The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces

by Sam Moskowitz

  Here it ceased its forward motion, but again rotated its trunk and arms. Several astounded pedestrians showed a sudden preference for the opposite side of the street, and a passing bus driver almost side-swiped a parked car as he leaned from the spectacle. Bradley and Hume pelted down the steps, hit the pavement and made for the robot.

  It might almost have sensed their coming, for immediately it ceased rotating and raced along the street, its arms still extended. Grimly, the two men chased after it. They knew in their hearts that there Was little chance of outpacing the speedy automaton, but both clung to the hope that eventually it might trap itself or its alien mechanism break down.

  At the bottom of this street ran the wide and busy Bucks Road. Its flow of traffic didn't worry George. He raced into it with utter disregard for the comfort and safety of other users, turned right, made a sharp curve around the bonnet of a private car and left its driver fuming. In similar manner, he indulged in close shaves which jittered the drivers of two more private cars, an Upper Douglas bus and a lorry. By the time he’d reached the top of the steep and treacherous Prospect Hill he’d increased his lead by another ten yards.

  Upon the crest a police car caught up with him. The car roared along Bucks Road, blew a flood of cooling wind over the sprinting Bradley and Hume, overtook the robot. Side by side, robot and police car raced down the hill and out of sight. “Phew!” Bradley stopped, mopped his forehead, drew In great gulps of air. “Let’s carry on after it, Ron. We can take it easier—the police will have collared him by now.”

  He was wrong. At the bottom of Prospect Hill they found the defeated patrol car. An excited crowd milled around it. Further along Victoria Street more excitement was evident. Catching sight of Bradley, the police car’s driver pushed through the crowd.

  “That was the gadget out of the mystery ship, wasn’t it, sir?” “Yes, that was it,” agreed Bradley.

  “I thought as much. I recognized it from the descriptions in the papers. Well it got away from us.”

  “How?”

  “We didn’t want to smash it up and that made us careful, you see? We edged alongside it. The thing was going down the slope like a bat out of hell, and what with the twist in the hill and the crossroads at the bottom, We had a ticklish job. But Crellin leaned out of the nearby window and grabbed one of its extended arms.”

  “And what then?”

  “It spun its arms and damn near dragged him out of the car. We slewed right over the crossroads to avoid a crash while the thing went clattering full pelt down Victoria Street.” He gestured to the car. “Get in, sir, and we'll have another look for it. If we catch up with the thing maybe you’ll know how to control it."

  Bradley climbed into the car, thinking lugubriously that if he had known how to control George they’d never have started this frantic chase through sedate Douglas. With Hume and Crellin in the rear seat, the police car slid away from the curb, nosed through the crowd and purred down Victoria Street. Although the subject of their pursuit was completely out of sight, its route was easy to follow, for it left behind an unmistakable trail in the form of disturbed streets with excited pedestrians all on one pavement.

  They reached the end of Victoria Street and came to the Jubilee Clock. Here possible routes splayed in half a dozen directions, but obvious signs of public disquiet were to the left, along the broad sweep of Loch Promenade. Swinging left, they bowled along that way, constantly scanning the immense width of the great roadway, the sunken gardens and the promenade proper. At a point opposite the Villa Marina, a chattering crowd hugged the rails between the prom and the beach. More spectators, some with binoculars, lined the balcony of the Villa, and still more thronged the steep pavements of Broadway. The focal point of observation lay towards the sea.

  Scrambling from the car, the four pushed through the crowd, which gave way reluctantly. They found themselves gazing across a sandy shore towards the incoming tide, which lapped and advanced irresistibly in long, foamy curves. A pair of parallel lines, two feet apart, cut through the soft sand to the water’s edge: they resembled the marks left by the steel treads of a midget tank. And there, at the extreme end of the lines, with rising waters hungrily lapping around its flexible tracks, stood the robot. It was rotating on its base, its outstretched arms going round and round.

  "'We’ll get it yet!" exclaimed Bradley. "The water’ll stop it if nothing else will." He vaulted the rails and raced across the sand, the others following.

  But they were still more than a hundred yards from it when the machine ceased its apparently pointless revolutions and, with a queerly impressive air of irrevocable decision, clanked boldly into the sea. Aghast, the four men stopped and watched. The slope of the shore was gentle, the water still shallow, and the robot submerged slowly, but it continued to move outward at fair speed. Gradually the eager ocean crept up to its middle, then to its still extended arms, at which point the vanishing machine started to leave a small wake on the surface. The arms made little splashes as they bobbed and dipped through the swells, then they disappeared.

  Bradley groaned loudly as the water level rose to the slots, but the lonely figure still did not stop. Stubbornly it forged ahead, until finally the sun struck a dull sheen from the domed top of its lead-colored casing before a rush of foam hid the whole thing from sight. A long-drawn sigh came from the crowd of witnesses.

  Sea water didn't stop it, commented Hume.

  “It may, when it’s had time to seep inside.” Bradley stared irefully at the chuckling ocean which had claimed his alien prize.

  Evidently those slots don't provide a free channel to the interior mechanism. The whole thing must've been remarkably well sealed and water-tight to have withstood total immersion.” He made a gesture of discouragement. “We'll get out the speedboat and search for it, just in case it's stalled—that's our only chance.”

  Wasting no more time, they rode the car to the main pier, commandeered a speedboat which swept them through the bay at a hectic pace. Their search was thorough but fruitless. With brilliant sunlight stabbing through clear blue water, the ocean bottom could be seen to a depth of twenty feet, but there was not the slightest sign of the missing robot.

  Bradley gave it up. The triumph with which he had viewed the machine's dramatic animation was now replaced by a dismal sense of frustration and defeat. Somehow he felt that he'd had within his grasp the most potent secret of the age— and it had slipped like mercury between his fingers. So deep and moody were his thoughts that he made no attempt to avoid the spray thrown up by the returning speedboat; he was content to be soaked so long as he could ponder over what might have been.

  “At least,” said Hume suddenly, “we know now where the crew has gone.” He jerked a thumb to indicate the depths of the sea. “Down there! They were even more alien than we suspected. They were aquatic, denizens of some faraway liquid world, and they made for water just as naturally as we'd make for land.”

  “After living completely waterless all the way here!” said Bradley sardonically. He shook his head, added, “Anyway, that's the end of that. We'll never hear of George again. All we've got left is that cryptic pile of junk in Liverpool and whatever's left in the ship.”

  “It just can’t be helped," Hume soothed. “I reckon that—” His voice cut off as a tremendous blast sounded from Douglas Head and went thundering across the bay. The men in the approaching speedboat looked up at the Head, saw a great column of white vapor erupting from the ship’s resting place. No words were needed to tell them and ten thousand others that the visitor from space had gone to oblivion in one fierce, disastrous explosion.

  Bradley sat In Professor Reed’s study in Liverpool and said: “And that's how the robot went, assuming the deuced thing really was a robot. The loss was most unfortunate— most unfortunate. Right on top of that ship blew itself to pieces, slightly injuring five engineers and damaging the adjacent hotel.”

  “How did that happen?” inquired Professor Reed.

  “The
y were trying to dismantle those weird engines in the tail. According to the engineer in charge of the gang, they’d just disconnected some of the leads from the panel assembly to the tire-shaped object feeding the tubes when something spurted out of a tubular lead and blazed with such hellish ferocity that everyone raced for safety. It was as well that they did!

  They got away in the nick of time, for the whole vessel suddenly blew up with extreme violence. When I got on the scene I was faced with a crater around which had been sprayed the molten fabric of the ship.”

  “H’m!” Reed thoughtfully stroked his neat grey beard. ‘This frequent rotation of your robot was a most peculiar feature, don’t you think? From personal observation, did you construct a theory to account for it?”

  Fidgeting uneasily, Bradley ventured: “There was nothing cogent upon which to base a reasonable theory. What 1 did get, though, was a hell of a queer feeling about it.”

  Go-on.

  The way its arms went round and round, always before or after it changed direction, gave me a strong but ridiculous impression that in some way it was searching, searching—for goodness knows what.” He fidgeted again. “Hume developed exactly the same notion, but expressed it better.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That it made him think of pigeons circling while they get their bearings. Science doesn’t know how pigeons take bearings, much less incorporate the same faculty in a machine.”

  “Our science might not,” agreed Reed, smoothly. “But what other-wordly science could do is quite another matter."

  “I realize that. I’ve pondered it a thousand times. It's one of those notions which are irritating because they're both plausible and potty. For what could such a thing be searching ? What bearings could it want?"

  “It is difficult even to hazard a guess." conceded Professor Reed. “It has been gone a couple of weeks now, hasn't it? Unless it has stopped, or at least paused on its way, it should have travelled a fair distance by this time.”

  He mused a moment. “I've some strange data which we've dug out of those cabinets. It is extremely interesting and highly suggestive, in fact it points to conclusions well-nigh incredible. But first answer me one more question. About those sensitive points built into the skin of the vessel; would you say they were solely photosensitive or might they not also have reacted to variation of gravitational strains in the cosmic field?"

  “Ah, you may have something there!" Bradley leaned forward. “I've thought of that no more than vaguely. If we'd been instructed on the functional technique of the ship's apparatus we could have checked against the solar traverse, or the lunar for that matter. But without that essential knowledge we were unable to check up. We checked on photosensitivity merely by making relays snap over, but that's as far as we could get."

  “Quite, quite." Reed opened a drawer in his desk, took out some papers and riffled through them. “We've dragged those cabinets, to bits, Bradley. Their interior apparatus was very wonderfully made; indeed, they were beautiful examples of scientific craftsmanship. They were controls and recorders of various kinds, all employing most ingenious and delicate relay systems based on master tapes of peculiar design. Here is a piece of such tape."

  He handed over a long, springy strip of silvery metal two inches wide by six feet long. Examining it, Bradley found it light, tough and flexible. There was a tiny saucer-shaped indentation near one end, another and smaller one a few inches from it, and yet another, much larger than either, at the other end of the strip.

  “We found four very big reels of such tape, and it took all the brains of a number of us finally to deduce their purposes. In fact, we had to call in some London recording technicians and some experts from the Automatic Telephone Company, before we could get to the bottom of the mystery."

  “You intrigue me," said Bradley eagerly.

  “This ship, we found, was controlled by three factors, two known, one unknown. The two known factors were two of these ingenious tapes. The then unknown factor, it now seems, was your robot.” His beard bristled with enthusiasm as he went on. "Unbelievable as it may be, the evidence shows most definitely that this vessel was deliberately launched upon an immense orbit, an ellipse so inconceivably vast that for all we know it may have encompassed much of this island universe. The guiding factors in one tape controlled the ship through the known part of the cosmos until its orbit was set, after which it coasted along that orbit, occasionally reacting when the proximity of orbit-deflecting bodies affected its sensitive cells either by light or by gravitation.”

  "It fits the facts,” Bradley endorsed. "The ship looked as if it had experienced a centuries-long journey.”

  "Now, the second tape recorded what I might call the calculated future factors. It was another master control, the purpose of which was to make the ship blow out of its orbit and steer itself in immediately it entered a part of the cosmos in which those future factors operated. In other words, its function reversed that of the first tape; it was a homing device designed to correct long maintained aberrations and bring the vessel to its destination.”

  And what of the other two tapes?” Bradley found his pipe and sucked at it without bothering to light it.

  "They were recorders. They noted the previously unknown factors encountered through the whole of the immense orbit, one on the outward journey, one on the inward. This vessel described a mighty ellipse during which it travelled for countless years, countless centuries. Heaven alone knows how long it travelled or how far it went, but those who built it knew thoroughly, and just as thoroughly recorded, their own section of the cosmos as it was then—and also calculated and recorded a part of the future cosmos coinciding with the vessel’s timed arrival.” "The ship itself was proof that their inventiveness was far ahead of ours,” commented Bradley.

  "Their inventiveness knew no bounds!” Professor Reed declared, a note of genuine admiration in his voice. "Doubtless they first explored the cosmos with telescopes far more powerful than ours, but these were not enough. So they developed spaceships, which gradually improved and explored farther and farther into the void.

  "Then at last they came up against the obstacle which faces all forms of life—the great handicap of their own mortality* Now they could build a spaceship capable of travelling for a thousand years, but alas t its crew could not survive one tenth as long. Were they beaten? No, they would not accept defeat! They built themselves a charting vessel, fully automatic and incredibly ingenious, and they made for it a one-man crew who came ten steps nearer to immortality—your robot!”

  “Yes, the robot,” Bradley echoed, wistfully. “I wish we’d been able to pick whatever he used for brains.”

  “It looks as if the robot had three prime functions,” Reed went on, “and it was the most potent item in this stupendous epic. It controlled the actual take-off until the master tapes stepped in, and later it regained command from the tapes and controlled the actual landing. Between these two functions it slumbered for eons. With all their incredible ingenuity, the builders could no more than closely approximate the ship’s cosmic destination, so upon the robot they placed the responsibility of landing the ship safely. And upon their master tape they indented the sign necessary to revive the robot.

  “But, as I said, the robot had a third function. Your story confirms it beyond all doubt.” Reed took off his pince-nez, spoke slowly and deliberately. “Upon him lay the duty of returning to his superiors and leading them back to the ship. George has gone home to report!”

  Bradley shot to his feet. “Ye gods! Are you suggesting that the ship came from this world, from our own world?”

  “It is not a suggestion. It is a fact! We could hardly credit it ourselves, but four eminent and responsible astronomers have endorsed the diagnosis of another equally eminent. We submitted to this last expert the inward and outward tapes, our idea being that he might be able to deduce from them something that had escaped our minds.

  “Look at that piece of tape in your hands. N
ote that its three indentations are of varying diameters and are sunk to varying depths. They are also biased off-center by varying amounts and their spacing is uneven. According to astronomical experts, all these peculiar features coincide exactly with the varying diameters, masses, planes to the ecliptic and mean orbital distances from the Sun of the planets from Earth outwards.”

  “This is really amazing!” Fingering the tape, Bradley found himself more than a little awed by the wisdom of its makers.

  “That’s not all,” continued Reed. He replaced his pince-nez, consulted his papers, frowning to himself as his listener began to pace restlessly up and down the room. “The great time gap makes the inward tape differ from the outward, as might be expected. But there is one feature which is strange indeed—both tapes record a planet between Mars and Jupiter!”

  Bradley abruptly ceased his pacing. A protest, he felt, was needed. “The implication being that the vessel left Earth before the Asteroid Belt was formed? Well, I can’t believe it!"

  “Nevertheless the characteristics of those two particular indentations correspond with modern theories of such a planet’s size, mass and orbit. These were a wonderful people, Bradley, who have sent us a relic of the days when men were like gods. They’ve sent us an enormous chart of a cross-section of the cosmos—and we don’t know which cross-section it is. I doubt whether we shall ever know. For all their mighty godhood, those people couldn’t foresee the disruption of a now non-existent planet, nor their proxy’s fate as he landed the ship in his last feeble flutter of radium-primed energy. They could not foresee our modern impotence, nor the great disaster which would plunge them into the depths from which we are still climbing.” His tone became reverent. “But they were a great people, and very wonderful!"