Hundreds of men were working there on the plain. Red-painted girders, skeletons of buildings, were already rearing against the frosty purple sky. The horizon behind was fantastically abrupt. The wooded hills had a curiously regular form, betraying the fact that they were the graves of ancient structures and machines, decayed to rust and ruins, and all but obliterated for millions of years.
“You’ve heard me say before, Chief, that there’s something really queer about this place,” Norvell began. “Asteroid QM-1, they call it. That shouldn’t be just a classification symbol. The ‘QM’ should stand for ‘Question Mark.’
“I’m not just referring to the existence of ruins, obviously of Mercurian origin, here. There are ancient remains, left by scientifically advanced but extinct peoples, on Mars too—and Earthmen get along well enough there....”
“Oh! Now you start that again, Norvell!” Big Jack Leland complained. “You’re going to say that there’s hidden danger on QM-1—and that I shouldn’t continue building my new spaceship factory here, until we waste six months or so investigating everything ‘thoroughly’!
“Bunk, Norvell! I don’t care what you’ve got in that box! QM-1 is a perfect site for my new plant. It’s the only asteroid with an atmosphere of its own, capable of supporting life! There are plenty of meteoric metals, waiting to be mined, directly beneath the surface soil.
“Workers and their families will like it here! And what if there are a few wild animals, or something? We’ve got the best weapons in the Solar System—ancient or modern!”
“I don’t feel so safe here now!” Arla Manly commented.
She cast a guarded glance at the steel packing case on which Frank Norvell was perched, from which issued a fresh torrent of thumps and angry screechings.
LELAND'S nephew smiled a smug, self-satisfied smile in Norvell’s direction.
“Jittery people should stay on Earth,” he drawled pointedly. “But you’re not really the jittery type, Arla. You shouldn’t associate with pint-sized engineers with wild imaginations.”
“Quiet!” Big Jack Leland ordered angrily. “Now what else have you got to say, Norvell?”
“Several things,” Norvell responded. “Excuse me if I repeat from previous discussions. Yeah—QM-1 has an atmosphere. That’s a fact that makes it different from all other asteroids which, with this one exception, are universally airless.
“QM-1 has an atmosphere because it has a gravity sufficiently strong to confine gases to its surface. About one-third the gravity of Earth. No other asteroid is massive enough to have anywhere near that much attractive force.
“So, again, QM-1 is unique. Moreover, it is a perfect sphere, like a true world, instead of being just a jagged chunk of rock. But curiously, it is only twenty-five miles in diameter. Many other asteroids have a much larger bulk. But when you think of that comparatively tremendous gravity, remember that gravity depends on mass and density.
“The inner core of QM-1 must be almost pure star metal—neutronium—inconceivably heavy!”
Norvell paused for a moment.
“All that I’ve just said,” he continued, “proves that QM-1 isn’t a true asteroid at all. It must have an origin entirely different from the others. It’s something special—unnatural. It’s even way out here toward Jupiter, instead of being near the center of this belt of shattered fragments.
“Remember, the inhabitants of the Twilight Zone of Mercury have been extinct for ages, even on their own planet. Fossil skeletons on Mercury show that the people died in their tracks, in great crowds, all at once. From plague or from some unidentified war gas. And that in spite of their vast scientific civilization.
“Besides, on Mars, even among the modern Martians, there are legends about huge, fiery events in this part of space, long ago, when their ancestors were still primitive.”
Norvell gestured expressively.
“So do you blame me for my hunch about danger here on QM-1, not even considering the thing I’ve got in this box? I can be wrong, of course, but do you want to risk thousands of lives and tremendous capital here, without being sure?
“What if a thorough investigation takes a few months? That’s a small waste, balanced against whatever might happen, if we don’t investigate. You’ve usually been reasonable, Chief.”
Frank Norvell’s gaze slammed hard against the steady, critical but not unfriendly eyes of Jack Leland.
“We’ve settled that much before,” Leland said. “I’ve got finished spacecraft to deliver on schedule to the various shipping companies. I’ve got competitors. The arguments you’ve offered so far are thin and vague.
“To my way of thinking, they don’t constitute sufficient reason for expensive delays. Maybe if I see whatever it is you’ve captured, Norvell, it might affect my opinion.”
“All right.” Norvell sighed tiredly. “We’ve got to rig a cage first, though. With another steel packing case.”
THE cage they improvised for the captive was stout and strong. Narrow observation slots were cut in its sides with Norvell’s neutron-blast pistol. It was set up in a toolshed among the moss-trees, some distance behind the office shanty. Norvell dumped the monster from the original box into its new prison, and secured the lid with a heavy padlock.
“There!” he grated. “I was out exploring about a mile from here. Suddenly this little devil-machine came flying up out of a hole in the ground, and headed straight for me. It did a certain amount of damage to yours truly before I temporarily stunned its control-centers with a weak burst from my neutron gun.
“I don’t think I injured it permanently. I figured it would be more useful captured than destroyed, because in the latter case we might not even be able to tell what it was.”
“Why—it’s a robot!” Arla gasped.
“Almost, but not quite,” Norvell returned grimly. “Look close.”
Deftly and cautiously the young engineer reached through one of the slots of the cage with a sharp knife. He cut the plastic bonds, apparently made from strips of his belt, which had restrained to some extent the vicious movements of the thing’s curious multiple metal arms.
Freed to this extent, it began to creep about the cage, its voice mechanism still murmuring and howling. Its body was a metal cylinder, two feet long, burnished and well oiled, but pitted as with vast age. It had no wings, though Norvell had said it could fly.
But wingless flight, now in the twenty-fifth century, was no miracle to Earth people. It had antennae, like horns of flexible metal, that waved nervously, and its metal-rimmed crystalline eyes still seemed to glint with hate and fury.
“Don't worry, Arla,” Norvell reassured the girl. “I’m sure it can’t attack us now—from inside the cage, anyway. It had heat-ray weapons attached to its forepart, but when I had it stunned I naturally took the precaution of unscrewing the focusing lenses from those weapons.”
Norvell was toying with two little crystal disks.
“The thing is of ancient Mercurian workmanship, all right,” Big Jack Leland commented, studying the weird captive. “I know. I used to hang around museums. It must be ten million years old. And it still functions!”
“Why not?” Norvell questioned. “If it took good care of itself. Now look through that crystal cover in its flank. See what’s there.”
They all stared—even Ames Leland. Beneath the transparent, window-like curve in the cylinder was a convoluted lump, pulsing with evident life and embedded in some fluid, certainly nourishing and preservative.
“A brain!” Arla gasped. “A brain kept alive in a machine!”
“Sure,” Norvell prompted. “That isn’t so wonderful. Our own scientists on Earth conceived the idea of keeping brains alive outside of living bodies, long ago. This one evidently belongs to a Mercurian. He managed to preserve his intellect this way, far beyond his natural life span and long after his race was destroyed.”
“But look how withered the brain is!” Arla pointed out.
NORVELL smiled patiently.
“Naturally,” he said. “After ten million years. Vitalizing apparatus could keep it living, but it aged slowly just the same—got senile. It isn’t a brilliant brain any more; its powers have largely decayed. The way it sent its metal body jumping at me a little while ago, without good reason, shows that.”
“All very nice,” Ames Leland drawled. “I congratulate you on your scholarly deductions, Norvell. But what do you mean to suggest? That QM-1 is dangerous merely because there is a robot-brain in it? That many others may lurk underground, ready to pounce on us and our spaceship factory?
“Personally, I say ‘bravo!’ if that’s true. The hunting around here needs improving, since otherwise there are only oversized dragon-flies and a species of modified Mercurian rodents, smaller than mice, in the moss-forests.”
He patted Norvell on the shoulder mockingly, as if the other were a small boy in need of reassurance.
“Don’t worry, Norvell,” Ames Leland added. “We’ll be ready for those robots. You’ll get protection. We won’t let anything happen to you!”
Ames Leland’s studied insults were getting beyond mere humor, as far as Frank Norvell was concerned. His face, showing the marks of recent battle, flushed with fury, and his fists went hard. He was ready to give the young snob a beating he’d remember for a long time.
But Big Jack Leland grasped Norvell’s arm.
“No hot-headed foolishness!” he said quietly. “I respect your opinions, Frank; but I can’t personally agree to delaying the work on our spaceship plant. We can defend ourselves, even if there are thousands of robot-brains. And we’ll keep on the lookout for anything suspicious.”
Norvell cooled a little. Leland pushed his nephew out of the toolshed and followed, leaving the engineer alone with Arla Manly and the ancient captive.
“Of course I didn’t mean just that we might have to fight a lot of robots, Arla,” Norvell muttered. “To tell the truth, I don’t know exactly what I do mean. But I still think there’s danger here. There’s so much that’s unexplained! Or maybe I’m just a fool.”
But suggesting to himself that he was a fool didn’t quiet Frank Norvell’s suspicions. The asteroid belt was a strange ribbon of jagged fragments, circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
QM-1 was a strange little world. And the quasi-human Mercurians who had once roamed the entire Solar System were a forgotten race now. They’d been here on QM-1—the last intellect of their kind was still here. Maybe he had companions, survivors of a nameless catastrophe.
“Our robot-brain friend has a voice mechanism,” Arla prompted. “Some of those noises it makes sound like words. If the thing were taught a little English, it might give us some information.”
“Yeah, I was thinking of that,” Norvell answered. “Let’s start being teachers.”
They tried a lot of words and methods. Pointing to objects and naming them. Repeating phrases as one might while trying to educate a parrot. Results were small. The robot-brain, propelled by whatever unseen spatial forces that enabled it to fly, launched itself at the slotted bars of the cage furiously. Some of its cries sounded now not like rage any more, but like sorrowful wails over its imprisonment.
“Poor thing,” Arla sympathized.
“Wait!” Norvell offered. “I’ve got a feeble idea. A hundred to one it’s no good—”
IN HIS hip pocket he had a harmonica. He took it out and started to play. It wasn’t very good playing, but presently the robot-brain seemed to listen with its microphonic ears. It quieted. Norvell used up all the tunes he knew, and then started over again. He was weak and out of breath, and his lips were raw.
“Our pet likes my music!” he commented.
Arla laughed teasingly.
“I’m glad somebody does,” she said. But she was somewhat awed at the strange being’s reaction, too.
They tried teaching again. Norvell played at intervals. Within a few hours—it was after midnight of the thirty-hour day of QM-1—the robot-brain from ancient Mercury could pronounce the words “Earthian” and “Hello!” And it offered a word of its own—“Kuda”—which seemed to be its name, or the name of the man it once had been. Its tone was cracked and wavering, but clear.
“The voice sounds like that of an old, old man,” Arla suggested. “A man so old that he's easily irritated and fussed.”
Norvell wondered if the comparison wasn’t practically perfect.
“We’d better call it a day,” he said. “Tomorrow there’s work to do.”
He locked the toolshed carefully as they left.
Under Big Jack Leland’s orders, QM-1 was resurveyed sketchily during the next week. The results revealed practically nothing new. The hole in the ground, out in the moss-forest, which Frank Norvell indicated as the burrow from which Kuda, the robot-brain, had emerged, was explored. It was fifty feet deep—just a crude shaft, apparently excavated with some high-energy tool involving intense heat.
But the bottom seemed a blank cul-de-sac. No one knew that the jagged rock at the lower end of the shaft masked an intricate revolving door of massive, super-hard alloy.
Frank Norvell’s days were spent directing the construction of the spaceship plant. Evenings he was always with Kuda, the robot-brain.
But teaching English to Kuda proved almost futile. His senile mind made scant effort to learn. He did not seem to hate Norvell any more, but he was stricken with moods of depression and retired sullenly within himself.
He needed nothing from Earthmen—food he did not require. His metal body was energized by an atomic-power battery, capable of sustaining it for centuries without renewal.
Even the nourishing fluids in which his living brain was embedded must have been constantly refreshed by the energy of that battery.
Music seemed to soothe him—it was his one slender contact with people from Earth. Harmonica music, radio music and sometimes Arla’s singing.
Norvell became moody, too, as he struggled endlessly to instruct that weird monster, and perhaps learn about the sullen past. But there was no result.
Often, at first, Arla tried to help Norvell. But presently she began to stay away. She was with Ames Leland a lot. Norvell was angry about that, and he was sad. Feeling low, he forgot to be his usual aggressive, good-humored self. Let Arla make her own choices.
“Well, where are the rest of your so-dangerous robots, Norvell?” Ames Leland would laugh. “I don’t see them around.”
A frustrated, sadistic light would come into young Leland’s eyes. Norvell admired hunters, but not the kind in whom the killer instinct was so easily and casually aroused.
“Beat it,” he would growl. “I’ve got more important business than to listen to you.”
AMES LELAND drank a lot. He was indolent and of little use with the construction work on QM-1. Norvell knew this, and he knew that Big Jack Leland knew it too.
Then came that evening when Norvell got wise to himself about Arla Manly. She certainly had gotten Ames Leland’s number long ago. She wasn’t dumb by any means. When he quit work that evening, Norvell went straight to her quarters.
“You never asked me to help you with Kuda, Frank,” she explained, “You forgot all about me. So I tried to make you jealous, I guess. Besides—well, I wondered if maybe—just maybe—you hadn’t been trying to slow up the project here, with all your talk of danger.
“You might have been trying to give an advantage to some competing spaceship company. That would be a pretty rotten trick, Frank. Being a paid saboteur—”
“Arla! For Pete’s sake!” he protested, hurt.
Then he guessed that it was Ames Leland who had somehow stirred up Arla’s faint suspicion. But he controlled his anger.
They hung around the barracks for a while, playing ping pong, looking at magazines. Then they went for a walk in the frosty night. Norvell had his arm around Arla.
They heard the sudden commotion from the direction of the toolshed where Kuda was kept. Kuda’s familiar screams, mingled with muffled
human mutterings.
“Quick, Frank! Something’s wrong!” Arla cried.
They ran through the darkness to the shed. The lock of the door had been clumsily pried away. In the lighted interior of the little structure there was a strange tableau.
Ames Leland stood swaying over Kuda’s cage. His hair was awry, his clothing soiled. He leered down at the imprisoned Mercurian robot-brain. The lid of the cage was partly open, the lock having been shattered. Leland held a heavy metal bar in his hands, and with it he was thrusting down viciously at Kuda’s body and sensitive antennae.
“Come on!” he was muttering thickly. “Le’s play circus! Come on—do tricks, you crazy, ten-millyun-yearsh-old monshter! Norvell shays he can’t teach you nothing. Thatsh ’cause he’s sho shtupid!”
“Ames!” Arla cried in terrified sharpness. “Close that cage cover! Kuda will escape! And then who knows what will happen!”
Leland lurched around in his alcoholic delight.
“Hello, folksh!” he greeted, waving part of his hand feebly. “Glad tuh shee yuh! Jusht in time for the show!”
If Frank Norvell had ever wanted to take a really murderous swing at Ames Leland, it was now. For his senseless cruelty, for his childish lack of responsibility. But that dangerously unfastened cage cover—Leland must have broken the lock with his metal bar—was far more a matter of concern now, than trying futilely to teach Big Jack Leland’s nephew a lesson.
Norvell leaped to remedy the danger. But he was too late. Kuda suddenly shot up from the bottom of the cage like a bullet. The force of his flight, driven by unseen energy, sent the lid of his prison banging wide.
He wasn’t temporarily paralyzed now by a neutron beam, as he had been just after his capture.
Like a wisp of wind he was gone through the doorway. But his thin scream echoed in the night. “Earthians! Earthians!”
Hell Stuff For Planet X Page 23
