[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction June 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Who or what was the scoundrel that kept
these couriers from the swift completion
of their handsomely appointed rondos?
On Tenthmonth 1, 2457 A.D., at exactly 9 A.M. Planetary Federation
Time--but with a permissible error of a millionth of a second either
way--in the fifth sublevel of NewNew York Robot Postal Station 68,
Black Sorter gulped down ten thousand pieces of first-class mail.
This breakfast tidbit did not agree with the mail-sorting machine. It
was as if a robust dog had been fed a large chunk of good red meat with
a strychnine pill in it. Black Sorter's innards went _whirr-klunk_, a
blue electric glow enveloped him, and he began to shake as if he might
break loose from the concrete.
He desperately spat back over his shoulder a single envelope, gave
a great _huff_ and blew out toward the sorting tubes a medium-size
snowstorm consisting of the other nine thousand, nine hundred and
ninety-nine pieces of first-class mail chewed to confetti. Then, still
convulsed, he snapped up a fresh ten thousand and proceeded to chomp
and grind on them. Black Sorter was rugged.
The rejected envelope was tongued up by Red Subsorter, who growled deep
in his throat, said a very bad word, and passed it to Yellow Rerouter,
who passed it to Green Rerouter, who passed it to Brown Study, who
passed it to Pink Wastebasket.
Unlike Black Sorter, Pink Wastebasket was very delicate, though highly
intuitive--the machine equivalent of a White Russian countess. She
was designed to scan in 3,137 codes, route special-delivery spacemail
to interplanetary liners by messenger rocket, and distinguish 9s from
upside-down 6s.
Pink Wastebasket haughtily inhaled the offending envelope and almost
instantly turned a bright crimson and began to tremble. After a few
minutes, small atomic flames started to flicker from her mid-section.
White Nursemaid Seven and Greasy Joe both received Pink Wastebasket's
distress signal and got there as fast as their wheels would roll them,
but the high-born machine's malady was beyond their simple skills of
oilcan and electroshock.
* * * * *
They summoned other machine-tending-and-repairing machines, ones far
more expert than themselves, but all were baffled. It was clear that
Pink Wastebasket, who continued to tremble and flicker uncontrollably,
was suffering from the equivalent of a major psychosis with severe
psychosomatic symptoms. She spat a stream of filthy ions at Gray
Psychiatrist, not recognizing her old friend.
Meanwhile, the paper blizzard from Black Sorter was piling up in great
drifts between the dark pillars of the sublevel, and flurries had
reached Pink Wastebasket's aristocratic area. An expedition of sturdy
machines, headed by two hastily summoned snowplows, was dispatched to
immobilize Black Sorter at all costs.
Pink Wastebasket, quivering like a demented hula dancer, was clearly
approaching a crisis. Finally Gray Psychiatrist--after consulting with
Green Surgeon, and even then with an irritated reluctance, as if he
were calling in a witch-doctor--summoned a human being.
The human being walked respectfully around Pink Wastebasket several
times and then gave her a nervous little poke with a rubber-handled
probe.
Pink Wastebasket gently regurgitated her last snack, turned dead
white, gave a last flicker and shake, and expired. Black Coroner
recorded the immediate cause of death as tinkering by a human being.
The human being, a bald and scrawny one named Potshelter, picked up the
envelope responsible for all the trouble, stared at it incredulously,
opened it with trembling fingers, scanned the contents briefly, gave
a great shriek and ran off at top speed, forgetting to hop on his
perambulator, which followed him making anxious clucking noises.
The nearest human representative of the Solar Bureau of Investigation,
a rather wooden-looking man named Krumbine, also bald, recognized
Potshelter as soon as the latter burst gasping into his office,
squeezing through the door while it was still dilating. The human
beings whose work took them among the Top Brass, as the upper-echelon
machines were sometimes referred to, formed a kind of human elite, just
one big nervous family.
"Sit down, Potshelter," the SBI Man said. "Hold still a second so the
chair can grab you. Hitch onto the hookah and choose a tranquilizer
from the tray at your elbow. Whatever deviation you've uncovered can't
be that much of a danger to the planets. I imagine that when you leave
this office, the Solar Battle Fleet will still be orbiting peacefully
around Luna."
"I seriously doubt that."
* * * * *
Potshelter gulped a large lavender pill and took a deep breath.
"Krumbine, a letter turned up in the first-class mail this morning."
"Great Scott!"
"It is a letter from one person to another person."
"Good Lord!"
"The flow of advertising has been seriously interfered with. At a
modest estimate, three hundred million pieces of expensive first-class
advertising have already been chewed to rags and I'm not sure the Steel
Helms--God bless 'em!--have the trouble in hand yet."
"Judas Priest!"
"Naturally the poor machines weren't able to cope with the letter.
It was utterly outside their experience, beyond the furthest reach
of their programming. It threw them into a terrible spasm. Pink
Wastebasket is dead and at this very instant, if we're lucky, three
police machines of the toughest blued steel are holding down Black
Sorter and putting a muzzle on him."
"Great Scott! It's incredible, Potshelter. And Pink Wastebasket dead?
Take another tranquilizer, Potshelter, and hand over the tray."
Krumbine received it with trembling fingers, started to pick up a big
pink pill but drew back his hand from it in sudden revulsion at its
color and swallowed two blue oval ones instead. The man was obviously
fighting to control himself.
He said unsteadily, "I almost never take doubles, but this news you
bring--Good Lord! I seem to recall a case where someone tried to
send a sound-tape through the mails, but that was before my time.
Incidentally, is there any possibility that this is a letter sent by
one _group_ of persons to another group? A hive or a therapy group or a
social club? That would be bad enough, of course, but--"
"No, just one single person sending to another." Potshelter's
expression set in grimly solicitous lines. "I can see you don't quite
understand, Krumbine. This is not a sound-tape, but a letter written in
letters. You know, letters, characters--like books."
"Don't mention books in this office!" Krumbine drew himself up angrily
and then slumped back. "Excuse me, Potshelter, but I find this very
difficult to face squarely. Do I understand you to say that one person
has tried to use the mails to send a printed sheet of some sort to
another?"
"Worse than that. A written letter."
"Written? I don't recognize the word."
"It's a way of making characters, of forming visual equivalents of
sound, without using electricity. The writer, as he's called, employs
a black liquid and a pointed stick called a pen. I know about this
because one hobby of mine is ancient means of communication."
* * * * *
Krumbine frowned and shook his head. "Communication is a dangerous
business, Potshelter, especially at the personal level. With you and
me, it's all right, because we know what we're doing."
He picked up a third blue tranquilizer. "But with most of the
hive-folk, person-to-person communication is only a morbid form of
advertising, a dangerous travesty of normal newscasting--catharsis
without the analyst, recitation without the teacher--a perversion of
promotion employed in betraying and subverting."
The frown deepened as he put the blue pill in his mouth and chewed it.
"But about this pen--do you mean the fellow glues the pointed stick to
his tongue and then speaks, and the black liquid traces the vibrations
on the paper? A primitive non-electrical oscilloscope? Sloppy but
conceivable, and producing a record of sorts of the spoken word."
"No, no, Krumbine." Potshelter nervously popped a square orange tablet
into his mouth. "It's a hand-written letter."
Krumbine watched him. "I never mix tranquilizers," he boasted absently.
"Hand-written, eh? You mean that the message was imprinted on a hand?
And the skin or the entire hand afterward detached and sent through
the mails in the fashion of a Martian reproach? A grisly find indeed,
Potshelter."
"You still don't quite grasp it, Krumbine. The fingers of the hand move
the stick that applies the ink, producing a crude imitation of the
printed word."
"Diabolical!" Krumbine smashed his fist down on the desk so that the
four phones and two-score microphones rattled. "I tell you, Potshelter,
the SBI is ready to cope with the subtlest modern deceptions, but when
fiends search out and revive tricks from the pre-Atomic Cave Era, it's
almost too much. But, Great Scott, I dally while the planets are in
danger. What's the sender's code on this hellish letter?"
"No code," Potshelter said darkly, proferring the envelope. "The return
address is--hand-written."
Krumbine blanched as his eyes slowly traced the uneven lines in the
upper left-hand corner:
_from_ Richard Rowe
215 West 10th St. (horizontal)
2837 Rocket Court (vertical)
Hive 37, NewNew York 319, N. Y.
Columbia, Terra
"Ugh!" Krumbine said, shivering. "Those crawling characters, those
letters, as you call them, those _things_ barely enough like print
to be readable--they seem to be on the verge of awakening all sorts
of horrid racial memories. I find myself thinking of fur-clad
witch-doctors dipping long pointed sticks in bubbling black cauldrons.
No wonder Pink Wastebasket couldn't take it, brave girl."
* * * * *
Firming himself behind his desk, he pushed a number of buttons and
spoke long numbers and meaningful alphabetical syllables into several
microphones. Banks of colored lights around the desk began to blink
like a theatre marquee sending Morse Code, while phosphorescent
arrows crawled purposefully across maps and space-charts and through
three-dimensional street diagrams.
"There!" he said at last. "The sender of the letter is being
apprehended and will be brought directly here. We'll see what sort
of man this Richard Rowe is--if we can assume he's human. Seven
precautionary cordons are being drawn around his population station:
three composed of machines, two of SBI agents, and two consisting of
human and mechanical medical-combat teams. Same goes for the intended
recipient of the letter. Meanwhile, a destroyer squadron of the Solar
Fleet has been detached to orbit over NewNew York."
"In case it becomes necessary to Z-Bomb?" Potshelter asked grimly.
Krumbine nodded. "With all those villains lurking just outside the
Solar System in their invisible black ships, with planeticide in their
hearts, we can't be too careful. One word transmitted from one spy to
another and anything may happen. And we must bomb before they do, so
as to contain our losses. Better one city destroyed than a traitor
on the loose who may destroy many cities. One hundred years ago,
three person-to-person postcards went through the mails--just three
postcards, Potshelter!--and _pft_ went Schenectady, Hoboken, Cicero,
and Walla Walla. Here, as long as you're mixing them, try one of these
oval blues--I find them best for steady swallowing."
Bells jangled. Krumbine grabbed up two phones, holding one to each ear.
Potshelter automatically picked up a third. The ringing continued.
Krumbine started to wedge one of his phones under his chin, nodded
sharply at Potshelter and then toward a cluster of microphones at the
end of the table. Potshelter picked up a fourth phone from behind them.
The ringing stopped.
The two men listened, looking doped, Krumbine with an eye fixed on
the sweep second hand of the large wall clock. When it had made one
revolution, he cradled his phones. Potshelter followed suit.
"I do like the simplicity of the new on-the-hour Puffyloaf
phono-commercial," the latter remarked thoughtfully. "The Bread That's
Lighter Than Air. Nice."
Krumbine nodded. "I hear they've had to add mass to the leadfoil
wrapping to keep the loaves from floating off the shelves. Fact."
* * * * *
He cleared his throat. "Too bad we can't listen to more
phono-commercials, but even when there isn't a crisis on the agenda, I
find I have to budget my listening time. One minute per hour strikes a
reasonable balance between duty and self-indulgence."
The nearest wall began to sing:
Mister J. Augustus Krumbine,
We all think you're fine, fine, fine, fine.
Now out of the skyey blue
Come some telegrams for you.
The wall opened to a small heart shape toward the center and a sheaf of
pale yellow envelopes arced out and plopped on the middle of the desk.
Krumbine started to leaf through them, scanning the little transparent
windows.
"Hm, Electronic Soap ... Better Homes and Landing Platforms ...
Psycho-Blinkers ... Your Girl Next Door ... Poppy-Woppies ...
Poopsy-Woopsies...."
He started to open an envelope, then, after a quick look around and an
apologetic smile at Potshelter, dumped them all on the disposal hopper,
which gargled briefly.
"After all, there _is_ a crisis this morning," he said in a defensive
voice.
Potshelter nodded absently. "I can remember back before personalized
delivery and rhyming robots," he observed. "But how I'd miss them
now--so much more distingué than the hives with their non-personalized
radio, TV and stereo advertising. For that matter, I believe there are
some backward areas on Terra where the great advertising potential of
telephones and telegrams hasn't been fully realized and they are still
used in part for personal communication. Now me, I've never in my life
sent or received a message except on my walky-talky." He patted his
breast pocket.
Krumbine nodded, but he was a trifle shocked and inclined to revise
his estimate of Potshelter's social status. Krumbine conducted his own
social correspondence solely by telepathy. He shared with three other
SBI officials a private telepath--a charming albino girl named Agnes.
"Yes, and it's a very handsome walky-talky," he assured Potshelter a
little falsely. "Suits you. I like the upswept antenna." He drummed
on the desk and swallowed another blue tranquilizer. "Dammit, what's
happened to those machines? They ought to have the two spies here by
now. Did you notice that the second--the intended recipient of the
letter, I mean--seems to be female? Another good Terran name, too, Jane
Dough. Hive in Upper Manhattan." He began to tap the envelope sharply
against the desk. "Dammit, where _are_ they?"
"Excuse me," Potshelter said hesitantly, "but I'm wondering why you
haven't read the message inside the envelope."
* * * * *
Krumbine looked at him blankly. "Great Scott, I assumed that at least
_it_ was in some secret code, of course. Normally I'd have asked you to
have Pink Wastebasket try her skill on it, but...." His eyes widened
and his voice sank. "You don't mean to tell me that it's--"