Turn Left at Thursday (1961) SSC Read online

  "No, no-not on your local level," Garrick explained quickly. "After all, what are a few thousand robots, a few hundred million dollars' worth of equipment? We could resupply this area in a week."

  "And in a week," said Roosenburg, "Trumie would have us cleaned out again!"

  "That's the trouble," Garrick declared. "He doesn't seem to have a stopping point. Yet we can't refuse his orders. Speaking as a psychist, that would set a very bad precedent. It would put ideas in the minds of a lot of persons-minds that, in some cases, might not prove stable in the absence of a completely reliable source of everything they need, on request. If we say no to Trumie, we open the door on some mighty dark corners of the human mind. Covetousness. Greed. Pride of possession-"

  "So what are you going to do?" demanded Kathryn Pender.

  Garrick said resentfully: "The only thing there is to do. I'm going to look over Trumie's folder again. And then I'm going to North Guardian Island."

  Roger Garrick was all too aware of the fact that he was only twenty-four. But his age couldn't make a great deal of difference. The oldest and wisest psychist in Area Control's wide sphere might have been doubtful of success in as thorny a job as the one ahead.

  He and Kathryn Pender warily started out at daybreak. Vapor was rising from the sea about them, and the little battery-motor of their launch whined softly beneath the keelson. Garrick sat patting the little box that contained their invasion equipment, while the girl steered.

  'Me workshops of Fisherman's Island had been all night making some of the things in that box-not because they were so difficult to make, but because it had been a bad night. Big things were going on at North Guardian; twice, the power had been out entirely for an hour, while the demand on the lines from North Guardian took all the power the system could deliver.

  The Sun was well up as they came within hailing distance of the Navy Yard.

  Robots were hard at work; the Yard was bustling with activity. An overhead traveling crane, eight feet tall, laboriously lowered a prefabricated fighting top onto an eleven-foot aircraft carrier.

  A motor torpedo boat-full-sized, this one was, not to scale -rocked at anchor just before the bow of their launch. Kathryn steered around it ignoring the hail from the robot lieutenant-j.g. at its rail.

  She glanced at Garrick over her shoulder, her face taut. "It's-it's all mixed up."

  Garrick nodded. The battleships were model-sized, the small boats full scale. In the city beyond the Yard, the pinnacle of the Empire State Building barely cleared the Pentagon, right next door. A soaring suspension bridge leaped out from the shore a quarter of a mile away and stopped short a thousand yards out, over empty water.

  It was easy to understand-even for a psychist just out of school, on his first real assignment. Trumie was trying to run a world single-handed, and where there were gaps in his conception of what his world should be, the results showed.

  "Get me battleships!" he ordered his robot supply clerks, and they found the only battleships there were in the world to copy, the child-sized, toy-scaled play battleships that still delighted kids.

  "Get me an Air Force!" And a thousand model bombers were hastily put together.

  "Build me a bridge!" But perhaps he had forgotten to say to where.

  Garrick shook his head and focused on the world around him. Kathryn Pender was standing on a gray steel stage, the mooring line from their launch secured to what looked like a coast defense cannon-but only about four feet long. Garrick picked up the little box and leaped up to the stage beside her, She turned to look at the city.

  "Hold on a second." He was opening the box, taking out two little cardboard placards. He turned her by the shoulder and, with pins from the box, attached one of the cards to her back. "Now me," he said, turning his back to her.

  She read the placard dubiously:

  I

  AM A

  SPY

  "Garrick," she said, "you're sure you know what you're doing?"

  "put it on!" She shrugged and pinned it to the back of his jacket.

  Side by side, they entered the citadel of the enemy.

  According to the fisherman robot Trumie lived in a gingerbread castle south of the Pentagon. Most of the robots got no chance to enter it. The city outside the castle was Trumie's kingdom, and he roamed about it, overseeing, changing, destroying, rebuilding. But inside the castle was his

  Private Place; the only robots that had both an inside-and outside-the-castle existence were the two bodyguards of his youth, Davey Crockett and Long John Silver.

  "That," said Garrick, "must be the Private Place."

  It was decidedly a gingerbread castle. The "gingerbread" was stonework, gargoyles and columns; there were a moat and a drawbridge, and there were robot guards with crooked little rifles, wearing scarlet tunics and fur shakos three feet tall. The drawbridge was up and the guards stood at stiff attention.

  "Let's reconnoiter," said Garrick. He was unpleasantly conscious of the fact that every robot they passed-and they bad passed thousands-had turned to look at the signs on their backs.

  Yet it was right wasn't it? There was no hope of avoiding observation in any event. The only hope was to fit somehow into the pattern-and spies would certainly be a part of the military pattern.

  Wouldn't they?

  Garrick turned his back on doubts and led the way around the gingerbread palace.

  The only entrance was the drawbridge.

  They stopped out of sight of the ramrod-stiff guards. Garrick said: "We'll go in. As soon as we get inside, you put on your costume." He handed her the box. "You know what to do. All you have to do is keep him quiet for a while and let me talk to him."

  "Garrick, will this work?"

  Garrick exploded: "How the devil do I know? I had Trumie's dossier to work with. I know everything that happened to him when he was a kid-when this trouble started. But to reach him takes a long time, Kathryn. And we don't have a long time. So--"

  He took her elbow and marched her toward the guards. "So you know what to do," he said.

  "I hope so," breathed Kathryn Pender, looking very small and very young.

  They marched down the wide white pavement, past the motionless guards--

  Something was coming toward them. Kathryn held back.

  "Come on!" Garrick muttered.

  "No, look!" she whispered. "Is that-is that Trumie?"

  He looked, then stared.

  It was Trumie, larger than life. It was Anderson Trumie, the entire human population of the most-congested-island-for-its-population in the world. On one side of him was a tall dark figure, on the other side a squat dark figure, helping him along. His face was horror, drowned in fat. The bloated cheeks shook damply, wet with tears. The eyes squinted out with fright on the world he had made.

  Trumie and his bodyguards rolled up to them and past. And then Anderson Trumie stopped.

  He turned the blubbery head and read the sign on the back of the girl. I AM A SPY. Panting heavily, clutching the shoulder of the Crockett robot, be gaped wildly at her.

  Garrick cleared his throat. This far his plan had gone, and then there was a gap. There had to be a gap. Trumie's history, in the folder that Roosenburg had supplied, had told him what to do with Trumie; and Garrick's own ingenuity had told him how to reach the man. But a link was missing. Here was the subject, and here was the psychist who could cure him, and it was up to Garrick to start the cure.

  Trumie cried out in a staccato bleat: "You! What are you? Where do you belong?"

  He was talking to the girl. Beside him, the Crockett robot murmured: "Reckon she's a spy, Mistuh Trumie. See thet sign ahangin' on her back?"

  "Spy? Spy?" The quivering lips pouted. "Curse you, are you Mata Hari? What are you doing out here? It's changed its face," Trumie complained to the Crockett robot. "It doesn't belong here. It's supposed to be in the harem. Go on, Crockett, get her back!"

  "Wait!" said Garrick, but the Crockett robot was ahead of him. It took Kathryn Pender by
the arm.

  "Come along thar," it said soothingly, and urged her across the drawbridge. She glanced back at Garrick, and for a moment it looked as though she were going to speak. Then she shook her head, as if giving an order.

  "Kathryn!" yelled Garrick. "Trumie, wait a minute! That isn't Mata Hari!"

  No one was listening. Kathryn Pender disappeared into the Private Place. Trumie, leaning heavily on the hobbling Long John Silver robot, followed.

  Garrick, coming back to life, leaped after them.

  The scarlet-coated guards jumped before him, their shakos bobbing, their crooked little rifles crossed to bar his way.

  He ordered: "One side! Out of my way! I'm a human, don't you understand? You've got to let me pass,"

  They didn't even look at him; trying to get by them was like trying to walk through a wall of moving, thrusting steel. He shoved and they pushed him back; he tried to dodge and they were before him. It was hopeless.

  And then it was hopeless indeed, because behind them, he saw, the drawbridge had gone up.

  Sonny Trumie collapsed into a chair like a mound of blubber falling to the deck of a whaler.

  Though he made no signal, the procession of serving robots started at once. In minced the maitre d', bowing and waving its graceful hands. In marched the sommelier, clanking its necklace of keys, hearing its wines in their buckets of ice. In came the lovely waitress robots and the sturdy steward robots, with the platters and tureens, the plates and bowls and cups.

  They spread a meal-a dozen meals-before him, and he began to eat.

  He ate as a penned pig eats, gobbling until it chokes, forcing the food down because there is nothing to do but eat. He ate, with a sighing accompaniment of moans and gasps, and some of the food was salted with the tears of pain he wept into it, and some of the wine was spilled by his shaking hand. But he ate. Not for the first time that day, and not for the tenth.

  Sonny Trumie wept as he ate. He no longer even knew he was weeping. There was the gaping void inside him that he had to fill, had to fill; there was the gaping world about him that he had to people and build and furnish . . . and use.

  He moaned to himself. Four hundred pounds of meat and lard, and he had to lug it from end to end of his island, every hour of every day, never resting, never at peace! There should have been a place somewhere, there should have been a time, when he could rest. When he could sleep without dreaming, sleep without waking after a scant few hours with the goading drive to eat and to use, to use and to eat . . .

  And it was all so wrong!

  The robots didn't understand. They didn't try to understand, they didn't think for themselves. Let him take his eyes from any one of them for a single day and everything went wrong. It was necessary to keep after them, from end to end of the island, checking and overseeing and ordering yes, and destroying to rebuild, over and over!

  He moaned again and pushed the plate away.

  He rested, with his tallow forehead flat against the table, waiting, while inside him the pain ripped and ripped, and finally became bearable again. And slowly he pushed himself up, and rested for a moment, and pulled a fresh plate toward him, and began again to eat.

  After a while, he stopped. Not because he didn't want to go on, but because he absolutely couldn't.

  He was bone-tired, but something was bothering him-one more detail to check, one more thing that was wrong. Mata Hari. The houri at the drawbridge. It shouldn't have been out of the Private Place. It should have been in the harem, of course. Not that it mattered, except to Sonny Trumie's never-resting sense of what was right.

  Time was when the houris of the harem had their uses, but that time was long and long ago; now they were property, to be fussed over and made to be right to be replaced if they were worn, destroyed if they were wrong. But only property, as all of North Guardian was property-as all of the world would be his property, if only he could manage it.

  But property shouldn't be wrong.

  He signaled to the Crockett robot and, leaning on it, walked down the long terrazzo hall toward the harem. He tried to remember what the houri had looked like. The face didn't matter; he was nearly sure it had changed it. It had worn a sheer red blouse and a brief fed skirt, he was almost certain, but the face--

  It had had a face, of course. But Sonny had lost the habit of faces. This one had been somehow different but he couldn't remember just why. Still-the blouse and skirt were red, he was nearly sure. And it had been carrying something in a box. And that was odd, too.

  He waddled a little faster, for now he was positive it was wrong.

  "Thar's the harem, Mistuh Trumic," said the robot at his side. It disengaged itself gently, leaped forward and held the door to the harem for him.

  "Wait for me," Sonny commanded, and waddled forward into the harem halls.

  Once he had so arranged the harem that he needed no help inside it; the halls were railed, at a height where it was easy for a pudgy hand to grasp the rail; the distances were short the rooms close together.

  He paused and called over his shoulder: "Stay where you can hear me." It had occurred to him that if the houri robot was wrong, he would need Crockett's guns to make it right.

  A chorus of female voices sprang into song as he entered the main patio. They were a bevy of beauties, clustered around a fountain, diaphanously dressed, languorously glancing at Sonny Trumie as he waddled inside.

  "Shut up!" he shrieked. "Go back to your rooms!"

  They bowed their heads and, one by one, slipped into the cubicles.

  No sign of the red blouse and the red skirt. He began the rounds of the cubicles, panting, peering into them.

  "Hello, Sonny," whispered Theda Bara, lithe on a leopard rug, and he passed on. "I love you!" cried Nell Gwynn, and, "Come to me!" commanded Cleopatra, but he passed them by. He passed Dubarry and Marilyn Monroe, he passed Moll

  Flanders and he passed Troy's Helen. No sign of the houri in red--

  Yes, there was. He didn't see the houri, but he saw the signs of the houri's presence: the red blouse and the red skirt, lying limp and empty on the floor.

  Sonny gasped: "Where are you? Come out here where I can see you!"

  Nobody answered Sonny.

  "Come out!" he bawled.

  And then he stopped. A door opened and someone came out; not an houri, not female; a figure without sex but loaded with love, a teddybear figure, as tall as pudgy Sonny Trumie himself, waddling as he waddled, its stubby welcoming arms stretched out to him.

  He could hardly believe his eyes. Its color was a little darker than Teddy. It was a good deal taller than Teddy. But unquestionably, undoubtedly, in everything that mattered, it was--

  "Teddy," whispered Sonny Trumie, and let the furry arms go around his four hundred pounds.

  Twenty years disappeared. "They wouldn't let me have you," Sonny told the teddybear.

  It said, in a voice musical and warm: "It's all right Sonny. You can have me now, Sonny. You can have everything, Sonny."

  "They took you away," he whispered, remembering.

  They took the teddybear away; he had never forgotten. They took it away and Mother was wild and Father was furious. They raged at the little boy and scolded him and threatened him. Didn't he know they were poor, and Did he want to ruin them all, and What was wrong with him, anyway, that he wanted his little sister's silly stuffed robots when he was big enough to use nearly grown-up goods?

  The night bad been a terror, with the frowning, sad robots ringed around and the little girl crying; and what had made it terror was not the scolding-he'd had scoldings-but the worry, the fear and almost the panic in his parents' voices. For what he did, he came to understand, was no longer a childish sin. It was a big sin, a failure to consume his quota--

  And it had to be punished.

  The first punishment was the extra birthday party.

  The second was-shame.

  Sonny Trumie, not quite twelve, was made to feel shame and humiliation. Shame is only a little thing,
but it makes the victim of it little, too.

  Shame.

  The robots were reset to scorn him. He woke to mockery and went to bed with contempt. Even his little sister lisped the catalogue of his failures.

  You aren't trying, Sonny, and You don't care, Sonny, and You're a terrible disappointment to us, Sonny.

  And finally all the things were true, because Sonny at twelve was what his elders made him.

  And they made him . . . "neurotic" is the term; a pretty sounding word that means ugly things like fear and worry and endless self-reproach . . .

  "Don't worry," whispered the Teddy. "Don't worry, Sonny. You can have me. You can have what you want. You don't have to have anything else."

  Garrick raged through the halls of the Private Place like a tiger. "Kathryn!" he shouted. "Kathryn Pender!"

  The robots peeped out at him worriedly and sometimes they got in his way and he bowled them aside. They didn't fight back, naturally-what robot would hurt a human? But sometimes they spoke to him, pleading, for it was not according to the wishes of Mr. Trumie that anyone but him rage destroying through North Guardian Island. Garrick passed them by.

  "Kathryn!" he called. "Kathryn!"

  He told himself fiercely: Trumie was not dangerous. Trumie was laid bare in his folder, the one that Roosenburg bad supplied, and he couldn't be blamed; he meant no harm. He was once a little boy who was trying to be good by consuming, consuming, and he wore himself into neurosis doing it; and then they changed the rules on him. End of the ration, end of forced consumption, as the robots took over for mankind at the other end of the farm-and-factory cornucopia. It wasn't necessary to struggle to consume, so the rules were changed.

  And maybe Trumie knew that the rules had been changed, but Sonny didn't. It was Sonny, the little boy trying to be good, who had made North Guardian Island.

  And it was Sonny who owned the Private Place and all it held-including Kathryn Pender.