Assignment in Tomorrow Page 8

  It was punishable by instant death to even write it in a letter or diary that the Venusians might find and read later. Nothing in print! Newspapers and book publishers were ordered to cease publication.

  Riots occurred in Chicago, London, Tokyo. Ten million died in riots over a four-year period. A civil war raged in China and in India and the Continental Mop Squads roared in and broke it up to the tune of fifteen million dead.

  Earth was combed from North Pole to South. No one must be left alive. All men and women must be dead and buried.

  Orders came by radio.

  Joe Leighton got his.

  “There it is, Alice. June 1st, four o’clock. A simple statement that puts an end to you and me.”

  “At least we’ll be one of the last ones.”

  “We’ll be one of the last, sure. And this—poison—they say it’s good stuff. Hell! I was going to get a promotion next month. Huh.”

  “Will the plan work, Joe? Will everyone be dead?”

  “All except the others, who’ll keep on running, all five hundred million of them. They’ll see to it we don’t refuse to take our poison at the last moment.” He shook his head. “There’s a coroner to each block. He checks everyone. He makes sure everyone is accounted for. If there’s a mistake, it’ll be corrected.”

  “Will the others survive?”

  “Who’d suspect them?”

  “No one, I guess. And intelligence will survive with them through reproduction——”

  “Sure. Years ago you couldn’t have done it. It would’ve taken a million years to produce the effect any other way. But you leave things to the scientists; they do anything with synthetic protoplasm.”

  “I’m—I’m glad our children are sleeping, Joe, instead of dying. I’m glad they’ll wake up and have a chance.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Nice for them, eh? Well—bottoms up!”

  Harler was one of the last ones in the Change.

  “Street wardens,” he directed over the television. “Time is short. You have twelve hours to complete your rounds. The Venusian fleet is just off the orbit of the moon. All the others in the sound of my voice will receive verbal communications from time to time by word of mouth. Spread out; scatter. Don’t be seen together. Roam alone. Eat and sleep alone. Take to the hills and valleys and deserts, but keep near running water. That’s all. Good-by to all of you. You’ve done splendidly. May our prayers be answered. Signing off!”

  Harler stood alone on a high hill, as the Venusian ships hurled down from the sky. He was in the town, unnoticed, when the Venusians swirled through.

  He saw the bewilderment, amazement, the growing apprehension and terror of the Venusians as they found the world in death . . .

  Armu, leader of the Venusian horde, gave orders.

  “Tell ships to capture New York, Chicago and London first! Land everywhere that there are huge populations!”

  “What about those reports from Paris, Bombay and Tokyo, Armu?”

  Armu scowled. “Widely separated cases. We will have our slaves yet; do not fear!”

  But reports boiled in. Denver, Singapore, New York, Cairo. Dead, dead, dead. Sprawled, buried, killed. Shot, poisoned, euthanasia.

  Frustration.

  Armu roared from the steps of City Hall in New York, from the steps of City Hall in Los Angeles. He scanned them with quick purple flicks of his staring eyes.

  Streets deserted except for a few stray alley-cats or unkempt dogs ambling, or perhaps a few birds fluttering across the sky. And silence—a great quantity of silence.

  After two weeks of rummaging, of growing fury, Armu ordered his fleet to about face and head for Venus. This climate was bad, and the silence and death were damaging to morale.

  Defeated, the Venusians poured into the sky. They never returned.

  Harler saw them go. Manhardt saw them go. The president of the States saw them go. Five hundred million pairs of eyes watched the invaders vanish in hopeless fury.

  What a fantastic life this is, thought Harler. And yet our children will take the Change, the new arts, the new customs as natural. Our next flesh will be stronger, better shaped, better adapted. The Venusians are gone for good!

  Harler looked at the sky, seeing new color. Impossible a century ago, reality today. New homes, new foods for us all. New bodies. New synthetic bodies formed to imitate others, but new and capable of reproducing intelligence in themselves.

  He stood upon the hill again, overlooking Los Angeles.

  He raised his voice and chilled himself to hear the sound he made.

  And now, beside a river, running, skipping, panting toward him, came a pack of dogs. Fine-furred, lean, gray, supplefooted, bright-eyed animals. Unsuspected animals. Dogs that roamed streets under the very feet of the invaders. Dogs that had brushed the invaders’ bodies.

  They had seemingly wandered, looking for their dead masters, and they had been ignored and kicked aside. Running and laughing, a new breed of animal, moulded from synthetic flesh and human brain.

  Simplification. Adaptation. Subterfuge.

  Harler ran to meet them, thinking, God, but it is strange to run on four feet. It is strange the way the sun warms my fur, and the sound of my paws on the grass and my change of hunger and thoughts and demands!

  But most of all, as he hurtled down to join Manhardt, the president, Jane Smith and all the rest, he thought, Well, I’ve kept my promise. The Venusians were misdirected. Earth has won!

  And, glowing with elation, he loped down into the valley.

  Subterfuge by Ray Bradbury. Copyright, 1943, by Popular Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Harold Matson, agent for the author.

  LESTER DEL REY

  There are wonders in books; and one of the most wonderful of all books is a modest volume called . . . And Some Were Human by one Ramon F. Alvarez (better known as Lester) del Rey. Find the book if you can; for in it you will read an even dozen splendid stories—wistful fantasies like The Coppersmith and Forsaking All Others, bright glimpses of tomorrow’s space ways like The Luck of Ignatz and The Wings of Night, the massive and magnificent Nerves . . . and, perhaps the best of all, the outré love story of K2W88, better known as——

  Helen O’Loy

  I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.

  “Man, isn’t she a beauty?”

  She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that, the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.

  “Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen . . . Mmmm . . . Helen of Alloy.”

  “Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”

  “Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.

  Dave and I hadn’t gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to practice medicine, I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After that,” we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin, he found the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.

  When our business grew better, we rented a house out near the rocket field—noisy but cheap, and the rockets discouraged apartment building. We liked room enough to stretch ourselves. I suppose, if we hadn’t quarreled with them, we’d have married the twins in time. But Dave wanted to look over the latest Venus-rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn. From then on, we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.

  But it wasn’t until “Lena” put vanilla on our steak instead of salt that we got off on the subject of emotions and robots. While Dave was dissecting Lena to find the trouble, we naturally mulled over the
future of the mechs. He was sure that the robots would beat men some day, and I couldn’t see it.

  “Look here, Dave,” I argued. “You know Lena doesn’t think—not really. When those wires crossed, she could have corrected herself. But she didn’t bother; she followed the mechanical impulse. A man might have reached for the vanilla, but when he saw it in his hand, he’d have stopped. Lena has sense enough, but she has no emotions, no consciousness of self.”

  “All right, that’s the big trouble with the mechs now. But we’ll get around it, put in some mechanical emotions, or something.” He screwed Lena’s head back on, turned on her juice. “Go back to work, Lena, it’s nineteen o’clock.”

  Now I specialized in endocrinology and related subjects. I wasn’t exactly a psychologist, but I did understand the glands, secretions, hormones, and miscellanies that are the physical causes of emotions. It took medical science three hundred years to find out how and why they worked, and I couldn’t see men duplicating them mechanically in much less time.

  I brought home books and papers to prove it, and Dave quoted the invention of memory coils and veritoid eyes. During that year we swapped knowledge until Dave knew the whole theory of endocrinology, and I could have made Lena from memory. The more we talked, the less sure I grew about the impossibility of homo mechanensis as the perfect type.

  Poor Lena. Her cuproberyl body spent half its time in scattered pieces. Onr first attempts were successful only in getting her to serve fried brushes for breakfast and wash the dishes in oleo oil. Then one day she cooked a perfect dinner with six wires crossed, and Dave was in ecstasy.

  He worked all night on her wiring, put in a new coil, and taught her a fresh set of words. And the next day she hew into a tantrum and swore vigorously at us when we told her she wasn’t doing her work right.

  “It’s a he,” she yelled, shaking a suction brush. “You’re all bars. If you so-and-so’s would leave me whole long enough, I might get something done around the place.”

  When we calmed her temper and got her back to work, Dave ushered me into the study. “Not taking any chances with Lena,” he explained. “We’ll have to cut out that adrenal pack and restore her to normalcy. But we’ve got to get a better robot. A housemaid mech isn’t complex enough.”

  “How about Dillard’s new utility models? They seem to combine everything in one.”

  “Exactly. Even so, we’ll need a special one built to order, with a full range of memory coils. And out of respect to old Lena, let’s get a female case for its works.”

  The result, of course, was Helen. The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic and rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair. The bill they sent with her was another miracle, but Dave and I scraped it together; we had to turn Lena over to an exchange to complete it, though, and thereafter we ate out.

  I’d performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues, and some of them had been tricky, but I still felt like a pre-med student as we opened the front plate of her torso and began to sever the leads of her “nerves.” Dave’s mechanical glands were all prepared, complex little bundles of radio tubes and wires that heterodyned on the electrical thought impulses and distorted them as adrenalin distorts the reaction of human minds.

  Instead of sleeping that night, we pored over the schematic diagrams of her structures, tracing the thought mazes of her wiring, severing the leaders, implanting the heterones, as Dave called them. And while we worked, a mechanical tape fed carefully prepared thoughts of consciousness and awareness of life and feeling into an auxiliary memory coil. Dave believed in leaving nothing to chance.

  It was growing light as we finished, exhausted and exultant. All that remained was the starting of her electrical power; like all the Dillard mechs, she was equipped with a tiny atomotor instead of batteries, and once started would need no further attention.

  Dave refused to turn her on. “Wait until we’ve slept and rested,” he advised. “I’m as eager to try her as you are, but we can’t do much studying with our minds half dead. Turn in, and we’ll leave Helen until later.”

  Even though we were both reluctant to follow it, we knew the idea was sound. We turned in, and sleep hit us before the air-conditioner could cut down to sleeping temperature. And then Dave was pounding on my shoulder.

  “Phil! Hey, snap out of it!”

  I groaned, turned over, and faced him. “Well? . . . Uh! What is it? Did Helen——”

  “No, it’s old Mrs. van Styler. She ’visored to say her son has an infatuation for a servant girl, and she wants you to come out and give counter-hormones. They’re at the summer camp in Maine.”

  Rich Mrs. van Styler! I couldn’t afford to let that account down, now that Helen had used up the last of my funds. But it wasn’t a job I cared for.

  “Counter-hormones! That’ll take two weeks’ full time. Anyway, I’m no society doctor, messing with glands to keep fools happy. My job’s taking care of serious trouble.”

  “And you want to watch Helen.” Dave was grinning, but he was serious, too. “I told her it’d cost her fifty thousand!”

  “Huh?”

  “And she said okay, if you hurried.”

  Of course, there was only one thing to do, though I could have wrung fat Mrs. van Styler’s neck cheerfully. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d used robots like everyone else—but she had to be different.

  Consequently, while Dave was back home puttering with Helen, I was racking my brain to trick Archy van Styler into getting the counter-hormones, and giving the servant girl the same. Oh, I wasn’t supposed to, but the poor kid was crazy about Archy. Dave might have written, I thought, but never a word did I get.

  It was three weeks later instead of two when I reported that Archy was “cured,” and collected on the line. With that money in my pocket, I hired a personal rocket and was back in Messina in half an hour. I didn’t waste time in reaching the house.

  As I stepped into the alcove, I heard a light patter of feet, and an eager voice called out, “Dave, dear?” For a minute I couldn’t answer, and the voice came again, pleading, “Dave?”

  I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect Helen to meet me that way, stopping and staring at me, obvious disappointment on her face, little hands fluttering up against her breast.

  “Oh,” she cried. “I thought it was Dave. He hardly comes home to eat now, but I’ve had supper waiting hours.” She dropped her hands and managed a smile. “You’re Phil, aren’t you? Dave told me about you when . . . at first. I’m so glad to see you home, Phil.”

  “Glad to see you doing so well, Helen.” Now what does one say for light conversation with a robot? “You said something about supper?”

  “Oh, yes. I guess Dave ate downtown again, so we might as well go in. It’ll be nice having someone to talk to around the house, Phil. You don’t mind if I call you Phil, do you? You know, you’re sort of a godfather to me.”

  MY ate. I hadn’t counted on such behavior, but apparently she considered eating as normal as walking. She didn’t do much eating, at that; most of the time she spent staring at the front door.

  Dave came in as we were finishing, a frown a yard wide on his face. Helen started to rise, but he ducked toward the stairs, throwing words over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Phil. See you up here later.”

  There was something radically wrong with him. For a moment, I’d thought his eyes were haunted, and as I turned to Helen, hers were filling with tears. She gulped, choked them back, and fell to viciously on her food.

  “What’s the matter with him . . . and you?” I asked.

  “He’s sick of me.” She pushed her plate away and got up hastily. “You’d better see him while I clean up. And there’s nothing wrong with me. And it’s not my fault, anyway.” She grabbed the dishes and ducked into the
kitchen; I could have sworn she was crying.

  Maybe all thought is a series of conditioned reflexes—but she certainly had picked up a lot of conditioning while I was gone. Lena in her heyday had been nothing like this. I went up to see if Dave could make any sense out of the hodgepodge.

  He was squirting soda into a large glass of apple brandy, and I saw that the bottle was nearly empty. “Join me?” he asked.

  It seemed like a good idea. The roaring blast of an ion rocket overhead was the only familiar thing left in the house. From the look around Dave’s eyes, it wasn’t the first bottle he’d emptied while I was gone, and there were more left. He dug out a new bottle for his own drink.

  “Of course, it’s none of my business, Dave, but that stuff won’t steady your nerves any. What’s gotten into you, and Helen? Been seeing ghosts?”

  Helen was wrong; he hadn’t been eating downtown—nor anywhere else. His muscles collapsed into a chair in a way that spoke of fatigue and nerves, but mostly of hunger. “You noticed it, eh?”

  “Noticed it? The two of you jammed it down my throat.”

  “Uhmmm.” He swatted at a non-existent fly, and slumped further down in the pneumatic. “Guess maybe I should have waited with Helen until you got back. But if that stereo cast hadn’t changed . . . anyway, it did. And those mushy books of yours finished the job.”

  “Thanks. That makes it all clear.”

  “You know, Phil, I’ve got a place up in the country . . . fruit ranch. My dad left it to me. Think I’ll look it over.”

  And that’s the way it went. But finally, by much liquor and more perspiration, I got some of the story out of him before I gave him an amytal and put him to bed. Then I hunted up Helen and dug the rest of the story from her, until it made sense.

  Apparently as soon as I was gone, Dave had turned her on and made preliminary tests, which were entirely satisfactory. She had reacted beautifully—so well that he decided to leave her and go down to work as usual.

  Naturally, with all her untried emotions, she was filled with curiosity, and wanted him to stay. Then he had an inspiration. After showing her what her duties about the house would be, he set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.