Director Birch said, “I think that’s all we’d better do just now till we study the case a little more closely.”
“Yes,” said Brother Raymond in a troubled voice. “We’ve got to think this over.”
They left the Rest Home through the main reception hall. The benches bulged with applicants for admission and their relatives, with custodian officers and persons in their care. Outside the sky was wadded with overcast. Sallow light indicated Urban somewhere in the sky. Rain spattered in the dust, big, syrupy drops.
Brother Raymond and Sister Mary waited for the bus at the curve of the traffic circle.
“There’s something wrong,” said Brother Raymond in a bleak voice. “Something very very wrong.”
“And I’m not so sure it isn’t in us.” Sister Mary looked around the landscape, across the young orchards, up Sarah Gulvin Avenue into the center of Glory City.
“A strange planet is always a battle,” said Brother Raymond. “We’ve got to bear faith, trust in God—and fight!”
Mary clutched his arm. He turned. “What’s the trouble?”
“I saw—or I thought I saw—someone running through the bushes.”
Raymond craned his neck. “I don’t see anybody.”
“I thought it looked like the chief.”
“Your imagination, dear.”
They boarded the bus, and presently were secure in their white-walled, flower-gardened home.
The communicator sounded. It was Director Birch. His voice was troubled. “I don’t want to worry you, but the chief got loose. He’s off the premises—where we don’t know.”
Mary said under her breath, “I knew, I knew!”
Raymond said soberly, “You don’t think there’s any danger?”
“No. His pattern isn’t violent. But I’d lock my door anyway.”
“Thanks for calling, Director.”
“Not at all, Brother Raymond.”
There was a moment’s silence. “What now?” asked Mary.
“I’ll lock the doors, and then we’ll get a good night’s sleep.”
Sometime in the night Mary woke up with a start. Brother Raymond rolled over on his side. “What’s the trouble?”
“I don’t know,” said Mary. “What time is it?”
Raymond consulted the wall clock. “Five minutes to one.”
Sister Mary lay still.
“Did you hear something?” Raymond asked.
“No. I just had a—twinge. Something’s wrong, Raymond!”
He pulled her close, cradled her fair head in the hollow of his neck. “All we can do is our best, dear, and pray that it’s God’s will.”
They fell into a fitful doze, tossing and turning. Raymond got up to go to the bathroom. Outside was night— a dark sky except for a rosy glow at the north horizon. Red Robundus wandered somewhere below.
Raymond shuffled sleepily back to bed.
“What’s the time, dear?” came Mary’s voice.
Raymond peered at the clock. “Five minutes to one.”
He got into bed. Mary’s body was rigid. “Did you say —five minutes to one?”
“Why yes,” said Raymond. A few seconds later he climbed out of bed, went into the kitchen. “It says five minutes to one in here too. I’ll call the Clock and have them send out a pulse.”
He went to the communicator, pressed buttons. No response.
“They don’t answer.”
Mary was at his elbow. “Try again.”
Raymond pressed out the number. “That’s strange.”
“Call Information,” said Mary.
Raymond pressed for Information. Before he could frame a question, a crisp voice said, “The Great Clock is momentarily out of order. Please have patience. The Great Clock is out of order.”
Raymond thought he recognized the voice. He punched the visual button. The voice said, “God keep you, Brother Raymond.”
“God keep you, Brother Ramsdell . . . What in the world has gone wrong?”
“It’s one of your protégés, Raymond. One of the Flits— raving mad. He rolled boulders down on the Clock.”
“Did he—did he—”
“He started a landslide. We don’t have any more Clock.”
* * * *
Inspector Coble found no one to meet him at the Glory City space-port. He peered up and down the tarmac; he was alone. A scrap of paper blew across the far end of the field; nothing else moved.
Odd, thought Inspector Coble. A committee had always been on hand to welcome him, with a program that was flattering but rather wearing. First to the Arch-Deacon’s bungalow for a banquet, cheerful speeches and progress reports, then services in the central chapel, and finally a punctilious escort to the foot of the Grand Montagne.
Excellent people, by Inspector Coble’s lights, but too painfully honest and fanatical to be interesting.
He left instructions with the two men who crewed the official ship, and set off on foot toward Glory City. Red Robundus was high, but sinking toward the east; he looked toward Salvation Bluff to check local time. A clump of smoky lace-veils blocked his view.
Inspector Coble, striding briskly along the road, suddenly jerked to a halt. He raised his head as if testing the air, looked about him in a complete circle. He frowned, moved slowly on.
The colonists had been making changes, he thought. Exactly what and how, he could not instantly determine: The fence there—a section had been torn out. Weeds were prospering in the ditch beside the road. Examining the ditch, he sensed movement in the harp-grass behind, the sound of young voices. Curiosity aroused, Coble jumped the ditch, parted the harp-grass.
A boy and girl of sixteen or so were wading in a shallow pond; the girl held three limp water-flowers, the boy was kissing her. They turned up startled faces; Inspector Coble withdrew.
Back on the road he looked up and down. Where in thunder was everybody? The fields—empty. Nobody working. Inspector Coble shrugged, continued.
He passed the Rest Home, and looked at it curiously It seemed considerably larger than he remembered it: a pair of wings, some temporary barracks had been added. He noticed that the gravel of the driveway was hardly as neat as it might be. The ambulance drawn up to the side was dusty. The place looked vaguely run down. The inspector for the second time stopped dead in his tracks. Music? From the Rest Home?
He turned down the driveway, approached. The music grew louder. Inspector Coble slowly pushed through the front door. In the reception hall were eight or ten people— they wore bizarre costumes: feathers, fronds of dyed grass, fantastic necklaces of glass and metal. The music sounded loud from the auditorium, a kind of wild jig.
“Inspector!” cried a pretty woman with fair hair. “Inspector Coble! You’ve arrived!”
Inspector Coble peered into her face. She wore a kind of patchwork jacket sewn with small iron bells. “It’s— it’s Sister Mary Dunton, isn’t it?”
“Of course! You’ve arrived at a wonderful time! We’re having a carnival ball—costumes and everything!”
Brother Raymond clapped the inspector heartily on the back. “Glad to see you, old man! Have some cider—it’s the early press.”
Inspector Coble backed away. “No, no thanks.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be off on my rounds . . . and perhaps drop in on you later.”
Inspector Coble proceeded to the Grand Montagne. He noted that a number of the bungalows had been painted bright shades of green, blue, yellow; that fences in many cases had been pulled down, that gardens looked rather rank and wild.
He climbed the road to Old Fleetville, where he interviewed the chief. The Flits apparently were not being exploited, suborned, cheated, sickened, enslaved, forcibly proselyted or systematically irritated. The chief seemed in a good humor.
“I kill the Big Devil,” he told Inspector Coble. “Things go better now.”
Inspector Coble planned to slip quietly to the spaceport and depart, but Brother Raymond Dunton hailed him as he passed their bungalow.
“Had your breakfast, Inspector?”
“Dinner, darling!” came Sister Mary’s voice from within. “Urban just went down.”
“But Maude just came up.”
“Bacon and eggs anyway, Inspector!”
The inspector was tired; he smelled hot coffee. “Thanks,” he said, “don’t mind if I do.”
After the bacon and eggs, over the second cup of coffee, the inspector said cautiously, “You’re looking well, you two.”
Sister Mary looked especially pretty with her fair hair loose.
“Never felt better,” said Brother Raymond. “It’s a matter of rhythm, Inspector.”
The inspector blinked. “Rhythm, eh?”
“More precisely,” said Sister Mary, “a lack of rhythm.”
“It all started,” said Brother Raymond, “when we lost our Clock.”
Inspector Coble gradually pieced out the story. Three weeks later, back at Surge City he put it in his own words to Inspector Keefer.
“They’d been wasting half their energies holding onto— well, call it a false reality. They were all afraid of the new planet. They pretended it was Earth—tried to whip it, beat it, and just plain hypnotize it into being Earth. Naturally they were licked before they started. Glory is about as completely random a world as you could find. The poor devils were trying to impose Earth rhythm and Earth routine upon this magnificent disorder; this monumental chaos!”
“No wonder they all went nuts.”
Inspector Coble nodded. “At first, after the Clock went out, they thought they were goners. Committed their souls to God and just about gave up. A couple of days passed, I guess—and to their surprise they found they were still alive. In fact, even enjoying life. Sleeping when it got dark, working when the sun shone.”
“Sounds like a good place to retire,” said Inspector Keefer. “How’s fishing out there on Glory?”
“Not so good. But the goat-herding is great!”
<
* * * *
JACK WILLIAMSON
Count the science-fiction novels you have most enjoyed over the past quarter-century, and see how many of them—The Humanoids, Dragon’s Island, Darker Than You Think, and many more—were written by a friendly and unassuming New Mexican named Jack Williamson. It is a pity that so few Williamsons appear in the science-fiction magazines these days. Perhaps New Mexico is too easy-going an environment to keep a writer chained to his typewriter, or perhaps it is only that his excursions into other areas of the science-fiction field (item, the comic strip Beyond Mars, which brightens the weekends of five million or so readers of the New York Sunday News; and item, the juvenile novel Undersea Quest, written in collaboration with your editor), don’t leave him enough time. But though the quantity of new Williamson stories is low, the quality is high; see for yourself in—
Guinevere for Everybody
The girl stood chained in the vending machine.
“Hi, there!” Her plaintive hail whispered wistfully back from the empty corners of the gloomy waiting room. “Won’t somebody buy me?”
Most of the sleepy passengers trailing through the warm desert night from the Kansas City jet gaped at her and hurried on uneasily, as if she had been a tigress inadequately caged, but Pip Chimberley stopped, jolted wide awake.
“Hullo, mister.” The girl smiled at him, with disturbingly huge blue eyes. The chains tinkled as her hands came up hopefully, to fluff and smooth her copper-blond hair. Her long tan body flowed into a pose that filled her sheer chemistic halter to the bursting point. “You like me, huh?”
Chimberley gulped. He was an angular young man, with a meat-cleaver nose, an undernourished mouse-colored mustache, and three degrees in cybernetic engineering. His brown, murky eyes fled from the girl and fluttered back again, fascinated.
“Won’t you buy me?” She caressed him with her coaxing drawl. “You’d never miss the change, and I know you’d like me. I like you.”
He caught his breath, with a strangled sound.
“No!” He was hoarse with incipient panic. “I’m not a customer. My interest is—uh—professional.”
He sidled hastily away from the shallow display space where she stood framed in light, and resolutely shifted his eyes from her to the vending machine. He knew machines, and it was lovely to him, with the seductive sweep of its streamlined contours and the exciting gleam of its blinding red enamel. He backed away, looking raptly up at the blazing allure of the 3-D sign:
GUINEVERE
THE VITAL APPLIANCE!
NOT A ROBOT—WHAT IS SHE?
The glowing letters exploded into galaxies of dancing light, that condensed again into words of fire. Guinevere, the ultimate appliance, was patented and guaranteed by Solar Chemistics, Inc. Her exquisite body had been manufactured by automatic machinery, untouched by human beings. Educated by psionic processes, she was warranted sweet-tempered and quarrel-free. Her special introductory price, for a strictly limited time, was only four ninety-five.
“Whatever your profession is, I’m very sure you need me.” She was leaning out of the narrow display space, and her low voice followed him melodiously. “I have everything, for everybody.”
Chimberley turned uncertainly back.
“That might be,” he muttered reluctantly. “But all I want is a little information. You see, I’m a cybernetics engineer.” He told her his name.
“I’m Guinevere.” She smiled, with a flash of precise white teeth. “Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456. I’d be delighted to help you, but I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for me first. You do want me, don’t you?”
Chimberley’s long equine countenance turned the color of a wet brick. The sorry truth was, he had never wholeheartedly wanted any woman. His best friends were digital computers; human beings had always bored him. He couldn’t understand the sudden pounding in his ears, or the way his knobby fists had clenched.
“I’m here on business,” he said stiffly. “That’s why I stopped. You see, I’m a trouble-shooter for General Cybernetics.”
“A shooter?” Psionic educational processes evidently had their limits, but the puzzled quirk of her eyebrows was somehow still entrancing. “What’s a shooter?”
“My company builds the managerial computers that are replacing human management in most of the big corporations,” he informed her patiently. “I’m supposed to keep them going. Actually, the machines are designed to adjust and repair themselves. They never really go wrong. The usual trouble is that people just don’t try to understand them.”
He snapped his bony fingers at human stupidity.
“Anyhow, when I got back to my hotel tonight, there was this wire from Schenectady. First I’d heard about any trouble out here in the sun country. I still don’t get it.” He blinked at her hopefully. “Maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”
“Perhaps I can,” she agreed sweetly. “When I’m paid for.”
“You’re the trouble, yourself,” he snapped back accusingly. “That’s what I gather, though the wire was a little too concise—our own management is mechanized, of course, and sometimes it fails to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of the human employee.”
“But I’m no trouble,” she protested gaily. “Just try me.”
A cold sweat burst into the palms of his hands. Spots danced in front of his eyes. He scowled bleakly past her at the enormous vending machine, trying angrily to insulate himself from all her disturbing effects.
“Just four hours since I got the wire. Drop everything. Fly out here to trouble-shoot Athena Sue—she’s the installation we made to run Solar Chemistics. I barely caught the jet, and I just got here. Now I’ve got to find out what the score is.”
“Score?” She frowned charmingly. “Is there a game?”
He shrugged impatiently.
“Seems the directors of Solar Chemistics are unhappy because Athena Sue is manufacturing and merchandising human beings. They’re threatening to throw out our managerial system, un
less we discover and repair the damage at once.”
He glowered at the shackled girl.
“But the wire failed to make it clear why the directors object. Athena Sue was set to seek the greatest possible financial return from the processing and sale of solar synthetics, so it couldn’t very well be a matter of profits. There’s apparently no question of any legal difficulty. I can’t see anything for the big wheels to clash their gears about.”
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