The Alien Years

by Robert Silverberg

  And as he soared he ripped out chunks of its memory by the double handful and tossed them to the breeze.

  Why not? What did he have to lose?

  The mainframe didn’t even notice for a good tenth of a second. That was how big it was. There was Andy, tearing great blocks of data out of its gut, joyously ripping and rending. And it didn’t even know it, because even the most magnificent computer ever assembled is nevertheless stuck with the necessity of operating at the speed of light, and when the best you can do is 186,000 miles a second it can take quite a while for the alarm to travel the full distance down all your neural channels. That thing was huge. Andy realized that it was wrong to think of himself as a mouse riding on an elephant. Amoeba piggybacking on a brontosaurus, was more like it.

  But of course the guardian circuitry did cut in eventually. Alarms went off, internal gates came clanging down, all sensitive areas were sealed away, and Andy was shrugged off with the greatest of ease. There was no sense staying around waiting to get trapped in there, so he pulled himself free.

  The android, he saw, had crumpled to the carpet. It was nothing but an empty husk now.

  Lights were flashing on the office wall.

  Tessa looked at him, appalled. “What did you do?”

  “I beat your android,” he said. “It wasn’t all that hard, once I knew the scoop.”

  “I heard an alarm. The emergency lights went on. You damaged the main computer!”

  “Not really. Not in any significant way. That would have been very hard, staying in there long enough to do anything important. I just gave it a little tickle. It was surprised, seeing me get access in there, that’s all.”

  “No. I think you really damaged it.”

  “Come on, Tessa. Now why would I want to do that?”

  She didn’t look amused. “The question ought to be why you haven’t done it already. Why you haven’t gone in there somehow and crashed the hell out of their programs.”

  “You actually think I could do something like that?”

  She studied him. “I think maybe you could, yes.”

  “Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. I doubt it, myself. But I’m not a crusader, you know, Tessa. I like my life the way it is. I move around, I do as I please. It’s a quiet life. I don’t lead uprisings. I don’t like to be out there on the firing line. When I need to gimmick things, I gimmick them just enough, and no more. And the Entities don’t even know I exist. If I were to stick my finger in their eye, they’d cut my finger off. So I haven’t done it.”

  “But now you might,” she said.

  He began to get uncomfortable. “I don’t follow you.”

  “You don’t like risk. You don’t like being conspicuous. You keep yourself out of sight and all that, and don’t start trouble just for the sake of making trouble. Fine. But if we take your freedom away, if we tie you down here in L.A. and put you to work, you’d strike back one way or another, wouldn’t you? Sure you would. You’d go right in there, and you’d figure out a way to cover your tracks so the machine didn’t know you were there. And you’d gimmick things but good. You’d do a ton of damage.” She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said. “You really would. You’d do such a job on their computer that they might have to scrap it and start all over again. I see it now, that you have the capability and that you could be put in a position where you’d be willing to use it. And so you’d screw everything up for all of us, wouldn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “If we let you anywhere near the Entity Net, you’d make such a mess of it that they’d feel obliged to do some sort of punitive strike to get back at us, and everybody in LACON would get fired, at the very least. Sent out for TTD, more likely.”

  She was overestimating him, Andy saw. The machine was too well defended for anyone, even him, to damage it that way. If he got back inside he could make a little mess here and there, sure, a mouse-mess, but he wouldn’t be able to hide from the guardian circuitry long enough to achieve anything important.

  Let her think so, though. Being overestimated is a hell of a lot better than being underestimated.

  “I’m not going to give you the chance,” she said. “Because I’m not crazy. I understand you now, Mickey. It isn’t safe to fool around with you. Whenever anybody does, you take your little revenge, and you don’t give a damn what you bring down on anyone else’s head. We’d all suffer, but you wouldn’t care. No. Uh-uh, Mickey. My life isn’t so terrible that I need you to turn it upside down for me. You’ve already done it to me once. I don’t need it again.”

  She was looking at him steadily. All the anger seemed to be gone from her and there was only contempt left.

  But he was still a prisoner in this place with his ankles fastened together, and she still had total jurisdiction over him. He said nothing and waited to see what would happen next. She studied him for a moment without speaking.

  Then she said something completely unexpected. “Tell me, can you go in there again and gimmick things so that there’s no record of your arrest today?”

  Andy couldn’t hide his surprise. “Are you really serious about that?”

  “I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t. Can you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I suppose I could.”

  “Do it, then. I’ll give you exactly sixty seconds to do whatever it is you have to do, and God help you if you do anything else while you’re in there, anything harmful. This is your dossier, here. Get rid of it.” She handed him a printout. “And once you’ve wiped out your record, get yourself going, fast. Out of here, away from Los Angeles. And don’t come back.”

  “You’re actually going to let me go?”

  “I actually and sincerely am.” She made an impatient gesture, a shoo-fly gesture.

  He wasn’t able to believe it. Was there some catch? He couldn’t see one. She genuinely appeared to be releasing him, just to get him out of her sight, evidently, before he could cause any trouble here that ultimately would come down on her own head.

  He was so astounded that he felt he had to make some corresponding gesture, some kind of repayment, and suddenly a torrent of inane words came gushing from him. “Look, Tessa, I just want to say—all that stuff about how guilty I’ve felt, how much I’ve regretted the thing I did to you back then—it was true. Every word of it.” It sounded foolish even to him.

  “I’m sure that it all was,” she said dryly. The gray eyes rested mercilessly on him for a long moment, shriveling him down to an ash. “Okay, Mickey. Spare me any further crap. Do your gimmicking and edit yourself out of the arrest records and then I want you to start moving. Out of the building. Out of the city. Okay? Do it now, and do it real quick.”

  Andy hunted around for something else to say. Anything. Couldn’t find a thing.

  Quit while you’re ahead, he thought.

  She gave him her wrist and he did the interface with her. As his implant access touched hers she shuddered a little. It wasn’t much of a shudder, but he noticed it. She hadn’t forgiven him for anything. She just wanted him gone.

  He went in and found the John Doe arrest entry right away and got rid of it, and then, since he still had about twenty seconds left, he picked her I.D. number off his dossier and searched out her civil service file and promoted her up two grades and doubled her pay. His own outburst of sentimentality flabbergasted him. But it was a nice gesture, Andy thought. And he never could tell when their paths might cross again someday.

  He cleaned up his traces and exited the program.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s done.”

  “Fine,” she said, and rang for her cop squad. “This is the wrong man,” she told them. “Clean him up and send him on his way.”

  One of the LACONs muttered an apology, more or less, for the case of mistaken identity, and they showed him out of the building and turned him loose on Figueroa Street. It was early afternoon. There were clouds overhead, and the air was cool with the kind of easy coolness that was typical of a Los Angeles winter da
y.

  Andy went to a street access and summoned the Toshiba from wherever it had parked itself.

  It came driving up, five or ten minutes later, and he told it to take him north, up the freeway, out of the city. He wasn’t sure where he would go. San Francisco, maybe. It rained a lot in San Francisco in the winter, Andy knew, and from all he had heard it was colder than he liked a place to be. But still, it was a pretty town, and a port city besides, so he could probably arrange to get himself shipped out there to Hawaii or Australia or someplace like that, where it was warm, where he could leave all the tattered fragments of his old life behind him forever.

  He reached the wall at the Sylmar gate, some fifty miles or so up the road. The gate asked him his name. “Richard Roe,” he said. “Beta Pi Upsilon 104324x. Destination San Francisco.”

  Implant reading, now. He provided access. No problem. All cool.

  The gate opened and the Toshiba went through, easy as Beta Pi.

  The car went zooming northward. It would be about a five-hour drive, maybe six, Andy guessed, to Frisco. The freeway here seemed to be in unusually good shape, all things considered.

  But then, when he was less than half an hour beyond the Sylmar gate, an idea came to him, an idea so strange and unexpected, so surprising and bewildering, that Andy couldn’t quite make himself believe that he had actually thought of it. It was a crazy idea, absolutely crazy. He brushed it aside for the craziness that it was; but it had its hooks in him and would not release him. He struggled with it this way and that for about five minutes. And then he surrendered to it.

  “Change of plan,” he told the Toshiba. “Let’s go to Santa Barbara.”

  “Someone at the gate,” Frank said, as the honking sounded. “I’ll get it.”

  It was a mild January day, getting toward evening, everything very green, the trees glistening from a recent drizzle. The weather had been very rainy lately; and more rain would be here before dawn, Frank figured, judging by the fishbelly clouds in the sky to the north. He grabbed the shotgun and went loping up the hill. He was a slender athletic young man, now, just on the cusp between adolescence and manhood, and he ran easily, gracefully, untiringly, in long loose strides.

  The car sitting out there was an unfamiliar model, fairly new as cars went these days, very fancy. Looking through the bars of the gate, Frank was unable to make out the driver’s face. With a wave of the shotgun he signaled to the man to get out of the car and show himself. The driver stayed where he was.

  Suit yourself, Frank thought, and started to turn away.

  “Hey, fellow—wait!” The car window was open, suddenly, and the man’s head was sticking out. A strong face, just a little jowly, dark eyes, heavy frowning eyebrows, tough, scowling expression. The face looked familiar, somehow. But for a moment Frank wasn’t quite able to place it. Then he gasped in astonishment as the click of recognition occurred.

  “Andy?”

  A nod and a grin from the man in the car. “Me, yes. Who are you?”

  “Frank.”

  “Frank.” A moment’s pause for contemplation. “Anson’s Frank? But you were just a little kid!”

  “I’m nineteen,” Frank said, not troubling to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “You’ve been gone better than five years, you know. Little kids grow up, sooner or later.” He pressed the button that opened the gate, and the bars slid back. But the car stayed where it was. That was puzzling. Frank said, frowning, “Look, Andy, are you coming in or aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. That is, I’m not really sure.”

  “Not sure? What do you mean, not sure?”

  “I mean that I’m not sure, is what I mean.” Andy scrunched his eyes closed for a moment and shook his head, like a dog shaking off raindrops. “—Shut up and let me think, will you, kid?”

  Andy stayed put inside the car. What the hell was he waiting for? A little drizzle began to come down again. Frank began to fidget. Then he heard Andy say something in a low voice, obviously not intended for him. Speaking to the car, apparently. A model this recent would have a voice-actuated drive. “Come on, will you?” Frank said, getting really irritated now, and beckoned once more with the shotgun. But then, grasping at last the fact that Andy had changed his mind about being here and was about to take off, he strode quickly out through the open gate and pushed the gun through the car window, right up against the side of Andy’s jaw, just as the car began slowly to move in reverse along the muddy road. He kept pace easily with the vehicle, jogging alongside, holding the shotgun trained on Andy’s forehead.

  Andy gave the muzzle of the gun a pop-eyed disbelieving sidewise stare.

  “You aren’t leaving here,” Frank told him. “Just forget about that idea. You’ve got about two seconds to put on the brakes.”

  He heard Andy tell the car to stop. It came abruptly to a halt. “What the fuck,” Andy said, glaring out at him.

  Frank did not pull the shotgun away from the window. “Okay, now get out of the car.”

  “Listen, Frank, I’ve decided that I don’t feel like visiting the ranch after all.”

  “Tough. You should have decided that before you drove up the hill. Out.”

  “It was a dumb idea, really. I never should have come back. Nobody here wants to see me again and there’s nobody here I want to see. So would you very kindly get that goddamn cannon out of my face, please, if you don’t mind, and let me move along?”

  “Out,” Frank said once more. “Now. Or I’ll blow the hell out of your car’s computer and you won’t go anywhere at all.”

  Andy gave him a surly look. “Come on.”

  “You come on.” Motioning with the gun.

  “All right, kid. All right! I’m getting out. Cool down a little, okay? We can both ride down to the house together. It’ll be a lot quicker. And I wish to hell you’d stop pointing that gun at me.”

  “We’ll walk,” Frank said. “It’s not that far, really. Let’s go. Now. You’re capable of walking, aren’t you? Move it, Andy.”

  Grumbling, Andy pushed the car door open and stepped out.

  This was very hard to believe, Frank thought, that Andy was actually here. For the past couple of weeks Steve and Paul and all the other computer people at the ranch had been doing all sorts of on-line gymnastics, trying to trace this man’s trail in Los Angeles, and here he was, turning up here all on his own. Operating under some confusion, apparently, about whether he should have come; but he was here. That was what mattered.

  “The gun,” Andy said. Frank was still holding it at the ready. “It really isn’t necessary, you know. I’d like you to realize that it makes me very uncomfortable.”

  “I suppose it does. But there’s just the two of us up here and I don’t know how dangerous you are, Andy.”

  “Dangerous? Dangerous?”

  “Walk on ahead, please. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “This is very shitty, Frank. I’m your own cousin.”

  “Second cousin, I think. Come on. Keep it moving.”

  “You taking me to your father?”

  “No,” Frank said. “Yours.”

  “Where is he?” Steve asked.

  “In the library,” said two of Anson’s boys, speaking at the same time, as Anson’s boys tended to do. Martin said, “My brother Frank’s keeping watch over him there.” “He’s got the shotgun on him,” added James, the other one. They both looked very pleased.

  Steve hurried down the hall. In the library, a dark low-roofed room with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with hundreds and hundreds of rare and learned books on various Oriental cultures that had belonged to the Colonel and had not been looked at by anyone in fifteen or twenty years, a most unscholarly tableau was on display. Frank was leaning casually against a bookcase to the left of the door, with the shotgun that everyone carried when going up to the gate resting lightly across his left forearm. It was pointing in the general direction of a tense, scowling, heavyset man in loose-fitting denim trousers and a plaid flan
nel shirt on the other side of the room. An angry-looking stranger, whom Steve recognized, after a moment, as his son Andy.

  “We probably don’t need to hold him at gunpoint, Frank. Do we, Andy?”

  “He seems to think so,” Andy said balefully.

  “Well, I don’t. Is that all right with you, Frank?”

  “Whatever you say, sir. Do you want me to leave the room?”

  “Yes. I think I do. Don’t go very far, though.”

  As Frank went out, Steve looked toward Andy and said, “Am I safe with you?”

  “Don’t talk crap, Dad.”

  “I can’t be sure. You’re a strange one, you are. Always were, always will be.” Andy had put on more than a little weight, Steve noticed. And his hair was beginning to recede. The Gannett genes rising up in him. How old was he, anyway? Steve had to count it up. Twenty-four, he decided. Yes. Twenty-four. He looked considerably older than that, but then Steve reminded himself that Andy had always had looked older than his years, even when he was only a little boy. “A strange one, yes, indeed, that’s you. Anson said he thought you were a mutant.”

  “He did? Look, Dad. Five fingers on each hand. Only one head. Only two eyes, on different sides of my nose, the way they’re supposed to be.”

  Steve was only faintly amused. “Nevertheless,” he said, “a mutant. A mutant personality, is what Anson meant. Someone who’s not at all like any of us.—Here, look at it this way: I’m a nerdy sort of guy, Andy. Fat and slow and cautious. Always have been, always will be. I don’t mind being like that. But I’m also a decent and responsible and hardworking citizen. So tell me this: How did I raise a criminal like you?”

  “A criminal? Is that what I am?”