The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC

by Frederik Pohl

  Geologists thought,' he said, shaking his head in wonder, 'that there wasn't any coal under Long Island, but trust the machines. They knew. We found it.'

  'Coal?' said Major Commaigne, his brows crinkling.

  'Why, yes, Major,' nodded the captain. 'Coal. Raw materials, for your disguise.'

  'Disguise?' repeated Major Commaigne.

  'That's right, Major.'

  'As lumps of coal?'

  The captain shrugged cheerfully. 'As organic matter,' he clarified.

  'The machine, after all, won't mind. Coal is carbon--hydrocarbons--oh, you're close enough. The machine won't mind a few little eccentricities.

  Why,' he went on, warming up, 'The machine would still accept you even if you were a lot more impure than any of you really are.'

  Marlene Groshawk stamped her pretty foot. 'Captain!'

  'I mean in a chemical way. Miss Groshawk,' the captain said humbly, and began to prepare their disguises.

  Bill Cossett tugged at his collar. 'Captain Margate,' he said, 'one thing.

  Suppose the factory catches us.'

  'It will, Mr. Cossett! That's the whole idea.'

  'I mean suppose it finds out we're not coal.'

  Captain Margate looked up thoughtfully from his pot of lamp-black and cold cream.

  'That,' he said meditatively, 'would be embarrassing. I don't know what would happen exactly, but--' He shrugged. 'Still, it's not the worst thing that could happen,' he added without worry. 'It might be a whole lot worse if it never does find out you're not raw materials.'

  'You mean--' gasped Marlene. 'We'd be-'

  Captain Margate nodded. 'You'd be processed. And,' he added gallantly, 'you would make a very nice batch of plastic, Miss Groshawk.'

  • • • •

  5

  It was a most trying time for all of them, you may be very sure. But they were brave enough.

  Major Commaigne let himself be smeared a sooty black without a flicker of his steel-grey eye or a quiver of his iron jaw.

  Bill Cossett tried desperately to remember how awful things were back in Rantoul--'Yes, yes,' he whispered frantically to himself, 'even more awful than this.'

  Marlene Groshawk--well, you couldn't tell much from her expression.

  But she wrote later, in her memoirs, that she was really anxious about only one thing: How she would ever get all that stuff off?

  Sappers had tunnelled them a neat little hole into a bed of brownish gassy coal. 'Ssh!' hissed Captain Margate, a finger to his lips. 'Listen.'

  In the silence, there was a distant chomp chomp, chomp, like a great far-off inchworm nibbling his way through armour-plate.

  'The factory,' the captain whispered. 'We'll leave you now. Keep very still. Oh, and there are sandwiches and drinking water in that hamper. I don't know how long you'll have to wait.'

  And the captain and the sappers withdrew up the shaft.

  Seconds later, a small explosive blast dumped the ceiling of the tunnel in, blocking it. The captain had warned them he would have to do that

  - 'Don't want to make the factory suspicious, you know!'--but it was like that first clod of soil falling on the coffin of the living entombed man, all the same.

  Time passed.

  They ate the sandwiches and drank the water.

  Time passed.

  They began to get hungry again, but there wasn't anything to do about it, not any more. They couldn't even call the whole thing off now, because there wasn't any way to accomplish it.

  The distant chomp, chomp was closer, true, but the darkness was closing in on them; the enforced silence was getting on their nerves; and the sulphury smell of the low-grade coal was giving Bill Cossett a splitting headache...

  And then it happened.

  Chomp, chomp. And a rattle, bang. And something broke through the coal shell around them with a splash of violet light. Stainless steel teeth, half a yard long, nibbled a neat circle out of the wall, swallowed, hic-coughed and inched forward.

  'Duck,' whispered Major Commaigne in the girl's ear and, 'Out of the way!' into Cossett's, though whispering was hardly needful in the metallic clangour around them. They crouched aside and the teeth gnawed past them, a yard a minute, trenching the floor of their little cavern and spewing the crushed coal onto a wide conveyor belt that followed the questing jaws.

  'Jump!' murmured Commaigne when the teeth were safely by, and the three of them leaped onto the belt, nestled in shaking beds of coal fragments, borne upwards and back towards the factory itself.

  They lay quiet, hardly breathing, against what unknown spy-eyes or listening devices the factory might employ. But if there were such, they missed their mark, or the strategy worked. At a steady crawling pace, they were drawn upward and into the growing din of National Electro-Mech's main plant. It was as easy as that.

  Getting in was. But that was, of course, only the beginning.

  • • • •

  When National Electro-Mech put its factory under the sod of Farmingdale, the UERMWA, Local 606, had torn up the old contract and employed its best dreamers to invent a new one.

  'Year-round temperature of 71.5,' said Clause 14a. 'Not less than 40

  cu. ft. of pure, fresh, filtered air per worker per minute,' said Paragraph 9.

  'Lighting to be controlled by individual worker at his discretion,' said Sub-Section XII.

  It was underground, right enough, but it was very nice indeed. Why, they even had trouble, serious trouble, with one worker in ten refusing to go home even to sleep, especially during the hay-fever season.

  But that was before automation had set in.

  Now things were not nice at all, at least by human standards.

  Machines might have loved it, but--

  Well, the lights, to begin with, were hardly the pleasant, glare-free fluorescents that Local 606 had had in mind. Why should they be? Human eyes relish the visible spectrum, but machines see by photo-electric cells, and photocells see as well by red or even infrared ... which is cheap to generate and produces a satisfactory length of filament life. Consequently National Electro-Mech was now washed with a hideous ochre gloom.

  The air--ah, that was a laugh. Whatever air the departing human workers chanced to leave behind was still there, for machines don't breathe. And the temperature was whatever it happened to be. In the remote ends of the galleries, it was chilly cold; in the area around the cookers, it was appalling.

  And the noise!

  Cringing, the three invaders gaped deafenedly around as they rode in on the conveyor belt. Bill Cossett stared through the blood-red gloom at a row of enormous stainless-steel spheres. He wondered what they were, and only glanced away in scant time to fling himself off the conveyor belt and yell: 'Jump!'

  The others obeyed just as the lumps of coal they had been travelling with thumped with a roar and suffocating dust into a huge hopper.

  Beads of sweat broke out over them all. That coal was ultimately to be polymerized in the huge steel cookers Cossett had been staring at. The factory had not, of course, bothered to sweep away the excess heat with blowers. Why should it? But it wasn't only the heat that brought out the sweat; they could hear the coal being powdered and whooshed away.

  They got out of there, holding hands to keep together, tripping and stumbling in the bloody dusk.

  'Watch it!' bawled the major in Cossett's ear, and Cossett ducked one horrifying instant before something huge and glittering swooped by his ear.

  This was, after all, an appliance factory, and Cossett couldn't help thinking that a factory should have certain recognizable features. Aisles, for example, between the machines.

  But the cavern factory didn't need aisles. Most factory traffic is in the changing of the shifts, the to-and-fro traffic of the coffee break, the casual promenade to the powder room or water cooler. None of these phenomena occurred in the manless caverns. Therefore the machine-mind had ended corridors and abolished aisles. It dumped jigs and bobbins where they were most convenient--to
a machine, not to a man. The movement of fresh parts and the carting away of finished assemblies was done by overhead trolleys.

  As Cossett blinked after the one that had nearly whacked him, he caught glimpse of another shadow out of the corner of his eyes.

  'Watch it!' he yelled, and grabbed Marlene slipperily by the neck as a pod of toasters swept by.

  They all dropped to the littered floor and got up, swearing--except that Marlene didn't swear. She was much too ladylike; that is, in that way. But she said, 'We ought to do our job and get out of here.'

  They looked at each other, a pathetic trio, smeared with grease and soot. They were lost in a howling, hammering catacomb. They were unarmed and helpless against a smart and powerful factory of machines and weapons.

  'This was a dopy idea from the beginning,' moaned Cossett 'We'll never got out.'

  'Never,' agreed the major, daunted at last.

  'Never,' nodded Marlene, and paused, frowning prettily in the gloom.

  'Unless we get thrown up,' she added.

  'You mean thrown out,' Cossett corrected.

  Marlene shook her head. 'I mean upchucked,' she said in a refined manner, 'like when you have an upset stomach.'

  The two men looked at each other.

  'The place does eat, in a way,' said Cossett.

  'It's a mistake to be teleological,' Commaigne objected.

  'But it does eat.'

  'Let's think it out,' said Major Commaigne authoritatively, hitting the dirt to avoid a passing coil of extension cords. 'Suppose,' he called up to the others, 'We blow up the conveyor belt and those cookers. This will undoubtedly interfere with the logistics of the command-apparatus, right? It will then certainly try to find out what happened, and will, we must assume, discover that certain alien entities--ourselves, that is--found their way in through the raw-material receptors. Well, then! What is there for the thing to do but close down its receptors? And when it has done so, it will be cut off from the things it needs to continue manufacturing. Consequently, we take as provisionally established, it will be unable--what?'

  Bill Cossett, bawling at him from under a parts table where he had taken refuge, repeated: 'I said, where's Marlene?'

  The Major clambered to his knees. The girl was gone. In the dull, clattering, crashing gloom, strange shapes moved wildly about, but none of them seemed to be Marlene. She was gone and, the major suddenly discovered, something was gone with her--the bag of explosives.

  'Marlene!' screamed the two men.

  And, though it was only chance, she at once appeared. 'Where have you been?' the major demanded. 'What were you doing?'

  The girl stood looking down at them for a second.

  'I think we'd better get out of the way,' she said at last. 'I took the bombs. I think I've given the thing a tummy-ache.'

  They had gone less than a dozen yards when the first of the little bombs went off, with a sodium-yellow glare and a firecracker bang; but it knocked a hundred yards of conveyor belt off the track.

  And then the fun really began...

  Less than an hour later, they were back on the surface, watching plumes of smoke trickle from fifty concealed ventilators scattered across the plain outside Farmingdale.

  Jack Tighe was delighted. 'You clobbered it!' he gloated. 'And it let you get out?'

  'Kicked us out,' exulted the major. 'We were in the raw-materials area, you know. As far as I can tell, the factory has closed down the raw-materials operation entirely. It swept everything off what was left of the conveyor belt, us included--believe me, we had to step pretty quick to keep from getting hurt! Then it plugged up the belt tunnel, and as we were getting away, I saw a handling machine beginning to put armour-plate over the plug.'

  Jack Tighe howled: 'We've licked it! Tell you what,' he said suddenly, 'let's give it a red bellyache. Plant a few more bombs in the coal beds to make sure...'

  And they did but, really, it didn't seem quite necessary; the cavern factory had withdrawn completely within itself. No further attempts were made to get raw materials, then or ever.

  In the next few days, while Tighe's men tried the same tactic on factory after factory, all across the face of the continent--and always with the same success--the armed guards outside National Electro-Mech's plant had very little to do. The factory wasn't quite dead, no. Twice the first day, occasionally in the days that followed, a single furtive truck would come dodging out of the exit ramps. But only one truck, where there had been scores; and that one partly loaded, and an easy target for the guards.

  It was victory.

  There was no doubt about it.

  Jack Tighe called for a day of national rejoicing.

  • • • •

  6

  What a feast it was! What a celebration!

  Jack Tighe was glowing with triumph and with joy. He was old and stern and powerful, but his hawk's face was the face of a delighted boy.

  'Eat, my friends,' he boomed, his voice rolling through the amplifiers.

  'Enjoy yourselves! A new day has dawned for all of us, and here are the glorious three who made it possible!'

  He swept a generous arm towards those who sat beside him on the dais. Applause thundered.

  The three heroes were all there. Major Commaigne sat erect, tunic crisp, buttons gleaming, a bright new scarlet ribbon over all the other ribbons on his chest, where Jack Tighe had impulsively created a new decoration on the spot. Marlene Groshawk sat beside him, radiant. Bill Cossett was stiff, grinning uncomfortably as he sat next to his wife (who was staring thoughtfully at Marlene Groshawk).

  Jack Tighe bawled: 'Eat, while the Marine Band plays us a march! And then we will have a few words from the heroes who have saved us all!'

  It was a glorious picnic. Hail to the Chief bounced brassily off the bright blue sky. Cossett sat miserably, no longer stiff, wondering what the devil he would find to say, when he noticed that the brassy bugles of the Marine Corps Band faded ringingly away.

  A uniformed Officer had dashed breathlessly through the crowd to the rostrum. He was whispering up to Jack Tighe, a look of tense excitement on his face.

  After a moment, Tighe stood up, hands raised, a smile on his face.

  'There's nothing to worry about, friends,' he called, 'nothing at all! But there's a little life in the cavern factory yet. The colonel here tells me that another truck is coming out of the ramp, that's all. So please just stay where you are and watch our boys knock it off!'

  • • • •

  Panic? No, there wasn't any panic--why should the crowd have panicked? It was a kind of circus, an extra added attraction, as risk-free as the bear-baiting at a Sussex village fair.

  Let the obstinate old factory send its trucks out, thought the assembled thousands with a joy of anticipation, it'll be fun to watch our boys smash them up! And it surely can't mean anything. The battle is won. The factories can go on plotting underground as long as they like, but you can't make toasters without copper and steel, and there hasn't been any of that going in for weeks. No, pure fun, that's all it is!

  And so they took advantage of the spectacle, climbing on chairs to see better, the fathers lifting the youngest to their shoulders. And the truck came whooping out. Rattle, rattle, the machine-guns roared. Wush went the rocket launchers. The truck didn't have a chance. In convoys, in the old days, a few always got through; but here was only one, and it got clobbered for fair.

  Bill Cossett, hand in hand with his wife, went over to look at the smouldering ruins. The crowd fell back respectfully.

  Essie Cossett said gladly: 'Serves them right! Those darn machines, they think they own us. I just wish I could get down there to watch them starving and suffering, like Mr. Tighe said. What are those things, dear?'

  Cossett said absently: 'What things?' His attention was fixed on what the bazooka charge had done to the truck's armoured radiator grill, and he was thinking of how handily a rocket launcher belonging to the factory might have done the same to him.

  'Th
ose shiny things.'

  'What shiny--Oh.' In the yawning flank of the truck, its steel plates sprung by half a dozen shells, a sort of metallic crate hung its edge over the lip of the hole. It was stencilled:

  NATIONAL

  Electro-Mech Appliances

  1 Gross Cigarette Lighters

  And from a dangling flap of the crate, small, shiny globules were oozing out--dripping out, but it was odd, because the confounded things were dripping up. They squeezed out like water from a leaky tap, bright, striated things, and, plop, they were free and floated away.

  'Funny,' said Bill Cossett to his wife, vaguely apprehensive. 'But it can't be anything to worry about Cigarette lighters! I never saw any like that.'

  Wonderingly he took his own cigarette case-and-lighter combination from his pocket.

  He opened it.

  He held it in his hand to read the name stamped on the bottom, to see if by chance it was a National Electro-Mech.

  Pflut. One of the shiny things swooped down on him, danced above the case, came towards his face. He felt a harsh, urgent thrusting at his lips, ducked, coughed, choked, nearly strangled.

  Cossett scrambled to his feet, tore the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, threw it to the ground.

  'Good God!' he cried. 'But how can they? We closed them down!'

  And all over the enormous crowd, others were making the same discovery, and the same error of deduction. From a smashed crate labelled Perc-o-Matics, S-Cup, a shimmering series of little globes of light was whisking its way out into the air and around the crowd.

  Coffee makers? Yes, they were coffee makers.

  'Help!' yelled a woman whose jug of icewater was snatched out of her hands; and 'Stop!' shrilled another, attempting to open a can of Maxwell House.

  Coffee grounds and water swam around in the air, like the jets at Versailles drowning the brown sands of Coney Island. Then the soggy used grounds neatly burrowed into the ground out of sight and the shimmering globe towed a sphere twice larger than itself from cup to cup, dispensing perfect coffee every time.