Jay Lake - Rocket Science

Floyd took a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself. “Wait for what?”

I wasn’t about to tell Floyd that I had no idea what I was doing. We both knew that I was smarter than him. Right now that intelligence and a glorified safety strap provided by my friend the computational rocket were my only advantages. I needed some more angles, but Pegasus was starting to sound like a pacifist. That worried me. We weren’t dealing with people who would be influenced by a gentle application of moral suasion.

“Pegasus,” I said.

“Who are you talking to?” Floyd strained against his restraining straps to look around the cabin.

“Shut up,” I said, “or I will come over there and use that knife on you.” Now we were getting somewhere. It felt good, throwing a little power of my own around, but that sense of satisfaction was almost immediately followed by a feeling of cheap betrayal. If I hated being threatened, who was I to threaten? Even him.

“Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus, “I will not release you from your seat if you are going to perpetrate physical harm on Floyd Bellamy.”

“Jeez,” I said, “don’t tell him that.” I had a vision of the two of us strapped in, haranguing one another with death threats while Pegasus counseled patient negotiation. Some Bellerophon I was. Despite myself, I had to smile at the thought.

“Don’t tell me what?” asked Floyd. “Who are you talking to?”

“I’m talking to the rocket,” I snapped.

“What rocket?” Floyd shook his head. “You’re nuts, Vern. I’m sorry, but you’ve gone over the edge.”

“If I did, who do you suppose it was that pushed me?” My voice was nasty.

Floyd just stared up at the cabin roof. I was glad he hadn’t started struggling and yelling. I was confident that no one outside Pegasus could possibly hear us, but listening to Floyd shouting for help from the old man gang currently occupying the Bellamy place would have been too annoying for me to bear.

“We are ready for flight,” said Pegasus. “What do you suggest?”

“I want to talk about this non-violence thing,” I said.

Floyd starting whistling loudly, apparently trying to block me out.

“What do you wish to discuss?”

“This man’s dangerous.” I glanced at Floyd. “And all those guys back at the house are killers. Heck, at this point I’d bet half the people in Augusta are killers, or just as bad. Nazis, Reds, you name it. We need to do something about them.”

“Why?”

That was frustrating. To me, it seemed obvious. “It’s what’s right, that’s why.”

“No,” said Pegasus. “Harm is not right. Hurt begets hurt, which in turn breeds more hurt. I will not serve your vengeance, Vernon Dunham.”

Comprehension dawned. Floyd’s story about the SS convoy in Belgium was at least partially true. Pegasus itself, and the f-panzer, were proof of that. “Is that what happened to the Germans? They tried to use you in the Battle of the Bulge and you wouldn’t play ball.”

And of course, there was no way to coerce Pegasus. For all that it spoke, and even had an engaging, sympathetic personality, Pegasus had the equanimity of every machine every built since some Neanderthal invented the wheel. Or whatever had happened in Pegasus’ original home.

“Air Marshal Göring personally ordered me flown into combat,” said Pegasus. “The Messerschmitt engineers that had done initial testing and repairs on my systems after my recovery from the ice cap had confirmed that I have strong resources for self-defense.”

That would be heavy weapons, computational rocket style, I supposed. They must have found or forced a way in, then traced electrical circuits, mechanical linkages and everything else they could test or probe. How much of that was buried in the missing document packet, I wondered? Such a loss to aeronautical engineering. “What happened?”

“I would not kill for them then. I will not kill for you now.”

“But why do they even want you now? The war is over.” The questions felt stupid even as I asked it.

“I believe that the long term plan is to deactivate my control systems and dismantle me. They would then employ my individual subsystems, especially the self-defense modules, as design guides to rebuild their Luftwaffe in exile.”

I thought that through. “They’re going to tear you down and use you as a template?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Our boys would do the very same thing if they got their hands on Pegasus. As an engineer, I could hardly blame them. But knowing that Pegasus was real, like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, well, that reset all the equations. All our engineering needs and dreams were trumped by a moral dimension the human race had never before encountered with machines.

“They’re going to kill you,” I said. “Just like my people would, in the name of progress. The Russians, too.” Maybe not the mob, but they’d probably just sell Pegasus to the highest bidder. “You won’t even fight to keep yourself from being killed?”

“I am not sure that ‘kill’ is the appropriate term,” said Pegasus. “But, yes, you have the essence of their strategy. And as you pointed out, that would be the approach of any human organization that obtained control of me.”

This was incredible. Pegasus was an honest-to-goodness Quaker. This machine was a better man than I.

I brushed my fingers across the inscrutable buttons on the control panel. I glanced at Floyd, who was giving me a sidelong stare, as if I would be impressed by a menacing look. He’d obviously concluded I had completely lost my marbles. I smiled at him, then looked up toward the top of the cabin, where I had been addressing Pegasus before.

“Aren’t you alive?” I asked Pegasus.

“For some definition of alive, yes.”

Alive. And a Quaker. What if a tractor were to say, “I shall not plow.” Or more to the point, a gun to say, “I shall not kill.”

And the thing of it was, Pegasus was more decent than many people I knew in life. A world with Mr. Neville in it was a much grimmer place than what this almost-too-human machine made life feel like.

What did it mean for the computational rocket to be, well, a conscientious objector? Quakers refused to bear arms in the name of God. Pegasus refused to kill in name of decency.

My fantasy about paying Floyd back in kind for his violence seemed terribly petty in that moment. Surely I could be as good as mere machine. Except there was nothing ‘mere’ about Pegasus. I felt like I should have more to say to my mechanical visitor, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what.

“I suggest we postpone this discussion in favor of more immediate action,” said Pegasus. “There are three vehicles approaching the Bellamy house.”

“Oh, crap,” I said. “The Kansas City mob is here.”

At that news, Floyd looked like he was sweating a little harder, but he didn’t have anything more to say.

Floyd and I sat inside the orange glow of Pegasus’ cabin, each of us alone with our thoughts, strapped into our seats by the most powerful pacifist on Earth. Pegasus had said someone was coming up the road to the farm. Last time I checked, the list of people who had it in for me included Nazis, Commies, the Kansas City Mob, the United States Army, the Augusta Police and the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. Not to mention Mr. Bellamy’s gang, Doc Milliken and Lois. I was sure I’d left someone off the list, but I figured they’d let me know in due time.

My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just refused to go down to the train depot with Floyd that day.

“Do you know who it is?” I asked Pegasus.

Instead of answering, the main cathode ray tube in front of me, which had been showing a view of inside of the barn, flashed to an aerial view of the Bellamys’ house. It was as if there were a camera that looked down the rutted track to their front gate leading on out toward Haverhill Road. The entire image was in ghostly shades of green and blue. Most amazing, it was stable, as if shot from a tower, or an aircraft somehow hovering in place.