by Robert Maxxe
"Let's hope whatever kind of power it uses can't be transmitted through wood," he said. He planted his feet firmly, and pushed.
The chorus of freakish croaking screams rose again from all the games, but Lon kept pushing. The machine tilted up an inch, two. Not far enough yet for Carrie to wedge the dolly underneath.
"More," she shouted over the voices of the games.
Grunting, Lon leaned harder into the planks, enduring the pain of the wood digging into his shoulders. He raised the machine another inch and Carrie was able to jam the dolly into the gap. At last Lon eased back, his strength so depleted that he let the two planks simply clatter to the floor.
Giving him a moment to rest, Carrie dashed to the street entrance and surveyed the scene outside. With all the noise coming out of the arcade, someone was bound to be alerted.
But the town remained dark, lifeless.
As she turned to rejoin Lon, the machines abruptly went silent again. Were they also reluctant to draw attention?
Passing down the aisle between the games, Carrie peered into the screens, searching for some distinct image within the gray glow like a lost mariner looking for landmarks through a fog.
There was nothing. Only that terrible sense of the things looking back at her.
Lon had just picked up the coil of rope and was walking loops around the machine to secure it to the dolly for moving. Suddenly he tripped over something at the back and went down out of sight. Carrie rushed behind the game.
They had forgotten about the cable that interfaced the machines. Lon was staring at it, wondering how to disconnect it without suffering another of the awful mind-shocks.
"I brought a pair of thick rubber gardening gloves," Carrie said, starting for the car.
He stopped her. "The cable's already sheathed in rubber." Gingerly, he touched the cable with one fingertip. Unaffected, he dared then to grasp the cable fully. Still no adverse reaction. He moved his hand along the wire, near where it connected to the machine, and pulled. The cable didn't come away. Lon yanked harder, but the connection wouldn't break. He stopped and shone his light at the back of the machine.
The cable was not attached by a plug, they saw now. It entered the machine through a small hole in the rear panel.
"I might be able to tear it out," Lon said, "but that could damage other hardware. We'll cut it."
In their sweep through Carrie's garage, they had picked up a pair of pruning shears. She brought it from the toolbox.
"I'll need those gloves, too," he said. "No telling what I'll hit once I cut through the insulation."
She fetched them from the car and while Lon slipped them on, she darted back to the entrance to check the street.
Their luck held. Phil the cop was still on his coffee break.
Carrie had traveled halfway back between the two rows of machines when she noticed that lines of letters and numbers were forming rapidly on the screens covering them. She stopped to watch.
00000532 00004144 FF 808H BIX 07 00B ;;;;;; ZZ
:ZO:xORIZ:ZO
00000811 00000092 UX 000008IM <090.0> 0,0,0,0:
:ZO:xORIZ:XO
The same incomprehensible patterns were appearing on every game.
"Lon, look!" Carrie called in an urgent whisper.
He came around and they watched together as more of the lines appeared on the screen, writing themselves so rapidly that it was only seconds before the screen was full. As new lines formed at the bottom, others were pushed off at the top.
"Mean anything to you?" Carrie asked Lon.
"Only in a general way. It's obviously some kind of computer language—a direct communication with the machine."
"Communication from Peale?"
"Or other machines somewhere. Or . . ." He finished with a shrug, but Carrie understood the other alternative: from whomever or whatever stood behind Peale.
The screens kept filling with more and more seemingly random designs.
000040300077 043000070500 ;;;;;;; 0006 DD HY5
:ZO:xORIZ:XOE
000017801780 314000000000 QQSQS
:xORIZ:ZZ
But it meant something. Secrets were being told right in front of them.
"Can't you understand any of it?" Carrie said. "You know computer language. You must . . ."
A puff of air exploded from Lon's lips, as though his frustration had to be blown away before he could speak. "Carrie, there's no one language anymore than different countries speak in one tongue. But it doesn't stop there. Think of how many words we've made just using twenty-six letters. Well, with strings of numbers there are a billion times more variations. There's no way I could interpret this. All I do know is that something's being said to that machine that it understands."
Staring at the screen, Carrie's fury rose. It was like standing in front of a group while sly notes were passed back and forth, like seeing people whisper in front of her.
New lines kept marching across the screen, entering at the bottom as others got pushed off the top.
And something about what she saw struck a chord of familiarity. She couldn't pinpoint it, yet somewhere within the circuits of her brain a receptor was stirred by recognition of the input.
Lon tugged at her. "C'mon. Maybe I can't read that, but whenever something's going through a computer it's working out a problem—and it's a good guess that the problem is us, I want to be gone before it's got the solution."
He dodged behind the machine again, but Carrie couldn't tear her eyes from the screen. What was it in the weave of symbols that pricked at the edge of her perception? She forced herself to scan the phalanxes of marching symbols, one at a time, as though looking for one familiar face in the middle of a parade.
0000100283 0004400832 IMX QE00QS
:XO:xORIZ:ZO
0000021900 WI 003—
She stopped halfway through the line and lifted her eyes again to the preceding series of symbols. :XO:xORIZ:ZO Yes. There. That night she and Lon were in the arcade at closing time, hadn't she heard it then? The last word from the little computer-animation before the machine went off.
"Oriz."
Carrie looked back over the lines that were still on the screen. Somewhere in every alternate line the four letters appeared. There were variations in what came before or after, but the word remained intact.
ORIZ.
A sign-off, a kind of good-bye. The spacies had echoed it—must have read it off the screen at some time. . . .
Perhaps with the "x" in front the meaning was changed to make it only a temporary sign-off—the equivalent of "over" or "roger" in an ongoing radio transmission.
Someone—something—was sending orders to the machines while they signaled their obedience.
Lon called sharply from behind the machine lashed to the dolly. "Carrie, I'm going to cut the cable now. Some big sparks may fly—so be ready to move fast!"
She wanted to be with him. As she went around he was just fitting the cable into the jaws of the pruning shears. He gave her the sort of glance that people exchange on the brink of a fatal risk, then squeezed the handle of the shears.
No sparks flew. No protest came from the machines. The two ends of severed cable flopped to the carpeted floor.
Surprised, Lon picked up the end connected to the machine and looked at it with the curious eye of the professional. Suddenly he let out a muffled cry, less alarmed than disgusted.
"Good God. It's not—there's no wire—it's not even—Jesus!"
He flung the wire down and began furiously rubbing his hands over his shirt.
"What's wrong?" Carrie said.
Lon shook his head and stared at the floor.
She aimed her flashlight beam at the carpet and saw small dark stains spreading outward from the cable's cut ends.
"Don't touch it!" Lon warned.
"It hurt you—?"
"No. But God knows whether it can or will—a liquid interface, for chrissakes. The goddamn things even have some sort of analogue to blood!"
/> Under her flashlight, Carrie could see now that what had appeared to be a flat ribbon of wire was actually an interlacing of small hollow tubes like capillaries. The trickle of liquid from the severed ends had slowed to mere droplets, yellowish and syrupy like sap oozing from a tree.
Then it began, barely audible to start, a sound like winds raging through vast caverns, but far, far away, high on some distant mountaintop, Coming from the eight machines that were still linked. Now, rising rapidly, it became voices, not a few, not merely eight, but millions blending together, the voice of every soul that ever lived, all joined in a single expression of anguish. Moaning, shrieking, sobbing, keening, whimpering, howling, a ululant transcendent note that filled the arcade, made the walls and floor and ceiling vibrate, And as it kept growing louder, swelling, it was no longer sound but something more tangible, an expanding vapor that would blow the place apart any moment.
Carrie stood paralyzed. Not by fear, but with grief and regret. How could the cause of such pain feel anything but remorse and shame? Her conscience was being touched and tortured by the machine just as Lon had felt a stabbing retaliation against his mind.
Lon's voice broke through, "MOVE! DAMN IT, MOVE! That noise will wake the whole town!" He was at the dolly, pushing it toward the fire door, taking their captive to the station wagon.
But Carrie couldn't budge. Somewhere within that wind of voices, the chorus of universal sadness, could she hear a call meant only for her?
NO IT IS IMPORTANT LET IT GO ON
A soundless call, perhaps, coming not from within the chorus but generated inside her head.
ON GO ON IMPORTANT ORIZ NO NO NO
Impulses, tingling in the chemistry of her brain
NO NO NO NO NO
ON ON ON ON ON
Writing their commands silently on the screen of her mind
NONONONONONONONO ONONONONONONONON NONONONONONONONO ONONONONONONONON NONONONONONONONO ONONONONONONONON NONONONONONONONO ONONONONONONONON
The "voices" of the eight that were left behind.
"Lon!" She screamed at last in terror—of the possession, but also of their crime. "No, we can't take it. It's important! We have to let it go on!"
She saw him reappear in the doorway and shout at her, but she couldn't hear him over the silent noise in her mind. When she didn't respond, he ran to her, seized her by the arm and hauled her outside.
The air was still and cool. And there was no sound except the soft dry rustling of trees bearing a few leaves that had refused to surrender to winter. The instant she had passed over the threshold the other noise was gone. The town slept on.
She turned to Lon, puzzled. "They didn't hear," he said. "Maybe it didn't exist except in there—inside some kind of energy field." He let go of her arm and gestured to the rear of the car, where the machine was waiting to be loaded. "Help me heave it in, and then we'll be home free."
The tailgate opening of the wagon was big enough to take the lower girth of the machine, but not the upper part where the winglike stereophonic speakers jutted out. The machine was heavy, much heavier than it had seemed at Peale's factory, yet, working together, they managed to upend it, lean it against the tailgate and slide it aboard. Lon draped a tarpaulin over the portion that remained outside, the flaring speakers, and tied it in place.
They were done. The prisoner taken. Disconnected, it had offered no resistance.
Lon maneuvered the car back to Elm Street through the trees without turning on the headlights. Before pulling out of the shadow of the arcade, he braked the car and looked in both directions.
The cop was still on his coffee break.
Lon took the car slowly over the curb, then accelerated in a burst, driving straight across Elm onto a side street, the first leg of a route back to Patrick's rooming house.
"Home free," Lon said after they took the next turn.
But Carrie couldn't share the release. She wasn't free or home. A piece of herself, she knew now, belonged to the arcade. With the arcade.
34
They took half an hour getting the machine into Mrs. Dilham's Victorian house, taking pains not to raise any clatter that would bring light sleepers in the neighborhood to their windows.
Inside, finding the staircase was too narrow to take the machine up to Patrick's room, they wheeled the dolly straight into the large front parlor. After pulling the heavy curtains across every window, Carrie turned on all the parlor lights. Lon scavenged a couple of additional lamps from other rooms, which he set up on the floor right next to the machine.
Then he started to take it apart.
Though Carrie had been helping every inch of the way, an unsettling split in her feelings persisted. She had lost none of the raging need to know how it worked, what it wanted; yet, watching Lon begin to dismantle the game, she felt oddly emotional, struck simultaneously by relief and repulsion, almost as though she were standing by as the body of a murdered friend was subjected to an autopsy.
The first step was easy. The back panel, one sheet of black-enameled metal four feet high by three feet wide, was secured by four screws, one at each corner. When Lon removed the screws, the panel came away. Just behind it was a board of components, mainly small narrow rectangles of metal or colored plastic laid out in a grid, so that the arrangement resembled a toy city as seen in an aerial view. Lon stared at it a moment, then pinched one of the blue plastic rectangles between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it loose from the board. Holding it up to Carrie, he showed her the underside, which had two rows of prongs that plugged into matching holes in the board.
"What is it?" she asked, crouching beside him.
"A memory module." He waved a hand at the whole grid of components. "So far all we've got is a plain old garden-variety systems board—pretty much what you'd find in any standard video game."
But of course that was only the beginning.
Like the outside panel, the systems board was held in place with four corner screws. Once removed, Lon was able to lift out the board in one piece. That revealed a cubicle crammed with a mass of equipment, and thick bunches of wire winding through every available crevice. Hanging out of the middle of the tightly packed electronics like a flaccid tail was the severed remnant of the interface cable. Lon tugged at it, and, when it resisted, poked at the place where it disappeared into the jumble of circuitry. Again, he decided not to force it. Letting go of the cable, he started to disconnect small separate pieces, one by one.
For a very long time he worked without saying a word. As parts of the machine rapidly accumulated on the floor, he laid them out according to a diagrammatic plan, evidently keeping track of their place in the construction. At first, Carrie saw nothing that looked very exotic. Once, when her Japanese television set had gone on the fritz and a repairman had come to the house, she had stood around watching while it was fixed; most of the parts she had seen then looked similar to what was coming out of the machine. Metal-encased cylinders, small wafflelike grids, little boards about the size of playing cards etched with a tracery of silver lines in geometric patterns, ceramic discs the size of coins. Many of the components could be unplugged like the memory module, simply pulled loose from sockets. Sometimes Lon used a screwdriver to remove them from brackets.
But there were also a number that could not be disconnected until Lon had clipped through a bunch of linking wires. And whenever he cut these, as with the cable, the open ends leaked fluid.
Then some items began to appear that were more unusual. From the muffled grunts of surprise Lon made as he encountered them, Carrie guessed they were not items commonly incorporated into computers. A number of extremely small glass-fronted dials with calibrated faces and hairline indicator needles. A square of clear rubbery material honeycombed with bubbles, within which droplets of liquid were sealed. A few panels the size and thickness of books that looked to Carrie like the filters she changed in her home air conditioners. And something that vaguely resembled a toy pinwheel—four pink glass vials, each hing
ed, by means of a ring around the mouth, to a pivoting central axle set in a lead base.
The assortment mounted up, spread out from the machine in ever-widening profusion. Lon had seemingly abandoned any effort to keep track of the interior construction. He was no longer placing pieces on the floor in a careful schematic order, but pulling them out, giving them a quick glance, and tossing them aside as though they were merely rocks dug out of a hole. Overwhelmed by the hopelessness of comprehending each detail, he was scratching around in the machine like a miner haphazardly pursuing his feverish dream of treasure, one ultimate justification for the work and suffering.
Of course, Carrie realized, it had been foolish to expect Lon or anyone else to penetrate the secrets of the arcade simply by glancing at these trinkets of technology, bits of metal, glass and plastic.
Disheartened, she gave up watching and slumped onto Mrs. Dilham's overstuffed sofa. The fatigue of a long day, the tensions of the night, and now this final wave of futility all combined to leave her feeling weak and old.
She stretched out and dozed fitfully, her eyes periodically flickering open to the vision of Lon still digging in the machine. At one point he was no longer behind it, but had moved to the front and was lifting out the control panel to inspect a tangle of wires that lay beneath the buttons. His expression, each time she looked, was marked by an intensity she read as frustrated incomprehension. She stopped looking.
Then she felt him jostling her, gently calling her back to consciousness.
"Wake up, it's done."
She rolled over and looked up at him. ". . . anything . . .?"
"I think so," he said. "A lot of it is guesswork, but I'm pretty sure it'll lead where we want to go." He held out a hand. "I've got this for a start."
She sat up, and was hit first by the sight of the parlor. A junkyard, bits and pieces heaped everywhere, the empty black hulk of the stripped machine standing in the middle. Then she glanced down into his hand.