“You’re sure it’s a computer?”
“Connally said it was, sir. He knows about computers. But it’s not like any he’s ever seen before. It works on a different principle than any he has seen, he says. But he says it makes a lot of sense, sir. The principle, that is. He says—”
“Well, go on!” the colonel yelled.
“He says its capacity is at least a thousand times that of the best computer that we have. He says it might not be stretching your imagination too far to say that it’s intelligent.”
“How do you mean—intelligent?”
“Well, Connally says a rig like that might be capable of thinking for itself, sir.”
“My God!” the colonel said.
He sat there for a minute, as if he might be thinking. Then he turned a page and pointed at something else.
“That’s another part, sir,” the sergeant said. “A drawing of the part. We don’t know what it is.”
“Don’t know!”
“We never saw anything like it, sir. We don’t have any idea what it might be for. It was attached to the transmission, sir.”
“And this?”
“That’s an analysis of the gasoline. Funny thing about that, sir. We found the tank, all twisted out of shape, but there was some gas still left in it. It hadn’t—”
“But why an analysis?”
“Because it’s not gasoline, sir. It is something else. It was gasoline, but it’s been changed, sir.”
“Is that all, Sergeant?”
The sergeant, I could see, was beginning to sweat a little. “No, sir, there’s more to it. It’s all in that report. We got most all the wreckage, sir. Just bits here and there are missing. We are working now on reassembling it.”
“Reassembling—”
“Maybe, sir, pasting it back together is a better way to put it.”
“It will never run again?”
“I don’t think so, sir. It’s pretty well smashed up. But if it could be put back together whole, it would be the best car that was ever made. The speedometer says 80,000 miles, but it’s in new-car condition. And there are alloys in it that we can’t even guess at.”
The sergeant paused. “If you’ll permit me, sir, it’s a very funny business.”
“Yes, indeed,” the colonel said. “Thank you, Sergeant. A very funny business.”
The sergeant turned to leave.
“Just a minute,” said the colonel.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sorry about this, Sergeant, but you and the entire detail that was assigned to the car are restricted to the base. I don’t want this leaking out. Tell your men, will you? I’ll make it tough on anyone who talks.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, saluting very polite, but looking like he could have slit the colonel’s throat.
When the sergeant was gone, the colonel said to me: “Asa, if there’s something that you should say now and you fail to say it and it comes out later and makes a fool of me, I’ll wring your scrawny little neck.”
“Cross my heart,” I said.
He looked at me funny. “Do you know what that skunk was?”
I shook my head.
“It wasn’t any skunk,” he said. “I guess it’s up to us to find out what it is.”
“But it isn’t here. It ran into the woods.”
“It could be hunted down.”
“Just you and me?”
“Why just you and me when there are two thousand men right on this base?”
“But—”
“You mean they wouldn’t take too kindly to hunting down a skunk?”
“Something like that, Colonel. They might go out, but they wouldn’t hunt. They’d try not to find it.”
“They’d hunt if there was five thousand dollars waiting for the man who brought the right one in.”
I looked at him as if he’d gone off his rocker.
“Believe me,” said the colonel, “it would be worth it. Every penny of it.”
I told you he was crazy.
I didn’t go out with the skunk hunters. I knew just how little chance there was of ever finding it. It could have gotten clear out of the county by that time or found a place to hole up where one would never find it.
And, anyhow, I didn’t need five thousand. I was drawing down good pay and drinking regular.
The next day, I dropped in to see the colonel. The medical officer was having words with him.
“You got to call it off!” the sawbones shouted.
“I can’t call it off,” the colonel yelled. “I have to have that animal.”
“You ever see a man who tried to catch a skunk bare-handed?”
“No, I never have.”
“I got eleven of them now,” the sawbones said. “I won’t have any more of it.”
“Captain,” said the colonel, “you may have a lot more than eleven before this is all over.”
“You mean you won’t call it off, sir?”
“No, I won’t.”
“Then I’ll have it stopped.”
“Captain!” said the colonel and his voice was deadly.
“You’re insane,” the sawbones said. “No court martial in the land—”
“Captain.”
But the captain did not answer. He turned straight around and left.
The colonel looked at me. “It’s sometimes tough,” he said.
I knew that someone better find that skunk or the colonel’s name was mud.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you want that skunk. He’s just a skunk that purrs.”
The colonel sat down at his desk and put his head between his hands.
“My God,” he moaned, “how stupid can men get?”
“Pretty stupid,” I told him, “but I still don’t understand—”
“Look,” the colonel said, “someone jiggered up that car of yours. You say you didn’t do it. You say no one else could have done it. The boys who are working on it say there’s stuff in it that’s not been even thought of.”
“If you think that skunk—”
The colonel raised his fist and smacked it on the desk.
“Not a skunk! Something that looks like a skunk! Something that knows more about machines than you or I or any human being will ever get to know!”
“But it hasn’t got no hands. How could it do what you think?”
He never got to answer. The door burst in and two of the saddest sacks outside the guardhouse stumbled in. They didn’t bother to salute.
“Colonel, sir,” one of them said, heaving hard. “Colonel, sir, we got one. We didn’t even have to catch it. We whistled at it and it followed us.”
The skunk walked in behind them, waving its tail and purring. It walked right over to me and rubbed against my legs. When I reached down and picked it up, it purred so loud I was afraid it would go ahead and explode.
“That the one?” the colonel asked me.
“He’s the one,” I said.
The colonel grabbed the phone. “Get me Washington. General Sanders. At the Pentagon.”
He waved his hand at us. “Get out of here!”
“But, Colonel, sir, the money—”
“You’ll get it. Now get out of here.”
He looked exactly like you might imagine a man might look right after he’s been told he’s not going to be shot at dawn.
We turned around and got out of there.
At the door, four of the toughest-looking hombres this side of Texas were waiting, with rifles in their hands.
“Don’t pay no attention to us, Mac,” one of them said to me. “We’re just your bodyguards.”
They were my bodyguards, all right. They went every place I went. And the skunk went with me, too. That, of course, was why they stuck around. They didn’t care a rap about me. It was the skunk that was getting the bodyguarding.