The Human Zero and Other Science-Fiction Masterpieces

by Sam Moskowitz

  Before Bradley could comment, the door opened and Hume came in. He was holding a copy of the evening paper.

  "George again, believe it or not,” he said. "He scared some Irish in County Cork. He emerged from the sea, gyrated on the beach before a hundred amazed spectators, then went back into the ocean.”

  "He's going home,” declared Professor Reed, positively. He stroked his short beard. To him, the robot's lonely march was a grand and plausible saga—and he was right.

  Two months later George was rumored to have been seen near the Panama Canal, but investigators were never able to gain positive confirmation of this. The whole world watched for George; ships at sea sought news of him and men in lonely outposts wondered whether his mysterious trail would run their way.

  Four more months rolled by before the robot made his final bow to the world of men. His leaden sheen came from the greeny depths of the secretive and laughing ocean, and his tracks clanked tiredly up the beach of a fertile atoll three hundred miles from Easter Island. Beneath the torrid sun, he stopped and rotated, his extended arms questing, questing, questing ... for no man knew what.

  Having Confirmed his direction, he ceased to revolve and paused awhile as if in brooding thought. Then he made straight across the atoll, using native paths and deftly evading rare obstructions. A few Polynesians saw him as determinedly he toiled onward, and in them stirred strange ancestral memories that said he was taboo. They wailed in sorrow for a sorrow they did not know, and hid themselves from his sightless sight.

  His route across the atoll made a direct pointer to distant Easter Island or to some submerged land in its vicinity. He paused again on the opposite shore of the atoll and stood with his tracks at rest while once more he faced the jeering sea. Perhaps he was puzzled by the sheer ubiquity of the ocean. He rotated again, just to make, sure, and the ocean waited for him as if time and destiny were on its side.

  Stopping his gyrations, his arms still widely stretched, the robot tracked slowly into the embracing waves. Parakeets screeched harsh protests as he sank into the vast waste of waters and still moved, more slowly, through groves of living coral.

  The faithful servant was returning to the Lemurians' fathers' fathers.

  I, Rocket

  by Ray Bradbury

  At the rate things are coming and going it’ll take a few hundred years to break me down into rust and corrosion. Maybe longer. In the meantime I’ll have many days and nights to think it all over. You can’t stop atoms from revolving and humming their life-orbits inside metal. That’s how metal lives its own special life. That’s how metal thinks.

  Where I lie is a barren, pebbled plateau, touched here and there with pale weedy growths, a few hunched trees coming up out of planetoid rock.

  There’s a wind comes over the plateau every morning. There’s rain conies in the twilight, and silence comes down even closer in the night. That’s my whole life now, lying here with my jets twisted and my fore-plates bashed.

  Somehow I feel I haven’t fulfilled my destiny In toto. A rocket ship isn’t built to lie on a hard gray plateau in the wind and rain—alone. After those trips through space it’s almost too much to believe, that the rest of my days will be wasted here—

  But while I’m rusting and wondering I can think it all over. How I came to be here, how I came to be built. . . .

  I've taken them all in their time, the crew; seen them wounded, crushed by centrifuge, or shattered by space-bombs; and once or twice I’ve had my rear-jets pounded off in a double-fisted foray: there’s hardly a plate in my hull hasn’t been welded again and again, not a chronometer in my control console hasn’t been blasted and replaced.

  But the hardest thing of all was replacing the men inside me. The little guys who ran around with greasy faces, yelling and fighting for air, and getting their guts frozen to their peritoneum every time I swung into an unexpected arc during the days when free gravity was experimental.

  The little guys were hard to find, harder to replace after a particularly violent thrust between worlds. I loved the little guys, the little guys loved me. They kept me shining like a nickel moon, nursed me, petted me, and beat me when I deserved it.

  From the very first I wanted to be of some help in the wild excursions from Earth to Deimos-Phobos coordinate Bases, the war moons held by Earth to strike against the Martians.

  My birth-period, and the Base where I was integrated, skeleton, skin and innards, went through the usual birth-pains. It is a dim portion in my memory, but when the final hull was melted to me, the last rungway and console fitted to my hulk, the awareness was there. A metal awareness The free electrical atom flow of metal come aware.

  I could think and could tell nobody that I thought.

  I was a war rocket. Fore and aft they placed their space-artillery nozzles, and weighted me with scarlet ammunition. I began to feel my purpose, expectantly, perhaps a bit impatiently.

  I wasn’t really alive yet. .1 was like a child half out of the womb, but not yet breathing or making any sound or making any movement. I was wailing for the slap on the back to give me strength and directed purpose.

  “Hurry it up, hurry it up! Skip!” directed the munitions-lieutenant, standing by my opened airlocks that day so many years ago. Sunlight baked my metal as men hustled in and out with small rubber-tired trucks bearing the tetron space explosives. “We’ve got a war to meet!” cried the lieutenant.

  The men hurried.

  There was some fancy bit of business about a christening going on simultaneously with this scurrying about in my cargo cubicles. Some mayor from some city crashed a bottle of foaming liquor on my prow. A few reporters flicked their cameras and a small crowd put up their hands, waved them a fraction and put them down again, as if they realized how stupid it really was, wasting that fine champagne.

  It was then and there I saw the captain, Metal bless him, for the first time. He came running across the field. The Master of my Fate, the Captain of my Soul. I liked him right off. He was short and whipped out of wrinkled hard brown leather, with green, implacable diamond eyes set in that hard leather, and a slit of white uneven teeth to show to anybody who disobeyed. He stomped into the airlock and set his clipping boots down and I knew I had my master. Small tight knuckle bones and wrists told that, and the way he made fists and the quick, smooth manner in which he cracked out the orders of the day:

  “Snap it!” he said. “Get rid of that damned mayor out there! Clear apron! sea! the locks, clamp ports and we’ll push the hell out of here! ”

  Yes, I liked him. His name was Lamb; ironic for a man lacking lamblike qualities. Captain Lamb, who threw his voice around inside me and made me like the steel edge to it. It was a. voice like silk-covered brass knucks. It flowed like water, but burned like acid.

  They rapped me tight. They expelled the mayor and his splintered champagne bottle, which by now now seemed childish. Sirens shouted across the base apron. The crew did things to my alimentary canal. Twenty-seven of them.

  Captain Lamb shouted.

  That was the slap on the back that brought me my first breath, my first sound, my first movement. Lamb pounded me into living.

  I threw out wings of fire and powder and air. The captain was yelling, snuggled in his crash-hammock, zippered up to his sharp chin; men were swaying, sweating in all their suspensory control hammocks. Quite suddenly I wasn't just metal lying in the sun any more. I was the damnedest biggest bird that ever sang into the sky. Maybe my voice wasn’t anything but thunder, but it was still singing to me. I sang loud and I sang long.

  This was the first time I had been outside the hangar and the base to see the world.

  I was surprised to find that it was round.

  As adolescence is to man, his days from thirteen to eighteen when overnight his viewpoints are radically reformed, so it was with my first plunge into space. Life was thrown at me in one solid piece. All of the life I would ever know was given to me without apprenticeship, suckling or consideration. I had grow
ing pains. There were stresses, forces attacking me from all sides simultaneously, feelings, impressions I had never considered possible. The solid understandable gravity of Earth was suddenly taken away and the competition of space gravities each tried their luck with me.

  The moon, and after the moon a thousand dark meteors crashing by, silent. Tides of space itself, indescribable, and the urge of stars and planets. And then a thing called momentum when my jets were cut and I moved without breathing or trying to move.

  Captain Lamb sat in the control room, cracking his knuckles. “She’s a good ship. A fine ship. We’ll pound the holy marrow out of those Martians.”

  The young man by the name of Conrad sat beside the captain at the duo-control. “We’d better,” he said anxiously. “There’s a girl waiting in York Port for us to come back.”

  The captain scowled. “Both of you?” You and Hillary?”

  Conrad laughed. “The two of us. Both on the same war-rocket, going to the fray. At least I can keep my eye on that drunkard this way. I’ll know he’s not down in York Port scudding along on my acceleration. . .” Captain Lamb usually said all his words quick, fast, like lines of mercury. “Space is a funny place to talk about love. Funny place to talk about anything. It’s like laughing out loud in a big cathedral, or trying to make a waltz out of a hymn.”

  “Lo, the sentimentalist,” remarked Conrad.

  Lamb jerked. He scowled at himself. “Lo, the damned fool,” he said, and got up to measure the control room with his little strides.

  They were part of me. Lamb, Conrad and the crew. Like blood pulsing in the arteries of a warm body, like leucocytes and bacteria and the fluid that sustains them—air—locomoting through my chambers into my heart, my driving engines, feeding my livened appetites, never knowing that they were only units of energy like corpuscles giving a greater mass—myself—nourishment, life, and drive.

  Like any body—there were microbes. Destroying elements. Disease, as well as the sentinal leucocytes.

  We had one job to do. I knew of this. To fend off the ever increasing attacks against earth’s Phobos-Deimos citadels. I felt tension spreading, growing as each day went by. There was too much cigarette smoking, lip biting, swearing among the crew-members. Big things lay ahead.

  The microbes within my body were in a small dosage; but virulent because they moved free, unchecked, unsuspected. Their names were Anton Larion and Leigh Belloc. I refer to them as bacteria simply because, like microscopic forms in a large body, their function was to poison and destroy me. And the best way to render me inactive would be the destruction of part of my red-blood. That meant Captain Lamb. Or part of his technical war-staff. Larion and Belloc planned for their poisoning, quietly, carefully.

  Self-preservation is an eternal, all-encompassing thing. You find it in metal as you find it in amoebas; you find it in metal as you find it in men. My body would be attacked. From outside I feared nothing. From inside 1 was uncertain. Coming from an unexpected quarter that attack might kill me so very soon after my birth. I didn’t approve of the idea.

  I went through space toward Mars. I couldn’t speak.

  I could only feel voice-vibrations throughout my length. The voices of Hillary and Conrad arguing about their woman named Alice in York Port, and the captain snapping at the heels of his crew when we hit the asteroid-skirt, and then the subtle undercurrent of poison stirring in the midst of this— Larion and Belloc—their voices touched my hull:

  “You’re familiar with the plan, Belloc; I don’t want you turning silly at the crisis.”

  “I know what to do. Don’t worry. What the hell.”

  “All right, I’m just explaining. Now —as far as killing Captain Lamb, that’s out. We’re only two against twenty-four others. I want to be alive to collect that money we’re guaranteed, for this—work.”

  “Logically, then—the engines. . . .”

  “I’m in favor of it, if you are. This is a war-rocket; spare parts, excess cargo, all that’s eliminated for speed. Timebombs should work miracles with the main jet-engines. And when it happens we can be out and away in space in plenty of time?”

  “When?”

  “During the next shift of crew relief. There’s a certain amount of inescapable confusion then. Half the crew’s too tired to worry, the other half is just turning out, groggy.”

  “Sounds okay. Huh. It seems a damn shame though, in a way.”

  “What?”

  “Nice new rocket, never tested before. Revolutionary design. I never enjoyed working on engines before, until I got my station with this jaloppy. She’s sweet. Those engines-—-sweet as the guts of a flower. And it all goes to hell before it has a chance to prove itself.”

  “You’ll get paid for it. What else do you want?”

  “Yeah, I’ll get paid, won’t I? Yeah.”

  “Shut up, then. Come on.”

  The routine circulation of crew-blood through the arteries of the ship took Larien and Belloc below to their stations in the fuel and engine cubicles. The poison was in my heart, waiting.

  What went on inside my metal is not to be described. There are no similes, comparatives for the hard, imprisoned, frustrated vibrations that surge through tongueless durasteel. The rest of the blood in me was still good, still untouched and untainted and tireless.

  “Captain.” A salute.

  “Belloc.” Lamb returned the salute. “Larion.”

  “Captain.”

  “Going below?” said the captain.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be down in-” Lamb eyed his wrist watch. “Make it thirty minutes. We’ll check the auxiliaries together, Belloc.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Go on down, then.”

  Belloc and Larion descended.

  Lamb walked quickly into the computation cube and struck up a rapid word exchange with young Ayres. Ayres, who looked like he was barely out of blushing and floppy hair and semantics school, and still not shaving as often as the others. His pink face glowed when the captain was around. They got on like grandfather and grandson.

  They probed charts together. When they finished, Lamb walked off the yardage in the computation room, scowling, examining his boots. Ayres computated.

  Lamb paused, looked out the visual-port concernedly. After a moment he said, “When I was a very little kid I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and I thought I’d seen everything there was to see—” A pause. “And now I’ve got my first captaincy, and—” he patted the hull of my body quietly “—a fine first rate lady of a ship.” Quick, to Ayres: “What are you, Ayres?”

  Startled, Ayres blinked. “Me, sir?” The captain stood with his strong, small back to Ayres, inspecting the stars as if they were a celestial regiment under his personal say-so. “Yes. I mean religion,” he explained.

  “Oh.” Ayres pulled his right earlobe with finger and thumb, musing. “I was a first class agnostic. Graduated, or should I say demoted? From an Atheist academy.”

  The captain kept looking at the stars. “You use the word ‘was,’ Ayres. You emphasize that word.”

  Ayres half-smiled. “Sure. I mean— yes, sir. But this is my first trip, sir, so that changes things.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes it does, sir.”

  The captain rocked casually on his heels. “How’s that, Ayres?”

  “You know the tale as well as I, sir. It’s an old tale. And a good one, I might add. To put it one way: ‘A Baptist is an atheist who took a trip to the Moon.’ ”

  “That holds true for Methodists, Episcopalians and Holy Rollers, doesn’t it?”

  “It does, sir.”

  The captain made a noise that sounded like laughter. “We’re all the same. Every damned one of us, Ayres. Hard-shelled God-fighters, good and true, when we’re home in Brooklyn and Waushawkee. Take away land and gravity, though, and we’re babes, undiapered and crying in a long dark night. Hell, there’s not a man rocketing today who isn’t religious, Ayres!” “Are yo
u religious, Captain?”

  Lamb closed his mouth, looked out the port straight ahead. He raised one small-boned hand, spreading it in a measured movement. “It’s always the same, Ayres. The first trip converts us. The very first trip. All you have to do is stand here for fifteen minutes or half an hour looking at space, feeling how insignificant you are flying around like a gnat in the middle of it, looking at those damned wonderful stars, and first thing you know you’re down on your knees, crying your eyes out, with a hot stomach, a wild head and a humble attitude forever after.” Lamb pulled back from himself suddenly, snapped around, stalked to a down-ladder, grabbed a rung and glared at Ayres. “'And so,” he pointed out, “you’ll notice that I never look at the stars too long! I’ve a ship to run—no time for it. And in case you believe all I tell you—go to hell! I should demerit you for questioning a superior!” Lamb dropped down the rungs like a weight.

  Ayres sat there a moment, trying to computate. After a while he looked up at the star-port. His eyes dilated very dark and wide. He stood up. He walked across the computation room and stood there, staring out. He looked like he was listening to music. His lips moved.

  “What did the Cap say? Stand here fifteen minutes or half an hour? Why, hell—” He bent his knees until they touched the deck. “I got the Cap’s time beat all hollow!”

  Good blood. Good leucocyte. Good Ayres.

  Mars come up ahead, the first really intense gravity I had felt since leaving earth and moon behind. It came up like a ruddy drop of dried blood on the void. Mass is the sexual drive of space, and gravity the intensified yearning of that mass, the gravitic libido of one tremendous body for the love, the following of any and all smaller bodies who transgress its void boundaries. I have heard the simple men within me speak of a planet as one speaks of a queen bee. The ultimate gravity toward which all smaller gravities and bodies yearn. Merciless harlot, mating with all, leading all on to destruction. Queen bee followed by the swarms. And now I was part of a swarm, the first of many yet to follow, answering the urge of one gravity, refusing another.