Anti-Man

XI

I went to the nearest easy chair and collapsed in it. My mind was in a state of pandemonium, trying to rationalize what I had seen. It did not help any when the recurring word Frankenstein whispered across the front of my brain like a cold, dry wind. At first, I tried to tell myself that it was just chance resemblance-that a thief had come up to this floor, had waited for someone to come so that he might rob them. But why would a thief bother coming up this far? It would be just that much more difficult to get out, for he would have to use the elevator to go down enough levels to reach a Bubble Drop station. The elevator could be stopped as soon as I turned in the alarm, and there was an alarm call-box not ten feet away. And if he had planned on robbing me, why shoot to kill? Why not just take the money and run? No, I was only deluding myself. There was nothing so simple as chance resemblance here. That man in the corridor had been one of His android selves, and it had been trying to kill me.

Now, why? Why

The only reason I could find was that, perhaps, He thought I would tell the WA people where He was, that He had not been killed after all. But that was senseless. Surely, He would know that I would keep faith, would not turn Him in. Even if I had wanted to, surely the time to have done it would have been while I was in jail and without much hope. I could have done it then to make my sentence easier. But to kill me now was pointless.

Besides, He was God. And God did not kill without some sort of divine reason. Wasn't that right? Or was it? I reminded myself that He was not the sort of God we had envisioned. He differed physically. Why not mentally? Why not a God who is sadistic? And maybe He had been lying to me. Who said that God did not lie? But what in the hell was He trying to do? Why kill me? What possible purpose could be served? I was right back where I started, nothing solved, but a great deal of apprehension spread on where there had not been any before.

Then I heard the noise. I had thought that He had gone away when the door closed Him out. Now I could hear Him forcing His weight against the heavy panel in an effort to either snap the lock or throw the door off its sliding track.

I stood up, suddenly frantic.

The door squeaked. I looked for a weapon. The door rattled as the bottom coasters slipped out of their grooves.

There was no weapon.

The door lifted, started bending inward. The wheels on the upper track snapped, popped, and scraped out of their track. The door swung inward.

I ran for the bedroom, slid that portal shut behind me, and thumbed the lock on it. A slug snapped into the door, came through, leaving a hole as big as a quarter near the top, and cracking the plastic of the portal, until it looked like a spider web. That would go down in a second. One solid push, and the pieces would fall inward, and He would be on top of me.

I turned, started for the bathroom, and remembered the guard-bot alarm that would bring a mechanical policeman from the storage vault at the far end of this floor. I ran to the bed, depressed the button in the wall, then hurried into the bathroom as He struck the bedroom door behind me. I slammed this final barrier, locked it, and looked around for something to push against it. There was nothing. Everything in the bath was bolted down. I sat on the commode to the left of the door, out of line of any bullets, and waited for the guard-bot, hoping it would make it in time.

I could hear Him in the bedroom. The door to the living room had given in with a crash, and He was through, only one plastic door away from me. Then He was against the bathroom door, and His voice came to me through the plastic, faint, husky, a dry whisper. "Jacob… Jacob, are you in there?"

"What do you want?" I asked.

"You," He said.

"But why?"

"Jacob…"

"Help!" I shouted as loud as I could. It was useless, of course. The apartments in that building were almost perfectly soundproof. And the most isolated room of all was the bath. Still, I shouted, because I felt a need to vocalize my terror. There was something in His voice, in the harsh, ugly tones of His whisper that I had never heard before. It was, I fancied, madness. He spoke like a psychotic, His words couched in a madman's cadences.

I do not know how long I shouted. When I stopped, my voice hoarse, I was aware of a rapping on the door. For a moment, I almost laughed at the absurdity of His knocking now, after blasting His way this far. Then I heard the voice, which must have been calling me for some time. "Dr. Kennelmen," it said. It was not a whisper, but a healthy male baritone. "This is your guard-bot. You called me. I have come in response. Dr. Kennelmen. This is your guard-bot. You called me. I have come-"

I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and stepped into the bedroom. The guard-bot, a slightly more complex form of the Clancy, hovered a few feet away, its pin-gun barrels uncapped and pointing out of the roundness of its underside. "You called me," it said. "I have come. Is anything wrong?"

"Come with me," I said, leading the way through the apartment. I searched all the rooms and closets until I was satisfied that He had gone. I had expected Him to stay, for I was certain it would be nothing for Him to handle the guard-bot. But the place was empty.

"Is there anything you want?" the guard-bot asked, the words coming out of its speaker grid with a faint whistling sound.

"Stay right here," I said. "I'm packing to leave. If you see or hear anyone approaching, summon me at once." And I left him in the living room while I stuffed clothes and toiletries into an overnight case. He walked me to the elevator and rode to the roof with me, waited while I got a helicar. When I lifted off into the night sky over New York City, he turned and floated back into the lift, sent it down with an electric signal.

The computer under the dash of the helicar asked me my roof destination. When I could not think of anything to say, the central traffic control computer housed in the old Empire State Building, cut in, demanded immediate notification of destination, and warned that I would be set down and my helicar privileges canceled if I tried to sabotage the traffic control pattern. I asked for a random flight out of the City, over the Atlantic. The central computer cut out, and my car's own brain began devouring information sent it by central and plotting a random course to slip between the lines of regular traffic.

When you have a few hundred thousand vehicles in the air over one city-from passenger liners to military craft to helicars to drop capsules being spit out of intercontinental rocket bellies-you need a highly complex regulator like the central traffic control computer in eighty-one floors of the Empire State. The other floors of the building house the offices and work areas of the technicians and staff who care for that same computer. One accident in the air can be like a domino collapse. If two craft on a top level of traffic collide, they may take down a dozen or two other pieces of air traffic before they smash into the roofs below.

For a full twenty minutes, we wove in and out of the pattern, swinging to all points of the compass, rising and going back down to make way for commercial and private craft already assigned to that position. Other craft slid by us on all sides, sometimes as close as five or ten feet, the drivers inside perfectly visible in the glow of their cabin lights. Then we were into clearer air, over the Atlantic, beyond the most used airlanes, even out past the holding patterns for transoceanic flights. I could lean against the window and look down on the sea below, where medium-sized waves curled off toward the continent, capped with white foam, otherwise black as oil. Above, there was a heavy cloud layer from which a light snow filtered. The wipers clicked on and thumped back and forth across the windscreen.

I asked the dash computer if it would be possible to go above the clouds since they were so low, and it obliged, because it could work out the maneuver without disturbing the traffic pattern. Suddenly, the clouds were below me, and the almost-full moon lay cold and serene in the black sky overhead.

"What do you do when God is out to get you?" I asked aloud.

"Pardon?" the computer said.

"Ignore me," I said.

"That is impossible, sir. My pickups function constantly and are beyond my control."

"That must get boring," I said, "listening to all your passengers' problems."

"On the contrary," the helicar said, "that is my only contact with the outside world."

I knew then that the central traffic computer had tapped this cab again to see if things were functioning properly. The simple brain and simple voice-tapes of the helicar would not have been up to this sort of banter.

"I'll try not to talk aloud," I said.

"Very well."

And there was silence again.

But what could you do when the omniscient was watching? When the omnipotent was about to make His move. But was He omniscient? No, that was doubtful. He had not shown any signs of knowing all that was going on and would go on. He was not omnipotent either, or He would not have been frightened off by the guard-bot. What had He said there in Harry's cabin? He had denied that He was the immovable object, but had stated that He was the irresistible force. And that summed Him up quite well. Parts of Him could be killed. He could be temporarily defeated. But, in the end, He would win because He could tap the flow of life and return to fight again and again in other copies of Himself. So the answer to the question, "What can you do when God is out to get you," was-"Nothing."

No. Wait. There was one thing.

"Kill Him," I said.

"Who?" the computer asked.

"Sorry. Thinking aloud."

"I don't mind. Passengers are my only-"

"Link to the outside," I finished for it. Then we were both quiet again.

Kill Him. Yes, it was possible. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly. I would have to go back to Cantwell, back to the mother body in the cellar of Harry's cabin. I would have to go well enough armed to take Him out quickly and completely, so He had no chance to heal Himself. I would have to get near enough without arousing His suspicions, or without letting Him kill me. How? Well, I could think about that. I could work on it and come up with something.

Why? Why would I want to kill Him when I had gone to all that trouble to help Him? Why kill Him after I knew that He was God, and, therefore, the greatest force for good in the universe. Or was He? Who could state with assurance that this God was a benevolent one? Suddenly, I could see one instance in which He might wish to see me dead. Suppose He was not benevolent. Suppose He was not even God, as He claimed. Suppose, instead, He was what He logically appeared to be: a superior species, the first of its kind, able to reproduce in hours and at will. And suppose He would be more pleased in a world composed of his own kind. Suppose all those things, and you could not help but be a little frightened. If He were about to initiate a war against mankind, it would be quite sensible to destroy me before continuing, for I was the only one who knew His sanctuary, the only one who even partially understood what had happened to Him in the last several days.

We dipped through the clouds as a huge airliner roared into our traffic lane. The helicar bumped about in the turbulence of the other craft's jets, then came up out of the clouds once more and leveled off, running out to sea.

So what could I do? Contact World Authority? Bring in the nukes and blast Cantwell and Harry's cabin to hell-and-gone? At first, that seemed like the most intelligent thing to do. Then the longer I thought about it, the more stupid it appeared. How many android selves would He have circulating by this time? Enough, surely, to keep track of things to the extent that He would notice any sudden troop maneuvers, and be able to extrapolate their meaning. I reminded myself that each of His android selves had a rubber face that could be restructured in seconds. He could impersonate anyone. If He were out for world domination, He could have already moved His plastic-faded androids into WA positions of authority. He very likely had. And He would know of any proposed bombing strike. And even if the mother body were destroyed, any one of the android selves could metamorphose into another mother body. The only chance of working against Him, then, was to work in total secrecy. And that ruled out the WA.

I would have to go after the mother body itself. Maybe I could get into the cellar and talk with Him. He might let me in before killing me, just to please whatever sadistic streaks there were in Him. I could, at least, find out how many android selves there were, how many other facets of Him we would have to hunt down.

Problem: He can read my mind. So He knows when I come in the cellar that I have a means of destroying Him. And He will not let me do it. And even if I manage to kill Him, I will very likely kill myself without being able to transmit information about the other android selves. In effect, I would not hurt Him at all.

"I must make a turn," the dash computer said. "If we continue out to sea, we will enter another traffic pattern not controlled by the New York central."

"Okay," I said.

We turned, gracefully, easily, moving back.

"Could we go under the clouds now?" I asked.

"Certainly."

We went down. Below the cover, the snow had picked up as I thought it might have. The wipers came back on, though I would have preferred to let the snow cover the glass, and there was no driver to require a clear view.

I had reached a dead end. There was no way to stop Him. All that was left was to wait for Him to kill me, or give up trying and launch His attack on civilization with, perhaps, a hundred mother bodies producing warriors.

I had never been so depressed in my life. Not only was the situation hopeless, but I had helped to make it so. And, to make my position worse, I could not share the problem with anyone else without making them as paranoid and depressed as I. There was no help anywhere.

"Take me to the Manhattan Colossus," I said to the computer. The Colossus was the best hotel in the city, but I felt as if I wanted to splurge tonight.

"Destination acknowledged," the computer said.

The snow beat at us, swept by the car, whirled and eddied around the corners of the windscreen.

We settled on the roof of the Colossus, and I fumbled my credit card out of my wallet, slipped it in the payment slot. When the central computer checked with the main banking computer for the city and discovered my card was good, it popped it back out to me and opened the doors so I could get out. I stepped onto the tarmac, carrying my overnight case, and had to fend off three human bellboys who wanted to heft it for me. I don't mind giving tips, but I despise being treated like a cripple, or a weakling who can't manage a single case without assistance. I went to the elevator, dropped down to the first reception desk on the 109th floor, and checked in under my own name.

In my room, I stripped, showered, and fell into bed. I did not know whether I could sleep or not. How does a man sleep when he knows the world may crash down around him at any moment? Somehow, I drifted to the very edge of awareness, ready to slip away into darkness, when the room phone rang. I reached out and picked it up.

"Yes?" I said sleepily.

"Jacob…"

It was His voice. I hung up.

A moment later, the phone rang again. I could not help myself. I answered it.

"Jacob, I know where you are," He said. "I know just exactly where you are."