PHILIPPA MADDERN
The important thing was to take notice when things changed, because changes meant danger of discovery. One had to be very sharp-eyed and careful; the nightly tour of the building was enjoyable, but also a necessity - the room-by-room, step-by-step, space-by-space check that everything was as it had been.
She had a routine of her own, and that in itself was pleasant. It was good to feel the same slight regret every evening at leaving the comfort of the three-cornered cave behind the display boards stacked against the conference room wall. It was reassuring to go down, every night, and get the lumi-torch from where it sat on the window ledge of the men’s toilets every day, soaking in the light to give back at night. To be sure, the torch had come into the building with her, and was not now as efficient as it had been; but then mostly she knew the building well enough to do without it. It was security, too, against the odd time when there was upheaval in the building, and she had to take to the dark spaces in the ceiling and behind the walls.
Then it was time to start the night’s first purposeful potter along her own laid-out track, starting from the basement, through the canteen (picking up the odd slice of kabana or bread or soy-bean munchie along the way), up around all the offices, rifling quickly through the desks, hunting the kitchen fridges for milk, nosing among the office memos and rubbish bins, absorbing bits from the small stores of biscuits, chocolate, sugar, brandy, vitamin pills, apples in bottom drawers along the way, up to the calm carpeted rooms on the fifth floor with their nuleather chairs and wooden desks. It was a slow progress, and demanded time and concentration; yet it was reassuring to search out food bit by bit, in inconspicuous nibbles and swigs, to ponder information, snaffle forgotten keys, search the workshop for handy bits and pieces.
There were not many places she could not get into. The hidden safe in the biggest office (but that was electronically keyed to palm print and voice control) and one or two filing cabinets, whose keys she had never found and whose locks had no space for the slip of plastic which worked well elsewhere - but that was all. The rest was her territory, unchanging and manageable.
After the prowl, there might be time for racing round the building (eight minutes by the basement clock was her fastest time, locking and unlocking as she went). Or she could go to one of the offices, sit in its desk chairs, and read its in-trays, letters, and diaries; or there was the maintenance room to go through (not of course using the machines, which would be noisy, but just touching up keys with a file, or sharpening the stolen chisel which she kept in the leg pocket of her jumpsuit). Then again, there were food caches to replenish, and a wash every few nights was a good thing; a person depending heavily on her sense of smell cannot afford the distraction of her own stink.
So the night passed and, at the end, she would replace the torch, and go down to the basement, locking herself into the workroom cupboard and dozing quietly while the cleaners came and went. Then, after she had heard them shuffling and joking and bye-byeing their way out, it was time to go back to the cave in the conference room; to lie on its furry floor, watching the blade of light on its straight wall strengthen and broaden as the day grew; to drowse through the hours, waking sometimes to the tramp-shuffle of feet, the drawing back of chairs, the slap of papers on the table, and the argument of the day-people’s voices; until the dark came, and it was time to start again.
* * * *
Once upon a time (so the story in her head ran), a girl like her had walked briskly through the daytime doors, into the lift, up to the second floor, into the personnel manager’s office. There she had had her papers stamped, and walked out, falsely calm, marginally cool, intelligence thinly overlaying terror, into yet another office, after another regulation forty-day lay-off, into another regulation twenty-day work shift. In despair at the constant sickening dislocations of living, she had approached the console, been assigned a desk - and found there, for the first time in such a situation, traces of the previous occupant. There on the wall, beside the chair but below desk-level, was a collection of pictures, cuttings, and extracts - all size-reduced, it is true, and taped very inconspicuously to the cool cream plaster, but nevertheless evidence of some continuity, some stability.
She spent the rest of the day dropping hand-scanners and sheets of paper and trays of clips so that, in pretending to search for them, she could read, gradually, the whole collection. It was fortunately eclectic rather than sequential. A few details stuck in her mind still; ingenious limericks, a series of cartoons about the consistent hopelessness of a child playing baseball, a small poem about mice and men living in the spaces left vacant by each other. But mostly it was the underlying premise that continuity was possible that she remembered. Outside, in the sliding networks of the world, people moved endlessly from city to city, following the minuscule regional rises in job placements, restless anonymous conglomerate crowds. Here beside her desk was stability.
It was, indeed, a fulcrum time in her life, a time when all occurrences clicked neatly into one implication, without volition on her part. One day there was a momentary power failure, and she saw the office for a moment safe and calm, all its efficiencies and activity smoothed out by the weight of the dark. Another time, at tea break someone commented on the strange coincidences of his coming back here as a clerk when he had been a cleaner here last year. Someone else asked what the cleaning shift was like, and he said, not bad, except for the hours - having to get to work at five-thirty every morning nearly killed him. Potential difficulties solved themselves at every step. Utilitarian fashions were in, so it was easy and inconspicuous to buy a well-pocketed black jumpsuit. A notice appeared in the fridge at work -
THERE HAVE BEEN COMPLAINTS IN THE PAST WEEK OF FOOD THEFTS FROM THIS FRIDGE; IF THESE DO NOT CEASE THE FRIDGE WILL BE REMOVED
- but everyone said it was only a threat, because these things worked themselves out with change of shifts. Every day, it seemed, new motivations appeared. Newsprints reported moves to shorten working shifts and promote longer and more varied lay-offs, in view of the rising production/population ratio. A friend died; he had gone swimming while on a high, and his companions reported that he had said, ‘The deep sea is beautiful,’ then closed his eyes and sank as if by willpower. Not realising what he was doing, and being somewhat high themselves, they had failed to rescue him.
It was easy, after that, to imagine him sliding beneath the nervously shining surface of the sea, deeper and deeper into the green space beneath, trails of perfect silver bubbles marking his path downwards. Always in her mind the bubbles rose quickly at first, and then increasingly slowly, and at last stopped; and they and his body hung suspended in a great stillness.
So one night before the end of her shift, this girl, instead of leaving the building, had locked herself in a cupboard, and waited for the lights to go out. Afterwards, she had wandered, panicky and exhilarated, around the few rooms to which she had access. Early in the morning she had walked out unchallenged, and spent the rest of the day in the car park, in the company of four sleeping meths drinkers.
At the end of her shift, she bought an expensive new lumi-torch, told all her acquaintances that she was going to spend her next forty days bushwalking around Hattah Lakes, and hinted that she was thinking of taking off for Central Australia. On the last day, she walked into the building carrying a limited-life plastic bag with a supply of food, the torch, a screwdriver, and other odds and ends which she thought would be useful. Most of them proved useless instead, and were ditched. The few good choices she carried around with her all the time. A lot of the food was eaten by mice (she cached it in the wrong places). The bag, dropped from a window, sat tangled in the sun for a few days before degrading into invisibility, and she disappeared from the unstable glare of her daytime life.
* * * *
She still thought of that girl often, not exactly for the pleasure of the memory, but because the contrast between her inefficiency and clumsiness then, and her present wisdom and knowledge and skill, was comfortingly sharp. That first girl’s life, for some weeks, had been full of alarms, noisy mistakes, unseen opportunities, missed information. Now, her life had settled, for the first time ever, into a constant routine, every day and every night the same, for ever and ever.
* * * *
Fairly regularly she revisited the picture sequence by her original desk, noting with some pleasure the failure of attempts to clean it off (the original compiler had cannily used bond-tape, which was now firmly integrated into the plaster) and the occasional small additions (moustaches on the cartoon figures). But this time, as she faced it, an inkling of more serious unfamiliarity with her surroundings made itself felt. The sequence, on closer inspection, proved to be the same; but something in the room was different.
Switching off the torch, she sat back on her heels, and considered. New sounds? Draught? Temperature change? Smell - smell, yes there was a whiff of something unusual here. By licking her finger and rubbing it on her nose, she brought it up stronger - a metallic, chemical smell, not immediately threatening, but suspicious. Careful prowling tracked it down to a desk at the opposite end of the room; the smell was printing ink from a newsprint lying open on the desk top, the cheap quick-drying ink of a tabloid print-out, very rarely smelt in the office.
Now that she had identified it, she could afford to be curious. Opening the torch, she played the light over the page. At first, it was disappointing, nothing but fuzzy pictures with meaningless captions; then her eye caught the paragraph scanned in red to mark the reader’s interest. It ran:
‘HUMAN MOUSE-TRAPPED. Mice? Rats? or just a new life style? London police reported today the capture of a man they claim had lived in an office building for eight years unknown to regular workers.
‘“He must have been a regular human mouse, stealing food, sleeping in corners,” said one his “trappers”.
‘Message for any other mice is “Watch Out”, though - I hear there’s new kinds of traps getting ready for them.
‘Otherwise - who knows? - might be just the life for some of you “mousy” types out there ...’
And so on, filling up space with a lack of information.
She stood for a while, pondering over it, and whether it might be a threat. On the one hand, it was in London, which was a long way away, and it had nothing really to do with her. On the other, the whole article began to seem like a little eye, peering up at her inquisitively from the desk top. It made her angry; what right did they have to take someone out of his home territory? But then again, what could she do about it? She never moved papers on desks; that was asking to be found out. For a moment she thought of putting it into the shredder. Would the owner think the cleaners had taken it? Or would he simply forget about it? It depended, of course, on how important it was to the owner (H Jorgensen, according to the panel on the desk). But how was she to know? It was scanned, so Jorgensen must have requested it, but why? For passing curiosity? Or, if not that, for what possible other reason?
She dithered for some time but, in the end, left the paper untouched. Instead she went down to the maintenance room and resharpened her chisel, feeling somehow that it was the safest thing to do.
Next evening, when she went to check H Jorgensen’s desk, it was properly empty, and only the faintest whiff of tabloid ink lingered above it.
* * * *
The following night, she knew the instant she crawled out of the cave that there was something wrong in the building. Crouched dead still at the entrance, she searched through all the impressions coming to her out of the dark for the one who had alerted her; and, at last, heard again the ominous sound. Footsteps. Footsteps; not close, a floor away, maybe. She raced silently for the angle in the corridor which sheltered the heating pipes, and put her head against it. Down the pipes from the floor above, the echoes came plainly. Pace pace pace, stumble, clang. Shuffle. Pace pace. Silence. Pace pace pace.
She thought. Once or twice there had been people in the building at night, but mainly in the big offices of the half-time permanents upstairs, but never for long. This might be the same, though it did not sound so. Neglecting the lumi-torch, she ran for the stairs and went up them as quickly and silently as a draught. The room on the corner had a window which overlooked the office where the footsteps sounded. Opening and closing the door with hardly a click, she moved in, avoided the table, and crept up to the window. If it was a day-person, there should be a light showing.
There was no light. All the long windows of the office were as blank as black paper in the thin gloom of the city. Worried, she moved to the corner of the room, near the pipes, and listened again. For a moment there was nothing; surely the person could not have got out so soon? But then, clear and loud, she heard the steps again, coming towards the near door of the office. As they halted, next to her but for the wall, she held her breath and heard, over the thumping of her own heart, the breathing of the person in the office, then the snap of the lock turning, then the door dragging over the carpet, and then the steps again moving out into the corridor.
There was a row of low seats along the corridor wall of the room, and she was under them in a fraction of a second, in case the intruder should come in. But, listening at the skirting board, she heard the steps go faltering on down the corridor, right to the dead end at the west wall, and come back again, and veer off towards the stairs.
She lay a moment to give the person time to move on, and to consider what to do. If it was only a day-person, it would not be long, but then day-people very seldom walked in the dark. Always before, she had been able to trace their progress through the building by the lights switched on and off, until they lit themselves safely out the door. But what if the person were a burglar? But then not many burglars worked in complete dark, either. A burglar would not be hard to cope with - she could avoid anyone like that all night, easily - but what would be the consequences? Quick to see the worst, her mind leapt to a picture of burglar alarms attached to every door. That would make things more difficult; not impossible, because she could dismantle some alarms, but difficult. Or what if the intruder were a security person? But there seemed no sense in having so slow and inefficient a security check.
She could simply keep out of the way all night; but then she would never know what the person had come for. Ignorance was dangerous. In the end, information could be more important than food. She wriggled out from under the chairs, and listened at the pipe again. The footsteps were still going down the stairs, but very faintly now. It was safe to come out of the room, and go fast-pace through the office and out and down the back stairs, to check on the intruder’s route through the lower floors.
All that night she shadowed the intruder, at first at a distance, and then, as she became sure of her own skill against the newcomer’s ineptitude, closer - once or twice, so close that she could catch the body smell, and be almost sure it was male. In one way it was so easy that it bored her; he fumbled slowly through the dark along a very small circuit of the building, while she ran in beautiful clever circles around him. Yet in another, it was uncanny, frightening; for he neither worked nor stole, but only walked, heavy-footed and alien, around her territory. In the end, he stayed so late that it was nearly dawn when she watched him out of the front door, and she had no time to scrounge before the cleaners came.
Standing, hungry and tired, in the basement cupboard, she thought ahead for the day. There was no reason that she could immediately see why an intruder at night should mean an upheaval in the day. But there might be a link that she did not see; the cave might not be safe. But the cave held her best cache of food, in a sealed niche under the floor. It would still be possible to hole up in the ceilings for the day, but she had no extensive food caches in the ceilings, because of the mice. Also, the ceiling hide-outs took time to reach; she would have to dismantle a light fitting and replace it behind her. There would not be time to do that and raid a food cache.
But the ceilings were undoubtedly safest; and thinking around all the hide-outs, she decided at last on the one reached through the washroom. That at least would leave her time for a drink and a piss before the day. For food, she would have to rely on the handful she always carried in her pockets, and whatever she could gather from the small ceiling caches; all right, as long as she could stock up tomorrow.
So the night did not end at its usual time, and was not restful, anyway. Standing balanced edgily on a washbasin, she prised out the light fitting, hauled himself in, and replaced it loosely behind her. After that, there was still the task (risky and slow without the lumi-torch) of inching through the ceiling fittings to retrieve food caches.
Even when she had finished, and lay uncomfortably in the cold stuffiness of the ceilings, there was still the future to be considered. The longer she thought, the more unusual and potentially dangerous the intruder seemed. Irrational happenings like that often meant large-scale disturbances in the building and, in case of one occurring now, the only thing to do was to collect resources and retreat almost wholly to the ceilings for some time. It was not a pleasant thought, and would mean a lot of hard work in the coming night; but, having thought it out, she felt a little less anxious, and at last, hours into the day, could fall asleep.
* * * *
When her time-sense woke her at about nine that night, she was at first bewildered at the unexpected black dark, and hard angular surroundings. The edges of bad dreams were still cutting at her attention, but there was no time to think of them. She had her program worked out - first, check for possible intruders, then general forage, and lastly, the demanding job of cleaning out food caches all over the building.
At the door of the washroom, she stopped to listen, and clenched her fists in anger as she heard, again, the slow footsteps of the intruder. Now she would have to check where he was and what he was doing before starting the night’s heavy work. From the sound of it, the man was in the office on her own floor. Visualising it, she remembered that the ceiling there was beam and presspanel, not always well laid. That would probably be the best place to spy on him. She ran for the lumi-torch, then back to the washroom, and went up into the ceilings again.
With the torch, ceiling work was much quicker. It took only a few minutes to reach the space over the office and find a crack beside one of the beams. She put her ear to it and listened; the sounds of someone in an unfamiliar place still came up clearly. Almost shutting off the torch, and angling the beam through the crack so that it just faintly lightened the dark, she squinted down. Nothing but a slice of desk and carpet. She moved to the next beam and, luckily, a slightly wider crack. Here, she could just see a blob and a curve, which resolved themselves, in a few moments, into the foreshortened arm and shoulder of the man. Then, as he took a step sideways, he swung into full view. She saw his head bent over something in his hands and, as he moved again, the thing became clearer - a long tube, almost like a very old gun, but thicker, with something that might have been a dial at one end. The man was swinging it round gradually, checking the dial every few degrees. Once he moved it up until it pointed almost directly at the ceiling, and she saw the faint grey circle of its muzzle clearly; then he clicked his tongue, and returned the tube to a level, and moved on a step, so that she lost sight of him again.
Whatever he was doing was incomprehensible, and therefore worrying, but it was slow. Also, it was not immediately threatening. A little reassured, she snaked back to the washroom, shut off the torch, and fled to the canteen, to collect waterproof containers, ferry them back to the washroom, fill them, and stack them one atop the other in rows in the ceiling.
She worked harder and faster that night than ever before in her life. She brought out her complete bunches of keys, raided the big refrigerators, recklessly pocketed whole chunks of cheese, packets of biscuits, cartons of bean-meal. At first she stopped every few minutes to listen to the man working his way ponderously through the office, and its adjoining rooms. Later, the manic urge for speed and thoroughness almost overcame caution, and she went from floor to floor, rifling through the desks, taking quantities that she would never normally venture on (but in a time of office upheaval they would not be missed). Sweating, she raced up and down the stairs from cache to cache, clearing them all - the cave, the lift well, the locked filing-cabinet drawer whose one key she had stolen long ago.
Late in the night, she came at last to her best cache, large and safe, hidden in the angle between two cupboards, boarded in (her own work) with slats stolen from the workmen who built the cupboards. It was difficult to reach, accessible only if one practically crawled inside one of the range of cupboards. Also, it was some time since she had checked it, and the slats had stiffened into place. Knowing that there was not much time, she wrenched at them roughly, aware of the noise it made only as a subsidiary factor, less important than the need to dismantle the cache.
So she was unprepared, as she backed out of the cupboard with hands full of food packages, to see the man standing in the centre of the room, pointing his metal tube at her.
Unprepared; but she had long ago learned to be quick. Before the packages had hit the floor, she had seen that he blocked her way (there was no second door to this room), and seen too that, though he had found her, he seemed hardly able to see her - standing stock-still, looking straight at her, as if he had never learned the trick of seeing sidelong in the dark.
The chisel came easily into her hand; she leapt just to the left of the man, slashing out and downwards, feeling the blade catch on cloth, then on flesh, then drag free. But the man himself had sprung back, quicker than she expected. He landed backed up hard against the door, one hand still grasping the tube, the other raised in defence, but still peering uncertainly through the gloom.
The thing might be a gun. She stopped, crouching, chisel still poised for stabbing. The man said something, and she snarled at him; belatedly, the words became meaningful, if not sensible.
‘Wait; it’s all right, I’m a friend.’
She did not answer, her mind crawling with plans for getting him away from the door, for killing him, for disposing of his body.
‘I’m a friend,’ he repeated. The tube wavered in his hand.
No point in killing him. If she hid him in her part of the building, he would stink her out, and if she put his body anywhere else, there would be an investigation. But what to do with him? She snarled again, and feinted with the chisel.
He dodged, and his head thumped against the door.
‘Out,’ she said, gesturing.
‘I only wanted to see -’
‘Out.’ The first time she had raised her voice in the building. The ring of it, down the corridors, through the pipes, the lift shafts, the ceiling spaces, terrified her with its noise and unfamiliarity.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said, moving sideways, trying to keep an eye on her.
‘What’s that?’ She gestured to the tube.
‘That? Oh, that’s all right. I’m sorry. It’s not a weapon or anything. It’s only an infra-red detector.’ Then, when she did not answer, ‘Really, it’s all right. I made it myself. You can look at it if you like.’
He reached it out to her. She struck at him, and he jumped back, dropping the tube on the floor, where it bounced harmlessly.
They faced each other, still and tense in the dark.
He began to speak again, the words slipping out of his mouth so fast that her unpractised ear missed patches of them.
‘Look, I saw this article, and I thought I’d ... interesting ... try for myself ... study ... the other night, did you know? ... okay, you’re scared I ... won’t stir things up ... find you ...’
She laughed, and gestured with the chisel towards the door. ‘Out.’
Cautiously, he backed through the doorway, and she followed, shepherding him down the corridor, out to the east stairs where the gloom was already lightening, down and around and down and around towards the exit.
At the stairs, he bravely turned his back to go down forwards. Once he said, ‘I’m not going to stir things up for you, you know that, don’t you?’
Unable to think of any of the terms of abuse she had once known, she flung out at him, ‘Jorgensen’, the only human name she could remember.
He half turned, in surprise. ‘How did you know?’
‘Get out.’
‘What’s your name?’
But she did not answer, having forgotten it long ago.
On the ground floor, two squares of pale grey light were already lying on the entrance tiles before the door. The cleaners would soon come in. He turned on the threshold, and said, ‘I could be useful, you know. You don’t know, but there are ways they could find you out. You might have to move, and you wouldn’t know where to go.’ In the light from the door, the sticky patch on his dark shirt where the chisel had caught him was plain to see. She hesitated, unwilling to approach the door; but the sight of him, braver, feeling safer now he was near daylight, was too much for her. She feinted to his left, then doubled back neatly, and drew the chisel in an elegant line across his face from one cheek-bone to the opposite jaw. Blood sprang out to meet the blade, and he cried out, crouched hands to face, humiliated; then turned, scrabbling for the door, and stumbled out.
Shivering, she watched him run twenty metres from the building, looking back in case she was following. Then, appalled by the near daylight, she turned herself, fled upstairs, grabbed the metal tube (no time to worry about its possible dangers) and raced for the ceiling.
* * * *
All the years, all the days, all the hiding, the careful secrecy, wasted. ‘You only have to be wrong once.’ Who had said that, long ago? On what work shift had that ultimate arrogance terrified her? For it was true; forget once to look around, and you could be discovered.
Nothing lasts; not memories, nor time, nor place, nor safety, nor secrecy. Nothing will keep, and nobody cares about it as she does. ‘It’ll be all right,’ they said when she wept and begged not to grow up, for childhood to last. ‘It’s wonderful for you young folks,’ they said, ‘nothing like all the unemployment when I was young’ - dragging her from one job, one building, to another and another and another. ‘I’m a friend,’ they said, trampling carelessly through her territory.
Nothing will keep.
Perhaps if one made a world, right from the start; built it piece by piece, space, planets, sea, land, plants, animals, humans, cities, all with one purpose; embedded in it everywhere directives that would last for all time; all to provide one niche for its creator, a place exactly appropriate, where nothing would disturb her and she would disturb nothing; perhaps then one would be safe, one would be left alone.
But she had left a mark on someone; they knew about her now.
The metal tube fitted awkwardly into the ceiling. Squinting down at the dial, she saw in vague wavering outline the pictures of the cylinders and pipes, coiling and sprouting from each other. Following the direction of its muzzle, she saw that it must be picking up part of the hot-water system, beyond the concrete beam. So Jorgensen had told the truth about one thing, anyway. But that did not confirm the rest of his story. He was out of her reach, in a different world. She could kill him - but he could safely lie to her. She waved the tube gently through the short arc of its possible movement, watching the pictures wriggle and glow on the dial.
* * * *
There was little reason, now, to come out of the ceilings at all; but neither could she remain there in peace. At any moment they might come to find her. She was always in danger. During the day, habit kept her still, but in the nights she came out for brief periods, to wander nervously around the building, imagining voices, footfalls, smells, changes, everywhere. Always, she was too afraid to stay out long, and always, returning, she thought of another place she should have checked, more information she might have looked for.
The ceilings began to fret her; the narrowness of them, the chill, always the cold smell of concrete. Narrow spaces had never worried her before; had always seemed safe, in fact. But there is a terrible difference between a niche you have chosen for yourself and a corner someone else has forced you into.
One night, driven by a great anger against the day-people, who could not even leave her to enjoy the space she had found for herself, she went back to Jorgensen’s desk, longing to show him what she thought of his stupid arrogant curiosity. It would be good to threaten him, to have him afraid again. She took the chisel in her hand, ready to break his name panel, slash his chair, gouge his name in the plaster - she had thought of many pleasant ways to frighten him.
All useless, of course. She could not hurt him without betraying herself, or even attempt to harm him without betraying her own position of weakness.
The smell of paper was in the air as she approached his desk, as if conjured up by the memory of the other time she had come here. Coming closer, however, she saw that it was no hallucination - a square of paper was indeed lying there. Time, perhaps, had stopped and doubled back on itself. Maybe Jorgensen had never come and found her with his sensitive metal tube, and there were second chances after all. Yes, and maybe I did create the world as well, she thought sourly, recognising that the paper smell was different this time. An office print-out smell it was, a memo smell.
She did not really want to read it - she no longer wanted to stay near the desk at all - but old lessons reasserted themselves (never let information go by). She shone the torch on it, and immediately the nasty word ‘infra-red’ caught her eye - once in the text, and again at the side of a diagram at the bottom of the sheet. A true Jorgensen word, she thought, forcing herself to read slowly, from the top:
‘Memo No. 713, 8th Nov. To all personnel.
‘For some time, ministerial directives have been received on the subject of building security. At the last DM, the motion was put and carried that:
‘A sub-committee be formed to investigate methods of securing office space from intrusion and damage.
‘The sub-committee has been in operation, and recommended to the Buildings Committee on 15th July that an A-T Model Securobot be purchased for the task. Grounds for recommendation of this particular model were as follows:
1. Multi-purpose faculties (see diagram) including stair-climbing program.
2. Local manufacture, ensuring ease of servicing.
3. Cost-effective as per study carried out by the sub-committee (see attached sheet).
‘Accordingly, an A-T Model Securobot (new) has been purchased, and will commence operations on all general areas of the third, fourth and fifth floors from 10th Nov. Office personnel are reminded again not to leave personal articles on or around desks after the afternoon shift, as this may impede the robot.’
There was a diagram, with its ring of labels: ‘Audio-sensors’, ‘Olfactory sensors (including smoke-triggering device)’, ‘General alarm circuits’, ‘Infra-red scanners’, ‘Light scanners’, ‘Stair treads’, ‘Guaranteed ten-year power unit’.
She stood looking at the diagram for a long time, thinking in a detached way what a good machine it was, and how well it covered all the skills she had herself built up over the hundreds and hundreds of hard nights. What would she not give to have eyes which would see through walls, ears to pick up pulse-beats three floors away, no need to eat?
Too late now to develop skills. The day-people had found a way to take her space from her; not by coming themselves, but by cowardly sending their machines to drive her out.
* * * *
There was nothing to be done, of course. She stayed one night longer, but the tension of waiting for the machine was too much for her. She could have faced a person - she had done so with Jorgensen - but she had no power to threaten a robot.
Early the next morning, submerging one terror in another, she went down to the doors for the last time, and stepped out into the strange light of pre-dawn, and the restlessness of the wind.
There was a man standing hunched in a coat some way from the door, and she dared not wait for him to go away. As she passed him, hurrying to look for a place to hide from the day, he turned round, and she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the half-healed scar running diagonally across his face.
‘You saw the memo,’ he called.
She walked on without answering.
‘I wanted to warn you,’ he said, walking a line parallel to hers, two or three metres away.
‘You told them,’ she said; but he shook his head. The wind was blowing eddies of dust around their feet.
‘I’m a researcher,’ said Jorgensen, after a while. But that was like all his talk, information in a vacuum, impossible to believe one way or the other.
The light was strengthening. She saw, looking around in horror, that a great paved plain stretched on all sides of them. She and Jorgensen were the only two things moving in the vast still space.
‘Soon be daylight,’ said Jorgensen.
First published 1979.