Only Human (36 page)

‘Hold it,' Len yelled.

The apparent leader of the party stopped where he was, assessing him through several pairs of inhuman eyes. ‘Well?' he said.

‘Come any closer and I'll thump you.'

‘Oh.' The leader shrugged. ‘I thought you were going to say something important. All right, grab them and let's get going.'

Two of the subsidary Things caught hold of the robot while a third pulled a black plastic sack down over its head. It didn't move. The leader and his remaining henchthing advanced on Len; in no particular hurry, keeping a multiplicity of eyes and the like on the Stilson in Len's hands, but not unduly worried about it. As they came close, he backed away. They walked straight past him.

‘Hey,' he said. ‘Where are you going?'

‘You'll see.'

They were standing on either side of the machine; the universal milling and turning machine that was much more Len than any bag of bones and blood would ever be. The leader picked up a twelve-pound sledgehammer single-handed; his chum was toying with the big adjustable spanner.

‘Come quietly,' said the leader, ‘or the machine gets it.'

‘You wouldn't.'

‘As a statement of fact, that has a basic flaw. As a threat, it doesn't work. As an appeal to my better nature—'

‘Get away,' Len said, ‘from that machine. It hasn't done you any harm.'

The subsidiary Thing tapped the main casing gently with the spanner. ‘Cast iron,' he observed. ‘Brittle stuff, if it gets hit. Can't be repaired.'

‘All right.' The Stilson clattered on the concrete floor; only Len heard it swearing. ‘Now get away from the machine.'

The Things took a step forwards; but suddenly there was an atmosphere in the workshop that hadn't been there a moment before. A sort of dull residual anger, you might say, if you had an excessively powerful imagination. Len could feel it well enough; he could remember feeling that anger many times himself, when some cack-haired apprentice had jammed his feed or graunched his threads. It tended to start with an ill-defined I-don't-like-this-man, after which it would develop over a period of days, sometimes years, biding its time until the object of the machine's resentment happened to put his thumb in the way of the boring-bar or lean over a moving chuck with his shirt-sleeves flapping. Then there'd be a short, usually bloody moment, followed by a certain amount of irrational human behaviour; after a while someone'd come along, switch him off at the mains and clean the blood and bits of stuff out of the cogs and threads. Odd how rarely human beings notice that ominous feel in the air.

EC Directive 463837/99 forsooth. One of the first things a machine tool learns is how to defend itself, and how to avenge its slighted honour.

It started when the leader's right leg brushed against the bench grinder, which promptly switched itself on. The leader immediately jumped two feet in the air and eighteen inches sideways, but all he achieved was to fall heavily across the bed of the bandsaw. With hindsight, an error on his part.

In a slightly edited form, the leader then hurled himself clear of the bandsaw and, with his remaining hand, grabbed at the nearest solid object to steady himself. His rotten luck it happened to be the arc welder.

From the arc welder, the leader then rebounded on to the table of the Great Machine, and that's where his real problems started. The horizontal arm, set up for slit-sawing, left just enough of him for the vertical arm to mess up quite comprehensively with a face-cutter.

Ah, Len said to himself. Always wondered why they called them that.

The subsidary Thing stayed perfectly still, at least until Len had brained him with the big Stilson.That just left the other three.

‘One of the advantages of buying second-hand gear,' Len said, ‘is that it doesn't comply with the latest EC directives. Do we have to do this the hard way, or are you lot going to bugger off and leave me in peace?'

A Thing grinned at him feebly. ‘In a perfect world,' he said, ‘we'd bugger off. Gladly.'

‘Like a shot,' confirmed his colleague to his immediate right.

‘Nothing'd give us greater pleasure,' chipped in the third.

Len shrugged. ‘Please yourselves, then,' he said; whereupon the spindle moulder jumped them. What a spindle moudler does to pieces of wood is bad enough.

‘You can come out now,' Len said.

‘Sorry,' the robot reiterated. ‘If it'd been up to me, I'd have pulled their heads off and made them eat them.'

‘I'm sure you would,' Len replied, pulling off the plastic sack. ‘Isn't there something in human literature about a tin man who has no heart?'

‘Not quite,' the robot replied. ‘In
The Wizard of Oz
—'

‘Well,' Len went on, ‘you're a steel man who has no balls. But we can fix that. Hand me that half-by-nine-sixteenths spanner.'

‘Please—'

‘Nuts,' Len went on, unscrewing one, ‘but no balls.' He paused and thought. ‘Maybe it's a human thing, courage,' he said.

‘Up to a - ouch, that
tickles
!'

‘It'll do more than tickle when I get the brazing torch on you. Now then, I'll need a schematic of male reproductive organs, some three-sixteenths copper pipe and a soldering iron. God, what a bloody daft way to go about a perfectly simple job of plumbing!'

‘Why are you—?'

Len looked up and reached for a hacksaw. ‘Because,' he replied, ‘as soon as I've bypassed that EC Directive, we're going to find out who sent these goons, these creatures who threatened to hurt a machine, and we're going to sort them out. All right?'

‘Okay. Um, boss.'

‘Yes?'

‘Why?'

‘Shut up.'

‘Ah. Now I understand. Thanks, boss.'

‘K
evin.' The younger son of God didn't reply. He was sitting curled up in the window-seat of one of the rear subsidiary seventeenth-floor chapels, gazing listlessly out over the back courtyard and fiddling with a plastic flower. A painter in need of a model for a watercolour lovelorn teenager would have offered him money not to move an inch.

‘Kevin,' Martha repeated. ‘Your dinner's going cold.'

‘Don't want any,' he mumbled, turning his head away. Outside, they were emptying the septic tank. Chances were that it wasn't the view that was monopolising his attention.

‘It's kedgeree,' Martha said. ‘And bread-and-butter pudding for afters.'

‘It's always kedgeree and bread-and-butter pudding,' Kevin replied; and if this statement wasn't entirely accurate, it was close enough.

Martha advanced, walking softly. ‘What's the matter?' she said.

‘Oh, nothing,' Kevin replied. ‘I've messed up the computer, the whole world's a complete shambles, I don't even know what harm I've done and when Dad gets home He'll be so angry it'll make what He did to Adam and Eve look like an awards ceremony.'

‘But that's not it, is it?'

‘No,' Kevin admitted.

‘She hasn't rung back, has she?'

‘Who? Oh, you mean that female mortal, the one from the computer place. No, she hasn't.' Kevin's voice wobbled like a tightrope walker in a hurricane. ‘Not,' he went on, ‘that I was expecting her to. I mean, what'd she want to go phoning
me
for? It's not as if anybody in their right mind'd want to talk to
me
. 'Specially not . . .' His voice trailed away, like the attention of a delegate on the fifth day of a conference, and he made a sort of burping noise that had nothing to do with indigestion.

‘Now then,' Martha said. Not tactful to point out that her not ringing back had probably avoided a potential disaster that would have relegated whatever else Kevin had done, no matter how cataclysmic, to a quarter of an inch on the back page under the Australian football results. She tried, briefly, to imagine what Himself would have said if He'd come home to meet a radiantly happy Kevin nervously stammering that there was someone he'd like Him to meet.

No, no more of that sort of thing.

Once had been quite enough . . .

She felt her face grow warm, and turned it away in case Kevin should see the blush. ‘You've got to keep your strength up,' she said. ‘There's ice cream with the bread-and-butter pudding.'

‘No thanks.'

‘Or custard.You like custard.'

Kevin said some words about bread-and-butter pudding that had probably never been used in Heaven before; where
did
he learn them? Martha wondered. She replied with some mild rebuke; her mind was elsewhere. No,
that
sort of thing was definitely not on. Perish the thought. She shrugged, and closed the door after her.

The boy's growing up, she reflected as she made her way down the stairs to the laundry room; a disturbing thought. He wasn't supposed to grow up. It had been part of the deal, in fact. It was a good bet that this sudden and unexpected contact with mortals was behind it; after all, a lad his age, talking to a girl for the very first time, it was only to be expected. Next thing you know, he'll be thinking about all sorts of things.

Like, for example; whatever became of his mother?

As she folded a towel, Martha shuddered. It really wouldn't do for Kevin to start asking that sort of question. Mind you, it was a miracle it hadn't occurred to him already. Very much a miracle; but in a place where everything from the plumbing to the immersion heaters works by miracle - so cheap, so environmentally friendly - you take such things for granted. If only everything in life was as reliable as a miracle.

Now if she could have her time over again—

Yes, but she couldn't, so no point worrying about it. There was no way Kevin would ever work it out for himself. That had been taken care of nearly two thousand years ago; no reason why it should suddenly change now.

Unless—

She dropped the towel; it folded itself anyway (My God! A miracle!). Unless, of course, one of the things Kevin had thrown out of kilter was her own rather shamefaced little miracle, the one that prevented a boy asking an obvious question. The very thought was enough to make her blood run as cold as a bath in a cheap hotel. No reason to suppose that it should, of course; except that here was Kevin, noticing girls. Why now? Compared with what they'd been like a few decades ago, girls in the fag-end of the twentieth century were scarcely worth noticing. Drab, featureless, uninspiring the lot of 'em; none of them the sort of creature you'd accept a second-hand apple from. Compared to the quality of girls they'd had in her young day—

Well, quite. Enough said about that. The plain fact of the matter was, if this mess didn't get sorted out as quick as ninepence, there could well be trouble, and then what? Another flood, maybe? Martha sincerely hoped it wouldn't come to that. Thousands of years it'd taken before they'd got rid of that horrible musty smell, not to mention the damp getting into the walls. And, of course, the mass devastation and loss of life, though it got a bit technical when you started trying to work out the ramifications of that particular line of thought. It was an option He might well consider, nevertheless; not to mention a first-rate excuse for winding up humanity and starting again with a relatively clean sheet. Would He go that far, just to cover up one little scandal?

No need to think too long about that one.

She left the rest of the bedlinen to fold itself - it was much better at it than she was - and hurried back down to the staff canteen. Fortunately, nobody was using the phone, and she still had enough small change.

From the KIC helpline number, no reply. To be precise, that high-pitched keening noise that means the line's been cut off. Frowning, she tried the main number, and got a recorded message, Sorry we can't take your call right now but we've quite unexpectedly ceased to exist. If you'd like to leave a message for the liquidators, please speak after the tone.

Martha didn't swear; but the way she said ‘Drat!' would have had your average Hell's Angel scowling at her and demanding that she wash her mouth out with soap. The only little flicker of light she'd seen so far, snuffed out. Back precisely where she'd started.

Which meant she'd have to think of something else.

Easier said than done. She was, in all modesty, reasonably bright, but solutions to insoluble problems weren't the sort of thing she could pluck out of thin air at a moment's notice. Intelligence wasn't quite enough. There had to be a certain element of luck as well; say ninety-nine per cent, in round figures. For her to fix this dreadful muddle all by herself, without any help or proper facilities; it'd be—