by Ben Bova
“Oh. What kind of cars do you hunt?”
“All kinds. We’re carnivores, in our limited way. We eat cars. We also eat trucks and half-tracks, but they’ve been getting rare in these parts. People say the half-tracks are about hunted out. Yet my father could tell you about herds of them that stretched from hill to hill as far as the eye could see. “
“Not like that any more, I suppose,” Hellman said, trying to fall in with the carhunter’s mood.
“You got that right. Not that it’s too difficult to stay fed, especially now, in summer. I got me a fat old Studebaker just two days ago. You’ll find a couple of its carburetors and headlights in the bin under you and to your left.”
Hellman could peer down through the metal wickerwork and see, in an open-topped metal box, headlights and carburetors half submerged in crankcase oil.
“Looks pretty good, don’t it? I know you don’t eat metal yourself, but no doubt you can empathize the experience.”
“They look tasty,” Hellman said. “Especially in all that oil.”
“Twice-used crankcase oil. Ain’t nothing like it. I’ve spiced it up a bit with a plant that grows hereabouts. We call it the chili pepper.”
“Yes, we have something like it, too,” Hellman said.
“Damn small galaxy,” the carhunter said. “By the way, I’m Wayne 1332A.”
“Tom Hellman,” Hellman said.
“Pleased to meet you. Settle yourself in and take a good grip. We’re going to the meeting.“
The carhunter broke into a stride, then, lowering wheels, built up speed across the flat face of the desert. But soon he slowed again.
“What’s the matter?” Hellman asked.
“Are you sure I’m doing the right thing, saving your life?”
“I’m absolutely sure,” Hellman said. “You need have no doubts over that. “
“I just wanted to be sure,” Wayne said. “ Anyway, it’s best to let the others decide what to do with you. “
Wayne 1332A started to pick up speed again.
“What do you mean, do with me?”
“You might be a problem for us, Tom. But I have to let the others decide. Now I need to concentrate.”
They had reached another part of the plain. It was strewn with gigantic boulders. The carhunter needed all his skill to dodge around them at the high speed he was maintaining. Let the others decide. Hellman hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Nothing much he could do about it at present, however. And anyhow, maybe the robots at the meeting wouldn’t be so difficult.
The sunlight had faded as they roared out of the rocky plain and into a region of low, steep hills. There was a rudimentary track leading up. Wayne took it as if he were a dirt-bike hill climber. Dirt, sand, and gravel showered Hellman as the carhunter dodged and slashed and braked and accelerated up the increasingly steep hill. At last Wayne’s wheels began to skid and he had to retract them and go entirely by pseudopod power. Hellman had to hold on extra tight, because the robot was shaking and quivering and lurching and swerving, and sometimes all of them at the same time.
Then Wayne slewed to a sudden halt.
Hellman said, “What is it?”
“Lookee over there.”
Hellman’s gaze followed the LED lights along one of the carhunter’s main support members. Off to one side, on a rough but serviceable road, a dusty old Mercedes 300 SL was moving sedately along.
“Ain’t that a beauty!” Wayne said.
Hellman looked and didn’t like the prospect of the carhunter hurling itself at this burly and self-reliant automobile on this hillside with its deeply tilted slant and its uneasy footing. One slip, and he and the carhunter would be at the bottom of the hill after rolling all the way. Maybe the carhunter could recover from that, but Hellman doubted a human could.
“Hell, it’s just a car,” Hellman said. “Let’s get to the meeting, huh?”
“That car is prime eating, and if you don’t want it I can sure use it.”
“Let’s eat latf;r, at the meeting.”
“Idiot, the meeting is a time of fasting. Why do you think I need a snack now?”
“Computer!” Hellman said, turning on the radio link he had managed to hold on to through everything, probably because it was attached to his wrist by a lanyard.
“Out of range,” the carhunter said. “Relax, I been gittin’ cars on worse terrain than this. Hang on, baby, here we got”
He started down the perilous slope. It was strange that at this time, just before the irrevocable launch into dangerous territory, Hellman should think of the Desdemona mystery. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t strange at all.
Desdemona was a satellite out past Neptune orbit. It was a dreary little place, a settlement of no more than a few hundred members of a now forgotten religious sect who had gone to this place to preserve their beliefs without contamination from the rest of the world. They
had taken their robots with them, of course; you couldn’t survive in the outer planets without robots and a lot of luck. They had been gatherers of Xeum, cosmic-ray residue. Due to topological peculiarities in the spacetime continuum, Desdemona happened to receive more Xeum than any other place in the solar system. But it was a bare living, because the only demand for Xeum was from scientists who were trying to find the primordial substance which generated the ultimate particle.
The settlers of Desdemona were sober people who kept only the most minimal contact with the other worlds. Still, they couldn’t isolate themselves entirely. There were stirrings, undercurrents, and a growing demand for new products and new ways. Some of the Desdemona citizens took to spending time at Ganymede Fun World, the pleasure satellite that had been erected in Jupiter orbit. It was a long way to go for a little fun, but go they did.
There was dissension on Desdemona. And then, one day, a blurry and hard-to-read signal was received on Earth and other worlds. No one could decipher it, but it seemed to refer to some disaster. A relief party was sent out and found Desdemona satellite deserted. The place had been dismantled in an orderly fashion, all useful material packed away and taken. The only hint of what had happened was a letter, begun and crumpled and thrown into a corner and there ignored in the general housecleaning that preceded the departure. After some chit-chat about family and friends, there was this: “Our robots have been giving us difficulties of late, and we’re not sure what to do about it. The Elders say there’s no danger of a revolt, though some doubt the wisdom of the new override instructions that permit our robots to get around the Three Laws of Robotics. Our Chairman says this is necessary in order not to inhibit their intellectual development, but some of us wonder if we aren’t asking for a lot of trouble-”
At that point the letter ended in mid-sentence.
There was conjecture that the robots, freed of the restraints of the Laws of Robotics, had somehow taken control and decided to take the spaceships, and the humans from Desdemona, and go somewhere else, a place where they would not be molested by the rest of humanity. It was theoretically possible to bypass the robotics laws; intelligent robots started their life with neutral ethical values. Moral defaults and restraints had to be built in and programmed. Not everyone agreed with this program. Some people had toyed with their robots’ conditioning, hoping to get more out of the robots. Instances of this were rare, however, and were stamped out as soon as they were encountered.
Large rewards were offered for anyone who solved the Desdemona mystery, and even larger rewards were available for anyone who discovered the present location of the Desdemona robots and their owners, the humans of Desdemona Settlement. No one had claimed this money so far, although there had been one or two false alarms.
Hellman was pretty sure that the Desdemona robots had come to this place, whatever this planet was called. He was potentially a rich man. The only difficulty was, he was at present clinging to the side of a carhunter which was rushing down a slope to attack a Mercedes 300 SL.
Slipping and sliding on the rocky
surface, the carhunter, wheels spinning, limbs struggling for purchase, came down on the hapless automobile. The Mercedes, sensing the attack at the last moment, put on a burst of speed. The carhunter was able to claw away a portion of its bumper before the Mercedes pulled free, and, with a snort from its double carbs, hurtled down the slope. The carhunter followed, caught up, and launched itself onto the back of the car. There was a wild bellowing from both machines. Then the carhunter had landed on the trunk of the Mercedes and was tearing and rending it, trying, with its long extensible arms, to reach under and break loose one of the vulnerable axles in order to hamstring the mechanical beast. But the Mercedes had armored side panels and a mesh of steel protected its vital organs. Its horn blared and from its modified supercharger ports came a blue-gray gas. The carhunter managed to pinch shut the main port out of which these fumes were rising. Extruding a metallic tentacle with a bludgeon-like steel fist at its end, it beat in the car’s side window and grabbed at the steering wheel. The car and the carhunter struggled for control as they careened across the steep hillside, coming perilously close to capsizing. This was prevented only by the carhunter’s superior sense of balance, for he managed somehow to keep both himself and the Mercedes upright on its wheels. The groans and snarls, screams and gruntings were impressive in the extreme. Hellman was battered back and forth as the two robots clashed, and thought for a moment he was going to be thrown free. And then, suddenly, it was over. The robothunter’s tentacle snaked through an entry port and found the creature’s central processing unit somewhere deep in its innards. The carhunter wrenched, once, twice, and on the third try a thick bunch of cables came loose and the Mercedes uttered a single sigh and slowed to a halt. The idiot lights on its dashboard flashed in crazy patterns, then went to black. The creature was dead.
Hellman managed to slide to the ground. He stretched himself and rested while Wayne stripped out the points and munched them, then dismantled the machine and stored some of the choicer parts in its cargo section just beneath its own CPU. Watching him, Hellman became aware that he was getting hungry, too.
“I don’t suppose you have anything that I can eat?” Hellman asked, as he watched Wayne slaver as it munched down one headlight.
“Not here, no,” Wayne said. “But at the meeting we’ll be able to do something for you. “
“I don’t eat metal, you know,” Hellman said. “Not even plastic. “
“I am aware of humans’ special dietary requirements,” the carhunter replied. He spit out a couple of lug nuts. “Well, that was delicious. Too bad you humans don’t know about headlights. Come on, mount up, we’ll be late.”
“Through no fault of mine,” Hellman muttered, climbing onto the carhunter again.
In another hour they had left the desolate badlands and were traveling across grassy rolling country. There was a river to their right, and green rolling hills to the left. So far Hellman had not seen any signs of human, or even animal, life. There was plenty of vegetation around here, however. Most of it seemed to be in the form of trees and grass. Nothing there for him to eat. But perhaps something would turn up when they reached the meeting place.
Far ahead, in a cleft between two hills, he caught sight of a glint of sunlight off metal. “What’s that?” he asked.
“That’s the Roundhouse,” Wayne said. “That’s what we call the Great Meeting Hall. And look. Some of the others are there already. “
The Roundhouse was a circular building, one story high, open to the weather and supported on pillars. It was nicely landscaped with big trees and shrubbery. There were perhaps twenty machines milling around outside. Hellman could hear their engines idling before he could make out the words they were saying to each other. Behind the Roundhouse was a fenced enclosure. Here there were several enormous mechanical creatures of a kind Hellman had not seen before. They towered above the carhunters, looking like mechanical renditions of brontosaurus. Close to their enclosure there were various other structures.
As Wayne approached, the carhunters spotted Hellman on his back and fell silent. Wayne coasted to a stop near them.
“Howdy, Jeff,” Wayne said. “Si, Bill, Skeeter, hello.”
“Hello, Wayne,” they replied.
“I reckon you can get down now,” Wayne said to Hellman.
Hellman slid down the carhunter’s back. It felt good to have solid ground beneath him again, though he was a little intimidated by the size of the other carhunters.
“What you got there, Wayne?” one of them asked.
“You can see for yourself,” Wayne said. “It’s a human.”
“Well, so it is,” the machine called Jeff replied. “Haven’t seen one of them critters around for a long time.”
“They’re getting pretty scarce, “ Wayne agreed. “ Anything to drink around here?”
One of the carhunters pointed one of his extensors at a forty-gallon barrel which had been put aside under one of the trees. “Try some of that. Some of Lester’s home brew he sent along. “
“Isn’t Lester going to make it?”
“Afraid not. He’s got that rot of the control cables; it’s got him crippled up pretty good.”
Wayne went over to the barrel. He extruded a tube and inserted it into the barrel. The others watched silently as the level of the barrel went down.
“Hey, Wayne! Save some for somebody else!”
Wayne finally withdrew his drinking tube. “Yahoo!” he said. “Got a kick, that stuff.”
“Three hundred proof and flavored with cinnamon. Human, you want to try some?”
“I guess I’ll pass on it,” Hellman said. The carhunters guffawed rudely.
“Where in the hell did you find him, Wayne?”
“Out on the prairie,” Wayne said…His owner is still out there in the spaceship. “
“Why didn’t he come along?”
“Don’t rightly know. Might not be mobile.”
“What’re you going to do with him?”
“That’s for the Executive Council to decide,” Wayne said.
“Does he talk?” the one called Skeeter asked. “Sure, I talk,” Hellman said.
Hellman was about to put this smart-alecky robot straight. But then there was a movement within the Roundhouse and two robots came out. Their open framework struts and girders were painted blue; their upper part was red. They had black symbols painted here and there. They seemed to be officials of some sort.
“The Chief sent us,” one of them said to Wayne. “He heard you came into camp with a human.”
“News gets around fast, don’t it?” Wayne said.
“Wayne, you know that’s against the rules.”
Wayne shook his big head. “It’s not customary, but I never heard it was against the rules.”
“Well, it is. We’ll have to take him inside for interrogation.”
“Figured as much,” Wayne said.
“Come with us, human,” one of the officials said.
There didn’t seem to be anything for Hellman to do but follow orders. He knew he was no match for the robots in speed or strength. He’d have to keep his wits about him. It might not be too easy to come out of this one okay.
What really perplexed him, however, was, what did these robots have against human beings? How had they developed in this way? Were there any humans at all on this planet? Or had the robots killed them all?
One of the buildings seemed to serve the carhunters as a prison. Its sides were closed. It had a door, which had a padlock. One of the red and blue officials or guards or whatever they were unlocked the door and held it open for Hellman.
“How long you going to lock me up for?” Hellman asked.
“You will be informed of the council’s decisions.” They closed the door behind him.
It was a large room made of galvanized iron. There were windows set high up. There was no glass in them. The room was devoid of furniture. Evidently robots didn’t use chairs or beds. There were a few low metal tables. Hellman looked aroun
d, and, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he made out a wink of lights from one corner. He went there to investigate.
There was a robot in the corner. It was somewhat smaller than a man, perhaps five feet high. And it was slender. It had a well-defined head sculpted from some bright metal, and the usual arms and legs. The creature watched him silently, and that was a little unnerving.
“Hi,” Hellman said. “I’m Tom Hellman. Who are you?”
The robot didn’t reply.
“Can’t you talk?” Hellman asked. “Don’t you speak English?”
Still no reply from the robot, who continued to watch him with one red and one green eye.
“Great,” Hellman said. “They put me in with a dummy. “
As he spoke, he noticed that the robot was scratching in the dirt of the packed earth floor with a long toe. Hellman read it: “The walls have ears.”
He looked at the robot. It gave him a meaningful look.
“What happens now?” Hellman said, dropping his voice to a whisper. The robot scratched, “We’ll know soon.” The robot didn’t want to communicate any further. Hellman went to the far side of the room and stretched out on the floor. He was very hungry now. Were they going to feed him? And more important, were they going to feed him something he could eat? Outside, it was growing late. After a while, Hellman started to doze off. He fell into a light sleep, and soon he was dreaming of vague, threatening things that came at him out of a dark sky. He was trying to explain to them that he was not to, blame, but he couldn’t remember what for.
Hellman awoke when the door to the prison was opened. At first he thought they had come to tell him what they had decided. But they had brought him food instead. It consisted entirely of fruit and nuts. None of them was familiar to him, but none were strange, either. They also brought him water. It was carried in quart oil cans which had been scrupulously cleansed and bore not even a trace of oil. Hellman learned later that these cans had never held oil, even though “oil” was stamped into the metal of their sides. He had no idea then that the carhunters had a ceremonial side to their nature, and were able to use certain utilitarian objects for their symbolic value alone.
