Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started from a small spot in the ear, which, being scraped, revealed a defect, deceptively minute, in the casting, which defect must subsequently have been pasted over with some unknown compound.
The remolten metal soon reassumed its place in the tower’s repaired superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically in its belfry boughwork of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the first anniversary of the tower’s completion—at early dawn, before the concourse had surrounded it—an earthquake came; one loud crash was heard. The stone pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown upon the plain.
So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord, but, in obedience, slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for the tower. So the bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.
(1855)
FIRST TO SERVE
Algis Budrys
Born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1931, Algirdas Jonas Budrys arrived in America with his parents in 1936. His writing career wasn’t exactly plain sailing. His first novel False Night (1954) was horribly hacked about by its editor, then his publisher ran out of money, stalling his second novel for years. When eventually it did appear, Who? was snapped up for a movie – quite a good one – starring Elliott Gould and Trevor Howard. The sentient artificial intelligence in Michaelmas, housed worldwide through a network of distributed computers, is a prescient creation indeed in a novel published in 1977. Budrys (AJ to his friends) was also an editor and publisher. Tomorrow Speculative Fiction was his, running from 1993 to 2000. But it’s as a writer of tough, cool, existential short stories that he’ll be best remembered.
thei ar teetcing mi to reed n ryt n i wil bee abel too do this beter then.
pimi
MAS 712, 820TH TDRC,
COMASAMPS, APO IS,
September 28
Leonard Stein, Editor,
INFINITY,
862 Union St.,
New York 24, N.Y.
Dear Len,
Surprise, et cetera
It looks like there will be some new H. E. Wood stories for Infy after all. By the time you get this, 820TH TDRC will have a new Project Engineer, COMASAMPS, and I will be back to the old Royal and the Perry Street lair.
Shed no tear for Junior Heywood, though. COMASAMPS and I have come to this parting with mutual eyes dry and multiple heads erect. There was no sadness in our parting—no bitterness, no weeping, no remorse. COMASAMPS—in one of its apparently limitless human personifications—simply patted me on my backside and told me to pick up my calipers and run along. I’ll have to stay away from cybernetics for a while, of course, and I don’t think I should write any robot stories in the interval, but, then, I never did like robot stories anyhow.
But all this is a long story about ten thousand words, at least, which means a $300 net loss if I tell it now.
So go out and buy some fresh decks, I’ll be in town next week, my love to the Associate and the kids, and first ace deals.
Vic Heywood
My name is really Prototype Mechanical Man I, but everybody calls me Pimmy, or sometimes Pim. I was assembled at the eight-twentieth teedeearcee on august 10, 1974. I don’t know what man or teedeearcee or august 10, 1974, means, but Heywood says I will, tomorrow. What’s tomorrow?
Pimmy
August 12, 1974
I’m still having trouble defining "man."Apparently, even the men can’t do a very satisfactory job of that. The 820TDRC, of course, is the Eight Hundred and Twentieth Technical Development and Research Center of the Combined Armed Services Artificial and Mechanical Personnel Section. August 10, 1974, is the day before yesterday.
All this is very obvious, but it’s good to record it.
I heard a very strange conversation between Heywood and Russell yesterday.
Russell is a small man, about thirty-eight, who’s Heywood’s top assistant. He wears glasses, and his chin is farther back than his mouth. It gives his head a symmetrical look. His voice is high, and he moves his hands rapidly. I think his reflexes are overtriggered.
Heywood is pretty big. He’s almost as tall as I am. He moves smoothly—he’s like me. You get the idea that all of his weight never touches the ground. Once in a while, though, he leaves a cigarette burning in an ashtray, and you can see where the end’s been chewed to shreds.
Why is everybody at COMASAMPS so nervous?
Heywood was looking at the first entry in what I can now call my diary. He showed it to Russell.
"Guess you did a good job on the self-awareness tapes, Russ," Heywood said.
Russell frowned. "Too good, I think. He shouldn’t have such a tremendous drive toward self-expression. We’ll have to iron that out as soon as possible. Want me to set up a new tape?"
Heywood shook his head. "Don’t see why. Matter of fact, with the intelligence we’ve given him, I think it’s probably a normal concomitant." He looked up at me and winked.
Russell took his glasses off with a snatch of his hand and scrubbed them on his shirtsleeve. "I don’t know. We’ll have to watch him. We’ve got to remember he’s a prototype—no different from an experimental automobile design, or a new dishwasher model. We expected bugs to appear. I think we’ve found one, and I think it ought to be eliminated. I don’t like this personification he’s acquired in our minds, either. This business of calling him by a nickname is all wrong. We’ve got to remember he’s not an individual. We’ve got every right to tinker with him." He slapped his glasses back on and ran his hands over the hair the earpieces had disturbed. "He’s just another machine. We can’t lose sight of that."
Heywood raised his hands. "Easy, boy. Aren’t you going too far off the deep end? All he’s done is bat out a few words on a typewriter. Relax, Russ." He walked over to me and slapped my hip. "How about it, Pimmy? D’you feel like scrubbing the floor?"
"No opinion. Is that an order?" I asked.
Heywood turned to Russell. "Behold the rampant individual," he said. "No, Pimmy, no order. Cancel."
Russell shrugged, but he folded the page from my diary carefully, and put it in his breast pocket. I didn’t mind. I never forget anything.
August 15, 1974
They did something to me on the Thirteenth. I can’t remember what. I’ve gone over my memory, but there’s nothing. I can’t remember.
Russell and Ligget were talking yesterday, though, when they inserted the autonomic cutoff, and ran me through on orders. I didn’t mind that. I still don’t. I can’t.
Ligget is one of the small army of push-arounds that nobody knows for sure isn’t CIC, but who solders wires while Heywood and Russell make up their minds about him.
I had just done four about-faces, shined their shoes, and struck a peculiar pose. I think there’s something seriously wrong with Ligget.
Ligget said, "He responds well, doesn’t he?"
"Mm-m—yes," Russell said abstractedly. He ran his glance down a column of figures on an Estimated Performance Spec chart. "Try walking on your hands, PMM One," he said.
I activated my gyroscope and reset my pedal locomotion circuits. I walked around the room on my hands.
Ligget frowned forcefully. "That looks good. How’s it check with the specs?"
"Better than," Russell said. "I’m surprised. We had a lot of trouble with him the last two days. Reacted like a zombie."