To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  Hacket shrugged off his feeling of depression and looked at the truck. Yes, Brewster had selected a good one for him.

  He approached it. “You have been briefed? I am Hacket.”

  “Yes, sir, I have all the details.”

  “These two heaps of rust are my personal assistants. The big one is Ben and the smaller one is Oscar—and you?”

  “I don’t have a name, Mr. Hacket.”

  “You have now. I shall call you Clarence.”

  “Good God!” said Oscar in shocked voice.

  Hacket was uplifted for a minute, aware of the comradeship between them. A link which people like Brewster failed to realize. Very few indeed suspected that a thinking machine could have a sense of humor.

  He jerked his mind back to the present. “I’d like a tour of the perimeter, please.”

  It was not far, but the robot stuck rigidly to the rules of the road and obeyed all signals. The robot carrier was wheelless, silent, held a knee-distance above the surface of the road by a gravity-plate.

  Brewster watched their progress through the city’s standard surveillance units.

  The vehicle was getting near the perimeter. If pedestrians appeared, they were never less than groups of six. There was a sprinkling of traffic, some privately owned, and some public transport, all of it heavily armored.

  Left, into Wraike Street, this was virtually no man’s land. From here on, figuratively speaking, one went over the top; one never knew what might be lying in wait in the next street.

  Right into Squire Avenue and—Dear God!—they were stopping at Bush House. It was well known what occupied Bush House. It was almost a tradition, they had held it unchallenged for almost forty years.

  God! The truck had stopped and Hacket was getting out. Only the robots dare walk into that place; the occupiers knew robots and accepted them as part of the scenery.

  Hacket was walking straight towards the building. Brewster wanted to shout a warning, mount a rescue team, but knew that both were hopeless. Hacket would obviously ignore a warning. As for a rescue attempt, he had not half enough staff on call to mount one.

  Unless Hacket had some sort of secret weapon, he was dicing with his own life.

  Christ! There were two at the top of the steps there, almost in front of the doorway.

  Hacket was bloody done for.

  The robots would do nothing for him. The robots never did anything violent for anybody.

  They were full length, and they looked up at him with their golden eyes as he drew near—then looked away.

  The nearest licked its left paw lazily and closed its eyes. All too obviously, it didn’t give a damn about Hacket.

  Brewster whimpered inwardly. God, he might have been warned; he had almost had a heart attack. Watching, he had almost shared the danger.

  On the other hand, was this all? Did the man have some mysterious power over wild animals and, if so, what about it? Yes, here the animal invasion was a problem—but not the problem.

  He looked again at Hacket walking casually among the dozing animals and thought, suddenly, how grotesque the world had become.

  Bush House, a once moderately priced family hotel, but now—

  Two lions lying full length on the wide steps, yet this was but a small view of a city under siege.

  Ocean City had once boasted that, close by, it had built one of the biggest and most comprehensive zoos in the world. Now, nearly one hundred years later, that zoo was taking over the city.

  There were other parts of the city where tigers roamed or hyenas ruled the streets, but, in truth, the great beasts were only a minor problem.

  The major threat came from the smaller beasts, the roaming bands of wild dogs, the reptiles, and, of course, the rats. Dear God, the rats! Veritable armies of the bloody things, apparently disorganized, yet cunning in the extreme.

  Brewster was lost in despair again; wherever he looked he could see no hope. All this because of the plague that had began long before his time, and decimated the population of the world in a few generations.

  He poured himself a drink, knowing he was going against his own rules.

  It was thinking about it that set him on edge, because it had not truly been a plague. No people had dropped dead in the streets, there had been no terrible sicknesses like those which had swept the Middle Ages.

  It was something insidious that had crept in by the back door and, for which man, himself, seemed partly responsible. In some ways he had been too damn clever for his own good.

  Hacket returned from his tour via Swanson Street, and ran into trouble.

  There was a vehicle in the way, but this one was not robotic. It was armored, yes, but it rode the highway on the ancient underjets.

  Four men stood in front of it with weapons pointing, and the tallest of the men stepped forward.

  “We’d like a word with you, Hacket.”

  “I’m not looking for trouble.” He stepped down from the carrier.

  “Neither are we, but it’s only right that you should have a clear picture of the situation. My name is Stead, by the way, no need to hide anything, cards on the table from the beginning. In the first place, boy, we know why you’re here. You’re a figurehead tossed into this city to show that Central Government is actually taking measures to deal with the situation. Oh, sure, we’ve heard all the rubbish about you having some sort of mystic powers to turn the tide locally, but, even if true, it’s a palliative, man. It will soothe but not cure.”

  Stead paused then jerked his weapon forward slightly. “All that we may not like but can take. What we do not like about you, Sonny Boy, is that you’re a known pro-robot—and that we do not like. You start shouting off your mouth here about equal rights, and you’re in for trouble. You keep that gap below your nose buttoned on the subject, and you’ll come to no harm—follow?”

  He tumed, and with the other men, stepped back into the armored vehicle.

  Brewster, who had witnessed the entire incident, mopped his forehead tiredly. Sending Hacket, placing him, figuratively speaking, in charge like an ancient, gun-bearing sheriff, had done nothing to help the situation.

  Hacket had no spoken authority, no guns, and his only support were the robots, who would lend him no physical aid whatever.

  Brewster’s mind went back to the alleged plague. Mankind thought it had found the answer, proved that it had risen far above the reproductive cycle of the animal. As soon as a woman became pregnant, the embryo was surgically removed and placed in an artificial womb. Here it was raised to infancy, then brought into the world in a normal way.

  The system had worked almost without fault for almost three hundred years, then, rapidly and without warning, it began to fail. The steady cycle of human continuation fell from an eighty-six percent success rate, to an alarming twelve percent.

  All this within five years, and humanity realized it had its back to the wall. Natural birth was almost unknown, occurring only in the few primitive communities still left in the world.

  The human race was ill-equipped to deal with the situation, both practically and psychologically. There were none with experience to deal with the problem, only ancient records. To the majority of the female population, the idea of reverting to breeding machines was not only repugnant but frightening.

  A vast propaganda campaign was brought into being, promising both rich rewards and savage punishments.

  The birthrate began to climb again, but not fast enough. There were still too few people to hold the vast complicated civilization together.

  The obvious and easy answer was to raise the mechanical work force, but powerful forces within the government jumped on that. A law was pushed through the House of Representatives permitting that only one mechanical could be constructed after twenty human births had been registered.

  Brewster realized with a sense of shock that he had never deeply considered the matter before. He had always regarded himself as open-minded and a neutral, but, hell, that was a limp sort of
attitude surely.

  One factor stood out all too clearly—a large proportion of the human race was scared out of its wits by its own creation, the Robot.

  Logic did not seem to come into it; in many places, it had become a superstition. The damn machines were just biding their time, waiting to take over. The fact that they had had nearly five hundred years to do so seemed to escape their reasoning.

  Brewster, really putting his mind to the matter, realized that he, too, was pro-robot.

  Fortunately, his private fear that there were aliens around had few facts to support it. But his intuition was correct and far too close for comfort.

  It was not human but it was organic. It was slimy, had a lot of eyes and tentacles, and was frighteningly intelligent.

  It was not on the world to mount an invasion—yet. It was here to assess. It knew the dominant life form was intelligent and undergoing some sort of crisis at the moment. Numerically the native life—Man—was vulnerable, but the alien was too wise to go plunging into anything. Local technology was only a few hundred cycles below his, and he was taking no risks.

  He was well aware that the conquest of a world was not just a matter of launching an invasion fleet. At the least, it would take forty Earth-years of preparation. Then there was the complex matter of backup and supply: goods to be transported over distances so vast that timing alone was pre-eminent.

  The alien had been on Earth for nine years, and had carved himself an immense cavern in the mountains. Here he had been growing things, not technical things that might be traced back to an outside source, but something organic. Something that might have come about by an accident of nature or something brought about by man himself—say, a nuclear error.

  He would try these out locally and note the response. He had only the race of man to deal with. Long observation had shown the robots would do nothing.

  It was an attitude which fueled the human anti-robot school among humans. In the early days the up-and-coming dictators had ordered the construction of a number of warrior robots. Brought face to face, however, the battle was a farce. The robots would not fight each other, nor would they attack either of the human factions who had ordered them into action.

  Who the hell did these machines think they were? They would not exist but for the human race.

  Hacket, for his part, was too busy to give the matter much thought. He was too busy patrolling one part of the city after another—under constant criticism from his opponents.

  The bastard doesn’t do anything. He just wanders around with those two bloody mechanicals and looks at things. So the animals leave him alone. Who cares?

  * * * *

  Out beyond the city, where once had been a gigantic zoo, the early attempts to hold the place in order or destroy it had failed or been botched.

  Countless creatures had escaped, many of them adapting to the semi-tropical climate. Many died or fell prey to stronger species, but the survivors were uncountable.

  The alien used a handful of his creations to test the native wild life. They were not just organic test units, they were agile and capable of biting the leg off an ox.

  In three days the alien had a clear picture of the native life. Some of the carnivores were formidable but lacked the intelligence to organize. Native wild life could, therefore, be brushed aside as no hazard.

  * * * *

  Brewster was not happy; he liked Hacket but he had nothing with which to support it.

  Stead had just come into the bar and would, no doubt, start getting in some backhanders with his first drink.

  Brewster knew it and tried to keep the peace. “Nice journey?” he asked. He knew Stead had been to New Zealand, and he was trying to keep the conversation back to basics.

  “As well as could be, only one flight a day. I often wonder who is responsible for this past birthrate drop. Of course, you can think what you like, but put something on a numerical level when it happened.”

  Brewster lost his temper. “Stead, you’re an idiot. What took you to New Zealand and brought you back? What feeds you, clothes you, and tidies your rooms? I’ll tell you, one of your despised robots. The real truth is that they make you feel inferior and, worse, they have the wrong attitude. They should be obedient, respectful, and grateful. Mr. Stead, you have a slave-master mentality.”

  Stead’s face turned a dark red. “No one talks to me like that, boy; you want to come outside and repeat those words?”

  Brewster had no chance to give a reply. Any words he might have spoken would have been washed away in a wailing sound. The room screens started flashing brightly, drawing attention to themselves

  Everyone in the city was asking more or less the same question: “What the hell is all that about?”

  A robotic voice answered the query. “A major alarm signal. The midday flight returning to New Zealand has just detected a large group of creatures approaching the city from the mountains. As these creatures are dissimilar to any previously known, precautions must be taken.”

  Brewster banged the street alarm with his clenched fist, dully aware that it was almost a hundred years old. It was an ancient-type air raid alarm.

  “What is it? Where have we got to look?” And, most important of all, “How long before they get here?”

  The answer to that question was roughly three hours.

  There was no emotional panic, but there was plenty in respect of organization. Vague plans had been made to deal with an invasion by animals, but none to deal with a situation like this.

  Only one hundred and fifty men mustered at the hotel. A large number refused, determined to protect their families or individual districts on the spot.

  In the meantime, everyone who could do so was looking towards the mountains.

  “What the hell are they?”

  “They look like carrots.”

  “They’re as big as bloody men, if you stood them upright.”

  “Hell! Did you see that? It flipped, it was like a sand hopper, just sort of flicked with its blasted tail and jumped. It must have covered all of six meters.”

  A man in shirtsleeves looked away from the screen a few moments. “You know, friends, this weapon is useless, strictly short range. All right for animals, perhaps, but now I’m wondering. This is a shotgun. God knows how old the shells are, but this bloody thing dates back three hundred years. Back to the time of our great-great grandparents, the idiots who set the animals free because there were not enough people to look after them. Perhaps these horrible things are some byproduct of misbreeding.”

  He paused and looked up at the screen again. “I’m so glad you gentlemen have likened these things to carrots. To me they bring to mind something far less pleasant. What we are looking at, my friends, are maggots, bloody, man-size maggots.”

  “One has just killed an animal,” said another observer. “A big deer, I think. One bite, but it made no attempt to eat.”

  Hacket entered at the main door. “Some sort of crisis? I’ve just come in from the Eastern Suburbs, my last duty run. What’s happening?”

  Brewster told him, pointing out the general direction of the alien approach on the map.

  “Then the approach must be along the High Ridge,” Hacket pointed. “It helps—narrows the front and makes it easier to defend.”

  “Under whose leadership?” enquired Stead, still flushed and angry.

  Hacket turned towards him and in that moment seemed to change. He took three long strides forward, grasped Stead by the front of his jacket and pinned him heavily against the wall. “I am officially in charge here. Would you care to dispute that?”

  He lifted the other clear of the ground and banged him painfully against the wall. “I can no longer tolerate your idiotic prejudices. If you stand in my way and the safety of this city, I shall not hesitate to kill you.”

  He let Stead drop. He tottered and nearly fell, but he had learned his lesson. He had not only felt Hacket’s strength, but had looked into his eyes. He knew, at that moment,
that Hacket was superhuman.

  Brewster sensed it too, but found himself inspired by the man. If this city stood a chance, here was the man to do it. If there were eighteen others like him in the world, so also, perhaps, did humanity.

  Hacket glanced at his watch. “We still have ample time to reach our front line of defense. While we wait, I want every weapon double-checked; and, yes, while you are doing it, I will tell you what I am and why I am here. Please see that those mustered outside hear every word.”

  He paused, then: “We all know the situation. Our birthrate fell so low that we were faced with extinction. That birthrate is slowly rising now, but is also slowly becoming overwhelmed by all forms of wild life. I was born with and soon became aware of an affinity with wild life in early childhood. As I grew older, I realized something else—I radiated, or exhaled, a quality affecting the genes of these creatures. Effects that will slowly develop over the centuries.”

  Hacket paused then continued. “Some of the more advanced species are affected now. The dogs, for example, were already halfway there. Let us not be absurd, however. Your infant cannot pat an African hunting dog, but from here on that dog will not attack a human. The change, the next step in evolution, has begun.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Time we were making a move.”

  There was sufficient transport outside, but Stead made for his own vehicle.

  “Leave that thing!” Hacket’s voice was sharp.

  Stead scowled but obeyed reluctantly. “What use are these bloody things going to be, apart from barricades?”

  Brewster, overtense, found himself taking in the details for the first time in his life. One grew up with the robots, accepted them, and yet…here and now, he might have been looking at an armored division from World War Two, centuries back. A flying armored division. Floating intelligent life held clear above the ground by anti-gravity plates. That smaller one of Hacket’s, for example, the one he called Oscar: here was a perfectly smooth sphere about the size of a beach ball with no hint that it contained countless specialist instruments.