by Ben Bova
“I know you’ve been good, Georgy. Do you like it here? Has everybody been nice to you?”
“I have lots of room to play and they feed me good. But nobody comes to play with me. I’m all alone.”
“I’m sorry… I haven’t been to see you as much as I should,” Lou replied guiltily.
“But the doctor said he’d come and play with me,” George whispered.
“The doctor? What doctor?’
“The doctor,” George answered. “He was here today… or was it yesterday? Do you call it today if it was the day before tonight?”
“Never mind,” Lou said impatiently. “What doctor? Who was he?”
“He’s a new friend. He said he’s going to play with me when he comes back again. And I didn’t move or yell or do anything, even when it hurt.”
“What did he do to you?”
The gorilla touched the back of his head with a huge clumsy hand. “He made a funny noise back here, and it hurt a little. But just a little. It feels all better now.”
Spinal tap, Lou thought, his innards sinking.
“I promised I wouldn’t move even if it hurt,” George said.
“Georgy, listen. The doctor… he said he’d be back. When? When’s he coming back?”
“Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. This morning, most likely. “Okay, Georgy, you get back to sleep now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”
“All right. Uncle Lou. Good night.”
“Good night.”
As the gorilla shambled back toward his pallet, Lou began to know what real responsibility felt like. Big George trusts me. he told himself. He needs me to keep them from hurting him.
And then with a shock Lou realized that the only way he could save Big George would be-to destroy Ramo. He almost laughed as he stood by the wire fence in the moonlight.
Some’family I’ve got, he thought bitterly. A gorilla and a computer. One of them is going to die. And it’s up to me to choose which one.
He hesitated only for a moment. Then he turned and headed for the computer building.
(15)
The door to the computer building was locked. Not by a voice-code lock, but an old-fashioned mechanical type, the kind that has a set of nine buttons that must be pushed in the right combination.
Lou didn’t know the combination. And I’ll bet Marcus has the building wired with alarms. There’d be guards swarming in here before I sat down in the control slot.
He stood there for a moment, uncertain. No sense getting shot if you can’t do the job you set out to do, he told himself. And then he smiled. On the other hand, if you’re smart enough, and quick enough, there might be a way to get the job done without killing anybody.
Grinning with his new idea, Lou walked back to the dormitory, undressed quickly, and got into bed. He set his wristwatch alarm to buzz at six, then closed his eyes. In five minutes he was sound asleep.
He had less than three hours of sleep, but Lou felt bright and ready as he stood by the fence of George’s compound again.
“Here’s some fruit I saved from breakfast,” he said to the gorilla. “Catch!”
He tossed a banana and two oranges over the fence. George backpedaled clumsily and managed to grab the banana in one huge hand. The oranges fell to the ground.
He stooped to pick them up, then jammed all three into his mouth.
“Thank you, Uncle Lou,” Big George said juicily.
Lou laughed. “You’re welcome, Georgy.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lou saw a guard walking past the lab buildings, stopping at each door briefly to touch out a combination on the lock. He talked with the gorilla for a few minutes more, then, when he was sure that the guard was out of sight, Lou walked briskly to the computer building.
The rest of the technical staff was probably just getting up, Lou thought as he glanced at the control panel clock. Sliding into the seat, he immediately started typing out instructions to Ramo.
It was mid-morning before he found out if his scheme had worked. Despite the computer room’s nearly arctic air conditioning, Lou was sweating as he sat at the control desk. He was trying to do his own work, but it was going very slowly. His mind certainly wasn’t on it.
The phone buzzed. Lou was expecting it, but it still made him jump. He touched the ANSWER button. The round Oriental face of the chief biochemist appeared on the screen. He looked unhappy.
“We seem to have a problem this morning,” he said without preamble.
“Really?” Lou said as innocently as he could.
Still frowning, the biochemist said, “Yes. We went to run a routine check of yesterday’s work and found that the data we recorded yesterday is missing from the computer’s memory bank.”
“Missing?” Lou shook his head. “Impossible. You’re probably just searching the wrong bank.”
They talked it over for nearly half an hour. The results of yesterday’s spinal tap on the gorilla, the cortical map, even some of the chemical formulas that had been stored in the computer weeks earlier—were gone from Ramo’s memory banks.
Lou forced himself to look serious. “I’ll do a complete check to find the missing data,” he said, “but it sounds to me like some of your people have goofed up. Running this computer isn’t as simple as operating a typewriter, you know. You should have let me record your data… or at least you ought to have a trained computer programmer or technician doing the job.”
“They are trained technicians!” the biochemist snapped.
Lou shrugged. “Then they haven’t been trained well enough— Okay, I’ll look for the data for you. But I’m willing to bet it was never stored properly in the first place, and it’s simply not in the memory banks.”
The biochemist was starting to look furious. “Two months of work lost!” He lapsed into Chinese.
It took them a week to figure out what was going on. Lou would spend his days at his own work, and then at the end of the day he’d have Ramo review the biochemists’ work for him. It took him only a few minutes to erase some of their material from Ramo’s memory banks. Lou never washed out very much material, just enough to slow them down.
The biochemists became a very unhappy group of people. Their chief went around screaming and purple-faced. The computer technicians who worked for (hem looked scared. By the end of the week, Lou was spending most of his day with the technicians, trying to find out why they couldn’t do their jobs properly.
Lou told nobody what he was doing. But Bonnie and Kori guessed it. By the end of the week, at dinner with them in the noisy cafeteria, Lou said to Kori:
“You’ve got to figure out some way to get us off this island. It’s only a matter of time until the biochemists figure out what’s wrong with the computer programs, and then…”
“I know,” Kori answered, hunching over the table and speaking as low as possible. “I’ve been trying to work out a navigational fix, so that we can at least find out where we are. But I’m afraid I’m not much of a navigator. And the sextant I’ve built isn’t very accurate.”
“But how do we get off the island?” Bonnie asked.
Kori shrugged. “Maybe we could build a raft—”
“Or a flying carpet,” Lou replied acidly.
That ended their discussion.
It happened the next day. Lou wasn’t really surprised when an armed guard showed up at the computer control room. It had been exactly a week since he had first started tinkering with Ramo’s biochemistry banks.
“What is it?” Lou asked, tensing.
The guard said, with a Malay lilt to this voice, “Mr. Marcus wishes to see you.”
“I’m busy at the moment. Tell him…”
“Now,” the guard said. And he hitched a thumb on the holster at his hip.
Lou nodded. “Okay, just let me…”
“Do not touch the computer controls,” the guard said softly, even gently. But his hand curled around the butt of his gun.
Lou found that his own hands we
re suddenly trembling,‘and well away from the controls. “Okay, okay, but the computer’s in the middle of a run.”
“Some other technicians are being brought in to take care of it. You will come with me, please.”
Marcus’ car was waiting outside, with another guard at the wheel. Lou climbed in and the first guard sat beside him. In a few minutes, Lou was ushered into the air-conditioned study of Marcus’ house. It was a small room, lined with books and a single large window that overlooked the sea.
Marcus was sitting at a desk in front of the window. There were a few straight-backed chairs in the room, and a comfortable-looking sofa. Marcus was talking into the viewphone on his desk when Lou entered. Without looking up, he gestured Lou to a chair next to the desk.
If he was angry, he wasn’t showing it. His face had it’s normal calm expression as he said quietly to the phone screen, “We’ve tracked down the source of the trouble and we’ll get things back under control and on schedule.”
Lou couldn’t see the screen, but heard the voice reply, “Very well. See that you do. The timing is very critical.”
“I understand. Good-by.”
“Good-by.”
Marcus pressed the OFF button, stared into the screen for a few moments longer, then turned to face Lou.
“You surprise me,” he said.
“I do?”
Marcus almost smiled. “Let’s not play games, Christopher. You’ve been sabotaging our computer programs, slowing down our biochemistry project. Why?”
“How do you know it’s me?” Lou stalled.
“It’s fairly obvious,” Marcus leaned forward in his chair slightly. “Now listen, Christopher. You’re not in the States any more. You’re playing in a different league, with different rules. I
don’t have to prove it’s you who’s screwing up the computer. I think it’s you, and I’m going ahead on that assumption. I called you here to find out why you’re doing it, and to tell you what’s going to happen if you don’t stop.”
Lou felt anger rising up inside him. “Just like that, huh? Somebody’s messing up the computer and I get blamed. What happens now, do you shoot me?”
“No, nothing so dramatic,” Marcus answered. In a voice that sounded genuinely concerned, he said, “You know, I really think you’re more worried about that gorilla than about your own skin.”
“Yeah. I’m a gorilla freak.”
Shaking his head like a patient father, Marcus said, “All right, play it tough if you want. But listen to this, and get it straight. We’re going to overthrow the world government. Never mind who ‘we’ consists of. There are some very important people in our group. We’re playing for the highest stakes there are, and we don’t intend to let you or anyone else stand in our way.”
“Is that why you’ve got Kori making bombs?”
“Of course. Did you ever hear of a government that allowed itself to be pushed out of power without a fight? We’re developing three weapons here on this island: nuclear bombs, the cortical suppressor, and genetic engineering.”
Lou said, “So you can blow up your enemies, turn the survivors into morons, and then—after you’ve taken over—you can control everyone’s children.”
“That’s not one hundred percent right, but it’s pretty close.”
“It doesn’t sound like a very happy world that you’re aiming to set up.”
“Oh no? And what kind of a world do we have now? The government’s letting the cities fester worse and worse, more and more barbarians being born and pushing out into the civilized parts of the world. How long do you think it’ll be before we see something like a plague of rats sweeping across the whole world? Two-legged rats, from New York and Rio and Tokyo and Calcutta and Rome…every big city in the world!”
“And your answer is to bomb them out or turn them into zombies.”
“If we have to,” Marcus said, in the same tone he would use to offer a drink. “The bombs are really for fighting the government troops. Once we’ve taken over, we’ll have other means of handling the barbarians—including the suppressors.”
Lou shook his head.
“I wish I could get through to you,” Marcus insisted. “What’s this government done for you? Put you in exile, you and all your friends. When we take over, you can go back to living normal, useful lives.”
“Useful to whom?”
With great earnestness, Marcus said, “Listen to reason, will you? You and the other scientists will be among the top people in the new society. Your children will get the best genetic care that you yourselves can provide.”
“Until somebody decides he doesn’t like what we’re doing, or what we’re thinking,” Lou answered. “This government’s slapped us in exile—your friends might not be so lenient.”
Marcus sank back in his chair, as if baffled. “I don’t have the time to argue with you. We’re going ahead, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. If you don’t stop tinkering with our biochemistry project, you’re going to get hurt.”
“No I’m not,” Lou flashed back. “You need me to make the genetic engineering a success, remember? And that’s where the real jackpot is. Because you might be able to surprise the government and knock it off, you might be able to take over the whole world … but without genetic engineering, you’ll never be able to control the world. I’m beginning to see how your minds work, and I know why genetic engineering is so important to you. You want to control everybody, don’t you? Make your own children supermen, and everybody else’s their slaves. Right?”
Marcus shook his head. “Not exactly. You make it sound …”
“Rotten. Filthy and rotten. And that’s what it is. But you need it, and that means you need me. I’m the key man, you told me so yourself.”
“There are others–-”
“Then why’d you yank me out of exile? Because it’d take anybody else at least a year to catch up to where I am. I understand the whole genetic engineering problem, and there’s plenty of it’tucked away in my head, not in any computer banks or notebooks. So don’t try to threaten me, unless you want to wait a year or more for the ability to control the next generation of children.”
Marcus leaned back in his chair with a more-in-sorrow-than-anger look on his bland face. Shaking his head wearily, he said, “You still don’t realize what you’re up against, do you? Why do you think we went to the trouble of finding that blonde girl friend of yours and bringing her here? We don’t have to threaten you. If you’re worried about what we’re going to do to your precious gorilla, try to imagine what could happen to the girl. Things could get very unpleasant for her. Very unpleasant.”
Lou gripped the arms of his chair hard enough to make his hands hurt. He was fighting an instinct to spring at Marcus and smash his bland, evil face.
“Just try to control yourself and do as you’re told,” Marcus went on. “If you can behave, everything will be fine for you. But if you keep working against me … the girl will suffer for it.”
“If you hurt her I’ll kill you.” Lou was almost surprised to hear himself say it, to hear the cold flat metallic ring of his own voice.
Marcus’ expression didn’t change. “Christopher, we shouldn’t be threatening each other. Just do your work and neither you nor anyone else will get hurt. That’s all we’re asking from you. As for the gorilla, it’ll probably be happier at its natural intelligence level that it is now.”
The greatest excuse in the world, Lou thought. They’ll be happier doing what I want them to do instead of what they themselves want to do.
Without saying another word, Lou got up and started for the door.
“Wait a minute,” Marcus called. “You haven’t said …”
Lou turned. “You’ve got all the answers you need. There’s no way for me to stop you.”
Trembling with rage, he left the office, walked past the guard lounging outside the door, went out of the house, ignored the car still parked in front with its driver, and walked back toward the dor
mitory.
As he passed the lab complex, Kori came running up to him.
“Lou, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
Lou didn’t answer.
“I’ve figured it out!” Kori whispered excitedly as he pulled up beside Lou. “How to get the government troops here. And quickly! Inside a few days!”
Lou shook his head. “It’ll be too late.”
(16)
Kori grabbed his arm and stopped him. “No, I’m serious. We can do it!”
