Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  “What’s that, Sarge?”

  Marcos smiled. And closed his eyes.

  “I’ll hang onto it,” he said.

  The Hum

  by Rick Hautala

  Under his own name as well as the pseudonym A. J. Matthews, Rick Hautala has published more than thirty novels as well as over sixty short stories in a variety of national and international anthologies and magazines. His most recent books under his own name include Bedbugs and The Mountain King. As A. J. Matthews, he has published The White Room, Looking Glass, and Follow. Forthcoming from C. D. Publications are Occasional Demons and Four Octobers . Also, a revised version of his novel Little Brothers titled Untcigahunk: Stories and Tales of the Little Brothers is due from Delirium Press. Chesapeake Films recently optioned his original screenplay Chills.

  “Can you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “That . . .”

  Dave Marshall rolled over in bed and struggled to come awake. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes in the darkness as he listened intently.

  “I don’t hear anything, Sweetie, he said as he slid his hand up the length of his wife’s thigh, feeling the roundness of her hip and wondering for a moment if she was interested in a little midnight tumble. He felt himself stirring.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t hear that,” Beth said irritably. Dave realized she was serious about this although he’d be damned if he could hear anything. It didn’t matter, though, because the romantic mood had already evaporated.

  “Honest to God, honey, I don’t hear anything. Maybe it was a siren or—”

  “It wasn’t a siren. It’s . . . I can just barely hear it. It’s like this low, steady vibration.” Beth held her breath, concentrating hard on the sound that had disturbed her.

  “Maybe it’s the refrigerator.”

  “No, goddamnit. It’s not the fridge.”

  Dave was exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Pressures at the office, he supposed, were getting to him. He sure as hell didn’t need to be playing “Guess That Sound” at 2 AM.

  “Just put the pillow over your head and go back to sleep. I’ll check it out in the morning.”

  “I can’t sleep with my head under the pillow,” Beth grumbled, but she turned away from him and put her head under the pillow just the same. He patted her hip one more time, feeling a little wistful.

  “Isn’t that better?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  Ignoring her sarcasm, Dave said leaned over and kissed her shoulder as he whispered, “Goodnight, honey.”

  Dave awoke early the next morning with every nerve in his body on edge. His eyes were itchy, and he could feel a headache coming on.

  This is really weird, he thought. I was in bed by 10 last night. That’s nine freakin’ hours of sleep. I shouldn’t feel like this.

  He went downstairs to the kitchen. Beth was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee clasped in both hands. Her face was pale, and she looked at him bleary-eyed.

  “How’d you sleep?” she asked, and he caught the edge in hr voice.

  “Before you woke me up or after?” He forced a grin.

  “Very funny. That goddamn hum kept me awake most of the night.” She took a sip of coffee and opened the newspaper, making a point of ignoring him.

  “Beth . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  Dave stood still in the middle of the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, he suddenly realized that he could hear something. There was a low, steady vibration just at the edge of awareness. He could almost feel it in his feet.

  “Wait a sec.” He held up a finger to silence her. “You know . . . ? I think I can hear it.”

  “Really?” Beth looked at him like she didn’t quite believe him, but then she relented and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought I might be going insane.”

  Over the next hour or so, they searched throughout the house from attic to basement, looking for a possible source of the sound. It wasn’t in the wires or the pipes or the circuit breaker box or the TV, of that Dave was sure. The odd thing was, no matter what floor they were on or what room they were in, the sound always seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. When Dave went outside to check the shed and garage, he found Beth in the middle of the yard, crying.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” He put his arms around her, feeling the tension in her body.

  “I can hear it just as loud out here as I can inside the house, “ she said, sobbing into his shoulder.

  “So?”

  “So . . . That means it’s not coming from inside the house. It’s out here somewhere. It’s like it’s coming from the ground or the sky or something.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” he said. He took a breath and, leaning close, stared into her eyes. “I’ll call the electric company and maybe the phone company. It’s gotta be a problem with the wires.”

  “Sure,” Beth said, not sounding convinced. She wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve, then turned and walked back into the house. Dave watched her leave, knowing she didn’t believe it was a wire problem.

  He wasn’t sure he believed it, either.

  Over the next few days, things got worse. A lot worse. Like a sore in your mouth you can’t help probing with your tongue, Dave found himself poised and listening for the sound all the time, trying to detect its source. Once he was aware of it, he couldn’t help but hear it. He was growing desperate to locate it and analyze it. His work at the office suffered. Jeff Stewart, his boss, noticed how distracted her was. At first he commented on it with amusement, but that changed to concern and, finally, exasperation. But Dave noticed that everyone in the office seemed a little distracted and, as the day went by, more and more irritable. This would make sense, he thought, if everyone was sleeping as poorly as he was. It had taken him hours to fall asleep last night, and once he was out, the noise still permeated his dreams. He woke up a dozen or more times and just lay there staring at the ceiling as he listened to the low, steady hum just at he edge of hearing. He knew Beth was lying awake next to him, but they didn’t talk. Every attempt at conversation ended with one of them snapping at the other.

  Over the next few days, sales of white-noise machines, soundproofing materials, and environmental sound CDs went through the roof. People turned their TVs and radios up loud in a futile effort to block out the hum, further irritating their neighbors, who were already on edge.

  Dave’s commute to work quickly became a crash course in Type-A driving techniques. One morning, he was trapped for over an hour behind a sixty-five-car pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway that had turned into a demolition derby. It took nearly the entire city police force and an army of tow trucks to break up the melee. After that, Dave kept to back streets going to and from work.

  Schools began canceling soccer and football games as soccer-mom brawls and riots in the stands became increasingly frequent and intense. Shoving matches broke out in ticket lines and grocery checkout lanes. Neighborhood feuds and other violent incidents escalated, filling the newspaper and TV news with lurid reports. As the week wore on, road rage morphed into drive-by shootings. Gang warfare was waged openly, and police brutality was applauded instead of prosecuted. The slightest provocation caused near-riots in public. The media reported that the hum—and the rise in aggressive behavior—was a global phenomenon.

  “It’s only a matter of time before some third-world countries start tossing nukes at each other,” Dave muttered one morning at the office staff meeting. Mike from Purchasing glared at him.

  “Who died and made you Mr-Know-It-All?” he snarled.

  “Jesus, Mike, quit being such an asshole,” Dave snapped back.

  “All right. That’s enough,” said Jeff. “This isn’t kindergarten. Let’s try to be professional here, okay?”

  “Professional, schmessional,” Mike grumbled. “Who gives a rat’s ass anymore, anyway?”

  “I said that’s enough.” Jeff thumped the conference
table with his clenched fist.

  Sherry from Operations burst into tears. “Stop it, stop it now! Jesus, stop it! I can’t take it any more! I can’t eat. I can’t sleep, and I sure as hell can’t stand listening to the two of you morons!”

  Dave noticed with a shock the fist-sized bruise on her cheek. She caught him staring at her face and shouted at him, “It’s none of your goddamned business!”

  “Wha’d I say?” asked Dave with a shrug.

  “That’s it!” roared Jeff. “You’re fired! All of you! Every damned one of you!”

  The entire staff turned and looked at him, seated at the head of the table. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bulging. In the moment of silence that followed, everyone in the room became aware of the hum, but Dave was the first to mentions that it had changed subtly. Now there was a discordant clanking sound, still just at the edge of hearing, but the sound was penetrating.

  “The music of the spheres,” Sherry whispered in a tight, wavering voice. “It’s the music of the spheres.” Her voice scaled up toward hysteria. “The harmony is gone. The center cannot hold. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong!” With a loud, animal wail, she got up and ran from the room with tears streaming down her face.

  Mike swallowed hard, trying to control his frustration. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

  “Go home. All of you. I’m closing the office until they figure out what this sound is.” Jeff’s fists were clenched, and his body was trembling as though he were in the grips of a fever. “If I don’t, I’m going to have to kill every single one of you . . . unless you kill me first.” He grinned wolfishly, then slumped down in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his ears as he sobbed quietly.

  Mike and Dave left the conference room without speaking.

  That afternoon, Dave drove home, mindful not to do anything that would irritate anyone on the road. Sitting on the sofa in the living room as he waited for Beth to get home, he couldn’t help but listen to the hum. He thought about what could possibly be happening but couldn’t come up with an answer.

  When Beth finally came home, Dave said, “Sit down. We have to talk.”

  She looked at him warily, and the mistrust he saw in her eyes hurt him.

  “What’s her name?”

  “What?” He realized what she meant and shook his head. “No. It’s nothing like that. Look, Beth, I’m trying to save us, not break us apart. Listen to me, okay?”

  Beth nodded as she took a breath and held it. He could see she was trying to pull the last shreds of her patience together, and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude and love for her. It was so good to feel something pleasant that for a brief moment he forgot all about the noise.

  “Jeff closed the office. This sound is getting on everyone’s nerves, and he’s afraid we’re all going to end up killing each other. He’s probably right. I was thinking—we get out of here. Let’s go up to your folks’ place in Maine or anywhere, as long as it’s far away from here and from all these people.”

  “But the news says this hum is everywhere. There’s no escaping it, Dave,” Beth said. Her face contorted, but she clenched her fists and regained her self-control. “What’s the point of going anywhere?”

  “Maybe there isn’t a point, but I . . . I feel like we have to do something. We have to try. I don’t want us to end up another murder-suicide statistic.” He took her into his arms and held her close. “I love you, Beth.”

  She clung to him and whispered, “I love you, too.”

  They sat silently in the living room as the twilight deepened, and the world all around them hummed.

  What would normally have been a nine-hour ride to Little Sebago Lake took almost twenty-four hours because Dave wanted to stay off the interstates. The latest news reports indicated that truckers were chasing down and crushing unlucky drivers who pissed them off. Dave had seen the film Duel once, and that was enough for him.

  As they headed north, the sound became more discordant. Dave noticed a mechanical chunking quality that was getting more pronounced. The endless, irregular rhythm ground away at his nerves like fine sandpaper, but they finally made it to the cabin by the lake without incident.

  The camp was on the east side of the lake, small and shabby, but a welcome sight. The lake stretched out before them, a flat, blue expanse of water with the New Hampshire mountains off in the distance to the west. The sun was just setting, tipping the lake’s surface with sparkles of gold light and streaking the sky with slashes of red and purple.

  It was beautiful, and when Dave and Beth looked at each other, the good feelings drowned out the hum, if only for a moment. The embraced and kissed with passion.

  Then the day was over. The sun dropped behind the mountains, and the humming noise pressed back in on them. After unpacking the car, they ate a cold supper of baked beans out of the can. Beth set about making the bed upstairs and straightening up while Dave walked down to the lake’s edge.

  The night was still except for the hum. All the usual sounds—the birds and crickets and frogs—were silent. The lake looked like a large pane of smoky glass. Stars twinkled in the velvety sky above. Dave sat down on a weather-stripped tree trunk that had washed up onto shore and looked up at the sky. The noise seemed to be changing again. It now was a faint, squeaky sound that reminded him of fingernails raking down a chalkboard. At least it was the only sound. No blaring TVs . . . no pounding stereos.

  How long can this go on? he wondered. How long can anyone handle this before we all go mad and exterminate ourselves?

  He heaved a sigh as he looked up at the sky. At first, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing when he noticed a few black flakes drifting down onto the lake’s surface. They looked like soot from a bonfire. Like a child in a snowstorm, Dave reached up and tried to catch one of the falling flakes.

  Funny, he thought, I don’t smell smoke.

  He looked at his hand. The flake lay in the cup of his palm, but it wasn’t soft and crumbly like ash. It was hard and thin, with a dark, brittle surface. It crunched like fragle glass when he poked it with his index finger.

  Jesus Christ he thought. It looks like paint.

  Curious, he looked up again. By now the flakes were sifting down rapidly from the sky. As he watched, Dave became aware of a low, steady vibration beneath his feet. It felt like a mild electrical current. As he watched the sky, irregular yellow splotches appeared overhead as more and more black paint fell away, exposing a dull, cracked surface behind. After a time, silver and yellow flakes began to fall. Dave watched in amazement, his mouth dry, his mind numb.

  A crescent moon was rising in the east behind him. He turned to see if it, too, was peeling away from the sky like an old sticker on a refrigerator. The noise rose to a sudden, piercing squeal, and then the vibration rumbled the ground like a distant earthquake.

  “Beth!” he called out, watching as fragments of the moon broke off and drifted down from the sky. They fluttered and hissed as they rushed through the trees behind him, and then he saw something overhead that was impossible to believe. The peeling paint had exposed a vast complex of spinning gears and cogs with a network of circuits and switches that glowed as they overheated. The humming sound rose even higher until it was almost unbearable as more pieces of the night sky fell away, revealing the machinery behind it. At last, Dave knew—as impossible as it was—what was happening.

  “Beth!” he called out so his wife could hear him above the steadily rising rumble. “Come out here! You’ve got to see this! The sky is falling!”

  Last of the Fourth

  By Bill Fawcett

  Bill Fawcett has been a professor, teacher, corporate executive, and college dean. He is one of the founders of Mayfair Games, a board and role play gaming company, and designed award-winning board games and role playing modules. He more recently produced and designed several computer games. As a book packager, he has packaged over 250 books. The Fleet science fiction series he edited and contributed
to with David Drake has become a classic of military science fiction. He has collaborated on several mystery novels as Quinn Fawcett. His recent works include Making Contact: a UFO Contact Handbook, and a series of books about great mistakes in history: It Seemed Like a good Idea, You Did What? and How to Lose a Battle.

  As he sealed his helmet, the deafening roar of a bay full of a dozen armored infantrymen preparing to drop was muted to a mere rumble. It wasn’t as loud as it had been when the Fourth Assault Regiment had been at full strength with thirty-six troopers and six officers. Being in almost constant combat, there had been no time to integrate replacements. This left Corporal Astin Olowoi free to once again wonder how something that only he had ever worn since it was uncrated could smell so disgustingly rancid. He knew had been the only person to ever wear this Mobile Assault Personnel Suit. Since it was tightly adjusted to every part and contour of his body, he was the only one who could wear and fight the powered combat armor effectively without days of adjustments. Still, each time he sealed his suit, the accumulated odor was nearly overpowering.

  Routine maintenance schedules called for the MAPERS interior to be flushed and relined after every twenty uses. That should mean it was subject to a refresh about every twenty-one days between the current regimen of training, actual combat drops and emergency servicing. Astin had been fitted into his MAPerS ten months earlier. That was two weeks before the Jenkle announced themselves by destroying the human colony on Delos. The maintenance schedule was for peacetime use. This was wartime, and things changed as needs must ruled. There had been hardly any downtime, much less a chance to clean the MAPerS’ pads since Delos.

  Shrugging his shoulders into the armor, the lean trooper let the servos adjust to him. The process went quickly. He hadn’t gained any weight since he had worn the suit in a simulated rehearsal of today’s drop twelve hours ago. Of course Assault Troopers didn’t gain weight. A few too many pounds and then a bit too much shock might get transmuted through his tighter-than-normal armor, turning his body’s internal organs into a mass of stringy mush. That had happened a few times on the raids the Fourth had made early in the war. The result was both fatal and so messy that the MAPerS of the casualty had to be retired into spare parts. Since those first deaths no one had to remind anyone in the Fourth to watch his weight, ever.