by Eando Binder
We went to see Dr. Hillory finally, after that golden month. It would have been a strange sight to any human eyes, I suppose. Two robots, glinting in the sunlight, strolling hand-in-hand through the woods, chatting as merrily as a country boy and girl.
A bird suddenly flew up and dashed itself against my chest plate, blinded no doubt by the shine. It fell to the ground, stunned. Eve picked it up in her steel fingers, but with all the tenderness of a soft-hearted girl, and cuddled it to her. After a moment the bird recovered, chirped uncertainly, then flew away.
Dr. Hillory’s cabin was only a mile away. He eyed us with his enigmatic expression.
“How are the honeymooners?” he grinned. He seemed pleased to note how perfectly Eve—his creation and mine—had turned out.
“I’ve been doing a little experimenting myself,” he confided. “You remember I took Kay’s trans-mind helmet along. It’s a fascinating gadget. I made some improvements. In fact, I eliminated the wires—made it work on the radio principle. Want to try it, Adam?”
I complied. He unhinged the skull-section next to the base of my brain and set the vibrator in contact. He had made another one, so Eve also joined the experiment.
No wires led from our two vibrators to Dr. Hillory’s single helmet. Instead, a little two-masted radio aerial at its top sent out impulses that sped forth electronically.
“Do you hear me clearly, Adam Link?” came Dr. Hillory’s voice in my brain. Yet his lips hadn’t moved. His thought-words had directly modulated the electron-currents of my brain, reproducing the same thought-words.
“Yes,” I returned, also by thought, since the system was a two-way contact. “This is rather clever but of what use—”
Dr. Hillory’s mental voice burst in. “Adam, strike Eve on the frontal-plate with your fist.”
To my surprise, I instantly balled my fingers and clanged my metal fist against Eve’s frontal plate. It didn’t hurt her, of course. But Eve did a strange thing. With a short, frightened cry, she reached her hands behind her head, to rip the vibrator away.
“Stop, Eve!” commanded Dr. Hillory. “Put your hands down. Fold them in your lap.”
She did. And she did not press them together; she wasn’t laughing. I sensed that she was instead very, very frightened. As for myself, up till this moment, I was little more than startled at Dr. Hillory’s commands, and his strange game with us.
“Adam!” Eve cried. “Don’t you see? We’re in his power—” Lightning struck my brain. Instinctively I also raised my hands to rip away the little instrument that gave him such command over us.
“Stop, Adam! Put your hands in your lap.”
I fought. I strained with every steel muscle. But my machine’s strength meant nothing. My hands dropped obediently.
Dr. Hillory was looking at us triumphantly. I had long suspected he was not a man to be trusted. Now he had revealed himself.
“Adam Link,” he said gratingly, “your brain controls every cable and cog in your body. But your brain, in turn, is under my control. I am amazed at my own success. Obviously a command given by me, impinging on your electron-currents, is tantamount to a command given by yourself. Perhaps you can explain it better than I. But this is certain—I can do with you as I will.”
I tried speaking and found I could, as long as he had made no direct command against it.
“Let us free, Dr. Hillory. You have no right to keep up this control. We are minds, like yourself, with the right of liberty.”
Dr. Hillory shook his head slowly. “No, Adam. You will stay under my domination—”
It was then I acted—or tried to. I tried to leap at him. A swift mental command from him—and I stopped short. Fighting an intangible force—fighting my own brain—I strained to move on. Every muscle cable was taut. Every wheel in my body meshed for movement. Electrical energy lay ready to spring forth in a powerful flood. But the mental command did not come from my brain. Instead, slowly, my body inched back and finally eased with a grind of unlocking gears.
Hillory had won.
He stood before me, my master. I had the strength of ten men in one arm, the power of a mighty engine at my fingertips. I could have taken, in three seconds, his puny, soft body and torn it to bloody shreds. Yet there he stood, my master.
Hillory eased his caught breath, as though not sure himself till then that he could stop me. Color came back into his face.
“You’re my slave,” he said, “And I have plans—”
Eve and I looked at each other helplessly. A sadness radiated from Eve’s eyes. Our happiness shattered suddenly like a fragile soap-bubble.
If I had any hope of breaking from Hillory’s clutch, it was quickly dispelled. First he made us lie down, then removed our frontal-plates. It was simple for him to unhook the cables from the batteries that gave us life. We blinked out of consciousness.
When we regained our senses—it was like a dreamless sleep—we realized our true hopelessness. Hillory had welded the vibrators to the backs of our skull-pieces so firmly that it would be impossible for us to tear them away with our fingers. Secondly, he had installed turn-off switches in the battery-circuit, so that we could be turned off when he desired. Eve’s switch had been removed before, when she reached “maturity.” Now it was back, this means of “turning off” our life.
“While I wear the helmet, you are under my command,” the scientist said matter-of-factly. “Whenever I wish to take the helmet off, I simply turn you two off first. You cannot escape me, and you must do as I wish.”
In the following month, part of his plan unfolded. He forced me to devise a new and larger robot body. When the parts came, from factories, my fingers put them together, under his command.
Completed, the body stood eight feet high, without a head. It was a super-powerful mechanism, with muscle cables and cogs all proportionately larger than mine. Twice as much electrical power would be needed to run it. It was probably the upper limit in robot bodies, within the boundaries of flexibility, mobility and strength. Anything larger would have been clumsy. Anything stronger would have been too heavy to walk without sinking into the ground.
Dr. Link had built my body as nearly in human proportion as possible. I stood five feet ten inches and weighed 500 pounds. This robot body was two feet higher and weighed 900 pounds. And when Hillory finally revealed his purpose, I screamed in protest.
“Put Eve’s head on that robot body,” he had commanded.
“No!” I bellowed. “What monstrous motive have you behind all this—”
He let me rage on for a while. He did that once in a while, playing with me cat and mouse, knowing he had the upper hand. Eve pulled at my arm. “Please don’t, dear!” she begged. “It’s no use!”
And it was no use. I quieted. Eve was turned off. Though it revolted me in every atom of my being, I unfastened her headpiece gently and attached it to the new body. I trembled doing it. Trembled with anguish. Though changing bodies does not mean so much to a robot as it would to a human being, it is nevertheless a disagreeable thought. I had come to love every contour, every dent and scratch on Eve’s former body. She would be strange to me, in the new one.
Finally every little wire had been connected, between her brain and the relay switches in the body’s neck. Then I bolted the neck-piece in place, holding the head firmly. At the last, under Hillory’s command, I snapped the on-switch.
With a creak and groan of new metal, the body arose. It towered above us both like a Goliath. I shed mental tears, and I could see the same in Eve’s eyes as she looked down at me. This was as agonizing to us as to a human wife suddenly finding herself three feet taller than her husband. It was monstrous.
Hillory was ignoring our feelings, in this as in all previous things. Hopelessly, I tried to appeal to him.
“She’s my mental mate,” I said, “Don’t you understand? She’s my—wife. We have feelings. Please—”
The scientist laughed.
“Metal beings, parading as humans,”
he spat out. “You, Adam, prating about loneliness, wanting a companion, mental love! It was sickening the day you and Eve talked of loving each other. That’s all sentimental, twisted rot. Even among humans. You two, in the first place, are just metal beings. You have no rights alongside humans. You were created by human hands. I’ll show the world how to really use robots—as clever instruments.”
Instruments of what? What had he meant?
We soon found out. That very day, Hillory tested the range of his remote-control over Eve by radio. Eve, astride her new giant body, was sent step by step away, till she vanished in the woods. Still the scientist commanded her to move on, watching an instrument that recorded distance and control. Altogether, Eve was sent a mile, and came back obediently.
At no time, obviously, had she felt the slightest weakening of Hillory’s remote-control impulses, borne by high-frequency radio-waves. And radio-waves had a limitless range.
“You can be sent down to the city,” Hillory remarked, pleased with the results. “Under my control, you can be made to do anything I want there.”
“What are you planning, you devil?” I demanded.
A sly leer was my only answer.
That night, Eve was sent down the mountains to the city. Hillory was able to guide her easily enough, though she had never been there before. His mental commands told her every step. Conversely, her sharp comprehensive thoughts came back to him, whenever she was in doubt as to a road or turn. When she reached the city, in the dead of the night, Hillory read street signs through her and directed her footsteps. Svengali had never had the full, diabolical control over his Trilby that Hillory had over Eve.
At times, though the streets of the small city were nearly deserted at this hour, late wanderers spied the tall alien form. Eve involuntarily informed Hillory, and he would cause her to duck into shadowed doorways, or down alleys.
“This is perfect,” exulted Hillory to me. “I’m really there, by proxy. Through Eve, I can accomplish any deed within reason, without stirring a step from here.”
Eventually, Eve informed Hillory that she stood before a bank. Hillory sent her to the back entrance, and after a guarded look around, told her to shoulder down the door without making unnecessary noise. Inside, her keen mechanical eyesight picked her way to the vault. It was not a particularly sturdy vault. The bank was a small one.
Hillory gave an amazing order.
I heard all this through my mental contact with Hillory’s helmet. He told Eve to pull open the vault door. Through Eve’s involuntary thoughts, we could almost picture her tugging at the heavy metal door. Finally she braced her feet. The stupendous strength of her giant steel body exerted itself in one furious tug. There must have been a terrific grind of strained, breaking metal, as the vault lock cracked apart. Eve’s great new hands had done a job that might have balked a blast of nitroglycerine.
Eve did not know what money was, but Hillory did. He had her stuff great packets of bills in a sack and hurry out. The whole episode was over in three minutes. Eve arrived back without mishap, the sack dangling over her shoulder.
Hillory had robbed a bank, without the slightest personal danger. Was that his purpose, to amass ill-gotten wealth? He read my thought.
“No, Adam,” he said suavely. “This is a matter of personal revenge. The President of the bank once refused me a loan.” That made his motive still more petty and unworthy. I looked at poor Eve. Her eyes were haunted. She knew she had been forced to do something wrong. Her Kay-mind told her that. She was miserable. But I was more miserable. I had brought her to life. I had not dashed myself to pieces, there at the cliff. On my soul—robot or not—rested the deed.
I tried to remonstrate with Hillory. He clicked us off, laughing, with little more regard for us than he would have had for cleverly trained dogs.
The following day, Hillory tuned the radio to the city’s station. The news blared forth—
The Midcity Bank was mysteriously robbed last night. The thief or thieves broke down the back door and raided the vault, escaping with $20,000. The vault door did not seem to be blown down. It had apparently been forced open by some amazingly powerful lever or instrument. Police are puzzled.
They are investigating strange reports that a robot form was seen last night by several people, described as a huge one ten feet tall. Is it Adam Link, the intelligent robot, with a new body? Has he returned, after five months of mysterious absence, to commit this deed? Before he left, Adam Link was accepted almost with human status. Has he returned now to vindicate those who said he was a Frankenstein monster, dangerous to human life and property?
Frankenstein! Again that hideous allusion was springing up about me after I had labored so hard to erase it in the minds of humans.
“You are ruining all my past efforts,” I accused Hillory. “I saved life, helped humans, showed that the intelligent robot would do good, not harm. Now, you are destroying that—”
“Nothing of the sort,” retorted Hillory evenly. “I have reasoned the matter out carefully. After perfecting my robot-control, and doing one or two other personal things, I’ll take my plans to big business interests in New York. The few little things that happen here won’t matter. I’ll sell you as a great new invention.”
He might have been speaking of a new type of radio, or automobile.
I tried to speak slowly, calmly, in answer.
“You are making a frightful mistake, Hillory. When I came to life, and lived in the world awhile, I saw the enormous difficulties of introducing robot-life. I saw from my own experiences that it would not be like introducing a new mechanical gadget. For I have a mind and feelings and human emotions. Human life is complicated enough, without adding another complex factor. Before the cliff there, I had made up my mind it was better for the secret of the metal-brain to vanish. Both for my sake and the world’s. Foolishly, I let the thought of a companion robot sway me to stay in life. Yet perhaps the problem is not insoluble. But I tell you this, Dr. Hillory—I and I alone must decide. I alone, the Adam of intelligent robots, can find a way to introduce robot-life without creating future disaster.”
Hillory hardly heard.
“Rubbish! Your whole approach has been wrong. Who are you to tell humans what is best for them? You’re no more than a clever mechanical toy, with pseudo-human reactions. I have figured out the way to introduce robots. Not as independent individuals who wander around in a half-human daze, looking for mental love. But as an organized, controlled force of workers, under the strict domination of their human creators and masters. As for your so-called ‘feelings’, they are spurious. Like a phonograph, you have learned to imitate the human things. You are no more than a clever mechanism.”
He looked at Eve and me as one might look at a piece of prized furniture.
“We are life,” I said doggedly. I wished at that moment that my metallic larynx did not sound so cold, so expressionless. It destroyed the meaning of my words. “Life is in the mind. We have minds. Dr. Link realized that. You must too—”
“Shut up!” roared Hillory in exasperation. “Why should I listen to your meaningless drivel?”
I was helpless to go on. He had commanded me to stop talking. He was master of every atom of my body. Eve and I looked at each other. She understood. The future of robots lay in my hands. But I was a pawn in Hillory’s hands. The dread thought loomed before us—what would be the fate of our future kind? Of the robot—race? Slavery! We must have felt then like the Adam and Eve of Biblical history, denied Eden, foreseeing only misery and suffering for their people.
Hillory sent Eve out again the next night. His sly look told of some other hideous deed in mind.
A short time later, a car’s motor and brakes sounded outside, and then its horn. Hillory glanced out of the window. “Kay!” he breathed. But he seemed prepared.
Kay rushed in. She was alone. She glanced at us both. “Adam!” she cried. “I had to come. Is there anything wrong? Where’s Eve?”
“No, th
ere is nothing wrong, Kay,” I returned, but the words had been projected from Hillory’s mind. I had no power to stop them, or utter words of my own. “Eve is all right. She just went out for a walk.”
Kay heaved a tremulous sigh.
“Then all those ugly rumors are groundless, just as Jack said.” Her voice held deep relief. “The robbery naturally would be pinned on Adam Link, Jack said. People are like that. He said the criminals probably did things in such a way as to leave signs pointing to you. You’re their perfect cover-up. I wanted to come up yesterday, but Jack said not to disturb you and Eve until you called for us. But I was so worried that tonight I jumped in the car and came up, just to make sure everything is all right.”
There was still a trace of doubt in her voice. She was staring at Hillory, and the queer helmet he wore.
“Adam and I were just finishing a little experiment,” Hillory said easily.
Kay turned to me again. “Then everything is all right?”
“Of course, Kay. It was nice of you to be concerned and come up, but why not come back some other time, when we aren’t so busy?”
Hillory’s words, of course, through my helpless brain and larynx by proxy. I strained to put in a note of warning, distress. But a robot’s voice is devoid of human emotion.
But strangely, instead of taking the hint to go, she seemed curious over the experiment. She moved toward the control board of the helmet, connected to it by wires.
“This looks something like the helmet I used with Eve,” she said.
I could see Hillory’s impatience for her to go. But he could not afford to arouse her suspicions. He began to describe the experiment in general, meaningless terms.
Suddenly Kay moved.
She moved with a swiftness and purpose that startled us both. Her hand grasped the switch cutting off current to the helmet. Hillory recovered and clutched at her wrist. With a furious effort, Kay opened the switch.
That was all that was needed.
CHAPTER 10
Machine Battles Machine
