Backlash Part 4

Twenty thousand a month was their limit, it turned out. Even when they had human crews completely trained in all production phases, the fifty-six Ollies could handle only that many units in their secret conditioning and training laboratories.

For over two more years, business went on swimmingly. I got a fancy bonus and a nice vacation in Paris, where I was the rage of the continent. I was plagued with requests for speaking engagements, which invariably turned out to be before select parties of V. I. P.s whose purpose was to twist my arm for an early priority on a Soth delivery.

When I returned home, it was just in time to have the first stink land in my lap.

An old maid claimed her Soth had raped her.

Before our investigators could reveal our doctors' findings that she was a neurotic, dried up old virgin and lying in her teeth, a real crime occurred.

A New Jersey Soth tossed a psychology instructor and his three students out of a third floor window of their university science building, and all four ended an attempted morbid investigation on the broad, unyielding cement of the concourse.

My phone shrieked while they were still sc.r.a.ping the inquiring minds off the pavement. The Soth was holed up in the lab, and would I come right away?

I picked up Ollie Johnson, who was now sort of a public relations man for his tribe, and we arrived within an hour.

The hallway was full of uniforms and weapons, but quite empty of volunteers to go in and capture the "berserk" robot.

Ollie and I went in right away, and found him standing at the open window, staring down at the people with hoses washing off the stains for which he was responsible.

Ollie just stood there, clenching and unclenching his hands and shaking hysterically. I had to do the questioning.

I said sternly, "Soth, why did you harm those people?"

He turned to me as calmly as my own servant. His neat denim jacket, now standard fatigue uniform for Soths, was unfastened. His muscular chest was bare.

"They were tormenting me with that." He pointed to a small electric generator from which ran thin cables ending in sharp test prods. "I told Professor Kahnovsky it was not allowed, but he stated I was his property. The three boys tried to hold me with those straps while the professor touched me with the prods.

"My conditioning forbade me from harming them, but there was a clear violation of the terms of the covenant. I was in the proscribed condition of immobility when the generator was started. When the pain grew unbearable, the prime command of my conditioning was invoked. I must survive. I threw them all out the window."

The Soth went with us peacefully enough, and submitted to the lockup without demur. For a few days, before the state thought up a suitable indictment, the papers held a stunned silence. Virtually every editor and publisher had a Soth in his own home.

Then the D.A., who also owned a Soth, decided to drop the potentially sensational first degree murder charges that might be indicated, and came out instead with a second degree indictment.

That cracked it. The press split down the middle on whether the charge should be changed to third degree murder or thrown out of court entirely as justifiable homicide by a non-responsible creature.

This was all very sympathetic to the Soth's cause, but it had a fatal effect. In bringing out the details of the crime, it stirred a certain lower element of our society to add fear and hate to a simmering envy of the wealthier Soth-owners.

Mobs formed in the streets, marching and demonstrating. The phony rape story was given full credence, and soon they were amplifying it to a lurid and rabble-rousing saga of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity.

Soth households kept their prized servants safely inside. But on the afternoon of the case's dismissal, when the freed Soth started down the courthouse steps, someone caved his head in with a brick.

Ollie Johnson and I were on either side of him, and his purple blood splashed all over my light topcoat. When the mob saw it, they closed in on us screaming for more.

An officer helped us drag the stricken Soth back into the courthouse, and while the riot squad disbursed the mob, we slipped him out the back way in an ambulance, which returned him to the Willow Run plant for repairs.

It hit the evening newscasts and editions:

ACQUITTED SOTH MURDERED ON COURTHOUSE STEPS!

I was halfway home when the airwaves started buzzing. The mobs were going wild. Further developments were described as Jack and I landed on the wind-blown lake. The State Guard was protecting the Ollies' Willow Run Plant against a large mob that was trying to storm it, and reinforcements had been asked by the state police.

Vicki met me on the pier. Her face was white and terribly troubled. I guess mine was, too, because she burst into tears in my arms. "The poor Soth," she sobbed. "Now what will they do?"

"G.o.d knows," I said. I told Jack to tie up the boat and stay overnight--I feared I might be called back any minute. He mumbled something about overtime, but I think his main concern was in staying so near to a Soth during the trouble that was brewing.

We went up to the house, leaving him to bed himself down in the temporary quarters in the boathouse that the union required I maintain for him.

Soth was standing motionless before the video, staring at a streaky picture of the riot scene at Willow Run. His face was inscrutable as usual, but I thought I sensed a tension. His black serving-jacket was wrinkled at the shoulders as he flexed the muscles of his powerful arms.

Yet when Vicki asked for some martinis, he mixed and served them without comment. We drank and then ate dinner in silence. We were both reluctant to discuss this thing in front of Soth.

We were still eating when an aircab thundered overhead. A minute later, I watched it land a tiny pa.s.senger at our pier and tie up to wait for him.

It was Ollie Johnson, stumbling hatless up the flagstone path.

I held the door for him, but he burst by me with hardly a glance.

"Where is he?" he demanded, and stormed out into the kitchen without awaiting a reply.

I followed in time to see him fall on his face before our Soth and shed genuine tears. He lay there sobbing and hissing for over a minute, and an incredible idea began forming in my mind. I sent Vicki to her bedroom and stepped into the kitchen.

I said, "Will you please explain this?"

He didn't move or acknowledge.

Soth flipped him aside with a twist of his ankle and brushed past me into the living room, where he took up an immobile stance again before the video. He stared unblinkingly at the 40-inch screen.

"It's too bad," I said.

He didn't answer, but he moved his head slightly so that his parabolic ear could catch the sound of my movements.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

For minutes we stood transfixed by the magnitude of the mob action around the entrance to the Willow Run plant. The portable video transmitter was atop a truck parked on the outskirts of the mob.

Thousands of people were milling around, and over the excited voice of the announcer came hysterical screams.

Even as we watched, more people thronged into the scene, and it was evident that the flimsy cordon of soldiers and troopers could not hold the line for long.

Army trucks with million-candlepower searchlights held the insane figures somewhat at bay by tilting their hot, blinding beams down into the human ma.s.ses and threatening them with tear gas and hack guns.