In the Centre of the Galaxy

by Clark Darlton

  At the same moment, Pucky materialized in the middle of the room and landed, not very gently, at Homunk’s feet. He shook himself and made sure he was alone with Homunk. He did not notice Harno’s presence.

  "I’ve been chasing behind you forever but the robots were guarding you as if you were the apple of their pie. When they came out of the building, I took the chance. Have they left you behind?"

  Before the android could answer, Harno made himself noticeable and explained to Pucky in broad outline what had happened. The mousebeaver was so shaken that he made no reply. Wordlessly he squatted on a ledge and stared darkly in front of him. Then at last, after long minutes, he murmured: "Well, and what now?"

  "That," said Harno, "is why I’m here. In 2 or 3 days the EX-238 will meet us here; until then we must make a clean sweep of it."

  "A clean sweep? What do you mean? You surely don’t want us to continue with this circus?"

  "You’re wrong!" Harno’s thought impulse was strong and sharp. Pucky ducked involuntarily. "This is no circus. The robots are wrong only on one point: they take Homunk for a human being, an Arkonide, some kind of a humanoid. So they think he’s their creator. But Homunk is an artificial man. He stands here for all other men and represents them. When the EX-238 lands, 50 men will come into this world. Fifty gods, if you will. It can lead to catastrophe."

  Pucky looked at the picture on the altar. "And what should we do?" he asked in a small voice.

  "We will organize that crusade," Harno replied.

  5/ REVOLUTION #2

  During the night Harno told them the history of the planet in the centre of the galaxy. The energy-being turned into a screen that filled the entire hall. From the distant past, it projected the events at a smaller scale. Homunk and Pucky witnessed the rise of the kingdom of the Metalix.

  The dome hall became the galaxy.

  The present sank into the sea of time.

  * * * *

  A fleet of 10 spherical ships was forging toward the centre of the Milky Way. Their path backward led to a spiral arm that reached deep into intergalactic space in which there was a scarcity of stars, lonely worlds in lonely space.

  The scale changed as the yellow sun—in the time projection, a bit brighter—moved to the centre and details became clearer. The planet became visible. It revolved around its mother star in the orbit it was following to this day. The continents had not changed but the surface was without a sign of animal life. It was covered with broad steppes and huge forests. In the few oceans swam sea mammals that had not yet made the attempt to crawl onto land.

  The fleet of 10 ships steered toward the planet, circled it and finally landed on a rocky plateau. At this point Harno explained to his audience:

  "Radio communication of the expedition fleet with its home base had long been broken but it was an independent and self-contained system. After landing, the ships were dismantled so that the first shelters could be built. The old home base was overpopulated, the new planet uninhabited and capable of development—exactly what the Galacteers had been looking for."

  "Galacteers?" Pucky interrupted.

  "They called themselves something else but the name suits me. Besides, it fits in every respect. Now see what happened next."

  Harno had become a sphere with a diameter of 10 meters. He rotated slowly like a planet so the entire surface could be seen. On it, in accelerated time, the first changes were depicted. In a few minutes, years and centuries went by.

  The huge forests disappeared, making room for large cities and highways. Fields were planted and the civilization of the Galacteers entered an agricultural stage. The many rivers made irrigation of the broad steppes possible and soon all kinds of fruits were growing and supplementing the initial scarcity of food.

  "It’s not unusual for space-roaming races to forget their origins after colonizing a new planet. The new surroundings, the influence of strange cosmic rays and the striving of all intelligent beings to look to the future rather than to the past contributed to the trend. No wonder, then, that after a few thousand years the Galacteers no longer knew that they had come from another world. They lived in a sphere of suns. In their various legends, though, there was a world on which the sun sank and it grew dark. Here it was light practically all the time. Darkness could be created only artificially. And so, after a time, the Galacteers discovered again the benefits of darkness. They retreated below the surface of their world."

  The cities above ground remained but they did not grow. What did grow were powerful factories that gradually crowded out both nature and cultivated fields. An unimaginable industry arose until the first robots were created.

  "It was only a re-discovery; the remembrance of machines that could relieve men of work existed deep in the consciousness of the Galacteers. So far the intensified radiation from the conglobulation of suns exerted a beneficial effect on their brains. They were still profiting from their favourable position in the middle of the Milky Way. Effortless production of synthetic foods made agriculture superfluous. The last fields gave way to factories. The first robot crews were installed."

  The position of the stars had not changed but again many centuries had passed. The rhythm of life of the Galacteers had changed. At night they withdrew underground to their dark housing while the robots continued to work in the bright light of the eternal stars. They produced the necessary food, arranged for amusements and even took care of their proper distribution to the various administrative districts. Robot stations relayed the appropriate orders. Still, these stations were run by the Galacteers.

  "Again thousands of years went by. Out in the galaxy, ever more planets were settled. The original race of the Galacteers spread out but they lost contact with each other. On one planet, far from the original home base, a colony of Akons was established; from them the Arkonides developed later on. Nearer the edge of the spiral arm, where all traditions had long been forgotten, a wild man climbed out of the trees and swung a cudgel for the first time again. It was his first step towards civilization. And on the planet of the Galacteers, the planet of the yellow sun, development reached its absolute peak."

  Homunk and Pucky did not interrupt Harno’s soundless explanation. In the dome hall, silence reigned. No sound reached them from the outside and the sun must have set long ago. Time had lost its meaning for before the eyes of the two on-lookers passed thousands of years.

  Now Galacteers were only seldom seen above ground. The surface was ruled by robots. They still served their masters, the humanoids, but a few groups began to dissent. At the beginning of this movement, they were rousted out by the robot police and destroyed. All of this happened without any Galacteer having to move a finger or even giving any orders. It happened automatically.

  The cities of the surface crumbled away for they no longer served any purpose. Only one of the most modem settlements at the foothills of a mountain range withstood the natural decay. Perhaps because of the material, perhaps because of other reasons. In any case, one thing was certain: it was the city in which they now found themselves—the only city still in existence on this planet.

  Until this moment the Galacteers had been only shadows without personality. But now the scales of the plastic time-projection changed again. The magnification was such that single Galacteers became recognizable. Harno recalled from the past what seemed to be a family.

  "I’m now going to show you the decisive moment that spelled the doom of the Galacteers—not in a day but during the course of the next 2,000 years. The man there is the leader of an administrative district. His assignment is to give orders to the robots through the relay brain. He does it every day and it is the only assignment he has to carry out. But he is sick of it for it’s monotonous and there’s no room for initiative. The Galacteer—all Galacteers—is actually satisfied with this. He doesn’t want to work any more. Even thinking seems difficult and is an effort. He is glad that the robots relieve him of all work. But even giving orders is work—much too much work. And so
it was inevitable that one day an idea would come to him. And not only to him."

  Homunk and Pucky looked into a dimly lit room. On a wide and sumptuously upholstered couch there lay a woman. She wore light clothing and was looking at a screen that had been affixed to the ceiling above her. Two children were tended to by robots. Though they fought against it, they were put to bed in an adjoining room.

  The Galacteer looked like the man whom the robots had worshipped on the screen today. His widow’s peak reached deep onto his forehead and ended between his eyebrows. He was sitting at his control desk in his underground living quarters. A small screen serviced the control. On it appeared command impulses to be relayed to the robots on the surface.

  The room blurred, became indistinct.

  Harno explained: "The robots got the order to continue their present assignments if there were no special orders. The guardians of the brains were given the task to make any necessary decisions without checking back, as long as they were to the advantage of the Galacteers. At the same time, the order was given to reactivate the factories that had long been standing still, to produce new work robots. That was the beginning of the end."

  Homunk and Pucky saw it for themselves.

  Most of the Galacteers had not worked for a long time and the responsible ones at most half an hour a day. Their brains, no longer necessary, deteriorated faster than their bodies. After a thousand years the Galacteers had lost the ability to move at all. They lay motionless on their beds and let their robot servants feed and care for them. Soon the birth rate declined and the race was on its way toward extinction.

  On the surface, things went on as usual. The production of commodities and food ran at high gear. In the factories, new robots were built every day while the old models were sorted out and discarded. Growth was greater than attrition. The planet was threatened with over-population because of the too-diligent robots.

  The robots started by forgetting their real masters who had disappeared into the converters long ago. They were no more. And when one day an exploration expedition of robots penetrated to an underground city, they found only deactivated robot servants which they transported to the surface and there destroyed.

  The robots had become, without wishing it, the lords of their world. They didn’t know what to do with all this power and perhaps there would have been an unimaginable catastrophe if at this moment the robot brains had not taken the initiative. They had always existed just to relay the orders of the Galacteers. Why should it not continue this way? Outwardly, nothing was changed as the three or four dozen machines took control.

  The production of new robots was immediately stopped, whereupon a kind of civilization whose like had never before been seen in the Milky Way had its start. It was a civilization with no desires for conquest; instead, it wanted to remain entirely isolated. But their independence led to the robot brains’ learning to think. And with thought, they also learned to forget.

  So the Galacteers became just figures in maxims, nothing more.

  Here Harno came in again.

  "Both the robots and the ruling robot brains disagreed as to whom they had to thank for their original creation. It was obvious they were not organic beings but had been created by a higher intelligence. Since they could discover only arrangements useful for robots on the planet’s surface, they could only assume that this world had always belonged to them."

  "They never had been servants, only masters."

  "At this point, the split developed."

  In their zeal to discover the truth about themselves the robots developed a philosophy, as crazy as this might sound. There were few scientific pointers for real knowledge, for the Galacteers had left no records behind them. The robots did not know what to do with the ever-running films. They were destroyed. Under normal circumstances the never-failing memory banks of their positronic brains now exhibited many symptoms of decline that could not be explained. Harno pointed out that stellar radiation intensified a million times, and in their inimitable combination, were responsible. Practically, on the centre of the galaxy were concentrated the collected cosmic rays of the entire Milky Way, and no place stood closer to all suns.

  As further developments could not be followed on the projection screen, Harno took over the account:

  "The ruling robot brains were in communication with one another and were aware of their great responsibility. They knew that the rule would end whenever men would rediscover the Central Planet, as they called it. On the other hand, the robots were anxious to be building spaceships in order to seek their masters."

  "A compromise was reached."

  "The brains realized that in the, long run they could not hold out against the wishes of several million robots. Without any previous experience, factories for Silver Arrows were constructed and put into operation. The robot brains created space travel from theory, from scratch, using only logic. The first ships completed successful experimental flights and production of a mighty fleet was begun."

  "In every ship there was a small commanding brain programmed by the mother brain. Whatever any commander might do, whatever might happen to him, he would have to make sure never to establish contact with alien spaceships. If a Silver Arrow would nevertheless actually meet an alien ship and contact it, a disaster prevention mechanism would simply destroy the Silver Arrow."

  And so the unending chase of the robots began, the chase that had to be senseless from its very beginning. They forged deep into the galaxy, found inhabited and uninhabited systems, landed on many planets and contacted their inhabitants. But never did they find a world of humanoids. When, in the deeps of space, they did meet an alien craft, they avoided contact. From time to time, a commander, despite all contrary orders from the brain on board, would try to establish contact with some alien ship but then the Silver Arrow either had to become independent and fly in the opposite direction from that given or it would self-destruct.

  "And so it happened that the robots never did find their gods."

  "To the advantage of the robot brains, whose power grew ever greater and whose hunger for more power became more and more unimaginable."

  Harno was silent.

  His magnified projection showed the city that would be called ‘holy’ by one group of robots. An underground shaft to the now empty living quarters of the Galacteers opened up. Three robots came up. They were carrying a huge rectangular thing that they handled with the utmost of care. They carried it to the dome hall and took off the drapery. It was the figure of the Galacteer that had appeared on the screen.

  "The altar was actually one of the ruling robot brains," Harno explained. "The 3 robots loosened some contacts and broke communication with the other robot brains. They removed the external controls so that no one could tamper with them. They took over the brain. When they had finally de-programmed it and were sure that they would not be betrayed, they restored a one-sided communication with the other robot brains and began their propaganda campaign."

  "Then there arose the two groups that are still in existence today, bitterly opposed to each other. One thought that the Galacteers would return one day to demand a reckoning, while the other group held fast to the theory that they had been created to rule over both this and other worlds. While the first group deemed the human beings to be their gods, the other regarded them as their servants. These striking differences finally led to war."

  Harno became a projection of the planet again as he reported further:

  "The robots who thought of themselves as the lords of creation naturally outnumbered the others. They were also in possession of most of the factories. Thus they had the advantage. But the others felt they were more in the right. Their 5 or 6 robot brains incited them to religious fanaticism that would make them fight to the point of self-destruction."

  "The Silver Arrows shot out into space and gave gruesome battle during which more than one ship was incapacitated. Those were the craft the Terranians had often met. The war finally ended without
result, without conquerors and without conquered."

  "The ‘believers’ had accomplished what they wanted. Unhindered, they could claim the ‘holy’ city and here they could await the second coming of their gods. In their imaginations, the Galacteers had been transformed into gods who could work miracles."

  "In this group of robots, mostly examples of the original construction, there still slumbered the memory of a bygone service. They simply wanted to, had to, serve someone; but there was no one to be served. So, someone must be found. Life—if these robots had life!—seemed purposeless without having someone to serve. No wonder, then, that they took the appearance of Homunk as the fulfilment of an old prophecy, In their eyes, the Galacteers had at last returned—the creators, the gods, the masters. The servitude of the robots was at an end. The hour of freedom was near—whereby they meant the freedom to serve. As man was born free and experienced freedom, so the robots were created for service and could only look on service as the highest good. In reality there has developed a paradoxical situation in which the ‘believing’ robots behave quite normally, think and feel as they should, while the group that thinks soberly and realistically should be called quite abnormal. That’s why we have to convert the non-believers."

  "With a crusade?" Pucky shook his head and watched as Harno grew smaller and congealed once more into a black sphere. "No, count me out! What do these crazy robots matter to me? All I wanted to know is what was behind the Silver Arrows. I wanted to know who was leading them and why they avoided contact with us. Now I know. And I don’t care whether the robots are converted or not."

  "That’s not the point, Pucky. The fanatics have gained a great following since the appearance of Homunk. What was mere belief before this has suddenly become concrete. The gods are not dead after all; they live. The purpose for the existence of the robots has been moved towards the understandable: they can be servants again. If the believers lose, the victorious robot brains will change the programming of their ships. A huge fleet of automatically steered Silver Arrows will descend on men and worlds inhabited by humanoids until a battle unto death will take place. A whole swarm of deadly missiles will transform one planet after another into suns and no one will be able to hold them back. Not even the Solar Empire."