Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  Sergeant, hell, Polchik thought. This stuff goes right to Captain Summit, Santorini and the Commissioner. Probably the Mayor. Maybe the President; who the hell knows?

  Petulantly (it seemed to Polchik), the robot resumed, “Reviewing my tapes, I find the matter of the bottle of liquor offered as a gratuity still unresolved. If I am to—”

  Polchik spun left and kicked with all his might at a garbage can bolted to an iron fence. The lid sprang off and clanged against the fence at the end of its short chain. “I’ve had it with you…you nonreturnable piece of scrap crap!” He wanted very much to go on, but he didn’t know what to say. All he knew for certain was that he’d never had such a crummy night in all his life. It couldn’t just be this goddamned robot—staring back blankly. It was everything. The mortgage payment was due; Benjy had to go in to the orthodontist and where the hell was the money going to come from for that; Dorothy had called the precinct just before he’d come down, to tell him the hot water had split and drowned the carpets in the kid’s bedroom; and to top it all off, he’d been assigned this buzzing pain in the ass and got caught with a little juice passed by that nitwit Rico; he’d had to have this Brillo pain tell him there was a hassle two blocks away; he was sure as God made little green apples going to get a bad report out of this, maybe get set down, maybe get reprimanded, maybe get censured…he didn’t know what all.

  But one thing was certain: this metal bird-dog, this stuffed shirt barracks lawyer with the trailalong of a ten-year-old kid behind his big brother, this nuisance in metal underwear, this…this…thing was of no damned earthly use to a working cop pulling a foot beat!

  On the other hand, a voice that spoke with the voice of Mike Polchik said, he did keep that jughead from using a broken bottle on you.

  “Shuddup!” Polchik said.

  “I beg your pardon?” answered the robot.

  Ingrate! said the inner voice.

  It was verging on that chalky hour before dawn, when the light filtering out of the sky had a leprous, sickly look. Mike Polchik was a much older man.

  Brillo had interfered in the apprehension of Milky Kyser, a well-known car thief. Mike had spotted him walking slowly and contemplatively along a line of parked cars on Columbus Avenue, carrying a tightly-rolled copy of the current issue of Life magazine.

  When he had collared Milky, the robot had buzzed up to them and politely inquired precisely what in the carborundum Polchik thought he was doing. Polchik had responded with what was becoming an hysterical reaction-formation to anything the metal cop said. “Shuddup!”

  Brillo had persisted, saying he was programmed to protect the civil rights of the members of the community, and as far as he could tell, having “scanned all data relevant to the situation at hand,” the gentleman now dangling from Polchik’s grip was spotlessly blameless of even the remotest scintilla of wrongdoing. Polchik had held Milky with one hand and with the other gesticulated wildly as he explained, “Look, dimdumb, this is Milky Kyser, AKA Irwin Kayser, AKA Clarence Irwin, AKA Jack Milk, AKA God Knows Who All. He is a well-known dip and car thief, and he will use that rolled-up copy of the magazine to jack-and-snap the door handle of the proper model car, any number of which is currently parked, you will note, along this street…unless I arrest him! Now will you kindly get the hell outta my hair and back off?”

  But it was no use. By the time Brillo had patiently repeated the civil rights story, reiterated pertinent sections of the Peace Officer Responsibility Act of 1975 and topped it off with a précis of Miranda-Escobedo-Baum Supreme Court decisions so adroit and simplified even a confirmed tautologist would have applauded, Milky himself—eyes glittering and a sneer that was hardly a smile on his ferret face—was echoing it, word for word.

  The robot had given Milky a thorough course in legal cop-outs, before Polchik’s dazed eyes.

  “Besides,” Milky told Polchik, with as much dignity as he could muster, hanging as he was from the cop’s meaty fist, “I ain’t done nuthin’, and just because I been busted once or twice…”

  “Once or twice!?” Polchik yanked the rolled-up magazine out of Milky’s hand and raised it to clobber him. Milky pulled in his head like a turtle, wincing.

  But in that fraction of a second, Polchik suddenly saw a picture flashed on the wall of his mind. A picture of Desk Sergeant Loyo and Captain Summit and Chief Santorini and the Mayor’s toady and that silent FBI man, all watching a TV screen. And on the screen, there was the pride of the Force, Officer Mike Polchik beaning Milky Kyser with a semi-lethal copy of Life magazine.

  Polchik held the magazine poised, trembling with the arrested movement. Milky, head now barely visible from between his shoulders, peeped up from behind his upraised hands. He looked like a mole.

  “Beat it,” Polchik growled. “Get the hell out of this precinct, Milky. If you’re spotted around here again, you’re gonna get busted. And don’t stop to buy no magazines.”

  He let Milky loose.

  The mole metamorphosed into a ferret once more. And straightening himself, he said, “An’ don’t call me ‘Milky’ any more. My given name is Irwin.”

  “You got three seconds t’vanish from my sight!”

  Milky née Irwin hustled off down the street. At the corner he stopped and turned around. He cupped his hands and yelled back. “Hey, robot…thanks!”

  Brillo was about to reply when Polchik bellowed, “Will you please!” The robot turned and said, very softly in Reardon’s voice, “You are still holding Mr. Kyser’s magazine.”

  Polchik was weary. Infinitely weary. “You hear him askin’ for it?” He walked away from the robot and, as he passed a sidewalk dispenser, stepped on the dispodpedal, and flipped the magazine into the receptacle.

  “I saved a piece of cherry pie for you, Mike,” the waitress said. Polchik looked up from his uneaten hot (now cold) roast beef sandwich and French fries. He shook his head.

  “Thanks anyway. Just another cuppa coffee.”

  The waitress had lost her way somewhere beyond twenty-seven. She was a nice person. She went home to her husband every morning. She didn’t fool around. Extra mates under the new lottery were not her interest; she just didn’t fool around. But she liked Mike Polchik. He, like she, was a very nice person.

  “What’s the matter, Mike?”

  Polchik looked out the window of the diner. Brillo was standing directly under a neon street lamp. He couldn’t hear it from here, but he was sure the thing was buzzing softly to itself (with the sort of sound an electric watch makes).

  “Him.”

  “That?” The waitress looked past him.

  “Uh-uh. Him.”

  “What is it?”

  “My shadow.”

  “Mike, you okay? Try the pie, huh? Maybe a scoop of nice vanilla ice cream on top.”

  “Onita, please. Just a cuppa coffee, I’m fine. I got problems.” He stared down at his plate again.

  She looked at him for a moment longer, worried, then turned and returned the pie on its plate to the empty space behind the smudged glass of the display case. “You want fresh?” she asked.

  When he didn’t answer, she shrugged and came back, using the coffee siphon on the portable cart to refill his cup.

  She lounged behind the counter, watching her friend, Mike Polchik, as he slowly drank his coffee; and every few minutes he’d look out at that metal thing on the corner under the streetlamp. She was a nice person.

  When he rose from the booth and came to the counter, she thought he was going to apologize, or speak to her, or something, but all he said was, “You got my check?”

  “What check?”

  “Come on.”

  “Oh, Mike, for Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I want to pay the check, you mind?”

  “Mike, almost—what—five years you been eating here, you ever been asked to pay a check?”

  Polchik looked very tired. “Tonight I pay the check. Come on…I gotta get back on the street. He’s waiting.”r />
  There was a strange look in his eyes and she didn’t want to ask which “he” Polchik meant. She was afraid he meant the metal thing out there. Onita, a very nice person, didn’t like strange, new things that waited under neon streetlamps. She hastily wrote out a check and slid it across the plasteel to him. He pulled change from a pocket, paid her, turned, seemed to remember something, turned back, added a tip, then swiftly left the diner.

  She watched through the glass as he went up to the metal thing. Then the two of them walked away, Mike leading, the thing following.

  Onita made fresh. It was a good thing she had done it so many times she could do it by reflex, without thinking. Hot coffee scalds are very painful.

  At the corner, Polchik saw a car weaving toward the intersection. A Ford Electric; convertible, four years old. Still looked flashy. Top down. He could see a bunch of long-haired kids inside. He couldn’t tell the girls from the boys. It bothered him.

  Polchik stopped. They weren’t going fast, but the car was definitely weaving as it approached the intersection. The warrior-lizard, he thought. It was almost an unconscious directive. He’d been a cop long enough to react to the little hints, the flutters, the inclinations. The hunches.

  Polchik stepped out from the curb, unshipped his gum-ball from the bandolier and flashed the red light at the driver. The car slowed even more; now it was crawling.

  “Pull it over, kid!” he shouted.

  For a moment he thought they were ignoring him, that the driver might not have heard him, that they’d try and make a break for it…that they’d speed up and sideswipe him. But the driver eased the car to the curb and stopped.

  Then he slid sidewise, pulled up his legs and crossed them neatly at the ankles. On the top of the dashboard.

  Polchik walked around to the driver’s side. “Turn it off. Everybody out.”

  There were six of them. None of them moved. The driver closed his eyes slowly, then tipped his Irkutsk fur hat over his eyes till it rested on the bridge of his nose. Polchik reached into the car and turned it off. He pulled the keys.

  “Hey! Whuzzis allabout?” one of the kids in the back seat—a boy with terminal acne—complained. His voice began and ended on a whine. Polchik re-stuck the gum-ball.

  The driver looked up from under the fur. “Wasn’t breaking any laws.” He said each word very slowly, very distinctly, as though each one was on a printout.

  And Polchik knew he’d been right. They were on the lizard.

  He opened the door, free hand hanging at the needler. “Out. All of you, out.”

  Then he sensed Brillo lurking behind him, in the middle of the street. Good. Hope a damned garbage truck hits him.

  He was getting mad. That wasn’t smart. Carefully, he said, “Don’t make me say it again. Move it!”

  He lined them up on the sidewalk beside the car, in plain sight. Three girls, three guys. Two of the guys with long, stringy hair and the third with a scalplock. The three girls wearing tammy cuts. All six sullen-faced, drawn, dark smudges under the eyes. The lizard. But good clothes, fairly new. He couldn’t just hustle them, he had to be careful.

  “Okay, one at a time, empty your pockets and pouches onto the hood of the car.”

  “Hey, we don’t haveta do that just because…”

  “Do it!”

  “Don’t argue with the pig,” one of the girls said, lizard-spacing her words carefully. “He’s probably trigger happy.”

  Brillo rolled up to Polchik. “It is necessary to have a probable cause clearance from the precinct in order to search, sir.”

  “Not on a stop’n’frisk,” Polchik snapped, not taking his eyes off them. He had no time for nonsense with the can of cogs. He kept his eyes on the growing collection of chits, change, code-keys, combs, nail files, toke pipes and miscellanea being dumped on the Ford’s hood.

  “There must be grounds for suspicion even in a spot search action, sir,” Brillo said.

  “There’s grounds. Narcotics.”

  “‘Nar…you must be outtayer mind,” said the one boy who slurred his words. He was working something other than the lizard.

  “That’s a pig for you,” said the girl who had made the trigger happy remark.

  “Look,” Polchik said, “you snots aren’t from around here. Odds are good if I run b&b tests on you, we’ll find you’re under the influence of the lizard.”

  “Heyyyy!” the driver said. “The what?”

  “Warrior-lizard,” Polchik said.

  “Oh, ain’t he the jive thug,” the smartmouth girl said. “He’s a word user. I’ll bet he knows all the current rage phrases. A philologist. I’ll bet he knows all the solecisms and colloquialisms, catch phrases, catachreses, nicknames and vulgarisms. The ‘warrior-lizard,’ indeed.”

  Damned college kids, Polchik fumed inwardly. They always try to make you feel stupid; I coulda gone to college—if I didn’t have to work. Money, they probably always had money. The little bitch.

  The driver giggled. “Are you trying to tell me, Mella, my dear, that this Peace Officer is accusing us of being under the influence of the illegal Bolivian drug commonly called Guerrera-Tuera?” He said it with pinpointed scorn, pronouncing the Spanish broadly: gwuh-rare-uh too-err-uh.

  Brillo said, “Reviewing my semantic tapes, sir, I find no analogs for ‘Guerrera-Tuera’ as ‘warrior-lizard.’ True, guerrero in Spanish means warrior, but the closest spelling I find is the feminine noun guerra, which translates as war. Neither guerrera nor tuera appear in the Spanish language. If tuera is a species of lizard, I don’t seem to find it—”

  Polchik had listened dumbly. The weight on his shoulders was monstrous. All of them were on him. The kids, that lousy stinking robot—they were making fun, such fun, such damned fun of him! “Keep digging,” he directed them. He was surprised to hear his words emerge as a series of croaks.

  “And blood and breath tests must be administered, sir—”

  “Stay the hell outta this!”

  “We’re on our way home from a party,” said the boy with the scalplock, who had been silent till then. “We took a short-cut and got lost.”

  “Sure,” Polchik said. “In the middle of Manhattan, you got lost.” He saw a small green bottle dumped out of the last girl’s pouch. She was trying to push it under other items. “What’s that?”

  “Medicine,” she said. Quickly. Very quickly.

  Everyone tensed.

  “Let me see it.” His voice was even.

  He put out his hand for the bottle, but all six watched his other hand, hanging beside the needler. Hesitantly, the girl picked the bottle out of the mass of goods on the car’s hood, and handed him the plastic container.

  Brillo said, “I am equipped with chemical sensors and reference tapes in my memory bank enumerating common narcotics. I can analyze the suspected medicine.”

  The six stared wordlessly at the robot. They seemed almost afraid to acknowledge its presence.

  Polchik handed the plastic bottle to the robot.

  Brillo depressed a color-coded key on a bank set flush into his left forearm, and a panel that hadn’t seemed to be there a moment before slid down in the robot’s chest. He dropped the plastic bottle into the opening and the panel slid up. He stood and buzzed.

  “You don’t have to open the bottle?” Polchik asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh.”

  The robot continued buzzing. Polchik felt stupid, just standing and watching. After a few moments the kids began to smirk, then to grin, then to chuckle openly, whispering among themselves. The smartmouthed girl giggled viciously. Polchik felt fifteen years old again; awkward, pimply, the butt of secret jokes among the long-legged high school girls in their miniskirts who had been so terrifyingly aloof he had never even considered asking them out. He realized with some shame that he despised these kids with their money, their cars, their flashy clothes, their dope. And most of all, their assurance. He, Mike Polchik, had been working hauling sides of beef from the
delivery trucks to his old man’s butcher shop while others were tooling around in their Electrics. He forced the memories from his mind and took out his anger and frustration on the metal idiot still buzzing beside him.

  “Okay, okay, how long does it take you?”

  “Tsk, tsk,” said the driver, and went cross-eyed. Polchik ignored him. But not very well.

  “I am a mobile unit, sir. Experimental model 44. My parent mechanism—the Master Unit AA—at Universal Electronics laboratories is equipped to perform this function in under one minute.”

  “Well, hurry it up. I wanna run these hairies in.”

  “Gwuh-rare-uh too-er-uh,” the scalplock said in a nasty undertone.

  There was a soft musical tone from inside the chest compartment, the plate slid down again, and the robot withdrew the plastic bottle. He handed it to the girl.

  “Now whaddaya think you’re doing?”

  “Analysis confirms what the young lady attested, sir. This is a commonly prescribed nose drop for nasal congestion and certain primary allergies.”

  Polchik was speechless.

  “You are free to go,” the robot said. “With our apologies. We are merely doing our jobs. Thank you.”

  Polchik started to protest—he knew he was right—but the kids were already gathering up their belongings. He hadn’t even ripped the car, which was probably where they had it locked away. But he knew it was useless. He was the guinea pig in this experiment, not the robot. It was all painfully clear. He knew if he interfered, if he overrode the robot’s decision, it would only add to the cloud under which the robot had put him: short temper, taking a gift from a neighborhood merchant, letting the robot out-maneuver him in the apartment, false stop on Kyser…and now this. Suddenly, all Mike Polchik wanted was to go back, get out of harness, sign out, and go home to bed. Wet carpets and all. Just to bed.

  Because if these metal things were what was coming, he was simply too tired to buck it.

  He watched as the kids—hooting and ridiculing his impotency—piled back in the car, the girls showing their legs as they clambered over the side. The driver burned polyglas speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. In a moment they were gone.