Andre Norton (ed) (20 page)

"There's nothing new
under any sun," said Chang.

They
looked out across the burning to the green plain and the blue hills and bluer
sky, and there was no pleasure in these things any more. It was as if a cloud
had passed across the sun.

Adhem
said puzzledly, "Sir, if I understand you, you're assuming that these
robots were built by some intelligent race and turned on and killed their
creators."

"Correct," nodded
Chang.

"But what makes you
think so?"

"You
said yourself that metallic beings wouldn't evolve on a world like this.
Therefore they were manufactured. To manufacture them, or that lunar station,
would require a colossal technology—they're light-years ahead of any robots
I've seen on any world—and the only
living
beings
we've seen are small and without holding appendages. If
they
have the technology, where is it? There are no roads, no cities, not
even any houses. The only artificial thing we've seen is a radio station,
camouflaged to look like a hill. Living creatures—organic creatures—need
protection from the weather and usually means of getting from place to place.
They get tired. But no weather can touch a durasteel robot, and it never gets
tired. It needs neither roads nor cities. And there aren't any underground
cities or any similar place where the inhabitants could be hiding, or our
seismo probes would have shown them up. Further, if the intelligent race only
made itself scarce because we came, why didn't it take its servants with
it?"

He sucked at his pipe, but
it had gone out.

"Add
to that the fact that we saw a rocket on the inner moon —with its locks open—a
meteor-damaged entry to a pressurized city, of which someone or something had
mended the floor but hadn't bothered to repair the roof, and a robot. Robots
don't need air. Shortly afterwards we saw something that could have been that
same rocket lift from the moon and dodge into radar shadow—most conveniently.
That wasn't accident, Ad-hem."

"But—why haven't they
attacked us?" demanded Engelhart.

"Why
should they? The status quo suits them perfectly. If we don't interfere with
it, they won't trouble us. If we try to set up house, though, that'll be a
different matter."

"But
. . . but maybe some natural disaster like a disease—or a war—was
responsible?" Adhem suggested.

"Think
it over for yourself, Adhem. If there was a war, why did the robots survive?
Even durasteel won't take atomic blast. And if they used radio-dust, why
haven't we found traces of lead in the soil? Poisons are out for the same
reason. As for germ warfare or disease, there are no bacteria here now. Robots
don't catch diseases. Why should they clear away the germs after their masters
died? Isn't it far more likely that living beings did that?"

Deeley,
who had been listening in silence, put in, "Sir, you're assuming that
these robots are volitional, aren't you?
That their free-will
extended even to harming their creators?"
Chang nodded. "I
thought that wasn't possible."

"Ask Keston. He's the authority."

Deeley looked at the observation officer, who
held a doctorate in cybernetics among other distinctions, and received an emphatic
nod.

"We
couldn't do it. We couldn't put that much intelligence into a single mobile
robot. A human-built servant is nothing but a small number of stimulus-response
circuits that enable it to obey orders. But it can evaluate situations. It
hasn't an endocrine balance, for one thing,
nor
a
random factor in its analyzer. We have to work with a binary signal system—impulse
or no impulse. But the stuff we picked up uses variable-strength impulses, and
with that you could store between twice and a hundred times as much data
according to the sensitivity of your analyzer. Oh yes, it could be done. I see
no reason why these robots shouldn't be volitional."

Engelhart
was appalled. His face went white. "You know what this reminds me of? The
time I talked to the big brain on Canopus X and XI. I wouldn't go through that
again if I was paid. I was terrified."

"Why?" Deeley
wanted to know.

"Well, I suppose it wasn't really fright
so much as awe—the knowing that this man-made thing was ten times as
intelligent as its builders and knew ten thousand times as much as any man
could hope to learn in a lifetime. But at the bottom of it was always the fear
that the servant would become the master."

Chang stuffed his pipe afresh, forcing
himself to feel calm. He said, "Here the fear has become reality."

There
was a roar of jubilation from the stern of the ship as a big hitter in the
baseball game swiped one over the head of the pitcher and began a home run. It
symbolized the joyous irrationality of mankind—the knowledge that they were not
perfect, not infallible, and quite content to remain so, but permanently
afraid, because of that knowledge, of going down before something inhumanly
efficient, fearing most of all lest their downfall be of their own doing.

"By all that's holyl" said Keston
suddenly, slapping his thigh and sitting up with a jerk. "I think that
gives us the answer to the radio signals we picked up."

"How, Keston?"
demanded Chang.

"We've wasted time trying to make a
language out of it. It isn't a language. It's true telepathy."
"Telepathy!"

"Yes,
on the mechanical level. It's pure thought without intervening steps. The
robot, being mechanical, thinks with electrical impulses, and communicates by
broadcasting them as they stand. Magnificent! Running Bull'll go wild over
this. Excuse me, sir." He got up and went hastily inship.

By the stern, the noise from the men playing
baseball had stopped. A soft breeze ruffled the grassy vegetation of the plain.

Deeley said eventually, "Sir, we can't
afford not to have this planet."

Chang nodded, taking his pipe out of his
mouth. "Not with twenty billion people on New Earth alone and a
birth-death ratio of plus two per cent. This world is worth more than any man
could spend."

"Well, sir—what are we
going to do about it?"

Til
need time to consider it, but the general pattern is clear. The first step
would be to pick up a sample of the opposition-magnetic grapples should hold
them—and find out if and how, they can be destroyed or immobilized. Then do it.
As for that fake hill with the concealed radar gear atop, we'll just blast it
and any like it. If these tin soldiers took the world from their creators, I
feel no compunction about taking it from them. This is the course of action I
suggest in outline. We grab our specimen and go upstairs at once. We can fight
off attack easier in space, and if necessary we can dodge into hyperdrive. If
we find the robots indestructible, at least by our resources, we'll have to put
back for reinforcements. A robot-dominated world would be an unstable element
in a galactic culture anyway, and on a sweet world like this one it's a
criminal waste—"

His lapel alarm went and he said, "Chang
listening."

"Sir, Trooper Phillips
P.J. has disappeared."

Chang jerked as if stung.
He said, "How?"

"Sir, he was in the ball game by the
stern, and Trooper Horrigan was at bat and hit a homer which went behind a
ridge, and Trooper Phillips went after it and didn't come back, and from the
tracks in the grass it looks like a robot got him."

Chang was on his feet. "What went wrong
with the alarm system?"

"Blanked out, sir.
We found the master cell'd been blown with a big overload."

"O.K. Call everyone inship at
once." He snapped off the speaker, whirled to Engelhart. "Have a heli
after that robot. Fit it with a magnetic grapple or some means of stopping the
robot without harming the man.
Battle stations!"

Engelhart went inship at a
run,
and Chang turned to the stunned-looking Adhem. He said briefly, "It looks
as if our plan to get a sample of the opposition has been anticipated."

They turned and went into the bridge. As they
did so, Keston and Spinelli entered from the opposite direction and sat down at
their control desks without speaking. The entire ship seemed suddenly to have
tensed for action, and instead of being as it were a convenient and comfortable
dwelling in beautiful surroundings, it was again a tight little world of its
own, very much alone against the universe.

Engelhart's speaker bubbled, and he turned to
Chang. "The helis we sent after the robot and Phillips reporting, sir.
He's outrun them. He's gone invisible, but they can follow his tracks, and they
claim he's making all of three hundred."

"Which way's it
heading?" demanded Chang curtly.

"Southwest, sir.
Towards the place where we found the radar
antennae."

Before Chang could say anything further,
Keston interrupted, "Sir, there's an unbeamed broadcast going
out—non-pictorial on about three hundred seven meters. Its source appears to be
the radio station ninety miles southwest of here."

Chang said, "Spinelli, get us off the
ground. This is asking for trouble."

"Planetary take-off, sir?" said the
engines officer, bis hand reaching for the appropriate switches.

"No, just hoist us up
to about five thousand feet."

"We
can't hold that for long on antigrav, sir," said Spinelli wamingly.
"The generators will burn out this close to a planetary mass."

"It needn't be for long.
Long enough to get Phillips back, if we can, or deliver a few
shrewd punches if we can't."
"Can't you use a heli for that,
sir?"

"No," said Chang with infinite
patience.
  
"A ship can go right
upstairs in case of trouble, but a heli can't." "I see, sir,"
said Spinelli.

Shortly, the big ship floated awkwardly up
from the ground, leaving a broad dent in the soft rich soil of the plain and a
few scorched logs that might have been a clump of trees nobody noticed on the
way down, and lumbered at an energetic two hundred miles an hour the ninety
miles to the camouflaged building. Maneuvering a big ship on antigravs was
necessarily slow near a planet, rather like walking on stilts with a rider on
your back.

From five thousand feet up they surveyed it.
Even here it was difficult to make out the aerials concealed among the trees,
and there was no sign at all of an entry to the underground building itself,
but that was probably the best-hidden part of the setup.

Chang said musingly,
"I wonder why they did that."

Adhem
shrugged, said, "Maybe they camouflaged it to hide it from their masters
when they revolted and never bothered to uncover it again."

"Perhaps.
Even so, it's an interesting thing about
these robots. They may dominate the planet, but they seem to look after it well
and have an eye for beauty. They've made the best of their resources."

"Sir,"
said Deeley diffidently, Tve been thinking. Maybe these robots are the advance
guard of another race wanting to colonize the planet. That would account for
the sterility of the soil and air. Prophylactic measures. When we take over a
new planet we immunize the colonists against the local plagues with vaccines
and antitoxins. A race with higher technology might prefer to sterilize the
planet."

"That's
an ingenious idea, but it doesn't jibe with the lunar station we found,
nor
with the attitude of the robots towards us. I refuse to
believe in a race that builds pressurized cities out of durasteel for its
overnight huts. That looked more like a way station for outgoing interplanetary
traffic, which implies a race on the planet already. And if it were so, the
robots would be putting up KEEP OUT signs all over."

Before
anyone could argue with his conclusion, Spinelli said, "Sir, the
generators are beginning to show signs of strain."

"All right.
Engelhart, have you a medium-light hydrogen
mine handy?"

"Yes,
sir.
Do
you want me to blast the hill?"

"No.
I don't want to kill Phillips if I can help it. Put it out on the end of a beam
and dangle it over the radar antenna looking at us out of those trees. Keston,
any sign of life on the radio waves?"