The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  “I had to take fantastic precautions there, to protect my own life. I stayed aboard the ship, until the first shielded laboratory was finished. I wore elaborate armor, and breathing masks. I used every medical resource, to repair the damage from destroying rays and particles. Even so, I fell desperately ill.

  “But the mechanicals were at home there. The radiations didn’t hurt them. The awesome surroundings couldn’t depress them, because they had no emotions. The lack of life didn’t matter, because they had no emotions. The lack of life didn’t matter, because they weren’t alive. There, in that spot so alien and hostile to life, the humanoids were born.”

  Stooped and bleakly cadaverous in the growing dark, the old man fell silent for a little time. His haggard eyes stared solemnly at the small hurried shapes that moved like restless shadows out across the alley, silently building a strange new palace, which glowed faintly in the night.

  “Somehow, I felt at home there, too,” his deep, hoarse voice went on deliberately. “My belief in my own kind was gone. Only mechanicals were with me, and I put my faith in them. I was determined to build better mechanicals, immune to human imperfections, able to save men from themselves.

  “The humanoids became the dear children of my sick mind. There is no need to describe the labor pains. There were errors, abortions, monstrosities. There were sweat and agony and heartbreak. Some years had passed, before the safe delivery of the first perfect humanoid.

  “Then there was the Central to build – for all the individual humanoids were to be no more than the limbs and the senses of a single mechanical brain. That was what opened the possibility of real perfection. The old electronic mechanicals, with their separate relay-centers and their own feeble batteries, had built-in limitations. They were necessarily stupid, weak, clumsy, slow. Worst of all, it seemed to me, they were exposed to human tampering.

  “The Central rose above those imperfections. Its power beams supplied every unit with unfailing energy, from great fission plants. Its control beams provided each unit with an unlimited memory and surpassing intelligence. Best of all – so I then believed – it could be securely protected from any human meddling.

  “The whole reaction-system was designed to protect itself from any interference by human selfishness or fanaticism. It was built to insure the safety and the happiness of men, automatically. You know the Prime Directive: to serve and obey, and guard men from harm.

  “The old individual mechanicals I had brought helped to manufacture the parts, and I put the first section of Central together with my own hands. That took three years. When it was finished the first waiting humanoid came to life.”

  Sledge peered moodily through the dark at Underhill.

  “It really seemed alive to me,” his slow deep voice insisted. “Alive, and more wonderful than any human being, because it was created to preserve life. Ill and alone, I was yet the proud father of a new creation, perfect, forever free from any possible choice of evil.

  “Faithfully, the humanoids obeyed the Prime Directive. The first units built others, and they built underground factories to mass-produce the coming hordes. Their new ships poured ores and sand into atomic furnaces under the plain, and new perfect humanoids came marching back out of the dark mechanical matrix.

  “The swarming humanoids built a new tower for the Central, a white and lofty metal pylon, standing splendid in the midst of that fire-scarred desolation. Level on level, they joined new relay-sections into one brain, until its grasp was almost infinite.

  “Then they went out to rebuild the ruined planet, and later to carry their perfect service to other worlds. I was well pleased, then. I thought I had found the end of war and crime, of poverty and inequality, of human blundering and resulting human pain.”

  The old man sighed, and moved heavily in the dark.

  “You can see that I was wrong.”

  Underhill drew his eyes back from the dark unresting things, shadow-silent, building that glowing palace outside the window. A small doubt arose in him, for he was used to scoffing privately at much less remarkable tales from Aurora’s remarkable tenants. But the worn old man had spoken with a quiet and sober air; and the black invaders he reminded himself, had not intruded here.

  “Why didn’t you stop them?” he asked. “When you could?”

  “I stayed too long at the Central.” Sledge sighed again, regretfully. “I was useful there, until everything was finished. I designed new fission plants, and even planned methods for introducing the humanoid service with a minimum of confusion and opposition.”

  Underhill grinned wryly, in the dark.

  “I’ve met the methods,” he commented. “Quite efficient.”

  “I must have worshipped efficiency, then,” Sledge wearily agreed. “Dead facts, abstract truth, mechanical perfection. I must have hated the fragilities of human beings, because I was content to polish the perfection of the new humanoids. It’s a sorry confession, but I found a kind of happiness in that dead wasteland. Actually, I’m afraid I fell in love with my own creations.”

  His hollowed eyes, in the dark, had a fevered gleam.

  “I was awakened, at last, by a man who came to kill me.”

  Gaunt and bent, the old man moved stiffly in the thickening gloom. Underhill shifted his balance, careful of the crippled chair. He waited, and the slow, deep voice went on:

  “I never learned just who he was, or exactly how he came. No ordinary man could have accomplished what he did, and I used to wish that I had known him sooner. He must have been a remarkable physicist and an expert mountaineer. I imagine he had also been a hunter. I know that he was intelligent, and terribly determined.

  “Yes, he really came to kill me.

  “Somehow, he reached that great island, undetected. There were still no inhabitants – the humanoids allowed no man but me to come so near the Central. Somehow, he came past their search beams, and their automatic weapons.

  “The shielded plane he used was later found, abandoned on a high glacier. He came down the rest of the way on foot through those raw new mountains, where no paths existed. Somehow, he came alive across lava beds that were still burning with deadly atomic fire.

  “Concealed with some sort of rhodomagnetic screen – I was never allowed to examine it – he came undiscovered across the spaceport that now covered most of that great plain, and into the new city around the Central tower. It must have taken more courage and resolve than most men have, but I never learned exactly how he did it.

  “Somehow, he got to my office in the tower. He screamed at me, and I looked up to see him in the doorway. He was nearly naked, scraped and bloody from the mountains. He had a gun in his raw, red hand, but the thing that shocked me was the burning hatred in his eyes.”

  Hunched on that high stool, in the dark little room, the old man shuddered.

  “I had never seen such monstrous, unutterable hatred, not even in the victims of war. And I had never heard such hatred as rasped at me, in the few words he screamed, ‘I’ve come to kill you, Sledge. To stop your mechanicals, and set men free.’

  “Of course he was mistaken, there. It was already far too late for my death to stop the humanoids, but he didn’t know that. He lifted his unsteady gun, in both bleeding hands, and fired.

  “His screaming challenge had given me a second or so of warning. I dropped down behind the desk. And that first shot revealed him to the humanoids, which somehow hadn’t been aware of him before. They piled on him, before he could fire again. They took away the gun, and ripped off a kind of net of fine white wire that had covered his body – that must have been part of his screen.

  “His hatred was what awoke me. I had always assumed that most men, except for a thwarted few, would be grateful for the humanoids. I found it hard to understand his hatred, but the humanoids told me now that many men had required drastic treatment by brain surgery, drugs, and hypnosis to make them happy under the Prime Directive. This was not the first desperate effort to kill me that they had blo
cked.

  “I wanted to question the stranger, but the humanoids rushed him away to an operating room. When they finally let me see him, he gave me a pale silly grin from his bed. He remembered his name; he even knew me – the humanoids had developed a remarkable skill at such treatments. But he didn’t know how he had got to my office, or that he had ever tried to kill me. He kept whispering that he liked the humanoids because they existed to make men happy. And he was very happy now. As soon as he was able to be moved, they took him to the spaceport. I never saw him again.

  “I began to see what I had done. The humanoids had built me a rhodomagnetic yacht, that I used to take for long cruises in space, working aboard – I used to like the perfect quiet, and the feel of being the only human being within a hundred million miles. Now I called for the yacht, and started out on a cruise around the planet, to learn why that man had hated me.”

  The old man nodded at the dim hastening shapes, busy across the alley, putting together that strange shining palace in the soundless dark.

  “You can imagine what I found,” he said. “Bitter futility, imprisoned in empty splendor. The humanoids were too efficient, with their care for the safety and happiness of men, and there was nothing left for men to do.”

  He peered down in the increasing gloom at his own great hands, competent yet but battered and scarred with a lifetime of effort. They clenched into fighting fists and wearily relaxed again.

  “I found something worse than war and crime and want and death.” His low rumbling voice held a savage bitterness. “Utter futility. Men sat with idle hands, because there was nothing left for them to do. They were pampered prisoners, really, locked up in a highly efficient jail. Perhaps they tried to play, but there was nothing left worth playing for. Most active sports were declared too dangerous for men, under the Prime Directive. Science was forbidden, because laboratories can manufacture danger. Scholarship was needless, because the humanoids could answer any question. Art had degenerated into grim reflection of futility. Purpose and hope were dead. No goal was left for existence. You could take up some inane hobby, play a pointless game of cards, or go for a harmless walk in the park – with always the humanoids watching. They were stronger than men, better at everything, swimming or chess, singing or archeology. They must have given the race a mass complex of inferiority.

  “No wonder men had tried to kill me! Because there was no escape from that dead futility. Nicotine was disapproved. Alcohol was rationed. Drugs were forbidden. Sex was carefully supervised. Even suicide was clearly contradictory to the Prime Directive – and the humanoids had learned to keep all possible lethal instruments out of reach.”

  Staring at the last white gleam on that thin palladium needle, the old man sighed again.

  “When I got back to the Central,” he went on, “I tried to modify the Prime Directive. I had never meant it to be applied so thoroughly. Now I saw that it must be changed to give men freedom to live and to grow, to work and to play, to risk their lives if they pleased, to choose and take the consequences.

  “But that stranger had come too late. I had built the Central too well. The Prime Directive was the whole basis of its relay system. It was built to protect the Directive from human meddling. It did – even from my own. Its logic, as usual, was perfect.

  “The attempt on my life, the humanoids announced, proved that their elaborate defense of the Central and the Prime Directive still was not enough. They were preparing to evacuate the entire population of the planet to homes on other worlds. When I tried to change the Directive, they sent me with the rest.”

  Underhill peered at the worn old man, in the dark.

  “But you have this immunity,” he said, puzzled. “How could they coerce you?”

  “I had thought I was protected,” Sledge told him. “I had built into the relays an injunction that the humanoids must not interfere with my freedom of action, or come into a place where I am, or touch me at all, without my specific request. Unfortunately, however, I had been too anxious to guard the Prime Directive from any human hampering.

  “When I went into the tower, to change the relays, they followed me. They wouldn’t let me reach the crucial relays. When I persisted, they ignored the immunity order. They over-powered me, and put me aboard the cruiser. Now that I wanted to alter the Prime Directive, they told me, I had become as dangerous as any man. I must never return to Wing IV again.”

  Hunched on the stool, the old man made an empty little shrug.

  “Ever since, I’ve been an exile. My only dream has been to stop the humanoids. Three times I tried to go back, with weapons on the cruiser to destroy the Central, but their patrol ships always challenged me before I was near enough to strike. The last time, they seized the cruiser and captured a few men who were with me. They removed the unhappy memories and the dangerous purposes of the others. Because of that immunity, however, they let me go, after I was weaponless.

  “Since, I’ve been a refugee. From planet to planet, year after year, I’ve had to keep moving, to stay ahead of them. On several different worlds, I have published my rhodomagnetic discoveries and tried to make men strong enough to withstand their advance. But rhodomagnetic science is dangerous. Men who have learned it need protection more than any others, under the Prime Directive. They have always come, too soon.”

  The old man paused, and sighed again.

  “They can spread very fast, with their new rhodomagnetic ships, and there is no limit to their hordes. Wing IV must be one single hive of them now, and they are trying to carry the Prime Directive to every human planet. There’s no escape, except to stop them.”

  Underhill was staring at the toylike machines, the long bright needle and the dull leaden ball, dim in the dark on the kitchen table. Anxiously he whispered:

  “But you hope to stop them, now – with that?”

  “If we can finish it in time.”

  “But how?” Underhill shook his head. “It’s so tiny.”

  “But big enough,” Sledge insisted. “Because it’s something they don’t understand. They are perfectly efficient in the integration and application of everything they know, but they are not creative.”

  He gestured at the gadgets on the table.

  “This device doesn’t look impressive, but it is something new. It uses rhodomagnetic energy to build atoms, instead of to fission them. The more stable atoms, you know, are those near the middle of the periodic scale, and energy can be released by putting light atoms together, as well as by breaking up heavy ones.”

  The deep voice had a sudden ring of power.

  “This device is the key to the energy of the stars. For stars shine with the liberated energy of building atoms, of hydrogen converted into helium, chiefly, through the carbon cycle. This device will start the integration process as a chain reaction, through the catalytic effect of a tuned rhodomagnetic beam of the intensity and frequency required.

  “The humanoids will not allow any man within three light-years of the Central, now – but they can’t suspect the possibility of this device. I can use it from here – to turn the hydrogen in the seas of Wing IV into helium, and most of the helium and the oxygen into heavier atoms, still. A hundred years from now, astronomers on this planet should observe the flash of a brief and sudden nova in that direction. But the humanoids ought to stop, the instant we release the beam.”

  Underhill sat tense and frowning, in the night. The old man’s voice was sober and convincing, and that grim story had a solemn ring of truth. He could see the black and silent humanoids, flitting ceaselessly about the faintly glowing walls of that new mansion across the alley. He had quite forgotten his low opinion of Aurora’s tenants.

  “And we’ll be killed, I suppose?” he asked huskily. “That chain reaction—”

  Sledge shook his emaciated head.

  “The integration process requires a certain very low intensity of radiation,” he explained. “In our atmosphere, here, the beam will be far too intense to start any reaction
– we can even use the device here in the room, because the walls will be transparent to the beam.”

  Underhill nodded, relieved. He was just a small businessman, upset because his business had been destroyed, unhappy because his freedom was slipping away. He hoped that Sledge could stop the humanoids, but he didn’t want to be a martyr.

  “Good!” He caught a deep breath. “Now, what has to be done?”

  Sledge gestured in the dark toward the table.

  “The integrator itself is nearly complete,” he said. “A small fission generator, in that lead shield. Rhodomagnetic convertor, tuning coils, transmission mirrors, and focusing needle. What we lack is the director.”

  “Director?”

  “The sighting instrument,” Sledge explained. “Any sort of telescopic sight would be useless, you see – the planet must have moved a good bit in the last hundred years, and the beam must be extremely narrow to reach so far. We’ll have to use a rhodomagnetic scanning ray, with an electronic converter to make an image we can see. I have the cathode-ray tube, and drawings for the other parts.”

  He climbed stiffly down from the high stool and snapped on the lights at last – cheap fluorescent fixtures which a man could light and extinguish for himself. He unrolled his drawings, and explained the work that Underhill could do. And Underhill agreed to come back early next morning.

  “I can bring some tools from my workshop,” he added. “There’s a small lathe I used to turn parts for models, a portable drill, and a vise.”

  “We need them,” the old man said. “But watch yourself. You don’t have my immunity, remember. And, if they ever suspect, mine is gone.”

  Reluctantly, then, he left the shabby little rooms with the cracks in the yellowed plaster and the worn familiar carpets over the familiar floor. He shut the door behind him – a common, creaking wooden door, simple enough for a man to work. Trembling and afraid, he went back down the steps and across to the new shining door that he couldn’t open.

  “At your service, Mr. Underhill.” Before he could lift his hand to knock, that bright smooth panel slid back silently. Inside, the little black mechanical stood waiting, blind and forever alert. “Your dinner is ready, sir.”