“As a matter of fact,” the soldier said, “I sought you out to discuss the very thing upon which you’re engaged—creation of life. As usual you’re ahead of me. I too have been receiving reports on the decline of the population…That you have accomplished a miracle by bringing the creation of life within your control doesn’t seem to disturb you unduly.”
“No reason why it should. The proving of a theory is no cause for excessive jubilation. It is simply the answer to a perfectly computed problem in mathematics—allied to biology, electronics, and chemistry.”
Atkinson reflected for a moment, then he tapped the huge electrical instrument upon which he had been working.
“This is the sum total of my efforts,” he explained. “The length of it is six feet, as you observe, and the width three. If you could see within it you’d observe a mass of dead tissue exactly formed into the outline of a human being. Everything is there—bones, skin, all the organs. The first synthetic man, soaking in artificially induced cosmic rays in exactly the right proportion to produce the excitation of life. When it is finished—which won’t be for some days yet — there will step from this ‘creating case’ the first man to be born independent of another human being.”
“I see…” The General brooded and looked vaguely uneasy. “But won’t he be sexless, heartless, with none of the attributes of a normal human being?”
“Not a bit of it! That’s nonsense! If anything he’ll be a purer, more godlike type of man than any ever known—and why? Because he’ll have no inheritance. He cannot take over this or that vice from his father or mother. He will form entirely his own character…And then will come a woman,” Atkinson finished, his eyes bright.
“You mean a synthetic one?”
“Naturally. One test-tube man alone is useless if we are to start to repair the appalling deficiency in the human race. A woman must follow—”
“Why? Wouldn’t it be easier to make men and women artificially by the thousands and do away with natural birth?”
“Perhaps it would be easier but it would not be practicable. There is only a limited amount of cellular tissue. Just any sort of tissue won’t do: it has to be the essence, so to speak, of thousands of tons of the stuff…In the past few months since the war ended I’ve been gathering tissue together from the cadavers which lie around by the score. A filthy, ghoulish kind of job, yes, but essential. I learned one thing: there is only about enough tissue in the world to make perhaps four or five synthetic men and women. So I have chosen one man and one woman and, because of their humanless birth, I shall leave them to become attracted to one another. Psychology comes into that but I don’t propose to waste time explaining it.”
“They’ll be born adult, then?”
“Why not? The process of arriving at maturity is only one of education, and that education is—or was—full of disastrous mistakes. If that were not so the atomic war would never have come…Yes, these two will be adult, and if I have anything to do with it they’ll be married within a month of their creation. Then the first children—children of robots, to stem off into adult life with the passage of the years. We shall have the root of a new and, I hope, entirely perfect species.”
Atkinson fell silent, musing, hands pushed in the pockets of his tattered old overall. A warm wind stirred the fragments of plaster around one of the holes in the ceiling and they fell with a sudden clatter.
“Only one thing bothering me,” Atkinson confessed, arousing himself. “The tissue I’m using isn’t entirely unicellular. It’s bi-cellular. That is to say each cell has an identical counter-part…”
“Like cellular Siamese twins?” the General suggested.
“You might call it that.”
Quietness again. Atkinson’s eyes wandered to the electrical array and General Harrison wondered just what was going on inside that massive opaque metal tube. He got to his feet at length and brushed away the fine powder of dust which had collected on his worn uniform.
“I’d better be on my way, Atkinson. I’ve things to do and I’m pretty certain you’re not desperately anxious for my company. Let me know when anything happens…”
“You can be sure of that,” the scientist smiled, and as though his visitor had already departed he turned back to the work in which he was so obviously absorbed…
*
For many weeks afterwards General Harrison was kept busy in the supervision and planning of a new capital city where London had once been, a task which demanded so much of his time he quite forgot Dr. Atkinson. Then one day, in a rare moment of relaxation, it dawned upon him that he had not heard anything. Promptly he went to enquire as to progress…
And found a dead man in the ruin that had been a house. Grim and silent, Harrison looked about him once he had satisfied himself that the stiff, dust-coated body on the floor had been dead for perhaps nearly a fortnight.
The house was a shambles anyway, of course, but now even that one sacrosanct corner which had been devoted to the scientific equipment was in ruins. The great tube which had presumably contained the synthetic life was smashed as though with a steam hammer, the cables had been torn out of the generator, and most of the smaller instruments had been smashed to atoms.
Appalled, Harrison surveyed the ruin which had been Dr. Atkinson’s pride—then bestirring himself he set about trying to find a reason for such tragic vandalism. There was little enough to go upon, but finally he did discover a well-used notebook pushed away in a dust-filmed bureau. At first glance it appeared to be some kind of personal diary and under normal circumstances Harrison would not have read it—but here were circumstances which were not normal, and he meant to get at the solution.
Returning to headquarters he gave orders for the body of Dr. Atkinson to be removed and buried with full honours, then with a party of scientists able to solve the technical equations mixed with the dead man’s notes he tried to piece together the events which had led up to disaster. It proved an immensely difficult task, leaving countless blanks which would probably never be filled in.
“It seems to me.” observed Pearson, one of the scientists whom Harrison had requested to help him, “that Dr. Atkinson died from natural causes. The medical report said so, anyway. No reason to suspect foul play…As to who, or what, wrecked his equipment we don’t know. He says here that the creation of a male synthetic man was supremely successful, only it happened to be a bio-creation, the one thing he was reluctantly expecting. Apparently he killed off the duplicate man and left the original. What happened then we don’t know.”
“We don’t know what happened to the synthetic man, true,” the General admitted, frowning over the notes, “but we do know that Atkinson went further and created a woman successfully, just as he told me he would…Further than that we cannot get. His notes don’t tell any more, perhaps because death caught up on him.”
The scientists looked at one another, weighing up the imponderables of a quite extraordinary situation. It was known now that somewhere in the disordered community which had survived the war there presumably lived a synthetic man and a synthetic woman, perhaps together, perhaps separate. There was no indication in Atkinson’s notes as to whether his creations had proved to be as blissfully innocent as he had expected; nothing to explain the wrecking of his equipment. If the robot man and woman had done that, then they were capable of anything.
“I don’t like it,” Pearson said gravely, and from the expressions on those around him it was plain he was voicing their thoughts also. “In effect, Dr. Atkinson created a new species entirely, which might be capable of anything…”
“Nothing has happened so far,” another scientist pointed out. “We’d have heard of it otherwise.”
The conversation ceased. It seemed that the only thing to do was wait on events, and if anything really startling did happen it could only have one cause…But nothing did happen. Week followed week and from the toiling community, spending the summer in erecting a new city and re-forming social life, there came
no word of anybody unusual in their midst
The weeks became months, and still nothing untoward occurred—and since there is a limit to the expectancy anybody can muster General Harrison gradually began to forget all about the business and—apart from a regret that Atkinson’s great work seemed to have come to nothing—he gave his attention once more to the matters of the everyday…And all this time the male product of a test tube was amongst the very workers labouring to build a city, but because he looked exactly like any other young man, save perhaps for his unusually superb physique, no particular notice was taken of him. Indeed, why should it have been? He was a likeable fellow, good natured, with apparently no conceit whatever. Skilful, yes. His unusual knowledge of electricity had easily gained him a job as electrical fitter to the contractors who were gradually building the new London.
As for the young man himself he wondered a great deal what he was doing and why he was doing it. He could no more recall his actual birth than can a normally born human. Wisely, Dr. Atkinson had deliberately blanked the brains of his “creations” so that the process of their birth could not be remembered. As to the rest, it was acquired knowledge, partly through instruments used by Atkinson to implant vibratory thought-waves on the brain, and partly through knowledge picked up in the normal way…The young man had not even had a name until he had thought of one. Now he was registered as Colin Brook, and the fact that he had no known nationality was accepted as normal since hardly anybody could lay claim to any particular country with them all in ruin and ashes.
Colin Brook, electrician. He smiled vaguely to himself, wondered over many things, and worked day by day with the rest of people. He heard them speak of relatives and wondered why he had none he could recall. What age was he? Twenty-five by the looks of him—well built, blond, and with a likeable smile. He was happy enough, even if mystified. He had a good job, a good billet with hundreds of other male workers engaged on the city construction. Nothing to worry over except this one baffling blank in his life. From where had he come and who had been his parents? Indeed, what were parents? Even this aspect caused him no end of mental analysis, and always brought a completely negative answer.
Then, a year after he had enrolled as an electrical worker, he casually met Helda Ganson. Employed by the New City Secretariat, her duties demanded that she issue new instructions to the electricians, instructions created by her superiors. This was when Colin Brook first saw her—in the great office at headquarters from where all orders were given out. He, surrounded by his fellow workers, sat in silence and listened to her as she read from the briefing sheet she had brought in.
What she said Colin scarcely remembered—and in any case he would get detailed orders later from his superior. His whole attention was concentrated on the woman herself. She was slim, dark, extremely agile, with a mellow voice and a ready smile. There was something about her which Colin found irresistibly attractive. He felt that almost against his will he had to comply with the urge governing him…
Accordingly he was on speaking terms with Helda Ganson by that same evening. A week later they spent their spare hours together, roaming about the half erected and half demolished city, speaking and dreaming of the years to come when the blasting horror of the atomic war would be forgotten.
“And yet,” Helda said, as she sat beside Colin on a rising stretch of ground in the cool of the summer twilight, “I can’t somehow remember the atomic war. I’ve read all about it, seen the records, noticed the horror seared into the faces of those who have survived— Yet it has the odd remoteness of a dream. Like something which happened before my lifetime…That couldn’t be, though, could it? I’m in the mid-twenties and the war has only been over two years. I—I just don’t understand it.”
“There is much that neither of us understand, Helda,” Colin told her, an arm about her shoulders. “I gave up trying long ago. If the past cannot be remembered, surely the most sensible thing to do is look to the future? “
“You mean—together? “
“Seems a sensible proposition, doesn’t it? We have kindred interests, or kindred mystifications if you prefer. Maybe we should start trying to puzzle them out together?”
“Maybe we should, yes,” Helda murmured.
Colin did not say any more. He grasped her hand and around them the twilight deepened. In the new city lights were gleaming brightly. In the old metropolis gaunt, ugly girders and stones reared against the ashy western sky.
Unaware that they were the first of a new species, the young man and woman continued to hold hands and tried in vain to solve the mystery of the mental and physical attraction which bonded them so completely…
*
Two weeks later the newly formed Eugenical Council issued permits for Helda and Colin to marry. The union was sanctified by nothing more than a printed licence since church ceremonies were obsolete, then they immediately returned to work. No honeymoon, no anything. Daily matters were too pressing in their urgency to permit of a single personal indulgence…They were allotted married quarters with thousands of other young newly-weds and, by and large, they felt reasonably convinced that things were set fair for the future.
Indeed most of the survivors were beginning to believe in themselves again and were looking forward to an era of quiet and prosperity in which war would perhaps be extinct because of the frightful lesson it had imposed…But this was not to be. Helda and Colin had hardly been married a month before unexpected news was flashed from the world’s remaining observatories that a spatial armada was heading directly for Earth.
This was the only warning which was given, and since the unknown space armada was even then nearing the outer edge of Earth’s atmosphere there simply was no time to turn around. Even General Harrison, who had never been expecting to be called abruptly back into action, could not think up a military strategy quickly enough—or summon enough men and women together — to put up a defence before the invaders had struck.
Nobody had a chance to determine whence the destroyers had come, but they were obviously highly scientific and the weapons they used simply tore the flimsy, hastily erected Earth defences to shreds. For the second time in quick succession the survivors were stricken down amidst ash and rubble and those who yet again survived, Helda and Colin amongst them, discovered that they were under the heel of a conqueror.
What conqueror? He was never seen, nor indeed were any living beings ever sighted. Yet in all parts of the world there stood the marshalled rows of space machines which had inflicted such terrific devastation. Orders always came from loudspeakers, orders spoken in English yet in a voice so harsh and devoid of sentiment it sounded as though it might be synthetic, a pattern meticulously drawn upon a sound-track, perhaps, and then projected.
The orders themselves were not difficult to carry out since they seemed merely a continuation of the instructions to which the populace was accustomed—namely, to continue building the new metropolis which, either by accident or design, had been left untouched by the invaders. The destruction they had caused had been mainly centred on the workers’ dwellings, perhaps mainly as an object lesson to reveal unheard-of scientific power.
In the main the survivors obeyed the orders to save themselves, but others — Helda and Colin amongst them— aligned themselves with that small army which had risen in naked fury against this new destroyer of liberty and progress, and it was of course the indefatigable General Harrison who was at the head of this resistance movement…
“We owe it to him and ourselves to join his movement,” Colin declared, when first the news reached him and Helda by word of mouth. “No conqueror was ever defeated by lying down to his demands…”
“I agree,” Helda muttered, “but what I can’t see is how we fight this invasion. There doesn’t seem to be a leader to it. No commanders. No men. No living invaders at all. Just orders by loudspeakers, deadly weapons, scientific instruments…”
“Because there are no living invaders we stand a good chance of reaching Ge
neral Harrison and joining his ranks,” Colin insisted. “Living invaders could probably have found us long ago. As it is we’ve survived thus far.”
Helda nodded her dark head silently. She and Colin were deep within an old atomic crater north of the city. Outside the small rock cave they had made their temporary home was the shelving valley leading to the ridge which marked the perimeter of the crater. It was night and the summer air was warm. The only sound was from the directional loudspeakers which, using tremendous amplification, bellowed forth their orders across the inhabited regions of the new metropolis…The only light came from a risen full moon, filling the crater valley with sickly pools of grey, behind which loomed inky shadows.
“We know where Harrison has his headquarters,” Colin continued, as Helda made no further comment “What’s to stop us going tonight?”
“Nothing—I suppose.”
The hesitancy in her voice made Colin study her intently in the moonlight. She appeared to be thinking deeply.
“What’s wrong, Helda?’ Colin’s voice had become abrupt. “Do you want to continue this hole-and-corner existence and finish up by being caught by the invaders and killed? “
“Naturally I don’t want that. It’s just that I — Oh, I can’t explain it. It’s a kind of feeling that nothing can come of trying to overthrow an invader infinitely cleverer than ourselves.”
“I don’t believe they are that much cleverer. They simply have things better organized than us and sprang the lot on top of us before we could turn round…Let’s get moving. It can’t be any worse than rotting in this pest-hole and never knowing if we’re to eat again.”
Lunar Vengeance: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories Page 12
