The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  “You blundering fool, Claypool!” Lower now, his voice reflected neither hate nor anger, but only an infinite shocked regret. He came up to them, and his sick, pitying eyes fell to the rigid, staring child.

  “Now look what you have done!”

  XXII.

  For an instant Claypool stood heartsick and shaken, swaying on that narrow footway which was meant for sure machines. Fighting a sudden giddiness, he shrank back from the shadowy chasms of the metal brain. Hushed and unimaginable energies seemed to roar around him, a silent hurricane.

  “I tried to warn you, Claypool.”

  He heard that shocked and saddened reproof, and blinked unbelievingly at Frank Ironsmith—who should have been idling at Starmont, reading his books and playing his chess, riding his cycle and chewing his gum and playing around with his math.

  Cut this startling intruder was changed, somehow, from that lank and callow youth in the computing section, brilliant and indolent, amusing himself with new geometries instead of crossword puzzles. Youthful still, he looked leaner and liner and browner, older and sobered.

  “Because we can’t allow—”

  He was interrupted, by Claypool’s savage lunge.

  For a desperate resolution had overcome Claypool’s dizzy sickness. Another five minutes, he knew, would be enough to change the relay sections, to amend the Prime Directive and set men free. He didn’t intend to be stopped.

  He stood empty handed, for he had brought no weapon. Even the heavy pliers had been dropped, in his first alarm. But sudden purpose clenched his fist, and sudden fury drove his lashing blow.

  Darting forward, be forgot all his fear of the black spaces of the brain beneath that narrow path, ail his dread of the blind machines behind him. He remembered only the way Ironsmith had always liked the humanoids, and the unfair freedom he had won, and his treacherous hunt for White.

  But Ironsmith evaded that slashing blow. Smiling sadly, he caught Claypool’s quivering wrist. Quick and strong as any humanoid, he twisted it up and back. Claypool was pinned back against the gray panel faces. He gasped and pulled and tried to strike again, and somehow hurt his injured knee.

  Throbbing pain checked his fury.

  “That’s no use, Claypool.” Ironsmith’s low calm voice held no resentment, but only a gentle regret. “You can only hurt yourself. Because you didn’t let the humanoids complete their treatment of your leg, and you aren’t fit to fight. You may as well give up.”

  Not yet! Claypool shook his head to clear a dull mist of pain. He twisted in Ironsmith’s hard grasp, to ease his arm, and shifted his weight to relieve his throbbing knee. He looked desperately behind him on that perilous walk, and found Dawn Hall. She stood white and stiff with fright, but he knew the power in her.

  He fought his pain, and got his breath.

  “Dawn!” he whispered desperately. “Stop him!”

  Ironsmith twisted back his arm again, with the deft and ruthless skill of a machine. He. had to flinch, and too much weight came on his shuddering knee. But red surging hatred overcame the pain. Chilled with sudden sweat, he gulped for breath and whispered frantically:

  “Stop him, Dawn—like you stopped those machines! Mr. White can show you how. I know you can do it—because he has got potassium in his blood.”

  Cold waves of agony beat him back against the glowing panels of the grid, but still he whispered faintly:

  “Kill him, Dawn! You must— so we can set men free!” He twisted in a tight sheath of pain, and stared through a clotting mist of pain at the child’s fear-distended eyes. “Just find the K-40,” he implored her. “Break the atoms in his blood—Mr. White can show you how!”

  But the little girl shook her head, with a stiff, tiny movement. Her thin face was drained white, and her great staring eyes didn’t seem to see him. Her blue lips moved, as if she tried to whisper. But Claypool heard no sound.

  And nothing happened to Ironsmith.

  Dazed from the shock of that failure, Claypool gave way to his pain. He stopped his useless struggles and Ironsmith mercifully loosened his arm. His throbbing knee yielded suddenly, and he staggered on that unrailed footway, snatching frantically at nothing, until Ironsmith reached out to help him get his balance. He clung to the smooth palladium panels, sobbing weakly for his breath, chilled and pimpled with his pain.

  Dawn shuddered behind him, and spoke:

  “At your service, Dr. Claypool.” He shuddered back from her, numbed and stricken. For now her thin treble voice had a new quality of whining, emotionless melody. It was like the voices of the humanoids.

  “We heard your unwise request, but we cannot injure Mr. Ironsmith.” she said, “because he has kept the Compact. He has defended our relays, from your own unhappy effort to alter the Prime Directive. You are the one who must be restrained, sir.”

  That strange voice stopped, and the child stood motionless as a mechanical not working. Claypool couldn’t even see the stir of her breathing. Distended and dark in her bloodless face, her eyes seemed blank and blind as the steel-colored eyes of the humanoids.

  Even her human fear was gone. For a slow smile was coming over her tiny face—a white, dreamy smile, that he was sick to see. It held no human hope or joy or life. It reflected the serene benevolence of the humanoids. It was mechanical.

  Claypool turned shakenly away from her. His stomach felt cold and queasy, and he was sick with dread of something darker than the cavernous spaces of the unlit grid. He blinked at Ironsmith’s stem regretful face, and croaked his accusation:

  “What have you done to her?”

  “Not I.” Sadly, Ironsmith shook his bare sandy head. “It’s a dreadful thing, I know.” His cool gray eyes rested on the strange, frozen figure of the little girl, and Claypool saw the shocked pity in them. “Unless we’re “Very lucky, the humanoids will be forced to act too drastically, to preserve the Prime Directive.

  “But you’re the one to blame.”

  “I?” Claypool winced angrily. “How?”

  “Come along.” Ironsmith looked at the child again, and sorrowfully shook his head. “We can’t stay here in the Central.”

  And he turned his back, as if in sublime contempt of all Claypool’s attacks. He went striding back along the narrow inspection walk, sure and quick as any mechanical, toward the small metal door where they had entered. Claypool crept after him meekly, limping on his swelling knee, swaying to another wave of vertigo.

  TO BE CONCLUDED.

  Part III

  Originally published in the May 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

  Perhaps a truly trained mind could conquer all things—save the one thing it can never assault; itself and its own misunderstanding!

  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 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 underground launching station at Starmont, when a little girl spoke to him, and handed him an unexpected imitation 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, Down 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 telepo
rtation. 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 Claypool, are small android mechanicals, driven and controlled by rhodomagnetic beams from the relay grid of a central mechanical brain on the far planet Wing TV. 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 had spread from 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 menial weapons to fight the humanoids, but they were not 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. They had promised to end war and crime and toil and want, and all unhappiness. But Claypool, when he returned to Starmont, found bitter disillusionment.

  His great telescope had been demolished, because research is now too dangerous for human beings. Ruth had been given euphoride, a drug of forgetfulness, because she seemed unhappy. When he protested, the mechanicals suggested that his own memory ought to be removed.

  There is one man, however, who likes the humanoids. That is Frank Ironsmith, the brilliant but cheerily indolent young mathematician who had been employed in the observatory computing section. Strangely, he is exempted from the suffocating care of the humanoids. Claypool fails to understand his freedom, and suspects him of some treacherous deal with the machines.

  Fighting the humanoids, Claypool finally reached the hidden vault of Project Thunderbolt, resolved to smash Wing IV. He found the installation sabotaged. The missiles were gone, and he suspects that Ironsmith was the smiling saboteur.

  With a broken leg and an injured knee, Claypool was captured by the humanoids, and drugged with euphoride until after the bone had knitted. Ironsmith had him awakened and asked him to betray White—offering to let him join the same Compact which earned his then unfair freedom.

  Refusing to turn against mankind, Clay pool was rescued by White. Sealed in a deep cave, with White’s little band, he studied psychophysics and helped build the new relays, which were to modify the Prime Directive and set men free. When the new relays were finished, he was teleported to the Central, on Wing IV, to install them.

  Before he and Dawn Hall can finish the installation, however, Frank Ironsmith appears to stop them. Clay pool fights vainly, and hurts his knee again. He then calls on the child to kill Ironsmith—for White has taught her a mental trick of detonating the unstable potassium isotope, and Clay pool begs her to disrupt the K-40 in Ironsmith’s blood.

  But Dawn seems strangely frozen. Her face drains white and her eyes dilate into staring blindness. She smiles out of remote oblivion, and speaks to Claypool with the whining drone of another humanoid. She has been—mechanised!

  Stunned and beaten, Claypool follows Ironsmith out of the Central.

  XXIII.

  Beyond that narrow door, they came back into the dusty clutter of the shop where old Sledge had built the first-mechanical unit and the first sections of the relay grid to run it—the first germ cell, of metal and silicone plastics, from which all this ultimate and monstrous machine had grown.

  Claypool clutched anxiously for the jamb of the door, and limped gratefully off that giddy walk. He sank wearily into the rusty swivel chair, at the desk old Sledge had used, and tenderly eased his throbbing knee.

  Behind him came Dawn Hall.

  The smiling child walked that unrailed path out of the dusky cavern of the Central, with the quick gliding grace of another humanoid. She halted at the end of old Sledge’s battered desk, motionless as any Stopped machine.

  She kept on smiling. Her pinched face was set, lifeless, bloodless. The pupils of her eyes were dilated, relaxed into great pools of shadow. She seemed blind as any humanoid. And she smiled without mirth or joy, out of some frozen, far oblivion.

  Claypool looked away from her. He mopped his face and tried to swallow the dry horror in his throat and blinked bitterly at Ironsmith.

  “How—?” he croaked huskily. “How am I to blame?”

  Ironsmith strolled absently about that gray-lit, stale-smelling room. He glanced at the faded backs of old Sledge’s reference books, idly spun the loose headstock of a bench lathe, curiously tapped the time-stiffened keys of a tiny portable calculating machine—a remote forbear, that may have been on the Central itself.

  Dust came up in little gray puffs about his shoes, and dust left white marks on his dark suit, where he had brushed the benches and the drafting table. Deliberately, he thrust both hands deep in his pockets, and turned back to Claypool with a slow frown of thought.

  “The humanoids have to guard the Prime Directive.”

  His voice was calm and soft and friendly as if Claypool had never urged the child to detonate the unstable potassium atoms in his blood.

  “Sledge built that into the Central. When such blundering fools as you and White attempt to attack the Prime Directive by paraphysical means, the humanoids are compelled to develop paraphysical instruments of their own, to defend it. As you should have learned by now, they are thorough and efficient. Their efforts have been effective.” Claypool kept his eyes off the frozen child.

  “Theirs?” he rasped savagely. “Or yours?”

  Ironsmith stood silently, merely watching Claypool with gray troubled eyes. And a sudden gust of wrath brought Claypool out of the rusty old chair. His knee tried to buckle again, and he caught the corner of the old desk.

  “So you don’t deny it?” He spat on the dusty floor. “I guessed the truth a long time ago—when you seemed to like those vicious machines so well, and they always left you free. You . . . you traitor!”

  He gasped for breath, and shook his skinny fist.

  “Well, I don’t suppose you can deny your ugly treason now. Not when you’re right here on Wing IV—murdering the last chance for freedom the rest of us will ever have! Not when I know about this wicked Compact—whatever it is—between you and these machines.”

  Ironsmith nodded his bare head, calmly.

  “It’s true that a mutual pact exists,” he admitted pleasantly. “Because the humanoids aren’t creative, but merely logical. They couldn’t have protected the Prime Directive from paraphysical attacks, without human assistance. The Compact provides that aid.”

  Bleak-faced with hate, Claypool clung weakly to the splintered edge of the old desk, and Ironsmith stood frowning in doubt. The younger man rubbed the lean angle of his sunburned jaw, and strolled about the dusty shop again, and nodded at last in calm decision.

  “We’re going to give you one more chance to join us. Claypool, in the Compact.”

  Claypool peered hard at that honest and friendly-seeming man who had turned against his kind. He shook his head, perplexed.

  “Thank you.” he muttered, sardonically.

  “Not me.” Ironsmith smiled pleasantly. “There is someone else who is still willing to forgive most of your follies, and risk much to help you. Your thanks should go to Ruth—who was your wife,”

  “Ruth?” Claypool peered at him, narrow-eyed. “Ruth’s at Starmont, under euphoride, with her mind and memory gone.”

  “She was,” Ironsmith smiled again, open-faced and innocent. “But I had always admired her—more, I think, than you ever did. I brought her away with me, when I left Starmont. She has her memory now, and she’s with us in the Compact. She’ll be happy if you join us.”

  Ironsmith paused, hopefu
lly. “What shall I tell her, Claypool?” Claypool’s bad knee shuddered, and he gripped the old desk to support his weight. His stomach became a writhing knot of pain, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe or speak.

  “So she’s with you?”

  He nodded bitterly. He had never entirely liked Ironsmith—not even long ago, before the humanoids came. Now, in a shocking flash of intuition, he thought he saw the reason. Now, at last, he thought he understood the cause of Ruth’s unhappiness, that the humanoids had tried to cure with euphoride.

  The desert observatory had been an intimate little world, and Project Thunderbolt had left him too little time for Ruth. And young Ironsmith, he remembered bleakly, had always been very conveniently about, at the office and the cafeteria, at staff parties and on the tennis courts. Indolently brilliant, tossing off his work without apparent effort, he had been too handsome and too gay and too free.

  Claypool clung to the ancient desk. His stomach burned. His skin felt feverishly hot, and then pimpled to a clammy chill. He heard a roaring in his brain. His whole body tensed and shook with hatred, but his throbbing knee was useless and he knew he couldn’t light.

  He knew it was far too late to light. It must have been too late, ever since the supernova flamed. He caught his rasping breath, and deliberately turned his eyes away from the smooth treachery of Ironsmith’s clean, sunburned face. He tried to control the fury raging in him. And he saw the child again.

  She stood very tiny and very straight, and still as a stopped machine. Dilated eyes stared blindly from her stiff white face, and nothing fluttered the ribbon in her hair. Shivering with pity and terror, Claypool swung abruptly back to Ironsmith.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said flatly, “on one condition.”

  Ironsmith turned suddenly genial. “Then you’re willing to enter the Compact?” he asked softly. “To join our group, and accept the humanoids, and help defend the Prime Directive from any change.” He offered a vigorous, sunburned hand. “Welcome, Claypool!”