Only Human (10 page)

Kevin considered this information. ‘When you say things,' he asked, ‘are we talking about, you know,
things
, like in the horror movies? Aliens from another galaxy, that sort of . . .?'

‘Things,' Martha repeated. ‘Like in vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, tumble driers. And animals too, probably. And maybe even statues and the like.'

‘Ah.'

‘Not to mention,' Martha said with distaste, ‘spirits and stuff. You know,' she added nervously. ‘Angels and . . . wassnames. Doesn't bear thinking about, really.'

‘No,' Kevin agreed, his throat uncomfortably dry, ‘I can see that. Awkward.'

Martha nodded. ‘Awkward's right. I mean, what if one of 'em were to take it into his head to die? Right palaver there'd be. You'd have answering machines eligible for eternal salvation, and people going in the big squashers down the scrapyard. Your Father . . .'

‘Don't,' Kevin interrupted. ‘I don't want to think about that.'

‘He'll have to know sooner or later,' Martha admonished. ‘Your best bet is to get the phones fixed soon as you can and let Him know so's He can come and sort it all out. Otherwise; well, I shudder to think.'

Kevin nodded slowly. ‘You don't think,' he said slowly, ‘that if we found some way of putting it all right, then at least we could say it wasn't a problem any more. I mean,
There was a bit of a flap but we fixed it
sounds a bit less feeble than
Help help, Dad, I bust the cosmos.'

‘Kevin! Haven't you done enough damage already?'

Kevin hung his head, embarrassed, while Martha prodded a few more keys and tutted, sounding like a busy turnstile. ‘Mind you,' she said after a long while, ‘there must be an easy way to turn it all round. You know, send 'em back where they came from. Now if only I could . . . Computer.'

‘So I should think. Now then, which of these keys . . .?'

For a moment, everything seemed to stop. In the blue corner, so to speak, was Martha, the only person in the history of Existence to tell the Boss that his desk needed tidying. In the red corner, Mainframe, the only sentient entity in all twelve dimensions that could truly say it's forgotten more than His Omniscience would ever know. There was enough static electricity in the air to allow Dr Frankenstein to set up a production line.

‘All right,' Martha grumbled eventually. ‘You're being very childish and silly, mind, and I'll tell Himself so when He gets home, but if that's the way you want it, that's up to you. Kevin, pass me that manual.'

Kevin grimaced. ‘All right,' he said, ‘but actually it's not much . . .'

‘Don't be silly.' Martha produced a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of her pinny and perched them on her nose. ‘Now then, let me see. Stabilisers, psychomorphic waveband, adjustment of: page three. And here we are . . . Oh.'

Kevin chewed his lip for a moment. ‘What's it say?' he asked.

‘See for yourself.' Martha handed him the book, and he read:

‘Told you it wasn't much help,' Kevin said. ‘Mind you, they've got a point. Under normal circumstances, I mean, because . . .'

‘Kevin. Stop babbling and give me the manual back.' Martha took the book and flicked through the opening pages until she found what she was looking for. ‘Here we are!' she cried. ‘“If you have any enquiries that are not covered by this handbook, consult our twenty-four-hour Freefone helpline service on 0666 66666.” As simple as that.'

‘Except that the phones are out.'

Martha frowned. ‘So they are, what a nuisance. Just a moment, though. What about the payphone down in the staff canteen? That's on a different circuit.'

Kevin caught his breath. ‘Is it? Gosh. I didn't know that. Come to think of it, I didn't know there was a payphone in the staff canteen. Didn't know there was a staff canteen, either. Is there a staff canteen?'

Martha looked at him. ‘Of course there is,' she replied. ‘It's on level 5A. Actually, I don't go there very often myself, because the food's rather dull, but . . .'

‘Dull?'

Martha nodded. ‘Bread and fish,' she explained. ‘It's a subsidised canteen. But they have got a phone. And I'm sure I heard someone say it was a separate line. Let's try that, shall we?'

‘Huh? Oh, right,' Kevin replied, his mind still trying to decode the bit about bread and fish. ‘And if we can't get anything from the helpline, we can ring Dad, and . . .'

Martha sighed. ‘It's a payphone, Kevin. He's in a different
galaxy
, remember. Even if we broke into the Social Club swear-box, I don't think we've got enough small change for that.'

‘Then we could ring the operator. Try reversing the charges or something, I don't know. There must be
something
. . .
'
His eyebrows lifted. ‘Oh, I
see
,' he exclaimed, ‘About the subsidised food.'

Martha nodded. ‘Two loaves and five fishes,' she said. ‘Good plain food and we get luncheon vouchers, but I'd just as soon have a Cornish pasty. Come on.'

 

In the darkness, something scuttled.

‘You're right,' said a voice. ‘They have.'

‘Told you so.'

Then there was silence for a while, an absence of sound as absolute as the absence of light. It wouldn't do to try and give an impression of how long the silence lasted, because that might create an illusion that Time worked down here. The passage of time and the movement of light are, of course, linked by Einstein's chain. They're a double act, effectively inseparable; Time/Light Inc. Completely remove one, and the other ceases to have any real meaning.

‘Money?' enquired the first voice.

Welcome to Hell; which is like anywhere else, in that it has its nice bits and other bits which aren't quite as nice. This is one of the least attractive districts, notorious for the complete absence of light or sound, smell, gravity or friction; in this part of Hell, the five senses are about as much use as an early-model Spectrum with a busted tube. The theory runs that physical agony is bad enough, but complete sensory deprivation makes being roasted alive on a bed of red-hot coals seem like wicked self-indulgence. In practice, however it's not so much the absolute nullity of the place that makes people avoid it if they have the choice; it's the people you tend to find here. Either they're Customers (in which case they've been fairly monumentally naughty during their terrestrial existence, and are therefore probably worth avoiding); or else they're Staff, which implies Dukes of Hell or above, since nobody with a lower-grade security code can get past the doors. In actual fact, if it's Staff they need to be Dukes of Hell or above and either mechanically gifted or very, very thin, because the locks haven't worked properly since Noah was a kid.

‘Of course money,' replied the second, who, like his companions, was a Duke, Grade IV(c). ‘F equals MA squared. It's one of the three Actually True Laws of Nature. Wherever there's a misfortune, there's a sum of money of commensurate size waiting to be made out of it.'

A pause. ‘F equals MA squared?'

‘That's right. F's the fuck-up, M's the money, A's the dreams of avarice. In this case, we can only assume that avarice has been eating ripe Stilton last thing at night.'

‘Well of course, if there's
money
. . .'

The last word,
money
, drained away into the darkness like Lake Erie into the Sahara desert; a big word, but a bigger darkness. There was a distant slithering noise, then silence once again.

‘Wonder how it happened?'

‘Who knows?' replied the second voice, sounding bored. ‘Likewise, who cares? Look, either we can hang around here speculating about chaos theory and the enzyme of entropy in the yeast-vat of eternity, or we can pull our fingers out and go make some money. Which would you rather?'

‘Sorry? Oh, the money, definitely. What are the other two?'

More silence; only this time vaguely bewilderment-flavoured.

‘What other two?'

‘You said there were three Actually True Laws of Nature. What are the other two?'

‘Tell you later. Look, are you coming or what?'

‘Right behind you.'

‘Fine. Switch on the torch, and let's get out of here.'

‘Torch? I thought you had the . . .'

Brief reprise of the awful silence, abruptly shattered by the sound of a head being smacked.

 

And on the third day he beheld the work that he had made, and saw that it was good.

He leaned forward, blew a little fine swarf out of a freshly cut keyway and dabbed a tiny drop of oil into it with the tip of a cotton-bud. At a touch, the power feed rolled smoothly forward, running the table effortlessly from left to right, flick switch, right to left; and as it went, the dial of the clock showed no error, not so much as a hundred-thousandth of an inch, too small a space for even one angel to dance on without tripping over its feet and falling splat on its face. Then, with an easy sweep of a lever, he pivoted the head through ninety degrees, clamped the lock and ran the table past both ways, clocking the tolerances and seeing that they were, indeed, very good. With one oily hand he reached out for the stale crust of yesterday's bacon sandwich; with the other he set the jibs on the saddle, correcting an error of a tenth of the thickness of a mayfly's wing, before cramping it firm with an Allen key. Power feed on; no backlash, creep or drag. It seemed to move as silently and as regularly as the passage of the very finest bespoke, Swiss-made Time; except that it could go backwards too, and sideways, and up and down and through three hundred and sixty degrees.

Oh well, he thought. That'll have to do, for now.

He noticed something. Yuk. This bacon sandwich tastes of oil.

Which in turn reminded him that, as a human being, he was very tired and extremely hungry, and if he wanted to avoid falling over he ought to have something proper to eat and then go to bed. Indeed. Finish the job off tomorrow. Except—

Except, he realised, there was nothing left to do. In a remarkably short time he'd converted a basic Shipcock & Adley universal-miller-and-turner into a machine so comprehensively and completely useful that there was nothing -
nothing
- that couldn't be made on it. Everything he'd ever dreamt of, every half-realised schematic he'd glimpsed in his steel mind's eye, had been made real and now stood before him, perfect and ready to go.

And now there was nothing left. He could make anything, yes; but there wasn't anything he particularly wanted to make. All dressed up and nowhere to go.

‘Machine,' he said.

The only thing he couldn't do anything about, of course, was the human being trapped inside it. That was the only drawback. True, all he had to do in order to program the thing was to tell it so; but all his commands and specifications had to go through the residual Neville mechanism; which wasn't, in all fairness, exactly state-of-the-art, unless the art in question happened to be cave-painting. If only he could replace that one weak and troublesome component; with, for example -

- himself?

Yes, but then I'd be back in there, and there'd be some slate-brained Neville of a
Homo sapiens
standing out here telling me to cut the slots in fifty billion bolt-heads. Done that.

‘Nothing,' he replied. ‘Just testing. Go back to sleep.'

Sleep . . . Got to get some of that before too long, otherwise going to break down. Dammit, the limitations are as frustrating as the possibilities are endless. 'F only could be in two places at once.

He realised he was staggering, and grabbed hold of the saddle to pull himself upright.
Power to primary leg muscles, operate tendons, engage emergency balance control systems.
He managed it eventually, propped himself up against the machine and waited for his head to stop spinning.

Steel willing, flesh weak. Maybe, he began to wonder, there's something I could do about that. After all, human body's only a mechanism, a few design modifications here and there could make a big difference.

His feet were beginning to slide along the floor. He scrabbled for a handhold, knocked a tin of bolts flying, scattered the tray of tenth-millimetre graded drills, finally got a grip on something solid and jerked himself back upright.
Definitely
need some sleep. Now, in fact, would be a good time.

Cursing softly, he sat down on the table of the machine, dragged his feet up and lay flat on his back. A quarter of a second later, he was fast asleep.

At least, the human body slept. The machine inside it wasn't drowsy at all. Like an insomniac guest in a house where all the family have gone to bed, it sat, restless, bored. To pass the time, it ran checklists. When it had finished that, it ran a checklist of its checklists, double-checked that and then checked the double-checking to make sure it all checked out. It did. It tried staying perfectly still and designing an improved auto-lubrication system for the spindle head bearings. But there was no improvement left to be made. Perfect. Finished. Job done.

Maybe that's why God, having created the Earth, made Man. Once the machine was perfect, He needed to fit it with something that'd make sure it kept going wrong. Just to make sure there'd always be things for Him to do.