Collected Short Fiction, page 559
Forester hurried away from that damp underground room, tired and alarmed and vaguely ill, to look for a dose of bicarbonate.
X
THE imperturbable mechanism which had been Major Steel dictated the sweeping articles of a proposed agreement between the people and the humanoids, which would become final in sixty days if ratified by a vote of the people. At noon, with that same competent device standing by to prompt him, the old president stood tottering before a battery of news cameras to announce the coming of the mechanicals.
Forester had found his bicarbonate, and a hotel room. He had soaked out his aching fatigue in a hot tub and napped for two hours, and he awoke with his brooding unease gone. He even felt hungry again. Calling room service, he ate while he listened to the president’s broadcast.
The promised service of the humanoids was still an unknown quantity, but his first mistrust had been swept away by relief that the decision was made, with the terrible might of his own project still intact. Mark White’s hate and fear began to seem absurd, find he felt something of Ironsmith’s bright eagerness to see the new mechanicals.
He saw the ships from Wing IV landing that same afternoon. Returning in a staff car to his official aircraft, he had the driver pull off the highway where it ran near the spaceport, so that he could watch. One enormous interstellar vessel was already down, looming immense above the tall, familiar interplanetary liners, which now stood humbly along the edges of the field, towed hastily out of the way.
“Well, sir!” the awed driver whispered. “Ain’t she big!” She was. The thick concrete aprons had shattered and buckled under the weight of that black hull, which towered so high that a white tuft of cumulus had formed about its peak. Peering upward until his neck ached, Forester watched gigantic valves lifting open, and long gangways sliding down, and the hordes of humanoids start marching out to establish their service to mankind.
Tiny against the scale of their colossal craft, the new mechanicals were all identical, nude and neuter, quicker and sleeker than men, graceful and perfect and tireless. The sun shimmered blue on their dark hastening limbs, and glittered on their yellow brands. They spread out across the broken concrete by the busy thousands, innumerable.
The first scouts of that dark army came to the high wire fence around the spaceport, near where Forester had stopped. They began cutting it down, deftly slicing through the heavy mesh with small tools, and neatly piling the sections. Swarming about the task in ever greater numbers, they began to remind him of some social insects. They worked silently, never calling to one another—for they all were parts of the same ultimate machine, and each unit knew all that any of them did. Watching, he began to feel a vague impact of terror.
For they were too many. Glinting with bronze and frosty blue, their hard black bodies were too beautiful. They were too sure, too strong, too swift. Unlike any actual insects that he had ever watched, they wasted no time and no effort. They worked as one, and they made no blunders. Mark White’s apprehension of them seemed better founded now, and he was suddenly grateful for the president’s decision to save Project Thunderbolt.
“Let’s go!” He tugged at the staring driver’s sleeve, and his voice was a husky whisper, as if he were already afraid for the humanoids to hear. Drive on—fast!”
“Right, sir.” With a last astonished look at the vastness of that ship and the silent machines still swarming from it, the driver pulled back on the road. “The world sure changes,” he commented sagely. “What won’t they think of next!”
Back at Starmont, Forester hurried down to the project without even taking time to call Ruth, and worked that night and all the next day without sleep, modifying three missiles. Light would take two long centuries to reach Wing IV, from where the humanoids took their orders, but these tapered shapes of death had their own dreadful geometry.
When the third missile was ready at last, with drive and relays rebuilt, Forester went to sleep in his coveralls on a cot beside the launching station. The teleprinter bell awoke him instantly—and he saw that the time was somehow nine, next morning. The brief message from the defense minister was classified top secret. It warned him to be ready for a humanoid inspector, arriving within an hour.
Quickly checking the three modified missiles again, he left them racked and ready. Back at the surface, he locked the elevator, pushed the mirror down to hide the controls, kicked a rug over the escape door in the floor, hung his coveralls on a hook, and walked out of an innocent cloakroom into his office, to wait for the inspection.
The mechanical came on a military aircraft, escorted by the commanding general of the satellite space stations and his retinue. A staff car brought them from the landing strip below the mountain, and Forester waited to meet them at the inner gate. The machine stepped out ahead of the men, droning its greeting:
“Service, Dr. Clay Forester.”
In the midst of the stiff military uniforms, the slender silicone nakedness of the humanoid had a curious incongruity, but that oddness was not amusing. Its air of kindly blind alertness was somehow disturbing, and Forester couldn’t help an uncomfortable start when it spoke his name.
“We have come to examine your Project Lookout.” Its voice was a mellow golden horn. “Under the provisional agreement, we are to patrol all military installations, to prevent any aggressions before the ratification election. Then we shall remove all weapons.”
“But this project isn’t a weapon,” Forester protested. “Like the satellite stations, it’s only part of the warning network.”
He couldn’t tell what the humanoid thought; nothing ever changed that serene expression of slightly astonished paternal benevolence. But the machine went methodically ahead with a painstaking study of the building, the instruments, and the staff. The inspection became a cruel ordeal which lasted all day. Even when the human members of the party went to lunch at the cafeteria, the mechanical kept Forester to explain the deliberately sketchy records he had kept.”
“We have secured access to the secret files of the Defense Authority,” it purred blandly. “We have seen figures for the discretionary funds spent on this project, and lists of the items of equipment purchased for it. Can you tell us why those totals are so large, and why so much of that equipment does not appear to be in use here?”
“Certainly.” He tried not to look so ill as he felt. “This was an experimental installation, remember, and men aren’t quite so efficient as you machines claim to be. We made several expensive blunders in the design, and all that missing equipment was torn out and hammered into scrap long ago.”
“Our coming will end such waste,” the mechanical murmured, and he could see no other reaction. Even the humanoids, he thought grimly, would find it difficult to prove that those missing items had not already gone to the furnaces as scrap metal, but he was afraid to wonder what other clues to Project Thunderbolt their sleepless prying might uncover.
The inscrutable machine took him back, that afternoon, to the neutrino trackers. Its blind-seeming steel eyes stared blankly at the enormous search tubes, with their tiny grids of glowing wire forever sweeping space. It studied the softly clucking counters and the directional plotters. It made him dig all the specifications out of a safe, and inquired the name and address of every firm which had supplied any materials, and finally interviewed each of the six technicians.
As the inquisition dragged on, Forester felt increasingly tired and annoyed and alarmed. He hadn’t slept enough, and his empty stomach fluttered uncomfortably. He was afraid his own agitation might betray the project, and when the machine had finished grilling Armstrong, at dusk, he asked it desperately:
“Isn’t that enough? You’ve seen everything, and talked to all of us. Aren’t you satisfied?”
“Thank you, sir,” cooed the humanoid. “But there is one other man connected with the project whom we must question. That is the mathematician who calculated the designs for the search equipment.”
“All the routine math was done in our own computing section.”
“Who operates that?”
“A young chap named Ironsmith.” Forester’s voice rose, too sharply. “But he had nothing to do with the actual equipment. He never saw the tubes, or even heard about them. He’s just a mathematical hack, and all he did was solve the problems we gave him.”
“Thank you, sir.” droned the urbane machine. “But we must speak with Mr. Ironsmith.”
It was midnight before the mechanical came back from the computing section, its dark serenity still revealing nothing of what it might have learned. Nervously, Forester went down in the staff car to put the departing group aboard their aircraft, and then he hurried frantically back to Ironsmith’s rooms. The youthful clerk greeted him with shocked concern.
“What’s the matter, Dr. Forester?” He blinked, confusedly, and Ironsmith asked, “Why so grim and haggard?”
Ignoring the query, Forester peered sharply around the room. The few pieces of furniture were shabby but comfortable. A book printed in the strange characters of some ancient language of the first planet lay open on a little table, beside a tobacco humidor and a bottle of wine. Ironsmith himself, in unpressed slacks and open-collared shirt, looked guileless and friendly as the room, and Forester could see no evidences of his dealings with that inquisitive machine.
“What’s the trouble, sir?” he insisted anxiously.
“That damned mechanical,” Forester muttered. “The thing was grilling me all day.”
“Oh!” The clerk looked surprised. “I found it very interesting.”
“What did it want with you?”
“Nothing much. It asked a question or two, and looked at the calculators.”
“But it stayed so long.” Forester searched his open face. “What did it want to know?”
“I was asking the questions.” Ironsmith grinned with a boyish pleasure. “You see, that relay grid on Wing IV knows all the math that men have ever learned—and it’s quite a calculator! I happened to mention a tough little problem I’ve been kicking around, and we went on from there.”
“And?”
“That’s all.” Ironsmith’s gray eyes held a limpid honesty. “Really, Dr. Forester, I can’t see any reason for you to be disturbed about the humanoids, or Mark White to hate them.”
“Well, I do!”
“But they’re only machines,” Ironsmith persisted gently. “They can’t be evil—or, for that matter, good. Because they aren’t faced with any moral dilemmas. They have no choice of right or wrong. All they can do is what old Warren Mansfield built them to do—serve and obey mankind.”
Forester wasn’t sure of that, and he was less certain that Ironsmith himself had always chosen the right. That armor of amiable innocence seemed impregnable, however, and Forester was already staggering with fatigue. He gave up learning anything from the clerk, and went wearily home.
Walking back to his house and his wife, alone beneath the stars the humanoids had conquered, Forester felt a sudden savage envy of Ironsmith’s carefree ease. The harsh demands of the project became utterly intolerable. For one dark moment, he wished that the inspecting humanoid had found his fearful secret and set him free. But he stiffened his worn shoulders instantly. Those graceful missiles waiting in the vault were the last defense of man, and he dared not put his burden down.
XI
THE teleprinter recalled Forester to the capital, next morning, to attend the final sessions of the Defense Authority. The human government was already preparing to conclude its business on the day of the coming ratification election, but disturbing political tensions were mounting as a few fanatical opponents of the humanoids began campaigning vehemently against them.
A few labor leaders were afraid the mechanicals would bring technological unemployment, although they promised shorter hours and greater benefits than strikes had ever won. The heads of a few religious organizations suspected that the knowledge and power of the humanoids would leave insufficient scope for any superior omnipotence, and many bureaucrats were apprehensive of an unregimented society.
The humanoids, however, had learned the art of politics. They opened offices in every ward and village, glittering with displays of machine-made marvels. Their swarming units rang doorbells, calling each voter by name and promising paradise—admission free. When the election came, only a stubbornly skeptical few voted to halt the mechanized march of progress. The victorious humanoids, with malice toward none, offered the same efficient service to supporters and opponents. They directed the dissolution of the human government, and immediately began dismantling military installations. Forester was delayed at the capital a few days longer, until a brisk machine had put a pen in the trembling fingers of the world president and dictated the phrases of his resignation.
“I’m through,” the old statesman whispered to Forester, afterward, when the members of the liquidated Defense Authority were filing by to shake his withered hand. “Now,” he breathed, “it’s up to you.”
Meeting his dim, uneasy eyes, Forester nodded silently. He understood that the whole burden of the project now rested on his own tired shoulders. Yet, hastening out of the executive mansion, he felt a buoyant relief. For the efficient machines were also taking over the warcraft of the Triplanet Powers, and digging up the planted detonators. He was free at last to go back to Starmont, to Ruth and the pure science he loved. Under the stress of the election, he had all but forgotten his visit to that ruined tower by the sea. Mark White, with his disreputable disciples and his dubious science and his disturbing story, seemed to have no place in the bright new future.
The mechanicals had disposed of Forester’s official aircraft, informing him that all such primitive contraptions were too dangerous for human use. Waiting for him, when a trim humanoid driver took him from the hotel to the airport, he found a wonderful new vehicle; a long, mirror-bright teardrop, unmarred by any projecting airfoil or landing gear.
He watched through the hull as the cruiser lifted swiftly through a milky veil of high cirro-stratus, and on into the ionosphere. The sky turned purple-black. He could see the planet’s lazy curve, and flattened mountains crawling beneath, and the red-winged sun dropping back eastward. And suddenly they were landing on a strange landing stage.
“Is this—Starmont?”
The familiar shape of the dark butte and the known brown face of the desert around it answered his voiceless question, but everything else was changed. New walls and towers rose everywhere, luminous in the sunlight with vivid pastels. Broad new gardens were fantastic with plants which must have come from other worlds.
The door of the cruiser had no handle that a man could work, but it was opened for him silently. The solicitous machines helped him down, too carefully. Starting breathlessly across the new red pavement of the landing stage to look for his wife and his friends, he was halted by an abrupt, sharp sense of disaster.
The exotic gardens and the colonnaded walks and the long bright-walled villa were no real surprise, because he already knew that the teeming machines had been rebuilding all the planet into a streamlined paradise, and it was a moment before he knew just what was wrong. A breath of some rank jungle scent drew his eyes to a deep sunken garden where the administration building had stood, and he felt a faint revulsion from the tall, fleshy crimson stalks the machines had planted there. Next he missed the white concrete tower of the solar telescope, and then his breath went out when he looked again at the new blue-and-amber villa on the crown of the mountain.
“Where is it?” he gasped accusingly. “The big reflector?”
For that mighty telescope had been his life. The reach of it was farther than even the ships from Wing IV could go. It had found the clue to rhodomagnetics, and he had fondly planned to spend his last years with it, exploring the outer galaxies in quest of some other hint that might reveal the real prima materia of the universe.
But now that gay new dwelling stood where the telescope had been. The realization stunned him. For one painful instant, he tried to hope that the humanoids had simply replaced the precious instrument with some compact new device as wonderful as the silver teardrop behind him, but the machine was cooing serenely:
“The observatory has been removed.”
“Why?” A dim dread overwhelmed his first sharp anger, and his voice turned hoarse. “You had no right—”
“All necessary rights to set up and maintain our service were given us by a free election,” the humanoid reminded him. “And that space was required for your new dwelling.”
“I want the reflector put back.”
“That will be impossible, sir.” The tiny machine stood frozen and alert, staring past him with seemingly sightless polished eyes. “Observatory equipment is far too dangerous for you, because you would be so easily injured by heavy instruments, broken glass, electric currents, inflammable paper and film, or poisonous photographic solutions.”
“You’ve got to replace that telescope.” Forester stood trembling with a bitter amazement. “Because I’m going on with my astrophysical research.”
“Scientific research is no longer necessary, sir.” The benign surprise remained unchanged on that narrow silicone face. “We have found on many planets that knowledge of any kind seldom makes men happy, and that scientific knowledge is often used for destruction. Foolish men have even attempted to attack Wing IV with illicit scientific devices.”
Forester shuddered to a speechless terror. “Therefore, Clay Forester, you must now forget your scientific interests.” That melodious drone was dreadful with a ruthless benevolence. “You must now look for your happiness in some less harmful activity. We suggest philosophy or chess.”
The small machine merely watched as he cursed it, the black, high-cheeked face struck with highlights of bronze and icy blue, and set in serene solicitude. It didn’t move until a new fear made him gasp hoarsely, “Where’s my wife.”
In the harassed months of the ratification campaign he had stayed away from Starmont for fear of somehow betraying the project with his presence, but he had talked to Ruth every night until the telephone system was taken out of service after the election. He had told her that he would soon be home, back to take up their lives where the supernova’s light had interrupted. Shivering, now, he wondered why she hadn’t met him.
