by Isaac Asimov
It is plain from circumstantial evidence, however, that, in a general way, what did occur was this.
Sheriff Saunders opened his mouth; AL-76 pulled a switch. The Disinto worked, and seventy-five trees, two barns, three cows and the top three quarters of Duckbill Mountain whiffed into rarefied atmosphere. They became, so to speak, one with the snows of yesteryear.
Sheriff Saunders' mouth remained open for an indefinite interval thereafter, but nothing—neither firing orders nor anything else—issued therefrom. And then———
And then, there was a stirring in the air, a multiple ro-o-o-oshing sound, a series of purple streaks through the atmosphere radiating away from Randolph Payne's shack as the center, and of the members of the posse, not a sign.
There were various guns scattered about the vicinity, including the sheriff's patented nickel-plated, extra-rapid-fire, guaranteed-no-clog, portable machine gun. There were about fifty hats, a few half-chomped cigars, and some odds and ends that had come loose in the excitement—but of actual human beings there was none.
Except for Lank Jake, not one of those human beings came within human ken for three days, and the exception in his favor came about because he was interrupted in his comet-flight by the half-dozen men from the Petersboro factory, who were charging into the wood at a pretty fair speed of their own.
It was Sam Tobe who stopped him, catching Lank Jake's head skillfully in the pit of his stomach. When he caught his breath, Tobe asked, 'Where's Randolph Payne's place?'
Lank Jake allowed his eyes to unglaze for just a moment. 'Brother,' he said, 'just you follow the direction I ain't going.'
And with that, miraculously, he was gone. There was a shrinking dot dodging trees on the horizon that might have been he, but Sam Tobe wouldn't have sworn to it.
That takes care of the posse; but there still remains Randolph Payne, whose reactions took something of a different form.
For Randolph Payne, the five-second interval after the pulling of the switch and the disappearance of Duckbill Mountain was a total blank. At the start he had been peering through the thick underbrush from behind the bottom of the trees; at the end he was swinging wildly from one of the topmost branches. The same impulse that had driven the posse horizontally had driven him vertically.
As to how he had covered the fifty feet from roots to top—whether he had climbed, jumped, or flown—he did not know, and he didn't give a particle of never-mind.
What he did know was that property had been destroyed by a robot temporarily in his possession. All visions of rewards vanished and were replaced by trembling nightmares of hostile citizenry, shrieking lynch mobs, lawsuits, murder charges, and what Mirandy Payne would say. Mostly what Mirandy Payne would say.
He was yelling wildly and hoarsely, 'Hey, you robot, you smash that thing, do you hear? Smash it good! You forget I ever had anything to do with it! You're a stranger to me, see? You don't ever say a word about it. Forget it, you hear?'
He didn't expect his orders to do any good; it was only reflex action. What he didn't know was that a robot always obeys a human order except where carrying it out involves danger to another human.
AL-76, therefore, calmly and methodically proceeded to demolish his Disinto into rubble and flinders.
Just as he was stamping the last cubic inch under foot, Sam Tobe and his contingent arrived, and Randolph Payne, sensing that the real owners of the robot had come, dropped out of the tree head-first and made for regions unknown feet-first.
He did not wait for his reward.
Austin Wilde, Robotical Engineer, turned to Sam Tobe and said, 'Did you get anything out of the robot?'
Tobe shook his head and snarled deep in his throat. 'Nothing. Not one thing. He's forgotten everything that's happened since he left the factory. He must have gotten orders to forget, or it couldn't have left him so blank. What was that pile of junk he'd been fooling with?'
'Just that. A pile of junk! But it must have been a Disinto before he smashed it, and I'd like to kill the fellow who ordered him to smash it—by slow torture, if possible. Look at this!'
They were part of the way up the slopes of what had been Duckbill Mountain—at that point, to be exact, where the top had been sheered off; and Wilde put his hand down upon the perfect flatness that cut through both soil and rock.
'What a Disinto,' he said. 'It took the mountain right off its base.'
'What made him build it?'
Wilde shrugged. 'I don't know. Some factor in his environment—there's no way of knowing what—reacted upon his moon-type positronic brain to produce a Disinto out of junk. It's a billion to one against our ever stumbling upon that factor again now that the robot himself has forgotten. We'll never have that Disinto.'
'Never mind. The important thing is that we have the robot.'
'The hell you say.' There was poignant regret in Wilde's voice. 'Have you ever had anything to do with the Disintos on the moon? They eat up energy like so many electronic hogs and won't even begin to run until you've built up a potential of better than a million volts. But this Disinto worked differently. I went through the rubbish with a microscope, and would you like to see the only source of power of any kind that I found?'
'What was it?'
'Just this! And we'll never know how he did it.'
And Austin Wilde held up the source of power that had enabled a Disinto to chew up a mountain in half a second—
two flashlight batteries!
The next example is less blatantly humorous but is one in which the robots are still not taken quite seriously. The story arose out of another story—not about robots—to which the robot story served as sequel.
In the October 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction was published a story of mine called 'Not Final,' in which the human colonists on Ganymede (largest of the satellites of Jupiter) make radio contact with life forms on Jupiter. These life forms turn out to be madly hostile and Earth-men begin to fear for their safety if the Jovians ever achieve space travel.
To be sure, Jupiter's gravity is so intense and its atmosphere is so dense that spaceships of ordinary matter could not hold that atmosphere against the vacuum of space or lift itself against the gravity. However, human technology has developed force fields, and if the Jovians did the same, then they might emerge from their planet behind walls of sheer energy, rather than walls of matter.
It was necessary to investigate this point, but no human beings could possibly have survived a trip to Jupiter's fantastically unfriendly surface.
However, if human beings can't do it, robots built by human beings can. With this in mind I wrote 'Victory Unintentional,' which appeared first in the August 1942 issue of Super Science Stories.
VICTORY UNINTENTIONAL
The spaceship leaked, as the saying goes, like a sieve.
It was supposed to. In fact, that was the whole idea,
The result, of course, was that during the journey from Ganymede to Jupiter, the ship was crammed just as full as it could be with the very hardest space vacuum. And since the ship also lacked heating devices, this space vacuum was at normal temperature, which is a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
This, also, was according to plan. Little things like the absence of heat and air didn't annoy anyone at all on the particular spaceship.
The first near vacuum wisps of Jovian atmosphere began percolating into the ship several thousand miles above the Jovian surface. It was practically all hydrogen, though perhaps a careful gas analysis might have located a trace of helium as well. The pressure gauges began creeping skyward.
That creep continued at an accelerating pace as the ship dropped downward in a Jupiter-circling spiral. The pointers of successive gauges, each designed for progressively higher pressures, began to move until they reached the neighborhood of a million or so atmospheres, where figures lost most of their meaning. The temperature, as recorded by thermocouples, rose slowly and erratically, and finally steadied at about seventy below ze
ro, Centigrade.
The ship moved slowly toward the end, plowing its way heavily through a maze of gas molecules that crowded together so closely that hydrogen itself was squeezed to the density of a liquid. Ammonia vapor, drawn from the incredibly vast oceans of that liquid, saturated the horrible atmosphere. The wind, which had begun a thousand miles higher, had risen to a pitch inadequately described as a hurricane.
It was quite plain long before the ship landed on a fairly large Jovian island, perhaps seven times the size of Asia, that Jupiter was not a very pleasant world.
And yet the three members of the crew thought it was. They were quite convinced it was. But then, the three members of the crew were not exactly human. And neither were they exactly Jovian.
They were simply robots, designed on Earth for Jupiter.
ZZ Three said, 'It appears to be a rather desolate place.'
ZZ Two joined him and regarded the wind-blasted landscape somberly. 'There are structures of some sort in the distance,' he said, 'which are obviously artificial. I suggest we wait for the inhabitants to come to us.'
Across the room ZZ One listened, but made no reply. He was the first constructed of the three, and half experimental. Consequently he spoke a little less frequently than his two companions.
The wait was not long. An air vessel of queer design swooped overhead. More followed. And then a line of ground vehicles approached, took position, and disgorged organisms. Along with these organisms came various inanimate accessories that might have been weapons. Some of these were borne by a single Jovian, some by several, and some advanced under their own power, with Jovians perhaps inside.
The robots couldn't tell.
ZZ Three said, 'They're all around us now. The logical peaceful gesture would be to come out in the open. Agreed?'
It was, and ZZ One shoved open the heavy door, which was not double or, for that matter, particularly airtight.
Their appearance through the door was the signal for an excited stir among the surrounding Jovians. Things were done to several of the very largest of the inanimate accessories, and ZZ Three became aware of a temperature rise on the outer rind of his beryllium-iridium-bronze body.
He glanced at ZZ Two. 'Do you feel it? They're aiming heat energy at us, I believe.'
ZZ Two indicated his surprise. 'I wonder why?'
'Definitely a heat ray of some sort. Look at that!'
One of the rays had been jarred out of alignment for some undiscernible cause, and its line of radiation intersected a brook of sparkling pure ammonia—which promptly boiled furiously.
Three turned to ZZ One, 'Make a note of this, One, will you?'
'Sure.' It was to ZZ One that the routine secretarial work fell, and his method of taking a note was to make a mental addition to the accurate memory scroll within him. He had already gathered the hour-by-hour record of every important instrument on board ship during the trip to Jupiter. He added agreeably, 'What reason shall I put for the reaction? The human masters would probably enjoy knowing.'
'No reason. Or better,' Three corrected himself, 'no apparent reason. You might say the maximum temperature of the ray was about plus thirty, Centigrade.'
Two interrupted, 'Shall we try communicating?'
'It would be a waste of time,' said Three. 'There can't be more than a very few Jovians who know the radio-click code that's been developed between Jupiter and Ganymede.
They'll have to send for one, and when he comes, he'll establish contact soon enough. Meanwhile let's watch them. I don't understand their actions, I tell you frankly.'
Nor did understanding come immediately. Heat radiation ceased, and other instruments were brought to the forefront and put into play. Several capsules fell at the feet of the watching robots, dropping rapidly and forcefully under Jupiter's gravity. They popped open and a blue liquid exuded, forming pools which proceeded to shrink rapidly by evaporation.
The nightmare wind whipped the vapors away and where those vapors went, Jovians scrambled out of the way. One was too slow, threshed about wildly, and became very limp and still.
ZZ Two bent, dabbed a finger in one of the pools and stared at the dripping liquid. 'I think this is oxygen,' he said.
'Oxygen, all right,' agreed Three. "This becomes stranger and stranger. It must certainly be a dangerous practice, for I would say that oxygen is poisonous to the creatures. One of them died!'
There was a pause, and then ZZ One, whose greater simplicity led at times to an increased directness of thought, said heavily, 'It might be that these strange creatures in a rather childish way are attempting to destroy us.'
. And Two, struck by the suggestion, answered, 'You know, One, I think you're right!'
There had been a slight lull in Jovian activity and now a new structure was brought up. It possessed a slender rod that pointed skyward through the impenetrable Jovian murk. It stood in that starkly incredible wind with a rigidity that plainly indicated remarkable structural strength. From its tip came a cracking and then a flash that lit up the depths of the atmosphere into a gray fog.
For a moment the robots were bathed in clinging radiance and then Three said thoughtfully, 'High-tension electricity! Quite respectable power, too. One, I think you're right. After all, the human masters have told us that these creatures seek to destroy all humanity, and organisms possessing such insane viciousness as to harbor a thought of harm against a human being'—his voice trembled at the thought—'would scarcely scruple at attempting to destroy us.'
'It's a shame to have such distorted minds,' said ZZ One. 'Poor fellows!'
'I find it a very saddening thought,' admitted Two. 'Let's go back to the ship. We've seen enough for now.'
They did so, and settled down to wait. As ZZ Three said, Jupiter was a roomy planet, and it might take time for Jovian transportation to bring a radio code expert to the ship. However, patience is a cheap commodity to robots.
As a matter of fact, Jupiter turned on its axis three times, according to chronometer, before the expert arrived. The rising and setting of the sun made no difference, of course, to the dead darkness at the bottom of three thousand miles of liquid-dense gas, so that one could not speak of day and night. But then, neither Jovian nor robot saw by visible light radiation and that didn't matter.
Through this thirty-hour interval the surrounding Jovians continued their attack with a patience and persevering relentlessness concerning which robot ZZ One made a good many mental notes. The ship was assaulted by as many varieties of forces as there were hours, and the robots observed every attack attentively, analyzing such weapons as they recognized. They by no means recognized all.
But the human masters had built well. It had taken fifteen years to construct the ship and the robots, and their essentials could be expressed in a single phrase—raw strength. The attack spent itself uselessly and neither ship nor robot seemed the worse for it.
Three said, 'This atmosphere handicaps them, I think. They can't use atomic disrupters, since they would only tear a hole in that soupy air and blow themselves up.'
'They haven't used high explosives either,' said Two, 'which is well. They couldn't have hurt us, naturally, but it would have thrown us about a bit.'
'High explosives are out of the question. You can't have an explosive without gas expansion and gas just can't expand in this atmosphere.'
'It's a very good atmosphere,' muttered One. 'I like it.'
Which was natural, because he was built for it. The ZZ robots were the first robots ever turned out by the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation that were not even faintly human in appearance. They were low and squat, with a center of gravity less than a foot above ground level. They had six legs apiece, stumpy and thick, designed to lift tons against two and a half times normal Earth gravity. Their reflexes were that many times Earth-normal speed, to make up for the gravity. And they were composed of a beryllium-iridium-bronze alloy that was proof against any known corrosive agent, also any k
nown destructive agent short of a thousand-megaton atomic disruptor, under any conditions whatsoever.
To dispense with further description, they were indestructible, and so impressively powerful that they were the only robots ever built on whom the roboticists of the Corporation had never quite had the nerve to pin a serial-number nickname. One bright young fellow had suggested
Sissy One, Two, and Three—but not in a very loud voice, and the suggestion was never repeated.
The last hours of the wait were spent in a puzzled discussion to find a possible description of a Jovian's appearance. ZZ One had made a note of their possession of tentacles and of their radial symmetry—and there he had stuck. Two and Three did their best, but couldn't help.
'You can't very well describe anydüng,' Three declared finally, 'without a standard of reference. These creatures are like nothing I know of—completely outside the positronic paths of my brain. It's like trying to describe gamma light to a robot unequipped for gamma-ray reception.'
It was just at that time that the weapon barrage ceased once more. The robots turned their attention to outside the ship.
A group of Jovians were advancing in curiously uneven fashion, but no amount of careful watching could determine the exact method of their locomotion. How they used their tentacles was uncertain. At times the organisms took on a remarkable slithering motion, and then they moved at great speed, perhaps with the wind's help, for they were moving downwind.
The robots stepped out to meet the Jovians, who halted ten feet away. Both sides remained silent and motionless.
ZZ Two said, 'They must be watching us, but I don't know how. Do either of you see any photosensitive organs?'
'I can't say,' grunted Three in response. 'I don't see anything about them that makes sense at all.'
There was a sudden metallic clicking from among the Jovian group and ZZ One said delightedly, 'It's the radio code. They've got the communications expert here.'
