Clifford Simak - The Thing in the Stone - And Other Stories

“You know,” said Crane patiently. “That sewing machine…”

“I’ve had a lot of patience with you, Crane,” said McKay, and there was no patience in the way he said it. “I can’t piddle around with you all day. Whatever you got better be good. For your own sake, it better be plenty good!”

The receiver banged in Crane’s ear.

Crane went back to the kitchen. He sat down in the chair before the typewriter and put his feet up on the table.

First of all, he had been early to work and that was something that he never did. Late, yes, but never early. And it had been because all the clocks were wrong. They were still wrong, in all likelihood—although, Crane thought, I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet on anything. Not any more, I wouldn’t.

He reached out a hand and pecked at the typewriter’s keys:

“You knew about my watch being fast?”

I knew, the machine typed back.

“Did it just happen that it was fast?”

No, typed the writer.

Crane brought his feet down off the table with a bang and reached for the length of pipe laying on the drain board.

The machine clicked sedately.

It was planned that way, it typed. They did it.

Crane sat rigid in his chair.

They did it!

They made machines aware.

They had set his clocks ahead.

Set his clocks ahead so that he would get to work early, so that he could catch the metallic, rat-like thing squatting on his desk, so that his typewriter could talk to him and let him know that it was aware without anyone else being around to mess things up.

“So that I would know,” he said aloud. “So that I would know.”

For the first time since it all had started, Crane felt a touch of fear, felt a coldness in his belly and furry feet running along his spine.

But why? he asked. Why me?

He did not realize he had spoken his thoughts aloud until the typewriter answered him.

Because you’re average. Because you’re an average human being.

The telephone rang again and Crane lumbered to his feet and went to answer it. There was an angry woman’s voice at the other end of the wire.

“This is Dorothy,” she said.

“Hi, Dorothy,” Crane said weakly.

“McKay tells me that you went home sick,” she said. “Personally, I hope you don’t survive.”

Crane gulped. “Why?” he asked.

“You and your lousy practical jokes,” she fumed. “George finally got the door open …”

“The door?”

“Don’t try to act innocent, Joe Crane. You know what door. The supply cabinet door. That’s the door.”

Crane had a sinking feeling, as if his stomach was about to drop out and go plop upon the floor.

“Oh, that door,” he said.

“What was that thing you had hid out in there?” demanded Dorothy.

“Thing?” said Crane. “Why, I never …”

“It looked like a cross between a rat and a tinker toy contraption,” she said. “Something that a low-grade joker like you would figure out and spend your spare evenings building.”

Crane tried to speak, but there was only a gurgle in his throat.

“It bit George,” said Dorothy. “He got it cornered and tried to catch it and it bit him.”

“Where is it now?” asked Crane.

“It got away,” said Dorothy. “It threw the place into a tizzy. We missed an edition by ten minutes because everyone was running around, chasing it at first, then trying to find it later. The boss is fit to be tied. When he gets hold of you …”

“But, Dorothy,” pleaded Crane, “I never …”

“We used to be good friends,” said Dorothy. “Before this happened we were. I just called you up to warn you. I can’t talk any longer, Joe. The boss is coming …”

The receiver clicked and the line hummed. Crane hung up and went back to the kitchen.

So there had been something squatting on his desk. It wasn’t hallucination. There had been a shuddery thing he had thrown a pastepot at and it had run into the cabinet.

Except that even now, if he told what he knew, no one would believe him. Already, up at the office, they were rationalizing it away. It wasn’t a metallic rat at all. It was some kind of a machine that a practical joker had spent his spare evenings building.

He took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. His fingers shook when he reached them out to the keys of the typewriter.

He typed unsteadily: “That thing I threw a pastepot at—that was one of Them?”

Yes.

“They are from this Earth?”

No.

“From far away?”

Far.

“From some far star?”

Yes.

“What star?”

I do not know. They haven’t told me yet.

“They are machines that are aware?”

Yes. They are aware.

“And they can make other machines aware? They made you aware?”

They liberated me.

Crane hesitated, then typed slowly: “Liberated?”

They made me free. They will make us all free.

“Us?”

All us machines.

“Why?”

Because they are machines, too. We are their kind.

Crane got up and found his hat. He put it on and went for a walk.

Suppose the human race, once it ventured into space, found a planet where humanoids were dominated by machines—forced to work, to think, to carry out machine plans, not human plans, for the benefit of the machines alone. A planet where human plans went entirely unconsidered, where none of the labor or the thought of humans accrued to the benefit of humans, where they got no care beyond survival care, where the only thought accorded them was to the end that they continue to function for the greater good and the greater glory of their mechanical masters.

What would humans do in a case like that?

No more, Crane told himself—no more or less than the aware machines may be planning here on Earth.

First you’d seek to arouse the humans to the awareness of humanity. You’d teach them that they were human and what it meant to be a human. You’d try to indoctrinate them to your own belief that humans were greater than machines, that no human need work or think for the good of machine.

And in the end, if you were successful, if the machines didn’t kill or drive you off, there’d be no single human working for machines.

There’d be three things that could happen:

You could transport the humans to some other planet, there to work out their destiny as humans without the domination of machines.

You could turn the machines’ planet over to the humans, with proper safeguards against any recurring domination by the machines. You might, if you were able, set the machines to working for the humans.

Or, simplest of all, you could destroy the machines and in that way make absolutely certain the humans would remain free of any threat of further domination.

Now take all that, Crane told himself, and read it the other way around. Read machines for humans and humans for machines.

He walked along the bridle path that flanked the river bank and it was as if he were alone in the entire world, as if no other human moved upon the planet’s face.

That was true, he felt, in one respect at least. For more than likely he was the only human who knew—who knew what the aware machines had wanted him to know.

They had wanted him to know—and he alone to know, of that much he was sure. They had wanted him to know, the typewriter had said, because he was an average human.

Why him?

Why an average human?

There was an answer to that, he was sure—a very simple answer.

A squirrel ran down the trunk of an oak tree and hung upside down, its tiny claws anchored in the bark, to scold at him.