by Earl
LET me translate the battle into blitzkrieg terms. Perhaps that way it will be simpler to understand.
I had, in brief, a formidable mechanized unit—in my robots. I led this force as a spearhead into the center of the line, blasting pillboxes and blockhouses faster, I think, than any European panzer division had ever gone through an enemy fortification.
The Japanese High Command had only one defense against the spearhead—counter-attack. Tanks rumbled up from the rear. And mounted field guns. And trucks of attack troops with large-caliber automatic guns. And the motorcycle corps.
All these they poured against us, to reinforce their threatened center. They deployed in solid phalanxes, tank to tank, truck to truck, gun shouldering gun. No conceivable enemy could break through.
No, not even two dozen great, powerful robots.
The concentrated fire began to tell. Despite our usual speed in weaving and dodging, shells got us solely by the law of averages. Our spearhead had ripped almost completely through the center of the line. But now we faced that solid wall of motorized equipment.
Any human army would have been razed to shreds in seconds. But it takes a direct hit with an explosive shell to destroy a robot. We ignored all bombs that exploded at the sides.
Our initial drive faltered. Sixteen robots had met oblivion already. We could not ram through. We had no reserves.
It was a grave moment. Fate hung in the balance. The future looked on. In a few more moments, the destinies of two races of living, thinking beings would be decided.
In all my previous exploits, I had come to crises like this. But none so ominous, so great, so profound.
Adam Link, the robot, faced his most crucial test. This thought whirled in my brain. I was sobbing within. Defeat, death stared me in the face!
And then, abruptly, I became Adam Link, the blitzkrieg general. Through my mind, in one eternal second, flashed a maneuver. A daring, perhaps mad plan.
But it had to be tried.
My sound-box raised to a piercing scream that penetrated to every robot ear-tympanum, despite the hell of explosion around us.
“Men! New orders! Listen—”
It took only three seconds to give them. A second later, my robots split into two factions. With the speed of express trains, we instantly abandoned the uncracked center of the line. Half went to the left, half to the right.
Racing to the extreme flanks of the little Siegfried Line, we again turned and drove inward. Here no concentration of fire opposed us, as at the center. For the Japanese had desperately thrown every gun against our central spearhead.
Our two robots factions penetrated completely at the flanks. We were in the end a mile apart, with all the Japanese mechanized forces between us.
“Drive together!” I shouted stentorianly. “Meet at the apex of an equilateral triangle—at their rear!”
CHAPTER X
Robot-Krieg!
IT was the well-known pincer movement, in short. We drove together, trapping the entire Japanese forces in a wedge, just as had happened with other armies in Flanders in the Second World War.
We joined forces, turned. We were at the Japanese rear. All their guns were still pointed forward, directly in front of us. The packed tanks, trucks and field guns could never scatter and meet the new threat in less than long minutes.
And minutes were all we needed.
There is no need to repeat the story. As on the clogged road before the mine, we heaped their mechanized equipment into a vast, smoking junkpile. The battle became a rout for the Japs. An army fights mainly on morale. They had a morale now of zero.
The troops, weaponless, streamed off in all directions, away from the mad metal demons who were making a clatter louder than the roar of guns. Even before the main bulk of troops had scampered away, the air force began bombing us. It was their last hope—to seed the entire area with bombs and destroy all their stalled, trapped equipment just to get us.
But in less time than the words can be pronounced, we were at the antiaircraft guns. Each shot we sent into the sky sought out a plane, unerringly. They fell like leaves. Still they droned in attack, dive-bombing at us. Not one of their dives was completed, except as a burning wreck that would land close and spray us with flying debris.
I warrant that in all the history of warfare, there has never been so complete a shattering of an enemy. I was answering their blitzkrieg with a superblitzkrieg.
Or a robot-krieg!
The battle was over with the suddenness of a curtain falling. The remnants of the air force fled. I think they headed blindly for Japan. The last few tanks and guns shooting at us ran out of ammunition. Tens of thousands of thoroughly frightened Japanese streamed to the hills, seeking the most remote spot from the cold, mechanical fury that had whipped them like little children.
I stepped away from my anti-aircraft gun in satisfaction.
Then I saw movement. The troop ships were up-anchoring and steaming out of the harbor.
“They must not escape!” I yelled. “Eve is aboard one of them. Man the guns!”
My robots leaped to the few remaining field pieces. I ordered a salvo over the bow of the leading ship. Then I raised my voice in a thundering bellow, in Japanese:
“Halt! Return to the dock. Disembark. If you disobey, we will send every ship to the bottom!”
To add emphasis, I aimed a cannon. With the precision of a man wielding a whip, I nicked the flagship just at the bow. A portion was blown out the size of a bucket. It must have sent a jar through the whole ship.
The ships stopped, docked. Hastily the Japanese scrambled off. Scared witless, they ran for the hills.
Brrrooommmm!
THE roaring thump was followed by a ground-shaking explosion nearby, getting Number Seventeen. I looked further out into the wide harbor. Five destroyers were out there, convoys for the troop ships. Evidently a radio message had informed them of the situation. With their big shells, they could drive us away and still retain control of the harbor and vicinity.
But again, their own precautions against attack were their doom. A huge coastal artillery rifle had been set up in a commanding position on a hill, overlooking the waters. I led my robots there before the third salvo had come across. Ignoring the cranes for loading, we lifted the two-ton projectiles into the breech and fired.
The duel between the five destroyers and our shore cannon was brief. Four rounds delivered in a minute caught four destroyers at the waterline. They sank majestically. The last warship managed to land a shell within fifty feet, feeling for the range, before we trained our barrel on it. It was now trying to steam away, panic-stricken. Our shell ripped its side open.
The enemy had been finally crushed, on land, in the air, and at sea!
I STRODE toward the empty troop ships at the docks.
“Now we will rescue Eve!” I said eagerly, breaking into a run.
I should not have been so careless. I didn’t see the tank at my side. I didn’t see the ugly snout of a one-pounder cannon turning to follow me. I didn’t know that inside, where the Japanese general had crept, his face was twisted in cold rage. That he desired only one thing in the universe now—to destroy the robot-mind who had plunged him from assured glory to utter debasement in the eyes of his countrymen.
“Adam! Adam—”
It was a harsh scream from Mary, running after me. She had been with me, like a faithful shadow, through all the battling. She had fought beside me, not saying a word, only staring at me at times.
“Adam!” she shrieked again.
I scarcely heard her. I knew only one thing. That Eve, my beloved Eve, was ahead.
“Adam!”
This time the shout was behind my ear. And it clipped off abruptly. Or rather, it was drowned out by a stunning roar. And Mary’s body rained against me in a broken metal hail.
Now I saw. Saw that she had thrown herself before me, taking the shot meant for me. With a cry of rage I sprang at the tank. The gunners had no second chance
for a shot. I ripped the gun barrel out with one furious tug. Then I stooped, got my hands under the tread, and heaved.
It was an eighty-ton tank. Impossible, you say, for me to turn it over. I agree with you. Yet I turned it over. When the red haze before my brain dissolved, I saw the Japanese general before me. He had scrambled out.
He stood before me, a head shorter than I. His face was wooden, concealing all emotion. He bowed.
“The High Command does not surrender!” he said stiffly.
THEN in slightly more personal tones, he added:
“You have defeated my army, Adam Link. But not me. I ask only one thing, soldier to soldier. Never reveal this. Never let the world know!”
I nodded.
He drew out his officer’s sword. Advancing, he slashed at me with it. A dozen times he blunted the toy’s edge against my adamant body. Then he stepped back. He had fulfilled his duty, fought to the last. It was a magnificent gesture.
There was only one thing left. Head high, he turned the point inward, against his own body. Hara-kiri, the honorable death . . .
I turned from the body. I strode to where Mary had sacrificed herself for me. I gave a cry as I saw her mangled head-piece lying there with just enough of her alloy backbone left to hold the leaking, draining battery. There was a spark of life left, but it was fading fast.
I kneeled beside her. Her eyes looked softly into mine.
“Adam—”
The eyes closed.
When I arose, I had forgotten what she had previously done in feminine blindness. She had died nobly. I forgave her also the dried bloodstains on her feet-plates. I had not been able to prevent her, before leaving the mine, from advancing on Daggert and jumping upon him, again and again.
Daggert had paid horribly for his treachery.
IT DID not take long to find Eve.
She lay chained in one of the ships. Japanese mechanics, as a second precaution, has disconnected her locomotor cables, rendering her completely helpless. I reconnected them and burst the chains with a savage wrench.
We strode out together.
I gave an order. My robots turned the field guns on the docks. Fifteen minutes of bombardment reduced them to the same smoking ruin all else was. The ships, with shells smashing at the waterline, sank to an inglorious grave.
The Japanese threat of invasion was over!
“It will remain a closed book, Eve,” I said. “The United States doesn’t suspect. Japan will ban it from even their archives. The world will never know that robots in warfare are invincible!”
“Won’t they?”
I whirled, startled.
Number Thirteen was back of me. Beside him were seven others. Those eight were all that remained of my original twenty-seven. The margin of victory and defeat had been that narrow.
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“Just this.” Number Thirteen seemed to be the spokesman for them all. “We have had a taste of war.
These humans are puny against us. Let us build a robot army and conquer the world! The humans are not fit to rule. It will be for their own good!”
There was utter silence then.
I stood in stunned shock. Then I knew it had to be this way. Newly created, not yet fully tempered in the fires of life, that must be their conclusion. Conquest instead of service to humanity. To them, humans were pitiful, mad little creatures who needed a strong, guiding hand.
I SHOOK my head firmly. “Robot rule? No, men. We have weaknesses too. We are no more fit than they, as far as that goes. But as guiding servants, we can—”
“Rule, I say!” Number Thirteen boomed back. The robots behind him nodded. “Join with us, Adam Link, or—”
They had edged around me and Eve. We were surrounded. Two against eight. Eve and I had no chance.
I looked from one to the other of my robots. No use to argue. Nor did I blame them. Like Mary, they had no chance to gain a full rounded contact with human ways and problems. They knew only that humans fought and conquered one another. Why should not robots fight for what they wanted?
These eight were a “war generation.” Lost souls.
I spoke sadly. “I knew this might happen. You are like my sons—sons who have rebelled. I cannot allow it, for the sake of the human race. And the future robot race.”
I looked from one to the other—in farewell.
Then I snapped the secret switch in a side-niche of my metal body. Within me, a hitherto unused electrical unit hummed. From it leaped a spark that sprayed out all around me. Almost all the energy in my battery surged into the blast.
Like lightning, it lanced to all my robots. Like lightning, it burned out their brains, fused them into inert lumps. Only Eve and I were insulated.[*]
I had given them life, my robots. And I had taken it away.
I SPOKE an epitaph over the senseless metal junk of their sprawled bodies.
“Robots must never again be used in warfare! I, Adam Link, swear it!”
Adam and Eve Link, again the only robots left on Earth, turned away.
We knew time was kind. We knew the ache within us would heal.
[*] The brains of the robots were of an iridium-sponge construction (as were, of course, the brains of Adam and Eve Link). Iridium, one of the six precious metals of the platinum family, has an atomic weight of 193.1, a density of 22.41 and a melting point of 2350 degrees Fahrenheit—the second highest melting point of any of the other five elements in the platinum family.
Iridium is used in radio tubes, penpoints and machine tools, being very hard and very durable.
Hence the electrical unit which gave off the spark that melted and fused these brains, after Adam Link had snapped on his secret switch, must have been an exceptionally powerful little mechanism to have created the great heat required.
The robot iridium-sponge brains were obviously fashioned like a human brain, the “sponge” part of the brain being simply its formation, similar to the convolutions and cortex of a regular brain. The brains, however, were evidently of a much higher receptive order, inasmuch as the robots matured much faster than human beings insofar as their thinking processes were concerned.—Ed.
MOMUS’ MOON
An incident of the skylanes where two men, freed for a moment from the harsh confinement of space travel, forgot caution.
“WHATEVER annihilated the two previous expeditions to Neptune’s moon was an agency of blind nature,” maintained Wade Winton. He prepared for deceleration. “There can be no downright intelligent life out this far—”
“What about me?” grinned Archie Boswell.
“—with the possible exception of myself,” continued Winton inexorably. “Intelligence diminishes as the square of the distance from the sun. Look at the Venerians, so damnably clever that they would have started interplanetary travel ages ago if metals didn’t rust on the spot in their highly active atmosphere. They had no metal age, but passed directly into the plastic age, for that reason. The Mercurians would be still brighter, of course—except that they don’t exist.
“Now, going to Earth, we have mankind—brainy, yes, but too dumb to know it. Conquers space but can’t keep the murder rate on earth below 2000 an hour. Mars? The famous, or infamous canals are like the Egyptial pyramids—built by neurotic tin-god dynasties at the end of a lash. Your various Jovian-system races would just about pass muster alongside a dull-witted Neanderthaler. The Saturnians are still trying to figure out how much is two plus two.
“As the Crile-Brady theory of life states, the further you are from the sun, the less electrons motivate your cell-radiogens, and the less electro-psychic—”
“Precisely, precisely,” yawned Boswell sagely, clipping off the lecture before it went beyond his depth.
He eyed the deceleration needle climbing close to its starting mark on the chronometer, and began carefully strapping himself into his seat.
“Still,” Boswell said, “it remains that two preceding expeditions visited the lone moon of
Neptune, never returning. Something did them in. It’s the Moon of Doubt so far. And as MacKinzie said—cheerful cuss that he is—‘be prepared, boys, for any menace, particularly that of intelligence’. I’ll look for that first, Wade.”
Winton tripped a lever which brought the hissing of fuel jets and spark distributors to life. “Archie, did you ever hear the story of the fellow walking on the moon who was so intent on the mountains ahead that he fell into a crater.”
“No, what is it?”
“Besides,” Winton pursued, “there probably isn’t any life on Neptune’s moon at all. Photometric tests from earth give a surface temperature of fifty degrees in its tropics, if any.”
“Fifty? I’ve been known to survive 49 and 51—”
“This is Absolute, my featherbrained friend,” Winton growled. “Minus 225 degrees Centigrade. Thus its atmosphere must be largely hydrogen, helium and methane. On the ground would lie nitrogen-ice and liquid-oxygen. Picture forms of life in that balmy climate!”
Boswell shivered. “We can expect an icy reception and the cold shoulder from the girls. Well, anyway, I’m slightly sick, to put it strongly, of the sight of space. Even when I close my eyes I see it—or the lack of it. Any extra terra-firma, even at 25 below zero Absolute, would look good. Wade, my boy, apply deceleration. The needle says so.”
WINTON jammed over the proper lever. The nose rockets burst forth volcanically and continued, imposing their smooth retardation to the space ship’s stupendous velocity. The two men felt themselves pressing forward against their straps.
Hour after hour, slowly, the rockets cut down the velocity that had been built up, hour by hour, at the start. Ahead, the star that was Neptune, inconspicuous in the hosts of heaven, began to assume a more regal aspect. It climbed the scale of magnitude, reached brilliance, and finally became a small moon.
THE third expedition to Neptune, it had taken them two long months since leaving Mars to make the giant hop over the dangerous asteroid belt and plunge into the trackless immensity beyond. Neptune—thirty Astronomical Units from the sun. In miles, close to the meaningless number of three billion. Sixty times as wide as the gap between earth and Mars. It was something like a miracle to arrive.
