He reached the end of his strip and signalled that all was well. Then he swung around and headed north again, moving at his measured pace.
He was still five hundred meters from the visitor center when he saw its door open.
A man stepped out. He was dignified, even portly, in a gray tunic and a dark blue headband. As Micah-IV watched in amazement, the man walked briskly to the retaining barrier and began to climb it.
“Stop!” Micah-IV called.
He could not understand how the door of the visitor center could have been opened without authorization. He did not like the thought of an unsupervised human on the seawall. And he could not remotely see why the man was taking the risk of scrambling up onto the retaining barrier.
He ran with all his incredible speed.
He was too late.
Micah-IV was still a hundred meters away when the man reached the top of the barrier. He stood there flatfooted a moment, balancing himself. Then he launched himself into the air.
“No!” Micah-IV cried. “This is prohibited!”
It was suicide—that is, deliberate self-destruction. The bewildered synthetic raced toward the barrier and saw the man activate a gravity chute and glide easily toward the base of the seawall. What was his motive? If he wished to kill himself, why the gravity chute?
“Come back,” Micah-IV called, readying himself to go over the wall and retrieve the man, monsters of no.
The man was scrambling over the boulders at the shoreline, and now he was wading hip deep in the sea, brushing aside the tangled coils of brown weeds, lying face down and moving his arms, propelling himself rapidly away from the land. Micah-IV did not try to follow. It would mean double destruction and nothing gained.
In blank disbelief he watched the man swim rapidly out to sea. The belt of electricity did not harm him, since the mass of one human being was too slight to trigger a discharge. The poison zone offered no menace to a human metabolism. But then he was past the outer rim of the poison zone and in the open, unguarded sea.
A flash of bright scales—the glint of swordlike teeth—a rolling of the surface—
Then all was still out there.
Trembling, flooded with shock secretions, Micah-IV turned away. Within the visitor center were five other human beings, standing by the open door.
“Who was that man?” Micah-IV demanded. “How did he get out onto the seawall? Why did he kill himself?”
There were no answers. They all seemed strangely unmoved. Several of them requested Micah-IV to take them on the tour of the seawall. Irritably, Micah-IV told them the tours were canceled for the day and ordered them to leave the visitor center.
He had had his moment of diversion at last. But he found the novel incident less diverting than he had anticipated.
He reported it. Shortly his sector of the wall swarmed with authorities. Wearily, Micah-IV endlessly repeated the narrative. Experts examined the door of the visitor center and showed that it had been opened in the usual way, with thumb signals. Clearly the suicide had been privy to inside information.
Micah-IV was reprimanded for having failed to prevent the suicide. It was no use to tell them that it was not his fault. Someone had to be blamed, and who else but the sector warden? Humans were not to be permitted on the seawall unattended. Micah-IV therefore must have been guilty of negligence.
To himself, he insisted that he was innocent. He could not be everywhere on his sector at once. He could not run a thousand meters instantaneously. If a human bent on self-destruction had unlawfully gained access to the signal code and was able to let himself out onto the seawall at a time when the attendant was elsewhere, how was the attendant to have prevented the act of suicide?
The reprimand meant nothing tangible to Micah-IV. It did not affect his rank, his retirement status or his salary, for he had none of these things. He was not an employee but rather a part of the apparatus. But it did affect his standing among his peers. News of the episode had spread. The wardens of other sectors were aware that Micah-IV had been reprimanded. He was shamed before his barracks-mates, for he had allowed a human being to commit suicide in his sector.
For more than a month Micah-IV lived with that stigma.
It was a great relief to him, then, when a second suicide was reported.
The circumstances were virtually identical to the first. A young woman had slipped out onto the wall in DV-7 while its warden was occupied at the opposite end of his sector. Drifting to the beach below by gravity chute, she had gone into the water, swimming out to the waiting monsters and her death.
New security measures were put in force at the visitor centers. Micah-IV felt a sense of excitement, for now his days were mottled by unpredictabilities. There was little chance (that the sea-beasts would scale the seawall or that a section of the seawall would collapse, the two eventualities for which he was supposed to watch. But it was perfectly likely that at any given moment some irrational human being would go over the wall and invite a certain doom.
The third suicide, in FC-10, did not have a gravity chute. The victim—an adolescent boy—plummeted the sixty meters to the beach and was shattered on the shoreline rocks. Some monster was deprived of a snack, but the scavenger birds ate well.
A fourth death was reported.
A fifth.
A sixth and seventh.
Perplexed sector wardens stepped up their pace, moving from end to end of their zones in two-thirds of the previous time. There was talk of closing the visitor centers altogether, but nothing came of it; it was wrong to deny millions of human beings the right to view the sea, merely because a handful were perverse.
Instead, new locks were placed on the doors of the visitor centers. Despite this precaution, there were four suicides the following week.
In the barracks, the sector wardens were briefed on ways to cope with the crisis. Micah-IV listened attentively, feeling a certain pride at the knowledge that all this had begun in his own strip of the seawall.
An official with oily, grayish skin and small green eyes addressed a cadre of the synthetics and told them, “There is now a cult of gratuitous suicide among humanity. You must do all in your power to prevent further deaths from occurring. There is nothing more precious than a human life.”
The official with oily, grayish skin and small green eyes was the twenty-third suicide.
A psychiatrist with stiff, bristly hair spoke at a later meeting and declared, “The strain of the national effort to built the seawall is taking a delayed toll. The citizens are attempting individually to undo the great communal enterprise by seeking death in the sea. Since the monsters can no longer come to the land, they go to the monsters.”
It was a, plausible theory. The psychiatrist tasted it himself sot long afterward.
Micah-IV, pacing the wall through the salt spray and the gusting winds, did his duty. As each group of humans appeared—and there were more tourists than ever, now—he scanned them impassively, wondering if he could detect suicidal tendencies. Will you try to kill yourself, you plump female? What about you, young man with too-bright eyes? You, edgy father of two?
Tourists now came out on the wall in groups of three. The attendant remained close by. Despite this, there were several incidents in which humans eluded the grasp of the warden and plunged over the wall.