Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (18 page)

He got in, still carrying his putter, and their heads were jerked back as
the capsule was launched. They moved for only a short distance, then came
to a halt. The door didn't open.

"The system's probably tied up," Bach said, squirming. She didn't like to
see the municipal services fail in the company of this Terran.

"Ah," Birkson said, flashing a grin with an impossible number of square
teeth. "A panic evacuation, no doubt. You didn't have the tube system
closed down, I suppose?"

"No," she said. "I … well, I thought there might be a chance to get
a large number of people away from the area in case this thing does go
off."

He shook his head, and grinned again. He put this grin after every
sentence he spoke, like punctuation.

"You'd better seal off the city. If it's a hoax, you're going to have
hundreds of dead and injured from the panic. It's a lost cause trying to
evacuate. At most, you might save a few thousand."

"But …"

"Keep them stationary. If it goes off, it's no use anyway. You'll lose the
whole city. And no one's going to question your judgment because you'll be
dead. If it doesn't go off, you'll be sitting pretty for having prevented
a panic. Do it. I
know.
"

Bach began to really dislike this man right then but decided to follow his
advice. And his thinking did have a certain cold logic. She phoned the
station and had the lid clamped on the city. Now the cars in the
cross-tube ahead would be cleared, leaving only her priority capsule
moving.

They used the few minutes' delay while the order was implemented to size
each other up. Bach saw a blond, square-jawed young man in a checkered
sweater and gold knickers. He had a friendly face, and that was what
puzzled her. There was no trace of worry on his smooth features. His hands
were steady, clasped calmly around the steel shaft of his putter. She
wouldn't have called his manner cocky or assured, but he did manage to
look cheerful.

She had just realized that he was looking her over, and was wondering what
he saw, when he put his hand on her knee. He might as well have slapped
her. She was stunned.

"What are you … get your hand off me, you … you groundhog."

Birkson's hand had been moving upward. He was apparently unfazed by the
insult. He turned in his seat and reached for her hand. His smile was
dazzling.

"I just thought that since we're stalled here with nothing else to do, we
might start getting to know each other. No harm in that, is there? I just
hate to waste any time, that's all."

She wrenched free of his grasp and assumed a defensive posture, feeling
trapped in a nightmare. But he relented, having no interest in pursuing
the matter when he had been rebuffed.

"All right. We'll wait. But I'd like to have a drink with you, or maybe
dinner. After this thing's wrapped up, of course."

"'This thing …' How can you think of something like that …?"

"At a time like this. I know. I've heard it. Bombs get me horny, is all.
So okay, so I'll leave you alone." He grinned again. "But maybe you'll
feel different when this is over."

For a moment she thought she was going to throw up from a combination of
revulsion and fear. Fear of the bomb, not this awful man. Her stomach was
twisted into a pretzel, and here he sat, thinking of sex. What was he,
anyway?

The capsule lurched again, and they were on their way.

The deserted Leystrasse made a gleaming frame of stainless steel
storefronts and fluorescent ceiling for the improbable pair hurrying from
the tube station in the Plaza: Birkson in his anachronistic golf togs,
cleats rasping on the polished rock floor, and Bach, half a meter taller
than him, thin like a Lunarian. She wore the regulation uniform of the
Municipal Police, which was a blue armband and cap with her rank of chief
emblazoned on them, a shoulder holster, an equipment belt around her waist
from which dangled the shining and lethal-looking tools of her trade,
cloth slippers, and a few scraps of clothing in arbitrary places. In the
benign environment of Lunar corridors, modesty had died out ages ago.

They reached the cordon that had been established around the bomb, and
Bach conferred with the officer in charge. The hall was echoing with
off-key music.

"What's that?" Birkson asked.

Officer Walters, the man to whom Bach had been speaking, looked Birkson
over, weighing just how far he had to go in deference to this grinning
weirdo. He was obviously the bomb expert Bach had referred to in an
earlier call, but he was a Terran, and not a member of the force. Should
he be addressed as 'sir'? He couldn't decide.

"It's the bomb. It's been singing to us for the last five minutes. Ran out
of things to say, I guess."

"Interesting." Swinging the putter lazily from side to side, he walked to
the barrier of painted steel crowd-control sections. He started sliding
one of them to the side.

"Hold it … ah, sir," Walters said.

"Wait a minute, Birkson," Bach confirmed, running to the man and almost
grabbing his sleeve. She backed away at the last moment.

"It said no one's to cross that barrier," Walter supplied to Bach's
questioning glance. "Says it'll blow us all to the Farside."

"What is that damn thing, anyway?" Bach asked, plaintively.

Birkson withdrew from the barrier and took Bach aside with a tactful touch
on the arm. He spoke to her with his voice just low enough for Walters to
hear.

"It's a cyborged human connected to a bomb, probably a uranium device," he
said. "I've seen the design. It's just like one that went off in
Johannesburg three years ago. I didn't know they were still making them."

"I heard about it," Bach said, feeling cold and alone. "Then you think
it's really a bomb? How do you know it's a cyborg? Couldn't it be tape
recordings, or a computer?"

Birkson rolled his eyes slightly, and Bach reddened. Damn it, they were
reasonable questions. And to her surprise, he could not defend his opinion
logically. She wondered what she was stuck with. Was this man really the
expert she took him to be, or a plaid-sweatered imposter?

"You can call it a hunch. I'm going to talk to this fellow, and I want you
to roll up an industrial X-ray unit on the level below this while I'm
doing it. On the level above, photographic film. You get the idea?"

"You want to take a picture of the inside of this thing. Won't that be
dangerous?"

"Yeah. Are your insurance premiums paid up?"

Bach said nothing, but gave the orders. A million questions were spinning
through her head, but she didn't want to make a fool of herself by asking
a stupid one. Such as: how much radiation did a big industrial X-ray
machine produce when beamed through a rock and steel floor? She had a
feeling she wouldn't like the answer. She sighed, and decided to let
Birkson have his head until she felt he couldn't handle it. He was about
the only hope she had.

And he was strolling casually around the perimeter, swinging his goddamn
putter behind him, whistling bad harmony with the tune coming from the
bomb. What was a career police officer to do? Back him up on the
harmonica?

The scanning cameras atop the bomb stopped their back and forth motion.
One of them began to track Birkson. He grinned his flashiest and waved to
it. The music stopped.

"I am a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb of the uranium-235 type," it said. "You
must stay behind the perimeter I have caused to be erected here. You must
not disobey this order."

Birkson held up his hands, still grinning, and splayed out his fingers.

"You got me, bud. I won't bother you. I was just admiring your casing.
Pretty nice job, there. It seems a shame to blow it up."

"Thank you," the bomb said, cordially. "But that is my purpose. You cannot
divert me from it."

"Never entered my mind. Promise."

"Very well. You may continue to admire me, if you wish, but from a safe
distance. Do not attempt to rush me. All my vital wiring is safely
protected, and I have a response time of three milliseconds. I can ignite
long before you can reach me, but I do not wish to do so until the
allotted time has come."

Birkson whistled. "That's pretty fast, brother. Much faster than me, I'm
sure. It must be nice, being able to move like that after blundering along
all your life with neural speeds."

"Yes, I find it very gratifying. It was a quite unexpected benefit of
becoming a bomb."

This was more like it, Bach thought. Her dislike of Birkson had not
blinded her to the fact that he had been checking out his hunch. And her
questions had been answered: no tape array could answer questions like
that, and the machine had as much as admitted that it had been a human
being at one time.

Birkson completed a circuit, back to where Bach and Walters were standing.
He paused, and said in a low voice, "Check out that time."

"What time?"

"What time did you say you were going to explode?" he yelled.

"In three hours, twenty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds," the bomb
supplied.

"That time," he whispered. "Get your computers to work on it. See if it's
the anniversary of any political group, or the time something happened
that someone might have a grudge about." He started to turn away, then
thought of something. "But most important, check the birth records."

"May I ask why?"

He seemed to be dreaming, but came back to them. "I'm just feeling this
character out. I've got a feeling this might be his birthday. Find out who
was born at that time—it can't be too many, down to the second—and
try to locate them all. The one you can't find will be our guy. I'm
betting on it."

"What are you betting? And how do you know for sure it's a man?"

That look again, and again she blushed. But, damn it, she had to ask
questions. Why should he make her feel defensive about it?

"Because he's chosen a male voice to put over his speakers. I know that's
not conclusive, but you get hunches after a while. As to what I'm betting
… no, it's not my life. I'm sure I can get this one. How about
dinner tonight if I'm right?" The smile was ingenuous, without the trace
of lechery she thought she had seen before. But her stomach was still
crawling. She turned away without answering.

For the next twenty minutes, nothing much happened. Birkson continued his
slow stroll around the machine, stopping from time to time to shake his
head in admiration. The thirty men and women of Chief Bach's police detail
stood around nervously with nothing to do, as far away from the machine as
pride would allow. There was no sense in taking cover.

Bach herself was kept busy coordinating the behind-the-scenes maneuvering
from a command post that had been set up around the corner, in the Elysian
Travel Agency. It had phones and a computer output printer. She sensed the
dropping morale among her officers, who could see nothing going on. Had
they known that surveying lasers were poking their noses around trees in
the Plaza, taking bearings to within a thousandth of a millimeter, they
might have felt a little better. And on the floor below, the X-ray had
arrived.

Ten minutes later, the output began to chatter. Bach could hear it in the
silent, echoing corridor from her position halfway between the travel
agency and the bomb. She turned and met a young officer with the green
armband of a rookie. The woman's hand was ice-cold as she handed Bach the
sheet of yellow printout paper. There were three names printed on it, and
below that, some dates and events listed.

"This bottom information was from the fourth expansion of the problem,"
the officer explained. "Very low probability stuff. The three people were
all born either on the second or within a three-second margin of error, in
three different years. Everyone else has been contacted."

"Keep looking for these three, too," Bach said. As she turned away, she
noticed that the young officer was pregnant, about in her fifth month. She
thought briefly of sending her away from the scene, but what was the use?

Birkson saw her coming and broke off his slow circuits of the bomb. He
took the paper from her and scanned it. He tore off the bottom part
without being told it was low probability, crumpled it, and let it drop to
the floor. Scratching his head, he walked slowly back to the bomb.

"Hans?" he called out.

"How did you know my name?" the bomb asked.

"Ah, Hans, my boy, credit us with some sense. You can't have got into this
without knowing that the Munipol can do very fast investigations. Unless
I've been underestimating you. Have I?"

"No," the bomb conceded. "I knew you would find out who I was. But it
doesn't alter the situation."

"Of course not. But it makes for easier conversation. How has life been
treating you, my friend?"

"Terrible," mourned the man who had become a fifty-kiloton nuclear weapon.

Every morning Hans Leiter rolled out of bed and padded into his cozy water
closet. It was not the standard model for residential apartment modules
but a special one he had installed after he moved in. Hans lived alone,
and it was the one luxury he allowed himself. In his little palace, he sat
in a chair that massaged him into wakefulness, washed him, shaved him,
powdered him, cleaned his nails, splashed him with scent, then made love
to him with a rubber imitation that was a good facsimile of the real
thing. Hans was awkward with women.

He would dress, walk down three hundred meters of corridor, and surrender
himself to a pedestrian slideway that took him as far as the Cross-Crisium
Tube. There, he allowed himself to be fired like a projectile through a
tunnel below the Lunar surface.

Hans worked in the Crisium Heavy Machinery Foundry. His job there was
repairing almost anything that broke down. He was good at it; he was much
more comfortable with machines than with people.