Troublemakers (25 page)

   
It was common sense any Better Business Bureau would have applauded: if the tourist trade won’t come to your town, take your town to the tourists. Particularly if the freeway has forced commerce to pass you by. Particularly if your town needs fresh blood to prosper. Particularly if you have the civic need to share.

   
Green fog shrouded the Pontiac and the peculiar sounds that came from within. Don’t go into that dark room is a sensible attitude. Particularly if one is a sensible guy, in a sensible city.

Okay. So not everyone who puts you
into
the sh-t is an enemy; and not everyone who pulls you
out
of the sh-t is a friend. So, okay; you got that. Now let me give you the troublemaker lesson that has made me the Golden Icon you see before you. The point of the story you’re about to read is that even when they tell you “it can’t be fixed, you got to buy a new one, a more expensive one, the latest model,” they are jacking you around. Even when they tell you “it can’t be done, it’s never been done, nobody’s ever done it that way,” all they’re revealing about themselves is that they are limited, minimally-talented, inept, lazy to the point where they’ll let the job walk out the door then have to stretch their imagination to figure out a way the job
can
be done, and they are not people you should be dealing with, because they can’t solve their
own
problems, much less yours. The world is full of dullards. Sad, sorry little ribbon clerks who fear taking responsibility for their
own
lives, so how the hell can you expect them to be brave or smart enough to take on a problem that emanates from
your
life? They cannot pull you out of the sh-t. They can only put you further into it. They just aren’t very smart. The lesson here is the same lesson you find in
all
Art, whether book or story or movie or oil painting or classical symphony or great sculpture. (I cannot suggest that hip-hop or rap contain this message, because they’re too illiterate or loud or just bad street doggerel, but that’s my hang-up, so give it a pass, because I don’t suggest you should agree with me, or even like me, because I’m too smart to give a damn if you think I’m kewl or not, ‘cause we already got your money for this book.) What it is that
all
Art says is this: PAY ATTENTION. That’s it. Nothing more profound or hard to understand. Pay attention. And if you do, just like the guy in this story, you will discover that there are many ways to solve a problem that most other, timid ribbon clerks will never pull down. The lesson of this story-and this book entire-is that you can never know enough, you can never be too smart, and you need to figure out the way the world works without believing that every rule you’ve been told is immutable-it can’t be done, no one’s ever done it, etcetera-just because some limited potatobrain believes it. The world is yours, go get it.

T
errence slid his right hand, the one out of sight of the robot, up his side. The razoring pain of the three broken ribs caused his eyes to widen momentarily in pain. Then he recovered himself and closed them till he was studying the machine through narrow slits.

   
If the eyeballs click, I’m dead,
thought Terrence.

   
The intricate murmurings of the life hutch around him brought back the immediacy of his situation. His eyes again fastened on the medicine cabinet clamped to the wall next to the robot’s duty-niche.

   
Cliché. So near yet so far. It could be all the way back on Antares-Base for all the good it’s doing me,
he thought, and a crazy laugh rang through his head. He caught himself just in time.
Easy! Three days is a nightmare, but cracking up will only make it end sooner.
That was the last thing he wanted. But it couldn’t go on much longer.

   
He flexed the fingers of his right hand. It was all he
could
move. Silently he damned the technician who had passed the robot through. Or the politician who had let inferior robots get placed in the life hutches so he could get a rake-off from the government contract. Or the repairman who hadn’t bothered checking closely his last time around. All of them; he damned them all.

   
They deserved it.

   
He was dying.

   
His death had started before he had reached the life hutch. Terrence had begun to die when he had gone into the battle.

   
He let his eyes close completely, let the sounds of the life hutch fade from around him. Slowly, the sound of the coolants hush-hushing through the wall-pipes, the relay machines feeding their messages without pause from all over the galaxy, the whirr of the antenna’s standard turning in its socket atop the bubble, slowly they melted into silence. He had resorted to blocking himself off from reality many times during the past three days. It was either that or existing with the robot watching, and eventually he would have had to move. To move was to die. It was that simple.

   
He closed his ears to the whisperings of the life hutch; he listened to the whisperings within himself.

   
“Good God! There must be a million of them!”

   
It was the voice of the squadron leader, Resnick, ringing in his suit intercom.

   
“What kind of battle formation is
that
supposed to be?” came another voice. Terrence looked at the radar screen, at the flickering dots signifying Kyben ships.

   
“Who can tell with those toadstool-shaped ships of theirs,” Resnick answered. “But remember, the whole front umbrella-part is studded with cannon, and it has a helluva range of fire. Okay, watch yourselves, good luck-and give ‘em Hell!”

   
The fleet dove straight for the Kyben armada.

   
To his mind came the sounds of war, across the gulf of space. It was all imagination; in that tomb there was no sound. Yet he could clearly detect the hiss of his scout’s blaster as it poured beam after beam into the lead ship of the Kyben fleet.

   
His sniper-class scout had been near the point of that deadly Terran phalanx, driving like a wedge at the alien ships, converging on them in loose battle-formation. It was then it had happened.

   
One moment he had been heading into the middle of the battle, the left flank of the giant Kyben dreadnaught turning crimson under the impact of his firepower.

   
The next moment, he had skittered out of the formation which had slowed to let the Kyben craft overshoot, while the Earthmen decelerated to pick up maneuverability.

   
He had gone on at the old level and velocity, directly into the forward guns of a toadstool-shaped Kyben destroyer.

   
The first beam had burned the gun-mounts and directional equipment off the front of the ship, scorching down the aft side in a smear like oxidized chrome plate. He had managed to avoid the second beam.

   
His radio contact had been brief; he was going to make it back to Antares-Base if he could. If not, the formation would be listening for his homing-beam from a life hutch on whatever planetoid he might find for a crash-landing.

   
Which was what he had done. The charts had said the pebble spinning there was technically 1-333, 2-A
,
M & S, 3-804.39#, which would have meant nothing but three-dimensional coordinates had not the small # after the data indicated a life hutch somewhere on its surface.

   
His distaste for being knocked out of the fighting, being forced onto one of the life hutch planetoids, had been offset only by his fear of running out of fuel before he could locate himself. Of eventually drifting off into space somewhere, to finally wind up as an artificial satellite around some minor sun.

   
The ship pancaked in under minimal reverse drive, bounced high twice and caromed ten times, tearing out chunks of the rear section, but had come to rest a scant two miles from the life hutch, jammed into the rocks.

   
Terrence had high-leaped the two miles across the empty, airless planetoid to the hermetically sealed bubble in the rocks. His primary wish was to set the hutch’s beacon signal so his returning fleet could track him.

   
He had let himself into the decompression chamber, palmed the switch through his thick spacesuit glove, and finally removed his helmet as he heard the air whistle into the chamber.

   
He had pulled off his gloves, opened the inner door and entered the life hutch itself.

   
God bless you, little life hutch,
Terrence had thought as he dropped the helmet and gloves. He had glanced around, noting the relay machines picking up messages from outside, sorting them, vectoring them off in other directions. He had seen the medicine chest clamped onto the wall, the refrigerator he knew would be well-stocked if a previous tenant hadn’t been there before the stockman could refill it. He had seen the all-purpose robot, immobile in its duty-niche. And the wall chronometer, its face smashed. All of it in a second’s glance.

   
God bless, too, the gentlemen who thought up the idea of these little rescue stations, stuck all over the place for just such emergencies as this.
He had started to walk across the room.

   
It was at this point that the service robot, that kept the place in repair between tenants and unloaded supplies from the ships, had moved clankingly across the floor, and with one fearful smash of a steel arm thrown Terrence across the room.

   
The spaceman had been brought up short against the steel bulkhead, pain blossoming in his back, his side, his arms and legs. The machine’s blow had instantly broken three of his ribs. He lay there for a moment, unable to move. For a few seconds he was too stunned to breathe, and it had been that, certainly, that had saved his life. His pain had immobilized him, and in that short space of time the robot had retreated with a muted internal clash of gears.

   
He had attempted to sit up straight, and the robot had hummed oddly and begun to move. He had stopped the movement. The robot had settled back.

   
Twice more had convinced him his position was as bad as he had thought.

 
  
The robot had worn down somewhere in its printed circuits. Its commands to lift had been erased or distorted so that now it was conditioned to smash, to hit, anything that moved.

   
He had seen the clock. He realized he should have suspected something was wrong when he saw its smashed face. Of course! The digital dials had moved, the robot had smashed the clock. Terrence had moved, the robot had smashed him.

   
And would again, if he moved again.

   
But for the unnoticeable movement of his eyelids, he had not moved in three days.

   
He had tried moving toward the decompression lock, stopping when the robot advanced and letting it settle back, then moving again, a little nearer. But the idea died with his first movement. His ribs were too painful. The pain was terrible. He was locked in one position, an uncomfortable, twisted position, and he would be there till the stalemate ended, one way or the other.

   
He was suddenly alert again. The reliving of his last three days brought back reality sharply.

 
  
He was twelve feet away from the communications panel, twelve feet away from the beacon that would guide his rescuers to him. Before he died of his wounds, before he starved to death, before the robot crushed him. It could have been twelve light-years, for all the nearer he could get to it.

   
What had gone wrong with the robot? Time to think was cheap. The robot could detect movement, but thinking was still possible. Not that it could help, but it was possible.

   
The companies that supplied the life hutch’s needs were all government contracted. Somewhere along the line someone had thrown in impure steel or calibrated the circuit-cutting machines for a less expensive job. Somewhere along the line someone had not run the robot through its paces correctly. Somewhere along the line someone had committed murder.