We both looked down at the chair, then up at each other. Suddenly, she threw back her head and laughed. Not an unpleasant laugh, either; there was real humor in it.
I grinned for no reason.
She picked up the cigarette box and proffered it. “Try another one.”
I did and lit it successfully.
She said, in a voice several degrees warmer, though still lacking the old poetry, “As you refuse to be reasonable, I’m to keep you here another hour—on the Director’s instructions. The general transmission has been delayed an hour, you see, and Willoughby reported you haven’t a TV set in your home.”
“Did he now, the old telltale! True, though. I’ve no use for TV or anything it stands for. And I don’t want to see any transmission, general or particular.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to, Magellan. While we’re waiting for it, we may as well have a friendly chat. As one charlatan to another, how’s tricks in the spirit world?”
“Hm. So you’ve been checking up on me, Sarah. As one charlatan to another, what racket are you mixed up in here?”
She looked at me narrowly, then drew at her cigarette.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. So I’ll tell you—some of it. They’re letting the cat out of the bag today, anyhow.”
So she told me, and at length. And duly I didn’t believe her. It was a mad story; the little men were mad, and she was maddest of all.
The little men, she said, certainly came from a hot climate, but from no tropics of Earth. She didn’t know the point of origin but according to a prearranged plan they were spreading over the Galaxy. And they’d been following this plan for hundreds of thousands of years.
They were the Makkees.
Compared with a Makkee’s span of life, a man endured no longer than a butterfly. Yet they were humanoid too. And they were assuming the direction of every humanoid race they had discovered in their enormously long history of space exploration.
They always began by sending an advance party which infiltrated into such governmental bodies as they found—and ended by becoming those governments.
“Top-flight con men, huh?” I said, humoring her. “How do they go about it?”
“They have their methods,” she said cryptically. “And I’m not such a fool as to blab about them, either. Physically, the Makkees are soft. They like their comfort. You might call the press-button their emblem. Don’t let that give you any wrong ideas. In every other way they’re tougher than clearplast, harder than marloneum. Words like ‘mercy’ or ‘pity’ or ‘justice’ simply aren’t in their dictionary. But neither is ‘cruelty.’ If it would further their ends they would kill any man, woman or child. But not from cruelty. Only from logic.”
“Moral morons, you mean.”
She laughed, but there was no humor in it this time.
“Morality is for morons—you’ve got your wires crossed,” she said, and the rosebud lips took on an ugly twist. “Morons! Men are the morons, not the Makkees. I’ll tell you this. If it weren’t for the Makkees, men would still be living in the trees with the apes. The Makkees haven’t come to conquer this world—only reap the harvest they sowed.
“Here machines have mastered men. But the Makkees are the masters of all machines. Automation is their slave, their tool. They can make it do anything they damn well please. That makes them, for my money, supermen. I know which side my bread is buttered. I’m playing along with them, against mere men. I never had any use for men. Men never had any use for me.”
“That last remark,” I said, “is quite the most unbelievable thing you’ve told me.”
But she was brooding and didn’t seem to hear.
I tried again. “I take it the Director is the head of that detachment from the advance party out there?”
She stubbed out her cigarette absently. “Yes. He’s the boss-man of the whole party. There are other detachments taking over other countries. They’re all in touch with HQ here.”
She indicated with a nod the massed battery of TV screens.
“I’m on the network, you see. It’s part of my job. Anyhow, I’m a woman and like to hear all the gossip. It’s nice to be on the inside, for once.” She was brooding again. “I’ve been on the outside for too long. Left out of everything. It’s cold and lonely on the outside, you know.”
I stared at her sharply. She was far away in another world, in another time. So much beauty—it was a shame that there had to be a worm in the bud. Sarah Masters was as neurotic as they came. A glaze had come over the wide blue eyes. I could see that contact would be difficult to reestablish. I let her wander off on her private mental journey while I took a good look at that array of screens.
Some of them showed only complex and ever-changing patterns which presumably meant something to whomever held the key. There were plenty of thin,’ ugly Makkee faces mouthing silently, perhaps from all parts of the world. Perhaps from other planets. Perhaps from ships in space.
I wondered where the main invasion body was at this moment. Maybe as far as Alpha Centauri, maybe as close as Neptune, cruising, waiting for the final signal confirming that moving day had come at last.
I had to check myself. I was beginning to swallow this fantasy from the clearly not-too-stable mind of the lovely Sarah.
Yet, what else explained this colony of creatures who certainly didn’t seem quite human? What explained those screens and their lively evidences?
More immediately, what explained Sarah Masters?
Best let her explain herself. Some neurotic types were prone to do little else, and I had a feeling she was of that type. With a little encouragement…
“Sarah,” I said gently, trying to sound like her only friend in the world, “it’s obvious you’ve had a tough time of it. You don’t have to tell me about it, but—”
The dam burst over me. I didn’t have to say another word. I didn’t get a chance to for some time. She’d been all pent up. She had to unburden herself to someone or burst. I just happened to be there.
So were the Makkees, but she couldn’t tell them. They were humanoid but not human, not simpatico. They wouldn’t be in the least interested in the conflicts of a mixed-up human girl.
Chapter 2
It was the old story; unwantedness in childhood, an initial imbalance that time had never righted. She was an only child. Her mother was a brilliant artist, her father a brilliant concert pianist. Both had colossal egotism and prima donna temperaments. Both put themselves and their art before anybody or anything. Neither had any parental sense whatever.
They took pains to make it clear to Sarah that she was an encumbrance to them in their careers. She was not even a love-child, merely an irritating mistake, and it was unforgivably selfish and thoughtless of her to have thrust herself upon them. Quite openly they deplored her very existence.
Mother—a born nomad—would feel the urge to join a faraway artists’ colony and live the free Bohemian life. She would try to palm Sarah off on Father. But he was planning a concert tour of Australia.
“It’s a tough schedule; it wouldn’t be fair to the child,” he’d protest, and Sarah would be planted again on some reluctant relative.
For a long time, she strove pitifully to enter their worlds and their minds, hoping also to enter their hearts. But the Fates had played another joke on her; she was both colorblind and tone-deaf. Her parents spoke a language she could never learn.
She fared little better in the world at large. Every attempted friendship ended in a fight. She blamed the others, but I could guess where the trouble lay. She’d experienced nothing but hostility, and subconsciously expected nothing but hostility. If it wasn’t apparent, she’d suspect it was concealed—and that was treachery.
She was always the great misunderstood. I doubted that she could hope to become anything else. She would go on projecting from her imagination a pattern of enmity; she would twist people and circumstances to fit that pattern-then fight them like a wildcat.
As she spoke, with acid bitterness, she was squeezing her hands hard together as though imagining that the whole human race had but one neck and she was throttling it.
She went on, “I worked hard and got a secretarial post in the Government. Then, from nowhere, came the Makkees, and they became the Government. I stayed with them. I regarded them as avenging angels, come to knock the hubris out of the humans. Well, they’re not angels, neither are they avengers. But they are going to put the stinking, self-important humans back in their humble place in this universe. And I’m all for them.”
I said, “Making all due allowances for your raw deal, it still adds up to the fact that you’re a traitor to the human race, Sarah.”
She turned a freezing regard on me. “I should have saved my breath. Is it impossible for you to understand that I don’t—and never did—belong to the human race?”
I laughed, sympathetically, but her Medusa stare became even more intense.
I should have been petrified. Instead I said, “I’m sorry, Sarah, but in fact you’re only too human. You remind me of a little girl who’s dressed herself up in the mantle of Milton’s
Satan, and is half-smothered by it, but insists on striking suitable poses. It’s strictly a male role, you know, and even at that it skates perilously near the absurd. Hitler didn’t escape absurdity. Neither did my favorite clown-hero, Napoleon. But you, my dear, aren’t evil—and not really comic, either. Just touching. You’re still a hurt and bewildered child. I understand and I really am sorry for you.”
She said between clenched teeth, “Save your pity, Magellan, for yourself. You’re going to need it, I can assure you.”
She glanced at her watch, although there was a chronometer on the control panel. We’d been talking for an hour. She went across to the panel and began to snap switches. The TV screens blinked out one by one until only two were left alive. One pictured the drive at the front of the house; obviously it was the screen which had registered my approach.
The other was just a blank, illuminated rectangle, at first. Then suddenly it glowed with extraordinary brilliance, faded to grayness, then glowed, faded, glowed, faded, regularly, like the beam from a lighthouse.
A voice spoke dictatorially from it, “Attention, everybody. Watch this screen, watch this screen.”
It was hard to avoid doing so. The rhythmic beat of the light seemed to draw me to it, as a gull is drawn to the lighthouse. The room, Sarah, things on the periphery of my field of vision became blurred, then seemed to dissolve away. There was nothing left but this fierce pulsation of light, dominating my attention.
The same peremptory voice said, “You will now raise your right arm above your head.”
I felt my right arm lifting automatically.
Then my conscious self rebelled. I was angrily resentful of the unequivocal tone of that voice, of its implication that I was no more than a puppet.
The spell broke. “Like hell I will!” I growled, and thrust my hands deep in my pockets.
The voice continued, “If you are with other people, note those who have not raised their arms. They are enemies of the country. Report them to the police at once. If possible, detain them by force and send for the police. That is all. Drop your arms now.”
The glow faded, and this time the screen remained gray. I swung round to Sarah. “Okay, what was it all about?”
Her hostile attitude had been replaced by thoughtful appraisal.
She said, in a quiet tone that made me feel more uneasy than her Gorgon glare, “That was the general transmission we were waiting for. It was an experiment in mass hypnosis. Like myself, however, you’re impervious to hypnosis. You passed the test—alpha plus. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Was that all you wanted me for?”
“Yes. You can go home now.”
She pressed one of the desk buttons and I heard the door lock click open. She pressed another button and with a faint whirr a tray bearing a whiskey decanter, a soda siphon, bowl of ice cubes, and several glasses surfaced on the desk.
She poured herself a finger and tossed it down neatly.
“Good-bye, Magellan.”
But now that I could walk out, I perversely chose to linger.
“Your hospitality is pretty rugged, Sarah. You might at least offer me one for the road.”
She poured herself another. “In this hard world you’ve got to learn to help yourself—didn’t I make that clear, either?”
“I see. Have a drink, Magellan? You will? Good.” And I helped myself. I don’t take my whiskey straight, so squirted in a fair splash of soda-water.
“To our better acquaintance,” I said, and took a gulp. It wasn’t a big gulp but it was enough. Something solid seemed to hit my brain from behind the nostrils. My mouth burned, my eyes streamed. I reeled back, choking, and dropped the glass.
Tear-blinded, I stumbled about trying to locate the door. But I’d lost all sense of direction. My groping hand met a hard, smooth surface. I rubbed my tortured eyes and saw blurrily that I was right up against the window.
I tried to turn away—and couldn’t. Paralysis hit me with the suddenness of a stroke. The window ledge held me up, else I should have toppled stiffly to the floor like a felled tree. I lay rigidly against it, staring out through the clearplast. To anyone in the garden I must have looked like a tailor’s wax dummy in a store window.
But there wasn’t anyone on those great treeless lawns.
Sarah spoke behind me, cynically, “The initial effect of curare is odd. It paralyses the body completely, yet leaves the brain working unimpaired. You know, it’s criminal to ruin good whiskey with gas-water. Appalling taste—and I’d heard you shared it. I usually arrange for all such criminals to get paralytic on the soda instead of the whiskey. Poetic justice, I think.”
I was in no condition to discuss my symptoms, but I couldn’t agree that my brain was working unimpaired. It felt pretty punch-drunk to me.
But I was aware that curare was a fatal poison. Well, I wasn’t fond of this press-button world, but this seemed a shockingly sudden way to quit it. It was like stepping off a curb and discovering that actually you’d stepped off the parapet of the Empire State Building.
So, murdered by their crackpot agent, I was going to have to leave this world to the little yellow creeps, after all.
One of them had just come into the room, for I heard his voice fluting, “So it didn’t take, Sarah?”
The black clouds came rolling across my mind. Only in snatches could I hear Sarah replying. Dazed as I was, bitterness stung me to hear that special calm sweetness she assumed as the Director’s secretary.
She called this creature, phonetically, “Drahk.”
Between even more rapid mental blackouts, I heard Drahk whistling away to her. “Things are moving now… more likely than not a fraud… physical research… have heard interesting reports… no time to investigate now… the western concentration center…”
The garden beyond the window looked to me as swimmy as a view of the sea bed. A huge, round, black shadow was appearing in it which I took to be a projection from my darkening mind.
But it wasn’t.
Something like a gigantic humming top lowered itself vertically from the sky into the pool of its own shadow on the lawns. It appeared to me to be spinning, but more likely it was my head that was spinning. There was a row of ports along the rim of the thing and a bulbous protuberance on top like the knob of a kettle lid.
I just had time to register the impression that I was seeing my first flying saucer. Then I had
a blackout from which I didn’t emerge for a long, long time.
When I did, it was some other day, some other place.
Which day, precisely, I’ll never know. The place was a small, white-tiled cell.
I was lying flat on my back on a straw paillasse that somehow was a man’s height from the floor. I sat up and gazed around. My head was clear, and I was hungry and thirsty. For a man who’d been poisoned to death, I felt remarkably fit.
There was a small window—just one—set so high up that I couldn’t see out of it. There was a cubicle with a toilet, a door with a grill in it, a bench with a cut loaf and a mug on it, and in the corner, a washbasin. The faucet over the latter looked to me like an oasis in a desert. I licked dry lips and started for it.
I began to lower myself from my perch. My dangling right foot found a stepping stone of sorts. It was soft, but seemed firm, and I let my weight rest on it as I stepped down to the floor.
Then I learned I wasn’t alone. My bed was only an upper berth set in a wooden frame. The occupant of the bed beneath was sitting up slowly, rubbing a reddening ear. I had trodden on that side of his face.
He was a young, blond fellow. He seemed only mildly annoyed as he said in a varsity voice, “And I’ll be damned if I’ll turn the other cheek.”
I apologized, sincerely because I was still wearing my shoes, briefly because I was so thirsty. I filled and drained the mug twice, then tore a hunk off the loaf and chewed.
“Where the, hell are we?” I asked, with my mouth full.
“Dartmoor. My old man always said I’d end up here.”
I stopped chewing. “You mean… the prison?”
He nodded.
“Well, I’ll be… Thought this dump had been demolished years ago.”
“Oh, no. They preserved it as a historical building, to show what a wicked world it used to be once upon a time.”
“Hm. It still is, believe me. How did I get here?”
“On a stretcher. Unconscious. How you got that way you should know better than I.”
“How did you get here?”
“By putting one foot in front of the other—with a needle-gun in my back.”
The Automated Goliath Page 2