street.
“To the parking lot!” he called over his shoulder.
But the girl had slumped in a heap on the sidewalk. He grumbled a curse and hurried to her side. She was semiconscious, but her face was white and drawn. She shivered uncontrollably.
“What’s wrong?” he snapped.
There was no answer. Fright had dazed her. Her lips moved, seemed to frame a soundless word: “George.”
Muttering angrily, Mitch stuffed a fifty-round drum of ammunition in his belt, took another between his teeth, and lifted the girl over one shoulder. He turned in time to fire a one-handed burst at another skater. The burst went wide. But the skater stopped. Then the skater ran away.
He gasped and stared after it. The blare of the loudspeaker was furnishing the answer.
All human personnel. Central patrol service has reached the limit of permissible subunit expenditure. Responsibility for capture no longer applies without further orders to expend subunits. Please instruct. Commissioner of Police, please instruct. Waiting. Waiting.”
Mitch grinned. Carrying the girl, he stumbled toward a car on the parking lot. He dumped her in the back seat and started in behind her, but a loudspeaker in the front protested.
“Unauthorized personnel. This is Mayor Sarquist’s car. Unauthorized personnel. Please use an extra.”
Mitch looked around. There were no extras on the lot. And if there had been one, it would refuse to carry him unless he could identify himself as authorized to use it.
Mayor Sarquist’s car began twittering a radio protest to Central. Mitch climbed inside and wrenched loose the cable that fed the antenna. The loudspeaker began barking complaints about sabotage. Mitch found a toolbox under the back seat and removed several of the pilot-computer’s panels. He tugged a wire loose, and the speaker ceased complaining. He ripped at another, and a bank of tubes went dead.
He drove away, using a set of dial controls for steering. The girl in the back seat began to recover her wits. She sat up and stared out the window at the thin traffic. The sun was sinking and the great city was immersing itself in gloom.
“You’re worthless!” he growled at Marta. “The world takes a poke at you, and you jump into your mental coffin and nail the lid shut. How do you expect to take care of your baby?”
She continued to stare gloomily out the window. She said nothing. The car screeched around a corner, narrowly missing a mechanical cop. The cop skated after them for three blocks, siren wailing; then it abandoned the chase.
“You’re one of the machine age’s spoiled children,” he fumed. “Technologists gave you everything you could possibly want. Push a button, and you get it. Instead of taking part in the machine age, you let it wait on you. You spoiled yourself. When the machine age cracks up, you crack up, too. Because you never made yourself its master; you just let yourself be mechanically pampered.”
She seemed not to hear him. He swung around another corner and pulled to the curb. They were in front of a three-story brick building set in the center of a green-lawned block and surrounded by a high iron fence. The girl stared at it for a moment and raised her chin slowly from her fist.
“The city orphanage!” she cried suddenly and bounded outside. She raced across the sidewalk and beat at the iron gate with her fists.
Mitch climbed out calmly and opened it for her. She darted up toward the porch, but a servo-attendant came rolling out to intercept her. Its handcuff hand was open to grasp her wrist.
She crouched on the walkway, then rolled quickly aside on the lawn. A burst of machine-gun fire brightened the twilight. The robot spun crazily and stopped, hissing and sputtering. Wrecking a robot could be dangerous. If a bullet struck the tiny nuclear reactor just right, there would be an explosion.
They skirted wide around it and hurried into the building. Somewhere upstairs a baby was crying. A servo- nurse sat behind a desk in the hall, and she greeted them as if they were guests.
“Good evening, sir and madam. You wish to see one of the children?”
Marta started toward the stairs, but Mitch seized her arm. “No! Let
But she tore herself free with a snarl and bounded up the steps toward the cry of her child. Mitch shrugged to himself and waited. The robot nurse protested the illegal entry but did nothing about it.
“Nooo—!”
A horrified shriek from the girl! He glanced up the staircase, knowing what was wrong but unable to help her. A moment later he heard her vomiting. He waited.
A few minutes later she came staggering down the stairway, sobbing and clutching her baby tightly against her. She stared at Mitch with tear-drenched eyes, gave him a wild shake of her head, and babbled hysterically.
“Those cribs! They’re full of little bones. Little bones—all over the floor. Little bones—”
“Shut up!” he snapped. “Be thankful yours is all right. Now let’s get out of here.”
After disposing of another robotic interferer they reached the car, and Mitch drove rapidly toward the outskirts. The girl’s sobbing ceased, and she purred a little unsung lullaby to her child, cuddling it as if it had just returned from the dead. Remorse picked dully at Mitch’s heart, for having growled at her. Motherwise, she was still a good animal, despite her lack of success in adjusting to the reality of a ruptured world.
“Marta—?”
“What?”
“You’re not fit to take care of yourself.”
He said it gently. She only stared at him as he piloted the car. “You ought to find a big husky gal who wants a baby, and let her take care of it for you.”
“No.”
“It’s just a suggestion. None of my business. You want your baby to live, don’t you?”
“George promised he’d take care of us. George always took care of us.”
“George killed himself.”
She uttered a little whimper. “Why did he do it? Why? I went to look for food. I came back, and there he was. Why,
“Possibly because he was just like you. What did he do—before the war?”
“Interior decorator. He was good, a real artist.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you say it
“Was he qualified to live in a mechanical culture?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean—could he control his slice of mechanical civilization, or did it control him?”
“I don’t see—”
“Was he a button-pusher and a switch-puller? Or did he care what made the buttons and switches work? Men misuse their tools because they don’t understand the principles of the tools. A man who doesn’t know how a watch works might try to fix it with a hammer. If the watch is communal property, he’s got no right to fool with it. A nontechnologist has no right to take part in a technological civilization. He’s a bull in a china shop. That’s what happened to our era. Politicians were given powerful tools. They failed to understand the tools. They wrecked our culture with them.”
“You’d have a scientist in the White House?”
“If all men were given a broad technical education, there could be nothing else there, could there?”
“Technocracy—”
“No. Simply a matter of education.”
“People aren’t smart enough.”
“You mean they don’t
