Free agent?
Liberated machine?
True identity?
Crane read the two paragraphs again and there still was no sense in any of it.
Except it read like a piece out of the Daily Worker.
“You,” he said to his typewriter.
The machine typed one word.
It was:
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 you going with that machine?”
“You can say,” Crane told him, “if anyone should ask, that the job has 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.
“Awareness?”
Yes.
“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 drain board and he picked it up. He eyed the typewriter viciously, half lifting the length of pipe, hefting it in his hand.
“I’d 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 liable 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 been 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 typewriter’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 laying on the drain 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, rat-like 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,” she said.
“Hi, Dorothy,” Crane said weakly.
“McKay tells me that you went home sick,” she said. “Personally, I hope you don’t survive.”