructed, especially the computer-channeled Bubble Drops that webbed the city with hundreds of thousands of tubeways in which single-passenger plastic bubbles were bulleted along by compressed air cartridges slung under them. The interior of each of the tubeways was perhaps two feet wider than necessary to accept the bubbles. Projecting from the walls were thousands of soft wire cilia per square foot. When a capsule shot by these, the pressure they exerted on the cilia helped the computer to keep track of the exact position of all capsules in the network. With the new subways, the Bubble Drops, the ever-present high-speed elevators, the conveyor-belts pedways that connected the city on twelve different levels, and the buildings grown together into one structure tens of miles square and as much as a mile and a half high, New York City became an anthill of sorts, a colony closed off from the sun, a maze of corridors and rooms and pedways and tubes. But it survived. And survived so well that the Renovation was used as a pattern for other troubled cities in other parts of the world. The food problem for the ballooning population had been solved long ago through the culture vats for synthe-meats and the hydroponics farms that produced huge quantities of fat vegetables. Now, at last, the problem of living space and big-city transportation had been licked. As long as the population could be maintained at its present point, the world would survive.
After the WA boys arrested me in Cantwell, outside Harry’s cabin, I was taken to the great city, landed by helicopter on the roof of one of the highest sectors of the city. They hustled me onto the roof, keeping their guns in their hands as if I were some mad killer, some psychotic who had poisoned the water supply or planted a bomb in a community meeting cellar. We walked across the tarmac to a small extension of one of the building’s elevator shafts, signaled for the cab, and got in when it arrived. We dropped so fast that my stomach tried to crawl up my throat. We went down and down, until I knew that we had gone below the ground floor and under the surface, perhaps as deep as fifteen or twenty floors under ground level.
We got out of the elevator and stepped into a tunnel-like corridor lighted by inset blue fluorescents, spotlessly clean, decorated in blue and white tile. Every so often, the continuity of the floor-tile pattern would be broken by large letters—WA—formed out of green tile and bent to form a globe. We walked perhaps a block until we came to a widening of the passage. Here, a man sat at a broad desk, surrounded by panels of electronic instruments and a huge board with fifty television screens off to his right. Each of the screens was no more than three inches by three inches, and each had a different picture on it, though the details of the various scenes were almost too small to decipher. We stopped before this desk and waited.
The man at the desk was pudgy and had a second chin that puffed out farther than his first. His arms were like large, ready-to-burst sausages as they swept over the controls on the desk. Oddly, his head was luxuriant with black-gray hair that was obviously the result of Volper Stimulants to correct baldness. If he did not mind being heavy, why did he mind being bald? He did not look up at us immediately, but flipped another switch and turned to his right in his swivel chair. One of the three-inch screens on the big board moved out from the wall on an extensor arm, glided four feet, right up to his face, and stopped. The man examined the scene carefully. I could see what it was now: a cell. Each of those screens represented a cell in a maximum security prison, and the men in those cells were almost constantly being observed. When the clerk was satisfied with the behavior of the prisoner he was watching, he directed the extensor arm back, and the screen settled into its niche in the board. At last, he turned to us and said, “Yes?”
“Kennelmen,” the armed guard on my right said.
The jailer’s eyebrows raised an inch.
“You want us to stay with him?” the guard asked.
“No,” the jailer said. “Just wait until I get my Clancy hooked up to him. He won’t bother me then.”
I had heard about the Clancy used by WA police, though I had never had occasion to see one in use-let alone being attached to one. The Clancy is a robot, only as large as a beachball, spherical. Extending from apposite halves of its ball-shaped body are two strong, steel-nickle cable tentacles that terminate in handcuffs of a peculiar design. The cuffs are really heavier loops of the cable with a structured elasticity that allows them to conform to whatever wrist-size they are expected to encompass. Yet, the Clancy is more than a sophisticated set of cuffs. It floats before the prisoner on its anti-grav plate, directly out from his chest, three or four feet away (they had the same problem with anti-grav plates as they did with Kesey’s magnetic sleds: the plates can only be developed to a limited size, eighteen inches by eighteen inches. From then on, the field they generate is so erratic as to be totally unsafe. But the Clancy is the right size and can make good use of the anti-grav mechanisms). The cop can tell the Clancy where to take the prisoner, and the Clancy obeys, dragging its keep behind. If the prisoner gets unruly, the Clancy has a very efficient method of settling him down. T
he cuffs are contracted around the wrists, tighter and tighter, until the pain convinces the scoundrel that he really doesn’t mind being arrested. If that doesn’t work, the cables can transmit a stunning shock from the Clancy’s battery. In short, the Clancy is the policeman’s best friend.
Why a name like Clancy? Well, it was this Irish cop that originally came up with the idea of using the grav-plates for such a purpose, patented the idea, and named it after himself. Probably the only cop in the city’s history to immortalize himself.
The jailer worked over his switches and dials, then turned to the wall behind him. A moment later, a section of the wall slid up, the blue Clancy sphere floated out, its cable tentacles dangling to either side like thick lanks of greasy hair. The jailer directed it, then leaned back and watched as it set about doing its duty.
I tensed as the machine came toward me, moving silently, evenly, its single sight receptor nodule (set at the top and able to scan in all directions) shimmering a pretty green. The tentacles snaked out, the loop of cuffs opened at the end so that the cuff looked like two fingers or talons. The talons slipped around my right hand and tightened, even though I tried to pull away. I offered my left hand without battle. Still following the jailer’s instructions, the Clancy led me to the sliding door in the wall and opened it by emitting an audible beep. Beyond, the tunnel-like corridor continued. With the Clancy dragging me along, we went through the door into the WA prison. The door slid shut behind.
Once, I tried to work against the machine. I set my heels and refused to move. It tugged at me, harder and harder, then jerked so suddenly that I tipped forward, staggered, could not regain my balance, and went down on my shoulder on the hard floor. The Clancy floated above, tilted a bit so that its sight nodule could scan me. Its tentacles were stretched to the limit. It tried to pull me up, but could not manage the task. Then I felt the tightening of the cuffs. My hands began to grow numb and took on a bluish coloration. When it grew painful enough, I gave up this childishness and stood. I cooperated from then on.