by Neil Clarke
“Aw, don’t be like that,” Birkson said to Hans. “Not all cops are brutes. Ann here, she’s a nice person. Give her a chance. She’s only doing her job.”
“Oh, I have no objection to police,” the bomb said. “They are necessary to keep the social machine functioning. Law and order is a basic precept of the coming new Mechanical Society. I’m pleased to meet you, Chief Bach. I wish the circumstances didn’t make us enemies.”
“Pleased to meet you, Hans.” She thought carefully before she phrased her next question. She wouldn’t have to take the hard-line approach to contrast herself with affable, buddy-buddy Birkson. She needn’t be an antagonist, but it wouldn’t hurt if she asked questions that probed at his motives.
“Tell me, Hans. You say you’re not a Luddite. You say you like machines. Do you know how many machines you’ll destroy if you set yourself off? And even more important, what you’ll do to this social machine you’ve been talking about? You’ll wipe out the whole city.”
The bomb seemed to be groping for words. He hesitated, and Bach felt the first glimmer of hope since this insanity began.
“You don’t understand. You’re speaking from an organic viewpoint. Life is important to you. A machine is not concerned with life. Damage to a machine, even the social machine, is simply something to be repaired. In a way, I hope to set an example. I wanted to become a machine—”
“And the best, the very ultimate machine,” Birkson put in, “is the atomic bomb. It’s the end point of all mechanical thinking.”
“Exactly,” said the bomb, sounding very pleased. It was nice to be understood. “I wanted to be the very best machine I could possibly be, and it had to be this.”
“Beautiful, Hans,” Birkson breathed. “I see what you’re talking about. So if we go on with that line of thought, we logically come to the conclusion . . .” and he was off into an exploration of the fine points of the new Mechanistic worldview.
Bach was trying to decide which was the crazier of the two, when she was handed another message. She read it, then tried to find a place to break into the conversation. But there was no convenient place. Birkson was more and more animated, almost frothing at the mouth as he discovered points of agreement between the two of them. Bach noticed her officers standing around nervously, following the conversation. It was clear from their expressions that they feared they were being sold out, that when zero hour arrived they would still be here watching intellectual ping-pong. But long before that, she could have a mutiny on her hands. Several of them were fingering their weapons, probably without even knowing it.
She touched Birkson on the sleeve, but he waved her away. Damn it, this was too much. She grabbed him and nearly pulled him from his feet, swung him around until her mouth was close to his ear and growled.
“Listen to me, you idiot. They’re going to take the picture. You’ll have to stand back some. It’s better if we’re all shielded.”
“Leave me alone,” he shot back and pulled from her grasp. But he was still smiling. “This is just getting interesting,” he said, in a normal tone of voice.
Birkson came near to dying in that moment. Three guns were trained on him from the circle of officers, awaiting only the order to fire. They didn’t like seeing their Chief treated that way.
Bach herself was damn near to giving the order. The only thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that with Birkson dead, the machine might go off ahead of schedule. The only thing to do now was to get him out of the way and go on as best she could, knowing that she was doomed to failure. No one could say she hadn’t given the expert a chance.
“But what I was wondering about,” Birkson was saying, “was why today? What happened today? Is this the day Cyrus McCormick invented the combine harvester or something?”
“It’s my birthday,” Hans said, somewhat shyly.
“Your birthday?” Birkson managed to look totally amazed to learn what he already knew. “Your birthday. That’s great, Hans. Many happy returns of the day, my friend.” He turned and took in all of the officers with an expansive sweep of his hands. “Let’s sing, people. Come on, it’s his birthday, for heaven’s sake. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Hans . . .”
He bellowed, he was off-key, he swept his hands in grand circles with no sense of rhythm. But so infectious was his mania that several of the officers found themselves joining in. He ran around the circle, pulling the words out of them with great scooping motions of his hands.
Bach bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep herself steady. She had been singing, too. The scene was so ridiculous, so blackly improbable . . .
She was not the only one who was struck the same way. One of her officers, a brave man who she knew personally to have shown courage under fire, fell on his face in a dead faint. A woman officer covered her face with her hands and fled down the corridor, making helpless coughing sounds. She found an alcove and vomited.
And still Birkson capered. Bach had her gun halfway out of the shoulder holster, when he shouted.
“What’s a birthday without a party?” he asked. “Let’s have a big party.” He looked around, fixed on the flower shop. He started for it, and as he passed Bach he whispered, “Take the picture now.”
It galvanized her. She desperately wanted to believe he knew what he was doing, and just at the moment when his madness seemed total he had shown her the method. A distraction. Please, let it be a distraction. She turned and gave the prearranged signal to the officer standing at the edge of Prosperity Plaza.
She turned back in time to see Birkson smash in the window of the flower shop with his putter. It made a deafening crash.
“Goodness,” said Hans, who sounded truly shocked. “Did you have to do that? That’s private property.”
“What does it matter?” Birkson yelled. “Hell, man, you’re going to do much worse real soon. I’m just getting things started.” He reached in and pulled out an armload of flowers, signaling to others to give him a hand. The police didn’t like it, but soon were looting the shop and building a huge wreath just outside the line of barriers.
“I guess you’re right,” said Hans, a little breathlessly. A taste of violence had excited him, whetted his appetite for more to come. “But you startled me. I felt a real thrill, like I haven’t felt since I was human.”
“Then let’s do it some more.” And Birkson ran up and down one side of the street, breaking out every window he could reach. He picked up small articles he found inside the shops and threw them. Some of them shattered when they hit.
He finally stopped. Leystrasse had been transformed. No longer the scrubbed and air-conditioned Lunar environment, it had become as shattered, as chaotic and uncertain, as the tension-filled emotional atmosphere it contained. Bach shuddered and swallowed the rising taste of bile. It was a precursor of things to come, she was sure. It hit her deeply to see the staid and respectable Leystrasse ravaged.
“A cake,” Birkson said. “We have to have a cake. Hold on a minute, I’ll be right back.” He strode quickly toward Bach, took her elbow and turned her, pulled her insistently away with him.
“You have to get those officers away from here,” he said, conversationally. “They’re tense. They could explode at any minute. In fact,” and he favored her with his imbecile grin, “they’re probably more dangerous right now than the bomb.”
“You mean you think it’s a fake?”
“No. It’s for real. I know the psychological pattern. After this much trouble, he won’t want to be a dud. Other types, they’re in it for the attention and they’d just as soon fake it. Not Hans. But what I mean is, I have him. I can get him. But I can’t count on your officers. Pull them back and leave only two or three of your most trusted people.”
“All right.” She had decided again, more from a sense of helpless futility than anything else, to trust him. He had pulled a neat diversion with the flower shop and the X-ray.
“We may have him already,�
� he went on, as they reached the end of the street and turned the corner. “Often, the X-ray is enough. It cooks some of the circuitry and makes it unreliable. I’d hoped to kill him outright, but he’s shielded. Oh, he’s probably got a lethal dosage, but it’d take him days to die. That doesn’t do us any good. And if his circuitry is knocked out, the only way to find out is to wait. We have to do better than that. Here’s what I want you to do.”
He stopped abruptly and relaxed, leaning against the wall and gazing out over the trees and artificial sunlight of the Plaza. Bach could hear songbirds. They had always made her feel good before. Now all she could think of was incinerated corpses. Birkson ticked off points on his fingers.
She listened to him carefully. Some of it was strange, but no worse than she had already witnessed. And he really did have a plan. He really did. The sense of relief was so tremendous that it threatened to create a mood of euphoria in her, one not yet justified by the circumstances. She nodded curtly to each of his suggestions, then again to the officer who stood beside her, confirming what Birkson had said and turning it into orders. The young man rushed off to carry them out, and Birkson started to return to the bomb. Bach grabbed him.
“Why wouldn’t you let Hans answer my question about who did the surgical work on him? Was that part of your plan?” The question was halfbelligerent.
“Oh. Yeah, it was, in a way. I just grabbed the opportunity to make him feel closer to me. But it wouldn’t have done you any good. He’ll have a block against telling that, for sure. It could even be set to explode the bomb if he tries to answer that question. Hans is a maniac, but don’t underestimate the people who helped him get where he is now. They’ll be protected.”
“Who are they?”
Birkson shrugged. It was such a casual, uncaring gesture that Bach was annoyed again.
“I have no idea. I’m not political, Ann. I don’t know the Antiabortion Movement from the Freedom for Mauretania League. They build ‘em, I take ‘em apart. It’s as simple as that. Your job is to find out how it happened. I guess you ought to get started on that.”
“We already have,” she conceded. “I just thought that . . . well, coming from Earth, where this sort of thing happens all the time, that you might know . . . damn it, Birkson. Why? Why is this happening?”
He laughed, while Bach turned red and went into a slow boil. Any of her officers, seeing her expression, would have headed for the nearest blast shelter. But Birkson laughed on. Didn’t he give a damn about anything?
“Sorry,” he forced out. “I’ve heard that question before, from other police chiefs. It’s a good question.” He waited, a half smile on his face. When she didn’t say anything, he went on.
“You don’t have the right perspective on this, Ann.”
“That’s Chief Bach to you, damn you.”
“Okay,” he said, easily. “What you don’t see is that this thing is no different from a hand grenade tossed into a crowd or a bomb sent through the mail. It’s a form of communication. It’s just that today, with so many people, you have to shout a little louder to get any attention.”
“But . . . who? They haven’t even identified themselves. You’re saying that Hans is a tool of these people. He’s been wired into the bomb, with his own motives for exploding. Obviously he didn’t have the resources to do this himself, I can see that.”
“Oh, you’ll hear from them. I don’t think they expect him to be successful. He’s a warning. If they were really serious, they could find the sort of person they want, one who’s politically committed and will die for the cause. Of course, they don’t care if the bomb goes off; they’ll be pleasantly surprised if it does. Then they can stand up and pound their chests for a while. They’ll be famous.”
“But where did they get the uranium? The security is . . .”
For the first time, Birkson showed a trace of annoyance.
“Don’t be silly. The path leading to today was irrevocably set in 1945. There was never any way to avoid it. The presence of a tool implies that it will be used. You can try your best to keep it in the hands of what you think of as responsible people, but it’ll never work. And it’s no different, that’s what I’m saying. This bomb is just another weapon. It’s a cherry bomb in an anthill. It’s gonna cause one hill of ants a hell of a lot of trouble, but it’s no threat to the race of ants.”
Bach could not see it that way. She tried, but it was still a nightmare of entirely new proportions to her. How could he equate the killing of millions of people with a random act of violence where three or four might be hurt? She was familiar with that. Bombs went off every day in her city, as in every human city. People were always dissatisfied.
“I could walk down . . . no, it’s up here, isn’t it?” Birkson mused for a moment on cultural differences. “Anyway, give me enough money, and I’ll bet I could go up to your slum neighborhoods right this minute and buy you as many kilos of uranium or plutonium as you want. Which is something you ought to be doing, by the way. Anything can be bought. Anything. For the right price, you could have bought weapons-grade material on the black market as early as 1960 or so. It would have been very expensive; there wasn’t much of it. You’d have had to buy a lot of people. But now . . . well, you think it out.” He stopped, and seemed embarrassed by his outburst.
“I’ve read a little about this,” he apologized.
She did think it out as she followed him back to the cordon. What he said was true. When controlled fusion proved too costly for wide-scale use, humanity had opted for fast breeder reactors. There had been no other choice. And from that moment, nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists had been the price humanity accepted. And the price they would continue to pay.
“I wanted to ask you one more question,” she said. He stopped and turned to face her. His smile was dazzling.
“Ask away. But are you going to take me up on that bet?”
She was momentarily unsure of what he meant.
“Oh. Are you saying you’d help us locate the underground uranium ring? I’d be grateful . . .”
“No, no. Oh, I’ll help you. I’m sure I can make a contact. I used to do that before I got into this game. What I meant was, are you going to bet I can’t find some? We could bet . . . say, a dinner together as soon as I’ve found it. Time limit of seven days. How about it?”
She thought she had only two alternatives: walk away from him, or kill him. But she found a third.
“You’re a betting man. I guess I can see why. But that’s what I wanted to ask you. How can you stay so calm? Why doesn’t this get to you like it does to me and my people. You can’t tell me it’s simply that you’re used to it.”
He thought about it. “And why not? You can get used to anything, you know. Now, what about that bet?”
“If you don’t stop talking about that,” she said, quietly, “I’m going to break your arm.”
“All right.” He said nothing further, and she asked no further questions.
The fireball grew in milliseconds into an inferno that could scarcely be described in terms comprehensible to humans. Everything in a half-kilometer radius simply vanished into super-heated gases and plasma: buttresses, plateglass windows, floors and ceilings, pipes, wires, tanks, machines, gewgaws and trinkets by the million, books, tapes, apartments, furniture, household pets, men, women, and children. They were the lucky ones. The force of the expanding blast compressed two hundred levels below it like a giant sitting on a Dagwood sandwich, making holes through plate steel turned to putty by the heat as easily as a punch press through tinfoil. Upward, the surface bulged into the soundless Lunar night and split to reveal a white hell beneath. Chunks flew away, chunks as large as city sectors, before the center collapsed back on itself to leave a crater whose walls were a maze of compartments and ant tunnels that dripped and flowed like warm gelatin. No trace was left of human bodies within two kilometers of the explosion. They had died after only the shortest period of suffering, their bodies consumed or sprea
d into an invisible layer of organic film by the combination of heat and pressure that passed through walls, entered rooms where the doors were firmly shut. Further away, the sound was enough to congeal the bodies of a million people before the heat roasted them, the blast stripped flesh from bones to leave shrunken stick figures. Still the effects attenuated as the blast was channeled into corridors that were structurally strong enough to remain intact, and that very strength was the downfall of the inhabitants of the maze. Twenty kilometers from the epicenter, pressure doors popped through steel flanges like squeezed watermelon seeds.
What was left was five million burnt, blasted corpses and ten million injured so hideously that they would die in hours or days. But Bach had been miraculously thrown clear by some freak of the explosion. She hurtled through the void with fifteen million ghosts following her, and each carried a birthday cake. They were singing. She joined in.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday . . .”
“Chief Bach.”
“Huh?” She felt a cold chill pass over her body. For a moment she could only stare down into the face of Roger Birkson.
“You all right now?” he asked. He looked concerned.
“I’m . . . what happened?”
He patted her on both arms, then shook her heartily.
“Nothing. You drifted off for a moment.” He narrowed his eyes. “I think you were daydreaming. I want to be diplomatic about this . . . ah, what I mean . . . I’ve seen it happen before. I think you were trying to get away from us.”
She rubbed her hands over her face.
“I think I was. But I sure went in the wrong direction. I’m all right now.” She could remember it now, and knew she had not passed out or become totally detached from what was going on. She had watched it all. Her memories of the explosion, so raw and real a moment before, were already the stuff of nightmares.