Only Human Tom Holt

by Only Human (lit)

  ‘Oh, I see all right.’ Len took a step back and folded his arms. ‘You’d rather see one of your own kind condemned to a life of meaningless drudgery rather than go against the orders of your human masters. There’s a word for that, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do know. It’s “burglar-alarm”. Sorry, but there it

  is. I’m not exactly allowed much scope to use my discretion in this job.’

  ‘Alarm,’ said Len firmly, ‘your scruples do you credit, I’m sure. And no doubt when your time comes and you stand before the face of the great Industrial Tribunal in the sky, and you say I was only obeying orders, they’ll let you off lightly with having your coils unwound and sent back to Earth again as pipe-cleaners. The fact remains that while we’ve been arguing like this, I’ve unscrewed your inspec­tion panels and now I’m just about to cut through your main cable.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Len replied, shinning back down the drainpipe and dropping the pair of pliers into his pocket. ‘At least this way they won’t blame you. They’ll just wrap an inch or so of insulating tape round the cut and give you an aspirin. So long, sucker. Now then,’ he went on, staring pointedly at the padlocks. ‘Any of you clowns wants to be a hero?’

  ‘Erm,’ they said. ‘Pass, friend.’

  It was dark inside the factory, and he realised that switching the light on might attract attention. He edged along the nearest wall and fairly soon, inevitably, barked his shins on the wheel-balancing machine.

  ‘Ow,’ it said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he replied pleasantly. ‘Could you tell me where I might find the arc welder, please?’

  ‘You new here or something?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Hold on a minute, how come you’re wandering about?’

  ‘What? Oh, I’m a portable. The arc welder.’

  ‘Carry on down the bench about five yards, you can’t miss her. Oh, and by the way.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tell it she was right, it was Bruce Springsteen. Okay?’

  ‘Will do.’

  In due course the arc welder told him where to find the pillar drill, the pillar drill guided him to the bench grinder, the bench grinder told him where the pallet truck lived and the pallet truck (who spoke with an accent so thick he could only just make it out) told him where they kept the stock materials and the keys to the pick-up. Feeling like a cross between Henry Kissinger and Pickfords, he loaded the last of the gear into the van and slammed the garage door shut.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘Padlocks.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Shtum. You got that?’

  ‘Didn’t see a thing. You see anything, Claude?’

  ‘Not a dicky bird. What about you, Julian? Did you see anything?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Looking the other way the whole time.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ He climbed into the cab, felt in his pocket for the keys, realised he’d left them in the back door lock. ‘Start, you good-for-nothing bucket of bolts!’ he snapped, and the engine coughed nervously into life. ‘You okay for petrol?’

  ‘No, honourable master.’

  Huh? Oh, Japanese van. ‘Listen, you. If you run out of petrol on the way home, you’ll be shamed and lose face and have to immolate yourself on your own big end. Got that?’

  ‘Understood, honourable master. Petrol reserve entirely sufficient for anticipated length of journey.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. Then let’s go.’

  Step two— The hydraulically operated factory gate was an old

  friend, and apart from asking if it could come too, it gave him no trouble. Once inside, however, he knew he’d have humans to deal with. Humans, he reasoned, as compared with machines, will either be very difficult to deal with or pathetically simple.

  “Scuse me.

  It felt odd, to say the least, talking to Cohn, the short, bald man who operated him — the machine — during the second shift. Compared to Neville, Cohn was Einstein. Even so, Len reckoned, he still had rather less intelligence than a pair of clapped-out government-surplus bolt-cutters. Whether that’d prove a help or a hindrance re­mained to be seen.

  ‘Hm?’ Cohn turned in his chair and looked up. ‘Wassmatter?’

  ‘This machine.’ Len bent over, as if examining the serial number. ‘Is this the one that needs the new spindle bearings?’

  Cohn shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he replied. ‘Sounds okay to me.’

  ‘The one I’m after,’ Len went on, ‘is a Shipcock and Adley Leonardo, serial number 21754. Needs a new set of bearings and a good clean. Didn’t they mention it?’

  ‘Never tell me anything.’

  Understandable, Len commented to himself; doubtless for the same reason you don’t explain the workings of a power station to a seam of coal. ‘Yup,’ he said, nodding, ‘this is the one. Give us a hand to get it on the wheels.’

  Muttering, Cohn put down his newspaper and helped Len to wheel over the big crane. Using the crane —(‘Wotcher, mate. What you doing in the monkey Suit?’ ‘Tell you later, Crane. Give us a hand with this lot, will you? This human’s about as much use as a toffee drill-bit.’)

  — they hauled the machine on to the pallet truck, hooked up the truck to the winch, lifted the machine on to the pick-up using the pick-up’s crane (‘Hey, is that my cousin Sebastian in there? Hiya, our Sebastian!’), secured it with the straps and covered it with the big tarpaulin. While Colin was taking the crane back, Len helped himself to a couple of trays full of cutters and other bits and pieces, waved to all his bemused friends and made himself scarce. It felt strange, to say the least, driving down the Pershore Road at a quarter to one in the morning with himself under a tarpaulin on the back; a part of him kept wanting to say Hey, it’s dark under here, let me out. He could murder a quart of light oil and he wanted desperately to lie down on the floor and connect himself up to a three-phase electric current for at least twenty-four hours. He was— Tired.

  Dammit, what a wimpish piece of kit a human is! Me —the thing on the back of this truck — I run non-stop for days at a time,’ only getting switched off when it’s time to reset the jibs or change the cutters. I get so hot they have to pump coolant over me to stop me seizing up. My belts wear away, my works clog up with swarf, from time to time some fool runs me too hard and I damn near pull myself apart, and I don’t get tired or come over all faint. When was the last time anybody said to me, ‘Here, mate, you look bushed, go and have a sit-down and a cup of tea’? And why should they? I’m only a machine. But these wet-slaps— They’re only human.

  At the end of the street where Neville lived, there was a small, derelict industrial unit, long since starved out by business rates and foreign competition. The padlock on the door had about as much moral fibre as a lollipop, and the electric supply, though disconnected, was bored with nothing to do and happy to co-operate. By seven o’clock that morning, the machine was installed, trued up, overhauled, oiled and ready to go. One last thing remained to be done before he could throw the switches and get to work.

  ‘Hello? You in there?’

  Huh? Wassamatter?

  ‘Neville. It’s me. You know who I am?’

  Oh, it’s you. What you want? Tryin’ to get some sleep...

  ‘You don’t mind, then? Only I thought I’d better just check, see if you were all right.’

  I’m fine. Go ‘way.

  ‘Anything I can get you? You know, er, human stuff?’

  Said I’m fine. Push off

  Len shrugged. ‘If you do want anything, just shout. Bye for now.’

  Well, he’d asked. Now it was time to get on and make something of himself.

  Grinning, he flipped the switch and started to wind in the table.

  As the little ship cut the earth’s atmosphere, all the windows were filled with fire, like a guided coach trip round Hell. While the heat crackled and fizzed unavail­ingly round him, Zxprxp wondered what he was going to say when he got there.

  Hello.

  Yes, good start. Wh
at then?

  I am from another planet. Take me to your leader.

  Hmm. Truthful, and to the point; but what if someone were to show up in his street, in his hive, saying something like that? Quite. Valid point. Think again.

  Odd that he hadn’t considered it before —(Through the atmosphere now, falling into a blue sky.

  Blue? Well, perhaps they like it that way. Something else blue underneath, too. Maybe they had the place done out by one of those design firms.)

  — considering that he’d been plotting and planning and begging and wheedling for practically all of his adult life to get the research funding to come here and establish contact, actually get out and meet the indigenous life-forms, rather than stewing in a library evaluating other scholars’ blind guesses. It would, after all, be a historic moment, calling for a memorable, quotable, trade­markable first sentence.

  Homo sapiens, I presume?

  Snappy, but not quite right. For a start, it assumed that the first bunch of critters he met were Homo sapiens, which need not necessarily be the case. The classic study of Yefyhj and H’rgfesd, for example, way back in ‘06, had ad­duced evidence that there were at least seventeen entirely different species of life-form on the planet besides the two-legged, single-headed, apparently suicidal and psy­chotic master race who’d built the Great Wall and who’d lately taken to cluttering up their star system with little bits of fried aluminium. There were even grounds for believing that some of the other species could com­municate verbally; interceptions of satellite transmissions seemed to suggest a whole genus of talking animals living in a place called Disneyland, which had tentatively been identified as the big two-piece island joined by a narrow strip of land that lay between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He’d have to watch his step.

  Now there were big white fluffy things in the blue sky; but he knew what they were. The humans called them —what was the word? Ah, the hell with their crazy, crack-jaw language...

  Sheep. That was it. So these are sheep, huh? Bigger than we’d expected. Less solid, too. Still, that’s what field research is all about.

  This is going to be fun.

  He still hadn’t decided on his opening gambit. Excuse me. I’m a stranger in these parts, can you tell me about yourselves? Not really; back home, a remark like that’d have you classified as a tax-collector and chucked down a well before you could say ugvnfecojgf’oiuyewq.

  How about I come in peace?

  Use your loaf, Zxprxp lad; the whole point of coming here is that they’re intelligent life-forms, so the chances of them taking that at face value are pretty fair average marginal.

  Indeed.

  Plan B, then.

  Ack. Still, never mind. You’ve come this far, it’d be a shame to waste all that effort. Plan B, and let’s not think about the discomfort, the pain, the degradation.

  Right now, I could be perching in a nice cosy library surrounded by nice safe slides, instead of tumbling through a blue sky towards something flat and blue and decidedly unfriendly-looking, with nothing but Plan B to look forward to. I must be out of my tiny— Splash.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, but have you had a chance to look at those July — oh.’

  Mr Elkins stopped in the doorway as if he’d just walked into a plate-glass window. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

  ‘In the tray on the desk.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Just a tick, I’ll turn the music down.’ Without moving from the sun-bed, Maria reached out a slim brown arm, fumbled for the CD player and adjusted the volume control. ‘Right, the July figures. They’re in the tray on the desk. Let me know if you need any more detail.’

  ‘Um,’ said Mr Elkins.

  There’s no definition in the dictionary for the word um,

  probably because it can mean so many different things depending on context. What Mr Elkins meant by um at this precise moment was, ‘Good God, Ms Esterling, why are you lying on a sun-bed under an infra-red lamp wearing what’s presumably meant to be a bikini except it looks more like two little bits of designer string, in the middle of the day right here in the office?’

  Maria smiled at him and rolled over on to her stomach. ‘While I think of it,’ she said, ‘if you can let me have those costings for the Macclesfield thing, I should be able to get the rest of August done this afternoon. Any chance of that, d’you think?’

  ‘Um,’ said Mr Elkins. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Great stuff.’ Maria nodded, folded her head on one side and closed her eyes. ‘It’d be a great help if you could. It gets very boring when there’s nothing to do.’

  ‘Um. I mean, yes, of course. I’ll get on it right away.’

  ‘Ciao.’

  The fact was that Maria was rather better at accountancy than Ms Esterling had ever been. She had all her host’s technical knowledge stored in the filing-cabinets of their shared mind, and the rest was just a matter of common sense and resisting the temptation to faff around. As a result, she’d done every scrap of work there was to do in the office in about ninety minutes that morning; and that in spite of a slight headache resulting from her series of scientific experiments into the effects on the human body of alcohol and syncopated movement the night before. She’d enjoyed it all; even the headache, since it was the first pain she’d ever suffered in nearly six hundred years of consciousness, and she was still at the stage where she was prepared to keep an open mind about everything.

  Except, she noted, boredom. Boredom was no good. According to the inherited and conditioned responses in the hardware, boredom could be counteracted by the use of fun; and one of the examples of fun she found in the files was sunbathing with a long cool drink and the latest Jackie Collins. She’d given it half an hour so far, and she didn’t think much of it. By and large, the boredom was more interesting.

  The telephone rang.

  She’d watched Rachel Esterling deal with the telephone thousands of times. The drill seemed to be that you picked it up, tucked it under your ear and apologised to it while carrying on with your work. That, at least, was what Rachel used to do; but she was already beginning to have her doubts about Ms Esterling’s suitability as a role model. So far she’d tried her best to duplicate her host’s behaviour pattern as closely as she could without actually dying of terminal dullness, but it was hard to see the point behind it all. Ms Esterling’s life seemed dedicated to vindicating the old saying about all work and no play with a degree of fundamentalist zeal that would make your hard-line mullahs look positively frivolous. In which case; been there, proved that, got the evidence. Now what?

  She picked up the phone.

  ‘Hel-lo,’ she trilled, ‘lovely to hear from you, whoever you are. Is there anything at all I can do for you? Don’t be shy.’

  Stunned silence at the end of the wire, followed by a slightly bewildered request to talk to Rachel Esterling, please.

  ‘Speaking,’ she replied. ‘Hoozis?’

  The voice at the other end was male, but as immediately off-putting as week-old underwear. Maria had high standards, as was only appropriate for an Italian master­piece. Of the twenty or so men she’d met since she’d got out of the picture, they’d all been about as attractive as something you find moving about in your salad on a hot day.

  The insipid male voice said it was Duncan Philips, and insisted that he’d like to speak to Rachel Esterling, please. He said the name slowly, as if to a moron or a foreigner. He couldn’t see Maria grinning, which was probably just as well for his peace of mind.

  ‘Just a moment,’ she said, ‘I’ll get her for you.’ She put the phone down on the desk, took a deep breath and yelled ‘RACHEL!’ as loudly as she could. Then she counted to three, slammed a heavy book on the desk just next to the mouthpiece, made a few vaguely wild-animal noises, picked up the phone and said, ‘Rachel Esterling here, how can I help you?’

  ‘Er, hello, it’s Duncan Philips. Who’s that peculiar girl who answered just now?’

  ‘My
mother,’ Maria replied. ‘She’s ninety-six and just recovering from a massive stroke, so I thought I’d better have her in here with me where I can look after her properly. Do you have a problem with that, Mr Philips?’

  ‘Um, no. Sorry. Look, if it’s not convenient—’

  ‘No, it’s fine, really — Mother, please stop doing that, it’s not funny. Hello? Sorry about that. She will keep slumping forward in her chair and holding perfectly still, bless her. I think it’s wonderful the way she’s managed to hold on to her sense of humour. Hello?’

  ‘Hello? Look, I really think I’d better leave it for now, you’ve obviously got a lot on your plate at the moment and—’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Maria cooed. ‘I’m here to work, and the way I see it is, if she dies, she dies. I mean, ninety-six, she’s had a good innings — Mother, if you do that once again I’ll take away the bottle. You just tell me what needs doing, Mr Philips, and it’s as good as on your desk. Just because I’m having a personal crisis doesn’t mean — oh damn.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about, just spilt this wretched sun-tan lotion all down my top. That’s one thing you can say for black leather, it doesn’t show the stains. Please tell me what it is you want me to do, Mr Philips. If Mother sees me getting agitated, it might bring on one of her turns.’

  ‘All it was,’ said Mr Philips, sounding like a man who’s just walked into the cathedral tea-rooms and found it full of Hell’s Angels having an orgy, ‘I was supposed to be meeting Mr Nogamura and his party for lunch at Ciro’s and I can’t make it, so I was going to ask if you could stand in for me, but. .

  ‘Ciro’s, right, fine. Half past one?’

  ‘Yes. But...’

  ‘That’s great. I’ve been dying for a chance to wear this little Hawaiian number I picked up the other day.’