I was quite sure that I was looking very bad, and however severely I’d been shaken up by what had happened I still had a fair measure of control over my emotions.
I hadn’t stayed in the train or on the platform to assist in the investigation, but I didn’t feel guilty about it. Trilling could square all that with the authorities easily enough and he wouldn’t have wanted me to talk to the police and have to identify myself. I was sure of that. My evidence would be taken down and turned over to the proper authorities in good time. The rule for me—the only rule I had a right to consider—was no entanglements.
I shut and locked the front door and almost called out: “It’s me, darling!” as I usually do when I come home late, because when Joan is alone in the apartment and hears a door opening and closing she gets angry when I just walk in unannounced. It’s part woman-curiosity, part fear, I guess—the thought that it could be a prowler and why should she be kept in suspense while I’m hanging up my hat and coat?
But this time something prevented me from calling out. Possibly the quarrel we’d had was still rankling a little deep in my mind and I wasn’t quite sure how she’d take the “Darling.”
My stubborn pride again. Or possibly it was just the feeling I had that the apartment was quieter than usual, that when you’re keyed up and alert enough to hear a pin drop and you hear nothing—just a stillness that’s a little on the weird side—your anxiety becomes too great to be relieved by calling out a cheery greeting.
I felt somehow that it would be wiser, and set better with the way I felt, if I just hung up my coat and walked into the living room without saying a word.
So I walked into the living room without saying a word and she was sitting right in the middle of it, on a straight-back chair with all of her bags packed and standing on the floor by the window, and with all of my bags packed and standing cheek-by-jowl with hers, and the three trunks that were going with me to Mars all sealed up and double-locked, and she wasn’t angry or shaking her head or looking at the luggage with scorn.
There was pride in her lustrous brown eyes and the adorable tilt of her chin, and a warmth and a tenderness, and she was smiling at me and nodding.
“Oh, darling,” she said. “Darling…darling…come here. Did you think I’d ever let you go to Mars without me? It was just talk—just stubborn, wild, crazy talk and it didn’t mean a thing.”
If you marry a woman like Joan and ever have a moment of doubt…well, it means you ought to have your head examined. But you’re twice as far removed from sanity if you throw away the check. For you can always be sure it will be redeemed eventually, in full measure and brimming over.
I didn’t even have to put on my uniform and attach the small silver hawk to it.
6
We were not the only passengers in the eight-cabined forward section of the big sky ship which had been assigned to us. But it had taken us almost a week to get acquainted. To get really acquainted, that is, so that we could relax and feel at ease and really enjoy one another’s company.
We were sitting in lounge chairs on the long promenade deck that ran parallel with all eight of the cabins, staring out through translucent crystal at a wide waste of stars.
Sitting in the first chair was a tall, sturdily built man of thirty-eight, with keen blue eyes and a dusting of gray at his temples. His name was Clifton Maddox and he was an electronic engineer. He had stories on tap that could turn your hair white, because he had been to Mars and back eight times.
Seated next to him, with her hand resting lightly on his arm, was a woman in her early twenties, with honey-blonde hair and eyes that held unfathomable glints and an enigmatical ingenuousness that could keep a man guessing in an exciting way. Her name was Helen Melton and she had eyes only for the man at her side. She had managed to make of the trip a continuous honeymoon, despite a few lovers’ quarrels and the stern exactions which her work as a medical laboratory technician had imposed on her.
I mention these two because they were fairly typical of the group as a whole. They were all unusual individuals, the kind of people you take a liking to straight off, when you meet them casually at a party and exchange a few words with them that you keep remembering for days.
Joan and I sat in the last two chairs on the promenade deck, a little apart from the others. Joan was deep in a book and a little weary of talking and I…was thinking about the robots.
The robots were a story in themselves—a story that could bear a great deal of re-telling. If right at that moment I’d had a son—a bright and eager lad of six or eight—I’d have set him on my knee and talked about the robots.
The five hundred passengers in the big sky ship were not alone in the long journey through interplanetary space. In the last years of the twentieth century, I’d have taken pains to make very clear to him, and in the early years of the twenty-first, a great new science had grown from an infant into a giant.
The science of cybernetics, of giant computers that could do much of Man’s thinking for him on a specialized technological level, had transformed the face of the Earth and was continuing to transform it at a steadily accelerating pace.
The rocket’s four giant computers were of the newest and most efficient type—humanoid in aspect, with conical heads, massive metal body-boxes, and three-jointed metal limbs which had all of Man’s flexible adaptability in the carrying out of complex and difficult tasks.
Robotlike and immense, they towered in the chart room with their six-digited metal hands on their metal knees, their electronic circuits clicking, their tiers of memory banks in constant motion, but otherwise outwardly indifferent to the human activity that was taking place around them.
Four metal giants in a metal rocket, functioning cooperatively with Man in the gulfs between the planets, might have made an imaginative fiction writer of an earlier age catch his breath and glory in the fulfillment of a prophecy. An H. G. Wells perhaps, or an Olaf Stapledon. But the reality was an even greater tribute to the human mind’s inventive brilliance than the Utopian dream had been.
The four giant computers were capable of solving problems too technical for the human mind to master without assistance, usually with astounding swiftness and always with the more-than-human accuracy of thinking machines whose prime function was to correlate without error the data supplied to them on punched metallic tapes, and to perform intricate mechanical tasks based upon that data.
The robots were tremendous, by any yardstick you might care to apply, and if I’d had a son—
I stopped thinking about the robots abruptly and sat very still, listening. A sound I’d heard a moment before had come again, much louder this time—a chill, unearthly screeching.
The chart room was just outside the eight-cabin section and I could hear the sound clearly. My nerves again, my over-stimulated imagination?
In space strange and unusual sounds are as common as pips on a radar screen. It was queer how quickly you got used to them. You had to walk around with your ears plugged up, in a sense, but the plugs didn’t have to be inserted. They were just natural growths inside your ears—invisible and without substance, but plugs notwithstanding. They produced a kind of psycho-somatic deafness which didn’t otherwise interfere with your hearing.
Just the very unusual sounds, the totally inexplicable raspings, dronings, creakings—usually of short duration—were blotted out.
You didn’t hear them unless something deep in your mind whispered: “This one is different. This is an emergency. Take heed!”
The screeching was very different. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, on Earth or in space.
The others must have heard it too, for it had been too loud, the second time, to be ignored. But apparently that strange acceptance of strange noises in space which goes with the kind of deafness I’ve mentioned had only been shattered for me. The six men and women in the lounge chairs had looked a lit
tle startled for a moment and exchanged puzzled glances. Which meant, of course, that they had heard it despite the mental earplugs in some inner recess of their minds. But that didn’t prevent them from shrugging it off and resuming their conversation.
Joan also looked a trifle uneasy. She stopped reading just long enough to raise her eyes and frown, then became absorbed in the book again.
I got up quietly and pressed her wrist. “See you,” I said.
She shut the book abruptly and straightened in her chair. “Where are you going, Ralph?”
“Just stay right where you are, kitten,” I said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
“That screeching noise,” she said. “I was wondering about it, Ralph. I guess you’d better see what’s causing it.”
So she’d been disturbed by it too, and ignoring it had taken a deliberate effort of will which I hadn’t realized she was exerting. It made me happy in an odd inner way, because it proved again what I’d always known…that we were very close and there were currents of understanding which flowed back and forth between us and I had a wife I could be proud of.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said, not wanting to alarm her. “But I might as well take a look. It seems to be coming from the chart room.”
“All right,” she said and squeezed my hand.
I had to open and shut two sliding panels and pass along a blank-walled passageway to get to the chart room. To my surprise the door was standing open. It’s usually kept locked, because there’s no section of the sky ship where a man who didn’t want anyone to suspect that he harbored within himself the most dangerous kind of destructive impulses could do more damage.
The shattering of a photo-electric eye or the ripping out of a single live connection in just one of the four cybernetic robots could have wrecked the rocket, and sent it spiraling down through the space gulfs in flaming ruin, depending on just how vital to the robot’s functioning the shattered part happened to be.
There was a security alert system which would have to be disconnected first, but anyone resourceful enough to get inside the chart room at all, without identification-disk proof that he had a right to be there, would have known precisely how to take care of the preliminary obstacles.
I didn’t waste any time in getting to that wide-open door, for my mind was racing on ahead of me like the most alerted kind of alarm system, its jaggling warning me that every second counted and that what I dreaded most might very well be true.
What I actually saw, when I reached the doorway and stood there looking in, took me completely by surprise. It wasn’t the way I’d pictured it at all. But it was just as unnerving, just as much of a threat to the safety of the ship and it startled me so I must have looked almost comic, standing there idiot-still. But there was nothing comic about what I saw.
The woman I’d almost asked to go to Mars with me was staring straight at me, her hair still piled up high, a look of terrified appeal in her eyes. She wasn’t alone. She was struggling furiously with a crewman I’d talked to a few times and neither liked nor disliked—a heavyset man with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes. He was gripping her savagely by the wrist and they were both backed up against one of the robot giants.
Suddenly as I stared her head went back and a convulsive trembling seized her. She began to scream.
7
It was a christ-awful moment—for her and for me. For her because she had no right to be in the Chart Room, or even on the ship, as far as I knew, and there was a look on the crewman’s face that chilled me to the core of my being. It went beyond the anger of a duty-obsessed man, outraged by her infringement of the regulations. It was a completely different kind of anger. There was a savage cruelty, a killing rage in his eyes, impossible to misinterpret.
It was just as awful a moment for me, because I wasn’t sure I could get to him before he broke her wrist or did something worse to her. I’d seen a woman kneed in the groin once, by just such an enraged human animal, and the memory of it had never left me. A strong man, turned maniacal, could kill with his hands in a matter of seconds. I’d seen that happen too, and the victim hadn’t been a woman, but a man as powerful as the killer.
I crossed the Chart Room in a running leap, grabbed him by the shoulders and swung him about, raining blows on him more or less at random. I just tried to hit him as hard as I could without caring much where the blows landed, so long as they resounded with a meaty smack where they would do the most good. My only aim was to stun and, if possible, cripple him in a terrible, punishing way, so that he’d release his grip on the wrist of the woman he’d been trying to hurt before she screamed again and her hand dangled with a sickening limpness, making me want to permanently demolish him in slow and painful stages.
For a moment I was only sure of one thing. My fist had smashed very solidly into his face at least twice and drawn blood. I could see the gleam of blood on his jaw as he reeled back, and I was almost sure I’d heard his nose crack. There was nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t satisfy me. I wanted to turn his face into quivering jelly. But most of all I was hoping, praying that she’d break free before I set about doing that, because a voice was screaming deep in my mind that if she couldn’t he might still be capable of injuring her cruelly.
She broke free. Just how I don’t know, because the punishment I’d dished out hadn’t stunned him. He could still have fractured her wrist, judging by the look of blazing fury he trained on me.
His determination to repay me in full probably explained it. He needed both of his hands free for that, because I could see that what he would have liked to do most was get a strangler’s grip on my throat.
The human windpipe doesn’t fracture easily, as every experienced medical examiner knows. It’s elastic and it gives, and post-mortem appearances prove that you can die by strangulation with your windpipe intact. But I have a horror of anything like that, and I didn’t intend to let his fingers come anywhere near my throat.
I smashed my fist into his groin twice, putting so much shoulder-to-elbow resilience into the blows that he bent almost double, wrapped his arms about his middle just above his groin and went staggering backwards.
They were below-the-belt beltings, but I didn’t give a damn about that. Manhandling a woman just because she hasn’t the strength of a male has always seemed to be just about the worst crime on the books. All right…attacking a child is worse but you certainly forfeit all right to Queensberry Rules consideration when you’re called to account for using your strength against anyone weaker than yourself, unless he or she has done something vicious and there’s a hell of a good justification for it.
I no longer wanted to permanently demolish him, now that she’d broken free. But I had no control over what happened. The deck of the Chart Room is all smooth metal, and the polishing preparation that’s used to keep it bright makes it almost as skid-slippery as a skating rink, if you happen to be thrown a little off-balance.
He was off-balance just enough to change his backward lurch from a stagger to a swaying, spinning glide that sent him crashing against the base of a robot giant.
Up to that instant the four robot giants had looked exactly alike. But a robot in motion looks quite different from a robot at rest, with its massive metal hands on its metal knees, and its gleaming central section in an upright position. The crash was followed by a splintering sound which continued for several seconds without stopping. There was a whirring as well, and a blinding flash of light came from the metal giant’s conical head. Almost instantly the robot was in motion, and the way it swayed as it raised its segmented right arm high into the air so alarmed me that I shouted a warning to the man I’d just finished trying to send to the sick bay for a stay of at least two weeks.
The jerky, erratic way the robot giant was swaying could only mean that the crash had damaged its internal gadgetry, and it had gone completely out of control. It was shaking and quiver
ing all over and even its ponderous central section seemed to bulge a little, as if from hunger-bloat.
That, of course, was absurd. But it’s natural enough to think of a robot as human and take refuge in absurdity when you know that a cybernetic brain, encased in a functional body, can do just as much damage as a madman running amuck with a deadly weapon. Just as much…more…when it’s out of control.
You don’t want to face up to it squarely, you shrink from it, because some instinct tells you it would be dangerous to let the horror of it come sweeping into your mind too fast. So you take refuge in absurdity, you imagine things that are a little on the ludicrous side. A hunger-bloat, a maniacal glare in photo-electric eyes.
But when you’ve done that, you have to stand and watch the horror take place before your eyes and in the end you’ve gained nothing…because when anything as terrible as what I saw sears its way into your brain the memory of it will remain with you until you die.
The robot giant’s massive metal hand swept downward, descending on the head and shoulders of the man who’d crashed into it. It hurled him to the deck, and flattened him out with a hammer blow that crushed his skull, broke his ribs, and tore a deep gash in his back. A red stain spread over his ripped shirt. I shut my eyes, sickened. There was a screaming behind me. I swung dully about and went to her and held her head against my chest, stroking her hair, whispering soothing words into her ear. I could do that without endangering the safety of the sky ship, because the robot giant had ceased to move. With the descent of its hand all of the whirrings had ceased and it remained in a bent-over position, utterly rigid, its mace-like metal palm still resting on the unstirring crewman’s back.
I was quite sure that no jury on Earth would have held me criminally responsible for his death. It had been brought about by an accident I couldn’t have foreseen. Every man has the right to defend himself when he’s under attack, and not just my own life had been in danger. There was no doubt in my mind…not the slightest.… His rage had been homicidal and he would have killed me if I’d given him the chance.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel Page 22
