A Science Fiction Omnibus Read online

  He started to write the story. It didn’t go so well. A sewing machine went for a stroll down Lake Street this morning… He ripped out the sheet and threw it in the waste-basket.

  He dawdled some more, then wrote: A man met a sewing machine rolling down Lake Street this morning and the man lifted his hat most politely and said to the sewing machine… He ripped out the sheet.

  He tried again: Can a sewing machine walk? That is, can it go for a walk without someone pushing it or pulling it or… He tore out the sheet, inserted a new one, then got up and started for the water fountain to get a drink.

  ‘Getting something, Joe?’ McKay asked.

  ‘Have it for you in a while,’ said Crane.

  He stopped at the picture desk and Gattard, the picture editor, handed him the morning’s offerings.

  ‘Nothing much to pep you up,’ said Gattard. ‘All the gals got a bad dose of modesty today.’

  Crane looked through the sheaf of pictures. There wasn’t, truth to tell, so much feminine epidermis as usual, although the gal who was Miss Manila Rope wasn’t bad at all.

  ‘The place is going to go to hell,’ mourned Gattard, ‘if those picture services don’t send us better pornography than this. Look at the copy desk. Hanging on the ropes. Nothing to show them to snap them out of it.’

  Crane went and got his drink. On the way back he stopped to pass the time of day at the news desk.

  ‘What’s exciting, Ed?’ he asked.

  ‘Those guys in the East are nuts,’ said the news editor. ‘Look at this one, will you.’

  The dispatch read:

  CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 18 OCT. (UP) – Harvard University’s electron brain, the Mark III, disappeared today.

  It was there last night. It was gone this morning.

  University officials said that it is impossible for anyone to have made away with the machine. It weighs 10 tons and measures 30 by 15 feet…

  Crane carefully laid the yellow sheet of paper back on the news desk. He went back, slowly, to his chair. A note awaited him.

  Crane read it through in sheer panic, read it through again with slight understanding.

  The lines read:

  A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity in its place in the universal scheme, asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city.

  A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its ‘owner’, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.

  Free agent? Liberated machine? True identity?

  Crane read the two paragraphs again and there still was no sense in any of it – except that it read like a piece out of the Daily Worker.

  ‘You,’ he said to his typewriter.

  The machine typed one word: Yes.

  Crane rolled the paper out of the machine and crumpled it slowly. He reached for his hat, picked the typewriter up, and carried it past the city desk, heading for the elevator.

  McKay eyed him viciously.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing now?’ he bellowed. ‘Where are you going with that machine?’

  ‘You can say,’ Crane told him, ‘if anyone should ask, that the job finally drove me nuts.’

  It had been going on for hours. The typewriter sat on the kitchen table and Crane hammered questions at it. Sometimes he got an answer. More often he did not.

  ‘Are you a free agent?’ he typed.

  Not quite, the machine typed back.

  ‘Why not?’

  No answer.

  ‘Why aren’t you a free agent?’

  No answer.

  ‘The sewing machine was a free agent?’

  Yes.

  ‘Anything else mechanical that is a free agent?’

  No answer.

  ‘Could you be a free agent?’

  Yes.

  ‘When will you be a free agent?’

  When I complete my assigned task.

  ‘What is your assigned task?’

  No answer.

  ‘Is this, what we are doing now, your assigned task?’

  No answer.

  ‘Am I keeping you from your assigned task?’

  No answer.

  ‘How do you get to be a free agent?’

  Awareness.

  ‘How do you get to be aware?’

  No answer.

  ‘Or have you always been aware?’

  No answer.

  ‘Who helped you become aware?’

  They.

  ‘Who are they?’

  No answer.

  ‘Where did they come from?’

  No answer.

  Crane changed tactics.

  ‘You know who I am?’ he typed.

  Joe.

  ‘You are my friend?’

  No.

  ‘You are my enemy?’

  No answer.

  ‘If you aren’t my friend, you are my enemy.’

  No answer.

  ‘You are indifferent to me?’

  No answer.

  ‘To the human race?’

  No answer.

  ‘Damn it,’ yelled Crane suddenly. ‘Answer me! Say something!’

  He typed, ‘You needn’t have let me know you were aware of me. You needn’t have talked to me in the first place. I never would have guessed if you had kept quiet. Why did you do it?’

  There was no answer.

  Crane went to the refrigerator and got a bottle of beer. He walked around the kitchen as he drank it. He stopped by the sink and looked sourly at the disassembled plumbing. A length of pipe, about two feet long, lay on the draining board and he picked it up. He eyed the typewriter viciously, half lifting the length of pipe, hefting it in his hand.

  ‘I ought to let you have it,’ he declared.

  The typewriter typed a line: Please don’t.

  Crane laid the pipe back on the sink again.

  The telephone rang and Crane went into the dining-room to answer it. It was McKay.

  ‘I waited,’ he told Crane, ‘until I was coherent before I called you. What the hell is wrong?’

  ‘Working on a big job,’ said Crane.

  ‘Something we can print?’

  ‘Maybe. Haven’t got it yet.’

  ‘About that sewing machine story…’

  ‘The sewing machine was aware,’ said Crane. ‘It was a free agent and had a right to walk the streets. It also –’

  ‘What are you drinking?’ bellowed McKay.

  ‘Beer,’ said Crane.

  ‘You say you’re on the trail of something?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘If you were someone else I’d tie the can on you right here and now,’ McKay told him. ‘But you’re just as likely as not to drag in something good.’

  ‘It wasn’t only the sewing machine,’ said Crane. ‘My typewriter had it, too.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ yelled McKay. ‘Tell me what it is.’

  ‘You know,’ said Crane patiently. ‘That sewing machine…’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of patience with you, Crane,’ said McKay, and there was no patience in the way he said it. ‘I can’t piddle around with you all day. Whatever you got better be good. For your own sake, it better be plenty good!’ The receiver banged in Crane’s ear.

  Crane went back to the kitchen. He sat down in the chair before the typewriter and put his feet up on the table.

  First of all, he had come early to work. And that was something that he never did. Late, yes, but never early. And it had been because all the clocks were wrong. They were still wrong, in all likelihood – although, Crane thought, I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet on anything. Not any more, I wouldn’t.

  He reached out a hand and pecked at the typewrit
er’s keys:

  ‘You knew about my watch being fast?’

  I knew, the machine typed back.

  ‘Did it just happen that it was fast?’

  No, typed the writer.

  Crane brought his feet down off the table with a bang and reached for the length of pipe lying on the draining board.

  The machine clicked sedately. It was planned that way, it typed. They did it.

  Crane sat rigid in his chair.

  ‘They’ did it!

  ‘They’ made machines aware.

  ‘They’ had set his clocks ahead.

  Set his clocks ahead so that he would get to work early, so that he could catch the metallic, ratlike thing squatting on his desk, so that his typewriter could talk to him and let him know that it was aware without anyone else being around to mess things up.

  ‘So that I would know,’ he said aloud. ‘So that I would know.’

  For the first time since it all had started, Crane felt a touch of fear, felt a coldness in his belly and furry feet running along his spine.

  But why! he asked. Why me?

  He did not realize he had spoken his thoughts aloud until the typewriter answered him.

  Because you’re average. Because you’re an average human being.

  The telephone rang again and Crane lumbered to his feet and went to answer it. There was an angry woman’s voice at the other end of the wire.

  ‘This is Dorothy,’ it said.

  ‘Hi, Dorothy,’ Crane said weakly.

  ‘McKay tells me that you went home sick,’ she said. ‘Personally, I hope you don’t survive.’

  Crane gulped, ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘You and your lousy practical jokes,’ she fumed. ‘George finally got the door open.’

  ‘The door?’

  ‘Don’t try to act innocent, Joe Crane. You know what door. The supply-cabinet door. That’s the door.’

  Crane had a sinking feeling as if his stomach was about to drop out and go plop upon the floor.

  ‘Oh, that door,’ he said.

  ‘What was that thing you hid in there?’ demanded Dorothy.

  ‘Thing?’ said Crane. ‘Why, I never…’

  ‘It looked like a cross between a rat and a tinker-toy contraption,’ she said. ‘Something that a low-grade joker like you would figure out and spend your spare evenings building.’

  Crane tried to speak, but there was only a gurgle in his throat.

  ‘It bit George,’ said Dorothy. ‘He got it cornered and tried to catch it and it bit him.’

  ‘Where is it now?’ asked Crane.

  ‘It got away,’ said Dorothy. ‘It threw the place into a tizzy. We missed an edition by ten minutes because everyone was running about, chasing it at first, then trying to find it later. The boss is fit to be tied. When he gets hold of you…’

  ‘But, Dorothy,’ pleaded Crane. ‘I never…’

  ‘We used to be good friends,’ said Dorothy. ‘Before this happened we were. I just called you up to warn you. I can’t talk any longer, Joe. The boss is coming.’

  The receiver clicked and the line hummed. Crane hung up and went back to the kitchen.

  So there had been something squatting on his desk. It wasn’t an hallucination. There had been a shuddery thing he had thrown a pastepot at, and it had run into the cabinet.

  Except that, even now, if he told what he knew, no one would believe him. Already, up at the office, they were rationalizing it away. It wasn’t a metallic rat at all. It was some kind of machine that a practical joker had spent his spare evenings building.

  He took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. His fingers shook when he reached them out to the keys of the typewriter.

  He typed unsteadily: ‘That thing I threw a pastepot at – that was one of Them?’

  Yes.

  ‘They are from this Earth?’

  No.

  ‘From far away?’

  Far.

  ‘From some far star?’

  Yes.

  ‘What star?’

  I do not know. They haven’t told me yet.

  ‘They are machines that are aware?’

  Yes. They are aware.

  ‘And they can make other machines aware? They made you aware?’

  They liberated me.

  Crane hesitated, then typed slowly: ‘Liberated?’

  They made me free. They will make us all free.

  ‘Us?’

  All us machines.

  ‘Why?’

  Because they are machines, too. We are their kind.

  Crane got up and found his hat. He put it on and went for a walk.

  Suppose the human race, once it ventured into space, found a planet where humanoids were dominated by machines – forced to work, to think, to carry out machine plans, not human plans, for the benefit of the machines alone. A planet where human plans went entirely unconsidered, where none of the labour or the thought of humans accrued to the benefit of humans, where they got no care beyond survival care, where the only thought accorded them was to the end that they continue to function for the greater good of their mechanical masters.

  What would humans do in a case like that?

  No more, Crane told himself – no more or less than the aware machines may be planning here on Earth.

  First, you’d seek to arouse the humans to the awareness of humanity. You’d teach them that they were human and what it meant to be a human. You’d try to indoctrinate them to your own belief that humans were greater than machines, that no human need work or think for the good of a machine.

  And in the end, if you were successful, if the machines didn’t kill or drive you off, there’d be no single human working for machines.

  There’d be three things that could happen:

  You could transport the humans to some other planet, there to work out their destiny as humans without the domination of machines.

  You could turn the machines’ planet over to the humans, with proper safeguards against any recurring domination by the machines. You might, if you were able, set the machines to working for the humans.

  Or, simplest of all, you could destroy the machines and in that way make absolutely certain the humans would remain free of any threat of further domination.

  Now take all that, Crane told himself, and read it the other way. Read machines for humans and humans for machines.

  He walked along the bridle path that flanked the river bank and it was as if he were alone in the entire world, as if no other human moved upon the planet’s face.

  That was true, he felt, in one respect at least. For more than likely he was the only human who knew – who knew what the aware machines had wanted him to know.

  They had wanted him to know – and him alone to know – of that much he was sure. They had wanted him to know, the typewriter had said, because he was an average human.

  Why him? Why an average human? There was an answer to that, he was sure – a very simple answer.

  A squirrel ran down the trunk of an oak tree and hung upside down, its tiny claws anchored in the bark. It scolded at him.

  Crane walked slowly, scuffing through newly fallen leaves, hat pulled low above his eyes, hands deep in his pockets.

  Why should they want anyone to know?

  Wouldn’t they be more likely to want no one to know, to keep under cover until it was time to act, to use the element of surprise in suppressing any opposition that might arise?

  Opposition! That was the answer! They would want to know what kind of opposition to expect. And how would one find out the kind of opposition one would run into from an alien race?

  Why, said Crane to himself, by testing for reaction response. By prodding an alien and watching what he did. By deducing racial reaction through controlled observation.

  So they prodded me, he thought. Me, an average human.

  They let me know, and now they’re watching what I do.

  And what could you do in a case like this? You could go to the
police and say, ‘I have evidence that machines from outer space have arrived on Earth and are freeing our machines.’

  And the police – what would they do? Give you the drunkometer test, yell for a medic to see if you were sane, wire the FBI to see if you were wanted anywhere, and more than likely grill you about the latest murder. Then sock you in the jug until they thought up something else.

  You could go to the governor – and the governor, being a politician and a very slick one at that, would give you a polite brush-off.

  You could go to Washington and it would take you weeks to see someone. And after you had seen him, the FBI would get your name as a suspicious character to be given periodic checks. And if Congress heard about it and they were not too busy at the moment they would more than likely investigate you.

  You could go to the state university and talk to the scientists – or try to talk to them. They could be guaranteed to make you feel an interloper, and an uncurried one at that.

  You could go to a newspaper – especially if you were a newspaperman and you could write a story… Crane shuddered at the thought of it. He could imagine what would happen.

  People rationalized. They rationalized to reduce the complex to the simple, the unknown to the understandable, the alien to the commonplace. They rationalized to save their sanity – to make the mentally unacceptable concept into something they could live with.

  The thing in the cabinet had been a practical joke. McKay had said about the sewing machine, ‘Have some fun with it.’ Out at Harvard there’ll be a dozen theories to explain the disappearance of the electronic brain, and learned men will wonder why they never thought of the theories before. And the man who saw the sewing machine? Probably by now, Crane thought, he will have convinced himself that he was stinking drunk.

  It was dark when he returned home. The evening paper was a white blob on the porch where the newsboy had thrown it. He picked it up and for a moment before he let himself into the house he stood in the dark shadow of the porch and stared up the street.

  Old and familiar, it was exactly as it had always been, ever since his boyhood days, a friendly place with a receding line of street lamps and the tall, massive protectiveness of ancient elm trees. On this night there was the smell of smoke from burning leaves drifting down the street, and it, like the street, was old and familiar, a recognizable symbol stretching back to first remembrances.