The Complete Stories, Vol. 1: Final Reckonings

by Robert Bloch

  I want her to be wide awake when I take her in my arms, and I want her to be wide awake afterwards, when I hold her ever so gently, but ever so firmly, and tell her just what really happened. I want her to know how clever I am, and how strong, and how wise. I want her to know that I'm stronger and wiser than George could ever be.

  She must realize the cleverness that brought everything to perfection. She must come to appreciate that I'm the better man after all. And of course I am.

  It would have been stupid to confront them both with their guilt; what could I possibly have gained? And it would have been equally stupid for me to kill George and run the risk of discovery. As things worked out, as I planned them to work out, George is disposed of forever. I've sealed him up behind the walls of a madhouse for life. He'll live on and suffer, thinking Louise is dead and that he killed her. And of course the sheriff and the folks around here know differently. They know she's alive, and that there's nothing behind the cement wall. They'll remember talking to her and to me, and that she was to go away with me. Neither the new owners nor anyone else will ever tear down that wall.

  I'm going to make all this very plain to Louise. I'm going to tell her exactly what happened. In fact, that's why I'm writing this. I don't trust myself to find the exact word to convey the meaning of the moment.

  I'll let her read what I've written. Have you read this far, Louise?

  Do you understand now? Do you understand what I've done?

  And do you understand what I'm going to do, in just another moment?

  That's right, Louise.

  I'm going to bind and gag you. And I'm going to carry you down into the cellar, and tear the wall open once again. I'm going to thrust you into the darkness and let you scream away your life and your sanity while I wall you up again with fresh cement — wall you up forever, until your body rots to match your rotten soul.

  I'll be standing right behind you when you've read this far, so you won't have a chance to scream. And you won't have a chance to beg, or plead, or try any of your stupid feminine tricks with me. Not that they would do any good. No use telling me I'll be caught, either. You know better than that.

  The alibi is already set. I'll leave here alone in the morning. And you'll stay here forever.

  That's because everything was planned, Louise. Because, you see, I am a better man than George. He was only an animal, really. And the difference between an animal and a man is really very simple.

  It's all a matter of knowing how to use your imagination.

  Dead-End Doctor

  THE LAST PSYCHIATRIST ON EARTH sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

  "Come in," he said.

  A tall robot entered, the electronic beam of its single eye piercing the gloom and focusing on the psychiatrist's face.

  "Dr. Anson,' the robot said, "the rent is due today. Pay me."

  Dr. Howard Anson blinked. He did not like the harsh light, nor the harsh voice, nor the harsh meaning of the message. As he rose, he attempted to conceal his inner reactions with a bland smile, then remembered that his facial expression meant nothing to the robot.

  That was precisely the trouble with the damned things, he told himself; you couldn't use psychology on them.

  "Sixty tokens," the robot chanted, and rolled across the room toward him.

  "But —" Dr. Anson hesitated, then took the plunge. "But I haven't got sixty tokens at the moment. I told the manager yesterday. If you'll only give me a little time, a slight extension of credit — "

  "Sixty tokens," the robot repeated, as if totally unmindful of the interruption, which, Dr. Anson assured himself, was exactly the case. The robot was unmindful. It did not react to unpredictable factors; that was not its function. The robot didn't see the rental figures in this office building and had no power to make decisions regarding credit. It was built to collect the rent, nothing more.

  But that was enough. More than enough.

  The robot rolled closer. Its arms rose and the hooklike terminals slid back the panels in its chest to reveal a row of push buttons and a thin, narrow slot.

  "The rent is due," repeated the robot. "Please deposit the tokens in the slot."

  Anson sighed. "Very well," he said. He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and scooped out half a dozen shiny disks.

  He slipped the disks into the slot. They landed inside the robot's cylindrical belly with a series of dull plops. Evidently the robot had been making the rounds of the building all day; it sounded more than half full.

  For a wild moment, Dr. Anson wondered what would happen if he kidnapped the robot and emptied its cashbox. His own medical specialty was psychiatry and neurosurgery, and he was none too certain of a robot's anatomical structure, but he felt sure he could fool around until he located the jackpot. He visualized himself standing before the operating table, under the bright lights. "Scalpel — forceps — blowtorch — "

  But that was unthinkable. Nobody had ever dared to rob a robot. Nobody ever robbed anything or anyune today, which was part of the reason Dr. Anson couldn't pay his rent on time.

  Still, he had paid it. The robot's terminals were punching push buttons in its chest and now its mouth opened. "Here is your receipt," it said and a pink slip slid out from its mouth like a paper tongue.

  Anson accepted the slip and the mouth said, "Thank you."

  The terminals closed the chest panels, the electronic beam swept the corners as the wheels turned, and the robot rolled out of the room and down the corridor.

  Anson closed the door and mopped his brow.

  So far, so good. But what would happen when the robot reached the manager? He'd open his walking cash register and discover Anson's six ten-token disks. Being human, he'd recognize them for what they were — counterfeit.

  Dr. Anson shuddered. To think that it had come to this, a reputable psychiatrist committing a crime!

  He considered the irony. In a world totally devoid of antisocial activity, there were no antisocial tendencies which required the services of psychiatry. And that was why he, as the last living psychiatrist, had to resort to antisocial activity in order to survive.

  Probably it was only his knowledge of antisocial behavior, in the abstract, which enabled him to depart from the norm and indulge in such actions in the concrete.

  Well, he was in the concrete now and it would harden fast — unless something happened. At best, his deception would give him a few days' grace. After that, he could face only disgrace.

  Anson shook his head and sat down behind the desk. Maybe this was the beginning, he told himself. First counterfeiting and fraud, then robbery and embezzlement, then rape and murder. Who could say where it would all end?

  "Physician, heal thyself," he murmured and glanced with distaste at the dust-covered couch, where no patient reposed; where, indeed, no patient had ever reposed since he'd opened his office almost a year ago.

  It had been a mistake, he realized. A big mistake ever to listen to his father and —

  The visio lit up and the audio hummed. Anson turned and confronted a gigantic face. The gigantic face let out a gigantic roar, almost shattering the screen.

  "I'm on my way up, Doctor!" the face bellowed. "Don't try to sneak out! I'm going to break your neck with my bare hands!"

  For a few seconds Anson sat there in his chair, too numb to move. Then the full import of what he had seen and heard reached him. The manager was coming to kill him!

  "Hooray!" he said under his breath and smiled. It was almost too good to be true. After all this time, at last, somebody was breaking loose. A badly disturbed personality, a potential killer, was on his way up — he was finally going to get himself a patient. If he could treat him before being murdered, that is.

  Tingling with excitement, Anson fumbled around in his files. Now where in thunder was that equipment for the Rorschach test? Yes, and the Porteus Maze and —

  The manager strode into the room without knocking. Anson looked up, ready to counter the first
blast of aggression with a steely professional stare.

  But the manager was smiling.

  "Sorry I blew up that way," he said. "Guess I owe you an apology.

  "When I found those counterfeit tokens, something just seemed to snap for a moment," the manager explained. "You know how it is."

  "Yes, I do," said Anson eagerly. "I understand quite well. And it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm sure that with your cooperation, we can get to the roots of the trauma. Now if you'll just relax on the couch over there — "

  The red-faced little man continued to smile, but his voice was brusque. "Nonsense! I don't need any of that. Before I came up here, I stopped in at Dr. Peabody's office, down on the sixth floor. Great little endocrinologist, that guy. Gave me some kind of a shot that fixed me up in a trice. That's three times faster than a jiffy, you know."

  "I don't know," Anson answered vaguely. "Endocrinology isn't my field."

  "Well, it should be. It's the only field in medicine that really amounts to anything nowadays. Except for diagnosis and surgery, of course. Those gland-handers can do anything. Shots for when you feel depressed, shots for when you're afraid, shots for when you get excited, or mad, the way I was. Boy, I feel great now. At peace with the world!"

  "But it won't last. Sooner or later, you'll get angry again."

  "So I'll get another shot," the manager replied. "Everybody does."

  "That's not a solution. You're merely treating the symptom, not the basic cause." Anson rose and stepped forward. "You're under a great deal of tension. I suspect it goes back to early childhood. Did you suffer from enuresis?"

  "It's my turn to ask questions. What about those fake tokens you tried to palm off on me?"

  "Why, it was all a joke. I thought if you could give me a few more days to dig up — "

  "I'm giving you just five minutes to dig down," the manager said, smiling pleasantly, but firmly. "You ought to know that you can't pull a trick like that with a cash collector; these new models have automatic tabulators and detectors. The moment that robot came back to my office, it spat up the counterfeits. It couldn't stomach them. And neither can I."

  "Stomach?" asked Anson hopefully. "Are you ever troubled with gastric disturbances? Ulcers? Psychosomatic pain in the — "

  The manager thrust out his jaw. "Look here, Anson, you're not a bad sort, really. It's just that you're confused. Why don't you clever up and look at the big picture? This witch doctor racket of yours, it's atomized. Nobody's got any use for it today. You're like the guys who used to manufacture buggy whips; they sat around telling themselves that the automobile would never replace the horse, when any street cleaner could see what was happening to business.

  "Why don't you admit you're licked? The gland-handers have taken over. Why, a man would have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist nowadays and you know there aren't any crazy people any more. So forget about all this. Take a course or something. You can be an End-Doc yourself. Then open up a real office and make yourself some big tokens."

  Anson shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "Not interested."

  The manager spread his hands. "All right. I gave you a chance. Now there's nothing left to do but call in the ejectors."

  He walked over and opened the door. Apparently he had been prepared for Anson's decision, because two ejectors were waiting. They rolled into the room and, without bothering to focus their beams on Anson, commenced to scoop books from the shelves and deposit them in their big open belly-hampers.

  "Wait!" Anson cried, but the ejector robots continued inexorably and alphabetically: there went Adler, Brill, Carmichael, Dunbar, Ellis, Freud, Gresell, Horney, Isaacs, Jung, Kardiner, Lindner, Moll —

  "Darling, what's the matter?"

  Sue Porter was in the room. Then she was in his arms and Dr. Anson had a difficult time remembering what the matter was. The girl affected him that way.

  But a look at the manager's drugged smile served as a reminder. Anson's face reddened, due to a combination of embarrassment and lipstick smudges, as he told Sue what had happened.

  Sue laughed. "Well, if that's all it is, what are you so upset about?" Without waiting for a reply, she advanced upon the manager, her hand digging into her middle bra-cup. "Here's your tokens," she said. "Now call off the ejectors."

  The manager accepted the disks with a smile of pure euphoria, then strode over to the robots and punched buttons. The ejectors halted their labors between Reich and Stekel, then reversed operations. Quickly and efficiently, they replaced all the books on the shelves.

  In less than a minute, Anson faced the girl in privacy. "You shouldn't have done that," he said severely.

  "But darling, I wanted to. After all, what are a few tokens more or less?"

  "A few tokens?" Anson scowled. "In the past year, I've borrowed over two thousand from you. This can't go on."

  "Of course not," the girl agreed. "That's what I've been telling you. Let's get a Permanent and then Daddy will give you a nice fat job and — "

  "There you go again! How often must I warn you about the Elektra situation? This unnatural dependency on the father image is dangerous. If only you'd let me get you down on the couch — "

  "Why, of course, darling!"

  "No, no!" Anson cried. "I want to analyze you!"

  "Not now," Sue answered. "We'll be late for dinner. Daddy expects you."

  "Damn dinner and damn Daddy too," Anson said. But he took the girl's arm and left the office, contenting himself by slamming the door.

  "Aren't you going to put up that DOCTOR WILL RETURN IN TWO HOURS sign?" the girl asked, glancing back at the door.

  "No," Anson told her. "I'm not coming back in two hours. Or ever."

  Sue gave him a puzzled look, but her eyes were smiling.

  Dr. Howard Anson's eyes weren't smiling as he and Sue took off from the roof. He kept them closed, so that he didn't have to watch the launching robots, or note the 'copter's progress as it soared above the city. He didn't want to gaze down at the metallic tangle of conveyors moving between the factories or the stiffly striding figures which supervised their progress on the ramps and loading platforms. The air about them was filled with copters, homeward bound from offices and recreation areas, but no human figures moved in the streets. Ground level was almost entirely mechanized.

  "What's the matter now?" Sue's voice made him look at her. Her eyes held genuine concern.

  "The sins of the fathers," Anson said. "Yours and mine." He watched the girl as she set the 'copter on autopilot for the journey across the river. "Of course it really wasn't my father's fault that he steered me into psychiatry. After all, it's been a family tradition for a hundred and fifty years. All my paternal ancestors were psychiatrists, with the exception of one or two renegade Behaviorists. When he encouraged my interest in the profession, I never stopped to question him. He trained me — and I was the last student to take up the specialty at medical school. The last, mind you!

  "I should have known then that it was useless. But he kept insisting this state of affairs couldn't last, that things were sure to change. 'Cheer up,' he used to tell me, whenever I got discouraged. The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction.' And then he'd tell me about the good old days when he was a boy and the world was still full of fetishism and hebephrenia and pyromania and mixoscopic zoophilia. 'It will come again,' he kept telling me. 'Just you wait and see! We'll have frottage and nympholepsy and compulsive exhibitionism — everything your little heart desires.'

  "Well, he was wrong. He died knowing that he had set me up in a deadend profession. I'm an anachronism, like the factory worker or the farmer or the miner or the soldier. We don't have any need for them in our society any more; robots have replaced them all. And the End-Docs have replaced the psychiatrists and neurosurgeons. With robots to ease the physical and economic burden and gland-handers to relieve mental tension, there's nothing left for me. The last psychiatrist should have disappeared along with the last advertising man. Come to think of it, they p
robably belong together. My father was wrong, Sue, I know that now. But most of the real blame belongs to your father."

  "Daddy?" she exclaimed. "How can you possibly blame him?"

  Anson laughed shortly. "Your family has been pioneering in robotics almost as long as mine has worked in psychiatry. One of your ancestors took out the first basic patent. If it weren't for him and those endocrine shots, everything would still be normal — lots of incest and scoptophilia, plenty of voyeurism for everybody — "

  "Why, darling, what a thing to say! You know as well as I do what robots have done for the world. You said it yourself. We don't have any more manual or menial labor. There's no war, plenty of everything for everybody. And Daddy isn't stopping there."

  "I suppose not," Anson said bitterly. "What is the old devil dreaming up now?"

  Sue flushed. "You wouldn't talk like that if you knew just how hard he's been working. He and Mr. Mullet, the engineering chief. They're just about ready to bring out the new pilot models they've developed for space travel."

  "I've heard that one before. They've been announcing those models for ten years."

  "They keep running into bugs, I guess. But sooner or later, they'll find a way to handle things. Nothing is perfect, you know. Every once in a while, there's still some trouble with the more complicated models."

  "But they keep trying for perfection. Don't you see where all this leads to, Sue? Human beings will become obsolescent. First the workers, now the psychiatrists and other professions. But it won't end there. Inside of another generation or two, we won't need anyone any more. Your father, or somebody like him, will produce the ultimate robot — the robot that's capable of building other robots and directing them. Come to think of it, he's already done the first job; your factories are self-perpetuating. All we need now is a robot that can take the place of a few key figures like your father. Then that's the end of the human race. Oh, maybe they'll keep a few men and women around for pets, but that's all. And thank God I won't be here to see it."