by Eando Binder
I looked at Eve. We were the Adam and Eve of robots. And these were our sons. Five had gone back to nonexistence, in the performance of duty.
But what duty?
Like a lightning blast, the question struck me.
All the drive, the energy and excitement of defeating the mechanized army drained from me. All the rage and hatred for this human folly of murder by machine. Only a hollowness remained, in which boomed the terrible words:
“Adam Link, you have allowed robots to be used in warfare!”
Victory crushed me with its defeat.
My thoughts went back. I had refused military service, back in Washington. I had sworn never to wield the sword. I had come to the mine, to prove robot worthiness in peacetime pursuits. To prove to man that his use of the machine for destruction could be overbalanced by use of the machine for construction.
Now, in one stroke, I had sacrificed all this.
I had introduced into the technique of war a machine unit far more deadly and invincible than any conceived by human thought.
Around the world would go shrieking the news—THIRTY-THREE ROBOTS DEFEAT MECHANIZED ARMY!
I had branded the robot as an instrument of war! I had taken sides, in a human quarrel. I had destroyed any future trust in the robot as a non-Frankenstein innovation. I had in one moment obliterated my two years of effort to prove robots would not be a menace.
“EVE!” I groaned, overwhelmed by my crime. “Eve, I’ve murdered the future robot race! When the world hears of this—”
She understood what I meant. She interrupted me.
“Why should the world hear? We don’t have to tell. And certainly the Japanese won’t, to become a laughing stock. No formal declaration of war was issued. The United States has no inkling of the near-invasion. Don’t you see, Adam? What the world of humans doesn’t know won’t hurt them!”
“But the enemy must have one or two mechanized divisions in reserve,” I protested. “We should warn the country. They’ll try again—”
“And they still have to come through here,” Eve declared. “This is the only serviceable route, for their timed plans.
A blitzkrieg takes months of preparation and planning. They can’t change overnight. They must come through here!”
I looked around. The Pacific to the right. A desert to the left. Mountains in between. The mine straddled the pass through them. We could hold off ten mechanized divisions!
“Men!” I said. “We’re going to fight the invasion to a standstill—ourselves. No newspaper reporter, no single source of authority is going to know. Let the failure of a Japanese invasion become a sheer, unbelieved legend. We must do this, to keep our robot name clear of warfare!”
IT WAS noon.
For several hours, the repair shop hummed busily. We had not escaped unscathed. Our “wounds” were quickly healed; muscle cables replaced, bent plates hammered out, leaky batteries patched, short-circuits eliminated.
“Hurry—hurry!” I kept yelling.
We were facing more blitzkrieg. The Japs would hammer back instantly. And this time they would know what they faced. They would come in battle formation, no longer easy prey on a clogged road. They would bombard, attack, strafe, flank, spearhead, pincer, and all the rest of it.
The repairs were completed. We were new men. Our total number was just thirty. A new Number Eleven had been brought to life, to replace the Number Eleven of the mine death. The third of the replacement brains—Mary was the second—was also brought to life. If only I had more iridium-sponge brains! But it would take weeks to make more.
Thirty of us. We would stand or fall with that force.
I led them back to the battlefield. We retrieved equipment. We had not been thorough enough, luckily, to destroy every last gun. There were machine guns, mortars, field pieces, anti-aircraft, and mounted cannon with slight damage. Working like beavers, we lugged them all to the mine in two hours.
I had them set up strategically. We had every inch of the slopes leading to the mine and pass covered. It would take a mighty big putsch to get past our little Mannerheim Line!
BY nightfall, we were ready.
“I wish I knew if they were attacking tonight,” I said nervously.
“Why not find out—by sending a scout?” Mary suggested.
“Good idea!” I agreed. It was so obvious, I felt ashamed for not having thought of it. “I’ll send someone to watch for their advance units—”
“Let me go!” Mary begged. “Please let me go, Adam. I love excitement!”
I suppose I hesitated only at the thought that she was a girl, as a human would. Then I laughed at myself. Physically, Mary was the equal of any of us. And mentally she was just as alert. There was little danger. I could sense her eagerness. Yet if I could have read a little deeper . . .
“Okay, Mary,” I nodded. “Go twenty miles south. At the first glimpse of their advance units, race back and warn us. If they don’t show up by dawn, come back.”
She skipped away.
I WAITED, wondering if we could stave off any and all attack. Wondering if we would succumb, let the hordes through into a defenseless country. And thereby give the robot a black eye for all time . . .
My sharp hearing distinguished a sound at the bottom of the slope, two hours later. Footsteps. But not the ponderous ones of Mary’s metal feet.
Human steps. A human figure came with upraised hands into the glare of our lights.
“Daggert!” I gasped. “You dare come back, a traitor? You went with the Japanese—”
He shook his head. He was weary, worn, shoes cracked with hours of hiking.
“I left them, soon after the battle. Walked back. All the way I’ve cursed myself.” His tired blue eyes raised to mine. “Adam Link, I can say only one thing. I’m the most miserable human being on Earth!”
He slumped down, shoulders trembling. My loathing for him vanished. After all, it is human to make mistakes. It is something more than human to be the better for it.
“Shake!” I said.
He gripped my hand thankfully, then glanced around eagerly.
“You’re going to fight them off? Great! I’m with you. But they won’t attack today at all. I heard the Japanese general say it would take two days to organize all his forces for a concerted drive.”
I breathed in relief.
“Fine! It gives us a chance to really prepare. We can set up tank barriers with the debris out on the road. I’d better recall Mary—” I explained her departure on scout duty.
“Send Eve,” Daggert suggested. “The rest of us can begin to strengthen our defenses.” His eyes shone. “We’re going to show those Japs, the dirty, yellow—”
The rest was enough to almost make my metal ear-tympanums burn red.
EVE and Mary did not return by dawn. I began to worry.
“Probably picking flowers like any girls,” Daggert grinned. He realized now that robots were mental humans.
“Nothing could have happened to them.”
A metal figure glinted in the south, soon after. It was Mary. She came up alone, leisurely.
I ran to meet her. “Where’s Eve?” I demanded. “I sent her to call you back.”
“Eve?” Mary was surprised. “I didn’t see her.”
What had happened to Eve!
“I came back at dawn, as you said,” Mary shrugged. “Besides, they won’t attack for two days—”
I jerked. I grabbed Mary’s arm. Those were Daggert’s words!
“How did you know that?” I hissed. “Mary, how could you know that unless you met Daggert—”
Mary’s hand went to her mouth, like any human girl who had unwittingly let something slip. I shook her roughly.
“Mary, tell me!”
And then I released her, bounding away. In one stride I had caught Daggert, as he was edging away. I brought him back before Mary.
“Talk!” I thundered at him.
“Are you off your nut?” Daggert tried to be casual,
innocent.
Only for a second. Then he paled. I was squeezing his arm. My metal fingers pressed steadily into flesh. I would not stop till I had reached the bone, and snapped that arm like a twig. And after that, every bone in his tender human body.
“Talk!”
He talked. He babbled, with the fear of death in his eyes.
“I met Mary when she was on her way south to do her scouting. I was on scout duty for the Japs.” I squeezed again. “Sabotage duty,” he whined, knowing he must tell all the truth. “The Jap general told me to get back in your confidence, then try to spike your defenses somehow. He fears you.”
Why hadn’t I suspected? Why hadn’t I detected the insincerity in Daggert, who had not one spark of honor in him? Why hadn’t I remembered that fifth column methods are part and parcel of the blitzkrieg cult?
Daggert went on in a rush. He knew I wouldn’t release his bruised, throbbing arm till he had finished.
“I met Mary, as I said. She wanted to haul me here, before you. I talked her out of it. Told her if she played ball with me, I’d help her.”
“Help her do what?” I yelled.
Daggert looked at me queerly.
“Don’t you know?” he muttered. “That Mary is—well, madly in love with you? That she wants your love—all to herself? Even I saw that.”
All to herself! I staggered. A scene came before my eyes. Mary being pelted by the Mexican and Jap laborers with stones for “spying” on a murder. She had watched something of their raw mode of life. She had seen Amelia, the border girl, stick a knife in the back of Lolita—
“Mary!” I groaned. “What did you do to Eve?”
“She’s out of the way!” Mary said flatly. “You’re mine now, Adam. Aren’t you pleased that I did it? That I want you so much?”
YES, I knew anger. A towering rage that seemed about to burst my brain. But it faded.
What could I say? How could I tell poor, misguided Mary that the little she had seen was not the accepted human way of winning love? How could I even blame her? How is the untaught child to know right from wrong?
“Eve!” I whispered, gripping myself. “You destroyed her in some way? Tell me.”
“No,” Mary returned. “I held her while the Japanese tied her with chains.
She is with them now, their prisoner.”
CHAPTER IX
Adam Link, Blitzkriegist
I COULDN’T speak. I squeezed Daggert’s arm again, as the signal to explain.
“Mary and I figured it out this way,” he whined. “I was to go to the camp, win your favor, then have Eve go to recall Mary, just as it happened. Mary waited with the Japanese who were with me. They had chains. Our mission had been to try to capture a robot, somehow. Mary made it easy for us.
“When Eve came, Mary pinned her arms from the back, in the dark. The Japs chained her. As Mary’s part of the bargain, to make up for Eve being out of the way, she was to come here and help me sabotage the defenses, in the next two days. But of course she spilled the beans, like any dumb dame would—”
I cut off Daggert’s half bitter words.
“What are they going to do with Eve?” I demanded.
Daggert winced under my fingers. But I hated to hear the answer, confirming the horrible suspicion crawling in my mind.
“Duplicate her,” he said. “Duplicate robots!”
I flung Daggert away. I flung him so hard to the ground that his arm broke.
“You’ve just sold robots into slavery!” I raged. “And the human race into hell!”
I whirled on Mary. “And you’ve destroyed any slightest filial love I might have had for you.”
I looked from one to the other. “Of all humans, and all robots, you two are the lowest—”
Mary broke into my denunciation.
“Adam! I didn’t know of that part of it. Daggert deceived me, too. He said the Japanese would simply destroy Eve, after I had made her powerless. I didn’t want to do it myself. I thought the destruction of Eve was my pay—as Daggert put it—for returning to camp and helping him.”
She paused, and I knew she was burning with shame inside.
“I was going to expose Daggert later, after I was sure Eve had been taken care of.”
“You were going to double-cross him on top of it!” I groaned.
“But only because I love you, Adam!” she cried. “Can’t you see? No harm was done except that Eve is out of the way!”
Again, how could I blame her? At the “age” of three months, in a new and often strange world, I might also have violated the laws of civilization in sheer ignorance.
I turned away, brokenly.
Eve lost to me! My mental mate of two years. I felt utterly alone suddenly. All the world vanished—Daggert, Mary, my robots, the Japanese threat—and I was alone in a void. How could I live without my Eve? Everything would be meaningless without her!
How long I sank through this black pit, I do not know. But lightning stabbed into the darkness. I sprang up, shouting for my robots. I addressed them. My phonic voice revealed no emotion.
“Men, Eve is in the enemy’s hands. The enemy will send her metal brain to their home country. Their scientists will solve its secret. Then they will make more. Thousands more. Millions more. They will put them in giant metal bodies and send them into war. They will conquer the world with robots. Then the human and robot races both will be slaves!”
My voice went down a pitch.
“There is only one hope. One way to stop them We must try to rescue Eve—or the brain of Eve—from their hands. I appeal to you not as a man who has lost his mate, but as a leader forming a crusade against utter evil.”
My final words were a shout.
“We must attack the enemy—now!”
TWENTY-NINE robots attacking an army. Picture it if you can. No, you can’t. I will only try to describe it in general terms.
Crouching behind a hill in the hot sun, we looked out at a harbor in the Gulf of California. Secretly, the Japanese had come here a year ago, and built their base, just below the Mexican border. What arrangements had been made with the Mexican authorities no one will ever know. It is one of those dark cabals of unwritten history.
In the harbor were a dozen troop and supply ships. These had shuttled back and forth across the Pacific, bringing the mechanized army. New wooden barracks sheltered the troops and equipment. Vast preparations were in progress—for the assault against us at the pass. They didn’t know that instead of waiting for attack, we were attacking ourselves!
“It will be fairly easy,” said Number Five at my elbow. “We can rush in there and demoralize them.”
I shook my head and pointed. Closer to us, and protecting the harbor area, was a semicircular line of square concrete structures and smaller domed ones.
“Blockhouses and pillboxes,” I said. “A miniature Siegfried Line protecting the harbor. The Japanese, in their thorough way, prepared for any counter-attack of this key base, once the invasion of America held begun.”
“We’ll storm the line!” Number Twenty-Seven said loudly. “What are we waiting for?”
“You can’t overturn pillboxes like tanks!” I snapped in reproof. “Those guns will fire till they are ripped out. Dozens of guns will concentrate on each robot.” I looked around. “There will be casualties among us!”
Twenty-eight shiny heads nodded grimly. This was total war!
I outlined our procedure. We had to crack that line as quickly as possible—and yet have robots left to finish the job of driving the invaders right off the continent.
I leaped up. Twenty-eight metal forms leaped after me.
Silently, grimly, we raced for the middle of the fortified line. The alarm sounded before we got there. A siren wailed, drowned out a moment later by the roar of guns. The skeleton defense staff were already on the job. Reserves were motorcycling up from the barracks, to man all the gun turrets.
It would not be easy.
We neared the first line of
pillboxes. Machine guns rattled, bouncing bullets off our frontal plates. Then, from the blockhouses small cannon belched thunderously. Number Nine, beside me, disappeared. His broken metal parts spattered against me.
One robot gone!
But now we reached the pillboxes. It took only seconds to brace our feet and wrench the guns out by the barrels. Concrete then cracked under the blows of huge metal clubs we carried. We razed the front line in less time than it takes to tell.
Then on to the second line of emplacements.
The total line, I had estimated, was a half-mile deep. Every hundred feet was a new row of flaming guns. Guns that might pick us off faster than we could raze the concrete enclosures, to protect our rear. Time was an ally of the Japanese.
LET me translate the battle into blitzkrieg terms. Perhaps that way it will be simpler to understand.
I had, in brief, a formidable mechanized unit—in my robots. I led this force as a spearhead into the center of the line, blasting pillboxes and blockhouses faster, I think, than any European panzer division had ever gone through an enemy fortification.
The Japanese High Command had only one defense against the spearhead—counter-attack. Tanks rumbled up from the rear. And mounted field guns. And trucks of attack troops with large-caliber automatic guns. And the motorcycle corps.
All these they poured against us, to reinforce their threatened center. They deployed in solid phalanxes, tank to tank, truck to truck, gun shouldering gun. No conceivable enemy could break through.
No, not even two dozen great, powerful robots.
The concentrated fire began to tell. Despite our usual speed in weaving and dodging, shells got us solely by the law of averages. Our spearhead had ripped almost completely through the center of the line. But now we faced that solid wall of motorized equipment.
Any human army would have been razed to shreds in seconds. But it takes a direct hit with an explosive shell to destroy a robot. We ignored all bombs that exploded at the sides.
Our initial drive faltered. Sixteen robots had met oblivion already. We could not ram through. We had no reserves.