Short Fiction Robert Sheckley (best romantic books to read TXT) 📖

“This is from Washington,” his secretary said. “I thought you’d⁠—”

“Sorry.” Gelsen picked up the telephone. “Yes. Certainly is a mess⁠ ⁠… Have they? All right, I certainly will.” He put down the telephone.

“Short and sweet,” he told Macintyre. “We’re to shut down temporarily.”

“That won’t be so easy,” Macintyre said. “The watchbirds operate independent of any central control, you know. They come back once a week for a repair checkup. We’ll have to turn them off then, one by one.”

“Well, let’s get to it. Monroe over on the Coast has shut down about a quarter of his birds.”

“I think I can dope out a restricting circuit,” Macintyre said.

“Fine,” Gelsen replied bitterly. “You make me very happy.”

The watchbirds were learning rapidly, expanding and adding to their knowledge. Loosely defined abstractions were extended, acted upon and re-extended.

To stop murder⁠ ⁠…

Metal and electrons reason well, but not in a human fashion.

A living organism? Any living organism!

The watchbirds set themselves the task of protecting all living things.

The fly buzzed around the room, lighting on a table top, pausing a moment, then darting to a window sill.

The old man stalked it, a rolled newspaper in his hand.

Murderer!

The watchbirds swept down and saved the fly in the nick of time.

The old man writhed on the floor a minute and then was silent. He had been given only a mild shock, but it had been enough for his fluttery, cranky heart.

His victim had been saved, though, and this was the important thing. Save the victim and give the aggressor his just desserts.

Gelsen demanded angrily, “Why aren’t they being turned off?”

The assistant control engineer gestured. In a corner of the repair room lay the senior control engineer. He was just regaining consciousness.

“He tried to turn one of them off,” the assistant engineer said. Both his hands were knotted together. He was making a visible effort not to shake.

“That’s ridiculous. They haven’t got any sense of self-preservation.”

“Then turn them off yourself. Besides, I don’t think any more are going to come.”

What could have happened? Gelsen began to piece it together. The watchbirds still hadn’t decided on the limits of a living organism. When some of them were turned off in the Monroe plant, the rest must have correlated the data.

So they had been forced to assume that they were living organisms, as well.

No one had ever told them otherwise. Certainly they carried on most of the functions of living organisms.

Then the old fears hit him. Gelsen trembled and hurried out of the repair room. He wanted to find Macintyre in a hurry.

The nurse handed the surgeon the sponge.

“Scalpel.”

She placed it in his hand. He started to make the first incision. And then he was aware of a disturbance.

“Who let that thing in?”

“I don’t know,” the nurse said, her voice muffled by the mask.

“Get it out of here.”

The nurse waved her arms at the bright winged thing, but it fluttered over her head.

The surgeon proceeded with the incision⁠—as long as he was able.

The watchbird drove him away and stood guard.

“Telephone the watchbird company!” the surgeon ordered. “Get them to turn the thing off.”

The watchbird was preventing violence to a living organism.

The surgeon stood by helplessly while his patient died.

Fluttering high above the network of highways, the watchbird watched and waited. It had been constantly working for weeks now, without rest or repair. Rest and repair were impossible, because the watchbird couldn’t allow itself⁠—a living organism⁠—to be murdered. And that was what happened when watchbirds returned to the factory.

There was a built-in order to return, after the lapse of a certain time period. But the watchbird had a stronger order to obey⁠—preservation of life, including its own.

The definitions of murder were almost infinitely extended now, impossible to cope with. But the watchbird didn’t consider that. It responded to its stimuli, whenever they came and whatever their source.

There was a new definition of living organism in its memory files. It had come as a result of the watchbird discovery that watchbirds were living organisms. And it had enormous ramifications.

The stimuli came! For the hundredth time that day, the bird wheeled and banked, dropping swiftly down to stop murder.

Jackson yawned and pulled his car to a shoulder of the road. He didn’t notice the glittering dot in the sky. There was no reason for him to. Jackson wasn’t contemplating murder, by any human definition.

This was a good spot for a nap, he decided. He had been driving for seven straight hours and his eyes were starting to fog. He reached out to turn off the ignition key⁠—

And was knocked back against the side of the car.

“What in hell’s wrong with you?” he asked indignantly. “All I want to do is⁠—” He reached for the key again, and again he was smacked back.

Jackson knew better than to try a third time. He had been listening to the radio and he knew what the watchbirds did to stubborn violators.

“You mechanical jerk,” he said to the waiting metal bird. “A car’s not alive. I’m not trying to kill it.”

But the watchbird only knew that a certain operation resulted in stopping an organism. The car was certainly a functioning organism. Wasn’t it of metal, as were the watchbirds? Didn’t it run?

Macintyre said, “Without repairs they’ll run down.” He shoved a pile of specification sheets out of his way.

“How soon?” Gelsen asked.

“Six months to a year. Say a year, barring accidents.”

“A year,” Gelsen said. “In the meantime, everything is stopping dead. Do you know the latest?”

“What?”

“The watchbirds have decided that the Earth is a living organism. They won’t allow farmers to break ground for plowing. And, of course, everything else is a living organism⁠—rabbits, beetles, flies, wolves, mosquitoes, lions, crocodiles, crows, and smaller forms of life such as bacteria.”

“I know,” Macintyre said.

“And you tell me they’ll wear out in six months or a year. What happens now? What are we going to eat in six months?”

The engineer rubbed his chin. “We’ll have to do something quick and fast. Ecological balance is gone to hell.”

“Fast isn’t