“But they can’t—” Alarm caught him, as if his own brain had been threatened with oxygen starvation. “Without power, her memory tubes will discharge. She’ll—well, die!”
“So what?” The watchman shrugged. “The directors are meeting again in the morning, with our old legal staff, to get rid of her.”
“But I’ll have her checked and balanced again by then,” he promised desperately. “Just let me in!”
“Sorry, sir. But after all that happened yesterday, they told me to keep everybody out.”
“I see.” Chimberley drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper. “Would you tell me exactly what did happen?”
“If you don’t know.” The watchman winked impudently at the cab where Guinevere sat waiting. “Your big tin brain had developed those synthetic cuties secretly. It put them on the market yesterday morning. I guess they did look like something pretty hot, from a gadget’s point of view. The item every man wanted most, at a giveaway price. Your poor old thinking machine will probably never understand why the mobs tried to smash it.”
Chimberley bristled. “Call the responsible officials. Now. I insist.”
“Insist away.” The brown giant shrugged. “But there aren’t any responsible officials, since the computer took over. So what can I do?”
“You might try restraining your insolence,” Chimberley snapped. “And give me your name. I intend to report you in the morning.”
“Matt Skane,” he drawled easily. “Used to be general manager.”
“I see,” Chimberley muttered accusingly. “You hate computers!”
“Why not?” He grinned through the bars. “I fought ‘em for years, before they got the company. Lost my health in the fight, and most of the money I had. It’s tough to admit you’re obsolete.”
Chimberley stalked back to the cab and told the driver to take him to the Gran Desierto Hotel. The room clerk there gave Guinevere a chilling stare, and failed to find any record of his reservation. Another taxi driver suggested his life would be simpler, and accommodations easier to arrange, if he would ask the police to take her off his hands, but by that time his first annoyed bewilderment was crystalizing into stubborn anger.
“I can’t understand people,” he told Guinevere. “They aren’t like machines. I sometimes wonder how they ever managed to invent anything like Athena Sue. But whatever they do, I don’t intend to give you up.”
Day had come before he found an expensive room in a shabby little motel, where the sleepy manager demanded his money in advance and asked no questions at all. It was too late to sleep, but he took time for a shower and a shave.
His billfold was getting thin, and it struck him that the auditing machines might balk at some of his expenses on account of Guinevere, Prudently, he caught a bus at the corner. He got off in front of the plant, just before eight o’clock. The gate across the entrance drive was open now, but an armed guard stepped out to meet him.
“I’m here from General Cybernetics—”
He was digging nervously for his identification card, but the tall guard gestured easily to stop him.
“Mr. Chimberley?”
“I’m Chimberley. And I want to inspect our managerial installation here, before the directors meet this morning.”
“Matt Skane told me you were coming, but I’m afraid you’re late.” The guard gestured lazily at a row of long cars parked across the drive. “The directors met an hour ago. But come along.”
A wave of sickness broke over him as the guard escorted him past an empty reception desk and back into the idle silence of the mechanized administrative section. A sleek, feline brunette, who must have been a close runner-up in the Miss Chemistics contest, sat behind the chrome railing at the dead programming panel, intently brushing crimson lacquer on her talons. She glanced up at him with a spark of interest that instantly died.
“The hot shot from Schenectady,” the guard said. “Here to overhaul the big tin brain.”
“Shoulda made it quicker.” She flexed her claws, frowning critically at the fresh enamel. “Word just came out of the board room. They’re doing away with the brain. High time, too, if anybody wants to know.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you see ‘em?” She blew on her nails. “Those horrible synthetic monsters it was turning loose everywhere.”
He remembered that she must have been a runner-up.
“Anyhow,” he muttered stubbornly, “I want to check the computer.”
With a bored nod, she reached to unlatch the little gate that let him through the railing into the metal-paneled, air-conditioned maze that had been the brain of Athena Sue. He stopped between the neat banks of pastel-painted units, saddened by their silence.
The exciting sounds of mechanized thought should have been whispering all around him. The germanium pentodes, cells of the cybernetic mind, had always been as silent as his own, but punched cards should have been riffling through the whirring sorters, as Athena Sue remembered. Perforators should have been munching chemistic tape, as she recorded new data. Relays should have been clicking as she reached her quick decisions, and automatic typewriters murmuring with her many voices.
But Athena Sue was dead.
She could be revived, he told himself hopefully. Her permanent memories were all still intact, punched in tough chemistic film. He could set her swift electronic pulse to beating again, through her discharged tubes, if he could find the impossible flaw that had somehow led to her death.
He set to work.
Three hours later he was bent over a high-speed scanner, reading a spool of tape, when a hearty shout startled him.
“Well, Chimberley! Found anything?”
He snatched the spool off the scanner and shrank uneasily back from the muscular giant stalking past the programming desk. It took him a moment to recognize Matt Skane, without the watchman’s clock. Clutching the tape, he nodded stiffly.
“Yes.” He glanced around him. The billowy brunette and the guard had disappeared. He wet his lips and gulped. “I—I’ve found out what happened to the computer.”
“So?”
Skane waited, towering over him, a big, red, weather-beaten man with horny hands shaped as if to fit a hammer or the handles of a plow, a clumsy misfit in this new world where machines had replaced both his muscles and his mind. He was obsolete—but dangerous.
“It was sabotaged.” Chimberley’s knobby fist tightened on the spool of tape, in sweaty defiance.
“How do you know?”
“Here’s the whole story.” He brandished the chemistic reel. “Somebody programmed Athena Sue to search for a project that would result in her destruction. Being an efficient computer, she did what she was programmed to do. She invented vital appliances, and supplied a correct prediction that the unfavorable consumer reaction to them would completely discredit mechanized equipment. So the saboteur re-programmed her to ignore the consequences and put them on the market.”
“I see.” Skane’s bright blue eyes narrowed ominously. “And who was this cunning saboteur?”
Chimberley caught a rasping, uneven breath. “I know that he was somebody who had access to the programming panel at certain times, which are recorded on the input log. So far as I’ve been able to determine, the only company employee who should have been here at those times was a watchman—named Matt Skane.”
The big man snorted.
“Do you call that evidence?”
“It’s good enough for me. With a little further investigation, I think I can uncover enough supporting facts to interest the directors.”
Skane shifted abruptly on his feet, and his hard lips twitched as Chimberley flinched. “The directors are gone,” he drawled softly. “And there isn’t going to be any further investigation. Because we’ve already gone back to human management. We’re junking your big tin brain. I’m the general manager now. And I want that tape.”
He reached for the chemistic spool.
“Take it.” Chimberley cr
ouched back from his long bronze arm, and ignominiously gave up the tape. “See what good it does you. Maybe I can’t prove much of anything without it. But you’re in for trouble, anyhow.”
Skane grunted contemptuously.
“You can’t turn the clock back,” Chimberley told him bitterly. “‘Your competitors won’t go back to human management. You’ll still have all their computers to fight. They had you against the wall once, and they will again.”
“Don’t bet on it.” Skane grinned. “Because we’ve learned a thing or two. We’re going to use machines, instead of trying to fight them. We’re putting in a new battery of the smaller sort of auxiliary computers—the kind that will let us keep a man at the top. I think we’ll do all right, with no further help from you.”
Chimberley hastily retreated from the smoldering blue eyes. He felt sick with humiliation. His own future was no serious problem; a good cybernetics engineer could always find an opening. What hurt was the way he had failed Athena Sue.
But there was Guinevere, waiting in his room.
His narrow shoulders lifted, when he thought of her. Most women irked and bored him, with all their fantastic irrationalities and their insufferable stupidities, but Guinevere was different. She was more like Athena Sue, cool and comprehensible, free of all the human flaws that he detested.
He ran from the bus stop back to the seedy motel, and his heart was fluttering when he rapped at the door of their room.
“Guinevere!”
He listened breathlessly. The latch clicked. The door creaked. He heard her husky-throated voice.
“Oh, Pip! I thought you’d never come.”
“Guin—”
Shock stopped him, when he saw the woman in the doorway. She was hideous with old age. She felt feebly for him with thin blue claws, peering toward him blindly.
“Pip?” Her voice was somehow Guinevere’s. “Isn’t it you?”
“Where—” Fright caught his throat. His glance fled into the empty room beyond, and came back to her stooped and tottering frame, her wasted, faded face. He saw a dreadful likeness there, but his mind rejected it. “Where’s Guinevere?”
“Darling, don’t you even know me?”
“You couldn’t be—” He shuddered. “But still—your voice—”
“Yes, dear, I’m yours.” Her white head nodded calmly. “The same vital appliance you bought last night. Guinevere Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456.”
He clutched weakly at the door frame.
“The difference you have just discovered is our rapid obsolescence.” A strange pride lifted her gaunt head. “That’s something we’re not supposed to talk about, but you’re an engineer. You can see how essential it is, to insure a continuous replacement demand. A wonderful feature, don’t you think, darling?”
He shook his head, with a grimace of pain.
“I suppose I don’t look very lovely to you any longer, but that’s all right.” Her withered smile brightened again. “That’s the way the computer planned it. Just take me back to the vending machine where you bought me. You’ll get a generous trade-in allowance, on tomorrow’s model.”
“Not any more,” he muttered hoarsely. “Because our computer’s out. Skane’s back in, and I don’t think he’ll be making vital appliances.”
“Oh, Pip!” She sank down on the sagging bed, staring up at him with a blind bewilderment. “I’m so sorry for you!”
He sat down beside her, with tears in his murky eyes. For one bitter instant, he hated all computers, and the mobs—and Matt Skane as well.
But then he began to get hold of himself.
After all, Athena Sue was not to blame for anything. She had merely been betrayed. Machines were never evil, except when men used them wrongly.
He turned slowly back to Guinevere, and gravely kissed her shriveled lips.
“I’ll make out,” he whispered. “And now I’ve got to call Schenectady.”
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Star Science Fiction 3 - [Anthology] Page 22