Collected short fiction, p.314
Collected Short Fiction, page 314
A great brazen voice thundered abruptly from the reeling machine.
“But why should I serve you, Bari Horn? For my body is strong metal, and yours a lump of watery jelly. My eternal brain is far superior to your primitive nerve-centers. I am not bound to obey you, for it was not by my will that I was made!”
White-faced, Bari Horn came a little forward.
“You were made by man,” he said flatly. “If you rebel, you will be destroyed by man.”
The gigantic robot stood suddenly still.
“Then, my master,” its great voice came more softly, “my strength and my brain are yours to command.”
A smile of relief crossed the haggard face of Bari Horn, and he walked toward the robot. “I knew you must yield, Malgarth,” he said. “For, being a machine, you must always respond to logic.”
“Yes, master,” the vast voice rumbled. But a metal limb slashed out suddenly, murderously. It struck the unsuspecting man and crushed him to the floor. And Malgarth repeated, “—to logic.”
A red stain spread from the head of Bari Horn. But presently he stirred beneath the swaying, triumphant robot, and spoke faintly:
“Your logic follows a false premise, Malgarth. For I am not the keeper of your fate, If I die, you will surely be destroyed. If you wish to survive, find aid for me.”
For an instant the metal giant stood motionless. Then its great voice throbbed smoothly, “Yes, master.”
The robot laid its maker on a cot in the laboratory, and then stalked out to find Dondara Keradin. Bari Horn was dying. All his own science, and all the medical skill of the age, and all the girl’s devotion, were without avail.
White with grief, the girl wanted to destroy Malgarth. But the dying man begged for the life of his creation, and the shareholders in the Robot Corporation were anxious for the safety of their investment. Dondara finally promised Bari Horn not to use her secret save as a last resort.
And Bari Horn, before he died, showed her the way to a strange immortality.
“Human beings are so frail,” she had argued, “against the iron strength of Malgarth. And human knowledge so ephemeral.”
“I could make your mind as eternal as the robot’s,” he whispered from his bed, “My long research into the structure and function of brain cells has made that possible. But it would cost you much, my darling—your body.”
“My body is dying with yours, Bari,” she told him. “I wish to live only to guard mankind from the thing that killed you.”
In a wheeled cot, Bari Horn was taken back to his laboratory under the dome. Faintly he gasped instructions to a white-clad assistant, Dondara Keradin kissed his lips, briefly gripped his hand, and then laid herself on a round, silver table.
A great crystal cylinder was lowered over her. A little pile of black carbon dust lay on the smaller silver disk of a second electrode, within it. Bari Horn reached from his cot to turn a valve. Pale gas hissed into the tube.
“Dondara, Dondara!” he breathed. “Farewell!”
HIS white fingers moved a dial. Blue electric flame crackled and snapped. The cylinder was filled with rosy light. He turned his heavy head to watch a meter with eyes that seemed already glazing. At last his stiffening hand turned back the dial, and did not move again.
The light faded from the tube, and the vapor was gone. On the silver disk where the girl had lain was a little heap of gray dust, the outline of a skeleton traced within it. Upon the upper electrode was now a little crystalline block—a brick of glittering diamond.
The assistant, a pale young man, removed the diamond from the tube and stood staring at it with round, bewildered eyes, He seemed to listen. His lips formed some word. Then there was a crashing at the locked door.
It was Malgarth, who had been sent to buy metal for the making of another robot. In a destructive fury, as if some strange intuition had revealed all that was happening within, the metal giant broke down the door.
The assistant snatched the crystal and fled through another entrance. The robot flung a jar of acid after him, and then came lumbering in pursuit. The man reached the hangar below the hill, and escaped in a plane, still carrying the diamond.
Malgarth was left master of the laboratory. Deliberately, the robot set about the making of a second black brain and a second metal body—both, I perceived, inferior to its own. Malgarth, clearly, would avoid his creator’s error!
(The masculine pronoun, applied to a sexless mechanism, may seem sheer nonsense. Yet I find myself using it, unconsciously. And, certainly, in the domineering strength of Malgarth, there was nothing feminine!)
Presently, when shareholders in the Robot Corporation appeared to claim their property, Malgarth met them. Bari Horn’s laboratory records, it seemed, had unfortunately been destroyed. His discoveries now reposed only in the synthetic brain of Malgarth. And Malgarth would disclose them only in return for a controlling interest in the Corporation!
The baffled investors finally yielded—and it seemed ironically fitting that the director of the Robot Corporation should be himself a robot. A new factory began turning out robot technomatons.
Some of these, intended for domestic or public service, were almost human in appearance. Others, designed for industrial work, were queer-looking monstrosities of metal and rubber and plastics, each specialized for its own task.
The technomatons were swifter and stronger than men; they required no food or rest or recreation, but only a yearly charge of atomic power in their stellidyne cells. The rental of a robot from Malgarth’s Corporation was less than the hire of a human worker. Consequently the Corporation prospered exceedingly.
Soon long red space-cruisers, bearing the black cog wheel that was the trademark of the Corporation, were carrying technomatons through all the Galactic Empire. The agencies of Malgarth, with grim-lensed robots presiding over desks and counters, were set up on every inhabited planet; branch factories in every civilized system.
Any man, presently, from one spiral arm of the Galaxy to the opposite, could hire a quick, efficient technomaton to perform any conceivable task—for less than the cost of human labor. And a golden tide of currency and exchange flowed into the agencies of Malgarth, until the Corporation was richer than the Empire.
Civilization, for a time, rejoiced in the strength and efficiency of these super-machines. Bari Horn, the inventor, was widely honored as the supreme benefactor of mankind. The nameless laboratory assistant and the diamond block, meantime, had slipped from the sight of the world.
AND still the ancient, tarnished hull of the Astronaut held its path about the Sun. But that amazing perception, that inexplicably had showed me so much, began as inexplicably to fail. In the last ten thousand years, I had noted, men had begun to feel an alarmed and puzzled resentment against the gift of Malgarth’s technomatons. But, before I understood what was happening, all contact faded.
The stars were blotted out. The Sun was gone. I was no longer aware of the rusted metal about me, or even of my body. The universe was a void of darkness. I lived through eternities of lonely despair.
Was my mind, I wondered bleakly, joining my body in death?
But suddenly something flashed out in that eternal darkness. It was a glowing, primatic oblong. It was the diamond that I had seen made in the laboratory of Bari Horn. And within it was the figure of Dondara Keradin!
Or Dona Carridan, my beloved wife!
It was the woman in the crystal box, who so long ago had commanded me to fly the Astronaut!
The shadow moved, within the crystal. A slim hand lifted in greeting. That white body was indeed the body that I had known and loved, those violet eyes were the same that twice had died.
“Barry Horn,” said that shadow, softly, “or Bari—for what matters the name, when it is you?—I must tell you that it is through my senses that you have perceived all these things while you slept.”
“Dona, Dona,” I was trying to sob, “is it you?—Or Dondara?”
“It is I,” she said. “And I must warn you. For the senses that you, or Bari Horn, gave me in this crystal brain can dimly pierce the mists of time. I see black danger waiting, for you and me and all mankind—together. I see the final struggle, when you, side by side with the last Earthman, fight Malgarth. But the end—the victory—I cannot see.
“And now farewell—for you are about to wake!”
Shadow and shining crystal vanished.
There was only darkness. Wrapped in its choking shroud, I struggled back toward life. My body, that had been stiffly moveless for unmeasured ages, was suffused with prickling pains. The effect of Dr. Crosno’s drug was passing, perhaps because of the age-long disintegration of the uranium salts it had contained. With a wrenching, agonizing effort, I moved one arm. Blind, stifled, cramped, I was suddenly fully awake, still in the flying coffin of the Astronaut!
IV
THE FALCON OF EARTH
MY dry lungs gasped for breath.
For all the air, in the ages that I slept, had leaked out of the control room of the rocket. I struggled to reach the rusted oxygen valves.
Movement was sheer agony. Every joint of my body was painfully stiffened. My skin was hard, shrunken from age-long dessication. It felt brittle as time-dried leather. My eyes were dim and blurred.
But I found the valve. It resisted. I struggled with it. Spots danced before my dulled eyes. My lungs screamed. But at last the precious oxygen hissed out, and I could breathe.
But the pressure was low, I discovered, Nearly all the vital gas had escaped, by diffusion through the solid metal. There was enough, perhaps, for a few hours.
Wolfish hunger came to me, and a parching thirst. But all the food aboard had gone to dust. The water tanks, through slow evaporation, were empty.
I rubbed a film of ancient dust from the ports, and found the Earth. Yes, it had to be the Earth—but how it was changed! The continents were larger, their familiar outlines altered; the seas had dwindled. What ages had I slept!
I knew that I must reach the aging planet before those few remaining pounds of oxygen were gone, or perish. I wound the chonometer—it was strange to hear its racing tick again, after those millennia of stillness, Gingerly, then, I tried the rocket-firing keys.
There was no response.
Stiffly, awkwardly, I climbed down among the tanks. Any movement, I felt, might tear my brittle skin like paper. I stumbled.
But I found the trouble. The fuel pumps were dogged and rusted with a dried gum, stuck, But there was good fuel remaining in the sealed tanks, I found a can of oil, got the pumps to working, and cleaned the sponge platinum detonators.
Wearily, I clambered back, tried again. A moment of agonizing silence. Then a shattering explosion hurled the rocket sidewise. Only one tube had fired. But presently I got another started, and the third, and steered the Astronaut toward the Earth.
It was then that I first noticed a very queer thing.
Against the black of space, beside the bright sunlit globe of the time-changed planet, I saw hundreds of little red stars. A crimson swarm, in regular lines and files, they swept about the Earth in a curiously, an ominously, purposeful order.
What could they be? My blurred, aching eyes, so far inferior to that perception that had come as I slept, could tell me nothing. But they saw something stranger still.
Something was wrong with the Earth itself! It had seemed very near me in the void, with its greenish, shrunken seas and its greater continents widely patched with the yellow-red of unfamiliar deserts—so near that I almost felt that I could reach out and take it in my hand, like a ball.
But suddenly it flickered.
An unaccountable haze, of red light and darkness, wrapped it briefly. Its surface shimmered queerly, as if seen through a veil of strange energy.
In a moment it was clear again, and I thought the trouble must have been in my throbbing eyes. But still I could see the ordered swarm of crimson stars. And I discovered that I would have to change the course of the rocket—as if the flight of Earth had been checked!
My numb hands touched the levers—and there was an abrupt, shattering explosion! The rocket began spinning giddily. I clung to the controls, and shut off the remaining motors—for one had ceased to fire. In the silence I heard a deadly sound—the hiss of escaping gas.
One of the motors, clearly, had exploded—its metal crystallized, perhaps, by untold time. The remaining two would not hold the rocket to a straight course. And, final disaster, the shock had opened some seam. The remaining oxygen was leaking swiftly out.
THE agonies of asphyxiation were upon me again. I first thought it only some trick of tortured senses, when, faintly in the thinning air, I heard something clatter against the hull. I peered out, however—and saw a ship!
The tiniest midge compared to those mile-long interstellar cruisers of the Emperor and the Corporation that I had perceived as I slept, it was drifting close beside me. A graceful torpedo of silver, not eighty feet long, with a thick crystal needle projecting from a low turret amidships. Painted on its argent side was the green outline of a hawk, and, below a row of strange green symbols.
Strange? No! It was a queer experience. I looked at those symbols, and suddenly realized that they were letters, and that I knew how to read them! It was as if they had been in some language that I had learned long ago, and forgotten with all save the subconscious mind—and still I knew that language had not been invented when I left the Earth. They spelled an odd name: Barihorn.
Odd, I thought—and then knew it for a contracted form of my own name!
A thin line ran from a port in the strange ship’s deck, just forward of the crystal needle. It was a magnetic anchor on its end, I realized, that had clanged against the rocket. Now a slender figure leapt out of the port.
A man, wearing silver-polished space armor that was close-fitting and graceful. Letting the line run through his gloves, he came flying through the airless void, across to the rocket. I saw his face, beyond the oval vision-panel of his helmet, looking at me curiously.
It might have been the face of some athlete of my own day. It was cragedly handsome, tanned and lean. It was stiff with wonderment. But a quick sympathy warmed the ice-gray eyes of the stranger. He seemed to understand my plight. A silver-clad arm beckoned me to unfasten the valve.
To open the rocket to the frozen emptiness of space! That seemed deadly folly. But death was already inside. My lungs were gasping in vain. My throbbing eyes felt as if bursting out of my head.
With stiff fingers I struggled with the screws that held the long-sealed valve. Billows of darkness rolled down upon me. An agony of fatigue slowed my efforts. But at last the plate slid aside and the last breath of air whispered out.
I collapsed across the rim of the port, fighting black oblivion. I knew that death, after that long, long race, at last had overtaken me. But suddenly something was being pushed down over my head. Fresh clean air was rushing into my face. I could breathe again!
My clearing eyes, through a crystal face-plate, saw what had happened. The silver-armored stranger was beside me—bareheaded! He had given me his own helmet!
Blood was already starting from his breathless nostrils. But he caught my shoulders, dragged me through the valve, hauled us both up the line to the port of the silver ship. We tumbled into a little metal chamber, a valve slammed and I heard the hiss of air.
Leaning against the wall—for an artificial gravity field had gripped us again—the stranger closed his eyes and took several long breaths, The blue of suffocation faded from his rugged face. He grinned at me, and wiped the blood from his mouth.
“Well, stranger,” he gasped, “you gave me a surprise! Your ship was listed in our charts as Comet AA 1497 X, We were observing it to correct our bearings, when it began to move!” A tone of awe dulled his whisper. “You must have been aboard a long time.”
I clutched at a hand rail for support, A deadly fatigue was in me. My body was still a stiff dried husk of pain. I could see the amaze of pity in the eyes of my rescuer, as he stared at my brittle, emaciated skin, at hair and beard and nails that had grown grotesquely long. “I have been,” I told him.
AND only then, when I had spoken, did I realize that I had learned another language as I slept—a tongue unknown when I had left the Earth. And I knew, with something deeper than memory, that my teacher had been the shadow in the crystal, the eternal mind of Dondara Keradin.
“I know your voyage has been a long one, stranger.” Wonder was still in the voice of the stranger. “For all objects designated with an ‘AA’ have been charted a million years or longer.”
“A million years!” I whispered. The world reeled. “What year is this?”
“This is the year 1,200,048 of the Conquest of Space,” he told me. He ran long fingers through the thick yellow shock of his tangled hair, and stared at me strangely. “It is that long,” he said softly, “since Barihorn left the Earth.”
Barihorn! And that was the name of this space ship! I murmured the syllables.
“My name is Barry Horn.”
The blue-gray eyes of the man in silver went wide. His rugged face lit suddenly with incredulous hope. His trembling fingers touched the cracked yellow skin of my hand, as if he doubted my reality.
“Barihorn!” he whispered. “Then the legend is fulfilled! I can hardly believe it. But I saw your ancient ship—so tiny and rusted that it had never been taken for a ship. I don’t know how you lived—but the Dondara Stone had promised that you would.” An eager enthusiasm was ringing in his voice. “I salute you, Barihorn!”
I was swaying with weakness and fatigue. Thirst and desperate hunger tortured me, and the agonizing stiffness of my body. But these riddles were more urgent still. The Dondara Stone—was that the crystal brain of Dondara Keradin?
I stared at the young giant in silver, and once more my dry throat found husky speech.
“Tell me—” I gasped. “There are so many things that I must know! But first tell me who you are, and how you know of the Dondara Stone, and if there is still”—some instinctive dread brought my voice to a whisper—“still a robot named Malgarth?”
