Return to Otherness (1962) SSC

by Henry Kuttner

  DeeDee nodded in slavish adoration.

  “You sign contract?”

  Nod.

  Martin looked significantly into Watt’s eyes. He extended his hand.

  “The contract release,” Erika explained, upside-down. “Give it to him before he pulls your head off.”

  Slowly Watt pulled the contract release from his pocket and held it out. But Martin was already shambling toward the window. Erika reached back hastily and snatched the document.

  “That was a wonderful act,” she told Nick, as they reached the street. “Put me down now. We can find a cab some -”

  “No act,” Martin growled. “Real. Till tomorrow. After that -” He shrugged. “But tonight, Mammoth-Slayer.” He attempted to climb a palm tree, changed his mind, and shambled on, carrying the now pensive Erika. But it was not until a police car drove past that Erika screamed …

  “I’ll bail you out tomorrow,” Erika told Mammoth-Slayer, struggling between two large patrolmen.

  Her words were drowned in an infuriated bellow.

  Thereafter events blurred, to solidify again for the irate Mammoth-Slayer only when he was thrown in a cell, where he picked himself up with a threatening roar. “I kill!” he announced, seizing the bars.

  “Arrrgh!”

  “Two in one night,” said a bored voice, moving away outside. “Both in Bel-Air, too. Think they’re hopped up? We couldn’t get a coherent story out of either one.”

  The bars shook. “An annoyed voice from one of the bunks said to shut up, and added that there had been already enough trouble from nincompoops without -here it paused, hesitated, and uttered a shrill, sharp, piercing cry.

  Silence prevailed, momentarily, in the cell-block as Mammoth-Slayer, son of the Great Hairy One, turned slowly to face Raoul St. Cyr.

  ANDROID

  Bradley looked at the Director’s head. His stomach tried to crawl up into his throat. He felt suddenly dizzy. He knew that he was betraying himself, and that would be absolutely fatal.

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a few coins, and let the coins drop, as though by accident, to the airfoam carpet.

  “Oh-oh,” he said, and immediately crouched down to recover the money. It’s a basic principle of first aid, in cases of shock or faintness, to lower the head, and Bradley was doing just that. The giddiness began to pass as his circulation picked up. In a moment, he knew, he’d have to stand up and face the Director, and by that time he was determined to have his feelings under control. But how the devil could the Director’s head be where it was - after last night?

  And then sanity came back. He remembered that, last night, the Director couldn’t possibly have recognized him through the rubber-plastic false-face he had worn. On the other hand, after last night, the Director of New Products, Inc., should have been incapable of living or breathing, not to speak of using his memory-centers. Bradley had left the man’s body in one corner of the room and his head in another.

  Man?

  With a violent effort he controlled himself. He recaptured the last coin and stood up, his face flushed. “Sorry,” he said. “I came in to deliver that report on the induced mutation project, not to act like a horn of plenty.” His fascinated stare moved down to the Director’s neck and flicked away. The high collar concealed any - any mark. Any mark, such as might have been left by razor-sharp steel shearing through flesh and bone … Was there a reason for the high collar? Bradley couldn’t be sure. In the fall of 2060, men’s fashions had changed considerably from the uncomfortable styles of a few years before, and the Director’s flaring half-cape, with its gilt-braided, close-fitting collar, was far from extreme. Bradley owned one like that himself.

  Lord, he thought in white panic - can’t the - the things even be killed?

  Arthur Court, the Director, turned a bland smile on his Chief of Organization. “Hangover?” he asked. “Take an irradiation treatment. Medical’s always happy to use their gadgets. Our staff’s too healthy to suit them, I think.” He talked!

  A mad thought whirled into Bradley’s brain: a ringer? Was this really Court sitting behind the desk? But instantly he knew that couldn’t be the explanation. It was Court, the same Arthur Court whom Bradley had killed not many hours ago. If you could call it killing, when Court hadn’t actually been alive … at least, not with the same sort of life that activated human beings.

  He forced his mind from the danger-level and became the efficient Chief of Organization of the company. “You can’t argue with a hangover,” he said. “Here’re the latest figures -”

  “What about that variant factor? I gathered there was something that upset the calculations.”

  “There was,” Bradley said. “But it’s a theoretical variable. It doesn’t matter a bit in practice, because we’re not trying to mutate people. And the sterility rate doesn’t vary abnormally with fruit-flies or - or strawberries.”

  “But it does with people - eh?” Court glanced rapidly through the papers Bradley had given him.

  “Uh-huh. We could follow it up, but it would cost money and wouldn’t have any immediately practical results. That’s up to you to decide, sir.”

  “We can predict non-human reactions with reasonable accuracy, though?”

  Bradley nodded. “Two per cent factor of error. Close enough for us to mutate potatoes twenty feet long and tasting like roast beef, without any danger of getting them half an inch long instead, and tasting like cyanide.”

  “Does the curve of variance rise with animals?”

  “No. Only people. We can hatch chickens which are all white meat and built cube-shaped for easy carving. And, really, we could mutate people too, if it weren’t illegal - but the uncertainty factor steps in there, as I said. Too many people become sterilized instead of having mutated children.”

  “Um,” Court said, and pondered. “Well, forget about the people, then. There’s no profit in it. Drop that part of the investigation. Go ahead with the rest. All right?”

  “Fine,” Bradley agreed. He had expected to be stopped at this point of the inquiry, though, since last night, not by Court. He found he was still holding an unlighted cigarette. He put it in his mouth and went to the side door and opened it. Then he turned.

  “That’s all?”

  He watched Court twist his neck around, and had an insane fear that the man’s head might fall off. But it didn’t.

  “Yes, that’s all for now,” Court said pleasantly.

  Bradley went out, trying to forget the narrow red line he had just seen circling the Director’s throat, revealed when the man had turned his head.

  The things couldn’t be killed by decapitation, then. But they could be destroyed. They could be dissolved with acid, smashed with a hammer, dismantled, burned …

  The trouble was, there was as yet no sure way to recognize the creatures. The sterility curve after exposure to mild radioactivity meant something, but ordinary humans could have become sterilized too - though not usually by such slight dosages of gamma rays. And even then, some people were sterile anyway.

  All Bradley had was a general method of screening. After that, he had to depend on psychology to weed out the monsters. He knew that they could usually be found in positions of power and influence, though not necessarily in the public eye. Like Arthur Court, who, as Director of New Products, Inc., wielded tremendous influence on the culture - since civilization is moulded by the technological tools placed in its hands.

  Bradley shivered.

  Last night he had cut off Arthur Court’s head.

  Arthur Court was an android.

  “And what are you going to do about it?” Bradley asked himself in the hall outside Court’s door. He looked down with a certain academic interest at his own hand shaking until the papers he held fluttered. What could he do about it? He or any other man?

  You couldn’t fight them on equal terms. Probably their I.Q. was far higher than mankind’s. On terms of pure intellect Bradley would have no chance at
all. Super-comptometers could solve abstruse problems no limited human mind could tackle. Last night Bradley had worn a distorting rubber mask - but if Court’s cold metallic brain set itself the problem of reasoning out his identity, wouldn’t Court arrive at the right answer sooner or later?

  Had he already arrived at an answer?

  Bradley suppressed a panicky impulse to run. There was such dead silence behind the door at his elbow. For all he knew they had vision that could slip between the buzzing atoms of the door and see Bradley here as if he stood beyond glass - see through him and into the patterns of his brain, and read all his thoughts as they took form.

  “They’re only androids,” he reminded himself with great firmness, forcing his gait to a walk as he turned away down the hall. “If they had that much power I wouldn’t be here now.”

  Still, he wondered with a corroding urgency just what had happened last night after he left Court’s apartment. He would not think of how Court had looked, lying there motionless beside the heavy steel blade dimmed by that stickiness that looked like blood and was not human blood.

  Had he repaired himself, after Bradley left? Repaired was the word, of course - not cured. Only a human could be cured. It probably depended on just where the brain of the android was located. Not necessarily in the head. The head is really too vulnerable a place for such an important mechanism. You could improve on the structure of the human in so many ways. Perhaps the androids had. Perhaps Court’s brain was sheltered somewhere in the mysterious chambers of his synthetic body, and its cold, clicking thoughts had gone on then steely processes all the while Bradley stood there looking down in incredulous shock at the body of his - his victim?

  Which was the victim and which the victor?

  All functional processes had certainly stopped in the robot after decapitation. Bradley had made sure of that. No respiration, no heartbeat. But somewhere inside, perhaps the metallic brain had been clicking quietly on its cold way. So cold, Bradley thought irrationally, that not all the synthetic warmth of the synthetic blood could raise it a fraction of a degree toward human temperature.

  Either Court’s body had risen after Bradley left, then, and welded on the head again, or else others had come to - repair - the sabotage. Did each robot, in operation, send out the equivalent of a steady beam of energy which, when it ceased, brought a repair crew to the spot? If that had happened, it was lucky Bradley had not lingered too long in that room where no murder had been done, though Court’s head lay so far from his motionless body …

  Of course I could be fust as crazy as a bedbug, Bradley reminded himself sardonically. Certainly he would have a hard time convincing anyone he wasn’t. And he would have to convince someone. He couldn’t go on alone any farther. He had gone too far now to keep this knowledge to himself. By his very act of proof, by the cutting off of an android head, he had given himself away. Sooner or later they would track down the identity of the man behind that rubber mask. Before it happened, he would have to pass this information on.

  And there he ran his second terrible risk. The androids would show him no mercy when they caught him. But how much could he expect from his own kind, when he told his fantastic tale? I’ll end in a padded cell, he thought, while they go on multiplying outside until -

  Until what? Until they outnumber the humans and take over control? Perhaps they already had. Perhaps they had let him go free after that harmless murder because only he was human now in the whole civilized world … Perhaps he was quite harmless, really. Perhaps -

  “Oh, shut up,” Bradley urged himself impatiently.

  “Then at least you don’t suspect me of being a - an android?” Dr. Wallinger asked dourly. He was slightly nervous, as the result of having sat for ten minutes now with a gun-muzzle pointed unwaveringly at his stomach. It was, of course, ridiculous that a mysterious rubber-masked figure in a gold-braided cape whose flare concealed most of its wearer’s body should be sitting here in his library forcing him to listen to psychotic nonsense.

  “You have children,” Bradley said, his voice a little muffled behind the mask. “That was how I could feel sure about you.”

  “Look,” Wallinger said earnestly, “I’m a nuclear physicist. I think a psychologist could probably give you more help than -”

  “A psychiatrist, you mean?”

  “Not at all. Of course not. But -”

  “But all the same, you think I’m crazy. All right. I expected you would. I suppose I wouldn’t have trusted you very far if you hadn’t. That reaction’s normal. But - blast you, man, open your mind! Look at the thing fairly. Isn’t it conceivable that this could have happened?”

  Wallinger, with a glance at the gun, put his fingertips together and pursed his lips. “Um, conceivable … Well, there’s no threshold, naturally. Though 1/100 roentgen per day is considered safe unless both parents are subject to gamma bombardment. You’ve borne in mind the normal recovery time? Even under bombardment, you know, the changed genes have less tendency to divide and are gradually supplanted by normal genes.”

  “You aren’t telling me anything new,” Bradley said with forced patience. “My point is that gamma radiations that would produce mutation in humans have no effect on robots, which are sterile to begin with. If only androids were sterile it would be simple, but gamma rays induce sterility in humans too. You have children. You’re all right. But -”

  “Hold on,” Wallinger said. “Couldn’t there be android children? If they can make adults, couldn’t they put together synthetic children too?”

  “No. I’ve thought that out carefully. Children grow too fast. They’d have to reorganize the whole android child every couple of weeks, change all its inward and outward dimensions, work over everything about it. I think that would call for too much time and effort. They can’t afford it yet, if my calculations are right. There aren’t enough of them. And later, when they could afford the job, it wouldn’t be necessary. You see? By the time they were able to go to all that trouble, they wouldn’t need to. They’d be in the majority. They wouldn’t have to deceive us. They -”

  Bradley paused. His voice had been getting out of control. Above all, he would have to remain cool and calm about this.

  “There’s one other angle,” he said. “I don’t think an android child could deceive other children. Real children. They see things top directly. The android brain is coordinated to synthetic human adult thinking. They’ve done a good job of it, but even now, if you know the truth, you can catch them by their psychological failures of adjustment. For one thing, they aren’t exhibitionists. They never try to bully or assert themselves over others. Why should they? They’re perfectly functioning and efficient gadgets. They don’t need to compensate. They’re too well adjusted to be really human.”

  “Then why couldn’t they adjust to a child mentality?”

  “For the same reason they couldn’t create a growing child physically. A child’s mind is too different from an adult’s, and it changes too fast. It grows. Anyhow, why should they? They don’t need to. They’ve fooled us all up to now, and even when one man knows the truth, what can he do about it? You won’t listen to me. You won’t -”

  “I’m listening,” Wallinger said mildly. “It makes an interesting tale, anyhow. I wish you’d tell me what gave you the idea to start with.”

  Bradley caught himself on the verge of saying, “It was my work. I had a chance to correlate a lot of material and everything added up to an unknown factor.” But he didn’t say it. He meant to remain anonymous until he felt sure it was safe to reveal himself. A clue like that could be tracked down too easily.

  “I - figured it out,” he said. “- I have friends in various jobs who kept mentioning little discrepancies they’d noticed. I got interested. It began to add up. There were accidents in which the patients should have died, sometimes did die, and then came back to life. Oh, they always covered it by talk about adrenalin shots and so forth, but it’s happened too often. And always in cases involving peop
le in influential positions. I don’t know just how they work it - maybe a real person dies and his android double takes his place. They’ve got the recuperative powers of a machine, but a machine’s handicaps, too. Cut one and it bleeds, but -”

  Bradley paused, measuring Wallinger’s receptiveness with a wary glance.

  “All right,” he said suddenly, “I’ll tell you what really happened. Please try to listen without prejudice if you can. It was six months ago. I was alone in a - a laboratory - with one of my friends.” It had been Arthur Court, the Director. This had been the first proof Bradley actually saw.

  “He fumbled a retort and it shattered and cut his wrist to the bone. He didn’t know I saw it happen. And even though I did see, for a long time I tried to argue myself out of believing it. On the surface of his wrist there was flesh, and it bled. But underneath were wires and metal. I tell you, I saw them! It wasn’t an artificial arm, it was the real thing. An artificial arm wouldn’t be part flesh and blood.”

  “What did he do?”

  “That’s the real give-away. He put his hand in his pocket and made some excuse to get out of the room. He didn’t want me to know, because he’d have to call a doctor, and I suppose there weren’t any of their men within reach. He couldn’t let a human even go through the motions of bandaging him. Oh, they’re vulnerable in lots of ways. But now is the time to strike, before they cut down too far on their vulnerabilities. Now -” Bradley paused again, forcing his voice under control.

  “What do you suggest, then?” Wallinger asked in his mild voice. It was impossible to guess whether Bradley had succeeded in touching the man’s mind with conviction, or even the beginnings of it.

  “I don’t know.” Under the flared cape Bradley’s shoulders sagged. “That’s why I came to you. I thought - well, look. Here’s one possibility. I need an infallible way of locating them. Psychology’s all right up to a point, but it’s too slow. I’ve got to know so much about the subject’s life and habit patterns. If the factor of mechanical logic and efficiency’s too accurate, that’s a double check. But -”