Kelly was himself in many ways a tiny brilliant machine, and if all his scientific, electronic, mechanical, and chemical endeavors seemed to end in destruction it did not necessarily mean that all were failures. For though Kelly didn’t particularly want to destroy machines — he liked machines — and though he didn’t particularly want to destroy human beings — that was something other people did — it is undeniably true that Kelly did want to destroy something. He himself wasn’t sure what.
Life for Kelly so far had been an endless series of Pyrrhic victories. His home life had been marred by the fact that he and his mother had what might be called a personality conflict, making him perhaps the only child in modern America who was not spoiled, and his schooling had been blighted by his having been one of those unathletic know-it-alls who are too smart for their own good. Teachers don’t like to be outstripped by their pupils, and children don’t like children who know too much. Given also a vague and ineffectual father who didn’t want to hear about anybody else’s problems and who preferred not to be home very much anyway, it was perhaps inevitable that Kelly should grow up bitter, lonely, brilliant, and acidly anti-social.
After being thrown out of his fourth engineering college for learning not wisely but too well, Kelly had found himself at his mother’s instigation cut off from further access to the family funds. Further schooling, already unnecessary, was now made impossible. Unfortunately, the sort of explosive blue-sky research that had been occasionally available in college labs was now also impossible. How was he to continue his experiments? How was he to support himself? Work was out of the question, since his education had left him unequipped for gainful labor and he was, besides, socially unadapted to deal with his fellow man.
It was then he’d decided there was no possible future for him but a life of crime (short) to be followed by a life of ease (long). And for his first partner in crime what possible choice could he have made but the one he had? A machine. In fact, Starnap.
Starnap had been built by Kelly, alone, within this boat, which he’d bought fourth-hand — but still overpriced — in Altantic City. The ship had taken money, and so had Starnap, and the money had come from a variety of sources. Blackmail, for one, upon the adulterous person of his father, who had sighed and paid and said not a word. His automobile, a creature Kelly had loved and slaved over, went on the block, and so did his hi-fi set. Reluctantly but grimly he had sold all of what might have been the finest and most complete collection of horror and science-fiction comic books in the world. And finally, during his college days, he had patented two small inventions — a kind of self-sealing milk carton and a pesticide sprayer — both of which brought in small annual amounts, and these now he also sold, too cheap.
Kelly had planned — and Starnap, when finished, had agreed with him — to commit only one crime, but that one large enough to keep him comfortably fixed the rest of his life. What the crime would be he didn’t at first know, but he was sure he and his machine would find something worthy of their combined talents.
Once Starnap had been put together, therefore, Kelly began by feeding it The New York Times, both daily and Sunday, by the bale, by the truckload, till its memory banks were full to bursting with information on international affairs and sales at Ohrbach’s and all the news that’s fit to print. Only then, when Kelly considered the machine his intellectual equal, did they begin to consider the crime for which Starnap — not at that point yet named — had been brought into existence, and they studied the problem together for several weeks before at last making their decision.
Once the caper was chosen, however, a great disagreement occurred between them, one which almost caused a rift in their relations. Kelly, naturally, had wanted to pull the job himself, but Starnap had insisted upon assistants, two of them. Kelly had angrily demurred, but at last Starnap, with logic and patience, had brought him around and they had started their quest for a mob.
It had been Starnap’s decision to limit themselves to people Kelly already knew, and in retrospect Kelly could see that that had been an intuitively brilliant move, as well as an indication that Kelly’s own tendency toward paranoia had been transferred to his machine. The problem was one of trust, for it seemed to both Starnap and Kelly that a professional criminal might not consider himself honor-bound to deal fairly with someone who by lack of experience could be considered an amateur and therefore an outsider. Better to compose the gang entirely of amateurs, and of individuals already known and proven trustworthy under other circumstances.
Into Starnap, then, Kelly had fed every scrap of information he could find or remember about everybody he’d ever known at all well. There weren’t that many, given Kelly’s personality, but from the data presented it Starnap had at last produced two names. These two, Starnap had reported, not only had special qualifications and talents which would make them valuable members of the team, but also their personalities and histories were such that they were very likely to fall in with the sort of scheme Kelly had in mind.
Kelly had been out of touch with both prospects for some time, but they hadn’t been hard to track down, and he had been heartened to see that neither seemed to be doing very well for himself. Following Starnap’s plan for making contact he had sent letters to them both, containing a plane ticket and a twenty-dollar bill. The letters, which weren’t signed, had stated merely that there might be profit if the recipient were to come to a meeting at such and such a place at such and such a time, airline ticket and expense money enclosed. The implication was of something shady, which meant that if either or both did show up they were probably already half-committed to an illegal consequence.
And now was the day. If they were coming, they would be here at one o’clock. Kelly, sitting in reverie before Starnap, found himself wishing the planning stage could go on and on, that the actual recruiting of personnel, performing of the crime, could be forestalled indefinitely. The fun part, he was beginning to realize, was over.
A voice remarkably like that of Charles Laughton abruptly broke into his thoughts, calling from up on deck, “Mis-tah Chris-tian!”
“That’s Frank,” Kelly told Starnap, getting to his feet and looking at his watch. Five minutes to one. He’d been mooning down here almost an hour.
With a last look at Starnap, wishing he’d built a voice box into the machine so it could have taken over this interview itself now, Kelly switched off the light and went out to the main cabin, shutting the door behind him. He went over to the stairs and called, “Down here.”
The young man who came trotting down the steps was Kelly’s age and height, but there the similarity ended. Frank was blond, open-faced, cheerful and somewhat stocky of build. He was wearing brown loafers, tan slacks, a short-sleeved white shirt open at the throat, and wrap-around sunglasses with white rims. He removed these glasses when he reached the foot of the stairs and said, “Kelly! You’re the one?”
“I’m the one,” Kelly said. Nervousness made him short of words.
Frank stuck his hand out, saying, “It’s been a while, Kelly. The last time I heard from you was when you wanted to sell the comics. You get rid of them?”
“Yes. Eventually.”
“I would have liked to help you out,” Frank said, “but I’ve been out of that business for a long while now.” He no longer sounded at all like Charles Laughton.
“I know.”
Frank looked around the cabin. “This your boat? It looks good.”