Books: The Infernal Machine

LONELIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (238 pp.)—Kenneth Fearing—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Mikki was what Ellen Vaughn had instead of God. He was a strange deity chock-full of panels, bobbins, and spools of wire. His memory was perfect and his playback repertory ran to 463,635 recorded hours. Ellen’s late father, an audio-research addict, had fed Mikki everything: Bach, stock-market predictions, forgotten pre-Edison records. “Some jukebox!” said her younger brother Charles, admiringly. But Mikki was more than a giant jukebox; he was first cousin to all the electronic brain machines whose touted destiny is to make modern man obsolete.

Without conscious malice, Mikki just about erased the Vaughns. Among Mikki’s victims—as Ellen learns in playback sessions—were her stubborn father and brilliant elder brother. She hears the two in vicious argument over how best to exploit the machine’s commercial possibilities, then grappling together on the ledge of the family’s Manhattan penthouse, at last silent as they topple to their deaths. Casually, the unblinking Mikki goes on to expose the most shattering truth of all: the nice young gent who has been praising Ellen’s pretty blue eyes is really trying to steal the secret of Mikki’s mysterious panels and bobbins.

Ellen holes up like a recluse with the infernal machine, gradually realizes that Mikki is a modern vampire sucking the life out of all human relationships. In an unintentionally funny kiss-off scene, she turns to the monster-marvel and says softly: “I don’t like your soul…” Then, hauling out a heavy automatic, she riddles Mikki beyond repair.

Author Kenneth Fearing has tried to clamp a humanist allegory on a science-fiction frame. His real villain, the Industrial Revolution, is 200 years old, and his moral (Destroy the machine before the machine destroys you) has an antique creak. The author of that high-voltage thriller, The Big Clock, Fearing seems to have forgotten for the moment what time it is.