Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  Jimmy fixed something to eat, and after we had eaten, Ben said to us, "I think I'll go out and see how Elmer's getting on."

  I, for one, had seen enough of Elmer for a lifetime and Jimmy wasn't interested. Said he wanted to work on his saga.

  So Ben took a rifle and set out alone, back into the hills.

  My foot hurt me quite a bit and I got myself comfortable and tried to do some thinking, but I tried so hard that I put myself to sleep.

  It was late in the afternoon when I awoke. Jimmy was getting nervous.

  "Ben hasn't shown up," he said. "I wonder if something's happened to him."

  I didn't like it, either, but we decided to wait a while before going out to hunt Ben. After all, he wasn't in the best of humor and he might have been considerably upset if we'd gone out to rescue him.

  He finally showed up just before dusk, tuckered out and a little flabbergasted. He leaned his rifle against a box and sat down. He found a cup and reached for the coffeepot.

  "Elmer's gone," he said. "I spend all afternoon trying to find him. Not a sign of him anywhere."

  My first reaction was that it was just fine. Then I realized that the safest thing would be to know where Elmer was, so we could keep an eye on him. And suddenly I had a horrible hunch that I knew where Elmer was.

  "I didn't actually go down into the valley," said Ben, "but I walked around and glassed it from every angle."

  "He might be in one of the caves," Jimmy said.

  "Maybe so," said Ben.

  We did a lot of speculating on what might have happened to Elmer. Jimmy held out for his having holed up in one of the caves. Ben was inclined to think he might have cleared out of the country. I didn't say what I thought. It was too fantastic.

  I volunteered for the first watch, saying that I couldn't sleep with my foot, anyhow, and after the two of them were asleep, I walked over to Lulu and rapped on her hide. I didn't expect anything to happen. I figured she would keep on sulking.

  But she put out a tentacle and grew a face on it—a lens, an audio and speaker.

  "It was nice of you," I said, "not to run away and leave us."

  Lulu swore. It was the first and the only time I have ever heard her use such language.

  "How could I leave?" she asked when she at last turned printable. "Of all the dirty human tricks! I'd have been gone long ago if it weren't for—"

  "What dirty trick?"

  "As if you didn't know. A built-in block that won't let me move unless there's one of you detestable humans inside me."

  "I didn't know," I said.

  "Don't try to pass the buck," she snapped. "It's a dirty human trick and you're a dirty human and you're just as responsible as all the rest of them. But it doesn't make any difference any more, because I've found myself. I am finally content. I know what I was meant for. I have—"

  "Lulu," I asked her, straight out, "are you shacking up with Elmer?"

  "That's a vulgar way to say it," Lulu told me heatedly. "It's the nasty human way. Elmer is a scholar and a gentleman and his loyalty to his ancient, long-dead masters is a touching thing no human could be capable of. He has been badly treated and I shall make it up to him. All he wanted from you was the phosphate in your bones—"

  "The phosphate in our bones!" I yelled.

  "Why, certainly," said Lulu. "Poor Elmer has such a hard time finding any phosphate. He got it at first from animals that he caught, but now all the animals are gone. There are birds, of course, but birds are hard to catch. And you had such nice, big bones—"

  "That's a fine thing for you to say," I bawled her out sternly. "You were built by humans and humans educated you and—"

  "Still I'm a machine," said Lulu, "and I am closer to Elmer than I am to you. You humans can't get it through your heads that there might be a legitimate set of non-human values. You are horrified that Elmer wanted the phosphate in your bones, but if there were a metal in Elmer that you needed, you'd break him up to get it without a second thought. You wouldn't even consider that you might be wrong. You'd think it an imposition if Elmer should object. That's the trouble with you and your human race. I've had enough. I have what I want. I am content to stay here. I've found the great love of my life. And for all I care, your pals and you can rot."

  She pulled in her face and I didn't rap to try to get her to talk any more. I figured there wasn't any use. She had made it about as plain as anyone could wish.

  I walked back to the camp and woke Ben and Jimmy. I told them about my hunch and about the talk with Lulu. We were pretty glum, because we were all washed up.

  Up till now, there had always been the chance that we could make a deal with Lulu. I had felt all along that we needn't worry too much—that Lulu was more alone than we were and that eventually she would have to be reasonable. But now Lulu was not alone and she no longer needed us. And she still was sore at us—and not just at us, but at the whole human race.

  And the worst of it was that this was no sudden whim. It had been going on for days. Elmer hadn't been really watching us when he'd hung around at night. He'd come to neck with Lulu. And undoubtedly the two of them had planned Elmer's attack on Ben and me, knowing that Jimmy would be loping to the rescue, leaving the coast clear so that Elmer could rush back and Lulu could take him in. And once it had been accomplished, Lulu had put out a tentacle and swept the tracks away so we wouldn't know that Elmer was inside.

  "So she jilted us," said Ben.

  "No worse than we did to her," Jimmy reminded him.

  "But what did she expect? A man can't love a robot."

  "Evidently," I said, "a robot can love a robot. And that's a new one to paste into the book."

  "Lulu's crazy," Ben declared.

  In all this great romance of Lulu's, it seemed to me there was a certain false note. Why should Lulu and Elmer be sneaky about their love? Lulu could have opened the port any time she wanted and Elmer could have scampered up the ramp right before our eyes. But they hadn't done that. They had planned and plotted. They had practically eloped.

  I wondered if, on Lulu's part, it might be the mark of shame. Was she ashamed of Elmer—ashamed that she had fallen for him? Much as she might deny it, perhaps she nursed the smug snobbery of the human race.

  Or was I only thinking this to save my own smug snobbery, simply building up a defense mechanism against being forced to admit, now or in some future time, that there might be other values than the ones evolved by humans? For in us all, I knew, lingered that reluctance to recognize that our way was not necessarily best, that the human viewpoint might not be the universal viewpoint to which all other life must eventually conform.

  Ben made a pot of coffee, and while we sat around and drank it, we said some bitter things of Lulu. I don't regret anything we said, for she had it coming to her. She'd played us a nasty trick.

  We finally rolled back into our blankets and didn't bother standing guard. With Elmer out of circulation, there was no need.

  The next morning my foot was still sore, so I stayed behind while Ben and Jimmy went out to explore the valley that held the ruined city. Meantime, I hobbled out and walked all around Lulu, looking her over. There was no way I could see that a man might bust into her. The port itself was machined so closely that you had to get real close to see the tiny hairline where it fitted into her side.

  Even if we could bust into her, I wondered, could we take control of her? There were the emergencies, of course, but I wasn't too sure just how much use they were. They certainly hadn't bothered Lulu much when she'd got that crazy notion of eloping with us. Then she'd simply jammed them and had left us helpless.

  And if we broke into Lulu, we'd come to grips with Elmer, and Elmer was just the kind of beast I had no hankering to come to grips with.

  So I went back to camp and puttered around, thinking that now we'd really have to begin to lay some plans about how to get along. We'd have to build that cabin and work up a food supply and do the best we could to get along on our own. For I was
fairly certain that we could expect no help from Lulu.

  Ben and Jimmy came back in the afternoon and their eyes were shining with excitement. They spread out a blanket and emptied their pockets of the most incredible things any man has ever laid eyes on.

  Don't expect me to describe that stuff. There's no point in trying to. What is the sense of saying that a certain item was like a metal chain and that it was yellow? There is no way to get across the feel of it as it slid through one's fingers or the tinkle of it as it moved or the blazing color that was a sort of living yellow. It is very much like saying that a famous painting is square and flat and blue, with some green and red.

  The chain was only a part of it. There were a lot of other doodads and each one of them was the sort of thing to snatch your breath away.

  Ben shrugged at the question in my eyes. "Don't ask me. It's only some stuff we picked up. The caves are full of it. Stuff like this and a whole lot more. We just picked up one thing here and another there—whatever was pocket-size and happened to catch our eye. Trinkets. Samples. I don't know."

  Like jackdaws, I thought. Or pack-rats. Grabbing a thing that shone or had a certain shape or a certain texture—taking it because it was pretty, not knowing what its use might be or if, in fact, it had any use at all.

  "Those caves may have been storehouses," said Ben. "They're jammed with all sorts of things—not much of any one thing, apparently. All different, as if these aliens had set up a trading post and had their merchandise on display. There seems to be a sort of curtain in front of each of the caves. You can see a shimmer and hear a hissing, but you can't feel a thing when you step through it. And behind that curtain, all the junk they left is as clean and bright and new as the day they left it."

  I looked at the articles spread on the blanket. It was hard to keep your hands off them, for they felt good in your hands and were pleasing to the eye and one seemed to get a sense of warmth and richness just by handling them.

  "Something happened to those folks," said Jimmy. "They knew it was going to happen, so they took all this stuff and laid it out—all the many things they had made, all the things they'd used and loved. Because, you see, that way there always was a chance someone might come along someday and find it, so they and the culture they had fashioned would not be entirely lost."

  It was exactly the kind of silly, sentimental drivel you could expect from a glassy-eyed romantic like Jimmy.

  But for whatever reason the artifacts of that vanished race had gotten in the caves, we were the ones who'd found them and here once again they'd run into a dead end. Even if we had been equipped to puzzle out their use, even if we had been able to ferret out the basic principles of that long-dead culture, it still would be a useless business. We were not going anywhere; we wouldn't be passing on the knowledge. We'd live out our lives here on this planet, and when the last of us had died, the ancient silence and the old uncaring would close down once again.

  We weren't going anywhere and neither was Lulu. It was a double dead end.

  It was too bad, I thought, for Earth could use the knowledge and the insight that could be wrested from those caves and from the mounds. And now more than a hundred feet from where we sat lay the very tool that Earth had spent twenty years in building to dig out that specific kind of knowledge, should man ever happen on it.

  "It must be terrible," said Jimmy, "to realize that all the things and all the knowledge that you ever had, all the trying, all the praying, all the dreams and hopes, will be wiped out forever. That all of you and your way of life and your understanding of that life will simply disappear and no one will ever know."

  "You said it, kid," I chipped in.

  He stared at me with haunted, stricken eyes. "That may be why they did it."

  Watching him, the tenseness of him, the suffering in his face, I caught a glimpse of why he was a poet—why he had to be a poet. But even so, he still was an utter creep.

  "Earth has to know about this," Ben said flatly.

  "Sure," I agreed. "I'll run right over and let them know."

  "Always the smart guy," Ben growled at me. "When are you going to cut out being bright and get down to business?"

  "Like busting Lulu open, I suppose."

  "That's right. We have to get back somehow and Lulu's the only way to get there."

  "It might surprise you, Buster, but I thought of all that before you. I went out today and looked Lulu over. If you can figure how to bust into her, you've a better brain than I have."

  "Tools," said Ben. "If we only had—"

  "We have. An ax without a handle, a hammer and a saw. A small pinch-bar, a plane, a draw-shave—"

  "We might make some tools."

  "Find the ore and smelt it and—"

  "I was thinking of those caves," said Ben. "There might be tools in there."

  I wasn't even interested. I knew it was impossible.

  "We might find some explosive," Ben went on. "We might—"

  "Look," I said, "what do you want to do—open Lulu up or blow her to bits? Anyhow, I don't think you can do a thing about it. Lulu is a self-maintaining robot, or have you forgotten? Bore a hole in her and she'll grow it shut. Go monkeying around too much and she'll grow a club and clout you on the head."

  Ben's eyes blazed with fury and frustration. "Earth has to know! You understand that, don't you? Earth has got to know!"

  "Sure," I said. "Absolutely."

  In the morning, I thought, he'd come to his senses, see how impossible it was. And that was important. Before we began to lay any plans, it was necessary that we realize what we were up against. That way, you conserve a lot of energy and miss a lot of lumps.

  But, come morning, he still had that crazy light of frustration in his eyes and he was filled with a determination that was based on nothing more than downright desperation.

  After breakfast, Jimmy said he wasn't going with us.

  "For God's sake, why not?" demanded Ben.

  "I'm way behind on my writing," Jimmy told him, deadpan. "I'm still working on that saga."

  Ben wanted to argue with him, but I cut him off disgustedly.

  "Let us go," I said. "He's no use, anyhow."

  Which was the solemn truth.

  So the two of us went out to the caves. It was the first time I had seen them and they were something to see. There were a dozen of them and all of them were crammed. I got dizzy just walking up and down, looking at all the gadgets and the thingumbobs and dofunnies, not knowing, of course, what any of them were. It was maddening enough just to look at them; it was plain torture trying to figure out what use they might be put to. But Ben was plain hell-bent on trying to figure out because he'd picked up the stubborn conviction that we could find a gadget that would help us get the best of Lulu.

  We worked all day and I was dog-tired at the end of it. Not once in the entire day had we found anything that made any sense at all. I wonder if you can imagine how it felt to stand there, surrounded by all those devices, knowing there were things within your reach that, rightly used, could open up entirely new avenues for human thoughts and technique and imagination. And yet you stood there powerless—an alien illiterate.

  But there was no stopping Ben. We went out again the next day and the day after and we kept on going out. On the second day, we found a dojigger that was just fine for opening cans, although I'm fairly sure that was not at all what it was designed for. And on the following day, we finally puzzled out how another piece of equipment could be used for digging slanted postholes and, I ask you, who in their right mind would be wanting slanted postholes?

  We got nowhere, but we kept on going out and I sensed that Ben had no more hope than I had, but that he still kept at it because it was the one remaining fingerhold he had on sanity.

  I don't think that for one moment he considered the source or significance of that heritage we'd found. To him, it became no more than a junkyard through which we searched frantically to find one unrecognizable piece of scrap that we mig
ht improvise into something that would serve our purpose.

  As the days went on, the valley and its mounds, the caves and their residue of a vanished culture seized upon my imagination, and it seemed to me that, in some mysterious manner, I grew closer to that extinct race and sensed at once its greatness and its tragedy. And the feeling grew as well that this frantic hunt of ours bordered on sacrilege and callous profanation of the dead.

  Jimmy had not gone out with us a single day. He'd sit hunched over his ream of paper and he scribbled and revised and crossed out words and put in others. He'd get up and walk around in circles or pace back and forth and mumble to himself, then go back and write some more. He scarcely ate and he wouldn't talk and he only slept a little. He was the very portrait of a Young Man in the Throes of Creation.

  I got curious about it, wondering if, with all this agony and sweat, he might be at last writing something that was worth the effort. So, when he wasn't looking, I sneaked out a page of it.

  It was even worse than the goo he had written before.

  That night I lay awake and looked up at the unfamiliar stars and surrendered myself to loneliness. Only, once I had surrendered, I found that I was not so lonely as I might have been—that somehow I had drawn comfort and perhaps even understanding from the muteness of the ruin-mounds and the shining wonder of the trove.

  Finally I dropped asleep.

  I don't know what woke me. It might have been the wind or the sound of the waves breaking on the beach or maybe the chilliness of the night.

  Then I heard it, a voice like a chant, solemn and sonorous, a throaty whisper in the dark.

  I started up and propped myself on an elbow—and caught my breath at what I saw.

  Jimmy was standing in front of Lulu, holding a flashlight in one hand, reading her his saga. His voice had a rolling quality, and despite the soggy words, there was a fascination in the tenor of his tone. It must have been so that the ancient Greeks read their Homer in the flare of torches before the next day's battle.

  And Lulu was listening. She had a face hung out and the tentacle which supported it was twisted to one side, so that her audio would not miss a single syllable, just as a man might cup his ear.