Terminal Man (24 page)

“The main computer is going to a new program,” Gerhard said.

“So what?”

“We didn’t instruct that.”

“What’s the new program?”

“I don’t know,” Gerhard said. “We didn’t instruct any change.”

Ross and Anders watched the console.

Then there was nothing. No further letters appeared on the screen. Anders said, “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Gerhard said. “Maybe another time-sharing terminal is overriding us, but that shouldn’t be possible. We locked in priority for our terminal for the last twelve hours. Ours should be the only terminal that can initiate program changes.”

The console flashed up new letters.

“What?” Gerhard said. He started to punch buttons on the console, then quit. “It isn’t accepting any new instructions.”

“Why not?”

“Something must be wrong with the main computer in the basement.”

Ross looked at Anders. “You better show me that computer,” he said.

Then, as they watched, one of the consoles went completely dead. All its lights blinked off; the TV screen shrank to a single fading white dot. A second console went off, then a third. The teleprinter stopped printing.

“The computer has shut itself down,” Gerhard said.

“It probably had help,” Anders said.

He went with Ross to the elevators.

It was a damp evening, and cold as they hurried across the parking lot toward the main building. Anders was checking his gun, turning it sideways to catch the light from the parking-lot lamps.

“I think you should know one thing,” she said. “It’s no good threatening him with that. He won’t respond rationally to it.”

Anders smiled. “Because he’s a machine?”

“He just won’t respond. If he has a seizure, he won’t see it, won’t recognize it, won’t react appropriately to it.”

They entered the hospital through the brightly lit main entrance, and walked back to the central elevator banks. Anders said, “Where’s the atomic pack located?”

“Beneath the skin of his right shoulder.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Here,” she said, pointing to her own shoulder, tracing a rectangle.

“That size?”

“Yes. About the size of a pack of cigarettes.”

“Okay,” Anders said.

They took the elevator to the basement. There were two cops in the elevator car, and they were both tense, fidgety, hands touching their guns.

As they rode down, Anders nodded to his own gun. “You ever fire one of these?”

“No.”

“Never at all?”

“No.”

He didn’t say anything after that. The elevator doors opened. They felt the coolness of the basement air and looked down the corridor ahead—bare concrete walls, unpainted; overhead pipes running along the ceiling, harsh electric lighting. They stepped out. The doors closed behind them.

They stood for a moment, listening. They heard nothing except the distant hum of power equipment. Anders whispered, “Anybody usually in the basement at night?”

She nodded. “Maintenance people. Pathologists, if they’re still going.”

“The pathology labs are down here?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the computer?”

“This way.”

She led him down the corridor. Straight ahead was the laundry room. It was locked for the night, but huge carts with bundles of laundry were outside in the corridor. Anders eyed the bundles cautiously before they moved on to the central kitchens.

The kitchens were shut down, too, but the lights were
on, burning in a vast expanse of white-tiled rooms, with stainless-steel steam tables in long rows. “This is a short cut,” she said as they went through the kitchen. Their footsteps echoed on the tiles. Anders walked loosely, holding his gun slightly ahead, barrel pointed out to the side.

They passed through the kitchen and back into another hallway. It was almost identical to the one they had left. Anders glanced at her questioningly. She knew he was lost; she remembered the months it had taken her to learn her way through the basement. “Turn right,” she said.

They passed a sign on the wall:
EMPLOYEES REPORT ALL ACCIDENTS TO YOUR SUPERVISOR
. It showed a man with a small cut on his finger. Further down was another sign:
NEED A LOAN? SEE YOUR CREDIT UNION
.

They turned right down another corridor, and approached a small section containing vending machines—hot coffee, doughnuts, sandwiches, candy bars. She remembered all the late nights when she had been a resident in the hospital and had come down to the vending machines for a snack. The old days, when being a doctor seemed like a good and hopeful thing to be. Great advances would be made during her lifetime; it would be exciting; she would be a part of it.

Anders peered into the vending area, then paused. He whispered: “Have a look at this.”

She looked, astonished. Every machine had been smashed. There were candy bars and sandwiches wrapped in plastic strewn across the floor. Coffee was pouring in short, arterial spurts from the coffee vender onto the floor.

Anders stepped around the puddles of coffee and soda and touched the dents and tears in the metal of the machines. “Looks like an axe,” he said. “Where would he get an axe?”

“Fire-extinguisher stations have them.”

“I don’t see the axe here,” he said, looking around the room. Then he glanced at her.

She didn’t reply. They left the vending area and continued down the corridor. They came to a turn in the tunnels.

“Which way now?”

“Left,” she said. And she added: “We’re very close.”

Ahead of them, the hall took another turn. Ross knew that hospital records was around the turn, and just beyond that, the computer. The planners had located the computer near the records room because they eventually hoped to computerize all the hospital records.

Suddenly Anders froze. She stopped and listened with him. They heard footsteps, and humming—somebody humming a tune.

Anders put his finger to his lips, and gestured to Ross to stay where she was. He moved forward, toward the turn in the corridor. The humming was louder. He paused at the turn and looked cautiously around the corner. Ross held her breath.

“Hey!” a male voice shouted, and suddenly Anders’s arm flicked around the corner like a snake, and a man sprawled across the floor, skidding down the hall toward Ross. “Hey!” A bucket of water sloshed across the floor. Ross saw that it was an elderly maintenance man. She went over to him.

“What the—”

“Sh-h-h,” she said, a finger to her lips. She helped the man back to his feet.

Anders came back. “Don’t leave the basement,” he said to the man. “Go to the kitchen and wait.
Don’t try to leave.
” His voice was an angry hiss.

Ross knew what he was saying. Anyone who tried to leave the basement now was likely to be shot by the waiting cops.

The man was nodding, frightened and confused.

“It’s all right,” Ross said to him.

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

“There’s a man down here we have to find,” Ross said. “Just wait until it’s over.”

“Stay in the kitchen,” Anders said.

The man nodded, brushed himself off, and walked away. He looked back once, shaking his head. She and Anders continued along the corridor, turned a corner, and came to the records section. A large sign sticking out from the wall said:
PATIENT RECORDS
.

Anders looked at her questioningly. She nodded. They went inside.

Records was a giant space, filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves of patient records. It was like an enormous library. Anders paused in surprise.

“Lot of bookkeeping,” she said.

“Is this every patient the hospital ever had?”

“No,” she said. “Every patient seen in the last five years. The others are stored in a warehouse.”

“Christ.”

They moved down the parallel stacks of shelves quietly, Anders leading with his gun. Occasionally he
would pause to look through a gap in the shelves to another corridor. They saw no one at all.

“Anybody on duty here?”

“Should be.”

She scanned the rows of charts. The record room always impressed her. As a practicing doctor she had an image of medical practice that involved large numbers of patients. She had treated hundreds, seen thousands for a single hour or a few weeks. Yet the hospital records ran into the millions—and that was just one hospital, in one city, in one country. Millions and millions of patients.

“We have a thing like this, too,” Anders said. “You lose records often?”

“All the time.”

He sighed. “So do we.”

At that moment, a young girl no more than fifteen or sixteen came around the corner. She carried a stack of records in her arms. Anders had his gun up in an instant. The girl looked, dropped the records, and started to scream.

“
Quiet,
” Anders hissed.

The scream was cut off abruptly, to a kind of gurgle. The girl’s eyes were wide.

“I’m a policeman,” Anders said. He flicked out his shoulder wallet to show the badge. “Have you seen anyone here?”

“Anyone …”

“This man.” He showed her the picture, She looked at it, and shook her head.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes … I mean, no … I mean …”

Ross said, “I think we should go on to the computer.”
In some way, she was embarrassed at frightening the girl. The hospital hired high school and college students part-time to do the clerical work in records; they weren’t paid much.

Ross herself remembered when she had been frightened at about the same age. She had been walking in the woods with a boy. They had seen a snake. The boy told her it was a rattlesnake, and she was terrified. Much later she learned he had been teasing her. The snake was harmless. She had resented—

“All right,” Anders said. “The computer. Which way?”

Ross led the way out. Anders turned back once to the girl, who was picking up the charts she had dropped. “Listen,” he said. “If you do see this man, don’t talk to him. Don’t do anything except shout your bloody head off. You understand?”

She nodded.

And then Ross realized that the rattlesnake was real, this time. It was all real.

They came out into the corridor again, and continued down it toward the computer section. The computer section was the only refinished part of the basement. The bare concrete floor changed abruptly to blue carpeting; one corridor wall had been knocked out to install large glass windows that looked in, from the corridor, to the room that housed the main banks of the computer. Ross remembered when the computer was being installed; it seemed to her that the windows were an unnecessary expense, and she had mentioned it to McPherson.

“Better let the people see what’s coming,” McPherson had replied.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the computer is just a machine. Bigger and more expensive than most, but still just a machine. We want people to get used to it. We don’t want them to fear or worship it. We want them to see it as part of the environment.”

Yet every time she passed the computer section, she had the opposite feelings: the special treatment, the hallway carpeting, and the expensive surroundings served to make the computer special, unusual, unique. She thought it significant that the only other place in the hospital where the floor was carpeted was outside the small nondenominational chapel on the first floor. She had the same sense here: a shrine to the computer.

Did the computer care if there were carpets on the floor?

In any case, the employees of the hospital had provided their own reaction to the spectacle inside the glass windows. A handwritten sign had been taped to the glass:
DO NOT FEED OR MOLEST THE COMPUTER
.

She and Anders crouched down below the level of the window. Anders peered over cautiously.

“What do you see?” she said.

“I think I see him.”

She looked, too. She was aware that her heart was suddenly pounding; her body was tense and expectant.

Inside the room there were six magnetic tape units, a broad L-shaped console for the central processor, a printer, a card-punch reader, and two disc drive units. The equipment was shiny, sharp-edged, gleaming. It sat quiet under even, fluorescent lighting. She saw no one—
just the equipment, isolated, alone. It reminded her of Stonehenge, the vertical stone columns.

Then she saw him: a man moving between two tape units. White orderly’s coat, black hair.

“It’s him,” she said.

“Where’s the door?” Anders asked. For no good reason, he was checking his gun again. He snapped the revolver chamber closed with a loud click.

“Down there.” She pointed down the corridor to the door, perhaps ten feet away.

“Any other entrances or exits?”

“No.”

Her heart was still pounding. She looked from Anders to the gun and back to Anders.

“Okay. You stay down.” Anders pressed her down to the floor as he spoke. Then he crawled forward to the door. He paused, got to his knees, and looked back at her once. She was surprised to see that he was frightened. His face was taut, his body hunched tensely. He held the gun stiffly forward by his straight arm.

We’re all afraid, she thought.

Then, with a loud slam, Anders knocked the door open and flung himself on his belly into the room. She heard him shout, “Benson!” And then almost immediately there was a gunshot. This was followed by a second shot, and a third. She could not tell who was firing. She saw Anders’s feet sticking out of the door as he lay on the carpeting. Gray smoke billowed out through the open door and rose lazily in the corridor.