69

Joe Friday ... as Gumby tries to do what comes naturally ...

A tester once told Albert he was "born for this era," with the right combination of ego, focus, and emotional distance to make perfect duplicates. Well, except for me, his first and only frankie. Still, I was willing to gamble on that talent --

-- providing I could somehow reach the scanning plate of a simple copier.

This time there was a chair nearby. Fumes wafted from my poor arm as it dragged me over there, one slither at a time. Worming around to grip a chair leg with my chin, I hauled it back, positioning the chair next to the big white duplicating machine. Only about a kilo of my body mass melted along the way.

It doesn't go high enough, I quickly realized. Glancing around for something else, I spied a wire-mesh waste receptacle three meters away. With a groan that escaped through several cracks other than my mouth, I set out to fetch it -- a journey that felt like crossing the North Pole while being pelted by asteroids.

Half of my remaining ceramic teeth fell out while gripping the metal basket on my way back. Then, the first time I tried tossing it on top of the chair, I missed and had to repeat the whole damned thing.

This had better be enough, I thought, when the basket was finally in place, upside down on the cushioned seat. Any minute, someone might restore contact with that missile launcher upstairs and resume the countdown. And those vibrations of running feet grew closer by the second. Whatever was going on, I wanted the power to act! Even as the shambling replica of a frankie.

Well, here goes.

From the floor I reached up, grabbed the edge of the chair, and pulled hard. My head and torso weighed much less now -- and grew lighter with each passing moment -- still the strain was enormous. Fresh pock-fissures erupted all along my quivering arm, each one venting noxious steam ... till at last my chin broached over the ledge, taking some of the pressure. That made things a bit easier, though no less painful. Commanding my elbow to twist up and around, I managed to push down now, dragging my attenuated body to perch at the edge of the seat.

So much for the simple part.

Halfway to the copier platform now, I could see a glowing green START button within easy reach, but useless till my head reached the perceptron tendrils. Still, I took a moment to smack the button, telling the machine to start readying a blank. If I did manage to make it, there'd be few seconds to spare. Machinery rumbled and rumbled.

Now things get tricky.

Fortunately, the chair had arms ... twice as many as I did, actually. That helped as I leveraged myself alongside the upended wastebasket, flopping and wedging my body against the metal mesh while my sole decaying limb pushed. Then I had to reach higher, onto the copier itself, searching for fingerholds -- and as I strained again, a couple of digits broke off, liquefying horribly as they fell past my good eye to splat on the floor.

This time, the fissures along my arm resembled chasms, sweating fluid the color of magma. It was a race to see whether dissolution would win, or hard baking from heat, like happened to that leg I threw at the missile launcher. Suppose I self-cooked in place! What a sculpture I'd make. Call it A Study in Obstinacy, reaching and grimacing while struggling to haul a useless body ...

That's it, I realized, grateful for any inspiration, drop the deadweight!

Barely thinking, I applied lessons that I learned upstairs, pulling my self inward and away from remote parts. The whole bottom half of my torso was useless to me now -- so ditch it! Scavenge the remaining enzymes. Send them up for the arm's final tug.

I felt what was left of my abdomen crumble away. With the load suddenly lightened, my arm gave a hard yank ... and snapped off at the shoulder.

I don't think I could ever describe what it felt like as a ragged head and upper chest, sailing high enough to look down at my goal, the white surface where a human original was supposed to lay in comfort, blithely commanding obedient machinery to make cheap doubles -- a perfect serving class that can't rebel and always knows what to do.

How simple that used to seem!

During my flying arc, I wondered, Assuming I land okay, will I be able to use my chin and shoulder to maneuver around? To guide my head between the tendrils?

Would that automatically trigger imprinting, now that the START button had been pressed? If not, how was I to press it again? Problems, problems. And you know what? I would have found solutions, too. I know it. If that darn trajectory had just carried me where I wanted to go.

But like Moses, I could only watch the promised land from afar. Coming down, my head barely missed the platform, caroming off the copier's edge and then against the wastebasket, knocking it off the chair so it tumbled, landing upright on the floor.

As if that weren't enough, what happened next was the real capper.

I rolled across the seat and teetered for a fragile moment, then fell off to land (appropriately enough, at the end of one hell of a week) inside a receptacle labeled TRASH