A Day in the Life

by Gardner Duzois

  With a sip, only a sip, the older man relaxed a little. “You may be out to trick me, young man. You may think that I am an old fool running an abandoned planet. You may even be thinking that killing this girl is some kind of a crime. It is not a crime at all. I am the Administrator of Henriada and I have ordered that girl killed every year for the last eighty years. She isn’t even a girl, to start with. Just an underperson. Some kind of an animal turned into a domestic servant. I can even appoint you a deputy sheriff. Or chief of detectives. That might be better. I haven’t had a chief of detectives for a hundred years and more. You are my chief of detectives. Go in tomorrow. The house is not hard to find. It’s the biggest and best house left on this planet. Go in tomorrow morning. Ask for her master and be sure that you use the correct title: The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. The robots will tell you to keep out. If you persist, she will come to the door. That’s when you will stab her through the heart, right there in the doorway. My groundcar will race up one metric minute later. You jump in and come back here. We’ve been through this before. Why don’t you agree? Don’t you know who I am?”

  “I know perfectly well”—Casher O’Neill smiled—“who you are, Mr. Commissioner and Administrator. You are the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, once of Earth Two. After all, the Instrumentality itself gave me a permit to land on this planet on private business. They knew who I was too, and what I wanted. There’s something funny about all this. Why should you give me a power cruiser—the best ship, you yourself say, in your whole fleet—just for killing one modified animal which looks and talks like a girl? Why me? Why the visitor? Why the man from off-world? Why should you care whether this particular underperson is killed or not? If you’ve given the order for her death eighty times in eighty years, why hasn’t it been carried out long ago? Mind you, Mr. Administrator, I’m not saying no. I want that cruiser. I want it very much indeed. But what’s the deal? What’s the trick? Is it the house you want?”

  “Beauregard? No, I don’t want Beauregard. Old Madigan can rot in it for all that I care. It’s between Ambiloxi and Mottile, on the Gulf of Esperanzi. You can’t miss it. The road is good. You could drive yourself there.”

  “What is it, then?” Casher’s voice had an edge of persistence to it.

  The Administrator’s response was singular indeed. He filled his huge inhaler glass with the potent byegarr. He stared over the full glass at Casher O’Neill as if he were an enemy. He drained the glass. Casher knew that that much liquor, taken suddenly, could kill the normal human being.

  The Administrator did not fall over dead.

  He did not even become noticeably more drunk.

  His face turned red and his eyes almost popped out, as the harsh 160–proof liquor took effect, but he still did not say anything. He just stared at Casher. Casher, who had learned in his long exile to play many games, just stared back.

  The Administrator broke first.

  He leaned forward and burst into a birdlike shriek of laughter. The laughter went on and on until it seemed that the man had hogged all the merriment in the galaxy. Casher snorted a little laugh along with the man, more out of nervous reflex than anything else, but he waited for the Administrator to stop laughing.

  The Administrator finally got control of himself. With a broad grin and a wink at Casher, he poured himself four fingers more of the byegarr into his glass, drank it down as if he had had a sip of cream, and then—only very slightly unsteady—stood up, came over and patted Casher on the shoulder.

  “You’re a smart boy, my lad. I’m cheating you. I don’t care whether the power cruiser is there or not. I’m giving you something which has no value at all to me. Who’s ever going to take a power cruiser off this planet? It’s mined. It’s abandoned. And so am I. Go ahead. You can have the cruiser. For nothing. Just take it. Free. Unconditionally.”

  This time it was Casher who leaped to his feet and stared down into the face of the feverish, wanton little man.

  “Thank you, Mr. Administrator!” he cried, trying to catch the hand of the administrator so as to seal the deal.

  Rankin Meiklejohn looked awfully sober for a man with that much liquor in him. He held his right hand behind his back and would not shake.

  “You can have the cruiser, all right. No terms. No conditions. No deal. It’s yours. But kill that girl first! Just as a favor to me. I’ve been a good host. I like you. I want to do you a favor. Do me one. Kill that girl. At two seventy-five in the morning. Tomorrow.”

  “Why?” asked Casher, his voice loud and cold, trying to wring some sense out of the chattering man.

  “Just—just—just because I say so . . .” stammered the Administrator.

  “Why?” asked Casher, cold and loud again.

  The liquor suddenly took over inside the Administrator. He groped back for the arm of his chair, sat down suddenly and then looked up at Casher. He was very drunk indeed. The strange emotion, the elusive fatigue-despair, had vanished from his face. He spoke straightforwardly. Only the excessive care of his articulation would have shown a passerby that he was drunk.

  “Because, you fool,” said Meiklejohn, “those people, more than eighty in eighty years, that I have sent to Beauregard with orders to kill the girl . . . Those people—” he repeated, and stopped speaking, clamping his lips together.

  “What happened to them?” asked Casher calmly and persuasively.

  The Administrator grinned again and seemed to be on the edge of one of his wild laughs.

  “What happened?” shouted Casher at him.

  “I don’t know,” said the Administrator. “For the life of me, I don’t know. Not one of them ever came back.”

  “What happened to them? Did she kill them?” cried Casher.

  “How would I know?” said the drunken man, getting visibly more sleepy.

  “Why didn’t you report it?”

  This seemed to rouse the Administrator. “Report that one little girl had stopped me, the planetary Administrator? Just one little girl, and not even a human being! They would have sent help, and laughed at me. By the Bell, young man, I’ve been laughed at enough! I need no help from outside. You’re going in there tomorrow morning. At two seventy-five, with a knife. And a groundcar waiting.”

  He stared fixedly at Casher and then suddenly fell asleep in his chair. Casher called to the robots to show him to his room; they tended to the master as well.

  II

  The next morning at two seventy-five sharp, nothing happened. Casher walked down the baroque corridor, looking into beautiful barren rooms. All the doors were open.

  Through one door he heard a sick deep bubbling snore.

  It was the Administrator, sure enough. He lay twisted in his bed. A small nursing machine was beside him, her white-enameled body only slightly rusty. She held up a mechanical hand for silence and somehow managed to make the gesture seem light, delicate and pretty, even from a machine.

  Casher walked lightly back to his own room, where he ordered hotcakes, bacon and coffee. He studied a tornado through the armored glass of his window, while the robots prepared his food. The elastic trees clung to the earth with a fury which matched the fury of the wind. The trunk of the tornado reached like the nose of a mad elephant down into the gardens, but the flora fought back. A few animals whipped upward and out of sight. The tornado then came straight for the house, but did not damage it outside of making a lot of noise.

  “We have two or three hundred of those a day,” said a butler robot. “That is why we store all spacecraft underground and have

  no weather machines. It would cost more, the people said, to make this planet livable than the planet could possibly yield. The radio and news are in the library, sir. I do not think that the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn will wake until evening, say seven-fifty or eight o’clock.”

  “Can I go out?”

  “Why not, sir? You are a true man. You do what you wish.”

  “I mean is it safe for me to go out?”

  “Oh
, no, sir! The wind would tear you apart or carry you away.”

  “Don’t people ever go out?”

  “Yes, sir. With groundcars or with automatic body armor. I have been told that if it weighs fifty tons or better, the person inside is safe. I would not know, sir. As you see, I am a robot. I was made here, though my brain was formed on Earth Two, and I have never been outside this house.”

  Casher looked at the robot. This one seemed unusually talkative. He chanced the opportunity of getting some more information.

  “Have you ever heard of Beauregard?”

  “Yes, sir. It is the best house on this planet. I have heard people say that it is the most solid building on Henriada. It belongs to the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. He is an Old North Australian, a renunciant who left his home planet and came here when Henriada was a busy world. He brought all his wealth with him. The underpeople and robots say that it is a wonderful place on the inside.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Oh, no, sir. I have never left this building.”

  “Does the man Madigan ever come here?”

  The robot seemed to be trying to laugh, but did not succeed. He answered, very unevenly, “Oh, no, sir. He never goes anywhere.”

  “Can you tell me anything about the female who lives with him?”

  “No sir,” said the robot.

  “Do you know anything about her?”

  “Sir, it is not that. I know a great deal about her.”

  “Why can’t you talk about her, then?”

  “I have been commanded not to, sir.”

  “I am,” said Casher O’Neill, “a true human being. I herewith countermand those orders. Tell me about her.”

  The robot’s voice became formal and cold. “The orders cannot be countermanded, sir.”

  “Why not?” snapped Casher. “Are they the Administrator’s?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Hers,” said the robot softly, and left the room.

  III

  Casher O’Neill spent the rest of the day trying to get information; he obtained very little.

  The Deputy Administrator was a young man who hated his chief.

  When Casher, who dined with him—the two of them having a poorly cooked state luncheon in a dining room which would have seated five hundred people—tried to come to the point by asking bluntly, “What do you know about Murray Madigan?” he got an answer which was blunt to the point of incivility.

  “Nothing.”

  “You never heard of him?” cried Casher.

  “Keep your troubles to yourself, mister visitor,” said the Deputy Administrator. “I’ve got to stay on this planet long enough to get promoted off. You can leave. You shouldn’t have come.”

  “I have,” said Casher, “an all-world pass from the Instrumentality.”

  “All right,” said the young man. “That shows that you are more important than I am. Let’s not discuss the matter. Do you like your lunch?”

  Casher had learned diplomacy in his childhood, when he was the heir apparent to the dictatorship of Mizzer. When his horrible uncle, Kuraf, lost the rulership, Casher had approved of the coup by the Colonels Wedder and Gibna; but now Wedder was supreme and enforcing a period of terror and virtue. Casher thus knew courts and ceremony, big talk and small talk, and on this occasion he let the small talk do. The young Deputy Administrator had only one ambition, to get off the planet Henriada and never to see or hear of Rankin Meiklejohn again.

  Casher could understand the point.

  Only one curious thing happened during dinner.

  Toward the end, Casher slipped in the question, very informally: “Can underpeople give orders to robots?”

  “Of course,” said the young man. “That’s one of the reasons we use underpeople. They have more initiative. They amplify our orders to robots on many occasions.”

  Casher smiled. “I didn’t mean it quite that way. Could an underperson give an order to a robot which a real human being could not then countermand?”

  The young man started to answer, even though his mouth was full of food. He was not a very polished young man. Suddenly he stopped chewing and his eyes grew wide. Then, with his mouth half full, he said, “You are trying to talk about this planet, I guess. You can’t help it. You’re on the track. Stay on the track, then. Maybe you will get out of it alive. I refuse to get mixed up with it, with you, with him and his hateful schemes. All I want to do is to leave when my time comes.”

  The young man resumed chewing, his eyes fixed steadfastly on his plate.

  Before Casher could pass off the matter by making some casual remark, the butler robot stopped behind him and leaned over. “Honorable sir, I heard your question. May I answer it?”

  “Of course,” said Casher softly.

  “The answer, sir,” said the butler robot, softly but clearly, “to your question is no, no, never. That is the general rule of the civilized worlds. But on this planet of Henriada, sir, the answer is yes.”

  “Why?” asked Casher.

  “It is my duty, sir,” said the robot butler, “to recommend to you this dish of fresh artichokes. I am not authorized to deal with other matters.”

  “Thank you,” said Casher, straining a little to keep himself looking imperturbable.

  Nothing much happened that night, except that Meiklejohn got up long enough to get drunk all over again. Though he invited Casher to come and drink with him, he never seriously discussed the girl except for one outburst.

  “Leave it till tomorrow. Fair and square. Open and aboveboard. Frank and honest. That’s me. I’ll take you around Beauregard myself. You’ll see it’s easy. A knife, eh? A traveled young man like you would know what to do with a knife. And a little girl too. Not very big. Easy job. Don’t give it another thought. Would you like some apple juice in your byegarr?”

  Casher had taken three contraintoxicant pills before going to drink with the ex-Lord, but even at that he could not keep up with Meiklejohn. He accepted the dilution of apple juice gravely, gracefully and gratefully.

  The little tornadoes stamped around the house. Meiklejohn, now launched into some drunken story of ancient injustices which had been done to him on other worlds, paid no attention to them. In the middle of the night, past nine-fifty in the evening, Casher woke alone in his chair, very stiff and uncomfortable. The robots must have had standing instructions concerning the Administrator, and had apparently taken him off to bed. Casher walked wearily to his own room, cursed the thundering ceiling and went to sleep again.

  IV

  The next day was very different indeed.

  The Administrator was as sober, brisk and charming as if he had never taken a drink in his life.

  He had the robots call Casher to join him at breakfast and said, by way of greeting, “I’ll wager you thought I was drunk last night.”

  “Well . . .” said Casher.

  “Planet fever. That’s what it was. Planet fever. A bit of alcohol keeps it from developing too far. Let’s see. It’s three-sixty now. Could you be ready to leave by four?”

  Casher frowned at his watch, which had the conventional twenty-four hours.

  The Administrator saw the glance and apologized. “Sorry! My fault, a thousand times. I’ll get you a metric watch right away. Ten hours a day, a hundred minutes an hour. We’re very progressive here on Henriada.”

  He clapped his hands and ordered that a watch be taken to Casher’s room, along with the watch-repairing robot to adjust it to Casher’s body rhythms.

  “Four, then,” he said, rising briskly from the table. “Dress for a trip by groundcar. The servants will show you how.”

  There was a man already waiting in Casher’s room. He looked like a plump, wise ancient Hindu, as shown in the archaeology books. He bowed pleasantly and said, “My name is Gosigo. I am a forgetty, settled on this planet, but for this day I am your guide and driver from this place to the mansion of Beauregard.”

  Forgett
ies were barely above underpeople in status. They were persons convicted of various major crimes, to whom the courts of the worlds, or the Instrumentality, had allowed total amnesia instead of death or some punishment worse than death, such as the planet Shayol.

  Casher looked at him curiously. The man did not carry with him the permanent air of bewilderment which Casher had noticed in many forgetties. Gosigo saw the glance and interpreted it.

  “I’m well enough now, sir. And I am strong enough to break your back if I had the orders to do it.”

  “You mean damage my spine? What a hostile, unpleasant thing to do!” said Casher. “Anyhow, I rather think I could kill you first if you tried it. Whatever gave you such an idea?”

  “The Administrator is always threatening people that he will have me do it to them.”

  “Have you ever really broken anybody’s back?” asked Casher, looking Gosigo over very carefully and rejudging him. The man, though shorter than Casher, was luxuriously muscled; like many plump men, he looked pleasant on the outside but could be very formidable to an enemy.

  Gosigo smiled briefly, almost happily. “Well, no, not exactly.”

  “Why haven’t you? Does the Administrator always countermand his own orders? I should think that he would sometimes be too drunk to remember to do it.”

  “It’s not that,” said Gosigo.

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  “I have other orders,” said Gosigo, rather hesitantly. “Like the orders I have today. One set from the Administrator, one set from the Deputy Administrator, and a third set from an outside source.”

  “Who’s the outside source?”

  “She has told me not to explain just yet.”

  Casher stood stock still. “Do you mean who I think you mean?”

  Gosigo nodded very slowly, pointing at the ventilator as though it might have a microphone in it.

  “Can you tell me what your orders are?”

  “Oh, certainly. The Administrator has told me to drive both himself and you to Beauregard, to take you to the door, to watch you stab the undergirl, and to call the second groundcar to your rescue. The Deputy Administrator has told me to take you to Beauregard and to let you do as you please, bringing you back here by way of Ambiloxi if you happen to come out of Mr. Murray’s house alive.”