Beyond Control Page 4

  Score another point for making a simulacrum of Sam first.

  While waiting for the water to boil, he arranged his supplies to positions of maximum availability. They were getting low. That baby had taken up quite a bit of useful ingredients; too bad he hadn’t seen his way clear to disassembling it. That meant if there were any argument in favor of allowing the replica of himself to go on living, it was now invalid. He’d have to take it apart in order to have enough for Tina II. (Or Tina prime?)

  He leafed through Chapters VI, VII and VIII on the ingredients, completion and disassembling of a man. He’d been through this several times before; but he’d passed more than one law exam on the strength of a last-minute review.

  The constant reference to mental instability disturbed him. “The humans constructed with this set will, at the very best, show most of the superstitious tendencies, and neurosis-compulsions of medieval mankind. In the long run they are not normal; take great care not to consider them such. Well, it wouldn’t make too much difference in Tina’s case—and that was all that was important.

  When he had finished adjusting the molds to the correct sizes, he fastened the vitalizer to the bed. Then—very, very slowly and with repeated glances at the manual, he began to duplicate Sam Weber. He learned more of his physical limitations and capabilities in the next two hours than any man had ever known since the day when an inconspicuous primate had investigated the possibilities of ground locomotion upon the nether extremities alone.

  Strangely enough, he felt neither awe nor exultation. It was like building a radio receiver for the first time. Child’s play.

  Most of the vials and jars were empty when he had finished. The damp molds were stacked inside the box, still in their three-dimensional outline. The manual lay neglected on the floor.

  Sam Weber stood near the bed looking down at Sam Weber on the bed.

  All that remained was vitalizing. He daren’t wait too long or imperfections might set in and the errors of the baby be repeated. He shook off a nauseating feeling of unreality, made certain that the big disassembleator was within reach and set the Jiffy Vitalizer in motion.

  The man on the bed coughed. He stirred. He sat up.

  “Wow!” he said. “Pretty good, if I do say so myself!” And then he had leaped off the bed and seized the disassembleator. He tore great chunks of wiring out of the center, threw it to the floor and kicked it into shapelessness. “No Sword of Damocles going to hang over my head,” he informed an open-mouthed Sam Weber. “Although, I could have used it on you, come to think of it.”

  Sam eased himself to the mattress and sat down. His mind stopped rearing and whinnied to a halt. He had been so impressed with the helplessness of the baby and the mannikin that he had never dreamed of the possibility that his duplicate would enter upon life with such enthusiasm. He should have, though; this was a full-grown man, created at a moment of complete physical and mental activity.

  “This is bad,” he said at last in a hoarse voice. “You’re unstable. You can’t be admitted into normal society.”

  “I’m unstable?” his image asked. “Look who’s talking! The guy who’s been mooning his way through his adult life, who wants to marry an overdressed, conceited collection of biological impulses that would come crawling on her knees to any man sensible enough to push the right buttons—”

  “You leave Tina’s name out of this,” Sam told him, feeling acutely uncomfortable at the theatrical phrase.

  His double looked at him and grinned. “O.K., I will. But not her body! Now, look here, Sam or Weber or whatever you want me to call you, you can live your life and I’ll live mine. I won’t even be a lawyer if that’ll make you happy. But as far as Tina is concerned, now that there are no ingredients to make a copy—that was a rotten escapist idea, by the way—I have enough of your likes and dislikes to want her badly. And I can have her, whereas you can’t. You don’t have the gumption.”

  Sam leaped to his feet and doubled his fists. Then he saw the other’s entirely equal size and slightly more assured twinkle. There was no point in fighting—that would end in a draw, at best. He went back to reason.

  “According to the manual,” he began, “you are prone to neurosis—”

  “The manual! The manual was written for children of four centuries hence, with quite a bit of selective breeding and scientific education behind them. Personally, I think I’m a—”

  There was a double knock on the door. “Mr. Weber.”

  “Yes,” they both said simultaneously.

  Outside, the landlady gasped and began speaking in an uncertain voice. “Th-that gentleman is downstairs. He’d like to see you. Shall I tell him you’re in?”

  “No, I’m not at home,” said the double.

  “Tell him I left an hour ago,” said Sam at exactly the same moment.

  There was another, longer gasp and the sound of footsteps receding hurriedly.

  “That’s one clever way to handle a situation,” Sam’s facsimile exploded. “Couldn’t you keep your mouth shut? The poor woman’s probably gone off to have a fit.”

  “You forget that this is my room and you are just an experiment that went wrong,” Sam told him hotly. “I have just as much right, in fact more right . . . hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

  The other had thrown open the closet door and was stepping into a pair of pants. “Just getting dressed. You can wander around in the nude if you find it exciting, but I want to look a bit respectable.”

  “I undressed to take my measurements . . . or your measurements. Those are my clothes, this is my room—”

  “Look, take it easy. You could never prove it in a court of law. Don’t make me go into that cliché about what’s yours is mine and so forth.”

  Heavy feet resounded through the hall. They stopped outside the room. Cymbals seemed to clash all around them and there was a panic-stricken sense of unendurable heat. Then shrill echoes fled into the distance. The walls stopped shuddering.

  Silence and a smell of burning wood.

  They whirled in time to see a terribly tall, terribly old man in a long black overcoat walking through the smoldering remains of the door. Much too tall for the entrance, he did not stoop as he came in; rather, he drew his head down into his garment and shot it up again. Instinctively, they moved close together.

  His eyes, all shiny black iris without any whites, were set back deep in the shadow of his head. They reminded Sam Weber of the scanners on the Biocalibrator: they tabulated, deduced, rather than saw.

  “I was afraid I would be too late,” he rumbled at last in weird, clipped tones. “You have already duplicated yourself, Mr. Weber, making necessary unpleasant rearrangements. And the duplicate has destroyed the disassembleator. Too bad. I shall have to do it manually. An ugly job.” He came further into the room until they could almost breathe their fright upon him. “This affair has already dislocated four major programs, but we had to move in accepted cultural grooves and be absolutely certain of the recipient’s identity before we could act to withdraw the set. Mrs. Lipanti’s collapse naturally stimulated emergency measures.”

  The duplicate cleared his throat. “You are—”

  “Not exactly human. A humble civil servant of precision manufacture. I am Census Keeper for the entire twenty-ninth oblong. You see, your set was intended for the Thregander children, who are on a field trip in this oblong. One of the Threganders who has a Weber chart requested the set through the chrondromos which, in an attempt at the supernormal, unstabled without carnuplicating. You therefore received the package instead. Unfortunately, the unstabling was so complete that we were forced to locate you by indirect methods.”

  The Census Keeper paused and Sam’s double hitched his pants nervously. Sam wished he had anything—even a fig leaf—to cover his nakedness. He felt like a character in the Garden of Eden trying to build up a logical case for apple-eating. He appreciated glumly how much more than “Bild-a-Man” sets clothes had to do with the making of a man.<
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  “We will have to recover the set, of course,” the staccato thunder continued, “and readjust any discrepancies it has caused. Once the matter has been cleared up, however, your life will be allowed to resume its normal progression. Meanwhile, the problem is which of you is the original Sam Weber?”

  “I am,” they both quavered—and turned to glare at each other.

  “Difficulties,” the old man rumbled. He sighed like an arctic wind. “I always have difficulties! Why can’t I ever have a simple case like a carnuplicator?”

  “Look here,” the duplicate began. “The original will be—”

  “Less unstable and of better emotional balance than the replica,” Sam interrupted. “Now, it seems—”

  “That you should be able to tell the difference,” the other concluded breathlessly. “From what you see and have seen of us, can’t you decide which is the more valid member of society?”

  What a pathetic confidence, Sam thought, the fellow was trying to display! Didn’t he know he was up against someone who could really discern mental differences? This was no fumbling psychiatrist of the present; here was a creature who could see through externals to the most coherent personality beneath.

  “I can, naturally. Now, just a moment.” He studied them carefully, his eyes traveling with judicious leisure up and down their bodies. They waited, fidgeting, in a silence that pounded.

  “Yes,” the old man said at last. “Yes. Quite.”

  He walked forward.

  A long, thin arm shot out.

  He started to disassemble Sam Weber.

  “But listennnnn—” began Weber in a yell that turned into a high scream and died in a liquid mumble.

  “It would be better for your sanity if you didn’t watch,” the Census Keeper suggested.

  The duplicate exhaled slowly, turned away and began to button a shirt. Behind him the mumbling continued, rising and falling in pitch.

  “You see,” came the clipped, rumbling accents, “it’s not the gift we’re afraid of letting you have—it’s the principle involved. Your civilization isn’t ready for it. You understand.”

  “Perfectly,” replied the counterfeit Weber, knotting Aunt Maggie’s blue-and-red tie.

  Autofac

  Philip K. Dick

  Everyone knows the old tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice—who knew the spell that made the broom carry water from the well, but who didn’t know the spell that would get the broom to stop fetching water when the house was flooded. In a way, twentieth-century industrial society is reliving the woes of the sorcerer’s apprentice: we have conjured up a mighty technological civilization, which now marches on seemingly unchecked and uncheckable, devouring our planet while we hunt in vain for the spell that will get things under control. In this grim story, Philip K. Dick, one of science fiction’s unquestioned masters, vividly portrays the ultimate extension of this process.

  TENSION HUNG OVER the three waiting men. They smoked, paced back and forth, kicked aimlessly at weeds growing by the side of the road. A hot noonday sun glared down on brown fields, rows of neat plastic houses, the distant line of mountains to the west.

  “Almost time,” Earl Perine said, knotting his skinny hands together. “It varies according to the load, a half-second for every additional pound.”

  Bitterly, Morrison answered. “You’ve got it plotted? You’re as bad as it is. Let’s pretend it just happens to be late.”

  The third man said nothing. O’Neill was visiting from another settlement; he didn’t know Perine and Morrison well enough to argue with them. Instead, he crouched down and arranged the papers clipped to his aluminum checkboard. In the blazing sun, O’Neill’s arms were tanned, furry, glistening with sweat. Wiry, with tangled gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, he was older than the other two. He wore slacks, a sports shirt and crepe-soled shoes. Between his fingers, his fountain pen glittered, metallic and efficient.

  “What’re you writing?” Perine grumbled.

  “I’m laying out the procedure we’re going to employ,” O’Neill said mildly. “Better to systemize it now, instead of trying at random. We want to know what we tried and what didn’t work. Otherwise we’ll go around in a circle. The problem we have here is one of communication; that’s how I see it.”

  “Communication,” Morrison agreed in his deep, chesty voice. “Yes, we can’t get in touch with the damn thing. It comes, leaves off its load and goes on—there’s no contact between us and it.”

  “It’s a machine,” Perine said excitedly. “It’s dead-blind and deaf.”

  “But it’s in contact with the outside world,” O’Neill pointed out. “There has to be some way to get to it. Specific semantic signals are meaningful to it; all we have to do is find those signals. Rediscover, actually. Maybe half a dozen out of a billion possibilities.”

  A low rumble interrupted the three men. They glanced up, wary and alert. The time had come.

  “Here it is,” Perine said. “Okay, wise guy, let’s see you make one single change in its routine.”

  The truck was massive, rumbling under its tightly packed load. In many ways, it resembled conventional human-operated transportation vehicles, but with one exception—there was no driver’s cabin. The horizontal surface was a loading stage, and the part that would normally be the headlights and radiator grill was a fibrous, spongelike mass of receptors, the limited sensory apparatus of this mobile utility extension.

  Aware of the three men, the truck slowed to a halt, shifted gears and pulled on its emergency brake. A moment passed as relays moved into action; then a portion of the loading surface tilted and a cascade of heavy cartons spilled down onto the brown dust of the roadway. With the objects fluttered a detailed inventory sheet.

  “You know what to do,” O’Neill said rapidly. “Hurry up, before it gets out of here.”

  Expertly, grimly, the three men grabbed up the deposited cartons and ripped the protective wrappers from them. Objects gleamed: a binocular microscope, a portable radio, heaps of plastic dishes, medical supplies, razor blades, clothing, food. Most of the shipment, as usual, was food. The three men systematically began smashing the objects. In a few minutes, there was nothing but a chaos of debris littered around them.

  “That’s that,” O’Neill panted, stepping back. He fumbled for his checksheet. “Now let’s see what it does.”

  The truck had begun to move away; abruptly it stopped and backed toward them. Its receptors had taken in the fact that the three men had demolished the dropped-off portion of the load. It spun in a grinding half-circle and came around to face its receptor bank in their direction. Up went its antenna; it had begun communicating with the factory. Instructions were on the way.

  A second, identical load was tilted and shoved off the truck.

  “We failed,” Perine groaned as a duplicate inventory sheet fluttered after the new load. “We destroyed all that stuff for nothing.”

  “What now?” Morrison asked O’Neill. “What’s the next stratagem on your board?”

  “Give me a hand.” O’Neill grabbed up a carton and lugged it back to the truck. Sliding the carton onto the platform, he turned for another. The other two men followed clumsily after him. They put the load back onto the truck. As the truck started forward, the last square box was again in place.

  The truck hesitated. Its receptors registered the return of its load. From within its works came a low, sustained buzzing.

  “This may drive it crazy,” O’Neill commented, sweating. “It went through its operation and accomplished nothing.”

  The truck made a short, abortive move toward going on. Then it swung purposefully around and, in a blur of speed, again dumped the load onto the road.

  “Get them!” O’Neill yelled. The three men grabbed up the cartons and feverishly reloaded them. But as fast as the cartons were shoved back on the horizontal stage, the truck’s grapples tilted them down its far-side ramps and onto the road.

  “No use,” Morrison said, breathing hard. “W
ater through a sieve.”

  “We’re licked,” Perine gasped in wretched agreement, “like always. We humans lose every time.”

  The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planetwide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict.

  “There it goes,” Morrison observed dismally. The truck’s antenna had come down; it shifted into low gear and released its parking brake.

  “One last try,” O’Neill said. He swept up one of the cartons and ripped it open. From it he dragged a ten-gallon milk tank and unscrewed the lid. “Silly as it seems.”

  “This is absurd,” Perine protested. Reluctantly, he found a cup among the littered debris and dipped it into the milk. “A kid’s game!”

  The truck had paused to observe them.

  “Do it,” O’Neill ordered sharply. “Exactly the way we practiced it.”

  The three of them drank quickly from the milk tank, visibly allowing the milk to spill down their chins; there had to be no mistaking what they were doing.

  As planned, O’Neill was the first. His face twisting in revulsion, he hurled the cup away and violently spat milk into the road.

  “God’s sake!” he choked.

  The other two did the same; stamping and loudly cursing, they kicked over the milk tank and glared accusingly at the truck. ,

  “It’s no good!” Morrison roared.

  Curious, the truck came slowly back. Electronic synapses clicked and whirred, responding to the situation; its antenna shot up like a flagpole.

  “I think this is it,” O’Neill said, trembling. As the truck watched, he dragged out a second milk tank, unscrewed its lid and tasted the contents. “The same!” he shouted at the truck. “It’s just as bad!”