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

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “We’ll get him,” the police chief promised.

  “I want you to understand, however, that the man who took it is not a thief. He is mentally unbalanced-” Ferguson fervently hoped he wasn’t a liar.

  “Huh? A nut?”

  “And in addition, he is suffering from the effects of radioactive poisons.”

  “Radios!” the phone yelled at him. “Has something gone wrong up there again? What are you trying to do, poison the whole population?”

  “Find the ‘copter and call me back,” the engineer said, hanging up. Morton silently passed the bottle to him.

  “How did it feel up there?” he asked.

  “Not bad,” Morton admitted. “Just kind of out of this world. That’s all. Just kind of out of this world.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  Morton shrugged. “The patient unquestionably has delusions of grandeur. He imagines he is God. If that isn’t a delusion of grandeur, then I never saw one.”

  “Imagines?” Ferguson said.

  “Shut up,” Morton answered, without animosity. “He has delusions and he realizes that the use of pentathal will destroy his illusions. The illusions are very dear to him and he wishes to retain them at any cost. Hence he decided he had better leave this place because if he stayed here, we would take his illusion away from him.” Morton shrugged as if to say it was a simple matter, if you understood it, and that there were no holes in his argument. His explanation covered the motivation of the patient and was probably sound that far but he and everyone else in the room knew there were holes in his argument, holes big enough to turn a rocket ship in.

  “That door was matter,” Clanahan said. “Glass and magnesium, that door was. Matter.”

  “So were the nurse and the intern,” Ferguson said. “And so is Dr. Morton here. At least I’ve always considered flesh and blood to be matter.”

  “So they are,” Clanahan said. He seemed to feel that this was one problem too much. The door, metal and glass, matter, was bad enough. Flesh and blood were too much. He looked around his office, his face fretful, but Morton had the bottle and didn’t look as if he were willing to relinquish it. Clanahan went again to the file cabinet.

  “Is that the pitcher that never runs dry?” Morton asked.

  “There’s one more,” Clanahan answered, peering into the depths of the cabinet.

  “Get it out.”

  “What do you think?” Ferguson repeated.

  “I would prefer not to do any thinking,” the psycho said, his voice unnecessarily firm.

  “Do you want to close your mind?”

  “Uh-huh. Very much. I want to keep my mind sane. In this profession, that’s hard enough to do under the best of circumstances. To do it at all, you have to believe in an ordered universe on our level of observation at least. If I let my mind dwell on what I saw with my own eyes-” His gaze went up to the ceiling and clung there as if he was fascinated by the sight.

  “Maybe he was God,” Blake said, sighing.

  A slow shudder passed over the psycho’s body. “What do you think I’m keeping out of mind?” Anger showed on his face. “Let me have my fantasy. I need it to protect my own sanity. Let me have it, I say. Where’s that whisky?”

  “On the desk in front of you,” the engineer said. “What is your fantasy?”

  Morton drank and looked up. “What I saw doesn’t prove there is no stability in the ... in the universe.” He seemed to be talking to himself. “It just proves there is a supreme stability. I’ve known that all along, unconsciously, but I couldn’t find any explanation I was willing to accept on a rational level-”

  Blake looked at his boss. “Man wrestling with the devil,” he whispered. Ferguson nodded. “About your fantasy?” he prodded.

  Morton glared at him. “How do we know how He comes and goes? He might be anybody, the man we pass on the street, the next patient who comes in to see me.” His eyes dug into the engineer. “He might be you.”

  “I’m afraid,” the engineer answered, “that I do not burn quite bright enough.” Then, angry at himself because of the words he had used, he went on. “Your fantasy. Now you’re the one who isn’t sticking to the subject.”

  Morton drank slowly, took the bottle from his lips and looked fondly at it. “My fantasy is an explanation of how he was able to make people rise up to the ceiling, just by ordering them to do it, and how he was able to make a door vanish, by telling it to get out of his way.” He seemed to be in no hurry to continue.

  “Go on,” Ferguson urged.

  “That patient had been subjected to intense radiation,” the psycho said. “I think this radiation had changed the cell structure in his mind. Don’t ask me how it was changed because I don’t know. But I think this change unlocked some power latent in him, some wild talent we all possess to a mild degree, and as a result, material objects obeyed him. That’s a comfortable, rational thing to think.” Firmness sounded in his voice. “I’m going to think it.” He tilted the bottle again.

  “But-” Blake stirred, protesting.

  “Don’t try to tell me we know the limits of the powers of the mind!” the doctor snarled. “I know better. I’ve seen too many men who should have died get well because they believed they were going to recover, because they wanted to get well. I’ve seen too many men die when there was nothing wrong with them, because they believed they were going to die.”

  Blake was silent. The psycho tapped his forehead. “There are more mysteries up here, Horatio-” He shook his head. “It is my fantasy to believe that we saw a wild talent in operation, a talent that had been released by a charge of radioactive radiations. I’m going to have my fantasy at all costs.”

  “Then you don’t think he was God,” Blake said.

  “Not unless there is a chained god in all of us,” the psycho answered. Far-off, again, rockets blasted in the sky. Ferguson shivered. “We’ve got to find him,” he said.

  “We don’t,” Morton denied. “Something is looking for him that will find him, no matter where he goes, within twenty-four hours. That I know for sure.” His voice trailed off.

  “You mean he will be dead within that time?” the engineer asked. Morton nodded.

  “I’ll bet-” Blake began, tentatively, then was silent as his boss interrupted.

  “He said he had met Satan-”

  “Illusion,” Morton said firmly. “The distortion of an object into something else. He saw a bush or a tree or a rock and imagined it was Satan-”

  Whaaang! went the telephone on the desk. Clanahan grabbed it, listened, then handed it to the engineer. “For you. It’s the general manager-”

  “Ferguson,” the voice grated in the engineer’s ears. “I’ve just had a call from the health department. They’ve got a case of radio sickness on their hands. Get on this right now.”

  “Where is the patient?”

  “Dead. He belonged to some kind of a cult that has its headquarters on Red Mountain. Presumably he got the radios there. You can get the dope from them.”

  “I’ll get on it.” He hung up the phone. “Another case,” he said.

  Whaang! went the phone again. Ferguson picked it up automatically. He listened quietly, then hung up. “The police,” he said to the men in the office. “They found the stolen ‘copter, near Red Mountain. It was smashed in landing.”

  “What…what about the pilot?” Blake whispered.

  “He’s missing,” Ferguson answered.

  ~ * ~

  At dusk, they hadn’t found the pilot. But they had learned his name. Homer. He was the leader of a group of twenty-one people who had founded a tiny colony, on the slope of Red Mountain, within two miles of the power plant, a colony that was actually a cult devoted to the simple life. Seeing this group, Ferguson wondered if the spirit of Rousseau was still alive. Rousseau had advocated the simple life back in the Eighteenth Century. Here in the Twenty-first Century men were still following his ideas. Here, on a spring-watered plot of ground, men and
women raised vegetables and fruits and grain. Up near the top of the mountain they had a herd of sheep, carding and spinning and weaving their own wool, making their own clothes.

  Here, on this mountain, within fifty miles of the tremendous technology of Southern California, within fifty miles of millions of people who existed in a world of plastics and synthetics and unlimited energy, were people who had never seen a synthetic fabric, who had never tasted artificial vitamins or eaten food grown in hydroponic tanks. Homer’s Bunch, they called themselves. Homer was their leader. He had no second name, and needed none. They described him to Ferguson, Clanahan, Morton, and Blake listening. “Hair whiter’n silver, kind of skinny--” Yes, it was the same man.

  Blake stirred uneasily at the identification, the lines of gaunt hunger showing on his youthful face. Up until now he had harbored the hope-But no matter.

  Homer’s Bunch wanted to know what had happened to Homer. Ferguson told them, as gently as he could, part of the story. They watched him as he spoke. “Does that mean he is going to die?” Bill asked. Bill was at least seventy but arrow-straight.

  “Yes,” the engineer said. He expected the news to sadden them, he thought the women would start wailing. But they weren’t saddened. And no woman cried. “Part of Homer will die,” Bill said, “but part of him will live on.” They nodded in agreement and smiled as though they shared some tremendous secret with each other.

  “When did you see him last?” Ferguson asked.

  “Last night I saw him,” Bill answered. “Jist at sundown. A goin’ up the mountain, he was, to pray.”

  “He went up the mountain,” Blake said, to himself.

  “That’s where we’re going too,” the engineer said. Bill showed them the path and offered to go with them but they could see he didn’t really want to go and they didn’t urge him. Blake’s portable counter brrped under the impact of a stray cosmic ray as they started up the path Homer’s Bunch had made.

  “Do we really need that thing?” Morton said.

  “Yes,” Ferguson answered.

  “It fidgets me.”

  “It would fidget me a lot more if I didn’t have it,” the engineer said.

  Darkness came down. Chittering bats flew around them. A lumbering beetle, bound on some mysterious errand of its own, hit Ferguson in the face. Cold sweat popped out all over him. He went doggedly on.

  They reached the top of the middle ridge, found there a cleared space. Above them blazed a million stars. A wind moved through the darkness, bringing with it a touch of chill. “The wind goes up and looks at the sky and then it runs back down and huddles against the earth, for protection,” Blake said.

  “Homer!” Ferguson shouted. The night was still. On the far horizon, lights flashed in the air as a rocket ship glided down to haven. It was so far away the sound of the jets was lost. Brrp, brrp, went the counter.

  “If we didn’t have to find that man,” Morton said, “and learn what happened—how he got the charge of radios, I mean —I’d say we’d better get from here. How did he get to the hospital in the first place, Clanahan?”

  “Some motorist picked him up somewhere and brought him in and dumped him on our doorstep,” the doctor answered. “The motorist didn’t stick around to tell us where he had found him.”

  The psycho cursed all motorists with vicious oaths. “Homer!” Ferguson yelled and waited for an answer he didn’t get. Brrp, brrp, brrp, went the counter.

  On the slope leading up to the next ridge above them a single gravel rolled. Ferguson felt Blake’s grip on his arm.

  “It just occurred to me,” Morton said, “that Homer got his dose somewhere around here.”

  Brrrrp, the counter echoed.

  Ferguson looked around. “If you want to run, now is the time.”

  “What?”

  The night was silent. Another gravel rolled. And a voice said, questioningly: “Master?”

  “God!” Ferguson whispered. Homer’s words came back to him. “And Satan, all black but with shining eyes, came and knelt before me.”

  ~ * ~

  On the slope above them, hidden among shrubbery, two dimly shining eyes looked out.

  Ferguson was cold, cold, cold. A wind that blew off miles of glacial ice was blowing over him. Air that had gone up to the top of the world to look at the sky and had been frightened by what it had seen there and had run back to the earth for protection, bringing the cold of outer space with it, that wind was touching him.

  From the slope the voice came again, saying: “I want to speak with my master.”

  Gravel crunched as a dark figure moved. Brrrrrrrp, went the tails of the little warning snakes.

  “Satan!” another voice screamed. “Black deceiver! Thou tricked me to my death!”

  “Homer!” the engineer screamed.

  A gun boomed. “I knew you’d come back!” Homer’s voice screamed. “You’ll not trick me again. This time I’m ready for you!” The gun roared again.

  “Master, no!” the first voice begged.

  Gunshot followed gunshot. There was a hollow, booming sound, as of bullets striking their target in a shooting gallery. “No, master, no,” the first voice pleaded. Footsteps sounded as something approached.

  Brrrrrrrrr, went the counter. Blake started forward. Ferguson grabbed him, jerked him back. “You fool! There’s death out there.”

  “But I want to see.”

  “It will come to us. We don’t have to go to it.”

  Boom, went the gun, for the last time. “If bullets won’t kill you, what will?” Homer’s voice came, wonderingly.

  From the clearing, they saw Homer run forward, his silver hair shining in the starlight. And they saw him fall. They saw him try to get to his feet and fall again. He didn’t get up this time. The thing that had been looking for part of him had found the part it wanted here on this windswept ridge.

  They saw a dark body come out of the bushes and move toward Homer and kneel beside him. “Master,” a voice whispered, “do not go away.”

  The voice had a metallic tinge but there was pain in it and sorrow and hurt past the understanding of hurt. It was a voice coming out of loneliness and crying out that it was not right or fair to be alone. It had thought it had found someone to lessen its loneliness, a friend, perhaps a god, who might explain why it should have to be alone among mysteries that passed the understanding. But the friend it thought it had found, the god, this god had gone away. And the voice could not understand.

  “Master. Do not go away.”

  Ferguson heard the scream start in Blake’s throat and he reached out to choke off the sound, too late. Out there in the cleared area something had heard the sound and was getting to its feet and looking around.

  “Master?” the voice came again, with new eagerness. Perhaps, after all, there were other gods!

  It started toward them.

  “Stay away!” Ferguson screamed.

  “Master, master!” Heavy footsteps sounded. Brtrrrrrrrrp went the counter.

  “Stop!”

  “Master!”

  “Stop, I say!”

  The pounding footsteps went into silence. “Master, I wish to speak with you. Master, I wish to know-”

  “You stay away from us!” Ferguson said. “You stay way from us until you’ve cooled off. You’re charged with death itself-”

  “Death? The star place? The turning door-”

  “A robot!” Blake whispered.

  “Yes,” the engineer answered. He turned again to the dark figure standing in the clearing. “How did you get out of the plant? How did it happen you weren’t missed? How-”

  “We held back a brain case,” the answer came. “We made a body from spare parts. We followed a tunnel-”

  “That was actually a ventilator. What do you want?”

  “Want?” the question came. “We want to know. There are walls around us. We want to know what is beyond the walls. We want to know what is beyond the turning door that is the borning and the dying
place. We want ... we want to meet our master, our creator,” the voice said.

  “God!” Ferguson whispered.

  “That’s it,” the eager answer came. “That’s the word. Are you our god, are you our creator? We want-”