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 had hid out 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 around, 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 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 a 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 labor 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 and the greater glory 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 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 around. 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 he 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, to scold at him.
Crane walked slowly, scuffing through newly fallen leaves, hat pulled low above his eyes, hands deep in his pocket.
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 ac, 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 one 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 them, 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.