All channels shut down. The neuroconnectors released Christian. He lay for a minute breathing hard, then sat up. Willem stood above him with a tumbler of water. Christian drained it in two gulps. “Thanks,” he mumbled. “Dry as yon landscape, my mouth was.”
“Terror will do that,” his companion replied. “I saw your involuntary reactions. Want a levozine?”
Christian half grinned, without merriment. “What I really want is a stiff drink. But we’re in a hurry. Yes, I’ll take a pill.”
Willem gave him one. Some was always on hand, in case a mission got unexpectedly long or difficult and the operator could not stop to rest. “In a hurry, you said? Do you mean there is something we can do at once?”
Christian nodded. “We’d bloody well better.” He climbed to his feet. The medication began to tranquilize and stimulate. His trembling died away, his voice gained force. “Whew! Hope I can snatch a shower during preparations. I smell six weeks dead, don’t I?” Sweat sheened on his skin and darkened his shirt.
Willem regarded him narrowly. “My monitors say the machine is a ruin. The transceiver’s badly damaged. It can carry some information, erratically, but the power unit’s out of commission. Anything that could perhaps function, like an arm, can’t anymore. And the energy reserve is dwindling fast.”
“Gimmick’s intact.”
Willem sighed. “Yes, evidently. That hurts, doesn’t it?” He had often heard such highly developed computers and neural nets, with their programs and databases, called “brains.” People who worked with one, like Christian—although seldom as intimately as he did—were apt to give it a name and speak of its personal quirks, as other people might speak of a ship or a tool that had served them a long time. “I imagine you’d prefer the wreck to have been quick and total. Merciful, so to speak. That would have been a shock to you, however, worse than you got.”
“I know. Like suddenly dying myself. I’d have recovered. But this way—My God, man, Gimmick’s out there, not a heap of smashed parts but Gimmick! And sunrise is coming.”
Willem sighed. “Exactly. Have you any idea what happened?”
The question, its style carefully parched, demanded an answer in kind. Christian’s fists unclenched. “We were examining an unusual sort of crag. All at once it broke into huge chunks. It buried Gimmick.” His tone sharpened. “The body Gimmick was using.” Again impersonal: “The top of the transceiver mast, with the dish, is sticking out, and what came to me shows that the interior armor protected the brain.”
“Are you sure? It could be in poor shape too.”
Christian shook his head. “No. Do you believe I wouldn’t know that, feel it, same as I would if my own brain took a concussion?”
“All right. But the accident—how could a collapse happen? An earthquake?”
“No.” Christian spoke with certainty. He had, in a way, been there. “Nor a meteorite strike. Somehow our seismic probe must have touched things off. I don’t see how. You know it didn’t have any great force. And, and Mercury’s geologically used up. That jut of rock stood unchanged for—what?—three billion years?”
“A freak occurrence, then.”
“Maybe. Or maybe such formations and weaknesses are common. How much do we know? Why the devil are we on Mercury, except to get the lay of the land? Before something like this happens elsewhere—”
Christian drew breath and forced coolness upon himself. “I was only in linkage with Gimmick. The full information isn’t in me, it’s in his database. If we don’t retrieve him before sunrise, everything will be baked and blasted to nothing.”
“I suppose so. Thermostatic system destroyed and the rocks probably not a good replacement for smashed radiation shielding.” Willem laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Dreadful luck. Worse for you than the expedition, perhaps. This association you’ve grown used to, this particular rapport you’ve developed, gone. You’ll have to start all over, won’t you?” He regarded the creases in the face, the fallowness in the blond hair. “Unless you choose to make a career change, or just retire. I’m sorry, Christian.”
The response lashed at him: “No! There’s time to go dig, detach Gimmick from the wreckage, get back here. But we’ve got to move, I tell you!”
“I… am afraid not. Let me check and make sure.” Willem turned to his keyboards and readouts. Christian stood where he was. His fists doubled again.
After a while the cyberneticist looked at him and said slowly:
“No. I’ve gathered the present whereabouts of everything we have with proper capability,” self-programming robots surveying and studying the planet in advance of the grand enterprise. Christian’s had been the only direct human-machine alliance, expensive in terms of life support and equipment, rewarding in terms of special situations calling for an organic mind on the scene. “They’re scattered across the globe, remember. Even the nearest has rough terrain to cross. None can get there soon enough.”
Christian had become quite composed. “I guessed so. Well, it isn’t too far from here. I’ll go myself.”
3
Everyone else at Clement called the idea insane. The central artificial intelligence made a lightning-quick calculation and agreed. No possible gain was worth the risk of losing the outfit necessary, let alone a human life. Commander Gupta forbade it.
Christian Brannock stood his ground. He and Gimmick had been doing work impossible for any single man or machine. The delay while a replacement was found and brought to the planet, then the time spent regaining the lost information, could possibly cripple the whole undertaking, if only by the added cost. More to the point, as .in independent contractor he had broad discretion. Within limits that he insisted he was not exceeding, he could commandeer whatever he needed to cope with an emergency.
His haste and resolution overbore them. Two hours later he was on his way.
After that, he waited. The rover that carried him operated itself. Its program included a topographic map, and survey satellites provided exact detail. Following its progress through communication relays, from time to time the intelligence at base ordered a change of course that would make for better speed. None of this impinged directly on Christian. Nor could he talk with the robot that accompanied him. It was built for power and dexterity, not thought. When they reached the site, the intelligence would direct its operations. Meanwhile its bulk crowded a cabin intended for, at most, three men.
Otherwise he was fairly comfortable. Air blew recycled, always pure. (He remembered odors of blossoms, pines, a woman’s sunlit hair.) Temperature varied subtly because that was best for health and alertness, without regard to the hundred-Kelvin cold of midnight or the searing three hundred Celsius degrees of noonday. (He remembered a beach where surf burst and roared, a wind chill in his face and salt on his lips but warmth radiant from a leeward bluff.) The metal around him hummed and quivered, the deck underfoot pitched and swayed, as the vehicle drove full tilt across a rugged land. However, the seat in which he sat harnessed compensated for most, and what it could not entirely counteract didn’t amount to much in Mercurian gravity. If anything, the motion soothed, almost cradle like. (He remembered a boat heeled over, climbing the crests of waves and diving into their troughs, the tiller athrum beneath his hand, the mainsail a snowpeak against heaven.)
Exhaustion claimed him. He ate and drank something, reclined the seat, and slept. His dreams were uneasy. Once during them he asked Gimmick, “Do you ever dream? When we’re not linked, I mean,” and the robot replied, “You taught me how.” Or was that a confused memory? They’d been together quite a few years, in quite a few strange places.
He woke refreshed, though, unharnessed, balanced himself against the lurching while he stretched his muscles and used the sanitor, ate more of the cold rations, and settled back down. When he called for a revised estimate of arrival time, the vehicle said “About another three hours” in its flat voice.
He frowned. That wouldn’t be long before sunrise. Well, he’
d known when he started that this was the best he could hope for. And… the swollen solar disc would take fifteen hours to clear the horizon.
He looked outward. Direct vision was impossible when he sat in the middle of thick armor, but the electronics that he activated gave him a simulacrum as good. Suddenly it was as if everything above 1 he deck were gone and he directly beneath the sky, naked, alone, invulnerable. So might an angel have seen.
No, only a man. He did not now share the more than human senses of his partner. But for a while he lost himself in unaided vision.
A kind of dawn was breaking in the northeast, zodiacal light strengthened by the nearness of the sun. It lifted above rocks and craters like a huge wing, softly pearl-hued, a quarter of the way to the zenith before it faded among stars. The galactic belt outshone it, an ice-bright river from worldedge to worldedge. Everywhere else I he stars themselves gleamed and glittered, their thousands overwhelming the crystalline blackness behind. Though Christian had beheld them oftener than he could recall, for a moment he felt his spirit fall free, upward and upward forever into the majesty of their silence.
A glimpse drew him back. Low over a northwesterly ridge stood ii blue diamond. He could just espy a mote beside it, ashen-gold. Earth, he knew, and Earth’s moon. Home.
Did that moon tonight throw a glint off a bit of Ellen’s windborne dust?
Sometimes, without warning, the memory of her overtook him. He had long since healed himself of grief. There had been women before her; there had been women afterward. But she was the one for whom he left space and settled down to groundside engineering, because nothing was worth leaving her for months or years on end. When she died—robotic controls could not yet prevent every senseless accident—and he had scattered the contents of the urn across the countryside she loved, he returned to space. Their son was grown and didn’t need him any longer. He took up the new technology of human-machine linkage, and seldom came back for a visit. But from time to time he remembered, and it hurt.
Maybe, selfishly speaking, he was otherwise better off. Of course, he’d been happy to pay the price. Nevertheless, on Earth he had always felt trapped. The stars—
Again he looked aloft. A deeper longing shook him. He had fared and wrought across the Solar System. Beyond waited a universe.
Half angrily, he dismissed the emotion. Self-pity. They were going to the stars, yes, but it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, and they wouldn’t be flesh and blood, they would be machines. Oh, sentient, sensitive, bearing with them all the heritages of history, but not really human.
Her ghost lingered. It made the cabin too quiet.
He was not mawkish. In his job, he couldn’t be and survive. Yet you couldn’t survive either if you were a dullard. That meant you found ways to occupy long, empty stretches of time—not merely games and recorded shows, but anything from acquiring a language or mastering calligraphy to creating an artwork or maturing a philosophy. Christian Brannock was, among other things, a ballad singer who had composed several of his own.
He had taken his guitar along. The optics of total outervision obscured his immediate surroundings, but he knew where it was racked. He reached and pulled it free. Soundboard and strings glimmered into sight as he laid it over his lap. He struck a chord and began to sing.
“Once upon a hearth
We lit a little fire
To warm our winter hands
And kindle our desire,
Which never needed this;
But still, we found it good
To see the flames seduce
The dry and virgin wood…”
No. The music clanged to a halt. He had made the song in his Earthside youth, later Ellen enjoyed it, a while ago he revived it on Mars, where no true flame had ever danced. Doing it here felt somehow wrong.
Why was he so churned up inside? Because he was in danger of losing Gimmick? But Gimmick was only a machine, wasn’t he—wasn’t it? Well, maybe not “only…”
Christian had work to make ready for. Defiantly, he launched into something older and bawdier.
“Oh, a tinker came a-strolling,
A-strolling down the Strand—”
4
Already the solar corona was well over a ridge in the northeast. Its opalescent glory drowned the zodiacal light and cast a wan, shadowful glow across pocks and scars beneath. A crimson tongue of prominence heralded the oncoming disc. Elsewhere the stars still ruled. Earth no longer beckoned. The scarp blocked sight of it.
That cliff sheered from horizon to horizon, filling nearly half the sky. Christian remembered ledges, pinnacles, steeps, mineral streaks, the mark of meteorite strikes through billions of years. But he had seen those together with Gimmick. To his unaided eyes the heights were one vast darkness.
He might have imagined they were a storm front—on its own timescale the cosmos is neither enduring nor peaceful, it is appallingly violent—except that the wreckage on the rubble slope at the foot gripped his attention. His partner lay below that heap of broken stone. The communication disc poked above. He couldn’t make out exactly what damage it had suffered. Besides, lacking the necessary connectors, he was cut off from it. However, the intelligence back at Clement Base had no such limitations.
“Are you in touch?” he cried to it through the rover’s radio. “What can you tell us?”
The voice that replied was baritone. It could be in any register, always as vibrant and expressive as any human’s. “No more than formerly. The robot does not respond to calls. Evidently its own signals would be too feeble and distorted, and it doesn’t waste energy trying. Internal power is barely sufficient to maintain computational functions.”
In other words, Gimmick remains conscious, Christian said to himself. No, I’m being anthropomorphic. Which isn’t scientific, is it? “Does he know we’re here?”
“Possibly, through seismic or electronic traces.” The intelligence put a note of urgency into its calm. “Don’t delay if you want to save anything that matters.”
Christian thought of Gimmick lying prisoned, waiting either for rescue or death. Sensing? Hoping? So had many humans done, when an earthquake buried them alive or a disabled spacecraft went helpless off on trajectory. Was it altogether fantastic to suppose that Gimmick wanted to live?
“Right,” he said. “Take over the robot.” He hesitated. “Please.”
The big, half manlike thing stirred. It turned about and rumbled from the cabin. Christian heard its mass reach the crew-access air lock, then after a minute the hiss of pumps evacuating the chamber. He saw it go forth onto the surface, into the coronal luminance, stand for another minute while the intelligence at Clement studied the scene through its sensors, and start climbing the talus. Shards slipped from beneath its feet and slid downward. On Earth they would have rattled.
He couldn’t endure to sit and watch. His assigned part came toward the end, when he applied tools for which the robot was not designed. But the corona was creeping higher, the flame-tongue standing taller. Maybe his slight strength would make the slight difference that counted.
The intelligence perceived. “Don’t,” it warned. “You will hazard yourself more than enough according to plan.”
“I’m the captain here,” Christian flung back.
On the way out he stopped by a locker. From the geological gear stored there he took a pick and spade. At the lock he donned his spacesuit and went through his checklist with the almost mindless ruse of long practice. Almost mindless; one tiny malfunction or mistake could kill you. Machines were hardier. No wonder that it would be they who went to the stars. By now there weren’t too many uses for humans even on the planets.
Gear and all, he weighed less than he did unclad on Earth. Inertia was the same, of course, a combination that could get tricky.
He bounded across the ground to the detritus slope, but therefore picked his way with care. From the top he caught a chiaroscuro view of the rover, its metal partly shadowed, partly agleam under the waxing radiance.
If you ignored details, it looked rather like a giant version of Gimmick’s body, minus the specialized limbs, detectors, and collection bins—an ovoid with a turret, legs currently folded while it rested on caterpillar treads, radiator fins deployed against the sun’s assault.
To hell with bodies. Gimmick had worn a lot of different bodies. What needed saving was the unitized hardware, software, and database. The brain. The mind? The soul? Anyway, Gimmick himself.
The robot toiled stolidly. Attachments on its four arms loosened rocks and flung them off, to bounce across the lower terrain. Often it paused while the intelligence considered, then moved to another spot. Christian knew this was to excavate efficiently and avoid causing a slide. His judgment was poor by comparison, his muscles weak. Nevertheless, if he was cautious he could help rather than hinder—help just a bit.
The body began to appear, cruelly battered and rent. The corona climbed.
Christian dug. After a while he gasped. The spacesuit’s equilibrators couldn’t quite keep up; his faceplate fogged, his air thickened and stank. Hands trembled on handles. “Conserve yourself,” advised the serene voice. “You’ll be wanted for a precision task.”
He yielded. To stop his labor was about as hard a thing as he could recall ever doing.
A sliver of sun blazed over the ridge. Suddenly shadows were long and sharp. Small craters stood out of them like atolls. Stars fled from eyesight.
Fifteen hours… But well before then, the solar wind would sweep across the land, bearing its radiation rain. Furnace heat would follow. Only in the rover was there refuge.
“If you are prudent, you will retreat,” said the voice.
“I know,” Christian answered. “I ain’t.”
The robot worked on.
The midsection emerged. If Christian’s faceplate had not been self-darkening, the light off it would have blinded him. But he could at last get to his real job.
Nearly level, the sunbeams were little diffused. Night still hung around whatever they did not strike directly. The tool kit secured to his suit included provisions such as flashbeams and miniradars, but often he had to go by touch, through sensory-amplifying power gloves. The objective was to open several layered shells and detach the independent unit, as delicately as a brain surgeon.
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