Return to Otherness (1962) SSC

by Henry Kuttner

  “But there’s the mechanical factor itself,” Wallinger offered unexpectedly. “Have you thought of that? It might -” He paused and grinned a little sheepishly. “Go on,” he said.

  Behind the rubber mask Bradley’s face creased in a broad, exultant smile. That was the opening wedge. He had succeeded in presenting the physicist with a hypothetical problem that had struck a spark of momentary interest. It was still in the realm of theory, but Wallinger had responded. That was all that mattered now. He went on with increased enthusiasm.

  “That’s it exactly. A machine has to be operated. There must be a power source somewhere. Maybe it’s in them, or maybe they pick it up from some broadcasting source. But it should be possible to detect it. Something like a thyratron recorder hidden in places they frequent, or a Geiger counter, or -”

  “You think they could be trapped because of ionizing radiations?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I think. It could be nuclear fission that works the things. It could be anything. That’s why I need help from someone like you. Someone who could make closer guesses than I can.”

  Wallinger regarded his fingertips. “I couldn’t, you know,” he said. “Not without much more information than you can give me. You’ve asked me to hear you with an open mind. Now you listen to me. If our positions were reversed, wouldn’t you demand more proof than a stranger’s say-so? It would take almost unlimited time and experiment to make a theoretical gadget to detect these theoretical androids of yours, especially since you can’t even guess yet what their functional principle is. Have you thought of trying it from some more practical angle - x-rays, for instance? The human organism is a tremendously complicated structure. I doubt if it could be perfectly duplicated.”

  Bradley shrugged beneath the flaring cape. “All an x-ray shows is light and shadow. The - things - are constructed internally to register normally on a fluoroscope. The only way to be certain would be by using surgery - and how could you do that? They never get sick. If you’d seen what I have -”

  He paused. He couldn’t say, “If you’d cut off Arthur Court’s head and knew what I know about the wires and the plastic tubes, the vertebrae that aren’t bone -” But if he admitted how far he had gone to get his certain proof, it would sound to Wallinger like proof of his own madness.

  “They’re part flesh and blood, and part machine,” he said carefully. “Maybe the mechanical parts are necessary to keep the living tissues functioning normally. But we’ll never prove it except by force. They’re all adults, in high positions. You’d need their consent to perform an operation, and they naturally won’t give it. Unless -” He paused. The idea that had flashed through his mind blotted out Wallinger’s face for a moment. Perhaps there was a way, after all. Perhaps -

  “Now listen to me,” Wallinger was saying patiently, his eyes on the gun. “I’m not unreasonable. You’ve got an interesting idea here, but you aren’t ready yet to prove anything. Why don’t you go back to your job, whatever it is, and gather some more data? Then when you -”

  “I’m afraid to go back,” Bradley said in a thin voice.

  A knock, low down on the closed door, interrupted Wallinger’s reply. Before he could turn, the door opened a small crack and through it bounded a half-grown cat closely followed by a small girl and a much smaller boy. The cat hurtled across the carpet in the stiff-legged, high-tailed gallop which is a cat’s idea of humor. The girl paused when she saw Bradley, but the boy was too intent on the animal to notice anything.

  Wallinger said in a voice that did not sound at all like his own, “Children, go back upstairs! Now!” His face was suddenly grey. He did not glance at Bradley.

  The cat had fallen over heavily and lay lashing its tail and making clawless boxing motions at the small boy. Its rough, imperfect purring filled the sudden silence in the room.

  “Jerry,” Wallinger said, “take the kitten and go back upstairs. Do you hear me? Sue, you know you mustn’t come into my study without knocking. Go on upstairs.”

  “We knocked,” the girl said, her eyes on Bradley, who had slipped the gun under a fold of his cloak. He was trying to analyze a thought that had flashed through his mind as soon as he saw the children. There was something here he could use, but it would take time to work the idea out.

  He stood up, seeing Wallinger’s tense start as he moved. The man was terrified. Bradley knew why, suddenly.

  The girl watched the stranger with round, interested eyes. The boy and the cat had simultaneously noticed him now and both were stricken with shyness. The cat scrambled to its feet and prepared to sell its life dearly, and the boy looked around for something to hide behind. The little girl, however, exhibited unmistakable signs of intending to show off. She was around seven, Bradley guessed. He glanced from face to face of the Wallinger family, and then grinned.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I won’t keep you any longer, Doctor. You’ll hear from me.”

  “By all means,” Wallinger said, too heartily. He was only interested now in getting his children away from the dangerous proximity of his guest. He followed Bradley into the hall, pushing the children behind him and closing the door.

  “I -” He started to stammer a little.

  “Forget it,” Bradley said. “What do you think I am? They’re nice kids.”

  Wallinger sighed. “Where can I get in touch with you?”

  “You can’t. I’m going to bring you proof of what I’ve told you. Those things are half machines under the skins, and I’ll find some way to make you believe it. I suppose you’ll call the police as soon as I’m gone. I can’t help that.”

  “No, no, of course I won’t,” Wallinger lied soothingly.

  “All right. One more thing, though. I said I was afraid to go back. I meant it. I’ve done - well, some things that may have given me away. Things I had to do, to make sure … It’s a toss-up now whether they or I find the proof we’re after first. Dr. Wallinger, I’m going to write down names and facts on this case - things I don’t dare tell you now. If you receive that information, you’ll know the androids got their proof first. And that in itself ought to be your proof all this is true. I won’t be around any more, if that happens. It will all depend on you then.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Wallinger said. “I’m sure -”

  “All right, all right,” Bradley cut him off. “Wait and see. Good-by, Doctor. You’ll hear from me.”

  He watched the house over his shoulder as he went down the street. No one came out. When he reached the corner he turned it, entered a drugstore and made his way back through the crowded aisles to the telephone booths beside a window. Through the window he could see far away the corner of the Wallinger house, and the library window where Wallinger’s desk was. At the desk a distant man sat telephoning, making quick, excited gestures as he talked.

  Bradley sighed. At least, Wallinger didn’t know his face or name. He could give the police only a circumstantial tale almost too wild for belief. Bradley would have to walk a knife-edged path now, balancing like a tight-rope walker. Both sides were against him.

  He drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders and turned back toward the office where Arthur Court would be waiting for him.

  Two of them stood at Court’s desk, their backs to him. Bradley paused in the door. Something was wrong. Instinct warned him - a feeling in the air, the poise of the two before him, intangibles that still seemed to shriek an alarm to nerves tense enough to catch their message.

  Of the two at the desk, one was not human. The other went by the name of Johnson, and he might not be human either. It was hard to tell.

  Bradley had to try twice before his voice would come normally from a suddenly dry throat. “You want me, sir?”

  Court turned, smiling. His high collar hid the line where head and neck had been welded back in place. His smile was perfectly normal, but Bradley imagined now he could hear the tiny, soundless clicking of infinitesimal gears as the android’s jaw moved and its inhuman muscles
drew up.

  “Look here, Bradley,” Court said. “Ever see this before?”

  Bradley looked. Then for an instant the blood drained from his head and the room went grey with his sudden giddiness. But this time he did not dare to drop anything or even to pause while he got control of himself again. They were both watching. He made a tremendous effort and forced the greyness back, forced the quiver out of his voice, forced his hands to stop shaking.

  “See what?” he asked in a perfectly normal voice. But he knew well enough.

  Court held up the razor-edged blade that had struck his head from his neck forty-eight hours ago. It was unmistakably the same heavy weapon Bradley had bought at a second-hand shop two days before he used it on the Director. He knew it by the carving on the handle, by the nick in the blade where some inhumanly durable metal in Arthur Court’s neck had bitten into the honed edge of the steel. When Bradley saw it last, it lay beside the headless android body, red with unreal android blood.

  “Ever see it before?” Court asked again.

  “I - don’t think so,” Bradley heard himself saying, with just the right amount of impersonal interest. “Not to remember, anyhow. Why?”

  They looked thoughtfully at him. And by that single look, identical in both faces, he was suddenly quite sure that neither was human. It was something about the quality of the stare. He realized after a moment that it was the same look he had seen in the Wallinger kitten’s eyes - remote, wild, speculative, not inimical but wary. One species looking at another species, measuring possible danger. The kitten had seen him from quite another angle, from low down, in sharp perspective, and probably not in colors, but in tones of grey. It was extraordinary, suddenly, to think how strange he might have looked to the small, wild, wary creature. If he could see himself as it saw him, he might not recognize that looming figure as himself at all. And it occurred to him now that to the androids he must look equally strange and alien. In what colors beyond spectrum-range did they see him? And what a soft, vulnerable structure of flesh and bone he must look to these creatures of steel and synthetics.

  They let him wait a long moment before either spoke or moved. Then that cold-lensed stare dropped from his face, both androids acting as simultaneously as if they moved on a single shaft. It was a mistake, Bradley thought - they shouldn’t let me realize how mechanically they operate. And the second thought, close behind the first, warned him that perhaps now they didn’t care. They knew what he knew. They had nothing more to hide …

  Deliberately Court turned and made a note on his desk-pad.

  “All right, Bradley, thanks. Oh - wait a minute. Be in your office for the next half-hour, will you? I want to talk to you again.”

  Bradley nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak. He was suddenly filled with a deep and bitter humiliation that he must accept the orders of this - this machine.

  It was the reversal of all normal things, for a man to say “sir” to a thing of gears and wiring.

  He looked down at his own hands lying clenched before him on his desk. Ten minutes had ticked by. Before the next twenty were gone he would have to act. They knew. It had been no accident that they called him in to see the nicked steel blade. How they had traced it to him he could not imagine, but their cold, concise brains worked on theories of logic he could not even guess at. They had outwitted him, apparently, without effort. For all his precautions, his careful hiding of everything that might lead back to his identity, they knew. Or if they did not, they were, too definitely suspicious to ignore. In the next five minutes, ten at most, he would have to make up his mind. He would have to act.

  He couldn’t. All that filled his mind was the bitterness of premature defeat. How could he combat them, when even his own kind dismissed him as psychotic? It was doubtful, he told himself, if the whole human race, rousing at this moment to realization and activity, could defeat them now. How far had their preparations gone? How many of them were there? Too many for one man to fight.

  He thought of the whole long history of the race of man, struggling up through countless milleniums of unrecorded time, through five thousand years of slowly increasing knowledge and maturity - to this hour. To the laying in iron android hands, gloved with synthetic flesh, of that priceless heritage. What would they do with the gift? Why were they taking over this culture mankind had been so painfully long in building? Would it mean anything at all to them, or would they cast aside the heritage of all those milleniums and build up their own soulless civilization on a foundation that did not even spare a glance for all man’s wasted centuries?

  “How did it start?” he asked himself. “Why? Why?” And out of the human logic of his own mind came the glimmer of an answer. “When the first man made the first successful android, the human race was doomed.”

  For a successful android meant one indistinguishable from man, one capable of creating others in its own image, one capable of independent motion and reasoning. And what purpose moved in the brain of that first of its metal kind? Had its human creator implanted there some command which led - knowingly or unknowingly - to all that followed? Had the order been one which the android could achieve only by duplicating itself until the human race was infected through and through with the robot cells of the androids?

  It was quite possible. Perhaps the original creator still lived, perhaps he was dead - of age, of accident, or murder at the hands of his own Frankensteinian creations. And paradoxically, perhaps the android race moved on and on along the outward fanning lines of that first command, following toward infinity, toward the last decimal place, some impossible goal which no human being would now ever know …

  “They’ll finish me,” Bradley told himself, almost without emotion. “If they don’t suspect me yet, they will. And there’s nothing I can do to stop them. Wallinger didn’t believe me. No one else will. And the androids will follow me until they catch me no matter how far I run. When they finish me off, they’ll probably set to work to make their disguise so perfect not even I could have penetrated it, knowing what I know. They could do that. They could reason out every point where I suspected them, and stop every gap with humanoid behavior. They’re machines. That’s part of their problem. They can work it out if they set themselves the job. Maybe they’re working on it now. By the time they finish me, maybe …”

  He slammed both fists hard upon the desk. “No!” he told himself fiercely, and rose.

  There were fifteen minutes left.

  The telephone on Arthur Court’s desk buzzed. The android put out a metallic hand and machine spoke into machine. Out of the mouthpiece Bradley’s voice sounded small and clear.

  “Hello. Hello, sir. This is Bradley. Look, are you busy? Something very odd has just turned up and I thought you ought to be the first to know. I - I’m not sure what to do.”

  “What is it? What are you talking about?”

  “I’d rather not say on the phone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Across the street. You know the Green Door Grille?”

  “I thought I told you to wait in your office, Bradley.”

  “When you hear what I’ve got to tell you -” Bradley paused for an instant to swallow his own cold anger at the arrogance in the voice of the machine “- you’ll understand. Can you come?”

  “Sit tight. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Bradley sat at the wheel of his car, feeling the faint throb of the motor running softly. His eyes were on the door of the office building across the street. His fingers were clenched on the plastic of the wheel and the rhythmic beat of the car seemed an echo of the heavy beating in his chest as he waited.

  Arthur Court came out of the revolving door. He looked up and down the street. He turned left and with long strides hurried down the block toward the little side-street upon which the Green Door opened. Bradley waited, watching Court, watching the traffic, biding his time.

  It worked with miraculous precision. There were only three pedestrians on the side-street an
d all were walking the other way. Heavy trucks parked along the narrow curbing shut out all vision except the most direct. It was as if Arthur Court were dodging through a series of little private rooms between the trucks - and in the last little room he had a rendezvous with Bradley that he did not yet know about …

  The car purred like a tiger under Bradley’s hands as he rolled into the quiet street where Court moved ahead of him. This would have to be gauged exactly right, Bradley reminded himself tensely. Not too little, not too much. Not before Court was in a corner where he could not escape even by the exercise of instant reflexes, impulses electron-fast moving a body that was literally steel wire and springs. Not until he was in a trap of no escape.

  The car seemed to gather its haunches beneath it and spring. It roared in the quiet street and Court turned wildly around. His face was pure machine, Bradley thought, in that unguarded moment when the cold-lensed eyes met his. Bradley was part of the automobile, the two welded into one so that the car was his weapon, obedient to his hand as the steel blade had been obedient that severed Court’s head from his neck. But this time there would be no mistake.

  He crouched over the wheel, sighting the car like a gun, pinning Court between fender and fender, centered beyond the radiator cap, with the blank wall of a truck behind him. Man and man-made machine were one juggernaut weapon that crashed down upon machine-made machine and flattened it against a wall of steel …

  Bradley saw Court’s face go blank beyond the radiator cap. He saw the machine-body crumple slowly down out of sight. He waited for an instant, ready to urge the car on if he had to …

  “It’s all right,” Bradley said soothingly. Court stirred and mumbled on the seat beside him. “No, it’s all right, Court. Just relax. You had a little accident, but don’t worry, I’m not taking you to a doctor …”

  Court said, “No -” almost clearly. Bradley sighed and pulled over to the curb. He had hoped he wouldn’t need to use the hypodermic, but it was ready against the moment when he must.