by Atoms
“What are you going to do?”
“Yes, what are you going to do?” The deep voice came from the side of the ’copter. Anson and Sue looked up at the face of Eldon Porter.
“Daddy! How did you get here?”
“Alarm came through.”
The big, gray-haired man scowled at the dock beyond where the expediter robots were already mopping up with flame-throwers.
“You’ve got no business here,” Eldon Porter said harshly. “This area’s off limits until everything’s under control.” He turned to Anson. “And I’ll have to ask you to forget everything you’ve seen here. We don’t want word of accidents like these to leak out—just get people needlessly upset.”
“Then this isn’t the first time?” asked Anson.
“Of course not. Mullet’s had a lot of experience; he knows how to handle this.”
“Right, Chief.” Anson recognized the thin, bespectacled engineer at Eldon Porter’s side. “Every time we test out one of these advanced models, something goes haywire. Shock, overload, some damned thing. Only thing we can do is scrap it and try again. So you folks keep out of the way. We’re going to corner it with the flame-throwers and—”
“No!”
Anson opened the door and climbed out, dragging the long rope ladder behind him.
“Where in hell do you think you’re going?” demanded Eldon Porter.
“I’m after that robot,” Anson said. “Give me two of your men to hold the ends of this ladder. We can use it like a net and capture the thing without destroying it. That is, put it in restraint.”
“Restraint?”
“Technical term we psychiatrists use.” Anson smiled at the two men and then at the girl. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve got a case at last. Your robot is psychotic.”
“Psychotic,” grumbled Eldon Porter, watching the young man move away. “What’s that mean?”
“Nuts,” said Sue sweetly. “A technical term.”
Several weeks passed before Sue saw Dr. Howard Anson again.
She waited anxiously outside in the corridor with her father until the young man emerged. He peeled off his gloves, smiling.
“Well?” rumbled Eldon Porter.
“Ask Mullet,” Anson suggested.
“He did it!” the thin engineer exulted. “It works, just like he said it would! Now we can use the technique whenever there’s a breakdown. But I don’t think we’ll have any more. Not if we incorporate his suggestions in the new designs. We can use them on the new space pilot models, too.”
“Wonderful!” Eldon Porter said. He put his hand on Anson’s shoulder. “We owe you a lot.”
“Mullet deserves the credit,” Anson replied. “If not for him and his schematics, I’d never have made it. He worked with me night and day, feeding me the information. We correlated everything—you know, I’d never realized how closely your engineers had followed the human motor-reaction patterns.”
Eldon Porter cleared his throat. “About that job,” he began. “That vice-presidency—”
“Of course,” Anson said. “I’ll take it. There’s going to be a lot of work to do. I want to train at least a dozen men to handle emergencies until the new models take over. I understand you’ve had plenty of cases like this in the past.”
“Right. And we’ve always ended up by junking the robots that went haywire. Hushed it up, of course, so people wouldn’t worry. Now we’re all set. We can duplicate the electronic patterns of the human brain without worrying about breakdowns due to speed-up or overload. Why didn’t we think of the psychiatric approach ourselves?”
“Leave that to me,” Anson said. And as the two men moved off, he made a psychiatric approach toward the girl.
She finally stepped back out of his arms. “You owe me an explanation. What’s the big idea? You’re taking the job, after all!”
“I’ve found I can be useful,” Anson told her. “There is a place for my profession—a big one. Human beings no longer go berserk, but robots do.”
“Is that what this is all about? Have you been psychoanalyzing that robot you caught?”
Anson smiled. “I’m afraid psychoanalysis isn’t suitable for robots. The trouble is purely mechanical. But the brain is a mechanism, too. The more I worked with Mullet, the more I learned about the similarities.”
“You cured that robot in there?” she asked incredulously.
“That’s right.” Anson slipped out of his white gown. “It’s as good as new, ready to go back on the job at once. Of course it will have slower, less intense reactions, but its judgment hasn’t been impaired. Neuro-surgery did the trick. That’s the answer, Sue. Once you open them up, you can see the cure’s the same.”
“So that’s why you were wearing a surgical gown,” she said. “You were operating on the robot.”
Anson grinned triumphantly. “The robot was excited, in a state of hysteria. I merely applied my knowledge and skill to the problem.”
“But what kind of an operation?”
“I opened up the skull and eased the pressure on the overload wires. There used to be a name for it, but now there’s a new one.” Anson took her back into his arms. “Darling, congratulate me! I’ve just successfully performed the first prefrontal robotomy!”
CHANGE OF HEART
IT had been the sun, the moon, the stars to me—a whirling planet of silver, held to its orbit by a glittering chain. Uncle Hansi would twirl it before my eyes on those long, faraway Sunday afternoons. Sometimes he let me press the icy surface against my ear, and then I heard from deep within it the music of the spheres.
Now it was only a battered old watch, a keepsake inheritance. The once gleaming case was worn and dented, and a deep scratch crossed the finely etched initials below the stem.
I took it to a jeweller’s on the Avenue, for an estimate, and the clerk was frigidly polite. “We’ve hardly the facilities to handle such repair work here. Perhaps some small shop, a watchmaker of the old school—”
He laid it carelessly on the counter, for he did not know that this was a dying planet, a waning world, a star that flamed in first magnitude in the bygone eons of my childhood.
So I put the world in my pocket and went away from there. I walked home through the Village and came, eventually, to the establishment of Ulrich Klemm.
The basement window was grimy with the dust of years, and the gold lettering had flecked and moted, but the name caught my eye. “ULRICH KLEMM, WATCHMAKER.”
I descended five steps, turned the doorknob, and walked into a seething symphony of sound. Whispers, murmurs, frantic titterings. Deep buzzings and shrill cadences. Muted, measured, mechanical rhythms, set in eternal order—the testament of Time.
Against shadowed walls the faces loomed and leered. They were big, they were small, they were round or oval or broad; high and low they hung, these clock-faces in the shop of Ulrich Klemm, ticking and staring at me in darkness.
The white head of the watchmaker was haloed in the light of his workbench. He turned and rose, then shuffled over to the counter, his padding feet weaving in counterpoint to the rhythms of the clockwork on the walls.
“There iss something?” he asked. I stared into his face—the face of a grandfather’s clock; weathered, patient, enduring, inscrutable.
“I want you to have a look at this,” I said. “My Uncle Hansi willed it to me, but the regular jewellers don’t seem to know how to put it in working order.”
As I put Uncle Hansi’s watch on the counter, the face of the grandfather’s clock leaned forward. All of the faces on the wall gazed and gaped while I explained.
Ulrich Klemm nodded. His gnarled hands (do all grandfather’s clocks have gnarled hands? I wondered) carried the battered old timepiece over to the light above the workbench.
I watched the hands. They did not tremble. The fingers suddenly became instruments. They opened, revealed, pried, probed, delicately dissected.
“Yess. I can repair this, I think
.” He spoke to me, to all the faces on the wall.
“It will not be easy. These parts—they are no longer made. I shall have to fashion them especially. But it iss a fine watch, yess, and worth the effort.”
I opened my mouth, but did not speak. The faces on the wall spoke for me.
For suddenly the sound surged to a crescendo, sharp and shrill. The faces laughed and gurgled and shrieked; a hundred voices, accents, tongues and intonations met and mingled. Six times the voices rose and fell, proclaiming—
“It’s six o’clock, Grandfather.”
“No, it wasn’t my imagination. The voice said that. Not the mechanical voice, but the other one. The one that came from the long, slim, incredibly white throat of the girl who emerged from the rear of the shop.
“Yess, Lisa?” The old man cocked his head.
“Dinner is ready. Oh, excuse me—I thought you were alone.” I stared at golden hair and silver flesh. Lisa. The granddaughter. The clocks ticked on, and something leapt in rhythm deep in my chest.
She smiled. I smiled. Ulrich introduced her. And I became crafty, persuasive. I leaned over the counter and artfully led the conversation along, encouraging him to talk of the marvels of clockwork, of old days in Switzerland when Ulrich Klemm was a horologist of renown.
It wasn’t difficult. He extended an invitation to share the meal, and soon I was in one of the rooms behind the shop, listening to further reminiscences.
He spoke of the golden days of clockwork, of automata—mechanical chessplayers, birds that sang and flew, soldiers walking and sounding trumpets, angels in belfries chorusing the coming of day and brandishing swords against Evil.
Ulrich Klemm showed me the picture on his wall—the picture he had salvaged years ago when he and Lisa fled from Europe to the refuge of this tiny shop in the Village. The picture was a landscape, with railroad tracks running through a mountain pass. He wound a spring at the side of the frame and the train came out and raced through a tunnel, climbed the grade and disappeared again. It was a marvelous picture, and I told him so.
But no picture, however animated, could satisfy me as did the sight of Lisa. And while my tongue responded to the old man, my eyes answered the girl.
We didn’t say much to one another. She cut her finger while serving the meat, and I bandaged it as the blood flowed. We spoke of the weather, of trivial things. But when I departed I had wrung an invitation to come again from Ulrich Klemm. Lisa smiled and nodded as I left, and she smiled and nodded again that night in my dreams.
So it was that I came often to the little shop, even after my watch had been repaired and restored to me. Ulrich Klemm enjoyed an audience—he dreamed and boasted before me for long hours. He told me of things he had created in the old country; of royal commissions, mechanical marvels, medals and awards.
“There iss nothing I cannot fathom once I turn my hand to it,” he often said. “All Nature—just a mechanism. When I wass a young man, my father wished for me to become a surgeon. But the human body iss a poor instrument, full of flaws. A good chronometer, that iss perfection.”
I listened and nodded and waited. And in time, I achieved my goal.
Lisa and I became friends, bit by bit. We smiled, we spoke, we went walking together. We went to the park, to the theater. ’
It was simple, once the initial barriers were surmounted. For Lisa had no friends, and her school days were an alien memory. Ulrich Klemm treasured her with morbid jealousy. She and she alone had never failed him; she responded perfectly to his will. That is what the old man desired—he loved automatons.
But I loved Lisa. Lisa the girl, Lisa the woman. I dreamed of an awakening, an emergence into the world beyond the four walls of the shop. And in time I spoke to her of what I planned.
“No, Dane,” she said. “He will never let me go. He is old and all alone. If we can wait, in a few years—”
“Wake up,” I said. “This is New York, the twentieth century. You’re of age. And I want you to marry me. Now.”
“No,” she sighed. “We cannot do this to him.” And shook her head, like an automaton.
It was like something out of the Dark Ages. It was a world apart from my office uptown, with its talk of surveys and projects and a branch managership opening for me in Detroit.
I told her about the Detroit assignment. I insisted on speaking now. Lisa wept then, and Lisa pleaded, but in the end I went to the old man and told him.
“I’m going to marry Lisa,” I said. “I’m going to take her with me. Now.”
“No-no-no-no,” ticked the clocks on the wall. “NO—NO—NO,” boomed the chimes. And, “You cannot take her!” shouted Ulrich Klemm. “She iss all I have left. No one will ever take her from me. Never.”
It was useless to argue. And when I pleaded with Lisa to elope, to run away, she turned the blank perfection of a clock-face towards me and ticked, “No.” For Lisa was the old man’s masterpiece. He had spent years perfecting her pattern of obedient reaction. I saw that I could never tamper with Ulrich Klemm’s delicate adjustments.
So I went away, carrying my silver watch on a chain in my pocket; knowing that I could never find a chain that would link Lisa to me. During the months in Detroit I wrote frequently to the shop, but there was no answer.
I instructed a friend of mine to stop by and deliver messages, but I heard no word. The silver watch in my pocket ticked off the days and the weeks and the months, and finally I returned to New York.
Then I heard that Lisa was dead.
My friend had stopped by and found the shop shuttered and deserted. Going around to the rear, he roused Ulrich Klemm from his vigil. The haggard, sleepless old man said that Lisa had suffered a heart attack. She was dying.
Returning several days later, my friend was unable to rouse anyone. But the wreath on the door of the locked shop told its own grim story.
I thanked my informant, sighed, nodded, and went out into the wintry streets.
It was a bitterly cold day. My breath plumed before me, and I stamped the snow from my shoes as I descended the steps to Ulrich Klemm’s door. The glass was frosted like a wedding cake; I could not see into the shop through the sheet of ice.
My gloved hand tugged the doorknob. The door rattled, but did not open. I knocked. The old man was a little deaf, yet he must hear, he must answer. I knocked again.
Quite suddenly the door opened. I stepped over the threshold, into a vacuum of darkness and silence. No light shone over the workbench, no chimes heralded my entrance. And the clock-faces were invisible, inaudible. The absence of the familiar ticking struck me like a physical blow. It was as though a world had ended.
Everything had stopped. And yet Ulrich Klemm’s crazed fanaticism would not permit a stopping, an ending—
“Klemm,” I said. “Turn on the lights. It’s Dane.”
Then I heard the voice, the soft voice murmuring up at me. “You’ve come back. Oh, I knew you would come back.”
“Lisa!”
“Yes, dearest. I have been waiting for you here, all alone. So long it has been, I do not know—ever since he died.”
“He died? Your grandfather?”
“Did you not know? I was ill, very ill. My heart, the doctor said. It was I who should have died, but Grandfather would not hear of it. He said the doctor was a fool, he would save me himself. And he did. Yes, he did. He nursed and took care of me, even after I was in a coma.
“Then, when at last I was awake again, Grandfather failed. He was so old, you know. Caring for me without thought of himself—going without food or rest—it weakened him. Pneumonia set in and I could do nothing. He died here in the shop. That was a long time ago, it seems.”
“How long?”
“I cannot remember. I have not eaten or slept since, but then there is no need. I knew you would come—”
“Let me look at you.” I groped through the darkness, found the switch for the lamp over the workbench. The halo of light blossomed against the silent clock-faces on the w
alls.
Lisa stood there quietly, her face white and waxen, her eyes blank and empty, her body wasted. But she lived. That was enough for me. She lived, and she was free forever of the old man’s tyranny.
I wondered what he had done to save her, he who had boasted that nothing would ever take her away from him. Well, he had lavished the last of his skill and genius upon preserving her from death, and it was enough.
I sighed and took Lisa in my arms. Her flesh was cold against mine, and I strove to melt the icy numbness against the heat of my body. I bent my head against her breast, listened to the beating of her heart.
Then I turned and ran screaming from that shop of shadows and silence.
But not before I heard the hellish sound from Lisa’s breast—that sound which was not a heartbeat, but a faint, unmistakable ticking.
EDIFICE COMPLEX
WAYNE looked at Nora and laughed.
“You’re a good kid,” he said.
Nora’s smile was bleary. Even though the ship was in grav, she had difficulty standing because she was bashed to the gills.
“You keep saying that, but you never do nothing. I thought this was a pleasure trip,” she giggled.
“Wait until we land,” Wayne reassured her. “I told you last night when I brought you aboard, we can’t do anything in free-fall. Besides, you’ve got your pay.”
Nora staggered over and put her plump hand on his shoulder as he bent over the scanner. Her voice was soft. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” she murmured. “I know what you think, picking me up in a stinking dive like that, but when I said yes, it wasn’t just the money. I kind of went for you, hon, you know? And when you sweet-talked me into this I was thinking it would be, well, romantic like. Running off on your ship to a secret hideaway—”
She paused, blinking down into the scanner. They were cruising just a few thousand feet above the cloudless surface at a slow speed, circling over gentle, rolling sandy slopes with broad flat areas between. There was no water, no vegetation, no sign of life.