The Steam-Driven Boy (8 page)

He lurched slightly as he crossed the room to the niche. The floor must have detected it, for instead of a martini, his pressing the button drew blood from his thumb. In a second, the wall had analysed his blood and presented him with a glass of liquid. A sign lit: ‘Drink this down at once. Replace glass on sink.’

He drained the pleasant-tasting liquid and at once felt drowsy and warm. Somehow he found his way to the bedroom, the door moving to accommodate him, and he fell into bed.

As soon as James R. Fairchild,
AAAAGTR-RHOLA
was asleep, mechanisms went into action to save his life. That is, he was in no immediate danger, but
MED
8 reported his decrease in life expectancy by .00005 years as a result of over-indulgence, and
MED
19 evaluated his behaviour, recorded on magnetic tape, as increasing his suicide index by a dangerous 15 points. A diagnostic unit detached itself from the bathroom wall and careered into the bedroom, halting silently and precisely by his side. It drew more blood, checked pulse, temp, resp, heart and brain-wave pattern, and x-rayed his abdomen. Not instructed to go on to patcolar reflexes, it packed up and zoomed away.

In the living-room, a housekeeper buzzed about its work, destroying the orange cushions, the sculpture, the couch and the carpet. The walls took on an almost imperceptibly warmer tone. The new carpet matched them.

The furniture – chosen and delivered without the sleeping man’s knowledge – was Queen Anne, enough to crowd the room. Its polyethylene wraps were left on while the room was disinfected.

In the kitchen,
PHARMO
9 ordered and received a new supply of anti-depressants.

It was always the sound of a tractor that awoke Lloyd Young, and though he knew it was an artificial sound, it cheered him all the same. Almost made his day start right. He lay and listened to it awhile before opening his eyes.

Hell, the real tractors didn’t make no sound at all. They worked in the night, burrowing along and plowing a field in one hour that would take a man twelve. Machines pumped strange new chemicals into the soil, and applied heat, to force two full crops of corn in one short Minnesota summer.

There wasn’t much use being a farmer, but he’d always wanted to have a farm, and the Machines said you could have what you wanted. Lloyd was about the only man in these parts still living in the country by now, just him and twelve cows and a half-blind dog, Joe. There wasn’t much to do, with Them running it all. He could go watch his cows being milked, or walk down with Joe to fetch the mail, or watch TV. But it was
quiet and peaceful, the way he liked it.

Except for Them and Their pesky ways. They’d wanted to give Joe a new set of machine eyes, but Lloyd said no, if the good Lord wanted him to see, he’d never have blinded him. That was just the way he’d answered Them about the heart operation, too. Seemed almost like They didn’t have enough to keep ’em busy, or something. They was always worrying about him, him who took real good care of himself all through M.I.T. and twenty years of engineering.

When They’d automated, he’d been done out of a job, but he couldn’t hold that against Them. If Machines was better engineers than him, well, shoot – !

He opened his eyes and saw he’d be late for milking if he didn’t look sharp. Without even thinking, he chose the baby blue overalls with pink piping from his wardrobe, jammed a blue straw hat on his head, and loped out to the kitchen.

His pail was by the door. It was a silver one today – yesterday it had been gold. He decided he liked the silver better, for it made the milk look cool and white.

The kitchen door wouldn’t budge, and Lloyd realized it meant for him to put on his shoes. Damnit, he’d of liked to go barefoot. Damnit, he would of.

He would of liked to do his own milking, too, but They had explained how dangerous it was. Why, you could get kicked in the head before you knew it! Reluctantly, the Machines allowed him to milk, each morning, one cow that had been tranquillized and all its legs fastened in a steel frame.

He slipped on his comfortable blue brogans and picked up his pail again. This time the kitchen door opened easily, and as it did, a rooster crowed in the distance.

Yes, there had been a lot of doors closed in Lloyd’s face. Enough to have made a bitter man of him, but for Them. He knew They could be trusted, even if they had done him out of his job in nineteen and seventy. For ten years, he had just bummed around, trying to get factory work, anything. At the end of his rope, until they saved him.

In the barn, Betsy, his favourite Jersey, had been knocked out and shackled by the time he arrived. The Muzik played a bouncy, lighthearted tune, perfect for milking.

No, it wasn’t Machines that did you dirt, he knew. It was people. People and animals, live things always trying to kick you in the head. As much as he liked Joe and Betsy, which was more than he liked people, he didn’t really trust ’em.

You could trust Machines. They took good care of you. The only trouble with Them was—well, they
knew
so much. They were always so damned smart and busy, They made you feel kind of useless. Almost like you were standing in their light.

It was altogether an enjoyable ten minutes, and when he stepped into the cool milkhouse to empty the pail into a receptacle that led God knew
where, Lloyd had a strange impulse. He wanted to taste the warm milk, something he’d promised not to do. They had warned him about diseases, but he just felt too good to worry this morning. He tilted the silver pail to his lips –

And a bolt of lightning knocked it away, slamming him to the floor. At least it felt like a bolt of lightning. He tried to get up and found he couldn’t move. A green mist began spraying from the ceiling. Now what the hell was that? he wondered, and drifted off to sleep in the puddle of spilled milk.

The first
MED
unit reported no superficial injuries. Lloyd C. Young,
AAAAMTL-RH
01
AB
was resting well, pulse high, resp normal.
MED
8 disinfected the area thoroughly and destroyed all traces of the raw milk. While
MED
19 pumped his stomach and swabbed nose, throat, oesophagus and trachea,
MED
8 cut away and destroyed all his clothing. An emergency heating unit warmed him until fresh clothing could be constructed. Despite the cushioned floor, the patient had broken a toe in falling. It was decided not to move him, but to erect bed and traction on the spot.
MED
19 recommended therapeutic punishment.

When Lloyd awoke, the television came to life, showing an amiable-looking man with white hair.

‘You have my sympathy,’ the man said. ‘You have just survived what we call a “Number-One Killer Accident”, a bad fall in your home. Our machines were in part responsible for this, in the course of saving your life from –’ The man hesitated, while a sign flashed behind him: ‘B
ACTERIAL
P
OISONING
.’ Then he went on, ‘– by physically removing you from the danger. Since this was the only course open to us, your injury could not have been avoided.

‘
Except by you
. Only
you
can save your life, finally.’ The man pointed at Lloyd. ‘Only you can make all of modern science worthwhile. And only you can help lower our shocking death toll. You will cooperate, won’t you? Thank you.’ The screen went dark, and the set dispensed a pamphlet. It was a complete account of his accident, and a warning about unpasteurized milk. He would be in bed for a week, it said, and urged him to make use of his telephone and FRIENDS.

Professor David Wattleigh sat in the tepid water of his swimming pool in Southern California and longed to swim. But it was forbidden. The gadgets had some way of knowing what he was doing, he supposed, for every time he immersed himself deeper than his chest, the motor of the resuscitator clattered a warning from poolside. It sounded like the snarl of a sheep-dog. Or perhaps, he reflected, a Hound of Heaven, an anti-Mephistopheles, come to tempt him into virtue.

Wattleigh sat perfectly still for a moment, then reluctantly he heaved his plump pink body out of the water. Ah, it was no better than a bath. As he passed into the house, he cast a glance of contempt and loathing at the
squat machine.

It seemed as if anything he wished to do were forbidden. Since the day he’d been forced to abandon Nineteenth-Century English Literature, the constraints of
mechanica
had tightened about Wattleigh, closing him off from his old pleasures one by one. Gone were his pipe and port, his lavish luncheons, his morning swim. In place of his library, there now existed a kind of vending machine that each day ‘vended’ him two pages of thoroughly bowdlerized Dickens. Gay, colourful, witty passages they were, too, set in large Schoolbook type. They depressed him thoroughly.

Yet he had not given up entirely. He pronounced anathema upon the Machines in every letter he wrote to Delphinia. an imaginary lady of his acquaintance, and he feuded with the dining-room about his luncheons.

If the dining-room did not actually withhold food from him, it did its best to take away his appetite. At various times, it had painted itself bilious yellow, played loud and raucous music and flashed portraits of naked fat people upon its walls. Each day it had some new trick to play, and each day, Wattleigh outwitted it.

Now he girded on his academic gown and entered the dining-room, prepared for baffle. Today, he saw, the room was upholstered in green velvet and lit by a gold chandelier. The dining table was heavy, solid oak, unfinished. There was not a particle of food upon it.

Instead there was a blonde, comely woman.

‘Hello,’ she said, jumping down from the table. ‘Are you Professor David Wattleigh? I’m Helena Hershee, from New York. I got your name through
FRIENDS
, and I just had to look you up.’

‘I – how do you do?’ he stammered. By way of answer, she unzipped her dress.

MED
19 approved what followed as tending to weaken that harmful delusion, ‘Delphinia’.
MED
8 projected a year of treatment, and found the resultant weight loss could add as much as 12 years to patient Wattleigh’s life.

After Helena had gone to sleep, the Professor played a few games with the Ideal Chessplayer. Wattleigh had once belonged to a chess club, and he did not want to lose touch with the game entirely. And one did get rusty. He was amazed at how many times the Ideal Chessplayer had to actually cheat to let him win.

But win he did, game after game, and the Ideal Chessplayer each time would wag its plastic head from side to side and chuckle, ‘Well, you really got me that time, Wattleigh. Care for another?’

‘No,’ said Wattleigh, finally disgusted. Obediently the machine folded its board into its chest and rolled off somewhere.

Wattleigh sat at his desk and started a letter to Delphinia.

‘My Darling Delphinia,’ scratched his old steel pen on the fine, laid paper. ‘Today a thought occurred to me while I was bathing at Brighton. I have often told you, and as often complained of the behaviour of my
servant, M –. It, for I cannot bring myself to call it “him” or “she”, has been most distressing about my writing to you, even to the point of blunting my pens and hiding my paper. I have not discharged it for this disgraceful show, for I am bound to it – yes,
bound
to it by a strange and terrible secret fate that makes me doubt at times which is master and which, man. It reminds one of several old comedies, in which, man and master having changed roles, and maid and mistress likewise, they meet. I mean, of course, in the works of –’

Here the letter proper ended, for the professor could think of no name to fit. After writing, and lining out, ‘Dickens, Dryden, Dostoyevsky, Racine, Rousseau, Camus,’ and a dozen more, his inkwell ran dry. He knew it would be no use to inquire after more ink, for the Machine was dead set against this letter –

Looking out the window, he saw a bright pink-and-yellow striped ambulance. So, the doctor next door was going off to zombie-land, was he? Or, correctly, to the Hospital for the Asocial. In the East, they called them ‘Mussulmen’; here, ‘zombies’, but it all came to the same thing: the living dead, who needed no elaborate houses, games, ink. They needed only intravenous nourishment, and little of that. The drapes drew themselves, so Wattleigh knew the doctor was being carried out then. He finished his interrupted thought.

– and in any case, he was wholly dissatisfied with this letter. He had not mentioned Helena, luncheon, his resuscitator which growled at him, and so much more. Volumes more, if only he had the ink to write, if only his memory would not fail him when he sat down to write, if only –

James stood with his elbow on the marble mantlepiece of Marya’s apartment, surveying the other guests and sizing them up. There was a farmer from Minnesota, incredibly dull, who claimed to have once been an engineer, but who hardly knew what a slide rule was. There was Marya in the company of some muscular young man James disliked at sight, an ex-mathematician named Dewes or Clewes. Marya was about to play chess with a slightly plump Californian, while his girl, a pretty little blonde thing called Helena Hershee, stood by to kibitz.

‘I’m practically a champion,’ explained Wattleigh, setting up the pieces. ‘So perhaps I ought to give you a rook or two.’

‘If you like,’ said Marya. ‘I haven’t played in years. About all I remember is the Fool’s Mate.’

James drifted over to Helena’s side and watched the game.