The Last Defender Of Camelot

He turned around quickly, his back against the door, the hand grenade in his gloved right fist.

"Hold iti" called out a loudspeaker on the side of the black car that approached. "That shot was a warning! The next one won't be!"

Ta

There were two officers in the car, and the one on the passenger side held a .38 pointed at Ta

"You're under arrest," he said. "Looting."

Ta

"Looting," the man with the gun repeated. "You'll pull a real stiff sentence."

"Stick your hands out here, boy," said the second cop, and Ta

The man stared at it, dumbly, for several seconds, •^ then his eyes shot to Ta

Ta

"You didn't run the Alley on that bike!"

"No, I didn't. My car is dead somewhere between here and Albany, and so are a lot of folks who tried to stop me. Now you better take that medicine and get it where it's supposed to go."

"You on the level, mister?"

"My hand is getting very tired. I am not in good shape." Ta

He pulled his pardon out of bis Jacket and handed it to the officer with the handcuffs, "That's my pardon," he said. "It's dated just last week and you can see it was made out in California."

The officer took the envelope and opened it. He withdrew the paper and studied it. "Looks real," he said, "So Brady made it through... ."

"He's dead," Ta

"My God! Hold it tight! Get in the car and sit down! It'll just take a minute to get the case off and we'll roll. We'll drive to the river and you can throw it in. Squeeze real hard!"

They unfastened the case and put it in the back of the car. They rolled down the right front window, and Ta

The siren screamed, and the pain crept up 'fa

"Where do you keep your river?" he asked.

"Just a little farther. We'll be there in no time."

"Hurry," Ta

"That's the bridge up ahead. We'll ride out onto it, and you throw it off—as far out as you can."

"Man, I'm tired! I'm not sure I can make it...."

"Hurry, Jerryl"

"I am, damn it! We ain't got wingsl"

"I feel kind of dizzy, too...."

They tore out onto the bridge and the tires screeched as they halted. Ta

"I don't think I—"

Then he straightened, drew back his arm and hurled the grenade far out over the waters.

He gri

The two officers sighed and Ta

"I'm really okay," he said. "I just faked it to bug you."

"Why you—!"

Then he collapsed, and they saw the pallor of his face within the beams of their lights.

XIX

The following spring, on the day of its unveiling in Boston Common, when it was discovered that someone had scrawled obscene words on the statue of Hell Ta

So they re-veiled his statue, bigger than life, astride a great bronze Harley, and they cleaned him up for hoped-for posterity. But coming upon the Common, the winds still break about him and the heavens still throw garbage.

FOR A BREATH I TARRY

This is my favorite novelette. I would have included it in my Doubleday collection with the long title and the dead fish on the dust jacket except that, as with "Comes Now the Power," I didn't have a copy when I was assembling that one.

They called him Frost. Of all things created of Solcom, Frost was the finest, the mightiest, the most difficult to understand.This is why he bore a name, and why he was given dominion over half the EarthOn the day of Frost's creation, Solcom had suffered a discontinuity of complementary functions, best described as madness. This was brought on by an unprecedented solar flareup which lasted for a little over thirty-six hours. It occurred during a vital phase of circuit-structuring, and when it was finished so was Frost.

Solcom was then in the unique position of having created a unique being during a period of temporary amnesia.

And Solcom was not certain that Frost was the product originally desired.

The initial design had called for a machine to be situated on the surface of the planet Earth, to function as a relay station and coordinating agent for activities in the northern hemisphere. Solcom tested the machine to this end, and ail of its responses were perfect.

Yet there was something different about Frost, something which led Solcom to dignify him with a name and a personal pronoun. This, in itself, was an almost unheard of occurrence. The molecular circuits had already been sealed, though, and could not be analyzed without being destroyed in the process. Frost represented too great an investment of Solcom's time, energy, and materials to be dismantled because of an intangible, especially when he functioned perfectly.

Therefore, Solcom's strangest creation was given dominion over half the Earth, and they called him, unimaginatively, Frost.

For ten thousand years Frost sat at the North Pole of the Earth, aware of every snowflake that fell. He monitored and directed the activities of thousands of reconstruction and maintenance machines. He knew half the Earth, as gear knows gear, as electricity knows its conductor, as a vacuum knows its limits.

At the South Pole, the Beta-Machine did the same for the southern hemisphere.

For ten thousand years Frost sat at the North Pole, aware of every snowflake that fell, and aware of many other things, also.

As all the northern machines reported to him, re-ceived their orders from him, he reported only to Solcom, received his orders only from Solcom.

In charge of hundreds of thousands of processes upon the Earth, he was able to discharge his duties in a matter of a few unit-hours every day.

He had never received any orders concerning the disposition of his less occupied moments.

He was a processor of data, and more than that.

He possessed an unaccountably acute imperative that he function at full capacity at all times.

So he did.

You might say he was a machine with a hobby.

He had never been ordered not to have a hobby, so he had one.

His hobby was Man.

It all began when, for no better reason than the fact that he had wished to, he had gridded off the entire Arctic Circle and begun exploring it. inch by inch.

He could have done it personally without interfering with any of hi-, duties, for he was capable of transporting his sixty-four thousand cubic feet anywhere in the world. (He was a silverhlue box, 40X40X40 feet. self-powered, self-repairing, insulated against practically anything, and featured in whatever ma