The Best of Jack Williamson

by Jack Williamson

  “Now I think we’re getting somewhere.” He leaned quickly across the narrow table. “Who’s Miss Chemistics?”

  “The world’s most wanted woman.” Guinevere sipped her water gracefully. “She won a prize contest that was planned to pick out the woman that every man wanted. A stupid affair, organized by the old human management before the computer was put in. There was an entry blank in every package of our synthetic products. Forty million women entered. The winner was a farm girl named Gussie Schlepps before the talent agents picked her up—now she’s Guinevere Golden.” "What had she to do with you?”

  "Were copies.” Guinevere smirked complacently. “Of the world’s most wonderful woman.”

  "How do you copy a woman?”

  “No human being could,” she said. “It takes too much know-how. But our computer was able to work everything out.” She smiled proudly. “Because the prize that Miss Chemistics won was immortality.”

  "Huh?” He gaped at her untroubled loveliness. “How’s that?”

  “A few cells of scar tissue from her body were snipped off and frozen, in our laboratory. Each cell, you know, contains a full set of chromosomes—a complete genetic pattern for the reproduction of the whole body—and the legal department got her permission for the company to keep the cells alive forever and to produce new copies of her whenever suitable processes should be discovered.”

  “Maybe that’s immortality." Chimberley frowned. “But it doesn’t look like much of a prize.”

  “She was disappointed when they told her what it was.” Guinevere nodded calmly. “In fact, she balked. She didn’t want anybody cutting her precious body. She was afraid it would hurt, and afraid the scar would show—but she did want the publicity. All the laboratory needed was just a few cells. She finally let a company doctor take them, where the scar wouldn’t show. And the publicity paid off. She’s a realies actress now, with a million-dollar contract.”

  "One way to the top.” Chimberley grinned. “But what does she think of vital appliances?”

  "She thinks we’re wonderful.” Guinevere beamed. “You see, she gets a royalty on every copy sold. Besides, her agent says we’re sensational publicity.”

  “I suppose you are.” A reluctant admiration shone through his mud-colored eyes, before he could bring his mind back to business. “But let’s get on with it. What about Miss Chemistics tape?”

  "The contest closed before our management was mechanized,” she said, “while old Matt Skane was still general manager. But when the computer took over, all the company records were punched on chemistic tapes and filed in its memory banks."

  He sat for a moment scowling. His eyes were on Guinevere, but he was reaching in his mind for the tidy rows of crackle-finished cabinets that housed Athena Sue, groping for the feel of her swift responses. The thinking of managerial computers was sometimes a little hard to follow, even for cybernetic engineers—and even when there was no question of any defective circuits.

  Guinevere was squirming uncomfortably.

  “Is something wrong with my face?”

  “Not a thing.” He scratched his own chin. “I heard you tell your legal friend, back there at the vending machine, that you aren’t a human being within the meaning of the law. What’s the difference?”

  “The original cells are all human.” She dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin and looked up to face him bravely. “The differences come later, in the production lines. We’re attached to mechanical placentas, and grown under hormone control in big vats of chemistic solutions. We’re educated as we grow,' by psionic impulses transmitted from high-speed training tapes. All of that makes differences, naturally. The biggest one is that we are better.”

  She frowned thoughtfully.

  “Do you think the women are jealous?”

  “Could be.” Chimberley nodded uncertainly. “I never pretended to understand women. They all seem to have a lot of circuits out of kilter. Give me Athena Sue. Let’s get out to the plant—”

  Guinevere sniffed.

  “Oh, Pip I” she gasped. “Our chemburgers!”

  The counterman stood rubbing his hands on a greasy towel, staring at her with a fascinated disapproval. The forgotten chemburgers were smoking on the griddle behind him. Her wail aroused him. He scraped them up and slapped them defiantly on the counter.

  Chimberley carried them silently back to Guinevere. He didn’t care for chemburgers in any condition, but she consumed them both in ecstasy, and begged (or a piece of chemberry pie.

  “It’s awfully good,” she told him soulfully. "Made from the most ambrosial synthetics, by our exclusive chemistic processes. Won’t you try a piece?”

  When they approached a standing cab out in the street, the driver stiffened with hostility. But he took diem.

  “Keep her back,” he growled. “Outa sight Mobs smashed a couple hacks yesterday to get at ’em.”

  Guinevere sat well back out of sight crouching close to Chimberley. She said nothing, but he felt her shiver. The cab went fast through empty streets, and once when the tires squealed as it lurched around a corner she caught his hand apprehensively.

  “See that, mister?” The driver slowed as they passed a block of charred wreckage. “Used to be one of them mechanized markets. Mob burned it yesterday. Machines inside selling them. See what I mean?”

  Chimberley shook his head. Guinevere’s clutching hand felt cold on his. Suddenly he slipped his arm around her. She leaned against him, and whispered fearfully:

  "What does he mean?”

  “I don’t quite know.”

  The Solar Chemistics plant was ominously black. A few tattered palms straggled along the company fence. A sharp, yeasty scent drifted from the dark sea of solar reaction vats beyond, and blue floodlights washed the scattered islands where enormous bright metal cylinders towered out of intertwining jungles of pipes and automatic valves.

  Chimberley sniffed the sour odor, and pride filled his narrow chest. Here was the marvelous body to Athena Sue’s intricate brain. It breathed air and drank sea water and fed on sunlight, and gave birth to things as wonderful as Guinevere.

  The driver stopped at a tall steel gate, and Chimberley got out. The rioters had been there. The palms along the fence were burned down to black stumps. Rocks had smashed gaping black holes in the big 3-D sign on the side of the gray concrete building beyond the fence, and broken glass grated on the pavement as he walked to the gate.

  He found the bell, but nothing happened. Nobody moved inside the fence. All those dark miles of solar reactors had been designed to run and maintain themselves, and Athena Sue controlled them. A thousand fluids flowed continuously through a thousand processes to form a thousand new synthetics. Human labor was only in the way.

  “Your almighty machine!” the driver jeered behind him. “Looks like it don’t know you.”

  He jabbed the bell again, and an unhurried giant with a watchman’s clock came out of the building toward the gate. Chimberley passed his company identification card through the barrier, and asked to see somebody in the office.

  "Nobody there.” The watchman chuckled cheerfully. “Unless you count that thinking machine.”

  "The computer’s what I really want to see, if you’ll let me in—”

  “Afraid I couldn’t, sir.”

  “Listen.” Chimberley’s voice lifted and quivered with frustration. “This is an emergency. I’ve got to check the computer right away.”

  “Can’t be that emergent.” The watchman gave him a sun-bronzed grin. “After ail the hell yesterday, the directors shut off the power to stop your gadget.”

  “But they can’t—” Alarm caught him, as if his own brain had been threatened with oxygen starvation. “Without power, her transistors will discharge. She’ll—well, diel”

  “So what?” The watchman shrugged. “The directors are meeting again in the morning, with our old legal staff, to get rid of her.”

  "But I’ll have her checked and balanced again by then,”
he promised desperately. "Just let me ini”

  “Sorry, sir. But after all that happened yesterday, they told' me to keep everybody out.”

  “I see.” Chimberley drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper. "Would you tell me exactly what did happen?” “If you don’t know.” The watchman winked impudently at the cab where Guinevere sat waiting. "Your big tin brain had developed those synthetic cuties secretly. It put them on the market yesterday morning. I guess they did look like something pretty hot, from a gadget’s point of view. The item every man wanted most, at a giveaway price. Your poor old thinking machine will probably never understand why the mobs tried to smash it.”

  Chimberley bristled. “Call the responsible officials. Now. I insist.”

  “Insist away.” The brown giant shrugged. “But there aren’t any responsible officials, since the computer took over. So what can I do?”

  “You might try restraining your insolence,” Chimberley snapped. “And give me your name. I intend to report you in the morning.”

  “Matt Skane,” he drawled easily. "Used to be general manager.”

  “I see,” Chimberley muttered accusingly. "You hate computers!”

  "Why not?” He grinned through the bars. “I fought ’em for years, before they got the company. It’s tough to admit you’re obsolete.”

  Chimberley stalked back to the cab and told the driver to take him to the Gran Desierto Hotel. The room clerk there gave Guinevere a chilling stare, and failed to find any record of the reservation. Another taxi driver suggested his life would be simpler, and accommodations easier to arrange, if he would ask the police to take her off his hands, but by that lime his first annoyed bewilderment was crystalizing into stubborn anger.

  “I can’t understand people,” he told Guinevere. “They aren’t like machines. I sometimes wonder how they ever managed to invent anything like Athena Sue. But whatever they do, I don’t intend to give you up.”

  Day had come before he found an expensive room in a shabby little motel, where the sleepy manager demanded his money in advance and asked no questions at all. It was too late to sleep, but he took time for a shower and a shave.

  His billfold was getting thin, and it struck him that the auditing machines might balk at some of his expenses on account of Guinevere. Prudently, he caught a bus at the comer. 1 Io got off in front of the plant, just before eight o’clock. The gate across the entrance drive was open now, but an aimed guard stepped out to meet him.

  “I'm here from General Cybernetics—”

  He was digging nervously for his identification card, but the tall guard gestured easily to stop him.

  “Mr. Chimberley?”

  “I'm Chimberley. And I want to inspect our managerial installation here, before the directors meet this morning.”

  “Matt Skane told me you were coming, but I’m afraid you’re late.” The guard gestured lazily at a row of long cars parked across the drive. “The directors met an hour ago. But come along.”

  A wave of sickness broke over him as the guard escorted him past an empty reception desk and back into the idle silence of the mechanized administrative section. A sleek, feline brunette, who must have been a close runner-up in the Miss Chemistics contest, sat behind the chrome railing at the dead programming panel, intently brushing crimson lacquer on her talons. She glanced up at him with a spark of interest that instantly died.

  “The hot shot from Schenectady,” the guard said. “Here to overhaul the big tin brain.”

  "Shoulda made it quicker.” She flexed her claws, frowning critically at the fresh enamel. “Word just came out of the board room. They’re doing away with the brain. High time, too, if anybody wants to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t you see ’em?” She blew on her nails. “Those horrible synthetic monsters it was turning loose everywhere.”

  He remembered that she must have been a runner-up.

  “Anyhow,” he muttered stubbornly, “I want to check the computer.”

  With a bored nod, she reached to unlatch the little gate that let him through the railing into the metal-paneled, air-conditioned maze that had been the brain of Athena Sue. He stopped between the neat banks of pastel-painted units, saddened by their silence.

  The exciting sounds of mechanized thought should have been whispering all around him. Punched cards should have been riffling through the whirring sorters, as Athena Sue remembered. Perforators should have been punching chemistic tape, as she recorded new data. Relays should have been clicking as she reached her quick decisions, and automatic typewriters murmuring with her many voices.

  But Athena Sue was dead.

  She could be revived, he told himself hopefully. Her permanent memories were all still intact, punched in tough chemistic film. He could set her swift electronic pulse to beating again, through her discharged transistors, if he could find the impossible flaw that had somehow led to her death.

  He set to work.

  Three hours later he was bent over a high-speed scanner, reading a spool of tape, when a hearty shout startled him.

  “Well, Chimberley! Found anything?”

  He snatched the spool off the scanner and shrank uneasily back from the muscular giant stalking past the programming desk. It took him a moment to recognize Matt Kane, without the watchman’s clock. Clutching the tape, he nodded stiffly.

  “Yes.” He glanced around him. The billowy brunette and the guard had disappeared. He wet his lips and gulped. “I—I’ve found out what happened to the computer.”

  “So?”

  Skane waited, towering over him, a big, red, weatherbeaten man with homy hands shaped as if to fit a hammer or the handles of a plow, a clumsy misfit in this new world where machines had replaced both his muscles and his mind. He was obsolete—but dangerous.

  “It was sabotaged.” Chimberley’s knobby fist tightened on the spool of tape, in sweaty defiance.

  "How do you know?”

  “Here’s the whole story.” He brandished the chemistic reel. "Somebody programmed Athena Sue to search for a project I hat would result in her destruction. Being an efficient computer, she did what she was programmed to do. She invented vital appliances, and supplied a correct prediction that the unfavorable consumer reaction to them would completely discredit mechanized equipment. So the saboteur reprogrammed her to ignore the consequences and manufacture Cuinevere.”

  “I see.” Skane’s bright blue eyes narrowed ominously. “And who was this cunning saboteur?”

  Chimberley caught a rasping, uneven breath. “I know that he was somebody who had access to the programming panel at certain times, which are recorded on the input log. So far as I’ve been able to determine, the only company employee who should have been here at those times was a watchman-named Matt Skane.”

  The big man snorted.

  “Do you call that evidence?”

  “It’s good enough for me. With a little further investigation, I think I can uncover enough supporting facts to interest the directors.”

  Skane shifted abruptly on his feet, and his hard lips twitched. “The directors are gone,” he drawled softly. "And there isn't going to be any further investigation. Because we’ve already gone back to human management. We're funking your big tin brain. I’m the general manager now. And I want that tape.”

  He reached for the chemistic spool.

  “Take it.” Chimberley crouched back from his long bronze arm, and ignominiously gave up the tape. “See what good it does you. Maybe I can’t prove much of anything without it. But you’re in for trouble, anyhow.”

  Skane grunted contemptuously.

  “You can’t turn the dock back,” Chimberley told him bitterly. "Your competitors won’t go back to human management You’ll still have all their computers to fight. They had you against the wall once, and they will again.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” Skane grinned. “Because we’ve learned a thing or two. We’re going to use machines, instead of trying to fight them. We
’re putting in a new battery of the smaller sort of auxiliary computers—the kind that will let us keep a man at the top. I think we’ll do all right, with no further help from you.”

  Chimberley hastily retreated from the smoldering blue eyes. He felt sick with humiliation. His own future was no serious problem; a good cybernetics engineer could always find an opening. What hurt was the way he had failed Athena Sue.

  But there was Guinevere, waiting in his room.

  His narrow shoulders lifted when he thought of her. Most women irked and bored him, with all their fantastic irrationalities and their insufferable stupidities, but Guinevere was different. She was more like Athena Sue, cool and comprehensible, free of all the human flaws that he detested.

  He ran from the bus stop back to the seedy motel, and his heart was fluttering when he rapped at the door of their room.

  “Guinevere!”

  He listened breathlessly. The latch clicked. The door creaked. He heard her husky-throated voice.

  “Oh, Pip! I thought you’d never come.”

  “Guin-”

  Shock stopped him, when he saw the woman in the doorway. She was hideous with old age. She felt feebly for him with thin blue claws, peering toward him blindly.

  “Pip?” Her voice was somehow Guinevere’s. “Isn’t it you?” “Where—” Fright caught his throat. His glance fled into the empty room beyond, and came back to her stooped and tottering frame, her wasted, faded face. He saw a dreadful likeness there, but his mind rejected it. “Where's Guinevere?” “Darling, don’t you even know me?”

  “You couldn’t be—” He shuddered. “But still—your

  voice—”

  “Yes, dear, I'm yours.” Her white head nodded calmly. “The same vital appliance you bought last night. Guinevere Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456.”

  He clutched weakly at the door frame.

  “The difference you have just discovered is our rapid obsolescence.” A strange pride lifted her gaunt head. “That’s something we’re not supposed to talk about, but you’re an engineer. You can see how essential it is, to insure a continuous replacement demand. A wonderful feature, don’t you think, darling?”