The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces

by Sam Moskowitz

  Copa Paco was worried.

  He puffed on his pipe and failed to get any smoke—the damnable thing had gone out again. Why was it, he wondered, that a culture that could devise an overdrive for interstellar flight could not invent a pipe that would stay lit? He toyed with the notion of dropping the whole pipe into the desk vaporizer, but rejected the idea. He understood that he was taking out his anxiety on his pipe and, primarily to prove a point to himself, he refilled the mutinous instrument with fresh tobacco and tried again.

  He wiped his hands nervously on his handkerchief and looked at his watch. Four hours to zero. It was time for the final check.

  He walked through the great ship, feeling the surge of power trembling along its beams, his stomach a cold knot within him. He could feel the star-flecked emptiness outside the ship, a poignant emptiness, waiting.

  The question that he had lived with for years crawled endlessly through his brain: Had he made the right decision?Soon now, he would know.

  The problem of picking a single man to represent your people and your culture in a truly crucial situation was virtually beyond solution, and Copa Paco knew it. He had wrestled with it so long that he knew every angle, every consideration, every argument. The only thing he didn’t know with certainty was the answer.

  He listened to his heels clicking down the corridor, and he thought: It’s too late to back down now, and that’s something. We’ll just have to go through with it.

  It was easy enough to think of someone who was especially gifted along a particular line, such as mathematics or sociology or art. It was even possible to find individuals who had talent and training in all three fields. Conceivably, some fantastic individual might exist, somewhere, who was expert in ten fields, or even twenty.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t good enough.

  There was, certainly, an excellent possibility that any good man could successfully represent his people in the coming encounter between two alien peoples—a diplomat, perhaps. But the catch was that an “excellent possibility” still wasn’t good enough for this situation. There simply was too much dependent on the outcome.

  You had to be sure.

  Easy enough to state, but what was the answer? He had to find a representative who could respond to any imaginable combination of trickery or force. Unpleasant as it was, he had to plan on the possibility that the people of Earth would not keep faith with them. His own people of Capella IV had only honorable intentions, of course, but that didn’t mean that they were going to stick their collective head into the lion’s mouth and rely on a smile to get them out again. The trick was to be prepared for the worst, but be capable of responding to the best.

  The characteristics of the required representative could be listed briefly. One, he had to make a good impression. Two, he had to be ready for anything, insofar as possible, so that he could not be outwitted. Three, he had to be capable of making a complete and accurate report back to his superiors, no one man, naturally, could be entrusted with the power of decision in such a case. Fourth and last, he had to embody some sort of built-in defense mechanism, so that, in the event of his capture, he could not possibly be made to reveal classified information, no matter what pressures were brought to bear.

  The characteristics could be listed, then. It wasn’t even unduly difficult to do so. The difficulty lay in quite another direction: no such human being existed.

  Nor ever had existed, nor ever would.

  Once you accepted that fact, of course, there was only one thing to do.

  Copa Paco passed through the security check and into the special control room, his pipe still going. Maybe, he thought, that was a good sign.

  It had better be.

  He nodded to his co-workers and looked around. The room appeared to be ready. There was a large, spherical screen that occupied the whole center of the room—blank now. Around the screen were fifty chairs, each with a small control panel on one arm. The future occupants of the chairs milled about the room in a fog of blue smoke and conversation—semantics experts, philosophers, chemists, anthropologists, psychologists, generals, writers, doctors, corporation managers, diplomats.

  Above the spherical screen, situated so that the observer could look down into it, was another chair, completely surrounded by integration controls that co-ordinated the information from below. Copa Paco looked at it, nervously. His chair.

  He climbed up into it and settled himself. He clamped on his headphones and switched on the master control panel. He put down his pipe and picked up an auxiliary phone.

  “Trial run,” he said.

  The others took their places, silent now, and cut in their sets. The spherical screen flashed white and came to life. It revealed four rather drab green walls, a ceiling, and a floor. A storeroom.

  Copa Paco steadied his hands and played his fingers over the control panel. There wasn’t a sound. Gradually, the scene in the spherical screen shifted, swaying very slightly, precisely as does a view scene through the two eyes of a walking man. There was a door, which opened and shut. Then a corridor, long and featureless. Another door—

  There was a polite knock and the door of the special control room clicked softly open. The scene in the screen changed to the room in which they all sat —Copa Paco saw himself clearly, looking pale and nervous.

  A spacesuited figure walked into the room, carefully. He had on a glass helmet, behind which could be made out rather pleasant features, blue eyes, and an open smile. He stopped respectfully.

  “My name is Noco Cono,” the spacesuited figure said in a soothing, well-modulated voice. He spoke in English. “I hope I may he of some assistance.”

  There was a buzz of approval from the assembled men, and Copa Paco felt himself relax a little. There was no denying it—the robot was well made. When the ship finally landed just outside the restricted area on Mars, and they started the spacesuited assemblage of radio controls tri-di, and testing apparatus toward the tiny building in the desert where the meeting was to take place, Copa Paco began to worry again.

  He sat tensely in his chair, following Noco Cono’s every move in the spherical screen. The robot walked easily, gracefully, through the shifting sands. He looked convincing. He acted natural.

  But he wasn’t human, of course.

  Copa Paco asked himself, as always: Have I done the right thing? What if they find out? What if I’ve thrown away our only chance, just out of caution? It isn’t really that I distrust Earth, of course—but what else can I do?

  The problem was exactly analogous to hunting for a house in which to live. If you couldn’t find precisely what you wanted, at the price you could afford to pay, there was only one course of action open to you. Build your own.

  The robot they had called Noco Cono wasn’t precisely a robot, of course—that is, he wasn’t a mechanical man with a mind of his own. Rather, he was an integrated synthesis of fifty remote minds—fifty men, each with a control panel, each able to take over in any conceivable situation, each seeing out of his eyes through the spherical screen and hearing every word through radio transmission.

  Noco Cono, whatever else he may have been, was no fool.

  Copa Paco watched him, step by step—he was on automatic now. He watched him walk through the desert, and he saw the little building loom up before him.

  Beyond the building, a dark figure.

  The man from Earth.

  Copa Paco wiped the sweat off his hands and felt the tension in the special control room. Every eye, every thought, was on the spherical screen, and oh the spacesuited figure that walked slowly on, closer and closer

  First contact. Whom had they sent?

  The final step in the scientific method is known as the solution. From the solution, if all has gone well, may often be derived certain GENERAL PRINCIPLES…

  Ralph Hawley paced up and down the evaluation room, alternately staring at his watch and smoking cigarettes in short, jerky puffs. The others sat nervously in their chairs, watching him. “What
’s he doing?” he asked again. “Where in the hell can he be?”

  Lee Gomez, by profession a philosopher and by temperament not prone to impatience or, indeed, haste in any form, said: “Sit down, Ralph. John isn’t overdue yet, and he’s no doubt doing exactly what he’s supposed to be doing—contacting our non-Earthly friends.”

  “Ummm,” said Ralph Hawley, hooking his thumbs in his suspenders. And, sensing the inadequacy of the phrase, he added: “Three cheers for John, he is true blue.” Damn Gomez anyway—he was always right, and Hawley knew it, and it annoyed him.

  “My professional opinion,” stated Dr. Weinstein, “not that anyone is interested, is that we are all suffering from the scientific malady known by the technical term of Gestalt Jitterus. What we really need is a drink.”

  Ralph Hawley ran a hand through his graying hair. “Not yet,” he said. “Not that I couldn’t use one.”

  He continued his pacing, which was in itself unusual, for Ralph Hawley was not ordinarily a nervous man. He was tall, rather spare, with a pleasantly horse-like face. He was given to sloppy clothes, infrequent movements, and slow speech. By trade he was a social psychologist, and he was the last person in the world that he himself would have picked to head Project Contact.

  “Where is he?” he asked again, lighting another cigarette.

  A red light flashed.

  A speaker said: “John Graves has entered the ship. He has not been harmed, and reports a nonantagonistic contact, with some complications. As instructed, we have sent him to the evaluation room. Situation green, shading yellow. Over.”

  There was a knock on the door. A pause. The door swung open and John Graves walked in. Every eye in the room stared at him. He took it very well, never losing his poise for an instant.

  “I’m quite all right,” he said calmly. “You can relax.” No one relaxed.

  John Graves walked up to Ralph Hawley and smiled. “It went off like clockwork, Ralph,” he said. “Of course, I couldn’t get a good look at the man, but it was a fascinating experience. I suppose you want a full report, from the beginning?”

  “That won’t be necessary, John,” Ralph Hawley said.

  “I beg your pardon? I was given to understand that—”

  Ralph Hawley sighed. Then, quickly, he reached out and turned John Graves off.

  John Graves stiffened instantly, and the He left his eyes. He stood very still. He did not breathe. He was not “dead,” of course, since, properly speaking, he had never been “alive.”

  Ralph Hawley stripped off John’s shirt and opened a panel in his chest. He took out the cameras, the recorders, the testers, the analyzers, the dials, the data cards.

  “Print these up and get an analysis,” he told his specialists.

  The object that was John Graves stood immobile in the center of the room, empty and alone. When the last film had been studied, the last card interpreted, the last sentence broken down and examined, there was a stunned silence in the evaluation room.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Ralph Hawley said. There was a burst of comments in the room: “They didn’t trust us!”

  “They tried to trick us!”

  “They sent a remote-controlled robot!”

  “The clever devils…”

  Ralph Hawley sat down in a chair. He stared blankly at nothing. He said: “Don’t you see what this means?”

  The others looked at him.

  “They tried the identical trick on us that we tried on them,” said a psychologist. “Or roughly identical, anyway.”

  “They worked out the same basic solution to the same problem,” an anthropologist said.

  “They’re our kind,” said Gomez, the philosopher. “Cautious, insecure, tricky, proud, capable, liars …” Ralph Hawley closed his eyes. There was only one solution to the basic problem, of course, if you assumed that the two cultures saw the problems in the same terms. No human being could be entrusted with such a mission; it was unthinkable. And so the aliens had sent a robot, and Earth had sent— John Graves.

  An artificial humanoid mechanism, twenty years in the making, designed to perform with inhuman skill in a contact situation. Designed to believe it was a human being, so that it did not have to play a part. Designed with built-in recording devices, and equipped with fantastically skilled behavior patterns —but lacking classified data.

  A robot and a limited android two representatives of two cultures that were afraid to trust each other.

  Two very similar cultures.

  “Gentlemen,” Ralph Hawley said quietly, “we are equals.”

  The red light flashed again.

  The speaker said: “Commander Hawley, Co-ordinator Paco is calling from the alien ship. I have routed his call through to the evaluation room.”

  Ralph Hawley grinned. “The old buzzard!” he said. He walked over to the communicator.

  Cona Paco looked at him and smiled.

  Ralph Hawley smiled back.

  “I see we didn’t fool you,” Copa Paco said.

  “No. And I’m sure we didn’t fool you.”

  “No,” agreed Copa Paco. “Extremely clever, however.”

  “Thank you. Yours was pretty tricky too.” A pause.

  “Listen, Ralph,” said Copa Paco finally, “this isn’t getting us anywhere. Why not come on over yourself and let’s have a talk—over drinks?”

  Ralph Hawley hesitated only an instant. “It’s a deal, my friend,” he said. “I’ll come.”

  Copa Paco smiled more broadly. “Now we’re accomplishing something.”

  “See you in half an hour,” Ralph Hawley said, and switched off the communicator.

  He turned and looked at his specialists. They were laughing and clapping each other on the back. The tension was gone.

  They had not failed.

  Everything was going to be all right.

  The others gathered in a knot around him as he stepped into the port of the space shuttle that was to carry him to the alien ship. Everyone was trying to shake his hand and wish him well. For almost the first time in his life, Ralph Hawley was completely happy, and proud of the human race.

  Just before he left, an aide appeared with a case of Hawley’s own liquor, which was loaded aboard the shuttle.

  “I thought Paco invited you to drink,” objected Lee Gomez. “Why take your own liquor?”

  Ralph Hawley smiled. “A man can’t be too careful,” he said, and closed the port behind him.

  Itself!

  by A. E. van Vogt

  Itself, king of the Phillipine Deep - that awesome canyon where the sea goes down six miles - woke from his recharge period and looked around suspiciously.

  His Alter Ego said, ‘Well, how is it with Itself today?’

  The Alter Ego was a booster, a goader, a stimulant to action, and, in his limited way, a companion.

  Itself did not answer. During the sleep period, he had drifted over a ravine, the walls of which dropped steeply another thousand feet. Suspiciously, Itself glared along the canyon rim.

  … Not a visual observation. No light ever penetrated from above into the eternal night here at the deepest bottom of the ocean. Itself perceived the black world which surrounded him with high frequency sounds which he broadcast continuously in all directions. Like a bat in a pitch dark cave, he analyzed the structure of all things in his watery universe by interpreting the returning echoes. And the accompanying emotion of suspicion was a device which impelled Itself to record changing pressures, temperatures and current flows. Unknown to him, what he observed became part of the immense total of data by which faraway computers estimated the interrelationship of ocean and atmosphere, and thus predicted water and air conditions everywhere with uncanny exactness.

  His was almost perfect perception. Clearly and unmistakably, Itself made out the intruder in the far distance of that twisting ravine. A ship! Anchored to rock at the very edge of the canyon.

  The Alter Ego goaded, ‘You’re not going to let somebody invade your territory, are
you?’

  Instantly, Itself was furious. He activated the jet medians ism in the underslung belly of his almost solid metal body. A nuclear reactor immediately heated the plates of the explosion chamber. The seawater which flowed through the chamber burst into hissing clouds of steam, and he jetted forward like a missile.

  Arriving at the ship, Itself attacked the nearest of four anchor lines with the nuclear-powered heat beam in his head. When he had severed it, he turned to the second cable, and burned through it. Then he moved for the third cable.

  But the startled beings aboard the alien ship had spotted the twenty-foot monster in the black waters below.

  ‘Analyze its echo pattern!’ came the command. That was done, with total skill.

  ‘Feed the pattern back through the infinite altering system till the recorders register a response.’

  The significant response was: Itself forgot what he was doing. He was drifting blankly away, when his Alter Ego goaded, ‘Wake up! You’re not going to let them get away with that, are you?’

  The defeat had galvanized Itself to a more intense level of rage. He became multiples more sensitive. Now, he simply turned out the alien echo copies.

  The new greater anger triggered a second weapon.

  Itself’s echo system of perception, normally monitored to be safe for all living things in the sea, suddenly strengthened. It became a supersonic beam. Purposefully, Itself started toward the ship.

  Watching his approach, the enemy decided to take no chances. ‘Pull the remaining anchors in!*

  Itself headed straight for the nearest part of the vessel. Instantly, those ultrasonic waves started a rhythmic vibration on the hard wall, weakening it.

  The metal groaned under a weight of water that at these depths amounted to thousands of tons per square inch. The outer wall buckled with a metallic scream.