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By Root 421 0

against the chassis. But Zerchi had no way of knowing whether he had fallen victim to a law of Nature for filter capacitors or to a cunningly devised booby trap aimed at discouraging customer-tampering. Anyway, he had fallen. His posture on the floor had come about involuntarily. His only claim to competence at the repair of polylinguistic transcription devices lay in his proud record of once having extracted a dead mouse from the information storage circuitry, thereby correcting a mysterious tendency on the part of the machine to write double syllables (doudoubleble sylsylabablesles). Having discovered no dead mice this time, he could feel for loose wires and hope Heaven had granted him charismata as an electronic healer. But it was apparently not so.

“Brother Patrick!” he called toward the outer office, and climbed wearily to his feet.

“Hey, Brother Pat!” he shouted again.

Presently the door opened and his secretary waddled in, glanced at the open wall cabinets with their stupefying maze of computer circuitry, scanned the cluttered floor, then warily studied his spiritual ruler’s expression. “Shall I call the repair service again, Father Abbot?”

“Why bother?” Zerchi grunted. “You’ve called them three times. They’ve made three promises. We’ve waited three days. I need a stenographer. Now! Preferably a Christian. That thing-” he waved irritably toward the Abominable Autoscribe-”is a damned infidel or worse. Get rid of it. I want it out of here.”

“The APLAC?”

“The APLAC. Sell it to an atheist. No, that wouldn’t be kind. Sell it as junk. I’m through with it. Why, for Heaven’s sake, did Abbot Boumous-may his soul be blessed-ever buy the silly contraption?”

“Well, Domne, they say your predecessor was fond of gadgets, and it is convenient to be able to write letters in languages you yourself can’t speak.”

“It is? You mean it would be. That contraption-listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn’t believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a ‘thinking machine’-man-made-be a rational soul? Bah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know what?”

“Father?”

“Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think! It knows good and evil, I tell you, and it chose the latter. Stop that snickering, will you? It’s not funny. The notion isn’t even pagan. Man made the contraption, but he didn’t make its principle. They speak of the vegetative principle as a soul, don’t they? A vegetable soul? And the animal soul? Then the rational human soul, and that’s all they list in the way of incarnate vivifying principles, angels being disembodied. But how do we know the list is comprehensive? Vegetative, animative, rational-and then what else? That’s what else, right there. That thing. And it fell. Get it out of here-But first I’ve got to get a radiogram off to Rome.”

“Shall I get my pad, Reverend Father?”

“Do you speak Alleghenian?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Neither do I, and Cardinal Hoffstraff doesn’t speak SouthWest.”

“Why not Latin, then?”

“Which Latin? The Vulgate or Modern? I don’t trust my own Anglo-Latin, and if I did, he’d probably not trust his.” He frowned at the bulk of the robotic stenographer. Brother Patrick frowned with him, then stepped over to the cabinets and began peering into the maze of subminiature circuit components.

“No mouse,” the abbot assured him.

“What are all these little knobs?”

“Don’t touch!” Abbot Zerchi yelped as his secretary curiously fingered one of several dozen sub-chassis dial settings. These sub-chassis controls were mounted in neat square array in a box, the cover of which the abbot had removed, bore the irresistible warning: FACTORY ADJUSTMENTS ONLY.

“You didn’t move it, did you?” he demanded, going to Patrick’s side.

“I might have wiggled it a little, but I think it’s back where it was.”

Zerchi showed him the warning on the box’s cover. “Oh,” said Pat, and both of them stared.

“It’s the punctuation, mostly, isn’t it, Reverend Father?”

“That and stray capitals, and a few confused words.”

They contemplated