Bill was timorous but needful. “Yes,” he said. “I do, too. But-”
“If you don’t go with me, I’ll ask someone else. I’ll ask Dave.”
“Dave? He’s thirty years old. He’s one of them. All he wants to do is look. “
“I’ll teach him a few things. He can be taught. There aren’t many of us left, don’t you know that? Do you want the whole world to die?”
“It’s already dead.”
“I mean really die. Die out. No more children, nothing. Not even the machines. Most of those damned viewers don’t even work any more, they haven’t been tended in years.”
“There are probably fertile individuals in other clans. It doesn’t fall only to us. There have got to be others-”
“Do you want it to end this way, then? Don’t you want me-”
“Well, sure I want you,” Bill said hopelessly. “I guess I do, anyway. But there will always be someone looking at us, even after everyone here dies. “
“No there won’t.”
“Our own children will. “
“Those machines are breaking down, I told you. We won’t even take one. Let me tell you a secret. I smashed all of them around I could find.”
“Joan! When?”
“Just before.”
“They’ll kill us when they find out.”
“So I don’t care,” she said. She seized his wrists. “Now you know we’ve got to do something. You know we’ve got to go away.”
“How many did you break?”
“A lot. Rust will take care of the rest of them, and I don’t think any of the clan are smart enough to build them again. Don’t you understand? I think they’re really finished with them, now. I think it’s run out.”
Bill felt her pulling him along. Soon they would be out of the hutch, on level ground, and they could run. Forage from the land, build a settlement. Well, it sounded possible. Anything was possible. Joan was right, no one was going to follow them. They just weren’t that interested. “No more of them?” Bill said hopefully. ”You mean, no more of the machines?”
“I think not. But to be extra specially certain, just in case any instructions do survive in our new place, we won’t teach our kids to read.”
“Will it work?”
She smiled. “Oh, for a while,” she said. “Eventually one of them will learn to write and maybe put all of this down again, but by then it will be too late. And we’ll be free.”
And in the machine, in that swath of light Laurel had helped her cleave from the darkness Caroline saw them as it had been that night, the first night Arnold had known her, the night Arnold had loved her. She watched the bodies struggle, then slide in and amongst the shining spokes of light and then, in slow and terrible concert, the scene shifted, reassembled, and Caroline saw herself huge and arched against that wedge of vision as she struck the blow which killed Arnold, watched him collapse against her in that parody of embrace, and then the two of them locked, were rolling and rolling on the floor in and amongst the plans, the diagrams, the wires, the nest of that awful machinery. “Oh Laurel,” Caroline Potterly said. “Oh Laurel, oh Laurel…”
And the fires of Carthage came.
PAPPI
by Sheila Finch
The first thing tim noticed when he entered his old home was the visorphone in the hall flashing to warn him of an incoming call. It had to be for Karin, of course. But who wouldn’t already know she was dead? Karin didn’t have a very wide circle of friends.
The visorphone’s shrill call noise was irritating. He was tired from the shuttle flight, obscurely annoyed by the obsequious robot attendants, and feeling the pull of Earth’s excessive gravity already. He punched the receive button. The operator’s voice instructed Mr. Tim Garroway to stand by for a call from Mr. Howard Rathbone III.
Too late to worry about how Rathbone had figured where he’d be going to in such a hurry. He wasn’t cut out to play James Bond games, but he’d felt confident that Earth was the one place Rathbone would never think of looking for him if he made a run for it, since it was where Rathbone had wanted him to go. Obviously he’d under-estimated the man.
While he waited for the connection to be completed between Earth and the space station up at the Lagrange point that was Rathbone’s corporate headquarters, he glanced through the doorway into the living room to see what Beth was doing. She was sitting cross-legged on the rug, building a tower of books, her small plump face raised to the warm spring sunshine that flooded in through the undraped window. Sunlight sparked her curls to gold, and Tim’s heart lurched as he saw for the thousandth time how like her mother his little daughter was.
If only Sylvia could’ve seen her now.
If only the damned emergency-team robots had functioned as they were supposed to.
He’d gone over and over the options on the shuttle trip from the moon. There weren’t very many in his favor. Running had been an impulse that he’d begun to see might cause him a lot of nasty problems. He waited sullenly for the phone link to be completed.
The visorphone crackled, pulling his attention back, and the screen cleared. Howard Rathbone III gazed at him from the elegantly paneled office where he kept the helm of his billion-dollar enterprises. Tim had speculated once, on first seeing this magnificent room, how much it had cost to lob all that rare and expensive teak and mahogany and rosewood into space to reconstruct the look of a luxury ocean liner from the 1920s. Sylvia had giggled at his estimate. “Way, way under!” she’d said.
“Tim. You and Beth had a pleasant shuttle trip, I hope? Of course, you should have consulted me before you took the child along.”
So the old man wasn’t going to call it kidnapping just yet. Mr. Rathbone was a big man with a big man ‘s hearty voice and manner. And a heart made out of pure moon rock. Obviously he figured on gaining some advantage from playing along with Tim.
“Fine, thanks, Mr. Rathbone. I would’ve called you to-”
Rathbone overrode his words. “You and Beth will need some time to recover. Tomorrow will be plenty of time to do what we talked about. You will do it, of course. You have so much to gain!”
Uneasily, Tim considered how often the man seemed to read his mind. Or was it just that he himself was totally predictable, at least where Mercury Mining and Manufacturing was concerned? Maybe Rathbone was right; there was too much money involved to be squeamish, enough to buy Beth everything her heart desired now and for a long time to come. And was the price really so unreasonable?
“I’m relying on you, Tim,” Rathbone said. “Triple M’s future is in your hands. But I’m confident you’ll come through for us.”
Even when he was handing out praise and flattery, Rathbone’s words came out as orders. That was why he’d been so phenomenally successful, building his huge empire in less than two decades since the Second Mercury Expedition.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m a reasonable man, Tim. I’d like to have your willing cooperation. So I’m prepared to explain it all one more time. We must stop this now, before it goes any further. No telling what’ll happen if he gets away with it. Do you understand my position, Tim?”
Tim nodded, his throat dry.
“We can’t have all those machines out there thinking they’re entitled to rights and privileges same as humans. And they will, you know, if he gets away with this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re a bright man. But you’ve been squandering your talents. “
Not half as vicious as the things he’d said about Tim when he’d first learned of Sylvia’s marriage to a penniless student, and her pregnancy, Tim thought. But if he played his cards right…
Rathbone leaned back in his leather swivel chair, steepled his fingers, and gazed at the father of his daughter’s child. On the wall behind him a map of the inner solar system showed the Rathbone empire in scattered twinkling lights. “I have no heirs except for little Beth.”
Tim swallowed. His hunger to own and control what the map represented fought another battle with the cautious part of him. The outcome was indecisive again. Yet each time, the hungry side of him crept a little closer to victory. Especially here, in this house.
“I still wonder if it wouldn’t be better to try public exposure,” Tim said. “You know-subject him to public scrutiny-put him through tests he can’t pass-”
In the delay that followed, he knew what Rathbone’s answer would be.
“That’s been tried already!” Rathbone scowled at him across space. “ And failed. There’s no time left for pussyfooting here. He has to be removed. “
Tim shrugged uneasily.
“It’s not like killing a man, Tim. Stephen Byerley’s a robot!”
Rathbone spat the word out, loaded with all the contempt, the hatred, and the fear Tim knew that he felt for robots.
“Sleep on it, son,” his father-in-law said. In spite of the term he’d used, the threatening tone came through clearly. “I should think the consequences if you fail easily outweigh the demise of one robot.”
That was the other factor in the equation. If he refused to do what Rathbone wanted, then Rathbone would take Beth away from him. He couldn’t go back to the moon or the space station, and he sure couldn’t stay on Earth any more. There was no place he could hide that his father-in-law’s thugs couldn’t find him. And he certainly couldn’t take up the freelance life of an asteroid prospector, not with a three-year-old to raise.