Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  Offenses big and small were duly noted by the big remorseless machine. The neighborhood quickly divided on the subject of the cleric robot, the metal minister that Pastor Paul proudly called “God’s spy.”

  This was the week when Nick heard his son include the Protector in his nightly prayers. Thad urged him “to smite sinners just the way Pastor Paul wants you to.” Thad had also begun drawing sketchy pictures of the machine and plastering them throughout the house. For her part, Emily bought from the church a large well-framed photograph of the Protector and hung it in the living room.

  And this was also the week when Natalie Avery disappeared.

  Two days into the desperate search for her, Wiggins, the chief of police, announced that he and Pastor Paul had found her broken body at the bottom of Indian Cliff. They also added that they’d found a suicide note in the pocket of the jacket she’d been wearing.

  Nick was just stepping off the commuter train for the day when Richard Avery, whom Nick had seen sitting at the back of the car, came up to him and grabbed his shoulder with such force Nick felt like his bones were about to crumble to powder.

  “Are you happy now, Nick? You drove her to this. She was so damned ashamed of what she did she couldn’t live with it any more. Stop over sometime and listen to my kids crying for their mother.”

  By now, commuters and wives alike were watching this soap opera moment.

  “Emily tells me that you haven’t shown any remorse at all. And I believe it.”

  Nick managed to slip out of the much bigger man’s grasp.

  “You destroyed my wife. And now you’re destroying your wife, too, Nick. You’re a sad excuse for a man.”

  At first the audience had seemed inclined to sympathize with Nick. But as Richard began talking with tears in his voice, the rest of the passengers shifted their sympathies to Richard.

  The couple that was giving Nick rides home these days, Donna and Hank Owens, sort of scooped him up and dragged him over to their car. He’d been humiliated and undone. He was now in a kind of shock.

  He didn’t say a word to his friends, just got out of the car when it reached his place.

  She let him get out of his suit coat and tie before she said: “I suppose you heard about Natalie.”

  “Yeah.”

  She studied his face. What did she hope to see exactly? The suffering of a lover who had just lost his true love?

  Emily said: “I won’t waste your time pretending that I cared for her. She tried to destroy my marriage. But I want you to know that I did what Pastor Paul told me to do. I prayed for her eternal soul. Which is something she probably wouldn’t have done for me. But I don’t know how much anybody’s prayers will help her. God doesn’t look favorably on suicide.”

  Five nights after Natalie’s suicide, a clandestine meeting was held in the basement of an abandoned retail store on the outskirts of God’s Arms. The basement was laced with cobwebs, the floor covered with rat droppings. The only light was a double-size electric lantern.

  The man who’d organized it, Dev Talbot, stood in front of all eight people he’d invited and said: “I’m taking a risk being here tonight. And so are you.”

  “I’m sick of the Protector,” Molly Hackett said. “I don’t care anymore if he catches me or not. He’s turned my twin daughters into neurotic wrecks. They hate to do any of the things they used to do. He’s written them up on the average of three times a week. They’re terrified he’ll send them to that stupid camp.”

  “Same with my two boys,” Sam Nealon said. “He just keeps writing them up.”

  From here the meeting became an angry chorus of voices. Tina Wayman concluded by saying: “There’s one problem. I’ve been asking people what they think of that damned machine and the biggest majority is all in favor of him. They all say they have photographs of him in their homes. They say they’ve never felt more protected or more holy. I couldn’t believe it. At the very least that thing is a pain in the butt.”

  Mild as her language was, five people laughed in shock. The fine folks of God’s Arms never talked that way, especially women.

  “Well, then what do we do about it?” Dev Talbot said.

  “I’d like to destroy it, if I could.”

  In just a few words, Nick had become the focus of the meeting.

  “You mean literally destroy it?” Dev said.

  “It’s just metal alloys and a computer for a brain. It wouldn’t like killing a person.”

  He’d been so caught up in his anger that he didn’t realize how the others were looking at him. Destroy the Protector? Apparently they’d been thinking of sending the parson a chilly letter of protest.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”

  He sat down.

  One man and one woman disappeared in the next ten days. Nobody believed that one disappearance had anything to do with the other. The woman had had an alcohol problem, the man a woman problem. It seemed he wanted to have sex with everybody but his wife.

  By this time, Nick was certain that the Protector was involved in both disappearances. Since the robot’s appearance, many things had changed in God’s Arms.

  Nick visited with the families of the two missing people. The visits were more awkward and emotional than Nick had feared. Especially the wife of the womanizer. Nick had never seen anyone so divided between love and hate.

  Despite the tensions his visits created, he went ahead and asked his questions, the main one being had the Protector given the missing people write-ups?

  Turned out, they’d both received more than simple write-ups. Both had been threatened with long stays in the Get Right with God compound and put on probation. But the woman slipped and got drunk twice and the man tried to talk two women from the community into sleeping with him.

  At home one evening, Nick heard Emily coming halfway down the basement stairs. “Pastor Paul is on the communicator for you.”

  “I’m sick of Pastor Paul.”

  “Could you please just once not embarrass me and take the call?”

  “All right. I’ll take it down here.”

  Pastor Paul said, “I didn’t now you had a sideline.” “A sideline?”

  “Yes, walking among us here in God’s Arms is a private detective.”

  The rest was predictable. Pastor Paul knew everything. “I’m not sure which is more disturbing—that you’d inflict your own paranoid fantasies on the families of those people whose spouses have disappeared—or that you’d like to destroy the Protector.”

  Nick’s jaw tensed. Somebody at the meeting had told Pastor Paul.

  “I think I could help you if you’d let me. My counseling skills have seemed to help a number of people in our community.”

  “I appreciate the offer but I’m too busy right now.”

  “I could work around your schedule. And we could meet for half an hour rather than the full hour. I’d even come to your house if you’d like. The Protector tells me you’ve been drinking a lot and that can’t be helpful to your wife or your children.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Then can we set up an appointment?”

  “I’m not going to do it, Parson. As I said, I appreciate the offer. But it’s not what I want to do right now. Goodnight.”

  Moments after he’d broke the communicator link, Nick heard Emily coming down to her midway point on the stairs. He glimpsed her legs beneath the hem of her dark skirt. She had wonderful legs.

  “That was my idea. The counseling.”

  “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t handle it right now.”

  “You mean you couldn’t ’handle’ Pastor Paul.”

  “If you want to put it that way, yes.”

  “In other words, you won’t go to church anymore. You won’t give up drinking. And you won’t quit harassing people about the Protector. Church attendance is up twenty-five percent, even on weeknights. The Protector makes us face our sins and that makes us better Christians.”

  �
�I’m sorry, Emily.” Then: “You know, our anniversary’s coming up next week. Think I could sleep in our bed with you that night?”

  “I’m sorry, Nick. I just couldn’t ’handle’ that.”

  Her footsteps were whispers as she went back up the stairs.

  The crack-up came two nights later.

  Not even Nick could understand it. He certainly hadn’t planned it. He was working in the garage when he glimpsed his neighbors standing at curbside, waiting for the Protector to pass by. Nick had expected the number of watchers to decline as the months had passed. But their numbers had only increased.

  Something happened to him in the moment. He had been looking through some storage boxes for the baseball glove he’d used as a boy—he was going to give it to Thad in hopes that his son would begin speaking to him again—when the sound of the cheering watchers flipped some cosmic switch inside him.

  He was certain now (but aren’t all paranoids certain?) that Natalie’s supposed suicide and the disappearances were the work of the Protector. He saw it as one of those profound explosions of insight said to be visited on Paul on the Road to Damascus and Gauguin throughout his life.

  Yes, Pastor Paul and his machine were behind all this.

  Without being completely aware of what he was doing, he stalked across the garage, picked up the baseball bat that had also once been his, and ran out of the garage.

  Look at it from the point of view of the watchers, he would think later, to them I appear a reasonable, if not always admirable, man in control of himself except or his “flirtation,” which by now was the stuff of neighborhood legend.

  You’re standing at the curb, cheering and offering up prayers to the Protector, knowing that he’s filing away your name and your demeanor, ever ready to write you up if need be . . . you’re standing at the curb, and then you see your neighbor—whom you’ve come to despise—running down his driveway into the street—

  —waving a ball bat above his head and—

  —screaming words so vile you literally have to clamp your hands over the ears of your children and—

  —here is he now.

  Running up behind the Protector without any hesitation at all and begins slamming the bat into the back of the Protector’s head.

  The crashing crunching metallic sound is hideous on the air of this otherwise tranquil neighborhood.

  But neighbor Nick must have lost all reason because even though his head has been severely damaged, the Protector scoots away quickly, leaving Nick to chase after him again.

  But he doesn’t get far.

  Because men and women alike have reached him by now and punch, kick, scratch, bite and otherwise beat him to the ground. Nick turns black, turns blue, turns bloody as he falls to the pavement while continuing his terrible cursing.

  And all his wife and kids can do is watch in disbelief and shame as Nick tries to avoid the worst of the beating.

  There is a little drama in the window now as Emily tries to keep Allison from wriggling out of her grasp.

  But it’s no good. Allison manages to get free. The side door of the house slams open as Allison bursts from the house and runs down the driveway to save her father.

  Before she can reach him, two neighbors grab her and march her back up to the house, where her mother takes charge.

  By now, Emily has to wonder if her daughter has had some kind of trauma-induced (seeing your father kicked and beaten half to death will do it) breakdown. Allison, sobbing harder than she ever had as an infant, collapses on the grass to the side of the back door.

  Thad says: “She’s worse than he is. You should leave her out here all night and see how she likes it.” Then he turns to see how things are going in the street.

  Three sky cop cars are descending with lights glaring, sweeping over the entire neighborhood, and a solemn voice admonishing the neighbors to stand away from the man on the ground or they will be zapped with a free-blaster, not a happy fate.

  Thad says: “We won’t have to worry about him anymore, Mom.”

  While Allison, on the ground, continues to wail and sob. . . .

  The rashes on his legs and arms, one of the Friends explained to Nick, were because of Nick’s reaction to one of the drugs they had been blasting into him.

  Nick didn’t smile about the rashes—they hurt—but he did smile when the Friend ended his explanation with one of the running clich’s in the camp: “That’s what friends are for.”

  Friends—otherwise known as guards.

  Nick knew what they were doing to him. They were programming him to become a candidate for Dad of The Year. Not only would be accepted by his former neighborhood, he would soon become a beacon of true and profound belief in both God and Parson Paul.

  Nothing new, really, just better drugs than were used by the Germans and Russians and the CIA in the last century.

  Like hell they would reprogram him.

  Nothing new in the way he escaped, either. On his way back from the Daily Sermon, he slipped away from the line of fellow sinners and crept down into the basement.

  He’d observed that twice a week enormous supply trucks pulled up to a dock near Building D. He had also observed, thanks to his affection for old crime movies, how easy if somewhat dangerous it was to fasten yourself to the undercarriage of a truck and hold on while it drove you unseen out through the gates.

  The problem was getting to the truck and getting underneath it without being seen.

  He spent the entire morning working on this problem. Then he saw two of the guards coming out of their station on the first floor of this building. There would be clean uniforms in there.

  By three-thirty, the time one of the trucks usually arrived, he had disguised himself sufficiently to walk the four hundred yards to the dock. Now the only problem was pitching himself under the truck without anybody seeing him. Cameras encircled the walls of the camp. Each constantly moved right to left, left to right approximately every fifteen seconds. If he was off by even a few seconds, the camera working these four hundred yards would catch him.

  He took a last look around. Nobody on the dock, nobody in sight on either side on the ground.

  He moved.

  His first two nights in the cave were miserable thanks to heavy and cold rain. No food, either. At least the rain gave him something to drink. He just stood out there with his palms up.

  He and Alison had discovered the cave on one of their hikes. They’d agreed to keep it their secret. When either of both of them just had to get away from the probes of Pastor Paul, this was where they came. They’d tried burying trail food and jerky here for future use, but the “dumb” animals weren’t so dumb after all. They always found it with no trouble.

  He slept and made plans. The plans changed constantly.

  On the fourth day, after waking from a midafternoon nap, his physical resources starting to wane, he sat up and found himself in the midst of a vision, a shard of dreams that still lingered.

  Alison bent down to come into the narrow but deep cave and said, “Oh, Daddy, I’m so glad I found you.”

  Her footsteps scuffing over the rocky floor told him she was real. And when she knelt next to him and put his arms around him, he couldn’t help himself. He began crying, letting out in convulsions all the fear, confusion and despair he’d felt during his time in the camp.

  She held him, the parent now, calming, reassuring her small and terrified little boy.

  And then she blessed him with a turkey sandwich she’d made when, she said, she’d snuck out of the house to go looking for him after her mother went to see Parson Paul.

  “I knew you’d come here, Dad.”

  He had to force himself to move past the shakes and the tears and realize that his daughter had given him hope again, even if the underpinnings of that hope were vague.

  As he gobbled the sandwich, she told him about the past few days when many men went searching for him, certain that he would come back God’s Arms because of Allison. Pastor Pa
ul and Richard Avery had practically moved into the house, questioning her relentlessly, convinced that she’d had contact with her father following his escape. Her brother had been deputized to make sure that under no circumstances was she to leave the house or answer the communicator. Her Pri phone was smashed. Her brother slept on a cot right outside her bedroom door. He was a light sleeper.

  “Mom is going to get a sanctioned divorce.”

  With a dab of mayo hanging off his upper lip, he sighed and said, “I’ve disgraced her. I don’t blame her. I sort of figured on it, anyway. I’m sure Richard’ll start moving on her in pretty fast. He’ll figure he gets revenge on me for Natalie and gets to marry a very attractive woman to boot.”

  “Pastor Paul says you’ll probably leave the community. He’s on the little tv station saying that you’re insane and dangerous and that we should pray for you to give camp another try before you leave.”

  He chewed the sandwich crust, still ravenous. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “You have any ideas?”

  “Probably move into New Chicago.”

  And then he heard them. They weren’t exactly professional trackers. They moved through the forest surrounding the cave making enough noise for a platoon of men.

  And he understood in an instant. Pounding and pounding on poor Allison for days, her mother and brother approving. But getting nothing from the daughter. So what was next? Maybe she hadn’t heard from her father. But what if they let her escape? Would she lead them to her father’s hiding place? Worth a try, the interrogation getting nowhere.

  Let her escape and then follow her.

  To him.

  Only now did Alison become aware of what her father knew a minute ago. She had been followed.

  Six men, led by Richard Avery, appeared from the woods just now. They were all carrying hunting rifles.