Dark Benediction

A few minutes later she came staggering down the stairway, sobbing and clutching her baby tightly against her. She stared at Mitch with tear-drenched eyes, gave him a wild shake of her head, and babbled hysterically.

“Those cribs! They’re full of little bones. Little bones—all over the floor. Little bones—”

“Shut up!” he snapped. “Be thankful yours is all right. Now let’s get out of here.”

After disposing of another robotic interferer they reached the car, and Mitch drove rapidly toward the outskirts. The girl’s sobbing ceased, and she purred a little unsung lullaby to her child, cuddling it as if it had just returned from the dead. Remorse picked dully at Mitch’s heart, for having growled at her. Motherwise, she was still a good animal, despite her lack of success in adjusting to the reality of a ruptured world.

“Marta—?”

“What?”

“You’re not fit to take care of yourself.”

He said it gently. She only stared at him as he piloted the car. “You ought to find a big husky gal who wants a baby, and let her take care of it for you.”

“No.”

“It’s just a suggestion. None of my business. You want your baby to live, don’t you?”

“George promised he’d take care of us. George always took care of us.”

“George killed himself.”

She uttered a little whimper. “Why did he do it? Why? I went to look for food. I came back, and there he was. Why, why?”

“Possibly because he was just like you. What did he do—before the war?”

“Interior decorator. He was good, a real artist.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you say it that way? He was.”

“Was he qualified to live in a mechanical culture?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean—could he control his slice of mechanical civilization, or did it control him?”

“I don’t see—”

“Was he a button-pusher and a switch-puller? Or did he care what made the buttons and switches work? Men misuse their tools because they don’t understand the principles of the tools. A man who doesn’t know how a watch works might try to fix it with a hammer. If the watch is communal property, he’s got no right to fool with it. A nontechnologist has no right to take part in a technological civilization. He’s a bull in a china shop. That’s what happened to our era. Politicians were given powerful tools. They failed to understand the tools. They wrecked our culture with them.”

“You’d have a scientist in the White House?”

“If all men were given a broad technical education, there could be nothing else there, could there?”

“Technocracy—”

“No. Simply a matter of education.”

“People aren’t smart enough.”

“You mean they don’t care enough. Any man above the level of a dullard has enough sense to grasp the principles of physics and basic engineering and mechanics. They just aren’t motivated to grasp them. The brain is a tool, not a garbage can for oddments of information! Your baby there—he should learn the principles of logic and semantics before he’s ten. He should be taught how to use the tool, the brain. We’ve just begun to learn how to think. If the common man were trained in scientific reasoning methods, we’d solve our problems in a hurry.”

“What has this got to do with us?”

“Everything. Your George folded up because he couldn’t control his slice of civilization and he couldn’t live without it. He couldn’t fix the broken toy, but he suffered from its loss. And you’re in the same fix. I haven’t decided yet whether you’re crazy or just neurotic.”

She gave him an icy stare. “Let me know when you figure it out.”

They were leaving the city, driving out through the suburbs again into the night-shrouded residential areas. He drove by streetlight, for the car—accustomed to piloting itself by radar—had no headlights. Mitch thought gloomily that he had blundered. He had stalked into the city without a plan and had accomplished nothing. He had alerted Central and had managed to get himself classified as a criminal in the central data tanks. Instead of simplifying his task, he had made things harder for himself.

Whenever they passed a cop at an intersection, the cop retreated to the curb and called Central to inform the Coordinator of their position. But no attempt was made to arrest the fugitives. Having reached her limit of subunit expenditures, Central was relying on the nonexistent human police force. “Mayor Sarquist’s house,” the girl muttered suddenly. “Huh? Where?”

“Just ahead. The big cut-stone house on the right—with part of the roof caved in.”

Mitch twisted a dial in the heart of the pilot-computer, and the car screeched to a stop at the curb. The girl lurched forward.

“You woke the baby,” she complained. “Why stop here? We’re still in the city limits.”

“I don’t know,” he murmured, staring thoughtfully at the dark hulk of the two-story mansion set in a nest of oaks. “Just sort of a hunch.”

There was a long silence while Mitch chewed his lip and frowned at the house.

“I hear a telephone ringing,” she said.

“Central calling Mayor Sarquist. You can’t tell. It might have been ringing for three years.”

She was looking out the rear window. “Mitch—?”

“Huh?”