Collected fiction, p.273
Collected Fiction, page 273
But Prendergast had been subjected to the process, had been thrust back to the amoeba and the spore, and had climbed the hill on the other side of the valley. The acceleration of the process had completed the job in a night. Prendergast had become a specimen of the primal threereyed race, as it had existed on its own planet. There were certain changes, of course, due to environment and the error-margin of—Callister didn’t catch the rest of it.
ANYHOW, Prendergast had been kicked down the evolutionary ladder, into the primeval pit. Callister hadn’t known that there was another ladder on the other side of the pit.
“There will be changes. When you are ready to be made as I am, to regain your lost heritage, come to me and we will work together.”
“You can’t! The police will—” Callister began incoherently.
“We must take precautions. It will be best to be isolated. A force-shell will enclose this settlement. Interference would prove distracting.”
The sight of that unheeding back was too much for Callister. He felt his stomach go bottomless. Worst of all was the realization of his own helplessness. The giant was so completely inhuman!
“You cannot yet comprehend my outlook. Later, you will be as I am, and be supremely grateful for it.”
Not even his thoughts were private! Callister, with a sudden feeling of terror gripping him, sprang back into the hall. Fear spurred him as he fled. But the three-eyed man did not take up in pursuit.
His mind a chaotic turmoil, Callister got his car out of the garage and turned into the driveway. He caught sight of Tommy standing not far away, and jammed on the brakes.
“Get in! We’ll go after the police—”
“They can do nothing,” the Filipino telepathed. “I am undergoing the process. You will do the same, when you are ready.”
“Good God!”
Tommy smiled.
“There is a method of bridging the evolutionary gap without descending to the primeval spore. A short-cut through space-time—”
Callister let out the clutch and sent the heavy car racing perilously up the slope.
On his way out of the mountains, he drove past a house he recognized—the home of the girl whose bicycle Prendergast had taken a few days ago. Parked in the driveway was a forest ranger’s car, the pine-tree insignia painted on the door. Callister, after a moment’s hesitation, stopped and hurried toward the lodge.
The ranger was there, and the girl and her family. Their reaction was one Callister might have expected. They thought he was drunk.
“Confound it, man, I insist that you investigate! If you—”
“Now hold on a minute, Mr. Callister. Let me get this straight.”
“Are you going to go back to my place and—and—”
It ended with them all at cross purposes, and Callister flinging out of the lodge to clamber into his car and Continue down the mountain. He got perhaps a mile further before the engine stopped. There was a force-barrier in existence.
Later, he found that it was like a transparent bowl inverted over the region, with his own home the center. But that came later. The immediate problem was to escape. Callister tried all of the few roads, and most of the trails, before he admitted that he was trapped.
It was sundown when he went back to his own house. He stopped at a safe distance, noticing that the ranger’s car was parked in the driveway.
Working here and there in the grounds, at rather baffling tasks, were six figures. Tommy and the three-eyed giant were there, and so was the ranger. The girl and her parents were the others.
Even at that distance, Callister could see that Tommy was beginning to change.
A message telepathed into his mind.
“Are you ready to join us yet? You will be welcome—”
Callister cursed, turned the car around and fled, his face white as stone.
AFTER that came something akin to madness. Callister could not escape the force-dome. He could not find and enlist aid, for he had purposely built his home in an isolated part of the Angeles Forest, and this was not the camping season.
A week passed. Two weeks. Callister lost track of the days. He was horribly alone, and was grateful for the shelter that the deserted lodge of the girl and her parents provided. Like the ranger and Tommy, they were no longer recognizable, either. They were three-eyed giants. They had regained humanity’s lost heritage.
One evening, crouching by the fire in the hearth, Callister looked up in time to see a figure materialize from the air beside him. Instinctively he leaped up, but the three-eyed man, now completely tangible, smiled reassuringly.
“I mean you no harm, Callister. We must ask you to leave this building. It must be destroyed. We are remodeling and landscaping, and this structure is not functional or fitting.” Callister licked his lips.
“Are you—Prendergast?”
Despite himself, he could not help but feel an unwilling admiration for the super-being who stood before him, looking like the perfect matrix from which humanity had been imperfectly molded.
“Prendergast?” the thought came. “Oh—I see. No. I was the hermit who lived in the cave across the valley from your house. Now I am changed, of course.”
“I must raze this structure immediately. Will you leave, please?”
But Callister couldn’t speak.
He had to get out, naturally. And then there was no shelter and no food. He tried to hunt. His clothes were in rags, he was, within a week, filthy, bearded, unkempt and miserable. Worst of all was the realization that eventually he’d have to join the threeeyed giants.
And once he had done that, he would like it.
Egotism held him back. He procrastinated. All his life he had felt himself a cut above the average, completely civilized. Secure in his eminence, utterly self-confident of his status, he had looked down with pity and perhaps some smugness. He was the ne plus ultra—
When he joined the three-eyed group, he would move up. He would become far more civilized. And thus, automatically, he would admit, that his previous existence had been comparative barbarism. He would instantly cancel the long years of his own cultured humanity.
It was egotism that held him back for a little time, refusal to smash his fetish to shards, even for the reward offered. It was not fear that halted him, for there was no reason to be afraid. He would be welcomed.
Well—
He was hungry; there was only a little left of the deer he had killed last week. Hunkered down on his hams, he crouched at the mouth of the hermit’s cave and reached for a greasy bone to which some shreds of meat still clung. Sunlight warmed his half-naked hide.
Down across the valley, the rebuilt house stood, strange and lovely in its alienage. Abruptly Callister turned to stare at the spot, his attention attracted by the flash of sunlight binoculars.
Someone was watching him. He wondered, with a sick horror, if it was the three-eyed man who had been the hermit.
DEADLOCK
The indestructible robot was a swell little gadget in that time of feudal corporations. But—most went mad, and were still indestructible. The rest—
Thor was the first robot who didn’t go mad. It might have been better had he followed the example of his forerunners.
The trouble, of course, lay in creating a sufficiently complicated thinking machine that wouldn’t be too complicated. Balder IV was the first robot that could be called successful, and after three months he began to behave erratically, giving the wrong answers and spending most of his time staring blankly at nothing. When he became actually destructive, the Company took steps. Naturally, it was impossible to destroy a duraloy-constructed robot, but they buried Balder IV in concrete. Before the stuff had set, it was necessary to throw Mars II after him.
The robots worked—yes. For a time. Then there was an ambiguous sort of mental breakdown, and they cracked up. The Company couldn’t even salvage the parts—a blowtorch couldn’t melt plastic duraloy after it had hardened, and so twenty-eight robots, thinking lunatic thoughts, reposed in beds of cement, reminding Chief Engineer Harnahan of Reading Gaol.
“And their grave has no name,” Harnahan amplified, lying full length on the couch in his office and blowing smoke rings.
He was a big man with tired eyes and a perpetually worried frown. No wonder, in this day of gigantic corporations that fought each other tooth and nail for economic supremacy. It was vaguely feudal, for if a company went under, it was annexed by its conqueror, and vae victis.
Van Damm, who was more of a trouble-shooter than anything else, sat on the edge of the desk, biting his nails. Small, gnomish, and dark as a Piet, his shrewd wrinkled face was as impassive as that of Thor, who stood motionless against the wall. Now Van Damm looked at the robot.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Any sign of a mental crack-up?”
Thor said, “Mentally I am in fine shape, ready to cope with any problem.”
Harnahan turned over on his stomach. “O.K. Cope with this, then. Luxingham Incorporated swiped Dr. Sadler and his formula for increasing the tensile strength of mock-iron. The louse was holding out on us for a bigger salary. Now he’s taken a run-out powder and gone over to Luxingham.”
Thorn nodded. “Contract?”
“Fourteen-X-Seven. The usual metallurgist’s contract. Technically unbreakable.”
“The courts would uphold us. However, by this time Luxingham’s facial surgeons would have altered Sadler’s body and fingerprints. The case would run . . . two years. By that time Luxingham would have made sufficient use of the mock-iron formula.”
Van Damm made a horrible face. “Solution, Thor.” He shot a quick glance at Harnahan. Both men knew what was coming. Thor didn’t disappoint them.
“Force,” the robot remarked. “You need the formula. A robot is not legally responsible—as yet. I’ll visit Luxingham.”
“O.K.,” Harnahan said reluctantly, and Thor turned and went out. The chief engineer scowled.
“Yeah,” Van Damm nodded. “I know. He’ll just walk in and snaffle the formula. And we’ll get another injunction against operating an uncontrollable machine. And we’ll keep on just as we have been doing.”
“Is brute force the best logic?” Harnahan wondered.
“The simplest, maybe. Thor doesn’t need to work out complicated legal methods. He’s indestructible. He’ll just walk into Luxingham and take the formula. If the courts decide Thor’s dangerous, we can bury him in cement and make more robots. He’s without ego, you know. It won’t matter to him.”
“We expected more,” Harnahan grumbled. “A thinking machine ought to be able to do a lot.”
“Thor can do a lot. So far, he hasn’t gone crazy like the others. He’s solved every problem we’ve given him—even that trend chart that had everyone else buffaloed.”
Harnahan nodded. “Yeah. He predicted Snowmany’s election . . . that got the Company out of a scrape. He can think, all right. For my money, there’s no problem he can’t solve. Just the same, he isn’t inventive.”
“If the occasion arose—” Van Damm went off at a tangent. “We’ve got the monopoly on robots, anyhow. Which is something. It’s about time to give the go-ahead signal on more robots of Thor’s type.”
“Better wait a bit. See if Thor goes crazy. He’s the most complicated one so far.”
The visiphone on the desk came to life with an outraged screech. “Harnahan! You lousy, unethical murderer! You—”
“I’m recording that, Blake,” the engineer called as he stood up. “You’ll get a libel suit slammed on you within the hour.”
“Sue and be damned,” Blake of Luxingham Incorporated yelled. “I’m coming over and break your prognathous jaw myself! So help me, I’ll burn you down and spit on the ashes!”
“Now he’s threatening my life,” Harnahan said in a loud aside to Van Damm. “Lucky I’m recording this on the tape.”
Blake’s crimson face on the screen seemed to swell visibly. Before it burst, however, another portrait took its place—the smooth, bland countenance of Marshal Yale, police administrator to the sector. Yale looked worried.
“Look, Mr. Harnahan,” he said sadly, “this can’t keep up. Now just look at things sensibly, will you? After all, I’m an officer of the law—”
“Ha!” remarked Van Damm, sotto voce.
“—and outright mayhem is something I can’t condone. Maybe your robot’s gone mad?” he added hopefully.
“Robot?” Harnahan asked, his face blank. “I don’t understand. What robot’s that?”
Yale sighed. “Thor. Thor, of course. Who else? Now I realize you don’t know a thing about it”—his voice was as heavily sarcastic as he dared to make it—“but Thor has just walked into Luxingham and played merry hell.”
“No!”
“Yes. He walked right in. The guards tried to stop him, but he just kept on going. He stepped on ’em, in fact. They played a flame hose on him, but he didn’t stop for that. Luxingham got out every defense weapon in their arsenal, and that infernal robot of yours simply kept on going. He grabbed Blake by the neck and made him unlock the lab door. And he took a formula away from one of the technicians.”
“I am surprised,” Harnahan said, shocked. “By the way, which technician was it? Not a guy named Sadler?”
“I dunno . . . wait a minute. Yes, Sadler.”
“But Sadler’s working for us,” the engineer explained. “We’ve got him on a beryl-bound contract. Any formulas he works out belong to us.” Yale mopped his shining cheeks. “Mr. Harnahan, please!” he said desperately. “If you’d only think of the spot I’m in! Legally I’m bound to do something about this. You can’t let one of your robots try strong-arm stuff like that. It’s too . . . too—”
“Obvious?” Harnahan suggested. “Well, as I say, it’s all news to me. I’ll check up and call you back. By the way, I’m preferring charges against Blake. Libel, and homicidal threats.”
“Oh, my God,” Yale said, and broke the beam. Van Damm and Harnahan exchanged delighted glances.
“Fair enough,” the gnomish trouble-shooter chuckled. “It’s deadlock. Blake won’t try bombing us—we’ve both got too many antiaircraft defenses—so it’ll go to the courts. Courts!” He pursed his mouth wryly.
Harnahan returned to the couch. “Best thing we ever did was to concentrate on those robots. Within ten years the Company will own the world. And other worlds. We can send out spaceships, with robot operators.”
The door opened, and Thor appeared, looking none the worse for his ordeal. He put a slip of metal-plaque on the desk.
“Formula for mock-iron.”
“Hurt?”
“Impossible.”
Thor went to a filing cabinet, secured an envelope, and vanished again. Harnahan rose to study the plaque.
“Yeah. This is it.” He slipped it into a conveyor slot. “Things are too easy sometimes. Guess I’ll knock off for the day. Say! What was Thor up to just now?”
Van Damm looked at him. “Eh?”
“At the files. What’s on his mind?” Harnahan investigated. “Some electronic thesis—I don’t know what he wanted with that. Perhaps he’s going to do some research on his own.”
“Maybe,” Van Damm said. “Let’s go see.”
They took a dropper to the robot’s workshop in the basement, but the room was empty. Harnahan used the teleview.
“Check-up. Where’s Thor?”
“One moment, sir . . . In the Seven Foundry. Shall I connect you with the foreman?”
“Yeah. Ivar? What’s Thor up to?”
Ivar rubbed his bullet head. “Damfino. He ran in, grabbed a tensile chart, and ran out again. Wait a bit. He’s back again.”
“Let me talk to him,” Harnahan said.
“Sure—” Ivar’s craggy face vanished, and presently reappeared. “No soap. He picked up a chunk of syntho-plat and went.”
“Hm-m-m,” Van Damm put in. “Do you suppose—”
“He’s going crazy like the others?” Harnahan scowled. “They didn’t act like that. Still, it’s possible.”
Just then Thor appeared, his rubbery arms laden with an incongruous array of practically everything. Ignoring the two men, he dumped the stuff on a bench and began to rearrange it, working with swift accuracy.
“He isn’t crazy,” Harnahan said. “The light’s on.”
In Thor’s forehead was a crimson stud that lighted whenever the robot was working on a problem. It was a new improvement, a telltale for robot-madness. Had it been flashing intermittently, there would have been something to worry about—mixing a fresh batch of concrete to provide a grave for a crazy robot.
“Thor!” Van Damm said sharply. The robot didn’t reply.
“Must be a big problem,” Harnahan frowned. “Wonder what it is?”
“I’m wondering what gave him the idea,” the trouble-shooter said. “Something that occurred lately, that’s certain. An improvement on the mock-iron process?”
“Possibly. Hm-m-m.” They watched the busy robot for awhile, learning nothing; and finally went back to Harnahan’s office, where they had a drink, and speculated on what Thor was inventing. Van Damm thought it would be a mock-iron improvement. Harnahan didn’t agree, but had no better ideas.
Matters were not clarified when the teleview announced that there had been an explosion in the basement.
“Atomic energy!” Harnahan gulped, rising from the couch in one jerky motion. Van Damm was at his heels as they sped toward the dropper. In the basement, a knot of men was gathered around the door to Thor’s workshop.
Harnahan pushed through them and stepped across the threshold into a cloud of concrete dust. As it cleared, he saw the disjointed remains of Thor at his feet. The robot was obviously beyond repair.
“Funny!” Harnahan muttered. “That wasn’t an especially severe explosion. If it wrecked Thor, it should have wrecked the plant—or the basement anyway. His duraloy’s half melted.”
Van Damm didn’t answer. Harnahan looked up to see the trouble-shooter staring into the clouds of dust at a gadget that hung in midair a few feet away.
It was a gadget—just that. Harnahan recognized several of the parts that Thor had brought into his workshop. But the sum total was rather baffling. The device served no discernible purpose. It looked like the sort of toy an erratic child might construct with a mechano set.
