Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

The crash made every screen in the communications room flicker in distant sympathy. Sparks sprang out and steel plates groaned. Ego hung for an instant motionless upon the steel wall that opposed him, then fell back, staggered, braced himself to crash again.

  But he did not charge. He stood there sweeping his bright scanner over the line, and the clicking in his chest rose and fell so loudly the listeners in the communications room could hear it plainly. A storm of alternate choices seemed to be pouring through the electronic mind of the thinker.

  While Ego hesitated, the steel wall he confronted moved, curving outward at both ends toward the solitary figure. It was clear what the intention of the operators was. If these ponderous shapes could be made to close Ego in they could immobilize him by sheer massiveness, like tame elephants immobilizing a wild one.

  But Ego saw the trap in the instant before the line began to move. His backward step and quick spin showed it. Conway thought his eye flashed brighter, and his whirl was incongruously light-footed. In contrast to the heavy-duty machines he looked like a steel dancer in his light, keen balance. He made a quick feint toward one end of the line, and the robots massed sluggishly together to receive him. They opened a gap in their line when they moved, and Ego darted for the gap. But instead of passing through it he put out both arms and pushed delicately and fiercely at the two sides of the opening, in exactly the right spots. The two robots leaned ponderously outward, tipped just barely off their balance. They leaned, leaned, inexorably leaned and fell. Each carried its next companion down with it. The corridor thundered with the crash.

  Trampling on the fallen machines, the line closed up and moved ponderously forward. Ego ran at it with a clear illusion of joyous motion, stooped, struck two robots at once with the same delicate, exact precision, knowing before he struck at just what hidden fulcrum point their balance rested. The corridor thundered again with the tumult of their collapse. As the line tried to close once more over the fallen warriors Ego’s hands shot out and helped them heavily together, smashing two more into-one another with unexpected momentum. This time as he touched them his touches were sharp blows, and the steel plating buckled in like tin.

  In less than two minutes the walking wall was a mass of staggering leviathans, half of them out of commission, the rest stumbling ponderously over their fallen comrades trying to reform a line already too short to work.

  So much for that try, Conway thought. Then the supersonics were their last hope. There wouldn’t be time for more. Maybe there wasn’t even time for that.

  “Where’s the supersonic squad?” he asked, impressed at the false briskness of his own voice. The communications officer looked up at the luminous chart.

  “Almost there, General. Half a minute away.”

  Conway glanced once at the television screen, which now showed Ego standing over the prostrate metal giants and swaying rather oddly as he looked down. It wasn’t like his behavior pattern to hesitate like this. There seemed to be something on his mind. Whatever it was, it might mean a few moments’ leeway.

  “I’m going out there myself, sergeant,” Conway said. “I I want to be on the spot when—” He paused, realizing that he was saying aloud what was really a private soliloquy, Conway to Conway, with no eavesdroppers. What he meant was that he wanted to be there when the end came one way or the other. He had envied the robot, he had hoped infinite things for it. He had begun to identify with the powerful and tireless steel. Win or lose, he wanted to be on the spot at the payoff.

  Running down the corridor was like running in a dream, floating, almost, his legs numb and the sound of his footfalls echoing from feathery distances. Each time his weight jolted down he wondered if that knee could take it, whether it wouldn’t fold and let him fall, let him lie there and rest. But no, he wanted to stand beside Ego and see the steel face and hear the mindless voice when they destroyed the robot, or the robot destroyed them all. The third chance success seemed too remote to consider.

  When he got there he hardly knew it. He was dimly aware that he had stopped running, so there must be a reason. He was standing with his hand on a doorknob, his back leaning against the panels, gasping for breath. To the left stretched the narrow corridor down which he had run. Before him the broad hall loomed where men had fought Ego and failed, and machines had fought him and now lay almost still, or staggered futilely, out of control.

  No matter how clearly you see a scene on television screens, you never really experience it until you get there. Conway had forgotten, in this brief while, how tall Ego really was. There was a smell of machine oil and hot metal in the air, and dust motes danced in the cone of Ego’s searchlight as he stooped over the fallen robots. He was about to do something. Conway couldn’t guess what.

  Running footsteps and the clank of equipment sounded down the corridor to the left. Conway turned his head a little and saw the supersonic squad pounding toward him. He thought, maybe there’s still a chance. If Ego delays another two minutes

  On the floor the fallen robots still twitched and stirred in response to the distant commands of their operators. But a heavy-duty robot, fallen, isn’t easy to set upright again. Ego stooped over the nearest, seeming almost puzzled.

  Then with sudden, rather horrifying violence, he reached out and ripped the front plate off his victim with one rending motion. His gaze plunged shining into the entrails of the thing, glancing in bright reflections off the tubes and the wiring so coarse in comparison with his own transistors and printed circuits. He put out one steel hand, sank his fingers deep and ripped again, gazing, engrossed, at the havoc he made. There was something frightful about this act of murder, one robot deliberately disemboweling another on his own initiative, with what seemed the coolest scientific interest.

  But whatever Ego sought wasn’t there. He straightened and went on to the next, ripped, stooped, studied the ticking and flashing entrails intently, his own inward ticking quite loud as if he were muttering to himself.

  Conway, beckoning the supersonic squad on, thought to himself, “In the old days they used to tell fortunes that way. Maybe he’s doing it now ” And once more the chilly thought swam up to the surface of his consciousness that perhaps he knew what drove the robot to desperation. Perhaps he too knew the future, and the knowledge and the pressure made the two of them kin. Win the war was what Ego’s ticking entrails commanded, just as the more complex neurons of Conway’s brain commanded him. But what if winning was impossible, and Ego knew

  The supersonic squad, running hard, burst out of the side corridor and pulled up short at their first sight of Ego in the no, not flesh. In the shining steel, giant-tall, with the cyclops eye glaring. The sergeant panted something at Conway, trying to salute, forgetting that both his hands were full of equipment.

  Conway with his pointing finger drew a semicircle in front, of him before the calculator room door.

  “Set the guns up, quick along here. We’ve got to stop him if he tries to get in.”

  Ego straightened from his second victim and moved on to a third, hesitating over it, looking down.

  The squad had, after all, only about thirty seconds to spare. They had been assembling their equipment as they ran, and now with speed as precise as machinery they took up positions along the line Conway had assigned them. He stood against the door, looking down at their stooping backs as they drew up the last line of defense with their own bodies and their guns between Ego and the calculators. Or no, Conway thought, maybe I’m the last line. For some remote and despairing thought was shaping itself in his mind as he looked at Ego

  In exactly the same second that the first ultrasonic gun swung its snout toward the corridor, Ego straightened and faced the double doors and the circle of men kneeling behind their guns. It seemed to Conwaythat over their heads he and Ego looked at each other challengingly for a moment.

  “Sergeant,” Conway said in a tense voice. “Cut him off at the leg, halfway to the knee. And pinpoint it fine. He’s full of precision stuff and he’s worth
a lot more than you or me.”

  Ego bathed them in his cold headlight beam. Conway, wondering if the robot had understood, said quickly, “Fire.”

  You could hear the faintest possible hissing, nothing more. But a spot of heat glowed cherry-red and then blinding white upon Ego’s left leg just below the knee.

  Conway thought, “It’s hopeless. If he charges us now he’ll break through before we can—”

  But Ego had another defense. The searchlight glance blinked once, and then Conway felt a sudden, violent discomfort he couldn’t place, and the heat-spot went red again and faded. The sergeant dropped the gun nozzle and swore, shaking his hand.

  “Fire on six,” he said. “Eight, stand by.”

  Ego stood motionless, and the discomfort Conway felt deepened in rhythm with a subtle, visible vibration that pulsed through the steel tower before him.

  A second sonic gun hissed faintly. A spot of red sprang out on the robot’s leg. The vibration deepened, the discomfort grew worse. The heat-spot faded to nothing.

  “Interference, sir,” the sergeant said. “He’s blanketing the sound-wave with a frequency of his own something he’s giving out himself. Feel it?”

  “But why doesn’t he charge?” Conway asked himself, not aloud, for fear the robot could really understand. And he thought, maybe he can’t charge and broadcast the protecting frequency at the same time. Or maybe he hasn’t thought yet that he could wade right through before we could hurt him much. And Conway tried to picture to himself the world as it must look to Ego, less than an hour old, with impossible conflicts raging in the electronic complexities of his chest.

  Conway said, “The eight-gun’s on another frequency? Keep trying, sergeant. Maybe he can’t blanket them all at once. Hold out as long as you can.”

  He opened the door behind him quickly and softly and went into the computer room.

  This was another world. For a moment he forgot everything that lay outside the double doors and stood there taking in the feel and smell and sight of the room. It was a good place. He had always liked to be here. He could forget what stood eight feet tall and poised for destruction outside the door, and what lay waiting in the future, no farther away than day after tomorrow. He looked up at the high, flat faces of the computers, liking the way the lights winked, the sound of tape feeding through drums, the steady, pouring sound of typewriter keys, the orderly, dedicated feel of the place.

  Broome looked up from the group around the typewriter of the analogue computer. All the men in the room had left their jobs and were clustering here, where the broad tape flowed out from under the keys and the columns of print poured smoothly, like water, onto the paper.

  “Anything?” Conway asked.

  Broome straightened painfully, easing his back.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Tell me,” Conway said. “Quick. He’ll be here in seconds.”

  “He’s set up a block, accidentally. That’s pretty sure. But how and why we still don’t—”

  “Then you don’t know anything,” Conway said flatly. “Well, I think I may have a—”

  On the other side of the door sudden tumult broke out. Steel feet thudded, men shouted, equipment crackled and spat. The shouting rose to a crescendo and fell silent. The double doors crashed open and Ego stood on the threshold, facing the calculators. Here and there on his steel body spots of dull heat were fading. He was smeared with stains of oil and blood, and his searchlight eye swept around the room with a controlled speed that yet had something frantic in it. Ego looked at the calculators and the calculators placidly ticked on, rolling out unheeded data under the jaws of their typewriters as every man in the room faced the robot.

  In the open doorway behind Ego the squad sergeant stumbled into sight, blood across his face, the nozzle of a sonic-gun in his hand.

  “No,” Comvay said. “Wait. Stand aside, Broome. Let Ego get to the calculators.”

  He paid no attention to the buzz of shocked response. He was looking at Ego with almost hypnotized attention, trying to force the cogs of his own thinking to mesh faster. There was still a chance. Just a shadow of a chance, he knew that. And if he let Ego at the calculators and Ego failed, he wasn’t sure he could interfere in time to save anything. But he had to try. A line of dialogue out of something he couldn’t identify floated through his mind. Yet I will try the last. Some other desperate commander in his last battle, indomitable in the face of defeat. Conway grinned a little, knowing himself anything but indomitable. And yet I will try the last.

  Ego still stood motionless in the doorway. Time moves so much slower than thought. The robot still scanned the computers and thought with complex tickings to himself. Conway stepped aside, leaving the way clear. As he moved he saw his own image swim up at him from the stained surfaces of the robot body, his own gaunt face and hollow eyes reflected as if from a moving mirror smeared with oil and blood, as if it were he himself who lived inside the robot’s body, activating it with his own drives.

  Ego’s pause on the threshold lasted only a fraction of a second. His glance flicked the calculators and dismissed them one by one, infinitely fast. Then, as Broome had done, Ego wheeled to the analogue computer and crossed the floor in three enormous strides. Almost contemptuously, without even scanning it, he ripped out the programing tape. He slapped a blank tape into the punching device and his fingers flickered too fast to watch as he stamped his own questions into the wire. In seconds he was back at the computer.

  Nobody moved. The mind was dazzled, trying to follow his speed. Only the computer seemed fast enough to keep pace with him, and he bent over the typewriter of the machine tautly, one machine communing with its kinsman, and the two of them so infinitely faster than flesh and blood that the men could only stand staring.

  Nobody breathed. Conway because thought is so fast had time to say to himself with enormous hopefulness, “He’ll find out the answer. He’ll take over now. When the new assault starts he’ll handle it and win, and I can stop trying any more ”

  The stream of printed answers began to pour out under the typewriter bar, and Ego bent to read. The bright cone of his sight bathed the paper. Then with a gesture that was savage as a man’s, he ripped off the tape as if he were tearing out a tongue that had spoken intolerable words. And Conway knew the computer had failed them, Ego had failed, Conway had gambled and lost.

  The robot straightened up and faced the machines. His steel hands shot out in a furious, punishing motion, ready to rip the computers apart as he had already ripped the other machines which had failed him.

  Conway in a voice of infinite disillusion said, “Ego, wait. It’s all right.”

  As always when you spoke its name, the robot paused and turned. And faster than data through the computers there poured through Conway’s mind a torrent of linking thoughts. He saw his own image reflected upon the robot’s body, himself imprisoned in the reflection as Ego was jailed in a task impossible to achieve.

  He realized that he understood the robot as no one else alive could do, because only he knew the same tensions. It was something the computers couldn’t deduce. But it was something Conway had partly guessed all along, and forbidden himself to recognize until the last alternative failed and he had to think for himself.

  Win the war was the robot’s basic drive. But he had to act on incomplete information, like Conway himself, and that meant that Ego had to assume responsibility for making wrong decisions that might lose the war, which he was not allowed to do. Neither could he shift responsibility as the computers could, saying, “No answer insufficient data.” Nor could he take refuge in neurosis or madness or surrender. Nor in passing the duty on to someone else, as Conway had tried to do. So all he could do was seek more knowledge furiously, almost at random, and all he could want was

  “I know what you want,” Conway said. “You can have it. I’ll take over, Ego. You can stop wanting, now.”

  “Want—” the robot howled inhumanly, and paused as usual, and then r
ushed on for the first time to finish his statement, “to stop wanting!”

  “Yes,” Conway said. “I know. So do I. But now you can stop, Ego. Turn yourself off. You did your best.”

  The hollow voice said much more softly, “Want to stop ” And then hovering on the brink of silence, “ stop want ” It ceased. The shivering stopped. A feel of violence seemed to die upon the air around the robot, as if intolerable tensions had relaxed at last inside it. There was a series of clear, deliberate clickings from the steel chest, as of metallic decisions irrevocably reached, one after another. And then something seemed to go out of the thing. It stood differently. It was a machine again. Nothing more than a machine.

  Conway looked at his own face in the motionless reflection. The robot couldn’t take it, he thought. No wonder. He couldn’t even speak to ask for relief, because the opposite of want is not want, and when he said the first word, its negative forced him to want nothing, and so to be silent. No, we asked too much. He couldn’t take it. Meeting his own eyes in the reflection, he wondered if he was speaking to the Conway of a long minute ago. Perhaps he was. That Conway couldn’t take it either. But this one had to, and could.

  Ego couldn’t act on partial knowledge. No machine could. You can’t expect machines to face the unknown. Only human beings can do that. Steel isn’t strong enough. Only flesh and blood can do it, and go on.

  “Well, now I know,” he thought. And it seemed strange, but he wasn’t as tired as he had been before. Always until now there had been Ego to fall back on if he had to, but something he must not try until he reached the last gasp. Well, now he had reached it. And Ego couldn’t carry the load.

  He laughed gently to himself. The thought that had chilled him came back and he looked at it calmly. Maybe win the war was impossible. Maybe that paradox was what had stopped Ego. But Conway was human. It didn’t stop him. He could accept the thought and push it aside, knowing that sometimes humans really do achieve the impossible. Maybe that was all that had kept them going this long.