So It Begins Read Online Free Page B

the hour. I cannot call to you again nor can I ask again for you to come. I will wait in silence for you . . .”
      And, with a careful flare of his jets, Unit 22 left his position in the shadow of the asteroid, and began his long, silent fall toward the ore barge, toward his escape, and toward his strange dream of freedom.
     
      “Unit K71 was a woman?” This came from the thin silhouette, the man’s voice opposite her.
      She said: “The tissue in the cyborg’s brain had XX chromosomes, yes. We don’t know where she got her instincts from; she doesn’t have glands or organs or ovaries or anything . . .”
      “So what happened . . .?”
      “Apparently Unit 22 interfered with his own command/control circuitry the same way Unit 45 had done, so he wasn’t wearing a transponder, and the security system did not detect him aboard the barge. He shoveled out a mass of ore equal to his own weight, so that the barge’s performance was the same. It was a long trip. He made a brave attempt, but it came to nothing at the end. Of course, what did he expect? Those barges were meant to dock at orbital platforms . . .”
      “No,” said the thin man, “ I mean what happened to her? Unit K71?”
      “Oh, that. Unit K71 spent more and more time making little dolls of herself out of scraps of metal and stone; little ghastly things that looked like coffins with claws. And she wasn’t making her quota. They had to cut one of her claws off with a wielding torch to get her to drop her doll. Some people were hurt. The work supervisor on duty shut off Unit K71, flushed the damaged brain tissue out into space, and sent the body back to Vesta base for recycling. The wounded crewmen are receiving workman’s compensation at hazardous duty rates. But she’s dead.”
      The cold voice at the head of the table asked archly: “‘She’ . . .?”
      “‘It’. Of course I meant, ‘it’.”
      The cold voice again spoke with forced joviality: “We need not fret ourselves. All our intellectuals, modern philosophers, and writers tell us that pain and pleasure, judgments of good and bad, all that sort of stuff, are all relative. The cyborgs don’t really have bad lives, do they? Since they have nothing at all with which to compare it. They can’t even imagine food or sex or love or marriage or parenthood. And even if they could, they don’t have noses to smell the spring flowers, or feet to walk on the green grass, or hands to hold or anything. They could not enjoy our world anyway. We did not design them to. They’re not really missing anything, then, are they?”
      A silence answered him. No one spoke.
      He cleared his throat and continued in a louder voice: “And besides, they don’t know any other life. They were designed for space; they couldn’t even move if they were on the earth. And what would they be here? Freaks? Cripples? And we need them where they are now. Without those loads of iron and other metals to feed the orbital dockyards, all construction would stop. The space colonies would stop. And those colonies now are the only things sending food and power-casts to the masses now. The only thing between them and starvation. Who is going to question us? Who is going to dare?”
      The thin man asked: “But it will be a public relations nightmare if the people find out what we’re doing up there, sir. They may not take a . . . mature view of the situation, like we do. People can be very sentimental sometimes.”
      “The public? They will want to believe what we tell them.”
      “And what do we tell the public, sir?”
      “Autopilot malfunction aboard the ore barge. There’s no evidence at the crater site: Miss Nakumura tells us she has cleaned it up. The impact was in the middle of nowhere. Just thank God no one was hurt, I say. That is right, isn’t it, Miss Nakumura? No one was hurt, right?”
      She said dully: “That’s right. No one was hurt.”
      “Very well, then. The matter is