Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  They were at the rim of the clearing now, and Sheriff Saunders closed his eyes and stuck the corner of one out from behind the tree. Seeing nothing, he paused, then tried again, eyes open this time.

  Results were, naturally, better.

  To be exact, he saw one huge machine man, back toward him, bending over one soul-curdling, hiccupy Contraption of uncertain origin and less certain purpose. The only item he missed was the quivering figure of Randolph Payne, embracing the tree next but three to the nor’-nor’west.

  Sheriff Saunders stepped out into the open and raised his machine gun. The robot, still presenting a broad metal back, said in a loud voice-to person or persons unknown –” Watchl” and as the sheriff opened his mouth to signal a general order to fire, metal fingers compressed a switch.

  There exists no adequate description of what occurred afterward, in spite of the presence of seventy eyewitnesses. In the days, months, and years to come not one of those seventy ever had a word to say about the few seconds after the sheriff had opened his mouth to give the firing order. When questioned about it, they merely turned apple-green and staggered away.

  It is plain from circumstantial evidence, however, that, in a general way, what did occur was this.

  Sheriff Saunders opened his mouth; AL-76 pulled a switch. The Disinto worked, and seventy-five trees, two barns, three cows and the top three quarters of Duckbill Mountain whiffed into rarefied atmosphere. They became, so to speak, one with the snows of yesteryear.

  Sheriff Saunders’ mouth remained open for an indefinite interval thereafter, but nothing – neither firing orders nor anything else – issued therefrom. And then –

  And then, there was a stirring in the air, a multiple ro-o-o-oshing sound, a series of purple streaks through the atmosphere radiating away from Randolph Payne’s shack as the center, and of the members of the posse, not a sign.

  There were various guns scattered about the vicinity, including the sheriff’s patented nickel-plated, extra-rapid-fire, guaranteed-no-clog, portable machine gun. There were about fifty hats, a few half-chomped cigars, and some odds and ends that had come loose in the excitement – but of actual human beings there was none.

  Except for Lank Jake, not one of those human beings came within human ken for three days, and the exception in his favor came about because he was interrupted in his comet-flight by the half-dozen men from the Petersboro factory, who were charging into the wood at a pretty fair speed of their own.

  It was Sam Tobe who stopped him, catching Lank Jake’s head skillfully in the pit of his stomach. When he caught his breath. Tobe asked. “Where’s Randolph Payne’s place?”

  Lank Jake allowed his eyes to unglaze for just a moment. “Brother,” he said, “just you follow the direction I ain’t going.”

  And with that, miraculously, he was gone. There was a shrinking dot dodging trees on the horizon that might have been he, but Sam Tobe wouldn’t have sworn to it.

  That takes care of the posse; but there still remains Randolph Payne, whose reactions took something of a different form.

  For Randolph Payne, the five-second interval after the pulling of the switch and the disappearance of Duckbill Mountain was a total blank. At the start he had been peering through the thick underbrush from behind the bottom of the trees; at the end he was swinging wildly from one of the topmost branches. The same impulse that had driven the posse horizontally had driven him vertically.

  As to how he had covered the fifty feet from roots to top – whether he had climbed, jumped, or flown – he did not know, and he didn’t give a particle of never-mind.

  What he did know was that property had been destroyed by a robot temporarily in his possession. All visions of rewards vanished and were replaced by trembling nightmares of hostile citizenry, shrieking lynch mobs, lawsuits, murder charges, and what Mirandy Payne would say. Mostly what Mirandy Payne would say.

  He was yelling wildly and hoarsely, “Hey, you robot, you smash that thing, do you hear? Smash it good! You forget I ever had anything to do with it. You’re a stranger to me, see? You don’t ever say a word about it. Forget it, you hear?”

  He didn’t expect his orders to do any good; it was only reflex action. What he didn’t know was that a robot always obeys a human order except where carrying it out involves danger to another human.

  AL-76, therefore, calmly and methodically proceeded to demolish his Disinto into rubble and flinders.

  Just as he was stamping the last cubic inch under foot, Sam Tobe and his contingent arrived, and Randolph Payne, sensing that the real owners of the robot had come, dropped out of the tree head-first and made for regions unknown feet-first.

  He did not wait for his reward.

  Austin Wilde, Robotical Engineer, turned to Sam Tobe and said, “Did you get anything out of the robot?”

  Tobe shook his head and snarled deep in his throat. “Nothing. Not one thing. He’s forgotten everything that’s happened since he left the factory. He must have gotten orders to forget, or it couldn’t have left him so blank. What was that pile of junk he’d been fooling with?”

  “Just that. A pile of junk! But it must have been a Disinto before he smashed it, and I’d like to kill the fellow who ordered him to smash it – by slow torture, if possible. Look at this!”

  They were part of the way up the slopes of what had been Duck-bill Mountain – at that point, to be exact, where the top had been sheered off; and Wilde put his hand down upon the perfect flatness that cut through both soil and rock.

  “What a Disinto,” he said. “It took the mountain right off its base.”

  “What made him build it?”

  Wilde shrugged. “I don’t know. Some factor in his environment – there’s no way of knowing what – reacted upon his moon-type positronic brain to produce a Disinto out of junk. It’s a billion to one against our ever stumbling upon that factor again now that the robot himself has forgotten. We’ll never have that Disinto.”

  “Never mind. The important thing is that we have the robot.”

  “The hell you say.” There was poignant regret in Wilde’s voice. “Have you ever had anything to do with the Disintos on the moon? They eat up energy like so many electronic hogs and won’t even begin to run until you’ve built up a potential of better than a million volts. But this Disinto worked differently. I went through the rubbish with a microscope, and would you like to see the only source of power of any kind that I found?”

  “What was it?”

  “Just this! And we’ll never know how he did it.”

  And Austin Wilde held up the source of power that had enabled a Disinto to chew up a mountain in half a second – two flashlight batteries!

  Insert Knob A in Hold B

  2010 A.D.

  DAVE WOODBURY AND John Hansen, grotesque in their spacesuits, supervised anxiously as the large crate swung slowly out and away from the freight-ship and into the airlock. With nearly a year of their hitch on Space Station A5 behind them, they were understandably weary of filtration units that clanked, hydroponic tubs that leaked, air generators that hummed constantly and stopped occasionally.

  “Nothing works,” Woodbury would say mournfully, “because everything is hand-assembled by ourselves.”

  “Following directions,” Hansen would add, “composed by an idiot.”

  There were undoubtedly grounds for complaint there. The most expensive thing about a spaceship was the room allowed for freight so all equipment had to be sent across space disassembled and nested. All equipment had to be assembled at the Station itself with clumsy hands, inadequate tools and with blurred and ambiguous direction sheets for guidance.

  Painstakingly Woodbury had written complaints to which Hansen had added appropriate adjectives, and formal requests for relief of the situation had made their way back to Earth.

  And Earth had responded. A special robot had been designed, with a positronic brain crammed with the knowledge of how to assemble properly any disassembled machine in existence.r />
  That robot was in the crate being unloaded now and Woodbury was trembling as the airlock closed behind it.

  “First,” he said, “it overhauls the Food-Assembler and adjusts the steak-attachment knob so we can get it rare instead of burnt.”

  They entered the Station and attacked the crate with dainty touches of the demoleculizer rods in order to make sure that not a precious metal atom of their special assembly-robot was damaged.

  The crate fell open!

  And there within it were five hundred separate pieces – and one blurred and ambiguous direction sheet for assemblage.

  Runaround

  2015 A.D.

  IT WAS ONE of Gregory Powell’s favorite platitudes that nothing was to be gained from excitement, so when Mike Donovan came leaping down the stairs toward him, red hair matted with perspiration, Powell frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. “Break a fingernail?”

  “Yaaaah,” snarled Donovan, feverishly. “What have you been doing in the sublevels all day?” He took a deep breath and blurted out, “Speedy never returned.”

  Powell’s eyes widened momentarily and he stopped on the stairs; then he recovered and resumed his upward steps. He didn’t speak until he reached the head of the flight, and then:

  “You sent him after the selenium?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how long has he been out?”

  “Five hours now.”

  Silence! This was a devil of a situation. Here they were, on Mercury exactly twelve hours – and already up to the eyebrows in the worst sort of trouble. Mercury had long been the jinx world of the System, but this was drawing it rather strong – even for a jinx.

  Powell said, “Start at the beginning, and let’s get this straight.”

  They were in the radio room now – with its already subtly antiquated equipment, untouched for the ten years previous to their arrival. Even ten years, technologically speaking, meant so much. Compare Speedy with the type of robot they must have had back in 2005. But then, advances in robotics these days were tremendous. Powell touched a still gleaming metal surface gingerly. The air of disuse that touched everything about the room – and the entire Station – was infinitely depressing.

  Donovan must have felt it. He began: “I tried to locate him by radio, but it was no go. Radio isn’t any good on the Mercury Sunside – not past two miles, anyway. That’s one of the reasons the First Expedition failed. And we can’t put up the ultrawave equipment for weeks yet-”

  “Skip all that. What did you get?”

  “I located the unorganized body signal in the short wave. It was no good for anything except his position. I kept track of him that way for two hours and plotted the results on the map.”

  There was a yellowed square of parchment in his hip pocket – a relic of the unsuccessful First Expedition – and he slapped it down on the desk with vicious force, spreading it flat with the palm of his hand. Powell, hands clasped across his chest, watched it at long range.

  Donovan’s pencil pointed nervously. “The red cross is the selenium pool. You marked it yourself.”

  “Which one is it?” interrupted Powell. “There were three that MacDougal located for us before he left.”

  “I sent Speedy to the nearest, naturally; seventeen miles away. But what difference does that make?” There was tension in his voice. “There are the penciled dots that mark Speedy’s position.”

  And for the first time Powell’s artificial aplomb was shaken and his hands shot forward for the map.

  “Are you serious? This is impossible.”

  “There it is,” growled Donovan.

  The little dots that marked the position formed a rough circle about the red cross of the selenium pool. And Powell’s fingers went to his brown mustache, the unfailing signal of anxiety.

  Donovan added: “In the two hours I checked on him, he circled that damned pool four times. It seems likely to me that he’ll keep that up forever. Do you realize the position we’re in?”

  Powell looked up shortly, and said nothing. Oh, yes, he realized the position they were in. It worked itself out as simply as a syllogism. The photocell banks that alone stood between the full power of Mercury’s monstrous sun and themselves were shot to hell.

  The only thing that could save them was selenium. The only thing that could get the selenium was Speedy. If Speedy didn’t come back, no selenium. No selenium, no photocell banks. No photo-banks – well, death by slow broiling is one of the more unpleasant ways of being done in.

  Donovan rubbed his red mop of hair savagely and expressed himself with bitterness. “We’ll be the laughingstock of the System, Greg. How can everything have gone so wrong so soon? The great team of Powell and Donovan is sent out to Mercury to report on the advisability of reopening the Sunside Mining Station with modern techniques and robots and we ruin everything the first day. A purely routine job, too. We’ll never live it down.”

  “We won’t have to, perhaps,” replied Powell, quietly. “If we don’t do something quickly, living anything down – or even just plain living – will be out of the question.”

  “Don’t be stupid! If you feel funny about it, Greg, I don’t. It was criminal, sending us out here with only one robot. And it was your bright idea that we could handle the photocell banks ourselves.”

  “Now you’re being unfair. It was a mutual decision and you know it. All we needed was a kilogram of selenium, a Stillhead Dielectrode Plate and about three hours’ time and there are pools of pure selenium all over Sunside. MacDougal’s spectroreflector spotted three for us in five minutes, didn’t it? What the devil! We couldn’t have waited for next conjunction.”

  “Well, what are we going to do? Powell, you’ve got an idea. I know you have, or you wouldn’t be so calm. You’re no more a hero than I am. Go on, spill it!”

  “We can’t go after Speedy ourselves, Mike – not on the Sunside. Even the new insosuits aren’t good for more than twenty minutes in direct sunlight. But you know the old saying, ‘Set a robot to catch a robot’ Look, Mike, maybe things aren’t so bad. We’ve got six robots down in the sublevels, that we may be able to use, if they work. If they work.”

  There was a glint of sudden hope in Donovan’s eyes. “You mean six robots from the First Expedition. Are you sure? They may be subrobotic machines. Ten years is a long time as far as robot-types are concerned, you know.”

  “No, they’re robots. I’ve spent all day with them and I know. They’ve got positronic brains: primitive, of course.” He placed the map in his pocket. “Let’s go down.”

  The robots were on the lowest sublevel – all six of them surrounded by musty packing cases of uncertain content. They were large, extremely so, and even though they were in a sitting position on the floor, legs straddled out before them, their heads were a good seven feet in the air.

  Donovan whistled. “Look at the size of them, will you? The chests must be ten feet around.”

  “That’s because they’re supplied with the old McGuffy gears. I’ve been over the insides – crummiest set you’ve ever seen.”

  “Have you powered them yet?”

  “No. There wasn’t any reason to. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. Even the diaphragm is in reasonable order. They might talk.”

  He had unscrewed the chest plate of the nearest as he spoke, inserted the two-inch sphere that contained the tiny spark of atomic energy that was a robot’s life. There was difficulty in fitting it, but he managed, and then screwed the plate back on again in laborious fashion. The radio controls of more modern models had not been heard of ten years earlier. And then to the other five.

  Donovan said uneasily, “They haven’t moved.”

  “No orders to do so,” replied Powell, succinctly. He went back to the first in the line and struck him on the chest. “You! Do you hear me?”

  The monster’s head bent slowly and the eyes fixed themselves on Powell. Then, in a harsh, squawking voice – like that of a medieval
phonograph, he grated, “Yes, Master!”

  Powell grinned humorlessly at Donovan. “Did you get that? Those were the days of the first talking robots when it looked as if the use of robots on Earth would be banned. The makers were fighting that and they built good, healthy slave complexes into the damned machines.”

  “It didn’t help them,” muttered Donovan.

  “No, it didn’t, but they sure tried.” He turned once more to the robot. “Get up!”

  The robot towered upward slowly and Donovan’s head craned and his puckered lips whistled.

  Powell said: “Can you go out upon the surface? In the light?”

  There was consideration while the robot’s slow brain worked. Then, “Yes, Master.”

  “Good. Do you know what a mile is?”

  Another consideration, and another slow answer. “Yes, Master.”

  “We will take you up to the surface then, and indicate a direction. You will go about seventeen miles, and somewhere in that general region you will meet another robot, smaller than yourself. You understand so far?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “You will find this robot and order him to return. If he does not wish to, you are to bring him back by force.”

  Donovan clutched at Powell’s sleeve. “Why not send him for the selenium direct?”

  “Because I want Speedy back, nitwit. I want to find out what’s wrong with him.” And to the robot, “All right, you, follow me.”

  The robot remained motionless and his voice rumbled: “Pardon, Master, but I cannot. You must mount first.” His clumsy arms had come together with a thwack, blunt fingers interlacing.

  Powell stared and then pinched at his mustache. “Uh... oh!”

  Donovan’s eyes bulged. “We’ve got to ride him? Like a horse?”

  “I guess that’s the idea. I don’t know why, though. I can’t see – Yes, I do. I told you they were playing up robot-safety in those days. Evidently, they were going to sell the notion of safety by not allowing them to move about, without a mahout on their shoulders all the time. What do we do now?”