The Automated Goliath
by William F. Temple
PART ONE
Chapter 1
My name is Charles Wallace Magellan, which sounds like the kind of name that ought to mean something. My father was sure it would.
I always doubted it. But as things have turned out, he was right—but not in the way he expected. He’d always hoped I would follow his trade, and he taught me all he knew.
Well, I tried hard enough to follow him and be worthy of him. He was the greatest safe-cracker since the original of Jimmy Valentine. But the times were against me, as indeed they ran against Father during the latter half of his life.
A sort of febrile mechanical plague hit the world and the rash was permanent almost before anyone realized it. The plague was automation. After the initial delirium, mankind found it had been swept on into a very different world—the World of Plenty, the Age of Leisure. Adam’s curse had been lifted.
Which meant that most people found themselves out of a job. “Most people” included hitherto hard-working criminals like Father. Everyone could just help themselves to most of the material things they wanted—from the mechanical cornucopia. They largely lost the sense of the value of money. They left it lying around. Anyone could pick it up.
Safes went out of fashion like castles and moats, and for the same reason: there was no longer a need for them. It all but broke my father’s heart. It might have done so altogether, but he was good at kidding himself.
“It won’t last, son,” he told me, too often. “People have got too much of everything right now. Soon they’ll get bored to death. Why? Because men aren’t meant to be all on one level. Most folk just go* to have something the others haven’t got—a better diamond necklace, a better gold watch.”
My father was brilliant, but only in his own particular rut. Like most criminals, he was a creature of habit. Jewelry was his line. He knew the safest and least greedy fences. But machines could and did produce artificial gems bigger and better than the naturals. You could get them for a song.
The fences retired to grow tomatoes in their backyards. The professional ice-lifters turned to poker for excitement.
My father wasn’t fond of cards. He became aimless, introspective about the good old days. Often I happened on him brooding over his press clippings, with their gratifyingly large headlines: Cat-Burglar Lifts Hopeworth Rocks.
Then he’d tell me, over and over, just how he’d done it. But I never actually screamed out loud with boredom, because I loved him. One day the endless stories ended. I found him sprawled across one of his fat albums and thought he was asleep, until I saw the empty vial lying under his hand.
He didn’t leave a suicide note. He didn’t have to. I knew how the World of Satiety had stifled him with frustration. Until then, I’d taken that world as it came. Then, because it had killed my father, I started to hate it too. Irrationally, like a born criminal, I took my revenge on society.
I robbed people, manipulated them, made fools of them, and relished the resulting sense of power. I did it in the only way possible in such days. I was Magellan the Medium.
I read people’s minds and told them what they already knew—I never could see why they assumed that was evidence for survival. I made tables rap and levitate. In dimly lighted rooms I let “ectoplasm” assume whatever form my overeager sitters willed to imagine. Everyone was so anxious to perform my miracles for me.
In direct-voice sittings I was deceased uncles, aunts, wives, paramours. Never anyone’s kid, though—I’m sentimental. I found there was a widespread desire—and not only from the old folks—for assurance that another world existed beyond this land of milk and honey.
To relieve the tedium, I would introduce tonight’s celebrity. Julius Caesar, maybe, though I did a better job on Lincoln. My personal favorite was Napoleon Bonaparte. But the great were seldom a hit. The ordinary run of customers preferred to get the dope direct from the lips of Uncle Fred.
Oddly, the modern conception of paradise was a place where you weren’t just one of a pap-fed herd, but an individual allowed to do some sort of work for your living.
“I bake all the bread for our happy little community,” I would croak in the role of the late Mr. Guggenheim. And Guggenheim, Junior, all ears, would sigh enviously and mumble, “Sure wish I were there with you, Dad.”
I told the Guggenheims, the Smiths and the Jacksons what they wished to believe, made them happy, and made myself happy by accepting the gifts they offered in gratitude. I was a real benefit to the community I robbed. After a few years in business, I had the best collection of art and antiques in London, and a fine Georgian house on the heights of Hampstead.
My antiques included a Rolls car, the kind which ran by internal combustion. I got a kick out of steering it myself. The modern electronic self-driving car, which never ran into anything or broke down or lost the way, bored me. I’d as soon walk.
Hampstead, as ever, had a shifting population. Little colonies of foreigners were always forming, growing, fading, disappearing. A new one puzzled me somewhat. They were all weedy, undersized, sallow-faced men—I never saw any women. They conversed little in public. When they did, it was in a sibilant whisper. Their grammar and pronunciation were impeccable, but they were certainly un-English. Every s was a hiss. And they spoke flatly, without expression, like stage Chinese.
I couldn’t place the country but I guessed it was a hot one. Even on scorching summer days these people wore kapok-lined coats. If there was the slightest zephyr blowing, they’d turn up their collars and huddle in doorways.
I met more and more of them in the avenues around my house.
One day one knocked at my door. I opened it. There was something odd about his eyes—I’d noticed it with all of them. The irises were so black that the pupils hardly showed against them. The effect of two glassily blank disks regarding you was disturbing.
“Mr. Charles Magellan?” He said it with a pneumatic hiss.
“The one and only,” I admitted.
“I wish to discuss some business.” That bit sounded like a fight in a snakepit.
“By all means. Come on in.”
He came, treading so silently and closely behind me into my living room that I started when I turned and found him breathing in my ear.
“My name is Willoughby,” he said. It seemed highly unlikely, but I nodded and asked, “You wish to arrange for a sitting?”
He didn’t reply at once. His black marble eyes were taking in the room. Then he swung them on me and hissed, “I meant serious business.”
I liked him rather less than before, which was difficult. I put on my best bland smile and said, “My dear Mr. Willoughby, what can be more serious than conversing with the departed?”
He disregarded that. “The Government has need of this house. Perhaps we can arrange terms.”
My smile slipped somewhat. ” ‘We?’ You are the Government?”
“Part of it. I’m Assistant Under-Secretary to the Director.”
“Well, please accept my congratulations.”
“Possibly you aren’t aware that the Government owns all the houses in this vicinity except yours.”
“I wasn’t, Mr. Willoughby, but I am now. You want to complete your collection?”
“You might say that.”
“I just did say that. Tell me, aren’t the Houses of Parliament big enough to cage you these days?”
Willoughby began sibilantly to explain that the Director thought it expedient to have the members of his inner circle living in the same neighborhood so that extempore meetings could be held.
I lent him but half an ear—the one he had breathed in. Politics no longer interested me nor anyone else very much. T
hey had gone from bad to worse.
You were allowed to vote for your local scientific director. To show that democracy was still breathing, you had a choice of three. On polling day you were expected to press any of three buttons on the election panel, standard in every home.
Somewhere a computer would compute, and at midnight the lamp of victory would light over the winner’s button. I hadn’t waited up for it for years. I hadn’t pressed a button for years.
I—and most people—knew Mr. Green Button didn’t represent Smith, Jones, or Magellan. He represented an abstract called Science. Who really cared? There were no oppressed minorities, no shortages of anything, no injustices to get het up about.
Yet, aloofly listening to the fluting Willoughby, I began to ask myself if we shouldn’t have cared a bit more. Who knew, exactly, who the Government leaders were or what they were up to—excepting themselves?
Did whoever voted for this spindly, glass-eyed brother to the snake know who they were voting for? Were there any more in the Government like him? I began wondering about this colony of sallow runts. Recalling how they whispered conspiratorially when they met, I felt that there was something in the air and it didn’t smell like attar of roses.
I returned my whole attention to Willoughby. He was suggesting that in exchange for my Hillcrest the Government would hand over to me a fine mansion in Regent’s Park.
“Suppose I say no?”
“Then the Director would move that the Government employ its plenipotentiary powers to requisition this house.”
“In English, throw me out on my neck?”
Willoughby shrugged his almost nonexistent shoulders.
I decided it was time someone poked his nose into this viper’s nest, and that it might as well be my nose, it being immediately available. “Look, Willoughby, I’d like to discuss this directly with your Number One—the Director himself. If he can put it to me reasonably, then I’ll try to be reasonable too.”
“The Director,” said Willoughby icily, “has no time to waste on discussing minor issues like this.”
“I quite understand. I’m a busy man myself. Good-bye, Willoughby. When you call out the troops, tell them to apply at the tradesmen’s entrance, will you? Thanks.”
I hustled him out of the house and shut the heavy front door on him. Solid as it was, I knew it couldn’t shut out the Government. But I thought they’d tried to parley before they brought on the battering rams.
And they did make another approach, that very afternoon, through a more attractive medium than Willoughby.
The visaphone gong sounded melodiously, and then framed in the screen was the face of Helen of Troy—as I’d always pictured it. A truly classic blonde, with an exquisite coiffure of tight curls, a noble brow, a ruler-straight nose, a Grecian mouth, and azure eyes, calm and wide-set.
The vision spoke—and remained a vision. Her voice was as calm as her eyes, soft as her hair, sweet as her mouth. The words were everyday office jargon, but the way she said them they sounded like a Shakespearean sonnet.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Magellan. I am Sarah Masters, personal secretary to the Director. I understand you wish to see him about a matter concerning your house.”
Like Brutus, she paused for a reply. Like Romeo, I said, (but to myself): “Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?”
She smiled, and I—impressionable fool—was put altogether beyond speech, though she waited patiently for it. At length, she said: “Perhaps you would call on me first?”
I nodded stiffly.
“Say at five o’clock this afternoon?”
I managed another nod.
“The house is called Moravia, the next but two from your own, eastwards. Good-bye for now, Mr. Magellan.”
Properly then, the vision should have faded like a dream.
Instead of which it was cut off by the visaphone’s sharp disconnecting click. The screen and I were left staring blankly at each other. No woman had ever done anything like this to me before. In fact, I thought I had a natural gift for handling them. Charm was my most valuable stock in trade. Yet there was something about Sarah Masters which left me feeling like a bumbling adolescent.
I told myself I was a fool, but there I was at five to five hurrying along the old-fashioned gravel drive that led to Moravia. It was the second biggest house in the road; mine was the biggest.
As I climbed the steps, the front door opened by itself, welcomingly. Somewhere in the house someone was watching my approach—perhaps the divine Sarah herself. The coltish self-consciousness came seeping back. I beat it off and strode into the house as though I were royalty.
I was in a hall which ran through the house. At the far end of it another door was swinging open for me. I felt a touch of disappointment with the golden girl. I preferred to push a door rather than a button. I disliked the modern belief that opening and shutting doors by hand was manual labor.
Halfway along the hall, I paused. For coming faintly through a closed door on my right, was the sound of sibilant voices. Quite a gathering, it seemed to be.
I was never afraid of manual labor, so I opened that door by hand, very suddenly. A body of warm air flowed past me. I had crashed a committee meeting of maybe a dozen little snake-men with dirty yellow faces. They were seated at a long shiny table, hissing together in chorus, but not in English. It was a tongue unknown to me.
Only one was motionless and silent. He sat at the head of the table, facing me, and saw me at once. He raised his hand, palm outwards, and in an instant the rest became as silent as he. They turned to regard me with those black, pupil-less eyes. It was an eerie moment.
They remained as frozen as a tableau in a wax museum. They looked skinnier than ever, reed-slender. This was because they’d discarded their kapok-padded coats. They didn’t need them here. The heating was on full blast and the air was torrid.
The head man opened his small mouth tightly, the merest fraction, as though he were afraid I might see his tongue. Perhaps he was. Perhaps it was forked.
“You are?” he demanded, with authority.
“Yes, I am,” I admitted, with what in friendlier surroundings might have been a winning smile. Here I won nobody, least of all the head man.
A much pleasanter voice than his suddenly spoke behind me. “This is the wrong room, Mr. Magellan. Please come this way.”
Sarah, of course. When I turned and saw her, I gladly shut the little men up in their room again. She was of royal height, which meant that she was quite four inches taller than me. And her figure certainly needed no kapok padding.
She wore an ankle-length dress, tight-fitting, yet with long voluminous sleeves. It was pale yellow, filmy and insubstantial stuff. To my bemused mind she seemed to float down the hall ahead of me like an ethereal being.
We entered the room at the back of the house that I was intended to enter in the first place, and the door shut itself behind us with a vicious bang. It startled me, but not so much as the sight of the room did.
I’d had only the vaguest anticipation of what her room would be like. Something exotic, perhaps. Something very feminine, certainly. Instead of which it looked like a cross between an electronic laboratory and the control tower of an airport.
Two walls were like the multi-faceted eyes of a giant insect. Every facet was a TV or visaphone screen. Half of the screens were showing live but silent pictures. A third wall was mostly a control panel of switches and winking lights.
The fourth wall was a room-long window, framing much the same southern panoramic view visible from my own house: London, a few miles away and hundreds of feet below. The gray bubble dome of St. Paul’s was still a focal point in this London of 1986.
The floor was bare, brown marloneum, cold and business-like. Plumb center stood a severe metal desk barnacled with buttons. Beside it was a solitary chair. One of us was going to have to remain standing. Sarah decided who. She helped herself—but not me—to a cigarette from a box on the desk, seated herself, put he
r feet up on the desk, tilted her chair back so that she could lounge comfortably, lit up, and blew smoke at the ceiling.
This was not the way for a near-goddess to behave. I sensed the approach of disillusionment.
It came like a rocket. She turned hard eyes on me and said in a diamond-cutting voice, “Why the hell do you go out of your way to be awkward, you silly little man?”
I gaped at her, like a silly little man. The transformation had been so sudden. Nothing was left of Helen of Troy except her shape. This new personality was as tough and crude as a harpy and as friendly as a wildcat. The blue of her eyes had frozen to an ice-blue.
“I’m going to have your house, with or without your consent,” she said. “Make no mistake about that, Mr. Magellan the Medium. It makes no difference to me, either way, but it will to you if you don’t move out.”
I groped around inside and found my lost voice. “You want my house?”
“The Director promised it to me for my own use. For being such a helpful secretary.” She sounded ironical.
I felt I needed a cigarette and took one from the box.
“You and the Director can go jump in the Whitestone Pond. Arm in arm.”
She jumped, but not into the pond, She sprang up and hauled off at me. My unlit cigarette went spinning across the room. My ears rang like a peal of cracked bells. There was nothing ethereal about her right arm.
I stared at her contemptuously. This might have been effective if I hadn’t had to stare up at her. Then I turned to stalk with silent dignity from the room. I didn’t get far. The door was locked. I suspected it had locked itself when it slammed. No doubt it could be opened from inside the room at the touch of a button. But there were hundreds of buttons, and I was never lucky at games of chance.
I knew other ways to open it, but I needed tools.
Grim as an eagle, Sarah watched me. Hanging on to my dignity with both hands, I did an about face, walked back, picked up the chair and flung it at the wide window. Clank! The chair rebounded and thudded on the floor. The window wasn’t even cracked; it was clearplast, tough as steel.
The Automated Goliath Page 1