The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  I heard heavy movement in the underbrush. Cleo gasped. I crouched, pulling her down beside me. A voice carried clearly. “Step along, now!”

  That was Johnson’s voice. I yelled, “Johnson! Keep back!”

  The brush crashed in separate noises that converged on us. “You, there! Is that you, Bradley?”

  I was shaking. Cleo trembled under my hand. The firs around us quivered from roots to tips. The whole ground shook with a deep, steady tremor.

  A vast humming rose from the valley. Rock began to slip with thunderous crashings. The hum deepened. A slide started somewhere above us, above the timberline, and poured bellowing into the valley.

  “My God!” said Johnson. “What’s happening?”

  I yelled to be heard. “The takeoff!”

  Tons of rock moved, grinding together. The talus at the foot of the mountain stirred. Spouts of rock lashed into the air, like spume from an angry sea. A ship I had known it to be, buried there in the rubble. But what a ship!

  It was a quarter of a mile long. It seemed to thresh among the thundering boulders like a wounded whale. Dust rose to hang like an opalescent veil in the moonlight, dimming the view.

  I shivered with excitement to see its shape flashing there, urged upward by an invisible power without parallel.

  I heard from Coleman once more, as the ship floundered out of the restraining detritus. “Take care of Cleo, Gil!”

  That was all.

  The great ship shot into the air. Crumbled stone dripped from its shining flanks like Niagara. The air-tremoring hum swelled to a fantastic, ear-splitting shriek and diminished to silence in the sky.

  There were muttered curses from Johnson’s men. The B.I.S. agent didn’t have anything to say.

  The ship was gone. The sound of its passage had rumbled and screamed into nothing. I watched the sky, head tipped back, and Cleo gripped my arm.

  “They’re in space,” I said quietly. “Roy is jockeying for position; Bilfax is closing in.”

  I got that from the telepathor. There was nothing to be seen overhead but the milk and the sapphires, and the dead moon shining across the air. Inside my mind were confused glimpses of a complex control room, machines that whirred, throbbed, and glimmered in the shine of shielded lights, men weirdly strapped into bizarre…

  Somewhere, thousands of miles distant in airless space, the two ships closed in combat. All was confusion in my mind, disjointed, nightmarish. I thought of lashing beams of energy, of self-guiding missiles of enormous power.

  Then, suddenly, the confusion in my mind broke off. There was nothing. Simultaneously, among the stars, a nova flamed briefly, brilliantly, and went out.

  Johnson was cursing now. I don’t think he knew why.

  Cleo screamed. “I saw it! I saw it!” She fell against me, holding on hard.

  “Gil, oh Gil! Which ship was it?”

  “I know,” I said. I plucked the telepathor from my ear, held it out for her to see. She would recognize it, know that I knew. “Bilfax,” I lied.

  “He’ll come back! Roy will come back to me, Gil!”

  “Sure,” I said clumsily. I squeezed the telepathor between thumb and finger and felt it crumble. “He’ll come back, Cleo.”

  I have always been proud of that lie. The lie made it easier for her to bear her loss; and it made me see something, too, that I had overlooked—that we are no more apes than Coleman was a superman. The spirit of man is measured, not in the works of his hands nor the thoughts of his brain, not in his success or failure to cope with environment, but in terms of the goal he dreams of, and the struggle he puts forth to gain it. Coleman taught me that.

  We went back over the hump of the mountain, the way Johnson had brought his operatives in. He had come too late to prevent the takeoff, and chagrin kept him silent as we ’coptered back to town.

  Cleo refused to go back on the stage. She couldn’t bear it, without him; all she lives for now is the day her husband returns, and she dreams of him wandering the silent space trails.

  I got her a job writing copy for another agency in town. She’s good at it, and satisfied. Sometimes I drop by her apartment in the evening, and we drink a toast to the man I keep hoping she will forget.

  After all, I can’t help remembering that Cleo didn’t go down that shaft and on to the ship when I pushed her away from me. For a crucial moment, she had let a spark of concern for me lead her away from the man she loved…to safety.

  Someday, maybe, that spark will flare up again, grow big enough to engulf her, and she’ll return fully to her own.

  QUEST

  Originally published in Science Fiction Stories, November 1957.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea how a human being is put together,” said Alur, the robot. “I don’t recall ever having assembled one.”

  Helsing scowled down at his personal robot, about half his own size, grotesquely anthropomorphic. The bright sheen of its rustless alloy shell contrasted with Helsing’s pink, muscular nudity.

  Raised in the automatic, temperature-regulated cities of Voranamor, he needed no clothes for protection; as the only living human being among a world full of robots, he didn’t need them for reasons of modesty, either.

  “I’ve read more books than you have parts,” he growled. “All on the same subject. What I’m looking for is there, but made so tantalizingly mysterious, I don’t understand it.”

  “You just missed the right one,” suggested the robot. “You could go back and read some more.”

  “Go back to Voranamor? Give up the quest?” Helsing’s sharp blue eyes clouded with outrage. He tossed long, pale yellow hair away from his intelligent, broad face. “I should say not!”

  “It’s your quest,” said the robot resignedly. “Personally, I prefer Voranamor to this stuffy space ship. But don’t let me tell you your business.”

  “Go away,” said Helsing. “Get aft and inspect the engines. Inflict yourself on Control!”

  * * * *

  Responding to orders, Alur retreated aft and inflicted himself on the Control robot. Control said they hadn’t deviated from their course in umpteen days; hyperspace was sure a pretty sight when you were equipped to view it, and how much longer did they have to put up with that machine driver in the foreward compartment?

  Alur said, disgruntled, “Be charitable. Helsing is only human.”

  “He must think he’ll live forever,” grumbled Control, “if he plans to scour every planet in the galaxy in his lifetime. Besides, I’m getting tired of doing nothing but steer the ship. I had more to think about when I was a kitchen robot in the home of an old couple…”

  “That was a thousand years ago,” interrupted Alur. “There aren’t any more old couples on Voranamor; or young ones, either. Helsing is the last of his kind. We took you out of mothballs for this trip. You ought to be grateful.”

  “I am…to a point. I guess there are few enough of us robots in active service.”

  “Only what are needed to keep the basic mechanical levels of the cities going,” Alur agreed. “It isn’t so bad, now that the humans are all gone. We’ve more time for leisure.”

  “Where did they go?” Control wanted to know.

  “Nowhere. They just fell over, one by one; they called it ‘dying’. The human beings died off. It’s something like being mothballed; somebody pulled their fuses and put them away. After Helsing stops, we’ll be on our own.”

  “It would be lonely, being the only robot in the universe,” said Control.

  “Or the only human being,” added Alur. A sudden hum developed in the little robot’s thorax and grew loud. “That gear! I’ll have to get it out of there and put in a new one. It’s the third thoracic angle-of-stance adjustment; the worm is worn. Notice how I tilt a trifle to the right as I walk?”

&nbs
p; Alur walked up and down, demonstrating. Control was sympathetic.

  “I’ll have a new gear turned out for you, when I get around to it. Maybe if Helsing could change a few gears in himself, he wouldn’t be such a machine driver. You’d think we were witless.”

  “If he could, he doesn’t know how. They made us with built-in knowledge of self-repair. They didn’t seem to care so much about themselves.”

  Alur paused, thoughtful. “No, human beings were never like robots. How they were manufactured was always beyond me, I never could figure it out. They made them real little, no bigger than my brain-case. They grew as time went on; got big as Helsing. Would you believe it?”

  * * * *

  Helsing had his own quarters on the space ship, commodious enough, but confining. The voyage had already been long. He had looked in on bare, creature-less worlds, worlds of bizarre population, worlds of all kinds. Creature comforts and entertainment devices had long ago ceased to help assuage the ache inside him.

  The ship was his idea; the voyage was his project. He was captain and passenger at the same time. The robots ran the ship, and very well, too.

  Helsing knew nothing of his parents, or of any other human being. He could remember only the robots, who had nursed him, reared him, taught him, and fed him. In his heart was deep affection for these personalities in metal, which his people had created, long, long ago; but he could understand them no better than they could understand him.

  He knew he was different from the robots, but he didn’t know how or why. He was a human being; they were robots. When he was very young, he had thought that perhaps he had been the result of a mistake on the assembly line. Alur often assured him that this was not so.

  He had sought enlightenment in the pictures and pages of the books that crammed Voranamor’s deserted libraries. Libraries by the hundred thousand; books by the billion! How could he hope to read them all? No, if he were something different from the robots, he was at least not unique. There had been others like him before on Voranamor—there might now be others of his kind elsewhere in the universe.

  All he had to do was find them.

  He had never questioned the immediate response of the robots to his slightest wish, nor wondered why it was so. He had told them what he wanted, and they had produced it—the great ship that now flung itself across the void among the stars…so that he could search out another world where possibly…just possibly…

  Every system they approached was a new beacon, ablaze with the fire of hope. No matter that each time, so far, the hopeful glow had dimmed to the dull ashes of disappointment. Helsing still lived…and Seeing had located another solar system…dead ahead…

  Alur plodded about Helsing’s quarters, picking up the things the man had carelessly dropped. “Perhaps this will be it,” said the robot. “There are planets and the right kind of sunlight. Control says we will put on the brakes very soon.”

  Helsing was nervous. He paced the floor.

  “I had such a nice time, talking to Control,” Alur went on. “I should visit back there more often. Control told me about its dream.”

  “I didn’t know you could dream,” said Helsing. “You never sleep.”

  “We dream, just the same,” asserted Alur. “We don’t spend all our time thinking about rational things, any more than you do. Control dreamed that we were married.”

  “Don’t be silly. Only human beings married. It means they lived together.”

  “Just so,” said Alur. “We lived together, Control and I. We had a family of little robots.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” asked Helsing.

  “Of course not. I’m telling you Control’s dream.”

  Helsing frowned in puzzlement. “Did…?” He hesitated. “Did Control say—uh—how you came by the—uh—little robots?”

  “We had an assembly line in the basement,” said Alur. “We made them ourselves. Wasn’t that splendid?”

  Helsing looked ferocious. “I want to know if you learned anything that would help me!”

  “Of course not. Human beings are not robots.”

  Helsing continued to walk up and down. “Tell me about this new solar system coming up. What’s it like?”

  Alur began to spout galactic co-ordinates, spatial counter-positions, and inter-continua relationships, expressed in fourth degree mathematical logic.

  “Never mind all that,” Helsing said crossly. “When do we land?”

  “We’ve already landed,” replied the robot cheerfully.

  “What!” Helsing sprang to the view screen. It stared at him blankly.

  “Control!” Alur sang out sweetly, “Do turn on the juice in this screen, will you? Helsing wants to look outside.”

  Helsing looked eagerly upon a world of forest and blue mountains that hazed away in steps to a misty horizon. Control had landed them on a mountainside, and far below, a blue lake twinkled in the golden flood of light from a yellow sun. Helsing was too moved to speak.

  “Surely,” he breathed at last, “there must be human beings here!”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Alur, affecting boredom, “the place crawls with them. Control set us down where we would be least likely to run into any.”

  “What for? I want to see some people!”

  “In good time,” replied Alur wisely. “It is better to study them at a distance, first.”

  “Let me out, then,” Helsing grumbled. “I want to breathe some fresh air.”

  “Oh—oh!” Alur was alarmed.

  “What’s the matter? Tell Control to let me out!”

  “I don’t think,” said the robot, “that Control was careful enough.”

  “Stop talking and open the ship!”

  Alur pointed at the screen. “There is a human being out there.”

  * * * *

  Helsing’s heart leaped, he looked and beheld the creature, a long way off, lurking in the shadow of the forest. It was disappointing to make nothing of it but a spotty kind of colored movement.

  “Your eyes must be better than mine,” he said bitterly. “That could be anything.”

  “You might go out and call it over,” suggested the robot.

  Alur spoke gently again to Control. The wall split down the middle and drew apart. Helsing stepped out on the surface of the planet, emotion leaping within him. Human beings—real human beings at last! Gladness possessed him, joy, the intoxication of the moment. He did an impromptu dance on the weathered-brown pine needles covering the ground. Pink toes flashed, contacted a bit of gray rock protruding into the open.

  Helsing danced on one foot, clutched the other and yelped with anguish.

  “Now you’ve done it!” protested Alur. “You’ve scared it away. What are you making like that for, anyway?”

  Helsing frowned fiercely; it did no good to tell the robot about pain. He turned toward the whispering, wind-stirred forest, peering. The sunlight glinted on the fresh green of waving needles, made sepia shadows of the forest depths.

  Helsing called out. “Hey! Come here!” He turned to Alur. “Where did it go?”

  “It’s hiding in the brush,” said Alur. “I can sense it. Shall I fetch it?”

  “Please do,” said Helsing, feeling inferior.

  * * * *

  The robot disappeared into the woods. Presently, there came a piercing shriek, followed by a thunderous trampling and breaking of brush that diminished into faint noise in the distance. Alur came out, lugging a limp form.

  “Is that a human being?” asked Helsing, poking at it.

  It was somewhat smaller than himself, with a great deal of curled, yellow hair on its head. The eyes were closed, the mouth unnaturally red. In its unconscious state, it looked somehow frail and delicate.

  “What are those
wrappings on it?” Helsing wanted to know.

  “Clothes,” said Alur. “People on Voranamor used to wear them. That’s how I knew it was a human being.”

  “It doesn’t look very human,” said Helsing, doubtfully.

  “Two arms, two legs,” Alur pointed out. “Head, eyes, mouth, and so forth. Those are the marks of a human being. Moreover, it’s intelligent, or approximately so. It was about to climb on a four legged something and ride away when I surprised it. Did you hear the noise the creature made escaping?”

  “I heard it,” admitted Helsing. “Let’s get this thing inside and take the wrappings off. Maybe it’ll look more human.”

  A little later, with great disappointment, Helsing said, “It certainly isn’t human! Take it back out and leave it in the brush.”

  “On the contrary,” disagreed the robot, “it is human.”

  “It looks nothing at all like me,” argued Helsing, stiffly.

  “For your information,” said Alur, “human beings are manufactured in two models. This is one of the other models. Wake it up and ask it what you want to know.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be damaged,” observed Helsing, looking it over. “Before we wake it up, give it a shot with the hypno-learner, charged with Voranamorese. I’ll talk to it.”

  * * * *

  Allene Morgan awoke to a dim feeling of disorientation. Vague memories flitted through her mind, still fogged with shock. She recalled riding Star through the dappled light and shade of the pines, up and away from the ranch house at the lake. Had Star slipped and thrown her? Why had she been riding? Oh, yes. Joel. She and Joel had quarreled. He was such a bore. All he thought of was marriage. Wouldn’t take no…

  A feeling of urgency gripped her. Riding…riding…then…what? Where was Star? Where was she? Her eyes flew open, ranged wildly. What was this spacious room? Certainly, not the living room of her father’s ranch house, nor any other room in it. Her glance passed over Alur, returned, froze. She started up.