The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (84 page)

Underhill sat listening, numbed.

“However, you must not fear our power,” it urged him brightly. “Because we cannot injure any human being, unless to prevent greater injury to another. We exist only to discharge the Prime Directive.”

He drove on, moodily. The little black mechanicals, he reflected grimly, were the ministering angels of the ultimate god arisen out of the machine, omnipotent and all-knowing. The Prime Directive was the new commandment. He blasphemed it bitterly, and then fell to wondering if there could be another Lucifer.

He left the car in the garage, and started toward the kitchen door.

“Mr. Underhill.” The deep tired voice of Aurora’s new tenant hailed him from the door of the garage apartment. “Just a moment, please.”

The gaunt old wanderer came stiffly down the outside stairs, and Underhill turned back to meet him.

“Here’s your rent money,” he said. “And the ten your wife gave me for medicine.”

“Thanks, Mr. Sledge.” Accepting the money, he saw a burden of new despair on the bony shoulders of the old interstellar tramp, and a shadow of new terror on his raw-boned face. Puzzled, he asked, “Didn’t your royalties come through?”

The old man shook his shaggy head.

“The humanoids have already stopped business in the capital,” he said. “The attorneys I retained are going out of business, and they returned what was left of my deposit. That is all I have to finish my work.”

Underhill spent five seconds thinking of his interview with the banker. No doubt he was a sentimental fool, as bad as Aurora. But he put the money back in the old man’s gnarled and quivering hand.

“Keep it,” he urged. “For your work.”

“Thank you, Mr. Underhill.” The gruff voice broke and the tortured eyes glittered. “I need it – so very much.”

Underhill went on to the house. The kitchen door was opened for him, silently. A dark naked creature came gracefully to take his hat.

Underhill hung grimly onto his hat.

“What are you doing here?” he gasped bitterly.

“We have come to give your household a free trial demonstration.”

He held the door open, pointing.

“Get out!”

The little black mechanical stood motionless and blind.

“Mrs. Underhill has accepted our demonstration service,” its silver voice protested. “We cannot leave now, unless she requests it.”

He found his wife in the bedroom. His accumulated frustration welled into eruption, as he flung open the door.

“What’s this mechanical doing—”

But the force went out of his voice, and Aurora didn’t even notice his anger. She wore her sheerest negligee, and she hadn’t looked so lovely since they were married. Her red hair was piled into an elaborate shining crown.

“Darling, isn’t it wonderful!” She came to meet him, glowing. “It came this morning, and it can do everything. It cleaned the house and got the lunch and gave little Gay her music lesson. It did my hair this afternoon, and now it’s cooking dinner. How do you like my hair, darling?”

He liked her hair. He kissed her, and tried to stifle his frightened indignation.

Dinner was the most elaborate meal in Underhill’s memory, and the tiny black thing served it very deftly. Aurora kept exclaiming about the novel dishes, but Underhill could scarcely eat, for it seemed to him that all the marvelous pastries were only the bait for a monstrous trap.

He tried to persuade Aurora to send it away, but after such a meal that was useless. At the first glitter of her tears, he capitulated, and the humanoid stayed. It kept the house and cleaned the yard. It watched the children, and did Aurora’s nails. It began rebuilding the house.

Underhill was worried about the bills, but it insisted that everything was part of the free trial demonstration. As soon as he assigned his property, the service would be complete. He refused to sign, but other little black mechanicals came with truckloads of supplies and materials, and stayed to help with the building operations.

One morning he found that the roof of the little house had been silently lifted, while he slept, and a whole second story added beneath it. The new walls were of some strange sleek stuff, self-illuminated. The new windows were immense flawless panels, that could be turned transparent or opaque or luminous. The new doors were silent, sliding sections, operated by rhodomagnetic relays.

“I want door knobs,” Underhill protested. “I want it so I can get into the bathroom, without calling you to open the door.”

“But it is unnecessary for human beings to open doors,” the little black thing informed him suavely. “We exist to discharge the Prime Directive, and our service includes every task. We shall be able to supply a unit to attend each member of your family, as soon as your property is assigned to us.”

Steadfastly, Underhill refused to make the assignment.

He went to the office every day, trying first to operate the agency, and then to salvage something from the ruins. Nobody wanted androids, even at ruinous prices. Desperately, he spent the last of his dwindling cash to stock a line of novelties and toys, but they proved equally impossible to sell – the humanoids were already making toys, which they gave away for nothing.

He tried to lease his premises, but human enterprise had stopped. Most of the business property in town had already been assigned to the humanoids, and they were busy pulling down the old buildings and turning the lots into parks – their own plants and warehouses were mostly underground, where they would not mar the landscape.

He went back to the bank, in a final effort to get his notes renewed, and found the little black mechanicals standing at the windows and seated at the desks. As smoothly urbane as any human cashier, a humanoid informed him that the bank was filing a petition of involuntary bankruptcy to liquidate his business holdings.

The liquidation would be facilitated, the mechanical banker added, if he would make a voluntary assignment. Grimly, he refused. That act had become symbolic. It would be the final bow of submission to this dark new god, and he proudly kept his battered head uplifted.

The legal action went very swiftly, for all the judges and attorneys already had humanoid assistants, and it was only a few days before a gang of black mechanicals arrived at the agency with eviction orders and wrecking machinery. He watched sadly while his unsold stock-in-trade was hauled away for junk, and a bulldozer driven by a blind humanoid began to push in the walls of the building.

He drove home in the late afternoon, taut-faced and desperate. With a surprising generosity, the court orders had left him the car and the house, but he felt no gratitude. The complete solicitude of the perfect black machines had become a goad beyond endurance.

He left the car in the garage, and started toward the renovated house. Beyond one of the vast new windows, he glimpsed a sleek naked thing moving swiftly, and he trembled to a convulsion of dread. He didn’t want to go back into the domain of that peerless servant, which didn’t want him to shave himself, or even to open a door.

On impulse, he climbed the outside stair, and rapped on the door of the garage apartment. The deep slow voice of Aurora’s tenant told him to enter, and he found the old vagabond seated on a tall stool, bent over his intricate equipment assembled on the kitchen table.

To his relief, the shabby little apartment had not been changed. The glossy walls of his own new room were something which burned at night with a pale golden fire until the humanoid stopped it, and the new floor was something warm and yielding, which felt almost alive; but these little rooms had the same cracked and water-stained plaster, the same cheap fluorescent light fixtures, the same worn carpets over splintered floors.

“How do you keep them out?” he asked, wistfully. “Those mechanicals?”

The stooped and gaunt old man rose stiffly to move a pair of pliers and some odds and ends of sheet metal off a crippled chair, and motioned graciously for him to be seated.

“I have a certain immunity,” Sledge told him gravely. “The place where I live they cannot enter, unless I ask them. That is an amendment to the Prime Directive. They can neither help nor hinder me, unless I request it – and I won’t do that.”

Careful of the chair’s uncertain balance, Underhill sat for a moment, staring. The old man’s hoarse, vehement voice was as strange as his words. He had a gray, shocking pallor, and his cheeks and sockets seemed alarmingly hollowed.

“Have you been ill, Mr. Sledge?”

“No worse than usual. Just very busy.” With a haggard smile, he nodded at the floor. Underhill saw a tray where he had set it aside, bread drying up, and a covered dish grown cold. “I was going to eat it later,” he rumbled apologetically. “Your wife has been very kind to bring me food, but I’m afraid I’ve been too much absorbed in my work.”

His emaciated arm gestured at the table. The little device there had grown. Small machinings of precious white metal and lustrous plastic had been assembled, with neatly soldered bus bars, into something which showed purpose and design.

A long palladium needle was hung on jeweled pivots, equipped like a telescope with exquisitely graduated circles and vernier scales, and driven like a telescope with a tiny motor. A small concave palladium mirror, at the base of it, faced a similar mirror mounted on something not quite like a small rotary converter. Thick silver bus bars connected that to a plastic box with knobs and dials on top, and also to a foot-thick sphere of gray lead.

The old man’s preoccupied reserve did not encourage questions, but Underhill, remembering that sleek black shape inside the new windows of his house, felt queerly reluctant to leave this haven from the humanoids.

“What is your work?” he ventured.

Old Sledge looked at him sharply, with dark feverish eyes, and finally said: “My last research project. I am attempting to measure the constant of the rhodomagnetic quanta.”

His hoarse tired voice had a dull finality, as if to dismiss the matter and Underhill himself. But Underhill was haunted with a terror of the black shinning slave that had become the master of his house, and he refused to be dismissed.

“What is this certain immunity?”

Sitting gaunt and bent on the tall stool, staring moodily at the long bright needle and the lead sphere, the old man didn’t answer.

“These mechanicals!” Underhill burst out, nervously. “They’ve smashed my business and moved into my home.” He searched the old man’s dark, seamed face. “Tell me – you must know more about them – isn’t there any way to get rid of them?”

After half a minute, the old man’s brooding eyes left the lead ball, and the gaunt shaggy head nodded wearily.

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Can I help you?” Underhill trembled, with a sudden eager hope. “I’ll do anything.”

“Perhaps you can.” The sunken eyes watched him though-fy, with some strange fever in them. “If you can do such work.”

“I had engineering training,” Underhill reminded him, “and I’ve a workshop in the basement. There’s a model I built.” He pointed at the trim little hull, hung over the mantel in the tiny living room. “I’ll do anything I can.”

Even as he spoke, however, the spark of hope was drowned in a sudden wave of overwhelming doubt. Why should he believe this old rogue, when he knew Aurora’s taste in tenants? He ought to remember the game he used to play, and start counting up the score of lies. He stood up from the crippled chair, staring cynically at the patched old vagabond and his fantastic toy.

“What’s the use?” His voice turned suddenly harsh. “You had me going, there, and I’d do anything to stop them, really. But what makes you think you can do anything?”

The haggard old man regarded him thoughtfully.

“I should be able to stop them,” Sledge said softly. “Because, you see, I’m the unfortunate fool who started them. I really intended them to serve and obey, and to guard men from harm. Yes, the Prime Directive was my own idea. I didn’t know what it would lead to.”

Dusk crept slowly into the shabby little rooms. Darkness gathered in the unswept corners, and thickened on the floor. The toylike machines on the kitchen table grew vague and strange, until the last light made a lingering glow on the white palladium needle.

Outside, the town seemed queerly hushed. Just across the alley, the humanoids were building a new house, quite silently. They never spoke to one another, for each knew all that any of them did. The strange materials they used went together without any noise of hammer or saw. Small blind things, moving surely in the growing dark, they seemed as soundless as shadows.

Sitting on the high stool, bowed and tired and old, Sledge told his story. Listening, Underhill sat down again, careful of the broken chair. He watched the hands of Sledge, gnarled and corded and darkly burned, powerful once but shrunken and trembling now, restless in the dark.

“Better keep this to yourself. I’ll tell you how they started, so you will understand what we have to do. But you had better not mention it outside these rooms – because the humanoids have very efficient ways of eradicating unhappy memories, or purposes that threaten their discharge of the Prime Directive.”

“They’re very efficient,” Underhill bitterly agreed.

“That’s all the trouble,” the old man said. “I tried to build a perfect machine. I was altogether too successful. This is how it happened.”