Pohl, Frederik - The Age of the Pussyfoot

“That is not due to any malfunction on our part, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker with dignity. “That is due to—”

Silence.

“What did you say?” demanded Forrester.

“That is due to— That is due to—Awk,” said the joymaker, as though it were strangling. “That is due to the flight of many persons to freezing facilities.”

“You sound as though you’re breaking down, machine,” said Forrester apprehensively.

“No, Man Forrester! Certain nexial recursions are not operative, and some algorithms are looping. It is a minor technical difficulty.”

The machine paused, then said in a different tone, “Another minor technical difficulty is that certain priority programs have not been executed on schedule. My apologies, Man Forrester.”

“For what?”

“For not delivering a priority notice regarding your imminent arrest.”

Forrester was jolted. “The devil you say!”

“No, Man Forrester. It is a true message. The coppers are coming for you now.”

Seventeen

The door opened with a thwack, and two coppers plunged into the room. One of them grabbed him, rather roughly, Forrester thought, and glared into his eyes. “Man Forrester!” it cried. “You are arrested on sufficient charges and need make no statement!”

As if he could, thought Forrester, whirled off his feet as the coppers flanked him, one on each side, and half carried him out into the corridor and down to the fly-in, where a police flier was waiting for him. He shouted to them, “Wait! What’s it all about?”

They did not answer, merely thrust him in and slammed the door. It must be the Sirian business, he thought sickly, staring back at them as they watched the flier bear him away. But why now? “I didn’t do anything!” he cried, knowing that he lied.

“That is to be determined, Man Forrester,” said a voice from a speaker grille over his head. “Meanwhile, please come with us.”

The “please” was totally sense-free, of course; Forrester had no choice. “But what did I do?” he begged.

“Your arrest has been ordered, Man Forrester,” said the quiet, unemotional voice of the central computation facility. “Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

“You bet!” Forrester stared around fearfully. There was no one at the controls, but there didn’t seem to be a need for anyone; the car was sliding rapidly through the air toward the lake front.

“Your arrest has been ordered, Man Forrester,” repeated the computer voice. “Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

“Damn it, I just said I did!” They were over blue water and moving fast. Forrester hammered the fleshy part of his fist against a window experimentally, but naturally enough the glass did not break. It was just as well, of course; there was no place for him to go.

“Your arrest,” said the computer voice calmly, “has been ordered, Man Forrester. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

Forrester swore furiously and hopelessly. They were approaching a metal island in the lake, and the aircraft was dropping toward it. “All I want,” he said, “is to know what the devil’s going on. Joymaker! Can you tell me what this is all about?” But the mace clipped to his belt only said, “We are all the same, Man Forrester. Do you wish a precis of the charge against you?”

By the time the aircraft landed, Forrester had regained control of himself. Obviously something was wrong with the central computation facilities, but equally obviously there was nothing much he could do about it now. When two more coppers, waiting on the hardstand for the police car to alight, seized his arms and pulled him out of the door, he did not resist. The coppers’ grip was quite unbreakable, their strength far greater than his own.

He saw no human being and no other automata, while he was herded like livestock down through underground passages, under the lake waters, until finally he was pushed into a door that locked behind him.

He was in a cell. It held a bed, a chair, and a table, nothing else. Or nothing that was visible; its walls were mined with the usual electronic maze, however, because a voice said at once, “Man Forrester, message.”

“Drop sick,” said Forrester. “No, I don’t want a precis of the charge against me.”

But the message that followed was not the repetitious drone of the faulty machines. It was Taiko’s voice, and a wall of the cell sprang into light to show his face. “Hi, there, Chuck,” he said. “You said you wanted to see me.”

Forrester exhaled sharply. “Thank God,” he said. “Look, Taiko, something’s gone wrong with the machines, and I’m in jail!”

Taiko’s bland face creased in a smile. “Number one,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong with the machines—in fact, something’s going right with them! And, number two, of course you’re in jail. Who do you think brought you here?”

“Here? You mean you’re—”

Taiko grinned and nodded. “Not more’n fifty meters away, pal. Considering how messed up the computers are, the easiest way to get you here was to have you arrested. So I did. So now we come right down to it. Are you with the Ned Lud Society or are you against it? Because this is our chance. Everything’s so stirred up for fear of a Sirian invasion that we can straighten things out the right way. Know what I mean by the right way?”

“Smash the machines?” Forrester guessed. “You mean, you and I are going to break up the central computers?”

“Oh, not just you and I,” said Taiko triumphantly. “We’ve got a lot of help we didn’t have before. Would you like to see them?”

Taiko touched his joymaker, and the field of the view-screen widened. Forrester was looking into a fairly large room and a rather heavily populated one.

Taiko did indeed have a lot of help. There were perhaps a dozen of them, Forrester saw, but he did not count them very accurately. He was too shocked to count when he discovered that only one or two of the dozen “helpers” in the room were human.

The rest were not. They looked out at Forrester through eyes that were circlets of gleaming green dots. They were Sirians.

“You see, pal,” said Taiko easily, “it’s a matter of loyalties. Our friends here are kind of funny-looking, I admit. But they’re organic.”

Forrester goggled. The Sirians in their cone-shaped pressure suits looked exactly like his late friend and benefactor, S Four. The idea of making allies of them was hard to accept. Not only because they were potentially dangerous enemies, but because his own contact with S Four had left him with an unshakable conviction that men and Sirians were far from being able to communicate on any meaningful level.

Taiko laughed. “Takes you aback, eh? But it was obvious—only it took somebody like me to see how to make it work. These guys are geniuses on the electronic stuff, absolute geniuses. They’ve given us a chance to put the ideals of the Ned Lud Society into practice, once and for all. . . . Look, are you interested or not? Because I can send you back where you came from as easily as I brought you here.”

“I’m interested, all right,” said Forrester.

Taiko was sharp enough to catch a hint of double meaning. “Interested to work with us? Or to try to mess us up?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. He chuckled. “Makes no difference in the long run,” he said merrily. “What can you do? Come on up and talk it over, anyway. . . .”

And there was a faint click, and the door of Forrester’s cell sprang open, and a line of pale glowing green arrowheads appeared to point the way for him to walk.

I wish, he thought, that Adne were here to talk to.

But Adne was deep in the liquid-helium sleep of death, with her children, with nearly everyone else Forrester had met in this century. There was no one to tell him what to do.