Claypool nodded bleakly.
But Ironsmith would never be an ally—that was starkly clear. He had always liked the humanoids too well. Human beyond doubt, he still had turned against humanity. What price, Claypool wondered bitterly, had he paid for his special freedom?
Pondering that dark riddle, Claypool began to wish that the other had turned out to be a disguised mechanical, after all. That would have been a simple, clear solution. But the unknown truth behind Ironsmith’s pink and genial grin seemed darker and more ominous to him now than any humanoid.
“Until dinner, then.” Ironsmith murmured affably. “We’ll go down to the coast—the mechanicals have built a new place for me there, but so many things have happened that I’ve never found the time to move.” He nodded cheerfully at the shabby old room behind him. “Anyhow, I’m pretty well contented here.”
Graciously, Ironsmith held the door. Claypool drove himself out. He glanced back uneasily, past the two blind benign machines, at the waiting chessmen. Clammy-fingered dread touched his spine again.
Who, he wondered, was Ironsmith’s chess opponent?
TO BE CONTINUED.
Part II
Originally published in the April 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
A handful of strange, abnormal people who alone could fight the terrible over-helpful mass of the robots—with a child as their strongest fighter to free humanity!
Synopsis:
Dr. Webb Clay pool was only a distinguished astrophysicist, when the Crater Supernova flamed out in the sky. He and Ruth were on their honeymoon, the night he first saw it, but he broke off their plans and hurried back to Starmont to make his observations. Ruth cried over it, and never understood. But he studied the cruel sudden splendor of the star, and found the clue he wanted—to the new science of rhodomagnetics.
That new science created Project Thunderbolt—a secret weapon whose self-guided missiles detonate matter into destructive energy. It also wrecked his digestion and slowly blighted his happiness with Ruth, because Project Thunderbolt became an intolerable burden.
Claypool was at work on those planet-shattering missiles in the hidden underground launching station at Starmont, when a little girl spoke to him, and handed him an unexpected invitation to call on one “A. White, Philosopher.”
The child escaped, without explaining how she had entered that secret arsenal, through the locked and guarded gates. Baffled, Claypool obeyed instructions in the note, to visit the abandoned Dragonrock Light. There he found the child, Dawn Hall, with White and three other students of psychophysics. White was a huge, red-bearded, angry man, grimly waging a strange war.
Dawn, White explained, came to Starmont by teleportation. Graystone, an alcoholic stage magician, is a telepath. Overstreet, rescued from a mental hospital, is clairvoyant. Lucky Ford, a shrewd-eyed little gambler, was manipulating his dice by telekinesis. White had gathered and trained this singular group, for his desperate crusade.
He was fighting the humanoids.
The humanoids. White warned Clay pool, are small android mechanicals, driven and controlled by rhodomagnetic beams from the relay grid of a central mechanical brain on the far planet Wing IV. They were made to stop war. But their maker, an engineer named Sledge, built them too well.
“They’re too efficient,” White told him. “Too perfect, and too benevolent. They have spread front world to world, across the inhabited sections of the Galaxy, forever blindly obedient to the Prime Directive—To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm.”
Overstreet’s prevision, White warned him, had seen the humanoids coming here next—to protect this planet from the technological crisis caused by such discoveries as Claypool’s. White had been developing mental weapons to fight the humanoids, but they were net enough, and he needed a rhodomagnetic engineer.
Claypool refused to join him, however, because of his responsibilities at Project Thunderbolt, and the new mechanicals arrived in their great interstellar ships from Wing IV. At first they were welcomed, but when Claypool returns to Starmont after they are established, he finds bitter disillusionment.
His precious observatory has been demolished, because the over-zealous mechanicals rule that scientific research is now too dangerous for human beings. His wife, Ruth, has been given euphoride, a drug of forgetfulness, because she seemed unhappy. When Claypool protests, the humanoid suggests that he will be happier if they remove his own memory—for men now have no need to remember.
The secret of Project Thunderbolt has been kept from the humanoids. Now, Claypool resolves, he must reach the concealed vault under the old search building, to fire a planet-smashing missile at Wing IV and so free men from the smothering care of the new mechanicals.
Appalling difficulties face him, however. The watchful, blind machines, quicker and stronger than any man, never leave him for an instant. All the civilian technicians who used to man the project have been drugged with euphoride and sent away.
Desperately in search of aid, Claypool finds only one man left at Starmont. That is Frank Ironsmith, the brilliant but cheerily indolent young mathematician who had been employed in the computing section to do the laborious routine calculations for the observatory and the military projects. But Ironsmith, oddly, seems to like the humanoids.
And the little machines unaccountably exempt Ironsmith from their suffocating care. They even let him smoke his pipe—though Claypool has been told that fire is too dangerous for human use, and tobacco too injurious.
Ironsmith rides alone about the mountain on his rusty bicycle, and lives alone in his shabby old rooms at the computing section. Claypool visits him there, bitterly envious of his inexplicable freedom, and sees chessmen set up in an unfinished game—with no opponent visible.
Reluctantly, Claypool abandons his first shocking suspicion that Ironsmith is really a disguised mechanical. He fails to understand Ironsmith’s apparent contentment, or his unfair freedom. Baffled and shaken, he abandons all hope of getting any help from Ironsmith.
Who, he wonders, is Ironsmith’s chess opponent?
XII.
Frank Ironsmith was a friend of the mechanicals, and, therefore, an enemy. Yet he was still a man, among all these too-perfect and too-benevolent machines. Claypool was sorry to leave his cheery, sunburned grin, and the comfortable little island of familiar things that he had preserved in the midst of all this bright, bewildering newness.
With his two black keepers dose behind, Claypool came reluctantly down the narrow gravel path, through the old familiar evergreens. Sick with an envious longing, he paused to look back at the old, red-shingled building where Ironsmith lived, with its familiar wooden door that a man could open.
Ahead was a sea of strangeness.
Instead of common gravel, there were smooth new walks, too level and too straight, made of something that yielded warmly to the feet. Instead of the old evergreens, there was that rank new garden of queerly writhing weirdness. Instead of the proud, aluminum-colored dome of his old observatory, the great new villa stood blue-and-golden in the sun a splendid, spacious prison.
A sudden panic took hold of his throat, when he saw once more how all of Starmont had been transformed. Walking unwillingly between his keepers, he let his anxious gaze range northward.
He tried to find the squat old concrete building of the search project, which had been set up to conceal Project Thunderbolt. But he saw that it would be hidden from him now behind the long amber walls of the villa—if it still stood.
For he was seized with a suffocating dread, that the busy machines might have razed the old search building, in the course of their reconstruction, and so stumbled upon the rock-hewn vault which held the secret weapon. But he dared not even turn aside, to look again—his blind keepers were too close and too watchful. Shuffling forlornly between them, he must have betrayed his sharp unease.
“You do not appear very happy, sir,” pealed a sudden golden voice. “Perhaps you need euphoride, to help you forget—”
“No, I’m happy—quite!” he interrupted hastily. He wet his lips, and gulped at the dusty roughness in his throat. “It’s just that things are different, now. A man needs time to think.”
“Men no longer need to think.” Claypool shuddered from that cheery purr. For he had to think out a way to reach that buried vault alone, and press the key to smash Wing IV and stop the humanoids. Clearly, he could expect no help from Ironsmith—even that dinner invitation, he suspected bleakly, might turn out to be some kind of trap. No possible aid was left. Unless—
His plodding steps halted suddenly.
“At your service, sir,” whined the machine beside him. “Has something disturbed you, sir?”
He caught his breath, and made himself move on. The sharp conflict of hope and terror made a hard tightness in his fluttering stomach. Blood pumped loud against his ears. He walked on for a dozen yards, before he dared trust his voice.
“No, I’m quite all right”—he kicked at a pebble on the gravel path, to show his unconcern—“but a man needs to talk to his friends. I’ve just thought of an old acquaintance I’d like to see. I wonder if you can find him for me?”
“What is the name, sir?”
“White. Mr. A. White.” Claypool’s voice came too high, and he paused to frown as if with effort. “I don’t remember his last address, but he was living somewhere on the west coast. A big, blue-eyed man, with a thick red beard. A professional philosopher. I’d like to find him.”
Yet he decided to say nothing, of the old Dragonrock Light, where he had gone to see White and his strange disciples. For they might be hiding there still, seeking their weapons of the mind to turn against the humanoids, and he didn’t want to betray them. He turned to watch the small machine.
It stood frozen. The sun struck its sleek blackness into molten bronze and frosty blue. Its eyes were smooth steel orbs, opaque and blind and yet alert. He shivered inwardly. For Ironsmith had been with him at Dragonrock and heard White’s plans. Had he sold out White, to buy his freedom?
He waited, and the machine answered:
“There is no such individual among the men we serve on this planet, sir.”
Then he felt a difference in the sleek humanoid. Its narrow silicone face was still mildly astonished and intently benign. Its voice was still golden music, its steel eyes still blind. Yet he felt a new taut something, a veiled and dangerous intensity which frightened him.
“On other planets, however,” it purred gently, “we have several times encountered a very large man, who always wore a thick red beard and often called himself a philosopher and sometimes used the name White. His present whereabouts are unknown, because he took part in an unwise attack against Wing IV, and fled when it failed.”
Claypool felt that hidden alertness tighten.
“Where did you know this man, sir s” murmured the machine. “And when?”
With a careful unconcern, Claypool kicked the pebble again.
“I never knew him well.” He paused to control his voice, and tried to undo his blunder. “I met him at some scientific gathering on the west coast, when he read a paper on his philosophy. That was a number of years ago.”
He felt that searching attention relax.
“Then the man we seek is a different Mr. White,” the machine whined sweetly, “because he last escaped us only three months ago, on a planet four light-years from here.
But he is unhappy, and he needs our care.”
Claypool walked on again, deliberately.
He hoped his blundering inquiry wouldn’t be fatal to White, because this revelation gave that red-bearded giant a new heroic stature in his eyes. White loomed tremendous now, the last tragic champion of all men against the humanoids. But Claypool dared not try again to reach him, for one more ill-judged query might betray him.
Conscious of the two alert machines beside him, Claypool stooped desperately to pick a tattered yellow bloom from a weed beside the path. Its pollen made him sneeze, but he eyed it with a resolute pretense of casual interest, and walked on toward the villa.
Hopefully, he looked for the old search building again. Still he couldn’t see it, but his narrow shoulders stiffened stubbornly, and he tossed the yellow weed defiantly away. He had found no hope of aid, but he didn’t mean to quit.
The humanoids had to be stopped!
Back at the villa, he let the trim machines guide him through the two vast wings. He tried to appear delighted with all the mechanical wonders of that stately and commodious prison. Vast crystal windows turned opaque or luminous at need. Roofless gardens were tropical with radiation heat. The kitchen was an antiseptic laboratory. And every device, he bitterly observed, was worked by rhodomagnetic Relays, concealed from human reach.
Restless as any trapped animal, he wandered on.
He didn’t like the swaying, nightmarish half-plants in the sunken garden beyond the villa. Their hot rankness made him sneeze, and turned him faint with illness. But he walked on around them, with a determined show of curiosity, just to reach a spot from which he might see the old search building.
He scarcely dared to look, even when he was near enough. For his two little keepers were always too near, their blind steel eyes too alert, their black handsome faces too impassively kind. His knees felt weak, and his breath came too fast again.
But he turned to climb a little rocky point, near the lip of the basalt precipice which dropped straight from the flat crown of the mountain to the talus slope and the desert, nine hundred feet below.
“At your service, sir.” A tiny mechanical glided silently to block his path, lustrous in the sunlight and ruthlessly benign. “It is too dangerous, sir, for you to go so near the edge.”
He nodded, not protesting. Assuming an idle interest in the flat brown waste beyond the tumbled debris of six-sided basalt prisms, he let his gaze slide northward. Carefully casual, he swept a jutting buttress of the mountain, and the flat slope above.
The old squat building stood intact!
He made his anxious eyes move on instantly, away from the flat ugly dome of it. Yet he had time enough to see that the tall steel fence and the guard towers of the old military installation had been torn down. There was nothing to keep him from the building—nothing except the humanoids.
He stood looking out across that tawny waste with its white slashes of dry washes and wrinkles of far brown mountains, not seeing anything. Five minutes would see the end of the humanoids, he thought, once he got into that building alone.
A heavy rumbling vibration drew his glance again. He looked past the low gray building, careful that his eyes didn’t pause. And he found the excavating machine.
A monstrous mechanism, it held his gaze, and checked his heart. The whole mountain shuddered beneath it. The clean, functional lines of its armored case gave it a kind of ominous beauty. Red enamel and white metal glittered painfully under the desert sun. Its massive jaws rumbled, crushing stone.
On immense slow tracks, it was creeping through the flattened ruin of the old guard barracks. Its huge shining blades were slicing the grassy mountain crown into a long red dike of raw soil and broken stone. The search building, he saw, would stand in its way.
He tried to conceal his instant alarm, but the intent mechanical beside him must have followed his eyes and half his thoughts, for it purred apologetically:
“Unfortunately, the landscaping of Starmont is not quite complete, sir. The dense substratum, under the north end of the grounds has delayed the work, but it should all be finished in a few days, sir. We are going to remove all the old military buildings, and excavate the entire area for a pool.”
Claypool contrived a bleak smile. “That’s wonderful.” He dared not protest that he didn’t want a pool, although he could see that this huge slow mechanism would soon smash through the old search building and uncover the installation beneath it. He must strike soon— or never. Faintly, he managed to say:
“We used to swim every summer. Ruth and I.”
Gently the humanoid reminded him, “Swimming is forbidden now.” He couldn’t help retorting bitterly, “For Ironsmith, too?”
For an instant, it stood completely motionless. The driving sun struck and flowed in molten metallic sheens over its shining blackness. Claypool bit his lip, afraid his words had revealed too much of his own taut and bitter anxiety.
“Mr. Ironsmith,” the mechanical droned abruptly, “has earned a different status.”
“How?”
The graceful black machine stood frozen again, for long intolerable seconds. Its dark benevolent face regarded him with a faintly astonished vigilance. Suddenly its clear voice pealed:
“At your service, sir. Such questions tend to show unhappiness, and now we observe that you are squinting. This sunlight is too bright for your eyes. You should return to your dwelling and eat your lunch”
Claypool put up a. thin and desperate hand to shade his eyes, fumbling for a ruse. Perhaps he could manufacture some excuse to send one of his keepers away, and then knock out the other with a rock—better, push it off the cliff. Perhaps he could reach the search building, before the others came. Perhaps—
“The sun’s pretty bright,” he admitted cheerfully. “But I’m not hungry yet, and I want to see the rest of the grounds.” He peered hopefully at his nearest, keeper. “So, if you’ll just go back to the house and bring me a pair of sue glasses—”
The machine didn’t move.
“At your service, sir,” it whined. “Another unit will bring your glasses and a parasol.”
“Fine,” he muttered. “Very fine indeed!”
He walked on again, obliquely toward the low concrete building, keeping as near the brink of the precipice as his guards would allow. He began picking little blue wild flowers, looking for a likely stone.
He found one at last, and his fingers closed on it. He tried to cover it with the flowers he had picked. His muscles tightened, and his heart thumped painfully. He knew that he would have to be fast, that the fate of man was in his grasp—
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 15
