The Mile Long Spaceship (9 page)

Suddenly, she was galvanized into action by a caller. A stunned look of fear and excitement passed quickly over her face and she said, "Hold on a minute, Mr. Lawrence, I'll tell him. Yes, I know it is serious. Hold on." She bit her lip and unconsciously tugged at her girdle as she arose and approached the door to the inner office. Hesitantly she stopped and returned to her desk where she whipped out a paper she had been typing; her fingers flew as she tapped out the message for G. B. Then, clutching the paper purposefully, she opened the door and entered the room.

Only moments later the door opened again, and Mr. Stacey came out on a run. He spoke into the phone quietly but with an urgency, nevertheless. He listened a moment, and then banged down the receiver after telling the other one to stay where he was. As he turned to go back into the office, his eye landed on Old Mike watching curiously. He nodded curtly and started to turn, but he spun around instead and shouted, "Where did you get that?" He seized the robots Mike was still holding and demanded again, "Where did you get it? Did you stop the line?"

Mutely Old Mike nodded and pointed to the toys, "See? Look at them!"

Mr. Stacey stared at Mike in wonder, "Old man," he said, "do you know what you did? You stopped the line entirely! Every engineer employed by McKeldridge has been notified automatically, and is on his way down there to see what went wrong. The government men are here to sign a very important contract and you stopped the line! Are you crazy!" He grabbed Mike by the sleeve and pulled him after him, "You just come with me and tell them what you did!"

Inside the office, the men were talking excitedly in low voices, obviously trying to avoid directly staring at G. B. and not succeeding. Only the Secretary of Defense and G. B. were silent. G. B.'s fingers were drumming monotonously on the conference table as he waited for his lieutenant to come back and let them all know what had happened. There was fury behind his quietude.

"Old Mike did it! He removed a robot!" Mr. Stacey held up the two toys to show them. "Whew! What a fright for nothing. We should have trusted Sarah not to let us down." He laughed, and one or two of the others followed his example. The Secretary of Defense didn't.

"Are you sure that's all that happened, Mr. McKeldridge?"

G. B. turned to Old Mike and asked in a sofdy ominous voice, "Did you remove one of the robots from the belt Mike?"

"Yes, sir," Mike looked around the faces and saw the smiles grow more and more numerous as relief settled in on the men. He didn't volunteer more in the presence of outsiders; this was company business.

"And was the line moving smoothly when you removed the toy, Mike?" G. B. didn't look up as he asked, but played with his pencil instead.

"Yes, sir, it was moving—and then it stopped, and I come over here."

"That will be all, Mike. Wait for me in my office, will you please." G. B. turned back to the Secretary of Defense and shrugged, "You see, Mr. Secretary, foolproof. Even tells us when something goes wrong, if it does." He waited until Mike was nearly out the door, but still within range, to add, "And I can assure you that this won't happen again."

It was two hours later when Mr. Stacey and G. B. remembered Old Mike. The old man was staring out the window over the city when they returned to G. B.'s private office with well-satisfied smiles on their faces. Mike still clutched both robots to his chest defensively as he turned to face them.

"Mike, why'd you do it? And now of all times." Mr. Stacey spoke to him as he might to a child, very patient, willing to try to understand.

It was to him that Mike thrust the toys, "Look at 'em, Mr. Stacey. Sarah's changed them." He waited, an expectant smile about his withered lips.

"Of all the damn fool nonsense! Mike, you're finished! Get out and stay. Get yourself a room somewhere and keep out of my way!" G. B.'s face was apopletic as he pushed Mike toward the door.

"Wait a minute, G. B. ... Look. There
is
a difference." Mr. Stacey stood the two robots side by side on the gleaming desk. "Look—this one is nearly two inches taller. And more flexible." He was speaking absently as he compared them.

Forgetting Mike for the moment, G. B. watched. Finally he said, "It doesn't alter the situation. Mike nearly cost us the contract with his meddling. So someone tampered with the specifications. It still works, doesn't it?"

"Better. There's a wrist action we didn't have in it, and it's more powerful." Mr. Stacey didn't look up as he made measurements and jotted down his findings on a small pad. "And I wouldn't fire Mike now, if I were you. He proved Sarah's infallibility better than words could. This could be important—and he was the first to catch it." He added wryly, "Besides, it would mean bad publicity."

G. B. threw up his hands and exclaimed, "OK, OK, so Mike stays. But, old man, if you so much as breathe on that belt again, you're out. Do you understand?"

Mike nodded and shuffled his feet awkwardly as he looked apologetically toward Mr. Stacey. "Is it something really wrong, sir?"

"Hmm. Don't know, Mike. I'll run back with you now. I want to see for myself what has been changed and who did it."

Mike watched the engineers as they examined the various parts of Sarah. It was well past midnight when Mr. Stacey came to his office.

"Doesn't seem to be anything wrong. We're letting the altered version go through. Did you see who coded and gave her the new data?"

"Nobody's touched it since you fixed her up for these things." Mike had both of the robots standing at attention on his small, littered desk. "Ain't been no one back there 'til today." He paused a moment and added soberly, "She done it herself. She's trying her wings, so's to speak."

Mr. Stacey laughed good-naturedly and left, after saying that Mike should let him know if anyone went into Sarah's room. "Someone did it who knows exactly how, and that narrows it down—but no one will admit it. Probably afraid of a chewing out."

After he'd gone, and Sarah was appeased and back at work, Mike cautiously stood before the ever changing board with its thousand eyes. "You can fool them, Sarah, but you can't fool Old Mike. You done it yourself, and I know it. But no more shenanigans out of you, cause I'll be a'watching. You hear me, Sarah? I'll be a'watch-ing all the time."

The change-over went smoothly. Mr. Stacey, and several other serious-looking young men, worked in Sarah's room for two whole days giving her the new information in her own special code. They kept a constant watch until the first few of the new items to be manufactured were finished, and then they departed jubilantly.

Watching on his television screen Old Mike grinned to himself. "You old fool," he told himself genially. "See. She can't do a thing without getting showed how. You just always forget after awhile that they got to show her, after all." He was happy at change-over time. It served to remind him that Sarah was a tool, bigger and more complex than any of her predecessors, to be sure, but a tool, useful only so long as a human hand and brain guided her.

Once more, the belts were waltzing their silent, gliding fairy dance high above the floor. And the conveyor belts loaded their baskets with screws and tubes and wires and carried them to the tool that was designed to lift them and place them in their proper position. The humming filled the rooms in perfect harmony and the lights blinked in tune as information was brought forth to be put to use, rejecting one tool for another, keeping the raw materials flowing smoothly into place, punching out the coded orders for additional wire or plastic or whatever was needed. The messages dropped into a minor appendage of Sarah where they were changed to typed sheets, folded and placed in stamped envelopes and deposited in the chute that a messenger constantly sorted for delivery.

Mike dozed and smoked his pipe and made his timed inspections. He examined the finished product carefully, but could make nothing of it; and as no one had bothered to tell him what was being produced for the government, he shrugged his thin shoulders and went on his own way. "Figure I'm too old and useless to know anything that's supposed to be a secret. Might blab. Why, I can remember way back when the old man was here and we did that order for the Navy, back during the Big War. He said to me, 'Mike, see them shells. Biggest ever cast. We'll blow them off the map with them shells, Mike.' He knew he could trust Mike, he did."

The government men inspected the hundredth ones just as G. B. and Mr. Stacey had done before. And always they came from the inner office, where there wasn't a television camera, with smiles on their faces. Then after awhile, since the hundredth ones came during the night as well as during the day, their inspection became more haphazard, and finally almost ceased entirely. The orders were being boxed and stacked and readied for the boxcars as before. No one entered any more, unless it was with an escort and a special pass. Now when the great door opened, there were soldiers with guns on their belts to oversee the operation. Two of them climbed into the freight car with the order being shipped out, and the third man sealed the car. The mammoth door whispered a goodby to them as it slid back down and another crate was being slipped into place for the second part of the order.

And Mike, who had in the past gone to his lonesome room each night, moved into the office entirely. He left long enough each day to gulp down his frugal meals, and make the few purchases his barren life required—such as tobacco and the newspapers. There was an inner tension that he couldn't dispel, nor could he understand it. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing. But he watched. He knew this was big. Bigger even than the shells in the Big War. They hadn't called for such secrecy.

"So that's why they asked me all them tom fool questions and took my fingerprints and picture. They must have figured that since I wouldn't leave the place, they had to be sure of who I am." He hobbled again to the inspection room and looked carefully at the thing on the desk left there for comparison with the others that left the line for the inspection. Even as he watched, the opening in the wall admitted one of the newly-finished things. Old Mike knew, from keeping his eyes and ears open, that there were ten minutes in which to look over the displaced object before the line stopped as before. Gingerly he grasped it and lifted it. There was nothing to see. Just a box, closed on all sides. He compared it with the one on the desk and as far as he could see they were identical.

He replaced it on the belt and presently it began to glide back toward the main line. With a frown, Mike sat behind the desk and stared at the thing before him.

"Got to be something more important than a box. I seen wires and them new small tubes going in somewheres. Must be a special way to open them things." He tried to force each side of the box, with no better luck than with the other one. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and forgetting the strict orders he had not to interfere again, he began to go through the desk looking lor a clue. There was none. Then he surveyed the safe in the room. He knew it was geared to alarm if tampered with, but on the other hand, the government men had seemed to get careless at the last about making the required inspections; maybe they had got careless about the safe. Besides he only had a couple of years left with McKeldridge anyway. G. B. would see to that as soon as he no longer feared unfavorable publicity, he argued with himself.

Hesitantly Old Mike approached the safe. It was one that G. B.'s father had installed only days before his death some ten years ago. Very modern, very burglar-proof, very impenetrable. Mike grasped the door handle and it swung open. He ignored the papers and blueprints and documents, and instead fastened his eye on a thin strip of insulated wire with a bulge in the middle of it. He remembered seeing small holes in the thing on the desk. Quickly he had the ends of the wire in the holes and the opposite side of the box slid open. There was Sarah in miniature.

The same lights, only they weren't blinking at him, watching him, as she did. The same type of feed slot with a very small spool of ticker paper wound ready to go into it.

"Well, I'll be damned!" Mike said reverently. "Sarah's babies! Baby brains!"

He looked at the thing he was holding fearfully, and very gently—as if afraid of awakening a sleeping child—he placed it on the desk. Then he wiped off his wrinkled forehead which had grown very moist. "Baby brains," he whispered again and in his mind visualized the next war with things like it directing the fighting and the maneuvering, very much as Sarah directed the plant itself.

"This must be the heart," he said as he looked again at the lump in the middle of the wire that made the connection somewhere in the center of the brain. "Must stay asleep until the heart thing is connected, and then it's ready to go to work." Cautiously he disconnected the wires and the back of the box locked itself shut again. Still apprehensive of the tiny brain, he replaced it in its former position on the desk and restored the wire to the safe and shut the door. Then he made his way slowly back to his own office and waited.

"They shouldn't of showed her how to make brains. They shouldn't of done that. She's no good," he muttered to himself. "Gotta stay wide awake from now on and see to it that she don't cut no more capers. They shouldn't of done it." He repeated the words over and over in a worried voice.

The movement of the winding belts and overhead conveyors was hypnotic in its effect on him; that was why he had installed the clock in the first place. The melodic alarm roused him if he did succumb to the languor the place produced in him. "It's better not to keep watching all the time," he told himself, as he had done countless times in the past four years. "That way, your head begins swaying back and forth and you get to nodding. It's better to look at each screen for a minute or two and then go on to the next one," he reminded himself, but he couldn't tear his eyes from the assembly line.

Here the tubes came down, and intricate movements were made, too fast for his eye to follow. Next the shell was put around them, and from that point nothing could be seen of what went in. The whole belt rose and fell and went forever forward. Up and down and on and on. One basket of something or other was emptied and another replaced it with a motion so precise that the interval was too fast for the parts it carried to be missed. The empty basket climbed higher and higher, shuttled off the main line once as something else bypassed it on its way down, and then resumed its way to be replenished.