Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  ~ * ~

  In the corridor Blake helped him tear off his armor. “Come on,” Ferguson said. They started at a run. In the distance ahead of them voices roared. “Hup, two, three, four-” And then roared again, “Hup, two, three, four,” and were silent. In a changing world, one thing remained the same forever, the rhythm of the drillmaster’s voice. Caesar’s legions had marched to some variant of this sound, as had the men of world wars I, II, and III. It was the oldest sound on earth.

  They met the source of the sound and stopped running, standing against the wall to let the file of robots pass. Ferguson counted them mechanically. Eight robots. They were in charge of a technician and they were on their way to the revolving door. A U.N. man marched behind them. For a moment Ferguson hesitated, watching the file march away. They walked, they swung their arms, like marching men. Each of them, he knew, had a set of perfectly conditioned responses to the problems that would be met inside the plant. Only, of course, that part of their minds was not functioning yet and would not start to function until they went through the revolving door. To a robot, that door was the borning place and the dying place. Ferguson wondered if they ever wondered about the world outside an atomic power plant. What were the limits of the selective memory substance that Smither had invented? Was it able to put two and two together and think of the time when it had not been and of the time when it would again cease to be?

  Then the pressure of the urgency calling him to the hospital again erased all such thoughts from his mind. He turned, a tall gaunt man with a hungry look somewhere about him, and broke into a dogtrot down the tunnel. Behind him came his silent shadow, Blake, younger but also tall and gaunt and also with the look about him of some secret soul hunger.

  An elevator took them to the surface. They skirted the edge of the landing field with its parked helicopters. Before them, set among trees, was a cool white building—the hospital. As they went up the steps, rockets from a Moonbound freighter throbbed in the far sky above them.

  Inside the hospital a woman was screaming.

  ~ * ~

  The screams came from a room down the corridor. The door was open. Ferguson looked in. The woman doing the screaming was floating up against the ceiling. She was wearing a white uniform and he decided she was a nurse. He could not decide why she was floating in the air and he preferred not to try. A man in the white garb of an intern floated beside her. The intern was swearing and making swimming motions with his hands and feet.

  Dr. Clanahan, the chief resident physician, was standing on top of a stepladder and was reaching for the screaming nurse. An extremely fussed looking man in a white coat, whom Ferguson recognized as Dr. Morton, the staff psycho, was holding the stepladder. There was a hospital bed in the room, with a patient in it, propped up against pillows. The patient was a wizened little man, about fifty, with a skin so white and so clear it looked transparent, and a great shock of hair so silver white and shining that it made the spotless pillow covers seem dull and drab in comparison. The patient, looking up at the nurse and intern floating near the ceiling, was smiling happily, like a child with a new toy or like an old man with a new faith, Ferguson couldn’t decide which.

  The air seemed charged with static electricity. Ferguson thought he saw inch-long sparks leaping between Dr. Clanahan’s outstretched hand and the hand of the screaming nurse. The ever-present wall counter was sputtering, brrp, brrp, brrp-brrrpy as if catching radioactive indigestion.

  “Great day in the morning!” Ferguson said.

  “What…what’s holding them up?” Blake whispered, behind him.

  “I’m guessing we’re seeing an example of levitation.”

  “Lev . . . lev-” Blake couldn’t say the word. “What. . . what are we going to do?”

  Ferguson would have preferred to run but he didn’t say so. He would have liked to turn around and walk out, in the calm manner of a man walking away from a ghost and pretending he doesn’t see it, but he knew he couldn’t. Every atom in him sensed the strangeness of this situation and radiated warning vibrations. He could hear those atoms ringing, like little silver bells tense with subtle warning. Stay away, stay away, the bells said. Ferguson felt a wave of cold run over him, like a spider with a thousand icy feet. Stay away, stay away. This is not for men to see!

  Clanahan was suddenly aware of the presence of the safety engineer. “Help me,” he wailed, grabbing for the nurse.

  There was no mistaking the spark this time. It was six inches long, leaping between the nurse and the doctor. Ferguson moved forward as Clanahan at last got his hands on the nurse. There was a soft cracking sound as of something tearing. The nurse began to fall. Clanahan fell with her.

  Ferguson caught them as they fell, nurse and doctor. He didn’t know how much the nurse weighed when she was floating up against the ceiling but he knew how much she weighed when she hit him. He felt his knees sag under the unexpected weight. As he braced himself, Clanahan nose-dived across both of them and all three hit the floor. The nurse wailed, a thin sound deep in her throat that was like the whimper of a frightened child.

  The room was silent. The patient chuckled, an out of place sound. Ferguson smelled ozone. The wall counter went brrp, brrp in slowing cadence. The nurse moaned. Dr. Morton straightened up the stepladder. Clanahan got slowly to his feet.

  “Get me down from here!” the intern protested, from the ceiling. There was pain in the intern’s voice and shocked surprise. His voice was the voice of a man whose universe has been turned upside down and who has lost all faith in the orderly nature of the world around him.

  Hearing that voice, Ferguson knew that up near the ceiling a man was holding on to his sanity with a death grip. He sympathized with that intern.

  Dr. Clanahan, moving with the purposive determination of a man who is going to do his duty no matter what happens, climbed up the stepladder again. The nurse crawled off Ferguson’s lap and the engineer rose to his feet to catch the intern. Sparks leaped from Clanahan’s fingers to the intern, an invisible fabric ripped and was torn, and Ferguson, ready this time, caught the intern and eased him to the floor. The intern sat down, then laid down, his fingernails scraping across the smooth plastic linoleum as he tried to dig himself a hand-hold on the floor. Clanahan came down the ladder cautious step after cautious step and looked at the intern, then looked at the patient on the bed.

  “Would somebody mind telling me what happened?” Ferguson said. There was a plaintive note in his voice. He did not wonder at it being there. Deep inside of him he was aware of a strong urge to get down and help that intern dig a hand-hold in the plastic floor, to use to hold on to the spinning world.

  Dr. Clanahan took a cigarette out of the pocket of his white jacket. He was a young man but a worried man, now. A good doctor. He tapped the cigarette on his thumbnail, his motions slow and deliberate, and looked at the patient out of the corner of his eye. Then, the cigarette unlit, he went out into the hall. They heard him shouting out there. “Hicks. Judson. Miss Jones. Lock the doors. Don’t let anybody in, or out, then come here. On the double.” He came back into the room. There was a scurry of feet outside. Two men and a woman entered. Clanahan pointed the cigarette at the intern and the nurse. “Take care of them,” he said. “Give them a sedative and put them to bed. Then come back in here and stay here. You, Hicks, you stay here now.”

  Clanahan’s eyes sought Ferguson. “Come to my office,” he said. “You too, Dr. Morton, if you please.”

  ~ * ~

  They followed him, Blake coming, too. He went ahead of them. They found him opening a filing cabinet and taking out a bottle of whisky. He drank straight from the bottle, then handed it to Dr. Morton. The psycho took it without a word. The whisky made little gurgling sounds as it went down his throat.

  Ferguson had the feeling of unreality that goes with great events, the sensation that this is a puppet show with the actors on strings responding to the will of some unseen, far-off master. “Would somebody mind telling me what happened
?” he repeated, and wondered if this question was in the script. “How did those people get up on the ceiling?”

  “Why ... why didn’t they fall?” Blake asked.

  “Uh,” Dr. Clanahan said. He looked at Ferguson. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you for an hour. No, don’t bother answering. It isn’t important. How did those people get up on the ceiling? The patient put them there.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said, ‘Rise thou up,’ “ Dr. Morton spoke. He took another drink. “And they rose up.” He looked at the bottle, measuring its remaining contents.

  “Sky hooks!” Ferguson heard himself say. “Tell me just a little more,” he begged. He didn’t care how he sounded. The need to know was a million volt tension inside of him.

  “The patient was brought in this morning,” Dr. Clanahan said. He looked at the bottle Dr. Morton had and decided there was no hope of getting it away from the psycho. Turning, he opened the filing cabinet and took out a second bottle, which he kept in his possession. “He was brought in this morning with a load of radios.”

  “Oh,” Ferguson said. He knew now why he had been called. It was his job to keep radioactive materials and radiations where they belonged. They didn’t belong near any human being. “What department?” he asked quickly. “Where was he working and what is his name? How did he get the dose? Weren’t the counters working? Hadn’t he been warned-”

  Clanahan shook his head. “He’s not an employee, so far as I know. Anyhow he didn’t have a badge on him.”

  “Oh. Outside the plant?” This was worse. When an employee got a load of radios, it was bad, but when somebody outside the plant caught a dose of death, there was likely to be a stir that would disturb half of Southern California. People were scared of these plants. That was one reason they were located underground, in out of the way places, to give the public at least the illusion of protection. “Where did he get it?”

  “We don’t know,” Clanahan answered.

  “And we’re not likely to find out,” Dr. Morton spoke. “He won’t tell us his name or anything else.”

  “He’s got to tell us! We have to know!”

  Morton shrugged.

  “You’ve got drugs that will force a man to talk.”

  “Uh-huh,” the psycho nodded. “We were preparing to use one of them when . . . when-” He shrugged and took another drink.

  “When he said, ‘Rise thou up’ to the intern and nurse,” Clanahan said.

  “Oh. He resisted?”

  Morton laughed, a sound that was more giggle than laugh. “That he did.”

  “How did those people get up on the ceiling?” asked Blake.

  “I wish you would shut up!” Ferguson spoke fiercely. “You keep bringing up the one fact that I’ve been trying to ignore.” He glared at his assistant, then at Morton. “Well, how did they?”

  “I told you,” Morton said. “He told them to do it. A schizophrenic, paranoid type,” he added, talking to himself.

  “Nuts,” Ferguson said. “We’ve got to know! Got to!”

  “We’ll try again,” Morton said, his voice matter of fact. “You are not sticking to the subject, my friend,” he added.

  “I know it. I want to talk to him first.”

  “You may have that privilege,” Morton said. He made a little gesture with his hands which indicated that Ferguson was welcome to it.

  The nurse and the intern were gone from the room. Hicks and Judson, both male nurses, were in the room and not looking comfortable. The patient was still sitting up in bed.

  Ferguson grinned and walked up to the side of the bed. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Ferguson. I’m the safety engineer.” He held out his hand. “What’s your name?”

  The patient took the outstretched hand. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Ferguson. My name is God.”

  “I beg your pardon-”

  The patient smiled at him. “You thought I was swearing, didn’t you? I wasn’t. God is my name.”

  “But-” Ferguson pulled back his hand and shut his mouth. Behind him, he could hear Clanahan or Morton or Blake breathing heavily. The male nurse on the other side of the bed looked as if he wished a male nurse could quietly faint.

  “My name is God,” the patient repeated.

  In that moment, Ferguson had the dazed impression that the roof of the world had fallen in, that the sky had come tumbling down and a piece of it had landed on his head. Somewhere in the vault of heaven outside a rocket ship was blasting again. In this room, the far-off sound was a muted rumble but Ferguson, in that mad split second, had the soul-quickening feeling that he was hearing the rustle of angel wings, the roar of wind around mile-long pinions. And somehow or other the man on the bed seemed to grow in stature, to become an enthroned sky-high figure, with mile-long wings coming to answer his call. Then the moment passed. The sound in the sky became the sound of a rocket ship and nothing more, the figure on the bed came back to man size and was again a hospital patient.

  Ferguson was shaken. “Tiger, tiger-” the words formed on his lips. He glanced around at the two doctors. Morton was looking out the window and Clanahan was wiping sweat from his upper lip. The pupils of Blake’s eyes had shrunk to pinpoint size.

  The engineer took a deep breath. There was a way to handle this situation, if he could find it, he hoped. “All right, God,” he said quietly, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “You’ve picked up a charge of radioactive radiations. Mind telling me where you got them?”

  The patient heard the question but he answered some other question that existed in his own mind. “Satan, all black but with shining eyes, came and knelt before me,” he said. “He knew me. He acknowledged my authority. He said, ‘Thou art God.’ “

  Morton looked interested. Ferguson wiped sweat from his upper lip. “Tell me what happened, old man,” he urged.

  “Satan-”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Where-” The eyes were turned toward Ferguson. Involuntarily he drew back. He had seen the eyes of many men, had seen them in triumph, in happiness, and in sorrow, the eyes of the aggressive personality, the timid averted eyes of men who had no faith in themselves, but he had never seen eyes like these. The eyes of all sick men look alike, all of them reflect the knowledge that something has gone wrong inside the man.

  The eyes of this patient were not the eyes of a sick man. He was carrying a load of radioactive burn, inside, but that fact didn’t show in his eyes. The only thing that showed there was— joy that passed the understanding.

  This patient was happy! Death had marked his forehead with a red cross, labeling him as death’s own, but he had no fear because of that. He radiated happiness. It looked out of his eyes.

  “I went up the mountain,” he said. “There I met-”

  “What was the name of the mountain?”

  “. . . Satan-”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Dr. Morton spoke, behind Ferguson. “We’ll try again.”

  Ferguson, shrugging, admitted he was willing. “I’ll bet-” Blake said softly.

  The patient watched the hypodermic being prepared. “No,” he said.

  “We’re doing this to help you,” Morton said gently. He was a competent psychiatrist and he knew how to handle patients, how to soothe their fears. Ferguson, watching, admired the man’s ability and his courage but he could see the sweat on Morton’s face and he knew how the psycho felt. Morton approached the patient. The patient stood up in bed.

  “Rise thou up!” he said.

  The air was suddenly charged with electric tension. The wall counter started brrping. And Morton went up. He floated up to the ceiling and stayed there.

  The patient got off the bed. No one moved, no one tried to stop him. “I’ll have to leave,” he said.

  He approached the door. It was locked. He rattled the knob. The door didn’t open. “Out of my way,” he said.

  The door vanished. It went away, like smoke before the wind. The patient
walked through the opening and into the hall.

  From the window of Clanahan’s office, they saw him walk across to the landing field, and get in a helicopter. They saw the vanes start turning, they saw the ship rise in the air, they saw it become a dot in the distance.

  “Anyhow,” Blake said, sighing, “he went in a ship. He didn’t sprout wings and fly.”

  “Did you expect that?” Ferguson asked.

  “I was betting on it,” his assistant answered.

  ~ * ~

  “I want you to locate a stolen helicopter,” Ferguson said, into the telephone. He was talking to the police, from Clanahan’s office, and while he talked, he watched Clanahan, Morton, and Blake drink whisky. Blake was a teetotaler, or he had been until this moment. He wasn’t a teetotaler any longer. “It was taken from the landing field of Power Plant 71 less than ten minutes ago. When last seen it-was flying due west.”