"Henry Kuttner - Android" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

Drop that part of the investigation. Go ahead with the rest. All right?”
“Fine,” Bradley agreed. He had expected to be stopped at this point of the inquiry, though, since
last night, not by Court. He found he was still holding an unlighted cigarette. He put it in his mouth and
went to the side door and opened it. Then he turned.
“That’s all?”
He watched Court twist his neck around, and had an insane fear that the man’s head might fall
off. But it didn’t.
“Yes, that’s all for now,” Court said pleasantly.
Bradley went out, trying to forget the narrow red line he had just seen circling the Director’s
throat, revealed when the man had turned his head.
The things couldn’t be killed by decapitation, then. But they could be destroyed. They could be
dissolved with acid, smashed with a hammer, dismantled, burned. . . .
The trouble was, there was as yet no sure way to recognize the creatures. The sterility curve after
exposure to mild radioactivity meant something, but ordinary humans could have become sterilized
too—though not usually by such slight dosages of gamma rays. And even then, some people were sterile
anyway.
All Bradley had was a general method of screening. After that, he had to depend on psychology
to weed out the monsters. He knew that they could usually be found in positions of power and influence,
though not necessarily in the public eye. Like Arthur Court, who, as Director of New Products, Inc.,
wielded tremendous influence on the culture—since civilization is moulded by the technological tools
placed in its hands.
Bradley shivered.
Last night he had cut off Arthur Court’s head.
Arthur Court was an android.
“And what are you going to do about it?” Bradley asked himself in the hall outside Court’s door.
He looked down with a certain academic interest at his own hand shaking until the papers he held
fluttered. What could he do about it? He or any other man?
You couldn’t fight them on equal terms. Probably their I.Q. was far higher than mankind’s. On
terms of pure intellect Bradley would have no chance at all. Super-comptometers could solve abstruse
problems no limited human mind could tackle. Last night Bradley had worn a distorting rubber
mask—but if Court’s cold metallic brain set itself the problem of reasoning out his identity, wouldn’t
Court arrive at the right answer sooner or later?
Had he already arrived at an answer?
Bradley suppressed a panicky impulse to run. There was such dead silence behind the door at his
elbow. For all he knew they had vision that could slip between the buzzing atoms of the door and see
Bradley here as if he stood beyond glass—see through him and into the patterns of his brain, and read all
his thoughts as they took form.
“They’re only androids,” he reminded himself with great firmness, forcing his gait to a walk as he
turned away down the hall. “If they had that much power I wouldn’t be here now.”
Still, he wondered with a corroding urgency just what had happened last night after he left
Court’s apartment. He would not think of how Court had looked, lying there motionless beside the heavy
steel blade dimmed by that stickiness that looked like blood and was not human blood.
Had he repaired himself, after Bradley left? Repaired was the word, of course—not cured. Only
a human could be cured. It probably depended on just where the brain of the android was located. Not
necessarily in the head. The head is really too vulnerable a place for such an important mechanism. You
could improve on the structure of the human in so many ways. Perhaps the androids had. Perhaps
Court’s brain was sheltered somewhere in the mysterious chambers of his synthetic body, and its cold,
clicking thoughts had gone on their steely processes all the while Bradley stood there looking down in
incredulous shock at the body of his—his victim?
Which was the victim and which the victor?