Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Moments later he seemed to have forgotten them, and he reminded me in his dry voice about the list he had given me.

“The festival’s over: one, we went to the festival; two, you fought for the championship; three, we gained the purse; four, if you were alert you should have learned much; of course, the mutant learned much also, I didn’t foresee that,” he said, apparently worried by this lack of foresight.

When we came to the edge of the city, where the fires died out, where the music of the people gave way and the music of crickets held forth, he turned toward the mountains; but I was young, and I had caught my first glimpse of woman in all her glory.

The last time I saw him, he was moving up the mountain as slender and spry as a youth, and I remember with some bitterness and with some sadness that he never looked back to where I watched him from the road.

If thy right hand offend thee . . .

Artie stood at the staple press in the warehouse, yanking open cardboard boxes and loading them on the press, folding in the bottom flaps; then he slammed down his shoe on the trigger pedal, the pneumatic armature banged the pedestal and rammed brass prongs through dusty cardboard. Pshkkk. In the warehouse, Artie was standing, folding the flaps, pressing down his dusty shoe on the leaky pedal, holding each box while the machine slammed in staples, throwing the stiff boxes onto a pile. Pshkkk. Artie was standing up, stapling boxes at the warehouse, holding down the bottom flaps while the pneumatic press blew dusty air in his face and rammed staples through cardboard. Pshkkk. Artie stood working in the warehouse, throwing empty boxes onto a pile.

The portable radio that hung from the New Kid’s belt announced his approach. Artie looked up at him, strolling down the H-500-H-900 aisle. His eyes, under a red bandana, shot to Artie before he even got to the concrete column at the end of the aisle. He ducked under the steel beams of the shelf and stepped right over to Artie, slinging a pink sheet from inside his belt. The Kid rattled the paper and said, “Your phone’s ringing.”

“Why is it my phone?”

“You work here.”

“You also. You answer it. I answered it twice today. You know what it said? It tapped.”

“Bad connection?”

“A tapping noise. You listen.”

“Maybe it’s Morse code.”

“I happen to know Morse code.”

The Kid hooked a strand of hair out of his mouth and pushed it over his ear, grinning. “Skilled labor. Am I ever suitably impressed.” College punk. “Hey, maybe it’s a radio contest. I bet if you say the right words, you win a vacation.”

The armature punched four staples through four cardboard flaps. Artie swung a box up onto the pile.

“Art, you made that box upside-down.”

The phone stopped ringing.

“Art, if that was the freight manager calling, your ass is plastic grass. Speaking of whom, have a pink slip. Sample order. All that diddley-shit is supposed to be pulled by noon. All for you.”

The spring-loaded staple magazine was running low. The air pressure was uneven. A staple jammed up and twisted sideways, wedged all wrong. Pshkrk.

“Why me?”

“Years with the firm. You’re indispensable. Take the pink slip before my arm falls off.”

Artie took the order in his left hand and reached his right arm into the box to unbend the staple from the inside. His index finger snagged on a sharp prong. He couldn’t work it loose. He whipped the box to and fro on his arm, tried to shake it loose. Wouldn’t shake loose.

“Art, is that your latest attachment? I wish my right arm was so versatile.”

Artie grabbed the box under his left elbow and yanked it loose. His right hand gave a sickly whimper through its punctured cuticle. He pulled it out and checked it over. It had self-sealed with no fluid leakage.

“That’s real authentic, Art. You know, not every prosthetic gets hangnails. I remember this rubber hand I bought at a novelty shop. . . .”

Artie’s plastic third finger was still in fine form hydrodynamically. He held it under the Kid’s nose. Vertical.

The Kid laughed and walked to the stencil cutter for a cigarette.

The very first item on the pink slip was a problem, SERIAL # Q-14738 / product description hobbyist models, Gio-Dark Super-Shark Strato-Monitor. Artie had never seen a five-digit item number before, let alone a Q, series.

Artie wandered up and down aisles half a city block long, between steel racks three stories high. Scuffling around in his orthopedic nylon shoes, sidestepping pallets loaded with unshipped orders, hopping over jack-handles, Artie explored nooks he’d never even noticed. Inventory tags slid through the focus of his tired eyes. Moonbase Pogocraft. Sunbat Kiteship. Tripontoon Carrier with Conshelf ScubaSled. p-14737, p-14800. Customize Your Own SST. Model T Ford. Stilt-Man. The Human Ear. The Human Lung. Reptiles of the World. Insects of the World . . .

Artie thinking, I’ll never find anything in all this crap.

Artie up-angled his eyes, yearning for a clock to say quitting time. Above him, two stories of dusty air and hooded fluorescent tubes. No cranking skylights. He set his elbows on the shelf behind him, hands hanging limp. He bowed his head and stared at his prosthetic, drowsing off, wondering whether it slept when he did.

Artie got to thinking about how he lost his first right hand, the one that came with the rest of him. He thought about the details of the accident. A classic industrial accident.

It was before he worked in shipping—back when he worked in production. Part of his job was mixing colorant powder into barrels of polystyrene granules. His face and arms were always covered with colored dust. Ruby, amber, black, avocado . . . The day of the accident, the injection-molding machines were running amber, and the compression presses were taking ruby. Artie’s cheeks were smeared with yellow. His hands looked like sweaty lobster claws.

His main job was feeding the big machines. If their hoppers ran out of plastic, they overheated and broke down. They molded miniature parts, day and night, parts of model kits for kids. Numbered components clustered on stems. Flat twigs of mock machinery. Halves of pistons. Sections of fuselages. Deck A. Wing flap 20. Turret R-1. The presses never stopped crapping them out, heating and recycling, mold and eject, hissing and pounding, water-cooled and pneumatically powered.

Artie was on a stepladder, shoveling granules into the hopper of a compression press. It was steadily turning out a single part for the Mega-Manbot Water Strider set. A very popular model. All the heroes of modem youth seemed to be high-powered machines.

Artie stared into the collection bin of the press, trying to figure out what piece of the Manbot model he was looking at. It couldn’t be the cockpit bubble; it wasn’t translucent.

Artie figured it out. It was what went inside the cockpit bubble: the pilot. The head and shoulders of a man, mostly covered by helmet, headphones, and goggles. A firm jaw. A resolute mouth.

Hot water trembled inside a rubber hose that hung near Artie’s head. It fed under an enamel casing where a temperature gauge was almost in the red. Not his job to fix it. He’d report it to the foreman. He climbed down the stepladder. When the upper side of the mold lifted, he peered in at the lower. One Manbot pilot was mashed on top of another Manbot pilot pancaked over another Manbot pilot that had failed to eject. If the pileup got much bulkier, the mold could be damaged.

He pulled his screwdriver out of his pocket and bent over to dislodge the jam before the next compression cycle. The jam was a stubborn bugger.