Count the science-fiction novels you have most enjoyed over the past quarter-century, and see how many of them—The Humanoids, Dragon’s Island, Darker Than You Think, and many more—were written by a friendly and unassuming New Mexican named Jack Williamson. It is a pity that so few Williamsons appear in the science-fiction magazines these days. Perhaps New Mexico is too easy-going an environment to keep a writer chained to his typewriter, or perhaps it is only that his excursions into other areas of the science-fiction field (item, the comic strip Beyond Mars, which brightens the weekends of five million or so readers of the New York Sunday News; and item, the juvenile novel Undersea Quest, written in collaboration with your editor), don’t leave him enough time. But though the quantity of new Williamson stories is low, the quality is high; see for yourself in—
The girl stood chained in the
vending machine.
“Hi, there!” Her plaintive hail whispered wistfully back from the empty corners of the gloomy waiting room. “Won’t somebody buy me?”
Most of the sleepy passengers trailing through the warm desert night from the Kansas City jet gaped at her and hurried on uneasily, as if she had been a tigress inadequately caged, but Pip Chimberley stopped, jolted wide awake.
“Hullo, mister.” The girl smiled at him, with disturbingly huge blue eyes. The chains tinkled as her hands came up hopefully, to fluff and smooth her copper-blond hair. Her long tan body flowed into a pose that filled her sheer chemistic halter to the bursting point. “You like me, huh?”
Chimberley gulped. He was an angular young man, with a meat-cleaver nose, an undernourished mouse-colored mustache, and three degrees in cybernetic engineering. His brown, murky eyes fled from the girl and fluttered back again, fascinated.
“Won’t you buy me?” She caressed him with her coaxing drawl. “You’d never miss the change, and I know you’d like me. I like you.”
He caught his breath, with a strangled sound.
“No!” He was hoarse with incipient panic. “I’m not a customer. My interest is—uh—professional.”
He sidled hastily away from the shallow display space where she stood framed in light, and resolutely shifted his eyes from her to the vending machine. He knew machines, and it was lovely to him, with the seductive sweep of its streamlined contours and the exciting gleam of its blinding red enamel. He backed away, looking raptly up at the blazing allure of the 3-D sign:
GUINEVERE
THE VITAL APPLIANCE!
NOT A ROBOT—WHAT IS SHE?
The glowing letters exploded into galaxies of dancing light, that condensed again into words of fire. Guinevere, the ultimate appliance, was patented and guaranteed by Solar Chemistics, Inc. Her exquisite body had been manufactured by automatic machinery, untouched by human beings. Educated by psionic processes, she was warranted sweet-tempered and quarrel-free. Her special introductory price, for a strictly limited time, was only four ninety-five.
“Whatever your profession is, I’m very sure you need me.” She was leaning out of the narrow display space, and her low voice followed him melodiously. “I have everything, for everybody.”
Chimberley turned uncertainly back.
“That might be,” he muttered reluctantly. “But all I want is a little information. You see, I’m a cybernetics engineer.” He told her his name.
“I’m Guinevere.” She smiled, with a flash of precise white teeth. “Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456. I’d be delighted to help you, but I’m afraid you’ll have to pay for me first. You do want me, don’t you?”
Chimberley’s long equine countenance turned the color of a wet brick. The sorry truth was, he had never wholeheartedly wanted any woman. His best friends were digital computers; human beings had always bored him. He couldn’t understand the sudden pounding in his ears, or the way his knobby fists had clenched.
“I’m here on business,” he said stiffly. “That’s why I stopped. You see, I’m a trouble-shooter for General Cybernetics.”
“A shooter?” Psionic educational processes evidently had their limits, but the puzzled quirk of her eyebrows was somehow still entrancing. “What’s a shooter?”
“My company builds the managerial computers that are replacing human management in most of the big corporations,” he informed her patiently. “I’m supposed to keep them going. Actually, the machines are designed to adjust and repair themselves. They never really go wrong. The usual trouble is that people just don’t try to understand them.”
He snapped his bony fingers at human stupidity.
“Anyhow, when I got back to my hotel tonight, there was this wire from Schenectady. First I’d heard about any trouble out here in the sun country. I still don’t get it.” He blinked at her hopefully. “Maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”
“Perhaps I can,” she agreed sweetly. “When I’m paid for.”
“You’re the trouble, yourself,” he snapped back accusingly. “That’s what I gather, though the wire was a little too concise—our own management is mechanized, of course, and sometimes it fails to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of the human employee.”
“But I’m no trouble,” she protested gaily. “Just try me.”
A cold sweat burst into the palms of his hands. Spots danced in front of his eyes. He scowled bleakly past her at the enormous vending machine, trying angrily to insulate himself from all her disturbing effects.
“Just four hours since I got the wire. Drop everything. Fly out here to trouble-shoot Athena Sue—she’s the installation we made to run Solar Chemistics. I barely caught the jet, and I just got here. Now I’ve got to find out what the score is.”
“Score?” She frowned charmingly. “Is there a game?”
He shrugged impatiently.
“Seems the directors of Solar Chemistics are unhappy because Athena Sue is manufacturing and merchandising human beings. They’re threatening to throw out our managerial system, unless we discover and repair the damage at once.”
He glowered at the shackled girl.
“But the wire failed to make it clear why the directors object. Athena Sue was set to seek the greatest possible financial return from the processing and sale of solar synthetics, so it couldn’t very well be a matter of profits. There’s apparently no question of any legal difficulty. I can’t see anything for the big wheels to clash their gears about.”
Guinevere was rearranging her flame-tinted hair, smiling with a radiance he couldn’t entirely ignore.
“Matter of fact, the whole project looks pretty wonderful to me.” He grinned at her and the beautiful vending machine with a momentary admiration. “Something human management would never have had the brains or the vision to accomplish. It took one of our Athena-type computers to see the possibility, and to tackle all the technical and merchandising problems that must have stood in the way of making it a commercial reality.”
“Then you do like me?”
“The directors don’t, evidently.” He tried not to see her hurt expression. “I can’t understand why, but the first part of my job here will be to find the reason. If you can help me—“
He paused expectantly.
“I’m only four ninety-five,” Guinevere reminded him. “You put the money right here in this slot—”
“I don’t want you,” he interrupted harshly. “Just the background facts about you. To begin with—just what’s the difference between a vital appliance and an ordinary human being?”
He tried not to hear her muffled sob.
“What’s the plant investment?” He raised his voice, and ticked the questions off on his skinny fingers. “What’s the production rate? The profit margin? Under what circumstances was the manufacture of—uh—vital appliances first considered by Athena Sue? When were you put on the market? What sort of consumer acceptance are you getting now? Or don’t you know?”
Guinevere nodded brightly.
“But can’t we go somewhere else to talk about it?” She blinked bravely through her tears. “Your room, maybe?”
Chimberley squirmed uncomfortably.
“If you don’t take me,” she added innocently, “I can’t tell you anything.”
He stalked away, angry at himself for the way his knees trembled. He could probably find out all he had to know from the memory tapes of the computer, after he got out to the plant. Anyhow, he shouldn’t let her upset him. After all, she was only an interesting product of chemistic engineering.
A stout, pink-skinned business man stepped up to the vending machine, as the wailing urchin was dragged away. He unburdened himself of a thick briefcase and a furled umbrella, removed his glasses, and leaned deliberately to peer at Guinevere with bugging, putty-colored eyes.
“Slavery!” He straightened indignantly. “My dear young lady, you do need help.” He replaced his glasses, fished in his pockets, and offered her a business card. “As you see, I’m an attorney. If you have been forced into any kind of involuntary servitude, my firm can certainly secure your release.”
“But I’m not a slave,” Guinevere said. “Our management has secured an informal opinion from the attorney general’s office to the effect that we aren’t human beings— not within the meaning of the law. We’re only chattels.”
“Eh?” He bent unbelievingly to pinch her golden arm. “Wha—”
“Alfred!”
He shuddered when he heard that penetrating cry, and snatched his fingers away from Guinevere as if she had become abruptly incandescent.
“Oh!” She shrank back into her narrow prison, rubbing at her bruised arm. “Please don’t touch me until I’m paid for.”
“Shhh!” Apprehensively, his bulging eyes were following a withered little squirrel-faced woman in a black-veiled hat, who came bustling indignantly from the direction of the ladies’ room. “My—ah—encumberance.”
“Alfred, whatever are you up to now?”
“Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all.” He stooped hastily to recover his briefcase and umbrella. “But it must be time to see about our flight—”
“So! Shopping for one of them synthetic housekeepers?” She snatched the umbrella and flourished it high. “Well, I won’t have ‘em in any place of mine!”
“Martha, darling—”
“I’ll Martha-darling you!”
He ducked away.
“And you!” She jabbed savagely at Guinevere. “You synthetic whatever-you-are, I’ll teach you to carry on with any man of mine!”
“Hey!”
Chimberley hadn’t planned to interfere, but when he saw Guinevere gasp and flinch, an unconsidered impulse moved him to brush aside the stabbing umbrella. The seething woman turned on him.
“You sniveling shrimp!” she hissed at him. “Buy her yourself—and see what you get!”
She scuttled away in pursuit of Alfred.
“Oh, thank you, Pip!” Guinevere’s voice was muted with pain, and he saw the long red scratch across her tawny shoulder. “I guess you do like me!”
To his own surprise, Chimberley was digging for his billfold. He looked around self-consciously. Martha was towing Alfred past the deserted ticket windows, and an age-numbed janitor was mopping the floor, but otherwise the waiting room was empty. He fed five dollars into the slot, and waited thriftily for his five cents change.
A gong chimed softly, somewhere inside the vending machine. Something whirred. The shackles fell from Guinevere’s wrists and flicked out of sight.
SOLD OUT! a 3-D sign blazed behind her. BUY YOURS TOMORROW!
“Darling!” She had her arms around him before he recovered his nickel. “I thought you’d never take me!”
He tried to evade her kiss, but he was suddenly paralyzed. A hot tingling swept him, and the scent of her perfume made a veil of fire around him. Bombs exploded in his brain.
“Hold on!” He pushed at her weakly, trying to remind himself that she was only an appliance. “I’ve got work to do, remember. And there’s some information you’ve agreed to supply.”
“Certainly, darling.” Obediently, she disengaged herself. “But before we leave, won’t you buy my accessory kit?” A singsong cadence came into her voice. “With fresh undies and a makeup set and gay chemistic nightwear, packed in a sturdy chemyl case, it’s all complete for only nineteen ninety-five.”
“Not so fast! That wasn’t in the deal—”
He checked himself, with a grin of admiration for what was evidently an astutely integrated commercial operation. No screws loose so far in Athena Sue!
“Okay,” he told Guinevere. “If you’ll answer all my questions.”
“I’m all yours, darling!” She reached for his twenty. “With everything I know.”
She fed the twenty into the accessory slot. The machine chimed and whirred and coughed out a not-so-very-sturdy chemistic case. Guinevere picked it up and hugged him gratefully, while he waited for the clink of his nickel.
“Never mind the mugging, please!” He felt her cringe away from him, and tried to soften his voice. “I mean, we’ve no time to waste. I want to start checking over Athena Sue as soon as I can get out to the plant. We’ll take a taxi, and talk on the way.”
“Very well, Pip, dear.” She nodded meekly. “But before we start, couldn’t I have something to eat? I’ve been standing here since four o’clock yesterday, and I’m simply famished.”
With a grimace of annoyance at the delay, he took her into the terminal coffee shop. It was almost empty. Two elderly virgins glared at Guinevere, muttered together, and marched out piously. Two sailors tittered. The lone counterman looked frostily at Chimberley, attempting to ignore Guinevere.
Chimberley studied the menu unhappily and ordered two T-bones, resolving to put them on his expense account. The counterman was fresh out of steaks, and not visibly sorry. It was chemburgers or nothing.
“Chemburgers!” Guinevere clapped her hands. “They’re made by Solar Chemistics, out of golden sunlight and pure sea water. They’re absolutely tops, and everybody loves ‘em!”
“Two chemburgers,” Chimberley said, “and don’t let ‘em burn.”
He took Guinevere back to a secluded booth.
“Now let’s get started,” he said. “I want the whole situation. Tell me everything about you.”
“I’m a vital appliance. Just like all the others.”
“So I want to know all about vital appliances.”
“Some things I don’t know.” She frowned fetchingly. “Please, Pip, may I have a glass of water? I’ve been waiting there all night, and I’m simply parched.”
The booth was outside the counterman’s domain. He set out the water grudgingly, and Chimberley carried it back to Guinevere.
“Now what don’t you know?”
“Our trade secrets.” She smiled mysteriously. “Solar Chemistics is the daring pioneer in this exciting new field of chemistic engineering applied to the mass manufacture of redesigned vital organisms. Our mechanized management is much too clever to give away the unique know-how that makes us available to everybody. For that reason, deliberate gaps were left in our psionic education.”
Chimberley blinked at her shining innocence, suspecting that he had been had.
“Anyhow,” he urged her uneasily, “tell me what you do know. What started the company to making—uh—redesigned vital organisms?”
“The Miss Chemistics tape.”
“Now I think we’re getting somewhere.” He leaned quickly across the narrow table. “Who’s Miss Chemistics?”
“The world’s most wanted woman.” Guinevere sipped her water gracefully. “She won a prize contest that was planned to pick out the woman that every man wanted. A stupid affair, organized by the old human management before the computer was put in. There was an entry blank in every package of our synthetic products. Forty million women entered. The winner was a farm girl named Gussie Schlepps before the talent agents picked her up—now she’s Guinevere Golden.”
“What had she to do with you?”
“We’re copies.” Guinevere smirked complacently. “Of the world’s most wonderful woman.”
“How do you copy a woman?”
“No human being could,” she said. “It takes too much know-how. But our computer was able to work everything out.” She smiled proudly. “Because you see the prize that Miss Chemistics won was immortality.”
“Huh?” He gaped at her untroubled loveliness. “How’s that?”
“A few cells of scar tissue from her body were snipped off and frozen, in our laboratory. Each cell, you know, contains a full set of chromosomes—a complete genetic pattern for the reproduction of the whole body—and the legal department got her permission for the company to keep the cells alive forever and to produce new copies of her whenever suitable processes should be discovered.”
“Maybe that’s immortality.” Chimberley frowned. “But it doesn’t look like much of a prize.”
“She was disappointed when they told her what it was.” Guinevere nodded calmly. “In fact, she balked. She didn’t want anybody cutting her precious body. She was afraid it would hurt, and afraid the scar would show—but she did want the publicity. All the laboratory needed was just a few cells. She finally let a company doctor take them, where the scar wouldn’t show. And the publicity paid off. She’s a realies actress now, with a million-dollar contract.”
“One way to the top.” Chimberley grinned. “But what does she think of vital appliances?”
“She thinks we’re wonderful.” Guinevere beamed. “You see, she gets a royalty on every copy sold. Besides, her agent says we’re sensational publicity.”
“I suppose you are.” A reluctant admiration shone through his mud-colored eyes, before he could bring his mind back to business. “But let’s get on with it. What about this Miss Chemistics tape?”
“The contest closed before our management was mechanized,” she said, “while old Matt Skane was still general manager. But when the computer took over, all the company records were punched on chemistic tapes and filed in its memory banks.”
He sat for a moment scowling. His eyes were on Guinevere, but he was reaching in his mind for the tidy rows of crackle-finished cabinets that housed Athena Sue, groping for the feel of her swift responses. The thinking of managerial computers was sometimes a little hard to follow, even for cybernetic engineers—and even when there was no question of any defective circuits.
Guinevere was squirming uncomfortably.
“Is something wrong with my face?”
“Not a thing,” he assured her solemnly. He scratched his chin. “I heard you tell your legal friend, back there at the vending machine, that you aren’t a human being within the meaning of the law. What’s the difference?”
“The original cells are all human.” She dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin and looked up to face him bravely. “The differences come later, in the production lines. We’re attached to mechanical placentas, and grown under hormone control in big vats of chemistic solutions. We’re educated as we grow, by psionic impulses transmitted from high-speed training tapes. All of that makes differences, naturally. The biggest one is that we are better.”
She frowned thoughtfully.
“Do you think the women are jealous?”
“Could be.” Chimberley nodded uncertainly. “I never pretended to understand women. They all seem to have a lot of circuits out of kilter. Give me Athena Sue. Let’s get out to the plant—”
Guinevere sniffed.
“Oh, Pip!” she gasped. “Our chemburgers!”
The counterman stood rubbing his hands on a greasy towel, staring at her with a fascinated disapproval. The forgotten chemburgers were smoking on the griddle behind him. Her wail aroused him. He scraped them up and slapped them defiantly on the counter.
Chimberley carried them silently back to Guinevere. He didn’t care for chemburgers in any condition, but she consumed them both in ecstasy, and begged for a piece of chemberry pie.
“It’s awfully good,” she told him soulfully. “Made from the most ambrosial synthetics, by our exclusive chemistic processes. Won’t you try a piece?”
* * * *
When they approached a standing cab out in the street, the driver stiffened with hostility. But he took them.
“Keep her back,” he growled. “Outa sight. Mobs smashed a couple hacks yesterday, to get at ‘em.”
Guinevere sat well back out of sight, crouching close to Chimberley. She said nothing,, but he felt her shiver. The cab went fast through empty streets, and once when the tires squealed as it lurched around a corner she caught his hand apprehensively.
“See that, mister?” The driver slowed as they passed a block of charred wreckage. “Used to be one of them mechanized markets. Mob burned it yesterday. Machines inside selling them. See what I mean?”
Chimberley shook his head. Guinevere’s clutching hand felt cold on his. Suddenly he slipped his arm around her. She leaned against him, and whispered fearfully:
“What does he mean?”
“I don’t quite know.”
* * * *
The Solar Chemistics plant was ominously black. A few tattered palms straggled along the company fence. A sharp, yeasty scent drifted from the dark sea of solar reaction vats beyond, and blue floodlights washed the scattered islands where enormous bright metal cylinders towered out of intertwining jungles of pipes and automatic valves.
Chimberley sniffed the sour odor, and pride filled his narrow chest. Here was the marvelous body to Athena Sue’s intricate brain. It breathed air and drank sea water and fed on sunlight, and gave birth to things as wonderful as Guinevere.
The driver stopped at a tall steel gate, and Chimberley got out. The rioters had been there. The palms along the fence were burned down to black stumps. Rocks had smashed gaping black holes in the big 3-D sign on the side of the gray concrete building beyond the fence, and broken glass grated on the pavement as he walked to the gate.
He found the bell, but nothing happened. Nobody moved inside the fence. All those dark miles of solar reactors had been designed to run and maintain themselves, and Athena Sue controlled them. A thousand fluids flowed continuously through a thousand processes to form a thousand new synthetics. Human labor was only in the way.
“Your almighty machine!” the driver jeered behind him. “Looks like it don’t know you.”
He jabbed the bell again, and an unhurried giant with a watchman’s clock came out of the building toward the gate. Chimberley passed his company identification card through the barrier, and asked to see somebody in the office.
“Nobody there.” The watchman chuckled cheerfully. “Unless you count that thinking machine.”
“The computer’s what I really want to see, if you’ll let me in—”
“Afraid I couldn’t, sir.”
“Listen.” Chimberley’s voice lifted and quivered with incipient frustration. “This is an emergency. I’ve got to check the computer right away.”
“Can’t be that emergent.” The watchman gave him a sun-bronzed grin. “After all the hell yesterday, the directors shut off the power to stop your gadget.”
“But they can’t—” Alarm caught him, as if his own brain had been threatened with oxygen starvation. “Without power, her memory tubes will discharge. She’ll—well, die!”
“So what?” The watchman shrugged. “The directors are meeting again in the morning, with our old legal staff, to get rid of her.”
“But I’ll have her checked and balanced again by then,” he promised desperately. “Just let me in!”
“Sorry, sir. But after all that happened yesterday, they told me to keep everybody out.”
“I see.” Chimberley drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper. “Would you tell me exactly what did happen?”
“If you don’t know.” The watchman winked impudently at the cab where Guinevere sat waiting. “Your big tin brain had developed those synthetic cuties secretly. It put them on the market yesterday morning. I guess they did look like something pretty hot, from a gadget’s point of view. The item every man wanted most, at a giveaway price. Your poor old thinking machine will probably never understand why the mobs tried to smash it.”
Chimberley bristled. “Call the responsible officials. Now. I insist.”
“Insist away.” The brown giant shrugged. “But there aren’t any responsible officials, since the computer took over. So what can I do?”
“You might try restraining your insolence,” Chimberley snapped. “And give me your name. I intend to report you in the morning.”
“Matt Skane,” he drawled easily. “Used to be general manager.”
“I see,” Chimberley muttered accusingly. “You hate computers!”
“Why not?” He grinned through the bars. “I fought ‘em for years, before they got the company. Lost my health in the fight, and most of the money I had. It’s tough to admit you’re obsolete.”
Chimberley stalked back to the cab and told the driver to take him to the Gran Desierto Hotel. The room clerk there gave Guinevere a chilling stare, and failed to find any record of his reservation. Another taxi driver suggested his life would be simpler, and accommodations easier to arrange, if he would ask the police to take her off his hands, but by that time his first annoyed bewilderment was crystalizing into stubborn anger.
“I can’t understand people,” he told Guinevere. “They aren’t like machines. I sometimes wonder how they ever managed to invent anything like Athena Sue. But whatever they do, I don’t intend to give you up.”
Day had come before he found an expensive room in a shabby little motel, where the sleepy manager demanded his money in advance and asked no questions at all. It was too late to sleep, but he took time for a shower and a shave.
His billfold was getting thin, and it struck him that the auditing machines might balk at some of his expenses on account of Guinevere, Prudently, he caught a bus at the corner. He got off in front of the plant, just before eight o’clock. The gate across the entrance drive was open now, but an armed guard stepped out to meet him.
“I’m here from General Cybernetics—”
He was digging nervously for his identification card, but the tall guard gestured easily to stop him.
“Mr. Chimberley?”
“I’m Chimberley. And I want to inspect our managerial installation here, before the directors meet this morning.”
“Matt Skane told me you were coming, but I’m afraid you’re late.” The guard gestured lazily at a row of long cars parked across the drive. “The directors met an hour ago. But come along.”
A wave of sickness broke over him as the guard escorted him past an empty reception desk and back into the idle silence of the mechanized administrative section. A sleek, feline brunette, who must have been a close runner-up in the Miss Chemistics contest, sat behind the chrome railing at the dead programming panel, intently brushing crimson lacquer on her talons. She glanced up at him with a spark of interest that instantly died.
“The hot shot from Schenectady,” the guard said. “Here to overhaul the big tin brain.”
“Shoulda made it quicker.” She flexed her claws, frowning critically at the fresh enamel. “Word just came out of the board room. They’re doing away with the brain. High time, too, if anybody wants to know.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you see ‘em?” She blew on her nails. “Those horrible synthetic monsters it was turning loose everywhere.”
He remembered that she must have been a runner-up.
“Anyhow,” he muttered stubbornly, “I want to check the computer.”
With a bored nod, she reached to unlatch the little gate that let him through the railing into the metal-paneled, air-conditioned maze that had been the brain of Athena Sue. He stopped between the neat banks of pastel-painted units, saddened by their silence.
The exciting sounds of mechanized thought should have been whispering all around him. The germanium pentodes, cells of the cybernetic mind, had always been as silent as his own, but punched cards should have been riffling through the whirring sorters, as Athena Sue remembered. Perforators should have been munching chemistic tape, as she recorded new data. Relays should have been clicking as she reached her quick decisions, and automatic typewriters murmuring with her many voices.
But Athena Sue was dead.
She could be revived, he told himself hopefully. Her permanent memories were all still intact, punched in tough chemistic film. He could set her swift electronic pulse to beating again, through her discharged tubes, if he could find the impossible flaw that had somehow led to her death.
He set to work.
Three hours later he was bent over a high-speed scanner, reading a spool of tape, when a hearty shout startled him.
“Well, Chimberley! Found anything?”
He snatched the spool off the scanner and shrank uneasily back from the muscular giant stalking past the programming desk. It took him a moment to recognize Matt Skane, without the watchman’s clock. Clutching the tape, he nodded stiffly.
“Yes.” He glanced around him. The billowy brunette and the guard had disappeared. He wet his lips and gulped. “I—I’ve found out what happened to the computer.”
“So?”
Skane waited, towering over him, a big, red, weather-beaten man with horny hands shaped as if to fit a hammer or the handles of a plow, a clumsy misfit in this new world where machines had replaced both his muscles and his mind. He was obsolete—but dangerous.
“It was sabotaged.” Chimberley’s knobby fist tightened on the spool of tape, in sweaty defiance.
“How do you know?”
“Here’s the whole story.” He brandished the chemistic reel. “Somebody programmed Athena Sue to search for a project that would result in her destruction. Being an efficient computer, she did what she was programmed to do. She invented vital appliances, and supplied a correct prediction that the unfavorable consumer reaction to them would completely discredit mechanized equipment. So the saboteur re-programmed her to ignore the consequences and put them on the market.”
“I see.” Skane’s bright blue eyes narrowed ominously. “And who was this cunning saboteur?”
Chimberley caught a rasping, uneven breath. “I know that he was somebody who had access to the programming panel at certain times, which are recorded on the input log. So far as I’ve been able to determine, the only company employee who should have been here at those times was a watchman—named Matt Skane.”
The big man snorted.
“Do you call that evidence?”
“It’s good enough for me. With a little further investigation, I think I can uncover enough supporting facts to interest the directors.”
Skane shifted abruptly on his feet, and his hard lips twitched as Chimberley flinched. “The directors are gone,” he drawled softly. “And there isn’t going to be any further investigation. Because we’ve already gone back to human management. We’re junking your big tin brain. I’m the general manager now. And I want that tape.”
He reached for the chemistic spool.
“Take it.” Chimberley crouched back from his long bronze arm, and ignominiously gave up the tape. “See what good it does you. Maybe I can’t prove much of anything without it. But you’re in for trouble, anyhow.”
Skane grunted contemptuously.
“You can’t turn the clock back,” Chimberley told him bitterly. “‘Your competitors won’t go back to human management. You’ll still have all their computers to fight. They had you against the wall once, and they will again.”
“Don’t bet on it.” Skane grinned. “Because we’ve learned a thing or two. We’re going to use machines, instead of trying to fight them. We’re putting in a new battery of the smaller sort of auxiliary computers—the kind that will let us keep a man at the top. I think we’ll do all right, with no further help from you.”
Chimberley hastily retreated from the smoldering blue eyes. He felt sick with humiliation. His own future was no serious problem; a good cybernetics engineer could always find an opening. What hurt was the way he had failed Athena Sue.
But there was Guinevere, waiting in his room.
His narrow shoulders lifted, when he thought of her. Most women irked and bored him, with all their fantastic irrationalities and their insufferable stupidities, but Guinevere was different. She was more like Athena Sue, cool and comprehensible, free of all the human flaws that he detested.
He ran from the bus stop back to the seedy motel, and his heart was fluttering when he rapped at the door of their room.
“Guinevere!”
He listened breathlessly. The latch clicked. The door creaked. He heard her husky-throated voice.
“Oh, Pip! I thought you’d never come.”
“Guin—”
Shock stopped him, when he saw the woman in the doorway. She was hideous with old age. She felt feebly for him with thin blue claws, peering toward him blindly.
“Pip?” Her voice was somehow Guinevere’s. “Isn’t it you?”
“Where—” Fright caught his throat. His glance fled into the empty room beyond, and came back to her stooped and tottering frame, her wasted, faded face. He saw a dreadful likeness there, but his mind rejected it. “Where’s Guinevere?”
“Darling, don’t you even know me?”
“You couldn’t be—” He shuddered. “But still—your voice—”
“Yes, dear, I’m yours.” Her white head nodded calmly. “The same vital appliance you bought last night. Guinevere Model 1, Serial Number 1997-A-456.”
He clutched weakly at the door frame.
“The difference you have just discovered is our rapid obsolescence.” A strange pride lifted her gaunt head. “That’s something we’re not supposed to talk about, but you’re an engineer. You can see how essential it is, to insure a continuous replacement demand. A wonderful feature, don’t you think, darling?”
He shook his head, with a grimace of pain.
“I suppose I don’t look very lovely to you any longer, but that’s all right.” Her withered smile brightened again. “That’s the way the computer planned it. Just take me back to the vending machine where you bought me. You’ll get a generous trade-in allowance, on tomorrow’s model.”
“Not any more,” he muttered hoarsely. “Because our computer’s out. Skane’s back in, and I don’t think he’ll be making vital appliances.”
“Oh, Pip!” She sank down on the sagging bed, staring up at him with a blind bewilderment. “I’m so sorry for you!”
He sat down beside her, with tears in his murky eyes. For one bitter instant, he hated all computers, and the mobs—and Matt Skane as well.
But then he began to get hold of himself.
After all, Athena Sue was not to blame for anything. She had merely been betrayed. Machines were never evil, except when men used them wrongly.
He turned slowly back to Guinevere, and gravely kissed her shriveled lips.
“I’ll make out,” he whispered. “And now I’ve got to call Schenectady.”