Hornets and Others

itself on again and repeated once more, 'Robert, are you there? This is Father. Please answer me.'

A chill went up Lonnigan's spine and that feeling of deja vu gripped him again, and he stood staring at the machine he had built, the machine he had turned off with his own hands, its amber and green lights now blinking on and off in the darkness and typing out repeatedly on its printer, 'Robert, are you there? Please answer. Robert, are you there? Please answer.' Lonnigan finally ended it by shutting down the computer completely and pulling the plug from the power outlet. He then left quickly, fearing that Y-12 would somehow turn itself back on despite the fact that its power source had been disconnected.

The following morning the bleary-eyed project manager assembled our entire staff and gave us a small speech, demanding that if anyone had tampered with Y-12 he should make himself known. No one stepped forward. Lonnigan pleaded with us, asking that if anyone knew anything at all about what had happened the night before, he should step forward now because he was endangering the entire project. We remained mute to a man, and I must admit we began to look at him a bit strangely.

There was talk throughout the day that perhaps Lonnigan needed a rest. A decision had actually been made to put him on at least temporary suspension when Y-12 suddenly burst into life with myself and about ten others present and began once more to type out its ghost message.

When the pandemonium died down, Lonnigan set us all to work. It was imperative, he said, that whatever was wrong with Y-12 be corrected before the government, which was funding the project, found out and all hell broke loose. One of my friends, a man named Boylston, asked, 'But what if it really is haunted?' and Lonnigan, his face showing things he didn't want to show, answered, 'Don't even think about it.'

Every nut and bolt on the Y- 12 computer was removed, turned over, and, more often than not, replaced. Every circuit was tapped, checked and rechecked, each memory bank drained and carefully reprogrammed. Nearly three days later, when we were through, Y-12 looked exactly as it had before. 'Let's hope we've driven it out,' Lonnigan said as we ran it through a test program. 'Driven what out?' asked Boylston, and the look Lonnigan turned on him made him not ask again.

Y-12 ran through the program perfectly, and then ran through it again perfectly. There was a general sigh of relief. But then, almost as soon as it had been shut down, it blinked back into life and began to type: 'Robert, are you there?'

There was complete silence in the room, and Lonnigan's face went white. Heaven knows what thoughts were running through his mind then. Whatever they were he shook his head and refused to dwell on them.

He ordered the lab sealed, ordered Y-12 pulled to pieces again.

'Check every component twice, change everything that can be changed. We've got a government man coming tomorrow, dammit, so I want it finished before he gets here.'

No one moved, and all eyes were on him, with the same silent statement.

Lonnigan went into a rage. 'That's not my father in there, dammit! It's a bug. This is a machine. We built it, we can tear it down, we can smash it to bits and it can't talk back; there's a reason for what happened, and I want to know what it is! It's not my father!'

From across the room Y-12 burst into life and typed out, 'Robert, please answer me.'

'Get to it now!' Lonnigan screamed, and stalked from the room.

An hour before dawn the job was completed, and we all sat huddled across the room from Y-12, drinking coffee. No one spoke; all attention was fastened on the computer, or on Robert Lonnigan who sat huddled over a drafting table, a set of blueprints pinned out beneath his eyes. He was studying those prints minutely, almost obsessively, and muttering to himself under his breath. He looked drawn and haggard.

'There's something here... I know it. Something...'

At that moment Y-12 began to chatter and blink into life. Everyone in the room, including Lonnigan, jumped.

'Robert, are you there? This is Father. Can you hear me? This is Father—'

'Ah!' cried Lonnigan suddenly, grabbing the schematic and waving it aloft. There was a look of triumph on his face, and deep relief. 'By God, I know what it is,' he said. 'I should kick myself for not solving this before. Everyone come and look at this.'

He spread the diagram out on the drafting table as we gathered around it. Behind us, Y-12 went on, 'Can you hear me? Please answer. This is Father—' and some of us glanced back nervously.

'Don't worry about the damn computer,' said Lonnigan. 'We've got some real work ahead of us before that government man gets here. Look at this section.' He indicated a portion of the left upper corner of the sheet. 'What happened was this, and it really is fantastic. We took every component out of Y-12, at least two times, right? And some were even replaced.'

'A couple of times,' I said.

'Right,' continued Lonnigan. 'But what we forgot about was the fact that some of the components of Y- 12 were taken whole from other, earlier units and jerry-rigged into this one.'

'So?' said my friend Boylston, who was still casting worried looks over his shoulder at the computer. 'We've always done that; it's better than redesigning whole circuits that are basically the same. It just eliminates redundancy.'

'Well, that's basically true. But in this case we used a component that was haunted.'

Lonnigan savored the looks he got from us for a moment.

'Now before you bolt for the doors, listen to me. Do you remember where we got this component here from?' Again he indicated the upper left corner of the blueprint.

'Sure,' I piped in. 'From the A-6 model.'

'Right. And the A-6 unit we used was one of the first ever manufactured. In fact, I'll wager it was the first off the line. And look at this,' he said, pointing to a specific area; 'we used almost the whole thing intact.'

'No we didn't,' I protested. 'We went through a lot of circuitry, but we bypassed most of it.'

'Ali, but not all of it; this whole section over here was part of the memory banks of the original machine.'

'Yes, but we bypassed it,' I insisted.

'Did we?' This was an accusation from Lonnigan. 'Ever since this business started, I've had the eerie feeling that I had heard some of what Y-12 was saying before. Well, it suddenly came to me.

'When I was fresh out of school I worked briefly with a man named Fleishman Bushyager—a brilliant man, but a little on the dotty side. He was elderly at the time, and pretty close to retirement age; the A-6 project, in any case, was supposed to be his last. You must remember this is a long time ago, and that I haven't thought about any of these things in years, so I may be a little fuzzy on a few points. But this is basically how the story goes.

'Part of the reason Bushyager was being herded out after the A-6 project was the fact that he began to come up with a few strange ideas; his son Robert died in an automobile accident and, like Arthur Conan Doyle, the old man became obsessed with trying to reach his son beyond the grave. He was actually working on some computer circuitry to aid him in this—a sort of computerized medium. Some of the higher-ups found out about it and since Bushyager was a big man they couldn't get rid of him outright; so they ordered him to restrict himself to A-6 work alone while they put through, behind his back, paperwork for his retirement.

'The old man was just about ready to leave by the time I got there, but one day he showed me some of the designs and one of his programs in particular. I stared and stared at this blueprint for hours and then it suddenly all wrapped up in my mind. One of the designs for the final A-6 computer actually contained, embedded in the circuitry, the design for Bushyager's medium. And though it was hidden, it could still do the old man's work for him, though in secret. He'd arranged things in such a way that his input would never show up on a readout, but the way we cannibalized the circuitry freed, as it were, the program for the first time. If you look closely, you can even see how Y-12 turned itself on. A bit eerie, but there's your ghost. The Y-12 was haunted—in a way. And the Robert our ghost was calling for was Robert Bushyager.

'Well,' said Lonnigan, 'we haven't much time before that government man arrives. Let's unhook that circuitry and patch it up, and clean this place up. At least we didn't have to see any real ghosts, right?'

'Amen,' we all agreed.

'This,' said the stranger, sipping at his brandy and relighting his cold cigar, 'nearly ends