Two hours later a taxi let Kerry out at his door. He was remarkably drunk. Things swam before his eyes. He walked unsteadily toward the porch, mounted the steps with exaggerated care and let himself into the house.
He switched on a lamp.
The radio came forward to meet him. Tentacles, thin but strong as metal, coiled gently around his body, holding him motionless. A pang of violent fear struck through Kerry. He struggled desperately and tried to yell, but his throat was dry.
From the radio panel a beam of yellow light shot out, blinding the man. It swung down, aimed at his chest. Abruptly a queer taste was perceptible under Kerry’s tongue.
After a minute or so, the ray clicked out, the tentacles flashed back out of sight and the console returned to its corner. Kerry staggered weakly to a chair and relaxed, gulping.
He was sober. Which was quite impossible. Fourteen brandies infiltrate a definite amount of alcohol into the system. One can’t wave a magic wand and instantly reach a state of sobriety. Yet that was exactly what had happened.
The—robot was trying to be helpful. Only Kerry would have preferred to remain drunk.
He got up gingerly and sidled past the radio to the bookshelf. One eye on the combination, he took down the detective novel he had tried to read on the preceding night. As he had expected, the radio took it from his hand and replaced it on the shelf. Kerry, remembering Fitzgerald’s words, glanced at his watch. Reaction time, four seconds.
He took down a Chaucer and waited, but the radio didn’t stir. However, when Kerry found a history volume, it was gently removed from his fingers. Reaction time, six seconds.
Kerry located a history twice as thick.
Reaction time, ten seconds.
Uh-huh. So the robot did read the books. That meant X-ray vision and superswift reactions. Jumping Jehoshaphat!
Kerry tested more books, wondering what the criterion was. Alice in Wonderland was snatched from his hand; Millay’s poems were not. He made a list, with two columns, for future reference.
The robot, then, was not merely a servant. It was a censor. But what was the standard of comparison?
After a while he remembered his lecture tomorrow, and thumbed through his notes. Several points needed verification. Rather hesitantly he located the necessary reference book—and the robot took it away from him.
“Wait a minute,” Kerry said. “I need that.” He tried to pull the volume out of the tentacle’s grasp, without success. The console paid no attention. It calmly replaced the book on the shelf.
Kerry stood biting his lip. This was a bit too much. The damned robot was a monitor. He sidled toward the book, snatched it and was out in the hall before the radio could move.
The thing was coming after him. He could hear the soft padding of its—its feet. Kerry scurried into the bedroom and locked the door. He waited, heart thumping, as the knob was tried gently.
A wire-thin cilium crept through the crack of the door and fumbled with the key. Kerry suddenly jumped forward and shoved the auxiliary bolt into position. But that didn’t help, either. The robot’s precision tools—the specialized antennae—slid it back; and then the console opened the door, walked into the room and came toward Kerry.
He felt a touch of panic. With a little gasp he threw the book at the thing, and it caught it deftly. Apparently that was all that was wanted, for the radio turned and went out, rocking awkwardly on its rubbery legs, carrying the forbidden volume. Kerry cursed quietly.
The phone rang. It was Fitzgerald.
“Well? How’d you make out?”
“Have you got a copy of Cassen’s Social Literature of the Ages?”
“I don’t think so, no. Why?”
“I’ll get it in the University library tomorrow, then.” Kerry explained what had happened. Fitzgerald whistled softly.
“Interfering, is it? Hm-m-m. I wonder…”
“I’m afraid of the thing.”
“I don’t think it means you any harm. You say it sobered you up?”
“Yeah. With a light ray. That isn’t very logical.”
“It might be. The vibrationary equivalent of thiamine chloride.”
“Light?”
“There’s vitamin content in sunlight, you know. That isn’t the important point. It’s censoring your reading—and apparently it reads the books, with superfast reactions. That gadget, whatever it is, isn’t merely a robot.”
“You’re telling me,” Kerry said grimly. “It’s a Hitler.”
Fitzgerald didn’t laugh. Rather soberly, he suggested, “Suppose you spend the night at my place?”
“No,” Kerry said, his voice stubborn. “No so-and-so radio’s going to chase me out of my house. I’ll take an axe to the thing first.”
“We-ell, you know what you’re doing, I suppose. Phone me if—if anything happens.”
“O.K.,” Kerry said, and hung up. He went into the living room and eyed the radio coldly. What the devil was it—and what was it trying to do? Certainly it wasn’t merely a robot. Equally certainly, it wasn’t alive, in the sense that a colloid brain is alive.
Lips thinned, he went over and fiddled with the dials and switches. A swing band’s throbbing, erratic tempo came from the console. He tried the short-wave band—nothing unusual there. So?
So nothing. There was no answer.
After a while he went to bed.
At luncheon the next day he brought Cassen’s Social Literature to show Fitzgerald.
“What about it?”
“Look here.” Kerry flipped the pages and indicated a passage. “Does this mean anything to you?”
Fitzgerald read it. “Yeah. The point seems to be that individualism is necessary for the production of literature. Right?”
Kerry looked at him. “I don’t know.”
“Eh?”
“My mind goes funny.”
Fitzgerald rumpled his gray hair, narrowing his eyes and watching the other man intently. “Come again. I don’t quite—”
With angry patience, Kerry said, “This morning I went into the library and looked up this reference. I read it all right. But it didn’t mean anything to me. Just words. Know how it is when you’re fagged out and have been reading a lot? You’ll run into a sentence with a lot of subjunctive clauses, and it doesn’t percolate. Well, it was like that.”
“Read it now,” Fitzgerald said quietly, thrusting the book across the table.
Kerry obeyed, looking up with a wry smile. “No good.”
“Read it aloud. I’ll go over it with you, step by step.”
But that didn’t help. Kerry seemed utterly unable to assimilate the sense of the passage.
“Semantic block, maybe,” Fitzgerald said, scratching his ear. “Is this the first time it’s happened?”
“Yes—no. I don’t know.”
“Got any classes this afternoon? Good. Let’s run over to your place.” Kerry thrust away his plate. “All right. I’m not hungry. Whenever you’re ready—”
Half an hour later they were looking at the radio. It seemed quite harmless. Fitzgerald wasted some time trying to pry a panel off, but finally gave it up as a bad job. He found pencil and paper, seated himself opposite Kerry and began to ask questions.
At one point he paused. “You didn’t mention that before.”
“Forgot it, I guess.”
Fitzgerald tapped his teeth with the pencil. “Hm-m-m. The first time the radio acted up—”
“It hit me in the eye with a blue light.”
“Not that. I mean—what it said.”
Kerry blinked. ‘What it said?” He hesitated. “‘Psychology pattern checked and noted,’ or something like that. I thought I’d tuned in on some station and got part of a quiz program or something. You mean—”
“Were the words easy to understand? Good English?”
“No, now that I remember it,” Kerry scowled. “They were slurred quite a lot. Vowels stressed.”
“Uh-huh. Well, let’s get on.” They tried a word-association test.
Finally Fitzgerald leaned back, frowning. “I want to check this stuff with the last tests I gave you a few months ago. It looks funny to me—damned funny. I’d feel a lot better if I knew exactly what memory was. We’ve done considerable work on mnemonics—artificial memory. Still, it may not be that at all.”
“Eh?”
“That—machine. Either it’s got an artificial memory, has been highly trained or else it’s adjusted to a different milieu and culture. It has affected you—quite a lot.”
Kerry licked dry lips. “How?”
“Implanted blocks in your mind. I haven’t correlated them yet. When I do, we may be able to figure out some sort of answer. No, that thing isn’t a robot. It’s a lot more than that.”
Kerry took out a cigarette; the console walked across the room and lit it for him. The two men watched with a faint shrinking horror.
“You’d better stay with me tonight,” Fitzgerald suggested.
“No,” Kerry said. He shivered.
The next day Fitzgerald looked for Kerry at lunch, but the younger man did not appear. He telephoned the house, and Martha answered the call.
“Hello! When did you get back?”
“Hello, Fitz. About an hour ago. My sister went ahead and had her baby without me—so I came back” She stopped, and Fitzgerald was alarmed at her tone.
“Where’s Kerry?”
“He’s here. Can you come over, Fitz? I’m worried.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“I—I don’t know. Come right away.”
“O.K.,” Fitzgerald said, and hung up, biting his lips. He was worried. When, a short while later, he rang the Westerfield bell, he discovered that his nerves were badly out of control. But sight of Martha reassured him.
He followed her into the living room. Fitzgerald’s glance went at once to the console, which was unchanged, and then to Kerry, seated motionless by a window. Kerry’s face had a blank, dazed look. His pupils were dilated, and he seemed to recognize Fitzgerald only slowly.
“Hello, Fitz,” he said.
“How do you feel?”
Martha broke in. “Fitz, what’s wrong? Is he sick? Shall I call the doctor?”
Fitzgerald sat down. “Have you noticed anything funny about that radio?”
“No. Why?”
“Then listen.” He told the whole story, watching incredulity struggle with reluctant belief on Martha’s face. Presently she said, “I can’t quite—”
“If Kerry takes out a cigarette, the thing will light it for him. Want to see how it works?”
“N-no. Yes. I suppose so.” Martha’s eyes were wide.
Fitzgerald gave Kerry a cigarette. The expected happened.
Martha didn’t say a word. When the console had returned to its place, she shivered and went over to Kerry. He looked at her vaguely.
“He needs a doctor, Fitz.”
“Yes.” Fitzgerald didn’t mention that a doctor might be quite useless.
“What is that thing?”
“It’s more than a robot. And it’s been readjusting Kerry. I told you what’s happened. When I checked Kerry’s psychology patterns, I found that they’d altered. He’s lost most of his initiative.”
“Nobody on earth could have made that—”
Fitzgerald scowled. “I thought of that. It seems to be the product of a well-developed culture, quite different from ours. Martian, perhaps. It’s such a specialized thing that it naturally fits into a complicated culture. But I do not understand why it looks exactly like a Mideastern console radio.”
Martha touched Kerry’s hand. “Camouflage?”
“But why? You were one of my best pupils in psych, Martha. Look at this logically. Imagine a civilization where a gadget like that has its place. Use inductive reasoning.”
“I’m trying to. I can’t think very well. Fitz, I’m worried about Kerry.”
“I’m all right,” Kerry said.
Fitzgerald put his finger tips together. “It isn’t a radio so much as a monitor. In this other civilization, perhaps every man has one, or maybe only a few—the ones who need it. It keeps them in line.”
“By destroying initiative?”
Fitzgerald made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know! It worked that way in Kerry’s case. In others—I don’t know.”
Martha stood up. “I don’t think we should talk any more. Kerry needs a doctor. After that we can decide upon that.” She pointed to the console.
Fitzgerald said, “It’d be rather a shame to wreck it, but—” His look was significant.
The console moved. It came out from its corner with a sidling, rocking gait and walked toward Fitzgerald. As he sprang up, the whiplike tentacles flashed out and seized him. A pale ray shone into the man’s eyes.
Almost instantly it vanished; the tentacles withdrew, and the radio returned to its place. Fitzgerald stood motionless. Martha was on her feet, one hand at her mouth.
“Fitz!” Her voice shook.
He hesitated. “Yes? What’s the matter?”
“Are you hurt? What did it do to you?”
Fitzgerald frowned a little. “Eh? Hurt? I don’t—”
“The radio. What did it do?”
He looked toward the console. “Something wrong with it? Afraid I’m not much of a repairman, Martha.”
“Fitz.” She came forward and gripped his arm. “Listen to me.” Quick words spilled from her mouth. The radio. Kerry. Their discussion.
Fitzgerald looked at her blankly, as though he didn’t quite understand. “I guess I’m stupid today. I can’t quite understand what you’re talking about.”
“The radio—you know! You said it changed Kerry—” Martha paused, Staring at the man.
Fitzgerald was definitely puzzled. Martha was acting strangely. Queer! He’d always considered her a pretty level-headed girl. But now she was talking nonsense. At least, he couldn’t figure out the meaning of her words; there was no sense to them.
And why was she talking about the radio? Wasn’t it satisfactory? Kerry had said it was a good buy, with a fine tone and the latest gadgets in it. Fitzgerald wondered, for a fleeting second, if Martha had gone crazy.
In any case, he was late for his class. He said so. Martha didn’t try to stop him when he went out. She was pale as chalk.
Kerry took out a cigarette. The radio walked over and held a match.
“Kerry!”
“Yes, Martha?” His voice was dead.
She stared at the—the radio. Mars? Another world—another civilization? What was it? What did it want? What was it trying to do?
Martha let herself out of the house and went to the garage. When she returned, a small hatchet was gripped tightly in her hand.
Kerry watched. He saw Martha walk over to the radio and lift the hatchet. Then a beam of light shot out, and Martha vanished. A little dust floated up in the afternoon sunlight.
“Destruction of life-form threatening attack,” the radio said, slurring the words together.
Kerry’s brain turned over. He felt sick—dazed and horribly empty. Martha—
His mind churned. Instinct and emotion fought with something that smothered them. Abruptly the dams crumbled, and the blocks were gone, the barriers down. Kerry cried out hoarsely, inarticulately, and sprang to his feet.
“Martha!” he yelled.
She was gone. Kerry looked around. Where—
What had happened? He couldn’t remember.
He sat down in the chair again, rubbing his forehead. His free hand brought up a cigarette, an automatic reaction that brought instant response. The radio walked forward and held a lighted match ready.
Kerry made a choking, sick sound and flung himself out of the chair. He remembered now. He picked up the hatchet and sprang toward the console, teeth bared in a mirthless rictus.
Agai
n the light beam flashed out.
Kerry vanished. The hatchet thudded on to the carpet.
The radio walked back to its place and stood motionless once more. A faint clicking proceeded from its radioatomic brain.
“Subject basically unsuitable,” it said, after a moment. “Elimination has been necessary.” Click! “Preparation for next subject completed.”
Click.
“We’ll take it,” the boy said.
“You won’t be making a mistake,” smiled the rental agent “It’s quiet, isolated and the price is quite reasonable.”
“Not so very,” the girl put in. “But it is just what we’ve been looking for.”
The agent shrugged. “Of course, an unfurnished place would run less. But—”
“We haven’t been married long enough to have any furniture,” the boy grinned. He put an arm around his wife. “Like it, hon?”
“Hm-m-m. Who lived here before?”
The agent scratched his cheek. “Let’s see. Some people named Westerfield, I think. It was given to me for listing just about a week ago. Nice place. If I didn’t own my own house, I’d jump at it myself.”
“Nice radio,” the boy said. “Late model, isn’t it?” He went over to examine the console.
“Come along,” the girl urged. “Let’s look at the kitchen again.”
“O.K., hon.”
They went out of the room. From the hall came the sound of the agent’s smooth voice, growing fainter. Warm afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows.
For a moment there was silence. Then—
Click!
A Gnome There Was
Tim Crockett should never have sneaked into the mine on Dornsef Mountain. What is winked at in California may have disastrous results in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. Especially when gnomes are involved.
Not that Tim Crockett knew about the gnomes. He was just investigating conditions among the lower classes, to use his own rather ill-chosen words. He was one of a group of southern Californians who had decided that labor needed them. They were wrong. They needed labor—at least eight hours of it a day.
Crockett, like his colleagues, considered the laborer a combination of a gorilla and The Man with the Hoe, probably numbering the Kallikaks among his ancestors. He spoke fierily of down-trodden minorities, wrote incendiary articles for the group’s organ, Earth, and deftly maneuvered himself out of entering his father’s law office as a clerk. He had, he said, a mission. Unfortunately, he got little sympathy from either the workers or their oppressors.
The Best of Henry Kuttner Page 21