The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  Behind their halftrack, the four other vehicles of the party rattled into position. This ramp was one of eighteen that led from National Electro-Mech's plant to the outside world. Along it, at carefully randomed intervals, huge armoured trailer-trucks rumbled up, past six sets of iridium steel gates, out into the open air and onto the highways. No driver manned these trucks. Their orders were stamped into their circuits in the underground loading bays. Each had a destination where its load of percolators and waffle irons was to go, and each had the means of getting it there.

  Bill Cossett coughed. 'Major, why couldn't we just shoot them up as they come out?'

  'They shoot back,' said Major Commaigne.

  'Yes, I know, but maybe we could use the same tactics. Automatic weapons. Let them fight it out--our robot guns against the trucks. Then--'

  'Mr. Cossett,' said the major wearily, 'I'm glad to see you're thinking.

  But believe me, we've all had those thoughts.' He gestured at the approaches to the ramp. 'Look at those roads. You think there hasn't been plenty of fighting there?'

  Cossett looked at the approaches and felt foolish. There was no doubt of it--every road for a mile around was tank-trenched, Cadmus-toothed, booby-trapped. Those were the first--and most obvious--

  measures the population had taken, in its early mob panic. But the trailer-trucks had been too smart for anything so simple. They had bridged the trenches, climbed the rows of dragon's teeth, and exploded the land mines harmlessly against the drum-chains that ceaselessly pounded the roads ahead of them.

  'We had to stop,' the major brooded, 'because it just wasn't safe to live around here. The factories fight back, of course. The tougher we make it for them, the more ingenious their counterattacks and--Stations!' he blazed, thumbing down the microphone switch. 'Here they come!'

  The scarred outer gate whined open. A monster peered hesitantly out.

  No brain--no organic brain, at least, only a maze of copper, tungsten, glass--was in it, but the truck was eerily human as it tested the air, searched its surroundings, peered radar-eyed for possible enemies. The trucks learned. They knew. There was no circuit in their electronic intellects for wondering why, but their job was to get the merchandise delivered, and one of the sub-tasks in the job assignment was to clear the way of obstacles.

  The obstacle named Major Commaigne yelled: 'Hold your fire!'

  Silently, their weapons hunted the vulnerable spots of axles and steering linkages on the trucks as they came out, but in each armoured car, the gunners held down the interrupt buttons that kept the guns from going off. The trucks came lumbering out, flailing the roads, turrets wheeling to scan the terrain around. There were eight of them. Then:

  'Fire!' bawled Major Commaigne, and the battle was on.

  Bonfils, down the road, darted out of concealment and blasted the first trucks. There was no confusion, no hesitation, as the trucks regrouped and returned fire; but Bonfils had wasted no time either, and he was out of range in a matter of seconds.

  Korowicz added his fire as the first defensive missiles roared up.

  Gershenow caught two of the trucks trying to execute a flanking movement.

  It was a fine little fire fight.

  But it wasn't the main show.

  'Demolition teams in!' roared Commaigne, and Goodpaster's half track bobbed up out of concealment and landed its mining experts at the lip of the ramp itself. The controlling machines had many circuits for directing simultaneous activities, but the number was not infinite. They had good reason to hope that with the active battle out on the road, the principal guardians of the factory might not be able to repel an attack on the entrance.

  Commaigne snapped down his gas helmet and said thickly, through the gagging canvas and plastic: 'We're next.'

  Bill Cossett nodded, licked his lips and put his own helmet on as their car circled the battle and headed for the ramp. Before they got there, the demolition team had blown off the first of the sets of gates. Then grey-brown smoke still curled out, and already the demolition men were setting their charges for the second gate, twenty yards farther down.

  'Now,' said Major Commaigne, halting the halftrack and opening the hatch. 'Be careful!' he warned, leading the detachment out, but it was hardly necessary. If they were all like himself, Bill Cossett thought, they were going to be careful indeed.

  They marched on the heels of the demolition team down into the automated factory.

  It was noisy, and it was hot. It was dark, or nearly, except for the lights of the demolition team and what they carried themselves. The blasted gates were clicking and buzzing petulantly, attempting to close themselves, aware that someone was coming through, and resenting it.

  Somebody yelled: Watch it!' and, shwissh-poo, a tongue of liquid butane licked out across the ramp and puffed into flame. Everybody dropped--just in time. A smell of burning wool and a yowl from Major Commaigne showed how barely in time it had been.

  One of the enlisted men cried: 'It's onto us! Take cover!'

  But everybody had already, of course--as much as they could, not knowing just what constituted 'cover' in a place that the machine-brain that ran the factory had had a solid decade to study and chart. One of the machine's built in 37 millimetre auto-aimed guns sniffed the infrared spectrum for body heat, found it, aimed and fired.

  'I'm coming, I'm coming,' yammered the shells--Vengo, vengo, vengo--but there were blind spots around the shattered gates, and the invading party crouched in shelter.

  Major Commaigne, hardly daring to raise his head, cried: 'Everybody all right?'

  There wasn't any answer which meant either that everybody was indeed all right ... or dead, and thus exempted from the necessity of answering at all.

  Deafened, sweltering, choking inside his anti-gas helmet, Bill Cossett swallowed hard and wished he'd kept his big mouth shut, back in Rantoul.

  What a committee to volunteer for!

  Major Commaigne's combat boots kicked a pit in his kidneys as a .30

  calibre machine-gun opened up, firing by pattern--twenty rounds at forty yards elevation and 270 degrees azimuth, traverse two degrees and fire another burst, traverse again, fire again, endlessly. It was area fire.

  And it had one good feature.

  'They've lost us!' Major Commaigne gloated.

  The winking electronic brain inside the factory had lost sight of them--

  perhaps even thought they were disposed of--and was merely putting the finishing sterilizing touches on its disinfecting operation, in its meticulous machine fashion.

  But Bill Cossett wasn't able to read that encouraging message out of the machine-gun fire. He didn't have the faintest idea what Major Commaigne was talking about; all he was able to tell was that the ramp was suddenly lit with a flickering light of tracer rounds, and the smell of the ammunition stifled him, and the noise of the guns and the heterodyne squee of the ricochets was enough to deafen. Not to mention the fact that, with all that stuff flying around, a person could get hurt.

  But Major Commaigne was ready for his sneak punch. He propped himself on an elbow, very cautiously, and peered down the tunnel to where the demolition crews were rigging a larger-than-normal charge.

  'Ready?' he shouted.

  One of the figures waved a hand.

  'Then fire!' he bawled, and the demolition men thrust down a plunger.

  Warroom. A corner of the wall at the remains of the shattered gate flew out and collapsed.

  Bill Cossett stared. Down from the surface was clanking a machine--

  an enemy? But Major Commaigne was waving it on. One of theirs then, but he had never seen it before; never seen anything like it, in fact.

  And that was not surprising.

  Out of heaven knows what incalulable resources, the Pentagon had produced a Winnie's Pet. The story was that back in the old days Winston Churchill--yes, that long ago!--was fighting a war against Hitler, and Churchill decided that what he needed was a trench digger of heroic proportions. A big one, h
e dreamed, big enough so that in Flanders or at Soissons it could have turned the tide of battle.

  And so his design staff produced the Winnie's Pet, a tunnel digger, huge in size. Well, maybe it would have turned the tide in 1917. But what war was ever fought in trenches again after that?

  The machine was still around, though, and on the spot, because that was Major Commaigne's plan. He waved it on, into the breach in the armour-plating of the tunnel that his demolition crew had made. It was set for lateral tunnelling. They gave it its head and followed it into a brand-new and therefore (presumably) unguarded tunnel that would parallel the ramp they were in, clear down to the factory itself.

  Bill Cossett got up and ran after Major Commaigne, and the others, unbelieving. It was all too easy! Behind them, the clatter of gunfire dwindled. There were no guns here--how could there be? They were safe.

  Then-

  'Ouch!' yelped Major Commaigne, inadvertently touching the wall, for it was hot. Then he grinned at Cossett, his face shadowed in the light from their helmet lamps and the tunneller. 'Scared me for a minute,' he said. 'But it's all right. It must be fused--from the digging, you know. But--'

  He stopped, thinking.

  And it was only right that he should think, because he was wrong. It couldn't be atomic fusion that heated that wall. Why, Churchill didn't have atomic fusion to play with back in 1940, when Winnie's Pet was built!

  'Run!' shouted Major Commaigne. 'You, there! Get out of that thing!'

  The crew hesitated, then spilled out of the digger, and again just in time.

  Because the heat had been atomic, all right, but the atoms were bursting at the command of the computer that ran the factory.

  Seismographs had detected the vibration of their tunnelling; metal subterrene moles with warheads had been sent after them; as they raced out of the new tunnel at one end, the moles burst through at the other, struck the digger and exploded.

  They made it up the ramp and to their waiting halftracks, but just barely.

  And that was the end of Round One. If any referee in the world had been watching, I don't care who or how biased in favour of the human race, he would have given that round to the machines. It was an easy win, no contest; and the detachment brooded about it all the way back to the Pentagon.

  • • • •

  4

  Well, they didn't call him Unlickable Jack Tighe for nothing. In fact, they didn't call him Unlickable Jack at all then. That didn't come until later, and that's another story. But already Tighe was demonstrating the qualities which made him great.

  'There's got to be a way,' he declared, and pounded the table.

  'There's got to.'

  The Committee of Activity silently licked its wounds, staring at him.

  'Look, fellows,' Tighe said reasonably, 'men built these machines.

  Men can make them stop!'

  Bill Cossett waited for somebody else to speak. Nobody did.

  'How, Mr. Tighe?' he asked, wishing he didn't have to be the one to put the question.

  Tighe stared fretfully--and unansweringly--out of the Pentagon window.

  'You just tell us how,' Cossett went on, 'because we don't know. We can't get in--we've tried that. We can't blow up the goods as they come out

  - we've tried that too. We can't cut off the power, because it's completely self-contained. What does that leave? The computer has more resources than we have, that's all.'

  'There's always a way,' said obstinate Jack Tighe, and shifted restlessly in his leather chair. It was not that he wasn't used to positions of responsibility, for hadn't he been on the Plans Board of Yust & Ruminant?

  But running a whole country was another matter.

  Marlene Groshawk coughed apologetically.

  'Mr. Tighe, sir,' she said. (You know who Marlene Groshawk is.

  Everybody does.)

  Tighe said irritably: 'Later, Marlene. Can't you see this thing's got me worried?'

  'But that's what it's about, Mr. Tighe,' she said, 'sir. I mean It's about this thing.'

  She put her glasses on her pretty nose and looked at her notes. She, too, had come a long way from her public-stenographer days at Pung's Corners, and it wasn't entirely an upward path. Though no doubt there was honour to being the private secretary of old Jack Tighe.

  She said: 'I've got it all down here, Mr. Tighe, sir. You've tried brute force and you've tried subtlety. Well, what I ask myself is this: What would that wonderful, cute old TV detective Sherlock Holmes do?'

  She removed her glasses and stared thoughtfully around the room.

  Major Commaigne burst out: 'We could've been killed. But I don't mind that, Mr. Tighe. What hurts is that we failed.'

  Marlene said: 'So what I would suggest is--'

  'I can't go home and face my wife,' Bill Cossett interrupted miserably.

  'Or all those Buicks.'

  'What Sher-'

  Jack Tighe growled: "We'll lick it! Trust me, men. And now, unless somebody else has a suggestion, I suppose we can adjourn this meeting.

  God knows we've accomplished nothing. But maybe sleeping on it will help.

  Any objections?'

  Marlene Groshawk stuck up her hand. 'Mr. Tighe, sir?'

  'Eh? Marlene? Well, what is it?'

  She removed her glasses and looked at him piercingly. 'Sherlock Holmes,' she said triumphantly. 'He would have got in, because he would have disguised himself. There! Clear as the nose on your face, when you think of it, isn't it?'

  Tighe took a deep breath. He shook his head and said, with more than ordinary patience: 'Marlene, please stick to taking your shorthand.

  Leave the rest to us.'

  'But really, Mr. Tighe! Sir. I mean raw materials do get in, don't they?'

  'Well?'

  'So suppose--' she said, cocking her head prettily, tapping her small white teeth with a pencil in a judgmatical way--'suppose you fellows disguised yourselves. As raw materials. And didn't sneak in, but let the factory come and get you, so to speak. How about that?'

  Jack Tighe was a great and wise man, but he had a lot on his mind.

  He yelled: 'Marlene, what's the matter with you? That's the craziest--' he hesitated--'the craziest thing I ever--' he coughed--'it's the craziest ... What do you mean, disguise themselves?'

  'I mean disguise themselves,' Marlene explained earnestly. 'Like disguise. As raw materials.'

  Jack Tighe was silent for a second.

  Then he pounded his desk. 'Love of heaven,' he cried, 'I think she's got it! Captain Margate! Where's Captain Margate? You, Commaigne! Get out of here on the double and get me Captain Margate!'

  • • • •

  Bill Cossett slipped quarters into the slot and waited for his wife in Rantoul to answer her phone.

  Her image took form in the screen, hair curlers and the baggy quilted robe she liked to slop around in. But she was still an attractive woman. 'Bill?

  That you? But the operator said Farmingdale.'

  'That's where I am, Essie. We, uh, we're going to try something.' How did you say a thing like this without sounding heroic? It was hard, a fine line of distinction, for what he wanted was for his wife to think he was a hero, but not to think that he thought so too. 'We're going to, well, sneak into the cavern here.'

  'Sneak in?' Her voice became piercing. 'Bill Cossett! Those factories are dangerous. You promised me you wouldn't get in any trouble when I let you go east!'

  'Now, Essie,' he soothed. 'Please, Essie. If s going to be all right. I think.'

  'You think? Bill, tell me exactly what you're up to!'

  'No I can't !' he said, suddenly panicky, staring at the phone as though it were an enemy. 'They're all in it together, you see, The machines, I mean.

  I can't say over the phone--'

  'Bill!'

  'But they are, Essie. We found that out. National Electro-Mech's got a deep tunnel that goes clear to General Motors way out in Detroit, for trucks and so on. They get their computer parts from Philc
o in Philadelphia. How do I know the phone isn't in on it too? No--' he interrupted her as she was about to demand the truth--'please, Essie. Don't ask me. How are the kids?

  Chuck?'

  'Skinned knee. But, Bill, you mustn't--'

  'And Dan?'

  'The doctor says it's only a little allergy. But I'm not going to-'

  'And Tommy?'

  She frowned. 'I spanked him fifty times yesterday,' she said, an exaggeration, certainly, but at least she was diverted from asking questions; she gave a concise catalogue of smashed dishes, spilled milk, unhung jackets and lost shoes; and Bill breathed again.

  For what he told her had been the truth; he was suddenly deathly afraid that the automatic long-lines dialling apparatus of the phone company might have been infiltrated by its electronic brethren in the factories. There was no sense in telling the enemy what you were about to do!

  He managed to hang up without revealing his secret, and walked out of the booth to Major Commaigne's command post.

  Heroes come in many forms, but it had never before occurred to A.

  Cossett, Authorized Buick Dealer, that a motor-car franchise holder, like a general, must sometimes offer his life in battle.

  • • • •

  The command post was busy, but that was natural enough, for this was a project to which the entire resources of the United States of America could well have been devoted.

  And the effort was beginning to show results. Bill Cossett came to a scene of excitement. Major Commaigne was listening to an excited Captain Margate, while the rest of the detachment stood by.

  Margate, as Bill Cossett had come to know, was Jack Tighe's personal expert in raw materials and the like. A good man, Cossett thought.

  And so was Major Commaigne a can-do kind of guy. And this Marlene Groshawk who was tagging along--well, Essie wouldn't like that. But it was in line of duty. And, you know, kind of fun.

  Hastily, Bill Cossett shifted his thoughts back to the problem of getting into National Electro-Mech.

  'Found it!' Captain Margate was crying, delighted. 'We really found it!