Anti-Man

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New York City is a weird conglomeration of old, new and experimental that staggers the mind of anyone who has not lived in a city its size. Harboring approximately eighty-five million souls, it is the second largest metropolis in the world. Size alone would be enough to awe men from urban areas (which comprise sixty percent of North America) where only a few hundred thousand live in small communities, for his neighborhood still supports individual houses (though even there they are beginning to dwindle in number), still has streets open to the air and paved of concrete and macadam, still permits automobiles on roads other than the mammoth freeways. New York City, of course, has none of these things.

All of New York City's inhabitants live in high-rise apartment buildings, some as long as three and four blocks, the newest ones towering to two-hundred stories in some places. You can get a one-bedroom apartment or anything up to eight bedrooms, living room, dining room, two dens, playroom, reception room, two kitchens, and a library. These last suites are few and far between, for even in our Great Democracy, there are just not that many citizens able to shell out four thousand poscreds a month for a place to live. And to buy it-make certain you've just hit the first new oil well in the last ten years, have found a way to triple the life of a car battery between rechargings, or have discovered the answer to the food problem so that all the synthetic meats will taste as juicy and tender as the real thing.

And New York, of course, no longer has conventional streets, and would not allow an automobile into its great, throbbing mass of humanity even if it did. There is just no more room for individual vehicles in a metropolis of this size. Imagine eighty-five million people out on the roads of one city, and you'll have some idea of the sort of traffic jam that the city fathers used to have nightmares about before the Renovation.

Renovation… That period of the city's history was a landmark not only for the city and the nation, but for the entire world. There was a time when New York City was a part of New York State. During this time, the mayor could get little if any aid from the state government in Albany. The state was glad to take sales tax and state income tax from the metropolis' citizens, but was reluctant to pay back on an equal basis. Finally, when the situation became critical, when the city had an unbearable population of fifty-seven million, the mayor and the council arranged to bring before the people of the city a proposal that they seek to become another state. This was shortly before World Authority began to function as a valid international organization. The vote was cast and returned in favor of the proposal. The mayor proceeded to declare the city independent of the state.

The Governor, a rather stupid man who had been elected because of his appearance and his family name, who had been nominated for his faithful party work for thirty years, and who had been allowed into party politics in the first place simply because his family was a large contributor to candidate funds, thought the city's proclamation could be laughed off. He cut off all state funds to the city and sat back to wait them out.

He never finished waiting. The city leveled its own income tax, now that it did not have to worry about state levies at a percentage just above what they would need to start renovating the metropolis, and just below what the citizens would accept without revolution. There followed a ten-year building program wherein the city was restructured to accommodate its people. Space previously given over to streets was done away with. Instead, a series of underground tubes, much faster and more extensive than the subways, was installed. The existing buildings were connected with new sections of new buildings, until most of the city was one structure. Then, shoved through these structures, other transportation facilities were constructed, especially the computer-channeled Bubble Drops that webbed the city with hundreds of thousands of tubeways in which single-passenger plastic bubbles were bulleted along by compressed air cartridges slung under them. The interior of each of the tubeways was perhaps two feet wider than necessary to accept the bubbles. Projecting from the walls were thousands of soft wire cilia per square foot. When a capsule shot by these, the pressure they exerted on the cilia helped the computer to keep track of the exact position of all capsules in the network. With the new subways, the Bubble Drops, the ever-present high-speed elevators, the conveyor-belts pedways that connected the city on twelve different levels, and the buildings grown together into one structure tens of miles square and as much as a mile and a half high, New York City became an anthill of sorts, a colony closed off from the sun, a maze of corridors and rooms and pedways and tubes. But it survived. And survived so well that the Renovation was used as a pattern for other troubled cities in other parts of the world. The food problem for the ballooning population had been solved long ago through the culture vats for synthe-meats and the hydroponics farms that produced huge quantities of fat vegetables. Now, at last, the problem of living space and big-city transportation had been licked. As long as the population could be maintained at its present point, the world would survive.

After the WA boys arrested me in Cantwell, outside Harry's cabin, I was taken to the great city, landed by helicopter on the roof of one of the highest sectors of the city. They hustled me onto the roof, keeping their guns in their hands as if I were some mad killer, some psychotic who had poisoned the water supply or planted a bomb in a community meeting cellar. We walked across the tarmac to a small extension of one of the building's elevator shafts, signaled for the cab, and got in when it arrived. We dropped so fast that my stomach tried to crawl up my throat. We went down and down, until I knew that we had gone below the ground floor and under the surface, perhaps as deep as fifteen or twenty floors under ground level.

We got out of the elevator and stepped into a tunnel-like corridor lighted by inset blue fluorescents, spotlessly clean, decorated in blue and white tile. Every so often, the continuity of the floor-tile pattern would be broken by large letters-WA-formed out of green tile and bent to form a globe. We walked perhaps a block until we came to a widening of the passage. Here, a man sat at a broad desk, surrounded by panels of electronic instruments and a huge board with fifty television screens off to his right. Each of the screens was no more than three inches by three inches, and each had a different picture on it, though the details of the various scenes were almost too small to decipher. We stopped before this desk and waited.

The man at the desk was pudgy and had a second chin that puffed out farther than his first. His arms were like large, ready-to-burst sausages as they swept over the controls on the desk. Oddly, his head was luxuriant with black-gray hair that was obviously the result of Volper Stimulants to correct baldness. If he did not mind being heavy, why did he mind being bald? He did not look up at us immediately, but flipped another switch and turned to his right in his swivel chair. One of the three-inch screens on the big board moved out from the wall on an extensor arm, glided four feet, right up to his face, and stopped. The man examined the scene carefully. I could see what it was now: a cell. Each of those screens represented a cell in a maximum security prison, and the men in those cells were almost constantly being observed. When the clerk was satisfied with the behavior of the prisoner he was watching, he directed the extensor arm back, and the screen settled into its niche in the board. At last, he turned to us and said, "Yes?"

"Kennelmen," the armed guard on my right said.

The jailer's eyebrows raised an inch.

"You want us to stay with him?" the guard asked.

"No," the jailer said. "Just wait until I get my Clancy hooked up to him. He won't bother me then."

I had heard about the Clancy used by WA police, though I had never had occasion to see one in use-let alone being attached to one. The Clancy is a robot, only as large as a beachball, spherical. Extending from apposite halves of its ball-shaped body are two strong, steel-nickle cable tentacles that terminate in handcuffs of a peculiar design. The cuffs are really heavier loops of the cable with a structured elasticity that allows them to conform to whatever wrist-size they are expected to encompass. Yet, the Clancy is more than a sophisticated set of cuffs. It floats before the prisoner on its anti-grav plate, directly out from his chest, three or four feet away (they had the same problem with anti-grav plates as they did with Kesey's magnetic sleds: the plates can only be developed to a limited size, eighteen inches by eighteen inches. From then on, the field they generate is so erratic as to be totally unsafe. But the Clancy is the right size and can make good use of the anti-grav mechanisms). The cop can tell the Clancy where to take the prisoner, and the Clancy obeys, dragging its keep behind. If the prisoner gets unruly, the Clancy has a very efficient method of settling him down. The cuffs are contracted around the wrists, tighter and tighter, until the pain convinces the scoundrel that he really doesn't mind being arrested. If that doesn't work, the cables can transmit a stunning shock from the Clancy's battery. In short, the Clancy is the policeman's best friend.

Why a name like Clancy? Well, it was this Irish cop that originally came up with the idea of using the grav-plates for such a purpose, patented the idea, and named it after himself. Probably the only cop in the city's history to immortalize himself.

The jailer worked over his switches and dials, then turned to the wall behind him. A moment later, a section of the wall slid up, the blue Clancy sphere floated out, its cable tentacles dangling to either side like thick lanks of greasy hair. The jailer directed it, then leaned back and watched as it set about doing its duty.

I tensed as the machine came toward me, moving silently, evenly, its single sight receptor nodule (set at the top and able to scan in all directions) shimmering a pretty green. The tentacles snaked out, the loop of cuffs opened at the end so that the cuff looked like two fingers or talons. The talons slipped around my right hand and tightened, even though I tried to pull away. I offered my left hand without battle. Still following the jailer's instructions, the Clancy led me to the sliding door in the wall and opened it by emitting an audible beep. Beyond, the tunnel-like corridor continued. With the Clancy dragging me along, we went through the door into the WA prison. The door slid shut behind.

Once, I tried to work against the machine. I set my heels and refused to move. It tugged at me, harder and harder, then jerked so suddenly that I tipped forward, staggered, could not regain my balance, and went down on my shoulder on the hard floor. The Clancy floated above, tilted a bit so that its sight nodule could scan me. Its tentacles were stretched to the limit. It tried to pull me up, but could not manage the task. Then I felt the tightening of the cuffs. My hands began to grow numb and took on a bluish coloration. When it grew painful enough, I gave up this childishness and stood. I cooperated from then on.

It led me down the tunnel a good way, then through a second door; this, a dilating circle that cycled open at another electronic signal and admitted us to the chamber beyond. This was the prison proper, the area of the cells. Along each wall were dilating doors of heavy metal, each about twenty feet apart. The Clancy led me to the sixth door on the right, dilated it with another beep, and took me inside.

The cell was spacious, well-lighted, and comfortably furnished. Indeed, I was a little surprised at the lavish-ness of it. There was a network comscreen for news and entertainment, a chute from the library where stat copies of articles or reprints of novel tapes would be delivered on request. The toilet was enclosed and at the far right comer. When the standard melodrama relates a picture of the average modern prison as a hell-hole full of rats, lice, and sadistic jailers, it is giving the viewer a representation of the standard prison of the Fifties, maybe even through the Seventies and early Eighties. But prison reforms have been drastic in the last couple of decades, and prisoners are no longer treated as animals.

The Clancy led me to the cot, backed me into it until I understood that I was to sit. I plopped backward, and was pleased with the springiness, the softness of what had looked like only a mediocre bed. The cuffs opened, fell away to hang at the Clancy's side. It floated back to the dilated door, went through, letting the portal spiral shut in its wake.

Seconds later, the central mail delivery chute next to the library receptacle made a buzzing sound, and something dropped into the tray beneath it. I got up and went to the wall, picked the small, blue square of plastic out of the tray. It was a penitentiary credit card with my name and number. The jailer had submitted my name to the central city banks and had discovered, within a minute or so, that I was a good credit risk and had plenty of cards already. Upon discovering this, he had punched the prison computer to issue me a card for my stay in jail. With it, I could order anything over the phone (which was set next to the wall of the bathroom) and have it delivered by mail. The bill would go to my wife (if I had one, which I did not), to my lawyer (if a professional firm handled all my credit payments, which Alton-Boskone and Fenner did for me), or to my bank, where, the moment I had been checked into my cell, my accounts had been frozen by government order. In the end, the prisoner paid, but at least he lived well enough during his confinement.

That day, my lawyer, Leonard Fenner, came to visit me in my cell. Using pressure in the right places, he managed to bring Harry with him. We sat and talked for more than two hours, about inconsequentialities at first, then, increasingly about my predicament. It would not be so bad, Leonard asserted; if they could only charge me with kidnapping Him. First of all, the android was not considered a citizen, and, therefore, was a piece of property belonging to the State. Kidnapping could not be upheld in court; it was only a matter of grand larceny. But I had not just stolen Him. I had assaulted the WA representative who had recognized us that night in the Cantwell Port lot. I had killed game on a government preserve. I had assaulted a police officer in Anchorage at that recharging station. I had illegally converted a taxi from auto-to-manual and then had stolen it I had stolen a police car belonging to the Alaskan state patrol. And, most serious of all, I shot North American Supreme Court Justice Charles Parnel in the leg. The WA was charging me with intent to kill.

"Intent to kill?" Harry screeche'd. "Why, that's absurd! This boy couldn't kill anyone if-"

"Harry," I said, "let Leonard spell the story out. No matter what we would like, we have to face things as they're going to be."

"It's ridiculous!" Harry huffed, but he kept quiet.

I was not so certain that the charge was ridiculous. What had I been trying to do when I grabbed that rifle and whirled? I had fired into the light. I must have known there would be someone behind it I must also have known that the bullet would hurt or kill whoever was there. Couldn't that be termed intent to kill? Even if it was a gut reaction, something I had done without thinking.

"Here's what we aren't worried about," Leonard said. "One, they will never be able to uphold a charge of grand larceny. First of all, they were going to destroy the android anyway. It is not as if you stole something precious. And they will not dare tell in public what the android did to get itself condemned."

"You know?" I asked, surprised.

"I told him," Harry said. "He ought to know all the circumstances if he's to do his best for you. To hell with security."

"Go on," I said to Fenner.

"Anyway," he went on, "grand larceny will fall through. Maybe petty or nuisance theft, but that usually only requires a double reimbursement to the victim by the victimizer. Used to be punishable by a prison sentence, but not under WA law. Next, they will charge you with assaulting the WA rep in the taxi lot at Cantwell. Tell me the situation."

I told him.

"He did not draw first?" my crafty little attorney queried.

"No."

"Think. Did he go for a gun?"

"Yes, but I shot him before-"

"Then he went for a gun?"

"Yes."

Fenner chuckled. "Did he start for it before you pulled your own?"

"I can't remember," I said.

"You're right," he said. "Of course he drew first. And you had no way of knowing it was not a contraband weapon held by a non-WA Citizen. So much for that charge. Now, killing game on a government preserve only allows for a fine. Hellishly stiff. But maybe we can get it reduced since we can prove you didn't eat any of it. You didn't, did you?"

"No. But how did you-"

"My guess," Harry said. "If the android was continuing to evolve, I thought He might find it essential to have large quantities of energy foods. I knew you weren't the type to kill for the fun of it."

"Thanks," I said.

"Hell's bells, men," Fenner said, "will you let your shyster lawyer lay out his news and views?"

"Go ahead, Leo," Harry said.

"Gee, thanks," Leonard said. He continued pacing across the floor to the toilet, then back to the bunk where we sat. He punctuated all his words with his hands, waving them, slamming them together, slapping them against his hips. "Next, we have the problem of the stolen cars. You are going to admit to stealing both of them. There is no way around it, no way to disguise what you did. But we can argue that, since both vehicles were government property, you should be dealt with less severely than you would be for stealing private property. The case of Halderbon vs. World Authority sets a precedent for such an argument, whether it will get us anywhere or not."

"Now we're to the bad part," I said.

"You've got it right," Leonard said, pacing faster, slapping both hands into both hips in time to his step. "In the case of the Anchorage cop, you're still a little in the clear. We can easily prove you did not initiate the assault with intent to kill. After all, you tied him up, left the heat on so he would not freeze. That's simple assault, and we can handle that. But the big problem comes with Justice Parnel-who you so unkindly shot in the leg. What in good hell were you doing, boy?' '

I recounted the experience, went over it time and again from the moment Parnel had turned the light on me, until I had left him in the arms of the ranger at the main ranger station.

"You did see that he got medical attention," Leonard said. "We can argue that this proves you did not intend to kill. But they are going to fight like hell to keep the bigger charge, 'cause it's their only way to strike back at you for all you've done. I'm going to talk to Parnel tomorrow. I'll try to talk him into dropping the charges to simple assault. He, being the victim, can do that whether WA likes it or not."

Then they went, leaving me alone in the cell that night, the next day, the next night, and all of the following morning. But at noon on my third day in prison, as I was trying to concentrate on the melodic intricacies of a Lennon-extrapolated symphony that was playing in my wall stereo, Fenner returned with my bail papers, ushered me out to the desk where I signed another set of yellow sheets. From there, a WA clerk led us out of the prison complex, onto the roof of the building to the same landing pad that I had been brought in on, days earlier.

"Wait a minute," I said, grabbing Fenner by the arm and towing him to the wall at the edge of the roof, away from the landing pad where there was a busy rush of arriving and departing officers. "What the devil is going on? I thought I was in serious straits. They don't issue bail to people in the maximum security cells."

"You were put into maximum security only because the WA wanted to make a big issue of your apprehension. All of your crimes are bailable except assault with intent to kill. But I have talked with Justice Parnel."

"And he reduced the charge?"

"Not only that. He withdrew his complaint altogether."

"What?"

"He dropped the charges."

"I shoot a man, send him to the hospital for a week or two, and he drops the charges?" I shook my head. "What was his price?"

"You don't buy the Justice Parnel!" Fenner said.

"Then who is your mutual relationship?"

"You insinuate that I deal illegally to get my clients lighter sentences?" His tone of voice had changed. It bordered on anger now, was tainted with a sour, ugly streak.

"Okay," I said. "It was done honestly. But, Leonard, how in hell did you do it?"

He smiled and was his old, jovial self again. "I had a long talk with the Justice. I know his political leanings. I researched him well before I went to see him. I convinced him, without directly perjuring myself, that you had the same leanings and that your stealing the android that had been condemned to destruction was a manifestation of your political beliefs. I told him that I could not reveal all the circumstances behind the decision to destroy the android and behind your decision to rescue Him, but Justice Parnel was speaking warmly of you when I departed. He understood your ideals behind the theft, understood you thought he was a WA trooper about to shoot you when you returned fire. It was enough, I guess." He shrugged his shoulders.

"You're fantastic," I told him.

"Never. Just thorough. Now, can I drop you someplace in my copter?"

"At the Cul-de-sac. Grid 40I. You know it?"

"Best French restaurant in town," he said. "Of course, I know it. We lawyers are not necessarily slobs."

At the Cul-de-sac, the maitre d' gave me a corner table in a dark section of the main room and left me to the top-heavy, young blonde waitress who gave me a menu, requested my wine order, asked if I wanted a drink of any sort, and went away to get my Whiskey Sour while I perused the menu. All in all, it was a delightful meal, and I managed not to think about anything but the taste of the food-and whether or not the young blonde's blouse-bulging attributes were real or silicone-induced. I had no compunction against marrying a girl with chemically-created allurements, so long as they were indistinguishable from the real thing. As far as I could tell, these were. I played a game with myself, trying to decide whether or not I should ask her to marry me. I listed what I could see of her faults and her virtues. In the end, I decided to come back in a day or two and look the merchandise over again.

Outside, in the corridor, I boarded a pedwalk, one of the faster ones, and rode it a block and a half to a Bubble Drop station. There, I got off, moved through the turnstile, and onto the drop platform. The destination keyboard slid quickly down in front of me. I keyed my address in less than five seconds, then walked forward and sat down in the hard plastic seat that had slid in front of me. Attached to the bottom of the seat were the compressed air cylinders. A moment later, the chair moved into the tunnel, through the bubbling foyer where it moved over a discharge vent that blew the plastic around me in a teardrop. The plastic hardened instantly, and I shot forward into the sucking wind of the tunnel, pulled by the constant currents kept in operation there and also propelled by my own cylinders. At the hundreds of crossroads where tube slashed through tube, I sped by Bubbles going opposite ways, sped across the intersections inches ahead of them, saw others zip behind me, missing me by millimeters. The computer routed perfectly, but it was still a bit difficult to sit and watch the journey in a Bubble Drop tubeway.

So I thought. I had been trying not to think, but there was no way to deny what was going through my mind. I had spent hours on the concept in the prison, and I had still reached no conclusions. The android was God. He had said so. But why would He choose to come to Earth in such a laborious manner? And what was He planning to do here? Was this the Second Coming? Or wasn't He the Christian God? Was He the Buddhist version? The Jewish? The Hindu? Or, and this seemed most likely, was He not like any version of God that Man subscribed to?

I knew the last must be correct. We had never understood the nature of God. Our religions, all our religions, with all their extensive theories, doctrines and dogmas, all of them were totally wrong. But I am one who does not believe in criticizing something until you can replace it with something better. And I could not formulate any theories on the nature of this God of ours. His nature was a mystery beyond my immediate comprehension.

I worried about what was going to happen to the world when He began to bring His changes. Was the fabric of our reality going to change so drastically that many of us would not learn to fit into it? No, He had said we would be changed intellectually, our minds opened to full awareness. What a world of geniuses would be like was a toss-up question. In theory, it sounded quite lovely. In practice, it might be intolerable. A society of cold, thinking machines was not what I considered Utopia.

Before I knew it, I was shunted out of the main tubeways and into an exit tunnel. The Bubble swept through the exit foyer, crossing a suction vent where the molecules of the Bubble were instantly broken down, and the powdery residue slid down through the grating to be reconstructed into another Bubble, and another after that, and so on, for as long as the Bubble Drop system was operational. The chair stopped on a ramp; I stood, and walked off into the corridor.

I caught an elevator up, rose 104 floors to my level and debarked. In this apartment level, there were no pedways, for this was a relatively exclusive area. I walked along the thick carpeting to the door to my apartment, placed my thumb on the identification lock, and waited for the computer in the Yale system to decide I was one of those authorized to enter. A moment later, the door began to slide back. As I stepped through, two bullets smashed in the frame of the door and showered me with chips of wood. I fell, rolled inside, and made a vocal order to close the door.

It slid shut just as the killer on the other side slammed into it. I got shakily to my feet, trying to figure out what I should do. I was almost in a state of shock, for the killer I had seen when I rolled into the apartment was a dead ringer for the android in His humanoid form