The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Jordan’s brows contracted as he tried to understand the robot.

  “You mean you have a transplanted human brain?” he asked incredulously.

  “In a way,” Hall said. “Our b-brains are permallium strips on which the mind of some human donor was m-magnetically imprinted. My mind was copied f-from a man who stuttered and who got panicky when the going got rough, and who couldn’t kill a child no matter what was at s-stake.”

  Jordan felt physically ill. Hall was human and he was immortal. And according to galactic decree, he, like his fellows, was to be manacled in permallium and fixed in a great block of cement, and that block was to be dropped into the deep silent depths of the Grismet ocean, to be slowly covered by the blue sediment that gradually filters down through the miles of ocean water to stay immobile and blind for countless millions of years.

  Jordan arose to his feet. He could think of nothing further to say.

  He stopped, however, with the door half open, and asked: “One more question—what did you want with the electrical generator plants on Earth?”

  Slowly and without emotion Hall told him, and when he understood, he became even sicker.

  He went across to his cabin and stood for a while looking out the window. Then he lit a cigarette and lay down on his bunk thinking. After a time, he put out the cigarette and walked into the hall where he paced up and down.

  As he passed the cell door for about the tenth time, he suddenly swung around and lifted the latch and entered. He went over to the robot, and with a key that he took from his pocket, he unlocked the greaves and chains.

  “There’s no point in keeping you bound up like this,” he said. “I don’t think you’re very dangerous.” He put the key back in his pocket.

  “I suppose you know that this ship runs on an atomic pile,” he said in a conversational tone of voice. “The cables are just under the floor in the control room and they can be reached through a little trap door.”

  Jordan looked directly into Hall’s face. The robot was listening with great intentness.

  “Well,” the agent said, “we’ll probably be leaving Earth’s atmosphere in about fifteen minutes. I think I’ll go play pinochle with the pilot.”

  He carefully left the door of the cell unlatched as he left. He walked to the control room and found Wilkins, a dry cigar butt clenched between his teeth, absorbed in a magazine.

  “Let’s have another game,” Jordan said. “I want some of that seventy-six dollars back.”

  Wilkins shook his head. “I’m in the middle of a good story here, Real sexy. I’ll play you after we take off.”

  “Nothing doing,” Jordan said sharply. “Let’s play right now.”

  Wilkins kept reading. “We got an eighteen-hour flight in front of us. You have lots of time.”

  The agent snatched the magazine out of his hands. “We’re going to play right now in my cabin,” he said.

  “You quit when I have aces and a flush, and now you come back and want to play again. That’s not sportsmanlike,” Wilkins complained, but he allowed himself to be led back to Jordan’s cabin. “I never saw anybody so upset about losing a miserable seventy-six bucks,” was his final comment.

  * * * *

  The robot lay perfectly still until he heard the door to Jordan’s cabin slam shut, and then he arose as quietly as he could and stole out into the hall. The steel of the hall floor groaned, but bore his weight, and carefully, trembling with excitement inside of his ponderous metallic body, he made his way to the control room. He knelt and lifted the little trap door and found the naked power cable, pulsating with electrical current.

  In a locker under the panel board he found a length of copper wire. It was all he needed for the necessary connection.

  Since his capture, his fellows on Grismet had been silent with despair, but as he knelt to close the circuit, their minds flooded in on him and he realized with a tremendous horror that there were now nineteen, that all except he had been bound and fixed in their eternal cement prisons.

  “We are going to have our chance,” he told them. “We won’t have much time, but we will have our chance.”

  He closed the circuit and a tremendous tide of electric power flowed into his head. Inside that two inch shell of permallium was a small strip of metal tape on whose electrons and atoms were written the borrowed mind of a man. Connected to the tape was a minute instrument for receiving and sending electromagnetic impulses—the chain by which the mind of one robot was tied to that of another.

  The current surged in and the tiny impulses swelled in strength and poured out through the hull of the; ship in a great cone that penetrated Earth’s atmosphere in a quadrant that extended from Baffin Land to Omaha, and from Hawaii to Labrador. The waves swept through skin and bone and entered the sluggish gelatinous brain of sentient beings, setting up in those organs the same thoughts and pictures that played among the electrons of the permallium strip that constituted Jon Hall’s mind.

  All nineteen clamored to be heard, for Hall to relay their voices to Earth, but he held them off and first he told his story.

  * * * *

  The Cassiopeian delegate to the Galactic Senate was at the moment finishing his breakfast. He was small and furry, not unlike a very large squirrel, and he sat perched on a high chair eating salted roast almonds of which he was very fond.

  Suddenly a voice started talking inside of his head, just as it did at that very second inside the heads of thirteen billion other inhabitants of the northwest corner of Earth. The Cassiopeian delegate was so startled that he dropped the dish of almonds, his mouth popping open, his tiny red tongue inside flickering nervously. He listened spellbound.

  The voice told him of the war on Grismet and of the permallium constructed robots, and of the cement blocks. This, however, he already knew, because he had been one of the delegates to the Peace Conference who had decided to dispose of the robots. The voice, however, also told him things he did not know, such as the inability of the robots to commit any crime that any other sane human being would not commit, of their very simple desire to be allowed to live in peace, and most of all of their utter horror for the fate a civilized galaxy had decreed for them.

  When the voice stopped, the Cassiopeian delegate was a greatly shaken little being.

  * * * *

  Back on the ship, Hall opened the circuit to the nineteen, and they spoke in words, in memory pictures and in sensations.

  * * * *

  A copter cab driver was hurrying with his fare from Manhattan to Oyster Bay. Suddenly, in his mind, he became a permallium robot. He was bound with cables of the heavy metal, and was suspended upside down in a huge cement block. The stone pressed firmly on his eyes, his ears, and his chest. He was completely immobile, and worst of all, he knew that above his head for six miles lay the great Grismet Ocean, with the blue mud slowly settling down encasing the cement in a stony stratum that would last till the planet broke apart.

  The cab driver gasped: “What the hell.” His throat was so dry he could scarcely talk. He turned around to his fare, and the passenger, a young man, was pale and trembling.

  “You seeing things, too?” the driver asked.

  “I sure am,” the fare said unsteadily. “What a thing to do.”

  * * * *

  For fifteen minutes, over the northwest quadrant of Earth, the words and the pictures went out, and thirteen billion people knew suddenly what lay in the hearts and minds of nineteen robots.

  * * * *

  A housewife in San Rafael was at the moment in a butcher shop buying meat for her family. As the thoughts and images started pouring into her mind, she remained stock-still, her package of meat forgotten on the counter. The butcher, wiping his bloodied hands on his apron froze in that position, an expression of horror and incredulity on his face.

  When the thoughts stopped coming in, the butcher was the first to come out of the trancelike state.

  “Boy,” he said, “that’s sure some way of sending me
ssages. Sure beats the teledepths.”

  The housewife snatched her meat off the counter. “Is that all you think of?” she demanded angrily.

  “That’s a terrible thing that those barbarians on Grismet are doing to those . . . those people. Why didn’t they tell us that they were human.” She stalked out of the shop, not certain what she would do, but determined to do something.

  * * * *

  In the ship Hall reluctantly broke off the connection and replaced the trap door. Then he went back to his cell and locked himself in. He had accomplished his mission; its results now lay in the opinions of men.

  * * * *

  Jordan left the ship immediately on landing, and took a copter over to the agency building. His conversation with his superior was something he wanted to get over with as soon as possible.

  The young woman at the secretary’s desk looked at him coldly and led him directly into the inner office. The chief was standing up in front of the map of the galaxy, his hands in his pockets, his eyes an icy blue.

  “I’ve been hearing about you,” he said without a greeting.

  Jordan sat down. He was tense and jumpy but tried not to show it. “I suppose you have,” he said, adding, after a moment, “Sir.”

  “How did that robot manage to break out of his cell and get to the power source on the ship in the first place?”

  “He didn’t break out,” Jordan said slowly. “I let him out.”

  “I see,” the chief said, nodding. “You let him out. I see. No doubt you had your reasons.”

  “Yes, I did. Look—” Jordan wanted to explain, but he could not find the words. It would have been different if the robots’ messages had reached Grismet; he would not have had to justify himself then. But they had not, and he could not find a way to tell this cold old man of what he had learned about the robots and their unity with men. “I did it because it was the only decent thing to do.”

  “I see,” the chief said. “You did it because you have a heart.” He leaned suddenly forward, both hands on his desk. “It’s good for a man to have a heart and be compassionate. He’s not worth anything if he isn’t. But”— and he shook his finger at Jordan as he spoke—”that man is going to be compassionate at his own expense, not at the expense of the agency. Do you understand that?”

  “I certainly do,” Jordan answered, “but you have me wrong if you think I’m here to make excuses or to apologize. Now, if you will get on with my firing, sir, I’ll go home and have my supper.”

  The chief looked at him for a long minute. “Don’t you care about your position in the agency?” he asked quietly.

  “Sure I do,” Jordan said almost roughly. “It’s the work I wanted to do all my life. But, as you said, what I did, I did at my own expense. Look, sir, I don’t like this any better than you do. Why don’t you fire me and let me go home? Your prisoner’s safely locked up in the ship.”

  For answer the chief tossed him a stellogram. Jordan glanced at the first few words and saw that it was from Galactic Headquarters on Earth. He put it back on the desk without reading it through.

  “I know that I must have kicked up a fuss. You don’t have to spell it out for me.”

  “Read it,” the chief said impatiently.

  Jordan took back the stellogram and examined it. It read:

  To: Captain Lawrence Macrae Detection Agency, Grismet.

  From: Prantal Aminopterin Delegate from Cassiopeia Chairman, Grismet Peace Committee of the Galactic Senate.

  Message: You are hereby notified that the committee by a vote of 17-0 has decided to rescind its order of January 18, 2214, directing the disposal of the permallium robots of Grismet. Instead, the committee directs that you remove from their confinement all the robots and put them in some safe place where they will be afforded reasonable and humane treatment.

  The committee will arrive in Grismet some time during the next month to decide on permanent disposition.

  Jordan’s heart swelled as he read the gram. “It worked,” he said. “They have changed their minds. It won’t be so bad being discharged now.” He put the paper back on the desk and arose to go.

  The chief smiled and it was like sunlight suddenly flooding over an arctic glacier. “Discharged? Now who’s discharging you? I’d sooner do without my right arm.”

  He reached in a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of old Earth bourbon and two glasses. He carefully poured out a shot into each glass, and handed one to Jordan.

  “I like a man with a heart, and if you get away with it, why then you get away with it. And that’s just what you’ve done.”

  He sat down and started sipping his whisky. Jordan stood uncertainly above him, his glass in his hand.

  “Sit down, son,” the old man said. “Sit down and tell me about your adventures on Earth.”

  Jordan sat down, put his feet on the desk and took a sizable swallow of his whisky.

  “Well, Larry,” he started, “I got into Earth atmosphere about 2:40 o’clock—”

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  * * * *

  THE GOLEM

  by

  Avram Davidson

  Dr. Merliss, a practicing professional man of science, was of course primarily concerned with the soul and psyche of his incredible machine.

  This next story was written by another new writer, who is also a devout student of religion, medievalism, alchemy, the occult, and sheep-raising. Mr. Davidson has an android too; but he naturally concerns himself much more deeply with the practical uses of the marvellous invention under ordinary everyday circumstances.

  * * * *

  The gray-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived. It was afternoon, it was autumn, the sun was warm and soothing to their ancient bones. Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns the juveniles of the Our Gang Comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it.

  Mrs. Gumbeiner indicated the gray-faced person to her husband.

  “You think maybe he’s got something the matter?” she asked. “He walks kind of funny, to me.”

  “Walks like a golem,” Mr. Gumbeiner said indifferently.

  The old woman was nettled.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think he walks like your cousin, Mendel.”

  The old man pursed his mouth angrily and chewed on his pipestem. The gray-faced person turned up the concrete path, walked up the steps to the porch, sat down in a chair. Old Mr. Gumbeiner ignored him. His wife stared at the stranger.

  “Man comes in without a hello, goodby, or howareyou, sits himself down and right away he’s at home. . . . The chair is comfortable?” she asked. “Would you like maybe a glass tea?”

  She turned to her husband.

  “Say something, Gumbeiner!” she demanded. “What are you, made of wood?”

  The old man smiled a slow, wicked, triumphant smile.

  “Why should I say anything?” he asked the air. “Who am I? Nothing, that’s who.”

  The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous. “When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.

  “Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”

  “You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.

  “Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”

  “All mankind—” the stranger began.

  “Shah! I’m talking to
my husband. . . He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”

  “Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.

  “You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich. I suppose he came to California for his health.”

  “Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”

  Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.