"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, them 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 which 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.
One day he made a slip and got his leg caught in a massive roller. It was not a serious accident, because the failsafe systems turned off the machine before his body or head could be damaged, but it hurt terribly and completed ruined the leg. It had to be taken off. While he was waiting for the cloned replacement limb to be grown, Hans had been fitted with a prosthetic.
It had been a revelation to him. It worked like a dream, as good as his old leg and perhaps better. It was connected to his severed leg nerve, but was equipped with a threshold cut-off circuit, and one day when he barked his artificial shin he saw that it had caused him no pain. He recalled the way that same injury had felt with his flesh and blood leg, and again he was impressed. He thought, too, of the agony when his leg had been caught in the machine.
When the new leg was ready for transplanting, Hans had elected to retain the prosthetic. It was unusual, but not unprecedented.
From that time on, Hans, who had never been known to his co-workers as talkative or social, withdrew even more from his fellow humans. He would speak only when spoken to. But people had observed him talking to the stamping press, and the water cooler, and the robot sweeper.
At night, it was Hans' habit to sit on his vibrating bed and watch the holovision until one o'clock. At that time, his kitchen would prepare him a late snack, roll it to him in his bed, and he would retire for the night.
For the last three years Hans had been neglecting to turn the set on before getting into bed. Nevertheless, he continued to sit quietly on the bed staring at the empty screen.
When she finished reading the personal data printout, Bach was struck once more at the efficiency of the machines in her control. This man was almost a cipher, yet there were nine thousand words in storage concerning his uneventful life, ready to be called up and printed into an excruciatingly boring biography.
"...so you came to feel that you were being controlled at every step in your life by machines," Birkson was saying. He was sitting on one of the barriers, swinging his legs back and forth. Bach joined him and offered the long sheet of printout. He waved it away. She could hardly blame him.
"But it's true!" the bomb said. "We all are, you know. We're part of this huge machine that's called New Dresden. It moves us around like parts on an assembly line, washes us, feeds us, puts us to bed and sings us to sleep."
"Ah," Birkson said, agreeably. "Are you a Luddite, Hans?"
"No!" the bomb said in a shocked voice. "Roger, you've missed the whole point. I don't want to destroy the machines. I want to serve them better. I wanted to become a machine, like my new leg. Don't you see? We're part of the machine, but we're the most inefficient part."
The two talked on, and Bach wiped the sweat from her palms. She couldn't see where all this was going, unless Birkson seriously hoped to talk Hans Leiter out of what he was going to do in—she glanced at the clock—two hours and forty-three minutes. It was maddening. On the one hand, she recognized the skill he was using in establishing a rapport with the cyborg. They were on a first-name basis, and at least the damn machine cared enough to argue its position. On the other hand, so what? What good was it doing?
Walters approached and whispered into her ear. She nodded, and tapped Birkson on the shoulder.
"They're ready to take the picture whenever you are," she said. He waved her off.
"Don't bother me," he said, loudly. "This is getting interesting. So if what you say is true," he went on to Hans, getting up and pacing intently back and forth, this time inside the line of barriers, "maybe I ought to look into this myself. You really like being cyborged better than being human?"
"Infinitely so," the bomb said. He sounded enthusiastic. "I need no sleep now, and I no longer have to bother with elimination or eating. I have a tank for nutrients, which are fed into the housing where my brain and central nervous system are located." He paused. "I tried to eliminate the ups and downs of hormone flow and the emotional reactions that followed," he confided.
"No dice, huh?"
"No. Something always distracted me. So when I heard of this place where they would cyborg me and get rid of all that, I jumped at the chance."
Inactivity was making Bach impulsive. She had to say or do something.
"Where did you get the work done, Hans?" she ventured. The bomb started to say something, but Birkson laughed loudly and slapped Bach hard on the back. "Oh, no, Chief. That's pretty tricky, right Hans? She's trying to get you to rat. That's not done, Chief. There's a point of honor involved."
"Who is that?" the bomb asked, suspiciously.
"Let me introduce Chief Anna-Louise Bach, of the New Dresden Police. Ann, meet Hans."
"Police?" Hans asked, and Bach felt goose-pimples when she detected a note of fright in the voice. What was this maniac trying to do, frightening the guy like that? She was close to pulling Birkson off the case. She held off because she thought she could see a familiar pattern in it, something she could use as a way to participate, even if ignominously. It was the good guy-bad guy routine, one of the oldest police maneuvers in the book.
"Aw, don't be like that," Birkson said to Hans. "Not all cops are brutes. Ann here, she's a nice person. Give her a chance. She's only doing her job."
"Oh, I have no objection to police," the bomb said. "They are necessary to keep the social machine functioning. Law and order is a basic precept of the coming new Mechanical Society. I'm pleased to meet you, Chief Bach. I wish the circumstances didn't make us enemies."
"Pleased to meet you, Hans." She thought carefully before she phrased her next question. She wouldn't have to take the hardline approach to contrast herself with affable, buddy-buddy Birkson. She needn't be an antagonist, but it wouldn't hurt if she asked questions that probed at his motives.
"Tell me, Hans. You say you're not a Luddite. You say you like machines. Do you know how many machines you'll destroy if you set yourself off? And even more important, what you'll do to this social machine you've been talking about? You'll wipe out the whole city."
The bomb seemed to be groping for words. He hesitated, and Bach felt the first glimmer of hope since this insanity began.
"You don't understand. You're speaking from an organic viewpoint. Life is important to you. A machine is not concerned with life. Damage to a machine, even the social machine, is simply something to be repaired. In a way, I hope to set an example. I wanted to become a machine—"
"And the best, the very ultimate machine," Birkson put in, "is the atomic bomb. It's the end point of all mechanical thinking."
"Exactly," said the bomb, sounding very pleased. It was nice to be understood. "I wanted to be the very best machine I could possibly be, and it had to be this."
"Beautiful, Hans," Birkson breathed. "I see what you're talking about. So if we go on with that line of thought we logically come to the conclusion..." and he was off into an exploration of the fine points of the new Mechanistic world view.
Bach was trying to decide which was the crazier of the two, when she was handed another message. She read it, then tried to find a place to break into the conversation. But there was no convenient place. Birkson was more and more animated, almost frothing at the mouth as he discovered points of agreement between the two of them. Bach noticed her officers standing around nervously, following the conversation. It was clear from their expressions that they feared they were being sold out, that when zero hour arrived they would still be here watching intellectual ping-pong. But long before that, she could have a mutiny on her hands. Several of them were fingering their weapons, probably without even knowing it.
She touched Birkson on the sleeve, but he waved her away. Damn it, this was too much. She grabbed him and nearly pulled him from his feet, swung him around until her mouth was close to his ear and growled.
"Listen to me, you idiot, they're going to take the picture. You'll have to stand back some. It's better if we're all shielded."
"Leave me alone," he shot back, and pulled from her grasp. But he was still smiling. "This is just getting interesting," he said, in a normal tone of voice.
Birkson came near to dying in that moment. Three guns were trained on him from the circle of officers, awaiting only the order to fire. They didn't like seeing their Chief treated that way.
Bach herself was damn near to giving the order. The only thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that with Birkson dead, the machine might go off ahead of schedule. The only thing to do now was to get him out of the way and go on as best she could, knowing that she was doomed to failure. No one could say she hadn't given the expert a chance.
"But what I was wondering about," Birkson was saying, "was why today? What happened today? Is this the day Cyrus McCormick invented the combine harvester, or something?"
"It's my birthday," Hans said, somewhat shyly.
"Your birthday?" Birkson managed to look totally amazed to learn what he already knew. "Your birthday. That's great, Hans. Many happy returns of the day, my friend." He turned and took in all of the officers with an expansive sweep of his hands. "Let's sing, people. Come on, it's his birthday, for heaven's sake. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Hans..."
He bellowed, he was off-key, he swept his hands in grand circles with no sense of rhythm. But so infectious was his mania that several of the officers found themselves joining in. He ran around the circle, pulling the words out of them with great scooping motions of his hands.