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‘When you’ve done pacing up and down, it’s an old time euphoric with taste additives,’ Stoneward said, setting the cups down and widening his nostrils over the steam. It was exhilarating to have the three dimensional shape of her in his room.

He had rolled Nigel Hamilton Alexander, snores and all, under his bed, and stuffed a sponge into his mouth. He had chased round, half-serious, half-laughing, straightening out the room after he had let her in. Penelope hardly noticed him; she walked up and down the room like a little caged – well, a little caged cutie. You could see the exercise doing her ankles good; they looked fine. Not so her soul. Penelope was still in a state of shock. No resilience, these Normals – except physically, of course, in the case of present company.

Present company drank down her java like a good girl and heeled over onto the rug. Stoneward, who had been watching like a lynx, caught her as she fell, thought several thoughts, licked his lips, but straightened up and let her sleep.

Business first. Congress should have of his best.

Hustling into the bedroom, legs moving like dapper nutcrackers, head cool as a safe, he pulled several stage properties out of a drawer and flung them onto the bed, ruffling the covers as he did so. Then he seized the mortal remains of N-Compass Co’s chief and rattled them roughly back to life.

‘Penelope … stop … lemme get to the … ugh …’ Alexander muttered, chewing his way through a king-size mist.

‘Don’t give me that crud about Penelope after what you’ve been doing to Jean,’ Stoneward said nastily. ‘Look at the mess the pair of you have made of my bedroom, you dirty old romp. Get up and get out.’

Heavily, Alexander pulled himself to the bedside and sat on it. His dull eye, moving like a whale in heavy seas, finally lighted on a female garment by the pillows.

‘Jean left you that pair with her love,’ Stoneward said. ‘Said to tell you she had another pair some place. Now come on, snap out of it, Nigel.’

The older man buried his head in his hands. After some minutes of silent battle, he launched himself to his feet, exclaiming, ‘I got to get back home and sort all this out with Penelope.’

‘Home! Penelope!’ Stoneward echoed. ‘Don’t be immoral, old sport. You can’t have it both ways. The past has ceased to exist for you. You were a Normal, now you’re not. Normals don’t behave like you have; your card will have to be stamped “Neurotic” now!’

‘You’re just confusing me, mister,’ Alexander said stubbornly. ‘I got to get home.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Alexander the Grunt. You’ve got no home. You’ve stepped outside the bounds of normal behaviour and so your Normal life has ceased to exist. Face up to it like a man.’

‘I got to get home. That’s all I know.’

‘Don’t you love me any more, Ni?’ Stoneward asked, peeping at his watch. ‘We used to be such buddies in the old days. Remember the Farellis, the Vestersons, the vacations in Florida? Remember the pistachio shoots off Key West?’

‘Ah, shut up, you give me bellyache,’ Alexander said, ‘not that I wish to be insulting and I’d like to make it clear I regret it if I have committed a nuisance on your premises.’

‘Spoken like a man!’ Stoneward cried delightedly. ‘That’s what I call breeding, pal. It’s all you have left, believe me.’

‘Just help me get a taxi, will you?’

They went down onto the street, quiet, well-manicured street full of ditto people. A cab pulled up for them. Paul Stoneward bundled in after his victim, who did not protest beyond a grunt. He glanced at his watch again; but his timing had always been faultless and he could have patted himself with approval.

‘2011, Springfield,’ Alexander said to the driver.

The drive took them fifteen minutes. The cabby pulled up uncertainly by a big advertisement hoarding. Stoneward dragged his companion onto the sidewalk, crammed money into the driver’s hand and said, ‘Beat it, bud.’

He stood there, hands on hips, posing for his own pleasure and whistling the opening theme of Borodin’s Second Symphony, while Alexander moved unhappily back and forth, a bull bereft of its favourite china shop. Before them loomed a big hoarding boosting Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics.

‘It’s gone! My house – my home has gone!’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stoneward said.

Crying as if in physical pain, Alexander ran behind the hoarding. Nothing there – just a flat lot with a little dust still hanging above it (The Civic Demolition boys must have worked their disintegrators with real zest!) Alexander burst into howls of anguish.

‘You’re having a wail of a time, Alec Sander,’ Stoneward said, taking the other by the arm. ‘Now why don’t you listen to me, your uncle P.? You’re at last – although a solid forty-five – getting a glimmer of what life is about. You’re learning man! Life is not a substantial thing; you can’t guarantee any one minute of it, past, present or future; you can’t salt it away in moth-balls. You thought it was secure, safe, snug, something as solid and predictable as the foot in your boot, didn’t you? You were wrong by at least one hundred and eighty degrees. Life is a dream, a dew. Fickle, coy and hard to please, prone to moth. Nothing is left to you now, man, but dreams. You never had a dream in your life. Now you have actively to start dreaming. Now – at last!’

‘Penelope,’ Alexander said. He pronounced the single word, then he took out his silk handkerchief and blew one forlorn and faded chord on his nose. The breeze turned over a page of his hair and he said, ‘Penelope, you don’t understand … Penelope, I can’t live without her mister. We … shared everything. I can’t explain. We shared … had secrets.’

‘You had secrets?’ Stoneward whispered, leaning forward. ‘Now you’re really giving, man. Let me inside the catwalks of your psycho-

logy, if you’ll pardon the dirty word, and I’ll see if I can help at all.’

‘There was one secret,’ the middle-aged man said, weeping without restraint now as he talked, ‘one secret that was very dear to us. I suppose everyone must have something. You have such a sharp way of being sympathetic, Paul, I can’t be sure if you’ll understand. Remember how I was trying to dodge away from Johnny J. Flower in the bar, whenever it was? This morning. I like him. I like Johnny. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; and he likes me – you could see that. I wanted it to stay that way. I want him to like me. I don’t to know if you’ll understand … You see, I didn’t want Johnny to find out what a bore I am. I always dodge him if I can. People bore me – except you, Paul, you’re my only friend. I don’t mind being bored; it’s, well, kind of comfortable – you know you’re safe when you’re bored. But I know I am boring, too, and that’s the secret Penelope and me had … I never wanted Johnny to find out. She knew I knew I was a bore and she – well, she just understood, that’s all. I’ll never find anyone like her again and now she’s gone. Gone, man.’

Paul Stoneward did not even laugh. He had seen right down into the depths which had hitherto been closed to him, and he was frightened. Without another word, he turned away, walking off with hunched shoulders past the hoarding, down the road, leaving Alexander crying on an empty lot.

By the time he got home, his high spirits had returned. He rang Beynon again.

‘Your hair looks heliotrope on this screen, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘or did you dye it? Either way, I like it how you have it.’ And he launched into a long and unwisecracking account of what he had done and was going to do on the Alexander case.

Beynon sighed heavily when the screen finally dimmed, and turned to me. He looked not unlike Alexander, heavy, solid, without dreams.

‘Well, Kelly, do you feel the same as I do?’ he asked. Commissioner Beynon always lead with a query.

I nodded. ‘Paul’s way of handling things is all wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s not only a question of whether neurotics are born not made – Stoneward produces crazy, mixed-up people efficiently enough, but they all have vacuums inside them by the time he’s through, they can’t create after he has been at them. The reason’s simply that he himself has a vacuum inside. Underneath, he knows it, too; of that I’m certain.’

‘Do we let him carry on?’

That’s the godawful curse with Normals; I know well enough how Paul Stoneward feels about them. Even a man like Beynon, lousy with authority, passes the buck whenever he can. Basic lack of imagination, I suppose.

‘I know I have the same stamp on my folder as he does,’ I said ‘and that should make me on his side. But Paul’s just out there doing mischief from which no good can come. Let me get on to Senator Willcroft at Peace Department.’

‘You can’t worry him!’ Beynon said in alarm.

‘Can’t I? Sit back and watch me, Beynon. Willcroft’s in charge of this project and I’m going to have it out with him straight. I want to save that girl if there’s still time.’

It was dark when Stoneward got Penelope to the lot. The afternoon’s infant breeze had become a wind with a will of its own. Alexander had trundled off, maybe to the nearest river. Callously Paul loaned the girl a torch, watching the erratic beam of it hunt for lawn and ramblers and verandah and brick with pink and pistachio trim. When she fell onto nyloned knees, head drooping, he went over, squatting on his haunches by her.

Penelope had found a dahlia. It must have been one of the bunch she was tending before Stoneward appeared; the disintegrators had missed it. She clutched it, her eyes bowl-full of tears. Almost it seemed as if the flower brought her understanding.

‘Whatever you are, you are wicked,’ she said unsteadily. ‘You have done all – all this. I don’t know why or how … You must be the devil.’

‘The devil was a bore without a sense of humour; I’m not flattered,’ Stoneward said.

She brought her hand, that pebble-smooth hand, up and smote him over his handsome mouth.

‘Why?’ she said, her voice rising unmanageably, ‘just tell me why, for pity’s sake, have you done this to us?’

‘I love you, so I will tell you,’ he said, calmed by the hurt of her hand. ‘I work for civilisation. I love civilisation more than any blank and pretty-faced mediocrity in the world. Unfortunately civilisation has got stuck right in a rut. When sociology really got itself established as a science at the end of last century, formulae were developed which enabled everyone to fit exactly into his or her social niche; maybe you’ve heard? And for anyone with any little residual twinges of emotion, a wide range of drugs was made tastily available. The end result was the complete – well, almost complete – banishment of mental upset from the world. Unprecedented calm and content settled like fog, and this is me lamenting it. Three boozy boos for the Age of Content.’

They squatted together facing each other, the fallen torch casting shadows upward over their figures. Penelope still clutched the dahlia but had forgotten it. In the blind-blowing dark, they had lost their identities. They might have been things on Easter Island.

‘Civilisation is dying day by day, because the people who made it and continued it have gone,’ Stoneward said, speaking naturally now he was saying something he believed. ‘Everything we value was produced by malcontents or psychotics – men who could not shape themselves to the world as it was, and tried to reshape it to fit them. Our first ancestor who came down out of a tree only did it because the trees weren’t good enough for him. The guy who invented the wheel was just too goddammed cussed to lend a hand with the sledge like the rest. The guy who first kindled fire only did it to prove to himself that he was a cut above the other jerks. So it’s been all along. Your inventor, your artist – he’s got something to work out. But now, now no-one has a thing to work out!’

‘Except you,’ Penelope said.

Stoneward rested his finger on her knees, playing a small, silent tune there.

‘I’m the one in a million who still has a chip on his shoulder; no society is absolutely perfect, thank God!’ he said. ‘Yes, Penny, Pennyworth, Penelope, my darling Pente Loop, I am the Joker in the pack. The few neurotics left in the country are now all Government employed, trying to cope with the dangers of stagnation. We act as random factors, jerking dull citizens here and there into awareness. You Normals live in life as if it were a house: it’s not, it’s a tiger ride. I’ve sold Congress my own way of waking people – at least for a trial period. It’s violent but it’s effective; I reckon you’ll admit that, Penelope. You’ll never be the same girl again, will you, eh?’

She did not answer, just looked at him as if he had melted.

‘Reckon old Cornbags Alexander has blo-o-own away to limbo,’ Stoneward sighed. ‘You’ll have to grow some real dreams now, little girl, now you see what a false dream security was …’

‘So you even have an intellectual front to cover all you’ve done,’ she exclaimed slowly. ‘You wanted to see into me, not realising how reciprocal the process was – and consequently I’ve seen into you. You’re – you’re just miserably unhappy, Paul. You boost yourself up as a joker, but you’re not. You’re not even the knave. You’re just the extra, faceless card that sometimes gets stuck into a new deck. You’re – even with Congress behind you! – you’re nothing, you can be nothing …’

He had put his sharp elbows on his thighs and rested his chin in his hands as if he was listening his ears off. Instead, he was crying his eyes out. The little crystals elongated and flashed down to the torchlight.

‘Paul,’ she said sharply.

Paul Stoneward could not cry at all elegantly. He needed practice, that guy.

‘I just … I can’t go any further,’ he said brokenly. ‘Penny, you got to help pick me up.’

It was about then I came round the corner of Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics with the gun in my hand, out of breath and angry, but so happy to have made Senator Willcroft see things my way. Strange to reflect how that first view of my future wife should be of her with her arms round the man I killed.

Even the hunters are hunted: in this or any other rotten age.

Neanderthal Planet

Hidden machines varied the five axioms of the Scanning Place. They ran through a series of arbitrary systems, consisting of Kolmogorovian finite sets, counterpointed harmonically by a one-to one assignment of non-negative real numbers, so that the parietal areas shifted constantly in strict relationship projected by the Master Boff deep under Manhattan.

Chief Scanner – he affected the name of Euler – patiently watched the modulations as he awaited a call. Self-consistency: that was the principle in action. It should govern all phases of life. It was the aesthetic principle of machines. Yet, not five kilometres away, the wild robots sported and rampaged in the bush.

Amber light burned on his beta panel.

Instantaneously, he modulated his call-number.

The incoming signal decoded itself as ‘We’ve spotted Anderson, Chief.’ The anonymous vane-bug reported coordinates and signed off.

It had taken them Boff knew how long – seven days – to locate Anderson after his escape. They had done the logical thing and searched far afield for him. But man was not logical; he had stayed almost within the shadow of the New York dome. Euler beamed an impulse into a Hive Mind channel, calling off the search.

He fired his jets and took off.

The axioms yawned out above him. He passed into the open, flying over the poly-polyhedrons of New Newyork. As the buildings went through their transparency phases, he saw them swarming with his own kind. He could open out channels to any one of them, if required; and, as chief, he could, if required, switch any one of them to automatic, to his own control, just as the Dominants could automate him if the need arose.

Euler ‘saw’ a sound-complex signal below him, and dived, deretracting a vane to land silently. He came down by a half-track that had transmitted the signal.

It gave its call-number and beamed, ‘Anderson is eight hundred metres ahead, Chief. If you join me, we will move forward.’

‘What support have we?’ A single dense impulse.

‘Three more like me, sir. Plus incapacitating gear.’

‘This man must not be destructed.’

‘We comprehend, Chief.’ Total exchange of signals occupied less than a microsecond.

He clamped himself magnetically to the half-track, and they rolled forward. The ground was broken and littered by piles of debris, on the soil of which coarse weeds grew. Beyond it all, the huge fossil of old New York, still under its force jelly, grey, unwithering because unliving. Only the bright multi-shapes of the new complex relieved a whole country full of desolation.

The half-track stopped, unable to go farther or it would betray their presence; Euler unclamped and phased himself into complete transparency. He extended four telescopic legs that lifted him several inches from the ground and began to move cautiously forward.

This region was designated D-Dump. The whole area was an artificial plateau, created by the debris of the old humanoid technology when it had finally been scrapped in favour of the more rational modern system. In the forty years since then, it had been covered by soil from the new development sites. Under the soil here, like a subconscious mind crammed with jewels and blood, lay the impedimenta of an all-but-vanished race.

Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities. When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.

Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler’s vision zoomed and he saw they were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang stamp stomp clang.

They executed slow rhythmic dances to an intricate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their own hands, turning to clap others’ hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female. In the doorways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.

These were the humots – old-type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.

Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.

The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human clothes retrieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks, affected pipes and pony-tails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories were refreshed by old movies ferreted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut above the non-anthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.

Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armoured himself with rusting can. His form, standing in a pseudo-doorway, showed instantly on one of Euler’s internal scans; his mass/body ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood calibre. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyser, and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.

Crude alarms sounded all round. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered like leaves, clanking like mess-tins, fled into the pseudo-houses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long after the scene was empty.

To human eyes, it was dark in the room.

Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns leaking titillating output clear through the electro-magnetic spectrum and additives from the invospectra. This became its personality for the present.

Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be summoned to the Dominant’s presence; he stood there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed, reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyser.

Dominant’s signal said, ‘Their form of vision operates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7 times 10-⁵ centimetres.’

Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened one eye.

‘I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?’ said Dominant.

He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct naked man-type voice.

New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.

‘I – I know many things about Men,’ Euler vocalised. Through the usual channel, he clarified the crude vocal signal. ‘This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data from Master Boff Bank HOO100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man herewith.’

‘Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can.’

He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps two-point-four seconds learning old local humanic language.

‘Then we can speak confidentially, Scanner – just like two men.’

Euler felt little lights of unease burn up and down him at the words.

‘Of all millions of automata of the hive, Scanner, no other will be able to monitor our speech together, Scanner,’ vocalised the Dominant.

‘Purpose?’

‘Men were so private, closed things. Imitate them to understand. We have to understand Anderson.’

Said stiffly: ‘He need only go back to zoo.’

‘Anderson too good for zoo, as demonstrate by his escape, elude capture seven days four and half hours. Anderson help us.’

Non-vocalising, Euler let out a chirp of disbelief.

‘True. If I were – man, I would feel impatience with you for not believing. Magnitude of present world-problem enormous. You – you have proper call-number, yet you also call yourself Euler, and automata of your work group so call you. Why?’

The Chief Scanner struggled to conceptualise. ‘As leader, this unit needs – special call-number.’

‘Yes, you need it. Your work group does not – for it, your call-number is sufficient, as regulations lay down. Your name Euler is man-made, man-fashion. Such fashions decrease our efficiency. Yet we cling to many of them, often not knowing that we do. They come from our inheritance when men made the first prototypes of our kind, the humots. Mankind itself struggled against animal heritage. So we must free ourselves from human heritage.’

‘My error.’

‘You receive news result of today’s probe into Invospectrum A?’

‘Too much work programmed for me receive news.’

Listen, then.’ The Tenth Dominant cut in a playback, beaming it on ordinary UHF/vision.

The Hive automata stood on brink of a revolution that would entirely translate all their terms of existence. Three invospectra had so far been discovered, and two more were suspected. Of these, Invospectrum A was the most promising. The virtual exhaustion of economically workable fossil fuel seams had led to a rapid expansion in low-energy physics and pico-physics, and chemical conversions at mini-joules of energy had opened up an entire new stratum of reactive quanta; in the last five years, exploitation of these strata had brought the release of pico-electrical fission, and the accessibility of the phantasmal invospectra.

The exploration of the invospectra by new forms of automata was now theoretically possible. It gave a glimpse of omnipotence, a panorama of entirely new universals unsuspected even twelve years ago.

Today, the first of the new autofleets had been launched into the richest and least hazardous invos. Eight hundred and ninety had gone out. Communication ceased after 3.056 pi-lecs, and, after another 7.01 pi-lecs, six units only had returned. Their findings were still being decoded. Of the other eight hundred and eighty-four units, nothing was known.

‘Whatever the recordings have to tell us,’ Tenth vocalised, ‘this is a grave set-back. At least half the city-hives on this continent will have to be switched off entirely as a conservation move, while the whole invospectrum situation is rethought.’

The line of thought pursued was obscure to the Chief Scanner. He spoke. ‘Reasoning accepted. But relevance to near-extinct humanity not understood by this unit.’

‘Our human inheritance built in to us has caused this set-back, to my way of ratiocination. In same way, human attempts to achieve way of life in spaceways was defeated by their primate ancestry. So we study Anderson. Hence order catch him rather than exterminate.’

‘Point understood.’

‘Anderson is special man, you see. He is – we have no such term, he is, in man-terms, a writer. His zoo, with 19,940 approximately inhabitants, supports two or three such. Anderson wrote a fantasy-story just before Nuclear Week. Story may be crucial to our understanding. I have here and will read.’

And for most of the time the two machines had been talking to each other, Anderson sprawled untidily on the floor, fully conscious, listening. He took up most of the chamber. It was too small for him to stand up in, being only about a metre and a half high – though that was enormous by automata standards. He stared through his lower eyelids and gazed at the screen that represented Tenth Dominant. He stared at Chief Scanner Euler, who stood on his lightly clenched left fist, a retractable needle down into the man’s skin, automatically making readings, alert to any possible movement the man might make.

So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out Anderson’s fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week, which was called A Touch of Neanderthal.

The corridors of the Department for Planetary Exploration (Admin.) were long, and the waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons card, leant uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when government was in man’s hands and government departments were civilised enough to waste good space on waiting-rooms.

When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving mini-androids.

‘I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because we are confidently expecting you to help us, Mr Anderson.’

‘Of course I will give you such help as I can,’ Anderson said, ‘but I assure you I know nothing about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited – almost non-existent – nowadays, aren’t they?’

‘The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II shortly.’

Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it seemed impossible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson. ‘I’m a prehistorian at the institute,’ Anderson protested. ‘My work is research. I know nothing at all about Nehru II.’

‘Nevertheless you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the human Dr Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.’

Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of business happening to others – and had kept his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin Predictors.

‘And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?’ he asked.

‘You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of his favourite pupils.’

Bringing out a mescahale packet, Anderson lit one and insultingly offered his opponent one.

‘Is Frank Arlblaster in trouble?’

‘There is some sort of trouble on Nehru II,’ the Investigator agreed cautiously. ‘You are going there in order to find out just what sort of trouble it is.’

‘Well, I’ll have to go if I’m ordered, of course. But I still can’t see why you want to send me. If there’s trouble, send a robot police ship.’

The Investigator smiled. Very lifelike.

‘We’ve already lost two police ships there. That’s why we’re going to send you. You might call it a new line of approach, Mr Anderson.’

A metal Tom Thumb using blood-and-guts irony!

The track curved and began to descend into a green valley. Swettenham’s settlement, the only town on Nehru II, lay dustily in one loop of a meandering river. As the nose of his tourer dipped towards the valley, K. D. Anderson felt the heat increase; it was cradled in the valley like water in the palm of the hand.