Home Is the Hangman Page 4

  "Then you have nothing to worry about."

  He frowned. Then, "No," he said. "Being aware of this and still trying is where the presumption comes in."

  "Were you really thinking that way when you did it? Or did all this occur to you after the fact?"

  He continued to frown.

  "I am no longer certain."

  "Then it would seem to me that a merciful God would be inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt."

  He gave me a wry smile.

  "Not bad, John Donne. But I feel that judgment may already have been entered and that we may have lost four to nothing."

  "Then you see the Hangman as an avenging angel?"

  "Sometimes. Sort of. I see it as being returned to exact a penalty."

  "Just for the record," I suggested, "if the Hangman had had full access to the necessary equipment and was able to construct another unit such as itself, would you consider it guilty of the same thing that is bothering you?"

  He shook his head.

  "Don't get all cute and Jesuitical with me, Donne. I'm not that far away from fundamentals. Besides, I'm willing to admit I might be wrong and that there may be other forces driving it to the same end."

  "Such as?"

  "I told you I'd let you know when we reached a certain point. That's it."

  "Okay," I said. "But that sort of blank-walls me, you know. The people I am working for would like to protect you people. They want to stop the Hangman. I was hoping you would tell me a little more, if not for your own sake, then for the others'. They might not share your philosophical sentiments, and you have just admitted you may be wrong…Despair, by the way, is also considered a sin by a great number of theologians."

  He sighed and stroked his nose, as I had often seen him do in times long past.

  "What do you do, anyhow?" he asked me.

  "Me, personally? I'm a science writer. I'm putting together a report on the device for (he agency that wants to do the protecting. The better my report, the better their chances."

  He was silent for a time, then, "I read a lot in the area, but I don't recognize your name," he said.

  "Most of my work has involved petrochemistry and marine biology," I said.

  "Oh…You were a peculiar choice then, weren't you?"

  "Not really. I was available, and the boss knows my work, knows I'm good."

  He glanced across the room, to where a stack of cartons partly obscured what I then realized to be a remote-access terminal. Okay. If he decided to check out my credentials now, John Donne would fall apart. It seemed a hell of a time to get curious, though, after sharing his sense of sin with me. He must have thought so, too, because he did not look that way again.

  "Let me put it this way…" he finally said, and something of the old David Fentris at his best took control of his voice. "For one reason or the other, I believe that it wants to destroy its former operators. If it is the judgment of the Almighty, that's all there is to it. It will succeed. If not, however, I don't want any outside protection. I've done my own repenting and it is up to me to handle the rest of the situation myself, too. I will stop the Hangman personally, right here, before anyone else is hurt."

  "How?" I asked him.

  He nodded toward the glittering helmet.

  "With that," he said.

  "How?" I repeated.

  "The Hangman's telefactor circuits are still intact. They have to be: they are an integral part of it. It could not disconnect them without shutting itself down. If it comes within a quarter mile of here, that unit will be activated. It will emit a loud humming sound and a light will begin to blink behind that meshing beneath the forward ridge. I will then don the helmet and take control of the Hangman. I will bring it here and disconnect its brain."

  "How would you do the disconnect?"

  He reached for the schematics he had been looking at when I had come in.

  "Here. The thoracic plate has to be unplugged. There are four subunits that have to be uncoupled. Here, here, here, and here."

  He looked up.

  "You would have to do them in sequence, though, or it could get mighty hot," I said. "First this one, then these two. Then the other."

  When I looked up again, the gray eyes were fixed on my own.

  "I thought you were in petrochemistry and marine biology."

  "I am not really 'in' anything," I said. "I am a tech writer, with bits and pieces from all over, and I did have a look at these before, when I accepted the job."

  "I see."

  "Why don't you bring the space agency in on this?" I said, working to shift ground. "The original telefactoring equipment had all that power and range…"

  "It was dismantled a long time ago…I thought you were with the government"

  I shook my head.

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to mislead you. I am on contract with a private investigation outfit."

  "Uh-huh. Then that means Jesse…Not that it matters. You can tell him that one way or the other everything is being taken care of."

  "What if you are wrong on the supernatural," I said, "but correct on the other? Supposing it is coming under the circumstances you feel it proper to resist? But supposing you are not next on its list? Supposing it gets to one of the others next, instead of you? If you are so sensitive about guilt and sin, don't you think that you would be responsible for that death, if you could prevent it by telling me just a little bit more? If it's confidentiality you're worried about…"

  "No," he said. "You cannot trick me into applying my principles to a hypothetical situation which will only work out the way that you want it to. Not when I am certain that it will not arise. Whatever moves the Hangman, it will come to me next. If I cannot stop it, then it cannot be stopped until it has completed its job."

  "How do you know that you are next?"

  "Take a look at a map," he said. "It landed in the Gulf. Manny was right there in New Orleans. Naturally, he was first. The Hangman can move underwater like a controlled torpedo, which makes me Mississippi its logical route for inconspicuous travel. Proceeding up it then, here I am in Memphis. Then Leila,, up in St. Louis, is obviously next after me. It can worry about getting to Washington after that."

  I thought about Senator Brockden in Wisconsin and decided it would not even have that problem. All of them were fairly accessible, when you thought of the situation in terms of river travel.

  "But how is it to know where you all are?" I asked.

  "Good question," he said. "Within a limited range, it was once sensitive to our brain waves, having an intimate knowledge of them and the ability to pick them up. I do not know what that range would be today. It might have been able to construct an amplifier to extend this area of perception. But to be more mundane about it, I believe that it simply consulted Central's national directory. There are booths all over, even on the waterfront. It could have hit one late at night and gimmicked it. It certainly had sufficient identifying information, and engineering skill."

  "Then it seems to me that the best bet for all of you would be to move away from the river till this business is settled. That thing won't be able to stalk about the countryside very long without being noticed."

  He shook his head.

  "It would find a way. It is extremely resourceful. At night, in an overcoat, a hat, it could pass. It requires nothing that a man would need. It could dig a hole and bury itself, stay underground during daylight. It could run without resting all night long. There is no place it could not reach in a surprisingly short while…No, I must wait here for it."

  "Let me put it as bluntly as I can," I said. "If you are right that it is a Divine Avenger, I would say that it smacks of blasphemy to try to tackle it. On the other hand, if it is not, then I think you are guilty of jeopardizing the others by withholding information that would allow us to provide them with a lot more protection than you are capable of giving them all by yourself."

  He laughed.

  "I'll just have to learn to live with that guilt, to
o, as they do with theirs," he said. "After I've done my best, they deserve anything they get."

  "It was my understanding," I said, "that even God doesn't judge people until after they're dead, if you want another piece of presumption to add to your collection."

  He stopped laughing and studied my face.

  "There is something familiar about the way you talk, the way you think," he said. "Have we ever met before?"

  "I doubt it. I would have remembered."

  He shook his head.

  "You've got a way of bothering a man's thinking that rings a faint bell," he went on. "You trouble me, sir."

  "That was my intention."

  "Are you staying here in town?"

  "No."

  "Give me a number where I can reach you, will you? If I have any new thoughts on this thing, I'll call you."

  "I wish you would have them now, if you are going to have them."

  "No, I've got some thinking to do. Where can I get hold of you later?"

  I gave him the name of the motel I was still checked into in St. Louis. I could call back periodically for messages.

  "All right," he said, and he moved toward the partition by the reception area and stood beside it.

  I rose and followed him, passing into that area and pausing at the door to the hall.

  "One thing…"I said.

  "Yes?"

  "If it does show up and you do stop it, will you call me and tell me that?"

  "Yes, I will."

  "Thanks then, and good luck."

  Impulsively, I extended my hand. He gripped it and smiled faintly.

  "Thank you. Mister Donne."

  Next. Next, next, next…

  I couldn't budge Dave, and Leila Thackery had given me everything she was going to. No real sense in calling Don yet, not until I had more to say.

  I thought it over on my way back to the airport. The pre-dinner hours always seem best for talking to people in any sort of official capacity, just as the night seems best for dirty work. Heavily psychological, but true nevertheless. I hated to waste the rest of the day if there was anyone else worth talking to before I called Don. Going through the folder, I decided that there was.

  Manny Burns had a brother, Phil. I wondered how worthwhile it might be to talk with him. I could make it to New Orleans at a sufficiently respectable hour, learn whatever he was willing to tell me, check back with Don for new developments, and then decide whether there was anything I should be about with respect to the vessel itself.

  The sky was gray and leaky above me. I was anxious to flee its spaces. So I decided to do it. I could think of no better stone to upturn at the moment.

  At the airport, I was ticketed quickly, in time for another close connection.

  Hurrying to reach my flight, my eyes brushed over a half-familiar face on the passing escalator. The reflex reserved for such occasions seemed to catch us both, because he looked back, too, with the same eyebrow twitch of startle and scrutiny. Then he was gone. I could not place him, however. The half-familiar face becomes a familiar phenomenon in a crowded, highly mobile society. I sometimes think that that is all that will eventually remain of any of us: patterns of features, some a trifle more persistent than others, impressed on the flow of bodies. A small-town boy in a big city, Thomas Wolfe must long ago have felt the same thing when he had coined the word "manswarm." It might have been someone I'd once met briefly, or simply someone, or someone like someone, I had passed on sufficient other occasions such as this.

  As I flew the unfriendly skies out of Memphis, I mulled over musings past on artificial intelligence, or AI as they have tagged it in the think-box biz. When talking about computers, the AI notion had always seemed hotter than I deemed necessary, partly because of semantics. The word "intelligence" has all sorts of tag-along associations of the non-physical sort. I suppose it goes back to the fact that early discussions and conjectures concerning it made it sound as if the potential for intelligence was always present in the array of gadgets, and that the correct procedures, the right programs, simply had to be found to call it forth. When you looked at it that way, as many did, it gave rise to an uncomfortable deja-vu, namely, vitalism. The philosophical battles of the nineteenth century were hardly so far behind that they had been forgotten, and the doctrine which maintained that life is caused and sustained by a vital principle apart from physical and chemical forces, and that life is self-sustaining and self-evolving, had put up quite a fight before Darwin and his successors had produced triumph after triumph for the mechanistic view. Then vitalism sort of crept back into things again when the AI discussions arose in the middle of the past century. It would seem that Dave had fallen victim to it, and that he'd come to believe he had helped provide an unsanctified vessel and filled it with Something intended only for those things which had made the scene in the first chapter of Genesis…

  With computers it was not quite as bad as with the Hangman, though, because you could always argue that no matter how elaborate the program, it was basically an extension of the programmer's will and the operations of causal machines merely represented functions of intelligence, rather than intelligence in its own right backed by a will of its own. And there was always Godel for a theoretical cordon sanitaire, with his demonstration of the true but mechanically improvable proposition.

  But the Hangman was quite different. It had been designed along the lines of a brain and at least partly educated in a human fashion; and to further muddy the issue with respect to anything like vitalism, it had been in direct contact with human minds from which it might have acquired almost anything, including the spark that set it on the road to whatever selfhood it may have found. What did that make it? Its own creature? A fractured mirror reflecting a fractured humanity? Both? Or neither? I certainly could not say, but I wondered how much of its self had been truly its own. It had obviously acquired a great number of functions, but was it capable of having real feelings? Could it, for example, feel something like love? If not, then it was still only a collection of complex abilities, and not a thing with all the tagalong associations of the non-physical sort which made the word "intelligence" such a prickly item in AI discussions; and if it were capable of, say, something like love, and if I were Dave, I would not feel guilty about having helped to bring it into being. I would feel proud, though not in the fashion he was concerned about, and I would also feel humble…Offhand though, I do not know how intelligent I would feel, because I am still not sure what the hell intelligence is.

  The day's-end sky was clear when we landed. I was into town before the sun had finished setting, and on Philip Burns' doorstep just a little while later.

  My ring was answered by a girl, maybe seven or eight years old. She fixed me with large brown eyes and did not say a word.

  "I would like to speak with Mister Burns," I said. She turned and retreated around a comer. A heavyset man, slacked and undershirted, bald about halfway back and very pink, padded into the hall moments later and peered at me. He bore a folded newssheet in his left hand.

  "What do you want?" he asked.

  "It's about your brother," I answered.

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, I wonder if I could come in? It's kind of complicated."

  He opened the door. But instead of letting me in, he came out.

  "Tell me about it out here," he said.

  "Okay, I'll be quick. I just wanted to find out whether he ever spoke with you about a piece of equipment he once worked with called the Hangman."

  "Are you a cop?"

  "No."

  "Then what's your interest?"

  "I am working for a private investigation agency trying to track down some equipment once associated with the project. It has apparently turned up in this area and it could be rather dangerous."

  "Let's see some identification."

  "I don't carry any."

  "What's your name?"

  "John Donne."

  "And you think my brother had some stolen equipment w
hen he died? Let me tell you something…"

  "No. Not stolen," I said, "and I don't think he had it."

  "What then?"

  "It was, well, robotic in nature. Because of some special training Manny once received, he might have had a way of detecting it. He might even have attracted it. I just want to find out whether he had said anything about it. We are trying to locate it."

  "My brother was a respectable businessman, and I don't like accusations. Especially right after his funeral, I don't. I think I'm going to call the cops and let them ask you a few questions."

  "Just a minute. Supposing I told you we had some reason to believe it might have been this piece of equipment that killed your brother?"

  His pink turned to bright red and his jaw muscles formed sudden ridges. I was not prepared for the stream of profanities that followed. For a moment, I thought he was going to take a swing at me.

  "Wait a second," I said when he paused for breath. "What did I say?"

  "You're either making fun of the dead or you're stupider than you look!"

  "Say I'm stupid. Then tell me why."

  He tore at the paper he carried, folded it back, found an item, thrust it at me.

  "Because they've got the guy who did it! That's why," he said.

  I read it. Simple, concise, to the point. Today's latest. A suspect had confessed. New evidence had corroborated it. The man was in custody. A surprised robber who had lost his head and hit too hard, hit too many times. I read it over again.

  I nodded as I passed it back.

  "Look, I'm sorry," I said. "I really didn't know about this."

  "Get out of here," he said. "Go on."

  "Sure."

  "Wait a minute."

  "What?"

  "That's his little girl who answered the door," he said.

  "I'm very sorry."

  "So am I. But I know her Daddy didn't take your damned equipment."

  I nodded and turned away.

  I heard the door slam behind me.

  After dinner, I checked into a small hotel, called for a drink, and stepped into the shower.

  Things were suddenly a lot less urgent than they had been earlier. Senator Brockden would doubtless be pleased to learn that his initial estimation of events had been incorrect. Leila Thackery would give me an I-told-you-so smile when I called her to pass along the news, a thing I now felt obliged to do. Don might or might not want me to keep looking for the device now that the threat had been lessened. It would depend on the Senator's feelings on the matter, I supposed. If urgency no longer counted for as much, Don might want to switch back to one of his own, fiscally less burdensome operatives. Toweling down, I caught myself whistling. I felt almost off the hook.