By the Seawall

by Robert Silverberg

It was Michas-IV’s bad luck to be on duty by the seawall the day the first of the suicides occurred. He was not really to blame for what happened, but he was reprimanded none the less. How could he have known? How could he begin to comprehend human motives?

His post along the seawall was exactly a thousand meters long. It was Zone KF-6 on the master chart, shown as a neat, elongated blue block. Since the total length of the seawall was six thousand kilometers, Micah-IV knew that he was responsible for precisely one six-thousandth of the entire length of the seawall. It was a somber burden, for did not the safety of humanity depend on the wall? Yes. But Micah-IV was watchful. He patrolled his kilometer twelve hours a day, ever vigilant. He did his best; but he was not omniscient.

The seawall stood sixty meters high throughout most of its length and was twenty meters thick at its base, tapering to a width of six meters at the top. It was constructed of blocks of gray-green stone, dressed and trued to the last millimeter and laid one atop another without need of mortar. The stone came from the Wyoming nuclear kilns, beetle-trucked across the continent to its place at the shore. Building the wall had taken the better part of two generations, even with mechanical help. It had been the great communal effort of mankind. Its vastness made a mockery of all earlier accomplishments of its sort. The Great Pyramid was a heap of pebbles beside it, and China’s Great Wall, a rivulet of sand.

Beyond the seawall lay the gray bulk of the ocean, beast infested, sinister.

As he marched parade from one end of Zone KF-6 to the other, Micah-IV could sometimes see the beasts turning and twisting in the water. Now and then one would swim curiously up toward the land, searching for a chink in the armor of humanity. There were no chinks, of course. The beasts were deflected, a kilometer from shore, by a zone of poison, spewed day and night by vents sprouting from the seawall itself. If the beasts passed the yellow-stained poison zone, they next encountered a belt of electrification, fifty meters wide, ready to unleash thousands of kilowatts upon any lifeform large enough to trigger it. Within the electrified belt lay the seawall. Its outer face gleamed like annealed bronze and was as smooth as the finest glass.

No beast could climb that wall.

No beast ever had, in the eighty years since the wall’s completion.

Several had tried, though Micah-IV had not seen it happen. In Zone CI-9, some forty years ago, a scaly thing with fiery red eyes and a ferocious tail had propelled its way through the poison zone, had endured the electricity, and had launched itself against the wall in blind fury. Thirty tons of angry flesh struck the seawall without causing it to quiver. Bracing itself on mighty hind flippers, the monster rose erect, its snout twenty meters above the ground, its rough tongue lapping at the glassy stone, and it attempted to climb.

There was no way for it to gain purchase. It slipped back again and again. At last it dropped to the rocky shore just without the seawall and lay there exhausted. Its ponderous gasps could be heard far away. Levering itself up once more, it butted its head mindlessly against the base of the wall for days, until in the end the gray-green stone was liberally stained with red, and the decaying, bloated corpse of the monster lay by the shore as prey for the scavenger birds.

Twenty years later Zone BX-11 had had a much closer call. A sinuous ebony thing longer than any tree was tall had made its journey safely past poison and electricity and, extending tendrils thirty meters long tipped with great sucker-pads, had begun to climb. Up, up, up, until the stinking salty mass clung to the seawall’s middle, and then one of the sucker-pads slapped itself to the stone a scant five meters from the top. That activated the resonating circuits. Booming waves of sound raced along the spectrum from the bottom to a scope of several million hz. The sea boiled and churned. The sucker-pads relented; the creature fell back and was dashed against the boulders at the base of the seawall.

Micah-IV had known no such excitements. For half the hours of each day he moved from southern border of KF-7 to the northern border of KF-5, watching the sea. Now a lemon-colored torpedo of an animal, scales bright in the sunlight, would flash by, well outside the poison zone. Now Micah-IV would see by night the uplifted luminous trawler-organ of a giant sweeper of the seas and by its light would glimpse the terrible, gaping mouth behind that dangling orb. Now he would see tentacles lash the water; now, the sudden spike of a ghastly fin.

The beasts kept their distance. Once they had raided the shore settlements at will, for most of them could tolerate an hour or two in the air. Since the construction of the seawall they had been denied that pleasure. The dwellers of the land were safe from the nightmares in the sea. Walled off, thwarted, the great things circled and wheeled in their own salty element, now and again attacking each other in battles that made the continents tremble.

Twelve hours Micah-IV walked the battlements. Twelve hours he rested in the barracks of the guardians. Even synthetic flesh must have a chance to rid itself of the poisons of fatigue.

His job was simple. He patrolled the upper walkway, keeping watch on the sea against an unwanted intruder from below. In the event one of the beasts attempted an attack, he was required to notify the central authorities. His sphere of responsibility also embraced maintenance of the wall; he was charged with discovering potential defects or strains before they became serious, and with reporting them to the proper departments.

Lastly, Micah-IV’s tasks included dealing with the humans who occasionally mounted the wall to look at the sea.

They came, generally, in family groups of five or six. Micah-IV greeted them courteously, spoke of the techniques by which the seawall had been constructed, and when possible pointed out to them the sporting monsters off shore. If a child became fearful, Micah-IV comforted it. If a woman developed nausea, Micah-IV gave her medicine. If a man in his boldness went to close to the low retaining barrier that topped the wall, Micah-IV tactfully suggested that he stand back a bit. One never knew when a sucker-tipped tentacle would probe from below.

It was a dreary, mechanical job, which was why human beings did not care for it. Micah-IV, as a synthetic, was better able to cope with boredom. He had patrolled the seawall for more than a decade now, and the uneventful round of his days did not have serious effects on his mind. Every third year he needed a retuning to cancel the cumulative impact of the boredom, that was all.

Up the path. Down the path. Eyes right. Eyes left. Check the sea. Check the shore. Key in the resonating circuits every second hour. Report to Central every third hour. Monitor the visitor center.

Snow, Wind, Rain. Heat. Sun.

Tang of salt air in the cunningly crafted nostrils.

Whitecaps on the surface of the sea. Vast things heaving in its depths.

Privately Micah-IV yearned for an incident. Let a beast try to scale the wall, he prayed. Let a woman tourist enter childbirth atop the wall. Let a stone block be struck by lightning and crumble. Something novel, something unexpected, something to give Zone KF-6 its place in seawall history.

He was within a year of needing another tuning. That was why he felt the wish for novelty.

He stared hopefully at the things lashing the water, waiting for them to attack. But they did not attack. It would be futile, and the animals out there knew it. The wall was impenetrable. The days when marauders out of the sea devoured hundreds of humans for lunch were over forever.

It was curious, then, that when the first unusual incident in Micah-IV’s patrol career occurred, he was unable to prevent tragedy.

He was nearly at the southern end of his assigned strip of the seawall when a faint pinging sound informed him that tourists had entered the visitor center in the northern part of the zone. Micah-IV continued to the end of the strip. The tourists would remain in the visitor center until he got to them, for the glass-walled enclosure could not be opened except by the warden on duty. In good time Micah-IV would open the visitor center and take the humans on a conducted tour of the seawall.

He reached the end of his strip and signalled that all was well. Then he swung around and headed north again, moving at his measured pace.

He was still five hundred meters from the visitor center when he saw its door open.

A man stepped out. He was dignified, even portly, in a gray tunic and a dark blue headband. As Micah-IV watched in amazement, the man walked briskly to the retaining barrier and began to climb it.

“Stop!” Micah-IV called.

He could not understand how the door of the visitor center could have been opened without authorization. He did not like the thought of an unsupervised human on the seawall. And he could not remotely see why the man was taking the risk of scrambling up onto the retaining barrier.

He ran with all his incredible speed.

He was too late.

Micah-IV was still a hundred meters away when the man reached the top of the barrier. He stood there flatfooted a moment, balancing himself. Then he launched himself into the air.

“No!” Micah-IV cried. “This is prohibited!”

It was suicide—that is, deliberate self-destruction. The bewildered synthetic raced toward the barrier and saw the man activate a gravity chute and glide easily toward the base of the seawall. What was his motive? If he wished to kill himself, why the gravity chute?

“Come back,” Micah-IV called, readying himself to go over the wall and retrieve the man, monsters of no.

The man was scrambling over the boulders at the shoreline, and now he was wading hip deep in the sea, brushing aside the tangled coils of brown weeds, lying face down and moving his arms, propelling himself rapidly away from the land. Micah-IV did not try to follow. It would mean double destruction and nothing gained.

In blank disbelief he watched the man swim rapidly out to sea. The belt of electricity did not harm him, since the mass of one human being was too slight to trigger a discharge. The poison zone offered no menace to a human metabolism. But then he was past the outer rim of the poison zone and in the open, unguarded sea.

A flash of bright scales—the glint of swordlike teeth—a rolling of the surface—

Then all was still out there.

Trembling, flooded with shock secretions, Micah-IV turned away. Within the visitor center were five other human beings, standing by the open door.

“Who was that man?” Micah-IV demanded. “How did he get out onto the seawall? Why did he kill himself?”

There were no answers. They all seemed strangely unmoved. Several of them requested Micah-IV to take them on the tour of the seawall. Irritably, Micah-IV told them the tours were canceled for the day and ordered them to leave the visitor center.

He had had his moment of diversion at last. But he found the novel incident less diverting than he had anticipated.

He reported it. Shortly his sector of the wall swarmed with authorities. Wearily, Micah-IV endlessly repeated the narrative. Experts examined the door of the visitor center and showed that it had been opened in the usual way, with thumb signals. Clearly the suicide had been privy to inside information.

Micah-IV was reprimanded for having failed to prevent the suicide. It was no use to tell them that it was not his fault. Someone had to be blamed, and who else but the sector warden? Humans were not to be permitted on the seawall unattended. Micah-IV therefore must have been guilty of negligence.

To himself, he insisted that he was innocent. He could not be everywhere on his sector at once. He could not run a thousand meters instantaneously. If a human bent on self-destruction had unlawfully gained access to the signal code and was able to let himself out onto the seawall at a time when the attendant was elsewhere, how was the attendant to have prevented the act of suicide?

The reprimand meant nothing tangible to Micah-IV. It did not affect his rank, his retirement status or his salary, for he had none of these things. He was not an employee but rather a part of the apparatus. But it did affect his standing among his peers. News of the episode had spread. The wardens of other sectors were aware that Micah-IV had been reprimanded. He was shamed before his barracks-mates, for he had allowed a human being to commit suicide in his sector.

For more than a month Micah-IV lived with that stigma.

It was a great relief to him, then, when a second suicide was reported.

The circumstances were virtually identical to the first. A young woman had slipped out onto the wall in DV-7 while its warden was occupied at the opposite end of his sector. Drifting to the beach below by gravity chute, she had gone into the water, swimming out to the waiting monsters and her death.

New security measures were put in force at the visitor centers. Micah-IV felt a sense of excitement, for now his days were mottled by unpredictabilities. There was little chance (that the sea-beasts would scale the seawall or that a section of the seawall would collapse, the two eventualities for which he was supposed to watch. But it was perfectly likely that at any given moment some irrational human being would go over the wall and invite a certain doom.

The third suicide, in FC-10, did not have a gravity chute. The victim—an adolescent boy—plummeted the sixty meters to the beach and was shattered on the shoreline rocks. Some monster was deprived of a snack, but the scavenger birds ate well.

A fourth death was reported.

A fifth.

A sixth and seventh.

Perplexed sector wardens stepped up their pace, moving from end to end of their zones in two-thirds of the previous time. There was talk of closing the visitor centers altogether, but nothing came of it; it was wrong to deny millions of human beings the right to view the sea, merely because a handful were perverse.

Instead, new locks were placed on the doors of the visitor centers. Despite this precaution, there were four suicides the following week.

In the barracks, the sector wardens were briefed on ways to cope with the crisis. Micah-IV listened attentively, feeling a certain pride at the knowledge that all this had begun in his own strip of the seawall.

An official with oily, grayish skin and small green eyes addressed a cadre of the synthetics and told them, “There is now a cult of gratuitous suicide among humanity. You must do all in your power to prevent further deaths from occurring. There is nothing more precious than a human life.”

The official with oily, grayish skin and small green eyes was the twenty-third suicide.

A psychiatrist with stiff, bristly hair spoke at a later meeting and declared, “The strain of the national effort to built the seawall is taking a delayed toll. The citizens are attempting individually to undo the great communal enterprise by seeking death in the sea. Since the monsters can no longer come to the land, they go to the monsters.”

It was a, plausible theory. The psychiatrist tasted it himself sot long afterward.

Micah-IV, pacing the wall through the salt spray and the gusting winds, did his duty. As each group of humans appeared—and there were more tourists than ever, now—he scanned them impassively, wondering if he could detect suicidal tendencies. Will you try to kill yourself, you plump female? What about you, young man with too-bright eyes? You, edgy father of two?

Tourists now came out on the wall in groups of three. The attendant remained close by. Despite this, there were several incidents in which humans eluded the grasp of the warden and plunged over the wall.

In the barracks, Micah-IV listened with interest as Noah-I, one of the wisest of the synthetics, offered his views.

“It is a religious phenomenon,” declared Noah-I. “I have studied religion. These people feel an oceanic urge. They must return to the great mother.”

“And the monsters that devour?” asked Ezekiel-VII.

“Irrelevant. There are always risks in any relationship. The swimmers hope to elude the monsters and reach the depths of the sea. It is a spiritual yearning.”

“Where will it end?” Uzziah-III inquired.

“Perhaps the wall will be taken down,” suggested Noah-I. “Perhaps some new cult will arise. Or perhaps all the humans, one by one, will throw themselves into the sea.”

There were further deaths. Several hundred humans had perished, mow, and nearly every ten-sector overgroup had recorded its suicide. Now precautions were enforced. It was hoped that the onset of whiter would create a change in the prevailing psychological climate, but the pattern of self-destruction was not broken.

On a day when specks of snow dropped from a gray sky, Micah-IV prevented a suicide.

He had detected signs in advance: the bulge of a gravity chute beneath the clothing of a red-haired woman and a certain glossinees about her eyes. When he led his group of tourists out onto the seawall, he watched her closely.

“There,” he said, pointing, “is one of the enemies of mankind now. See the fluked tail? See the great spearlike tusks? See the clawed flippers?”

The red-haired woman broke from the group and bolted toward the retaining barrier.

Micah-IV, who had been expecting some such action, moved swiftly after her. She was crouching beside the barrier, activating the gravity chute. Lately, the barriers had been wired to give a mild electric shock, so that it was discouraging to try to climb one. Yet with a gravity chute it was no hard feat the leap completely over the barrier. As the woman coiled her muscles for the leap, Micah-IV closed his hand around her arm and held her in place.

“The rest of you!” he shouted. “Inside! Inside at once!”

The other two tourists rushed into the visitor center. Micah-IV grasped the would-be suicidc firmly.

“Let go of me,” she demanded.

“Why do you wish to jump?”

“None of your business! Let go! Let go!”

“You will die in the sea.”

“What’s that to you? You filthy robot, how can you defy a human being’s orders? Let go of me and let me jump!”

“I am a synthetic, not a robot,” Micah-IV reminded her gently. “I am not required to obey human orders except as they follow my programming. I forbid you to leave the seawall.” Efficiently he pulled the gravity chute from under her clothing and unsnapped its activator, without releasing his grip on the woman. She glowered at him.

“Tell me why you want to go to the sea,” he asked.

“You’d never understand. You’re just a machine.”

“Genetically I am nearly human. I can think and reflect and change my ideas. This is of great concern to me. Why do you want to go to the sea?”

“To belong to it,” said the woman.

“I do not understand.”

“I told you you wouldn’t. Don’t deprive me of it Let me jump!”

“I cannot do that,” Micah-IV informed her and dragged her toward safety. Her words cut him deeply. He had had little conversation with human beings in his lifetime, and he had never before been so blunty reminded of his nonhuman status. Perhaps he was a laboratory product, but he had feelings. She had wounded them. He gave way slightly to the emotion of self-pity.

As they neared the cubicle that was the visitor center, Micah-IV’s foot slipped in a patch of melting snow. Within an instant he recovered his balance, but that was just enough time for the red-haired woman to pull from his grasp and run to the seawall barrier. Micah followed her. She reached the electrified barrier and vaulted it, her hair momentarily standing on end like wire, and then she was gone, tumbling downward, drafting on the wind, smashing against the jagged rocks below. Scavengers gathered.

I will be severely reprimanded for this, Micah-IV told himself.

There were witnesses. Through my negligence I allowed her to destroy herself.

He stared at the gray, winter-churned sea. He saw dark, huge shapes beyond the poison belt.

Why do they kill themselves? What do they find in the sea? What drives them to do such things?

He did not know. I do not understand because I am not human, he thought.

Absently, Micah-IV climbed to the top of the barrier and walked along it. His nervous system absorbed the mild voltage without discomfort. Patrolling his sector from the unusual vantage-point, he marched a hundred meters south, to a place where there was no beach, no rocky shore, merely the sea lapping directly against the seawall.

I will do a human thing, Micah-IV decided, and perhaps it will give me an understanding of what it is to be human. In any case no one can reprimand me for this.

He faced the water and levered himself into space. As he fell, he pivoted and saw the glassy gray-green blocks of the seawall behind him. He hit the water at a sharp angle and sliced into it, gasping a bit at the impact. Then he bobbed to the surface.

Lithely, swiftly, inquiringly, Micah-IV swam outward toward the waiting beasts.

Content

By the Seawall
by Robert Silverberg