by B. V. Larson
He awoke when a dreadful yowl came from downstairs. At first he rolled over and pulled his pillow over his head, trying to get back into his interrupted dreams. Then he thought he heard a bang followed by a crash, and reluctantly opened one eye. He saw the door was ajar and knew instantly what was going on. It had happened before. Peter and Pinball were having a fight.
He almost yelled Mom before he remembered and sat up, cursing. He was going to have to handle this himself. He was vaguely worried for Peter, as Pinball was armed tonight. Climbing into his chair, he fumbled with the junk strewn over his workbench and finally came up with the garage door opener. He stabbed the button about ten times for good measure, then rolled his chair toward the door. As an afterthought, he put the controller in the wheelchair’s basket, taking it with him. The house was dark, hot and still. The walls were still radiating the heat of the summer day, and although the upstairs windows were open, there was no breath of wind to cool the house.
Trying to be quiet, Chuck rolled his chair to the top of the stairs using arm-power. He paused there for a moment, listening. He could hear nothing but the crickets outside and the vague sound of cars on the interstate, five miles east. He rode the escalator arm downward.
At the bottom of the stairs he hit the hall light, and nothing happened. He flipped the switch several more times, then remembered that he had left it on in the first place. A fuse must have blown down here, because the upstairs lights were still working. The downstairs was on a separate circuit, and the fuse box was located outside the house. Frowning, he unstrapped his chair from the grip of the escalator and then paused. He heard the whine of an electric motor, coming from the back of the house. Pinball was coming.
“Damn,” he muttered, pulling out the garage door opener again and pressing the button with unnecessary force. His thumb sunk deep into the plastic box, but still the high-pitched sound continued. There was a thump from the archway at the end of the hall that led into the family room, Pinball had miscalculated and run into the wall with one wheel. The sounds shifted as it reversed directions and corrected its course. For the first time, Chuck felt a sliver of fear run through his heart. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and for no apparent reason, his limp legs started to ache, dead nerves sending ghost-impulses up his spine. He looked back up the stairway, and realized that he didn’t have time to strap himself in and ride up to the top, especially in the dark. If he tried to make it without the harness, he could slip off the metal platform quite easily.
His tongue darted out and he chewed his lip. Down the hall, the tiny red glow-lights on Pinball’s motherboard could be seen, coming out of the gloom. Chuck wondered what the cattle prod would feel like it if touched his legs. Would they jump of their own accord, like frog legs in a skillet?
Pinball was closing fast. Chuck made his decision and rolled into the kitchen. Pinball followed the sounds with the guidance of its motion detectors, swinging through the opening without a hitch. As Chuck rounded the kitchen island he pulled the trashcan out from underneath it and dumped it behind him, directly in Pinball’s path. He caught a brief whiff of orange peels and moldy meat, then he rolled out into the living room. He glanced back and saw a snapshot of Pinball as it rolled through a pool of light coming in from the streetlamp outside. The cattle prod was lowered and leveled, ready for action. The two wheels spun together with smooth precision and the spokes flashed silvery lines of reflected light that seemed to hang in the air for a moment as it passed. Then Pinball ran into the dumped garbage and began trying to get past it, trying to negotiate a path over a loose mess of eggshells and cereal boxes.
In the living room, Chuck paused, breathing hard. He knew that he had about thirty seconds to think before Pinball’s program timed out and it backtracked, using its software map of the house to find another way. It would probably make it around the other side of the kitchen island within a minute. He used this minute to pull out the garage door opener and a penlight he kept in the wheelchair’s basket that he had forgotten about until his mind had tightened with adrenalin at that moment. With the penlight gleaming in the dark living room, he quickly learned that it was not the battery, but rather the spring for the button that was the problem. The contact wasn’t being made, it was that simple. All he had to do was get a screwdriver and open up the casing, fool with the spring and maybe brush the contacts a bit and it should work like new. The only problem was that Pinball wasn’t going to let him have that much time.
“This is crazy,” Chuck shouted in frustration. He tossed the garage door opener on the couch and snapped off his penlight.
“I should just grab you and switch you off!” he shouted at Pinball, who was still grinding gears, thumping its bike tires into the yellow plastic trashcan. Then there was a snapping sound and a terrific flash of blue electricity as the prongs contacted with the metal surface of the refrigerator.
Immediately, Chuck thought two things: Damn, Mom will be ticked if it scorched the paint and There’s no way I want that thing to touch me.
Not knowing what else to do and needing time to think, Chuck drove his wheelchair across the room and parked it between the armchair and the wall. While programming Pinball to the task of patrolling the house, he had played this game many times before. If he was quiet and still, Pinball would probably never find him here. If it did notice him, it would in all likelihood take him as a piece of furniture. Unexpectedly, Pinball emerged from the hallway rather than the kitchen. It cruised by the coffee table, did an abrupt right turn and headed back toward the kitchen entrance where it had last located Chuck’s voice.
Chuck smiled and couldn’t help feeling proud. Pinball had reasoned out another course, had attempted to cutoff and surprise its opponent. He frowned after a moment, however, at the implications of this. Pinball was not programmed to think of things like this unless it was sure there was a break-in in progress. The machine rolled into the kitchen from the other entrance, and he could hear its tires rubbing on the vinyl flooring.
He decided to make a run for the stairs again, he couldn’t very well spend the night imitating an armchair in the dark. Before he reached the hall his wheels crunched over the broken shards of a lamp that was lying on the floor. Trying to hurry, he drove over this like a tank revving over a hedgerow and then ran into another lump, this one felt soft under his wheels. He looked down and felt sick. It was Peter. Behind him Pinball wheeled out of the kitchen and charged across the living room, having picked him up again with its sound-directional unit.
Taking the time to roll around Peter, hoping the cat was only stunned, Chuck raced into the hallway. Behind him was a vicious snapping sound and another blue spark. He glanced back and saw that Pinball was repeatedly shocking the cat, making Peter’s muscles jump with electric current.
“God help me,” he muttered, rolling swiftly for the stairs. Soon Pinball tired of zapping Peter and followed him. While Chuck backed his chair into the escalator harness he watched Pinball charge him out of the gloom, looking for all the world like a small self-propelled field gun, its electric lance raised like the barrel of a cannon.
What if it gets to me, like it did the cat? Chuck’s mind screamed at him. What if it stunned him, knocked him out of his chair, maybe? Wouldn’t it go on zapping him every time the charge built up, following him as he tried to crawl away? Could he drag his dead legs fast enough? Would his heart stop?
Giving up on the harness which was fighting his groping fingers, he stabbed the UP button and the held onto the railing to steady himself. The platform tipped and neatly dumped him off, then continued up the stairs without him, disappearing into the dimness. Fortunately, he managed to keep his seat in the wheelchair and had a second or two to face the culmination of Pinball’s charge down the hall. The prongs stabbed right between his legs and made contact with the metal chair. The jolt wasn’t as bad as it could have been, it just felt like a buzzing sensation, a sharp uncomfortable pain in his hands and back where he was touching the wheelchair.
Then he grabbed Pinball’s spinning tires and lifted the machine right up, like a father grabbing a naughty child. The wheels gave a sudden, life-like spin in his grasp, and the cattle prod dove past his face and down. He realized that the prong must be going down toward his crotch, between his limp legs, and he grabbed the rod, his hand closing on the prongs themselves and he took a second sickening jolt. His stomach rolled over and went hard in his guts, while he ripped loose the cattle prod before the capacitor could charge up again, tearing it loose from the snap-ties and dropping Pinball back to the hall carpet. The machine bounced and clattered, then paused for a second, getting its bearings. It then bumped into his numb shins, following the imperatives of its tiny, insect-like mind.
“If my legs would move, I’d kick you across the room,” Chuck told it.
#
Around noon the following day Sylvia Mather came home. She walked in the front door and found the broken lamp.
“Sorry, I must have nudged it as I went by,” said Chuck, who was waiting for her.
“No big deal,” she sighed, setting her bags down and going back out to the car. Chuck followed her, his chair humming.
“You look like you didn’t sleep much Chuck. Did you have any problems?”
“No, no,” he said, forcing a smile. It was hot outside, but he parked his wheelchair in front of the garbage can and didn’t go back in until his mother did. He could hear the car engine ticking as the metal contracted under the hood. “Did you have fun with your family?”
“Yes, it was good to see everyone. Tammy has grown so much and Sarah is due in September, can you believe it?”
Eventually, they went into the house. Off and on, while Chuck listened to his mother’s excruciatingly detailed description of the wedding, he couldn’t help but lift the mini-blinds and peek out at the garbage can. Inside it was a paper sack containing a cattle prod and a dead cat. Fortunately, the garbage truck would pick it up tomorrow morning.
“Where’s Pinball, honey?”
“Oh, he’s upstairs. He had a problem and I had to take him apart.”
Love Aboard the Kamadeva
The entire hollowed-out asteroid formed the colonyship Kamadeva, and we were heading out from Earth at about twelve percent of the speed of light. As far as we knew, Rahashi and I were the only living souls onboard.
Neither of us knew how the fighting was going inside the rock. Since the rebellion had started, all the transmitters from the bridge and the interior decks of the Kamadeva had been ominously quiet.
The fundamental problem with combat in space had always been the same: everyone tended to die. In vacuum, staying alive even when everyone cooperated fully was difficult, but when crewmen turned against one another anyone could pop a critical membrane or cause a fire, destroying all the things that were required for life. Death stalked everyone in vacuum, every minute. Humans required a precise temperature range, a precise air quality and pressure, not to mention absurdly low radiation levels. We were like tropical fish when in space. You had to watch us every minute or we died mysteriously from any one of an array of possible causes.
The two of us were trapped inside a tubetrain on a superconductive railway. All that was left of the railnet ran from the automated mines in the Ohio crater up to the gutted observation pods that crested the Banfield cliffs. Up at the cliffs, the tracks ended at the station under the dead depressurized bridge of the asteroid ship. Just trundling around between these stations had gotten old fast, but we hadn’t yet built up the nerve to try to walk the surface to another station.
“Weaver, why are you always talking to Pandi? What have you told her?” Rahashi asked me. Rahashi wasn’t a tech, while I was, which gave him virtually nothing to do. Because of this he had become increasingly withdrawn and obsessed with a personality program, which he called Pandi.
“I’m not always talking to Pandi,” I said disgustedly, while soldering another lead onto the cannibalized transmitter I was working on. “I’m trying to save our skins by getting this dish online. Besides, her name isn’t Pandi, it’s Beth.”
“Her name is Pandi and I can tell that the weights in her neural net have fluctuated. I can tell,” said Rahashi with great intensity. His large, luminous brown eyes stared at me. I frowned at my work and hunched forward in my spacesuit, which had begun to stink with fresh sweat. Pandi was our greatest source of contention lately. She was a remarkable computer personality that was our only true female influence now that we were cut off from the rest of the Kamadeva.
Of course, she was only a program. We knew that, but somehow, after a few months in cramped isolation, this didn’t matter anymore.
“The firing frequency too!” shouted Rahashi suddenly, almost hysterically. “You can’t tell me that you haven’t altered her neural firing frequencies!”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded, surprised. I didn’t think he would notice. He wasn’t much of a programmer.
“She’s changed,” he said, his voice on the edge of tears.
“Come on, man,” I said looking at him incredulously.
“I can tell,” he hissed at me.
“How can you tell?”
“She’s starting to turn away from me. It’s little things,” he said, dropping those wild staring eyes for once. His hands nervously fluttered over his suit, tearing open self-seal pockets and watching them reknit themselves. Each time he tore them open, I winced.
His voice dropped to a whisper. “She doesn’t even call me Rashi anymore.”
I guess I shouldn’t have done it. In fact, I knew that I shouldn’t, but I laughed. I laughed long and loud and mean. A deep, resounding belly-laugh. The soldering laser in my hand slipped and a wisp of resin smoke spiraled up toward the recycling vent in the side of the tubeship. When I had finished laughing I squinted at the small brown-skinned man and saw a touch of madness in his face, a glimmer of insanity. He reminded me of an animal in mortal pain.
“I’m sorry. Cool down, Rahashi, you’re just getting cabin fever.”
Rahashi stood slowly, as if he had come to some great decision. He headed for the open manhole in the floor. I waved my hand disgustedly, snorting. Let him go off and pout. Then I heard the manhole cover slip quietly shut behind him. I whirled, listening, and then heard the electronic chime as the bolt shot home. I frowned for a moment, pondering the move. He had cut the tubetrain in half, top from bottom.
The little shuttle was built like a tennis ball canister, cut in half the long way. The upper deck was for carrying passengers, the lower for cargo. Being isolated in the upper half I still had air, food and water, and even the ship’s guidance control systems. I chuckled, he was just pouting again, shutting himself in the bathroom like an enraged teenager.
“Hope you like it down there Rahashi,” I shouted at the manhole.
If Beth liked me better and he couldn’t handle it, well, too bad. I sat down and finished off the last three solder connections on my transmitter, then flipped it on. Now we had a steady distress message going out. If there was anyone left around to hear it, they would. They had to. Then suddenly, I realized that the computer terminal was down there, with him. Instantly, his plan was clear. If he spent a few days alone with her, just making time with Beth, then he would swing her back his way. In my mind’s eye, I could see him putting on the awkward skullcap, buckling on the restraints and slipping into his favorite fantasy with the help of a good dose of blur-dust capsules. I growled and slammed my fist into my thigh. In a couple of days, with the higher firing frequencies I had given her to counterbalance the increased time that Rahashi had been spending with her, she would forget all about me. She would probably insist that I call her Pandi, of all the galling things. Worse, he might even be able to coax her into bed with him, something neither of us had ever managed.
I stomped on the metal manhole cover three times in rapid succession.
“Open up Rahashi!”
I heard only the echoes of my heavy boots hitting metal and R
ahashi’s high-pitched laughter. Listening closely, I could make out Beth’s voice, raised up an octave, the way that Rahashi liked it, talking to him. I heard him answer and panic gripped me. I had to stop him, he was making time with my girl. My eyes swung around the tubeship’s passenger deck, looking for possibilities. My gaze stopped on the security cameras and the passenger arrival monitors that were arrayed just over the airlock doors. I smiled, forming a plan. Half an hour later, I had managed to hook into the superconductor tubeway’s network. Hooking into the network’s optical backbone, I managed to connect the auxiliary output for Rahashi’s computer terminal to one of the monitors on the passenger deck.
I was rewarded when an image of Rahashi’s Pandi and Rahashi himself flashed up on the screen. The two of them were having a quiet meal above the streets of Bombay. Pandi served him in nothing but slippers and silk. They spoke Hindi together and sipped a green liquor. I noticed with a chuckle that Rahashi was at least six inches taller and broader than he was in real life. He had obviously doctored up the scanned-in imaged of himself. Pandi herself was a bit more of a shock. Instead of Beth, the buxom redhead with blue eyes and shoulder-length hair that I was familiar with, Rahashi’s Pandi was slight and dark, with fine sharp features and beautifully shaped olive-colored eyes. There was the definite hint of the orient in those eyes, indicating that Rahashi had a thing for the girls from the Far East.
What I found most upsetting was Pandi’s scanty clothing. I had never gotten so far with Beth, although I had plied her with song and strong drink on countless dates. I fiddled with a makeshift tuner until I got a channel up that spoke English. This dropped Rahashi’s part of the conversation out, although his lips still moved and occasionally parted to reveal a set of straight white teeth that were the purest fiction. Although Beth/Pandi would appear for us in any guise we wanted, her mind retained its knowledge of both of us. She truly knew that she had two ardent pursuers, and I am convinced that she enjoyed our competition for her attentions.