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'A' as in Android
by Milton Lesser
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Science Fiction

Wonder Audiobooks, LLC
www.wonderaudio.com

Copyright ©1951 by Future Science Fiction

First published in Future Science Fiction, 1951

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CONTENTS

* * * *

"A” AS IN ANDROID by MILTON LESSER

First appeared in Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, May 1951

It was one hell of a place for a nightmare. But then, Saturn's seventh moon, Hyperion, would be a hell of a place for just about anything. Oh, Government had done wonders—and spent fortunes—giving tiny Hyperion a warm, breathable atmosphere and earth-norm gravity. Outside of that, the jumble of rocky crags and powdered pumice might have been the space side of Pluto. I know, because I've been there.

Now I heard the anxious stirring among the tough spacehands and miners as they waited for the first wonder of the Saturnian System—Hyperion's Dancing Girls. You couldn't blame them. Girls were girls, Andies or not, and the female of the species was about as common out here as an aardvark.

But frankly, I was more than a little sore at the over-patriotic deckhand who had reported the existence of the Dancing Girls to Tycho City on Luna. It meant I had to traipse almost a billion miles to collect the tax. If the Dancing Girls were androids; if their maker had the money; if someone didn't put an end to the whole affair by deciding that a knife in my back might be distinctly better than paying a hundred bucks per head...?

I saw those Dancing Girls. Let me tell you about them briefly. No, I won't go into detail. I remember they got my mind off all those morbid thoughts out in Hyperion City, and I don't want my mind to stray now, not while I'm trying to tell you this story.

They came out, about a dozen of them, and they danced. There wasn't a sound in the Hyperion Club. Not even music. Not even breathing. I've never seen anything like it. And it took me a while before I realized just why those tall slim girls were so graceful. Well, graceful isn't quite the word, but then, no word exists in any language I know which can describe the something-more-than-grace which those girls had. They danced. All other dancing was mere walking, stumbling, clumsy tripping.

They had long legs. Not so you'd say they were nice long-stemmed chicks, but really long. Half again as long as they should be, or maybe more. But on them it looked good.

That clinched it. They were Andies, a dozen untaxed androids. I sighed and hoped the owner had his tax money. I didn't want to impound these Andies for the government, not these dancers.

When it was over I didn't hear a sound. No clapping, no roaring, no stamping of feet. Not even shouts for an encore. Anything would have been superfluous.

I got up. I took my time walking across the now empty dance floor to a door which was marked, quite plainly, Keep Out.

I didn't. I walked right on through and a big guy with a seamy face stood in front of me, shaking his head slowly.

“Move, friend,” he said; “can't you read signs?”

I told him that although I was not a college boy I could read, and would he please get out of my way because I had official business with the owner of the Hyperion Club. All he knew how to do was shake his head, but when I showed him the card in my billfold with the big letter A on it, the motion of his head changed. Now the seamy face bobbed up and down, but it looked worried. There's one thing about being in the Android Service—it sure can open doors for you.

Seamy Face ushered me through a corridor and down a flight of stairs. He only paused long enough outside a metal door to knock, and then I followed him inside.

The card on the desk said, Mr. Tuttle: Manager, and behind his thick-rimmed glasses Mr. Tuttle looked like he had insomnia. A little guy, and tired. He just wasn't cut out for the frontier. Maybe he should have had a curio shop in Marsport.

Seamy Face said, “This guy's from Android Service, Mr. T.”

Tuttle looked up unhappily. He waved me over to a chair and I sat down, taking out my card again. “Carmody's the name,” I said. “That's a nice act you have out there, Mr. Tuttle. Very nice. In fact, I've never seen anything like it. Androids?”

He didn't answer the question, not right away. Instead, he said in his tired voice: “A lot of people think so. Orders are beginning to pour in from all over the outworlds. There'll be thousands—”

I cleared my throat. “Andies will cost you exactly a hundred dollars a head, Mr. Tuttle. You know that, of course. What I want to know is this: why didn't you report the manufacture of your androids to the government? There's a reason for it, and for the tax, too. It isn't legal to upset the balance like this.”

Tuttle sounded so tired I thought he'd fall right over into a deep sleep any moment. He said, “Who told you anything about androids? What makes you think they're androids?”

I smiled. “No stilts,” I said. “Don't tell me they're wearing stilts. It's either that or androids, Mr. Tuttle.”

Tuttle didn't answer that one either. Instead, he asked a question of his own. “How would you like to earn five thousand dollars, Mr. Carmody?”

I told him that was my year's salary, exactly, and I'd love it. Only I had a funny suspicion that whatever the offer was, I'd have to turn it down. Maybe we honest guys are fools; maybe ten years from now I'd still be earning exactly five thousand, but at least I'd be able to live with myself. I'm no saint, but I've got a conscience.

“All you have to do,” Tuttle said, “is this. Go back where you came from and say my dancers are not androids—for five thousand dollars, utterly no strings attached.”

I asked him what I thought was purely a rhetorical question. “Are they androids, Mr. Tuttle?”

He was always answering a question with one of his own. “Define your term, Mr. Carmody. What is an android?”

I felt a little silly, and I said: “Why don't you ask your friend here?”

Seamy Face brightened. He said, “Well, an Andie is kinda like a person, only it's made in a laboratory, not born. You know—chemistry, not biology.” Seamy Face was very proud of his answer.

“Does that satisfy you?” Tuttle wanted to know.

I told him it did, and he said: “In that case, Mr. Carmody, I can assure you that Hyperion's Dancing Girls are not androids.”

I just sat there, hardly hearing Tuttle repeat his five thousand dollar offer. It didn't sound like he was lying, yet the whole situation smelled fishy. “Maybe you ought to let me see one of the—uh, girls,” I told him.

“I wouldn't advise it, Mr. Carmody.”

“Nah,” Seamy Face agreed. “Better stay happy, friend.”

“I'm stupid,” I said. “I don't know when I'm well off. I want to see one of them.”

Tuttle shrugged, pressed a button on his desk. “Tara, that you? Will you come in, please?”

I didn't have long to wait. In a few moments the door swung in, and the Dancing Girl closed it softly behind her.

She wore a pair of big gold earrings, with her long hair swept back and hanging halfway down to her waist. She had on one of those flimsy garments popular with the dancers these days, dark red and oddly metallic, with a bright gold sash. A lot of flesh showed, especially with those overlong legs. Android flesh, I was sure. She had an innocent face.

“What is it, Tuttle?” Nice voice, neither friendly nor hostile. Just plain nice. But no respect at all for Tuttle, the man who evidently had manufactured her.

Tuttle was sad, and afraid. “This man is from the Android Service,” he told her. “I mentioned the Android Service to you, Tara. A matter of tax—”

“Why don't you pay the tax, Tuttle?” Even less respect this time. Still a nice voice, but haughty.

“I can't. You know I'm in debt, and I've been paying; I haven't got the money.”

“Stupid of you,” she told him, still in her nice innocent voice. “You!” She turned in my direction, almost languidly.

“Me?” I said. Maybe Tuttle's fear was contagious, and I felt like seven different kinds of a damned fool. Only I was afraid, too.

“Yes, you. Do I look like an android?”

I looked her up and down, slowly, spending a lot of time on the graceful incredibly long legs. I nodded. “Yes.”

That set her back for a moment. “Come here, man. Come on. I won't bite.”

Woodenly, I crossed the room to her. Don't ask me why, but I was plenty scared. Ever see a terrestrial dog on Mars, in the presence of some of the Martian fauna for the first time? Don't ask me why, but that's the way I felt. Worse.

The nice voice told me, “Touch. Go ahead, touch me.”

I tried to act casual. I lit a cigarette, and I had to cup both my hands tightly around the match, so it wouldn't shake.

“Do you have to do that to touch me?” she demanded.

I stuck out my hand, foolishly. I grabbed her bare arm, high up, near the shoulder. I pulled my hand away, like it had been in fire.

She smiled. “Am I an android?”

I didn't say a word, not immediately. I just stood there, looking at my hand. What it had touched was cold—oh, not frigid, like a slab of ice, but cold, say, like the glass top on Tuttle's desk. Androids are just like humans; they're not hot, not feverish, but they feel pleasantly alive because they're warm-blooded. Tara's arm had a nice, rosy color, but it was cold.

Strange noises clucked in my throat before I could say anything. My voice came from way down inside me, much too deep. “If you're an android, you're new. I didn't know androids could be—”

“Cold?” she smiled. “Not really cold. About seventy of your degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. That's not cold. Really, I find it pleasant.” She shrugged. “But then, that happens to be the temperature of this room. I vary.”

“She varies,” I said.

Tuttle seemed a bit happier. “Well, now that you're satisfied she's not an android, I suppose you can go home and make your report. No tax, of course.”

“Of course,” Tara said.

If I ever get my conscience out in front of me where I could see it, I think I would kick it. Hard. “I'm not satisfied at all,” I said. “She may not be an ordinary android, but she's not human. You're tax-free for the present, but I'm going to order an investigation by some technicians.”

Tuttle shook his head, sadly. Tara shrugged her cold rosey shoulders. “Borden, you will take him, please.”

Seamy Face didn't like the idea, but he came at me ponderously, a great big slab of a man. It occurred to me at that moment that Tuttle's five thousand dollar offer had been about as sincere as a Venusian assertion of good will. We've been warring on and off with Venus for a hundred years. Because if Tuttle didn't have twelve hundred dollars to pay his tax, then he didn't have five thousand to pay me. Any way you looked at it, it came out murder. Or, I hoped, attempted murder.

Seamy Face swung a big fist which could have pulverized an adobe wall. I ducked and stepped inside of his flailing arms. They don't take weaklings for the Android Service, and I slugged away at his midsection, carefully. He grunted, and his guard came down, fast. Big men always do that. I stepped back, panting, and planted a right flush on his jaw, the way you see the Space Marines do it on video. Seamy Face shuddered and flopped about loosely for a moment, then he tumbled over on his face.

I felt cocky. “Who's next?” I demanded.

Tara's voice was still nice and innocent. “Why, you are,” she said.

I should have known it would be the overlong leg. It started at the floor, long and graceful, and it moved so fast I hardly could see it. It caught me under the chin, and I think my feet left the floor. I had a quick, spinning view of Tuttle shaking his head, sadly, and then something crashed against my stomach. I remember sitting down, and I tried to get up. I could see the long legs standing over me, see the hands on feminine hips. I tried to reach out for those legs, only I never made it.

Hyperion is almost a million miles out, and I could see Saturn with her majestic rings in the port, the size of a silver dollar held at arms length. That was all kind of hazy and far away, but it was enough to tell me I was in a spaceship before I blacked out again. Only I didn't quite black out, or, if I did, I had one crazy dream...?

I remember Tara and half a dozen others stripping me, peeling off the jumper and the spaceboots as objectively as you might flay an extraterrestrial animal to study its insides, leaving me in my shirt and trousers, and then carrying me. One of them, Tara again, I think, took me over her shoulder like maybe I weighed thirty pounds, and then I remember a big bright room with a lot of machinery. I was on a table and loud noises buzzed in my ear and I felt oddly like a lot of sharp things were going inside of me. I don't mean inside my clothing—I mean inside me, all the way. My head, my chest, all over, with a gentle but outrageous insistency. Probing. Probing. Countless little knives which were very sharp. So sharp that they didn't hurt at all. So utterly sharp that I knew they wouldn't leave any marks. Provided this wasn't some kind of an impossible, drugged dream.

The next part of the dream is even crazier. I sat up, still with too much fuzziness in my head to see clearly, and someone lay on the table next to me. That someone wore a jumper and heavy spaceboots. You could tell he was dead. You could tell—

I think I screamed, or at least I tried to scream. I saw everything through a fog, but the corpse looked just like me. Down to the last detail. Through all that fuzziness I could even see the little scar on the right temple. Me. A dead me, while the live me lay back and watched.

Someone was screaming and screaming, because the knives which were so sharp that you hardly felt them were going in again, doing their work. The someone was the live me.

“You feeling all right now, Jones?” Tara asked me.

“My name is Carmody.” My mouth tasted like someone had rammed it full of a lot of copper coins. “Carmody,” I said again, stubbornly. I should have known I was wasting my breath.

“You want a mirror, Jones? It may help convince you.” She gave me a big mirror, watched me with her innocent eyes.

I looked. I was twenty-five when Tara kicked me into her dream-world on Hyperion. I looked fifty now. I didn't look anything like Mike Carmody. I had gray hair and dull gray eyes, a very red face with tight, thin lips. Trembling, I stood up. Mike Carmody is six feet tall in his socks. Tara is a big girl, maybe six feet herself. The top of my head didn't quite come up to her nose.

Something made me look at my right wrist, the inside of it, over the big blue vein. There was a bright letter A. Half an inch high. Capital A as in “Android” ... It was the law, I knew, for all androids to be so identified.

I grabbed Tara's arm and she didn't try to pull away. She had no letter A.

“You seem confused, Jones.”

“I—” I couldn't say a thing. I just sat there.

“You were made fifty-three years ago, on Ganymede. You're a mechanic by trade, and a pretty good one.”

I shook my head. I hardly felt like fighting about it, but I said, “I was born on Earth, in Chicago, twenty-five years ago. I'm an investigator for Android Service. Name's Mike Carmody.”

She smiled. “While you were asleep, Jones, we landed back on Hyperion. Here's a newspaper.” She handed the sheet to me, still smiling.

It was a newspaper, all right. The Hyperion City Gazette. I looked at the headline, and what followed.

ANDROID SERVICE INVESTIGATOR SLAIN HERE

At four p.m. yesterday, Earth Greenwich time, the body of Michael Carmody, Special Investigator for Android Service, was found in an alley connecting Dana and Bodini Streets in this city. Carmody had been slain some two or three hours before that time, in a bold daylight attack by unknown thugs who succeeded in taking Carmody's money, although his official papers were found on his person. Carmody, it is believed....

There wasn't a thing to say. I was dead and my name was Jones now, and I'd better listen to Tara.

“So you see, Jones, you obviously couldn't be this Carmody. No, not you. He's a dead man, and you're a living android. Soon we'll put you to sleep again, and when you wake up, you'll understand. I can't blame you for being a little confused now, not really.”

“You mean—you'll make my mind believe that story?”

“Yes, something like that. We erase the memory waves present and put in their place certain other—memories. Simple. Why?”

I thought fast. Hell, I didn't stand a chance getting off this ship alive, but at least I wanted to know what the hell was going on. You couldn't blame me. I said, “Well, if you're going to do that, maybe you can tell me the truth now.” I meant it. I was a pretty resigned individual right then and there, and I wanted to know the truth as much as a man dying of thirst would want water. Even if the truth wouldn't stay with me very long.

Tara said, “All right, Jones. I suppose it won't hurt.”

“Carmody.”

“Carmody, then. What do you want to know?”

“Just about everything,” I said.

Her voice was still nice and innocent. “Tuttle and Borden are dead. I had no choice. So now we need you, Jones-Carmody. Carmody is dead too. You're Jones, an android. Soon you'll think that, too.”

“Yes, but—who are you? The Dancing Girls—”

“I assure you, we are not ‘girls,’ Carmody. You wouldn't understand. You just wouldn't, not at all.”

“Try me,” I suggested. I turned idly to look about the room, and my eyes took in the port first. Outside, I could see Saturn's great bulk, low in the right side of the port, and much closer, so close that it couldn't have been more than a few miles away in space, was a ship. A ship! There were spacesuits here on this boat someplace, and if I could reach one, could kick myself clear of the lock and jet out to that ship...?

“...Dimensions. Interlocking, say like two soap bubbles, Carmody. You live in one; we live in the other. There aren't a lot of us—perhaps a billion—and if you saw our dimension, you'd know why we like yours better. Just a question of infiltration now—and what could arouse less suspicion than some innocent, wonderfully graceful Dancing Girls? We'll get popular, Carmody. It's starting already; so popular that there'll be a dozen Dancing Girls in every nightclub in the solar system. Then, in time—”

I was hardly listening. A door opened, and one of the other Dancing Girls came into the room.

“Is he ready now?” she demanded.

Tara nodded. “I guess so. Carmody, are there any other questions before you're Jones, completely? No hard feelings, I hope. And even if you have them now, you won't—not when you're Jones. You'll have the memories of an android named Jones, who was made here, on this ship, a few days ago, but your memories will go back fifty years, and you'll be loyal to us. A publicity agent for us in your spare time, a mechanic otherwise. Any questions?”

I fiddled about for a question. I needed time. If they could take themselves from another dimension and assume their present, almost-earthly shapes, if they could kill me and yet somehow not kill me, leaving my body dead in an alley in Hyperion City, but leaving me alive in the scrawny body of android Jones...?

I had to believe Tara. I couldn't doubt a word of it. So incredibly simple. Sure, no one would suspect a dancing girl of anything. What did you have to be afraid of?

“One more question,” I said. I lifted a big bowl off the table and hurled it at her. “Just how strong are you?”

She stumbled back a few steps, trying to wipe some liquid from her eyes. She cursed roundly, and she may have been from another dimension, she may have assumed the shape of a girl here, but let me tell you she knew how to curse.

The other dancing girl leaped at me, and I side-stepped. I didn't want her to grab me, not when I remembered what Tara had done that day in Tuttle's office.

I ran out the door and I kept running. Behind me, I heard feet pounding down the corridor.

I don't know where they got the ship, but the single spacesuit I found hanging on a hook looked awfully old. I hoped it would be airtight, and I didn't have much time to think about it one way or the other. I stepped into the suit and took down the plexi helmet, and then someone spun me around and I saw it was Tara.

I swung my arm in a wide arc, starting from around someplace behind my back, and the helmet pounded against her face like a runaway meteor. It staggered her. The blow could have killed a man, but Tara just stumbled back a few steps, momentarily dazed.

The helmet fit in place snugly, the way it should, and I prayed again for air. Then I swung the lock door up, and I got a surprise.

There was no lock. Just cold empty space, with Saturn far off and the other ship hanging in space like a silver dart, much further than it had been before, but still close enough to reach with the suit jets.

I sensed the air wooshing out of Tara's ship, and I smiled. Maybe my worries were over. They had to be. You don't just go walking around in deep space, even if it's inside a ship.

Only Tara did. Her damned synthetic body—or whatever the make-believe dancing girl's flesh housed, could adjust to anything, instantly. She came for me, smiling innocently, still as if almost nothing was wrong. Maybe I'd been naughty, but that's all.

I kicked away from the ship a few yards. Tara stood in the simple doorway, and I felt a little giddy. I thumbed my nose at her.

It didn't last. She lifted a blaster and fired, and then I switched my jets on and began to soar away, darting, spinning, weaving—until I felt something like a gyroscope which lost its bearings.

The beam from her blaster zipped through space on all sides of me, but in a little while I was out of range, and by the time she could turn that ship around—even if she could withstand more gravities than a robot—I'd be in safe hands.

I smiled grimly as I swept closer to the other ship.

“Look,” I said. “Please, this is the fourth time I've told my story. It's been six months since the freighter picked me up.”

The police officer shrugged. “What do you want me to do, Jones? We like to be nice to you Andies—”

“I'm not an android!”

“We checked your fingerprints. There's the characteristic inverted V in the whorls. You have the android identification mark. You have your papers. Sylvester Jones, Android 1st class, Mechanic. So what do you want us to do? This Carmody guy is dead. He's buried now.”

“Please. I'm Carmody—”

“Now listen! We're going to have to put you away, Jones. We don't like to be hard on androids, but—”

“Carmody! Carmody! That's me, damn it—”

“Now, Jones, you'd better go away. We took you to Carmody's widow. She gave you the answer. Please, Jones, like a good Andie.” He frowned. “And that story you tell, better keep it to yourself. Dancing Girls invading the solar system. Ha, ha ha...”

I stood outside in the streets of Earth. Chicago. Home Town. It looked strange. I saw a billboard. “A hundred Dancing Girls in the Club Falcon. See them...”

The craze had swept the system. Every habitable world. Every club. They all had their long-stemmed Dancing Girls. Androids now, with little A's on their wrists, paying taxes properly, no questions asked. Infiltration...?

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