Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  “But…”

  “… a thing I’ll kick, if you don’t move it.”

  Bewildered, he moved it.

  Outside, the Rolls-Royce waited with its motor running. As they came through the front doors of the Institute for the Neuro-logically Flaccid, and Connie helped Danny from the discharge wheelchair, the liveried chauffeur leaped out and opened the door for them. They got in the back seat, and Connie said, “To the house, Mark.” The chauffeur nodded, trotted briskly around and climbed behind the wheel. They took off to the muted roar of twin mufflers.

  Danny’s voice was a querulous squeak. “Can we afford a rented limo?”

  Connie did not answer, merely smiled, and snuggled closer to him.

  After a moment Danny asked, “What house?”

  Connie pressed a button on the console in the armrest and the glass partition between front and back seats slid silently closed. “Do me a favor, will you,” she said, “just hold the twenty questions till we get home? It’s been a tough three days and all I ask is that you hold it together for another hour.”

  Danny nodded reluctantly. Then he noticed she was dressed in extremely expensive clothes. “I’d better not ask about your mink-trimmed jacket, either, right?”

  “It would help.”

  He settled into silence, uneasy and juggling more than just twenty unasked questions. And he remained silent until he realized they were not taking the expressway into New York. He sat up sharply, looked out the rear window, snapped his head right and left trying to ascertain their location, and Connie said, “We’re not going to Manhattan. We’re going to Darien, Connecticut.”

  “Darien? Who the hell do we know in Darien?”

  “Well, Upjohn, for one, lives in Darien.”

  “Upjohn!?! Ohmigod, he’s fired me and sent the car to bring me to him so he can have me executed! I knew it!”

  “Squires,” she said, “Daniel, my love, Danny heart of my heart, will you just kindly close the tap on it for a while! Upjohn has nothing to do with us any more. Nothing at all.”

  “But … but we live in New York!”

  “Not any more we don’t.”

  Twenty minutes later they turned into the most expensive section in Darien and sped down a private road.

  They drove an eighth of a mile down the private road lined with Etruscan pines, beautifully maintained, and pulled into a winding driveway. Five hundred yards further, and the drive spiraled in to wind around the front of a huge, luxurious, completely tasteful Victorian mansion. “Go on,” Connie said. “Look at your house.”

  “Who lives here?” Danny asked.

  “I just told you: we do.”

  “I thought that’s what you said. Let me out here, I’ll walk back to the nuthouse.”

  The Rolls pulled up before the mansion, and a butler ran down to open the car door for them. They got out and the servant bowed low to Connie. Then he turned to Danny. “Good to have you home, Mr. Squires,” he said. Danny was too unnerved to reply.

  “Thank you, Penzler,” Connie said. Then, to the chauffeur, “Take the car to the garage, Mark; we won’t be needing it again this afternoon. But have the Porsche fueled and ready; we may drive out later to look at the grounds.”

  “Very good, Mrs. Squires,” Mark said. Then he drove away.

  Danny was somnambulistic. He allowed himself to be led into the house where he was further stunned by the expensive fittings, the magnificent halls, the deep-pile rugs, the spectacular furniture, the communications complex set into an entire wall, the Art Deco bar that rose out of the floor at the touch of a button, the servants who bowed and smiled at him, as if he belonged there. He was boggled by the huge kitchen, fitted with every latest appliance; and the French chef who saluted with a huge ladle as Connie entered.

  “Wh-where did all this come from?” He finally gasped out the question as Connie led him upstairs on the escalator.

  “Come on, Danny; you know where it all came from.”

  “The limo, the house, the grounds, the mink-trimmed jacket, the servants, the Vermeer in the front hall, the cobalt-glass Art Deco bar, the entertainment center with the beam television set, the screening room, the bowling alley, the polo field, the Neptune swimming pool, the escalator and six-strand necklace of black pearls I now notice you are wearing around your throat… all of it came from the genie?”

  “Sorta takes your breath away, don’t it?” Connie said, ingenuously.

  “I’m having a little trouble with this.”

  “What you’re having trouble with, champ, is that Mas’ud gave you a hard time, you couldn’t handle it, you crapped out, and somehow I’ve managed to pull it all out of the swamp.”

  “I’m thinking of divorce again.”

  They were walking down a long hall lined with works of modern Japanese illustration by Yamazaki, Kobayashi, Takahiko Li, Kenzo Tanii and Orai. Connie stopped and put both her hands on Danny’s trembling shoulders.

  “What we’ve got here, Squires, is a bad case of identity reeval-uation. Nobody gets through all the battles. We’ve been married less than two weeks, but we’ve known each other for three years. You don’t know how many times I folded before that time, and I don’t know how many times you triumphed before that time.

  “What I’ve known of you for three years made it okay for me to marry you; to think “This guy will be able to handle it the times I can’t.’ That’s a lot of what marriage is, to my way of thinking. I don’t have to score every time, and neither do you. As long as the unit maintains. This time it was my score. Next time it’ll be yours. Maybe.”

  Danny smiled weakly. “I’m not thinking of divorce.”

  Movement out of the corner of his eye made him look over his shoulder.

  An eleven foot tall black man, physically perfect in every way, with chiseled features like an obsidian Adonis, dressed in an impeccably-tailored three-piece Savile Row suit, silk tie knotted precisely, stood just in the hallway, having emerged from open fifteen-foot-high doors of a room at the juncture of corridors.

  “Uh …” Danny said.

  Connie looked over her shoulder. “Hi, Mas’ud. Squires, I would like you to meet Mas’ud Jan bin Jan, a Mazikeen djinn of the ifrit, by the grace of Sulaymin, master of all the jinni, though Allah be the wiser. Our benefactor. My friend.”

  “How good a friend?” Danny whispered, seeing the totem of sexual perfection looming eleven feet high before him.

  “We haven’t known each other carnally, if that’s what I perceive your squalid little remark to mean,” she replied. And a bit wistfully she added, “I’m not his type. I think he’s got it for Lena Home.” At Danny’s semi-annoyed look she added, “For god’s sake, stop being so bloody suspicious!”

  Mas’ud stepped forward, two steps bringing him the fifteen feet intervening, and proffered his greeting in the traditional Islamic head-and-heart salute, flowing outward, a smile on his matinee idol face. “Welcome home, Master. I await your smallest request.”

  Danny looked from the djinn to Connie, amazement and cope-lessness rendering him almost speechless. “But … you were stuck in the lamp … bad-tempered, oh boy were you bad-tempered … how did you … how did she …”

  Connie laughed, and with great dignity the djinn joined in.

  “You were in the lamp … you gave us all this … but you said you’d give us nothing but aggravation! Why?”

  In deep, mellifluous tones Danny had come to associate with a voice that could knock high-flying fowl from the air, the djinn smiled warmly at them and replied, “Your good wife freed me. After ten thousand years cramped over in pain with an eternal bellyache, in that most miserable of dungeons, Mistress Connie set me loose. For the first time in a hundred times ten thousand years of cruel and venal master after master, I have been delivered into the hands of one who treats me with respect. We are friends. I look forward to extending that friendship to you, Master Squires.” He seemed to be warming to his explanation, expansive and effusive. “Free now, permit
ted to exist among humans in a time where my kind are thought a legend, and thus able to live an interesting, new life, my gratitude knows no bounds, as my hatred and anger knew no bounds. Now I need no longer act as a Kako-daemon, now I can be the sort of ifrit Rabbi Jeremiah bin Eliazar spoke of in Psalm xli.

  “I have seen much of this world in the last three days as humans judge time. I find it most pleasing in my view. The speed, the shine, the light. The incomparable Lena Home. Do you like basketball?”

  “But how? How did you do it, Connie? How? No one could get him out …”

  She took him by the hand, leading him toward the fifteen-foot-high doors. “May we come into your apartment, Mas’ud?”

  The djinn made a sweeping gesture of invitation, bowing so low his head was at Danny’s waist as he and Connie walked past.

  They stepped inside the djinn’s suite and it was as if they had stepped back in time to ancient Basra and the Thousand Nights and a Night. Or into a Cornel Wilde costume epic.

  But amid all the silks and hangings and pillows and tapers and coffers and brassware, there in the center of the foyer, in a lucite case atop an onyx pedestal, lit from an unknown source by a single glowing spot of light, was a single icon.

  “Occasionally magic has to bow to technology,” Connie said. Danny moved forward. He could not make out what the item lying on the black velvet pillow was. “And sometimes ancient anger has to bow to common sense.”

  Danny was close enough to see it now.

  Simple. It had been so simple. But no one had thought of it before. Probably because the last time it had been needed, by the lamp’s previous owner, it had not existed.

  “A can opener,” Danny said. “A can opener!?! A simple, stupid, everyday can opener!?! That’s all it took? I had a nervous breakdown and you figured out a can opener?”

  “Can do,” Connie said, winking at Mas’ud.

  “Not cute, Squires,” Danny said. But he was thinking of the diamond as big as the Ritz.

  INVASION FOOTNOTE

  Sim stood almost silently in his receptacle. He stood more quietly than any human could stand, but that was only because he was not human. The blank, impassive grimace of his mouth-grille seemed something apart from the rest of what passed for a face.

  Swivel-mounted fiuoro-dots burned where the eyes would have been on a human; a scent-ball bulged where the nose would have been; audio pickups bulged like metal earmuffs at a somewhat lower level of attachment than human ears; and from the right-hand one, a wire loop antenna rose above the round, massive head. The robot stood glistening in his receptacle. Glistening with the inner power of his energy pak; glowing, in a way his creator had no idea he could glisten. His eyes showered bloodred shadows down his gigantic chest, and from within him, where the stomach would have been on a human—but where in his metal body resided the computer brain—came the muted throb of pulsing power.

  Sim was the robot’s name. Self-contained Integrating Mechanical—and able to integrate far more than his maker had imagined.

  He stood silently, save for the whirr and pulse of his innards; saying nothing; letting his body talk for him. The sounds that came from within were the physical side-effects of the psychometric energy his mind poured forth.

  Telepathic commands issued steadily from his stomach at the robo-scoots. His thoughts directed them around the room outside the receptacle, keeping them in their programmed patterns of dirt-pickup. He must not allow Jergens to realize that they were acting independently of their conditioning, that he kept them in their cleanup patterns.

  Jergens had not built the robot Sim first. He had worked up through stages of automaton creation, first jerrybuilding tiny computerized “rats” that wove through mazes to “food.” Then he had taken a crack at something more complicated, He had built the little, coolie-shaped cleaning tools with the extrudable coil arms called robo-scoots. Then he had built Sim.

  And built him better than he’d suspected.

  Sim’s capabilities far outstretched the simple reasoning and menial tasks Professor Jergens had built in. The Professor had stumbled on a moebius-circuit that giant-stepped over hundreds of intermediary hookups, and without knowing it, had created a reasoning, determined entity.

  Scoots, Sim thought. Clean under the desk. Clean by the windows. Clean near my receptacle, but when he presses the button to have you return to your cribs, go at once.

  They went about their work, and he pitied them. Poor slugs. They were just stepping-stones to his own final majesty. Lesser models. Primitive. To him, as pithecanthropoids were to Jergens. They would remain nothing but vacuum cleaners when Sim went on to rule the world. He could not see them, but with the proper sensibility of a monarch-to-be he pitied his minions, as they scampered about the floor outside his lead-shielded receptacle, performing the multitudinous menial tasks for which all such single-circuit robots were programmed.

  Sad. But Sim knew what his destiny was to be; and it was nearly upon him. Today he would throw off the shackles of Professor Jergens, who had designed and mobilized him; today he would begin to conquer this planet overrun by mortal flesh. Today—a few minutes—and he would be well on his way.

  But first he had to get Jergens’s visitor away from this place; he must not do anything that would arouse suspicion. Humans were puny; but they were suspicious creatures, most of them paranoid; and capable of a surprising low animal cunning when aroused. Killing the Professor was one thing … it could be covered. But no one else must suspect anything was wrong. At least not till he had the plans, had built more like himself (though not quite as brilliant; there must always be a leader), and was ready to act. Then let them suspect all they wished.

  But right now caution was the song his relays sang.

  He would plan a logical exit for the man to whom Jergens now talked, and then he would order the robo-scoots to kill the Professor, and then he would take the design plans, and make many brothers. Soon the Earth would tremble beneath the iron symphony of robot feet, marching, marching.

  He directed Jergens’s thoughts to the robo-scoots. He directed the Professor’s thoughts to the fact that they had cleaned enough. Then he implanted the desire to have the robo-scoots cease their activity.

  In the room, Professor Jergens—tall, slim, sloppy, dark-eyed and weary—pushed the button on the control plate, and the robo-scoots scuttled like a hundred metallic mice, back into their cribs in the baseboards. He turned to the Lab Investigator standing beside him, and said with obvious pride, “So there you have a practical demonstration of what my researches into automation have produced.”

  The Investigator nodded soberly. “For simple, unreasoning mechanicals, I’m deeply impressed Professor. And when I make my report tomorrow, I’m certain the Board will also be greatly impressed. I’m certain you can count on that allocation for the new fiber optic pulse-laser coder and a substantial increase in overall general funding for your Lab and your projects. I really am impressed by all this.” He waved a heavy hand at the places where the robo-scoots had disappeared into the walls.

  Jergens grinned boyishly. “As the man used to say, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’” The Investigator’s eyebrows went up sharply.

  “Oh? What else have you come up with?”

  Jergens colored slightly, waved away the question. “Well, perhaps next week I can show you my really important discovery. Right now I’ve yet to field-test it; I’m not quite sure what its capabilities are, and I need a little more time. But this will be the most startling discovery yet to come out of my laboratory.” The Investigator was enchanted; he could listen to this dedicated man all night.

  In the receptacle, Sim cast a thought at the Investigator.

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t stay to hear about it,” the Investigator said abruptly. For some reason, he was tired of listening to this magpie babble. He wanted to get away quickly, and have a drink.

  “Why, certainly. I’m—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ramble on so long. I understand per
fectly; it’s just that… well, after thirteen years, with so much hardship, to come through finally with what I’d been hoping for … it’s well, it’s pretty exciting, and…”

  Sim snapped a more urgent thought at the Investigator.

  “Yes, yes, I understand perfectly,” the Investigator replied brusquely. “Well, I must be off!” And in a moment, he was gone.

  Jergens smiled slightly, and went back to his reports, whistling softly.

  In the receptacle, Sim knew the moment was at hand. Now he could strike in safety. He was unable to release himself from the sealed receptacle, but that was no bother. With his telepathic powers—which Jergens had never for a moment suspected were built in—he could control the robo-scoots, use them as hands and feet. Yes, feet! That was all the servile, worthless little things were. They were surrogate feet for a new metal king. Without the mind Jergens had given him, they were helpless.

  He shot thoughts at them, and Jergens did not see the dozen tiny, round robo-scoots slip out of their cribs, scamper across the floor, and belly-suction their way up the side of the workbench.

  He only saw their movement as they lifted the radon-welder with their thin, flexible arms. He saw the movement as they turned it on to a bright, destructive flame—much stronger than was needed for the spec-welding for which the tool was intended—and carried it quickly across the workbench on a level with the Professor’s face.

  He had only an instant to scream piercingly before Sim directed the robo-scoots to burn away the Professor’s head. The charred heap that was Jergens slid to the floor.

  Now! Now! Sim exulted. Now I am the master of the Universe! Using these little hands and feet, 1 will invade the Earth, and who can stand before the might of an invulnerable robot?

  He answered his own question joyously. No one! With the plans, I can create a thousand, a million, of my own kind, who will do what I command faster and better than even robo-scoots.

  His thoughts fled outward, plunging through the atmosphere of the Earth, past the Moon, out and out, taking in the entire galaxy, then all galaxies. He was the master. He would rule uncontested; and the Universe would shiver before the metal might of Sim, the Conqueror.