by Eando Binder
“Adam! Adam!” Eve almost sobbed. “What are you doing? This will end in catastrophe!”
I was saddened and dismayed myself. The humans were engaged in a tug-of-war for power. They were back at their old game of seeking privileges, not satisfied with just living and enjoying a better life than anywhere on Earth.
Could it go on? While I had ruled, all was well. Now Utopia was fast becoming a cess-pool of maladjustment and struggle. Even the gardeners, whose duty it had been to keep the city parks in trim, shirked. The city was beginning to look shoddy.
“But still we must wait patiently,” I told my restless, wondering robots. “They will come to their senses, of their own will. Utopia will rise from these ashes, stronger and better for it.”
Words of wisdom? Or words of utter folly?
I KNEW the answer one day, when Frank Steele stalked into my laboratory. “Adam Link, if you don’t do something, I will! Harley today demanded that I make another atomic-power unit, and make a complete set of blueprints for him. I refused. He threatened then to see that no oil was available to the robots, for our body-parts. Now that’s the last straw. These humans must be put in their place.”
It was the last straw—almost.
“Easy, Adam!” I told myself as I marched to Harley’s office. “Anger won’t help.”
I was reasonably calm when I faced Sam Harley, mayor of Utopia City.
“Sure,” he admitted readily. “I want the blueprints of the atomic-power unit. It’s the greatest thing in commercial history. We’ll patent atomic-power, and make a gigantic fortune. If we handle it right, we can even become the industrial captains of Earth!”
What madness had spawned in his mind? I answered patiently.
“But why do that? You are living a good, clean, abundant life. You need nothing. You can’t gain anything by simply amassing a fortune. You can’t live a better life with all the gold on Earth. Don’t you see, Harley?”
He turned a deaf ear.
“Don’t be childish, Link. This is the opportunity of the ages. Are we going to sit here like monks in a monastery, when we have the chance to really put Utopia City on the map? Why, we can manufacture the units right here, hold the monopoly, and make this the center of all Earth industry. Now tell me, am I right?”
“You’re right, as far as that goes,” Frank Steele put in. “Oil, coal, and all present methods of producing power in the world would be obsolete the moment atomic-power was introduced.”
“There you are!” Harley said triumphantly. “Your own man admits it, Link. Now let’s not waste time. How soon can you have the blueprints for me, Adam?”
“The day after eternity ends,” I said quietly.
“But Link, you must—”
“No!”
I thundered the word this time, so that the windows rattled.
“You’ve revealed yourself as completely incompetent, unworthy, and ruthless, Sam Harley. I hereby declare your government illegal. I will resume rule, since you humans are too blind and stupid to rule yourselves properly. I gave you all the leeway I possibly could, hoping you would merit your office. Instead, you’ve cracked the foundations of Utopia. This is my city. I will run it!”
I had finally put my foot down.
“The paper you signed!” Harley screeched. “How can you take back rule, against your pledged signature?”
“By the right of might,” I roared, “the only method you understand. Now get out!”
To help him, I caught him by the collar and deposited him outside the door. I put my metal fist through the glass-panel on which was his name, as mayor. I kicked his desk to pieces and stamped his papers to shreds.
Only then did the red rage in my brain clear away.
I turned as Eve and other robots dashed up.
“We’re taking over the city,” I commanded. “Destroy all money. Ban all strikes. Police all streets, day and night.
What a fool I was to let them play at their mad little games, like vicious children. By tomorrow, we will have Utopia again.”
BUT Utopia was not back the next day.
Or the next, or next. Was it too late? Had the seed of destruction been sown?
Harley had left, muttering threats. The threats materialized. Robots were stoned, wherever they appeared. What wild story Harley succeeded in telling, I don’t know. Perhaps that I had threatened to make them slaves. The people, inflamed by the recent release of their darker passions, were fertile ground for any tall tale that stigmatized the robots.
Curiously, the two human factions that had so recently been bitter antagonists united against us. Robots were the common enemy of mankind.
I tried to call a meeting in Utopia Square, to lay the ghost. The people refused to congregate, stoning robots sent after them from gangways and windows. I commanded my robots not to touch a human. One death or injury, even by sheerest accident, would brand us forever as Frankensteins.
“What can we do?” Eve cried. “Utopia is crumbling!”
I groaned, for she was right. My Eden had become Hell. Utopia had become wicked Babylon!
Desperately, I had my robots take over the power-plant, and shut off power. I would use human methods. I would let them feel the pinch of poverty and want they formerly had.
With power off, all the machinery in the city stopped. All radios, autos, air-conditioning units, cooking stoves. Life for humans would be unbearable in a few days. Then they would see their folly, and come around to me.
Instead, they tried leaving. With no vehicles available, some families began tramping out into the desert. They would die before they had gone half-way to safety under the burning sun. I sent my robots to carry them screaming and bawling back into the city. It only added fuel to their hatred.
The situation had gone from bad to worse. All the human population were our bitter enemies now. All except one.
Jed Tomkins came limping up to me, thinner, haggard, not even chewing tobacco. “Adam Link, I’m your friend,” he said.
“I still believe in you. But it’s all a mess now. God, what an awful mess! Harley, after you kicked him out, convinced the others that you had sworn to kill the whole human race-all over Earth! That you and your robots had finally turned Frankenstein. I tried to talk them out of it. Told them it was ridiculous. They beat me—”
He fell in a dead faint. He was horribly bruised. Eve knelt to attend to him, with a first-aid kit.
The rest of my robots looked at one another,. sadly,—and angrily. Sad that humans could be so wrong-minded. Angry at being branded as Frankensteins.
“They cast stones at us!” Frank Steele muttered. “They turned against us, forgetting all we did for them. They blame us for all their self-started troubles. For two cents I’d—”
“Silence!” I snapped, especially as some of the other robots were muttering, too. “Forgive them, don’t condemn them. There’s still hope for Utopia. Maybe in a few days they’ll listen to reason.”
CHAPTER VII
War in Utopia!
WE waited. We held the heart of the city, the downtown section. They were in the residential sections. Would they think better of their folly, and send a delegation to us, to talk things over? I found myself praying, to the High Powers of the universe who watched over humans and robots alike. Praying that I had not once again brought down the name Frankenstein on the robot race.
I was alone in my office. I had sent Eve away, wishing solitude.
I was aware suddenly that I heard her voice, low and distant. In the quiet, shutdown city, sounds carried well. It came from the tower, above.
“No, Frank,” she was saying. “You mustn’t talk that way. Adam will think a way out.”
I had experienced ail human emotions before. Jealousy, recently. Now it crept over me like a black tide. I made my way swiftly but silently up the steps, and peered out on the tower balcony, below which the city was spread. Again there was a full moon, overhead.
And two glinting metal bodies close together, ta
lking.
“I hate to say this, Eve. But I think your Adam is going to pieces. What’s more, I think lie mismanaged the whole business from the start—Jetting Harley go on till he smashed things. Adam ruined Utopia!”
Eve jerked back.
“Don’t say such horrid things, Frank! It’s not true.”
“Come, come,” Frank Steele snapped. “Adam botched up the whole robot problem from the start. From the day he was created. You can’t reason with humans. They are imbeciles. But they can be handled easily—in a way I’ve figured out!”
“What do you mean?” Eve asked, startled.
Steele’s microphonic voice changed to a sort of husky rumble.
“I mean that I love you, Eve! Leave Adam. Come with me. Together we’ll rule humans. Many of the robots are with me. Eve—”
IT was like a rifle shot. Eve’s hand swept around, slapping Steele’s metal cheek with a ringing clang. Eve is mentally a human girl. It was natural for her to do what she did, as any flesh-and-blood girl would.
“Beast!” she hissed. “I love Adam, as I will to the end of time!”
My thoughts were curious, at the moment. Dr. Charles Link had fashioned a being of metal—but one that acquired human emotions. Even they mighty emotion of love. More than once it had manifested itself. A human girl had once fallen in love with me, a metal man. Also a metal girl. But for the first time, this triangle had come up. A metal man striving for Eve’s love.
“What!” Frank Steele seemed entirely taken aback. “You lie! All those hours we spent together—”
“Were only to make Adam jealous,” Eve told him bitingly. “You mean nothing to me, Frank Steele.”
He stood for a moment, rocking. A robot’s alloy face shows no emotion, but I could feel the frustrated rage fuming in his mind. He leaped at her, arms upraised for smashing blows.
I leaped quicker. I dealt him a staggering blow at the side of the head. He stumbled back, then whirled like a beast at bay. With insane fury, he came at me.
My own robot attacking me! Not moving, I looked at him—this being I had created. This being who had—by the mockery of fate—become my Frankenstein monster! Appropriate, indeed, had been the name he chose for himself—“Frank! Short for Frankenstein, you know!”
Still couldn’t believe it.
“Stop!” I said. “I forgive you your words, Steele. You didn’t really mean them. We’ve all been a little upset lately—”
For answer, he dove at my legs. I was taken unawares. I toppled backwards, smashing through the light grill railing of the balcony. I fell twenty stories, with Eve’s scream ringing in my ears.
The universe seemed to explode in one rending crash, as I struck the pavement—head-first! The second before my mind blinked out, I knew that I would never awaken again. For my iridium-sponge brain would be crushed to atoms.
THEN how was it that my brain again blinked into being?
That was the question I asked myself, as I opened my eyes and realized I was alive. Eve stood over me, and a group of other robots. How long had I been unconscious?
“Thank Heaven you’ve come to, dear!” Eve half sobbed. “Ten, long, terrible hours I’ve waited!”
“Ten hours?” I said. “But what saved me? I landed on my head.”
“Number Nine,” Eve said. “He was below the tower, looking up and watching. He caught you. Saved you from smashing to the pavement itself. As it was, the jolt knocked your electron-center dead for ten hours.”
I bounced up, with no more than a few dents in my body, and my head a little twisted to the side from a loose neck cable.
“Where’s Number Nine” I asked gratefully.
The robots hung their heads.
“He fell back so hard from cushioning your fall,” Eve said in a low voice, “that his head cracked against the stone. His brain—”
She didn’t have to say it. His iridium-sponge must be sprayed over a ten-foot circle, as mine would have been. I hung my head, too, honoring the. passing of Number Nine. For once in his short, bewildered life he had thought quickly—and beat the swiftest of all foes, Death. For. me! And so many times I had shouted at him, scolded him—
Useless recriminations, now.
“Frank Steele?” I demanded. “Where is he. We have a little unfinished business—” I stopped and went cold. Why were the robots fidgeting nervously? Why was Eve looking at me in stark horror?
“Adam,” she said, “prepare yourself. After Steele threw you down, he thought you were dead, as we all did. He came below and proclaimed himself the new robot leader. He announced his plan—to rule Earth! When he left, sixty of the robots followed him. Forty of us stayed behind. Then we found you alive.”
I digested what I had heard. Steele leading sixty robots in a war against the human race! I had to stop it.
“Where is he?”
“At the power-house.”
“Come.”
WE marched to the power-house. A robot sentry was on the steps outside, but more to guard against human intervention than robots. He stared at me, in the lead, then darted within.
Frank Steele emerged a second later, all his robots at his back. His amazement at seeing me alive was great, but controlled. I explained in brief phrases.
“Now,” I said, “your short reign is over. And for what you spoke, I sentence you to death. You men back of him—grab him! Deliver him to me.”
But not robot moved, back of him.
“They accept me as leader, Adam,” Steele crowed, “whether you are dead or alive. They believe, as I do, that you are a has-been. And that robots have only one place in the world of humans—as rulers!” I forgave them, the robots who had listened to such words, even as he spoke. They had seen the worst of human nature, recently. They had seen the humans foolishly trample their own Paradise into the dirt. Small wonder that they believed now robots must rule these pitiful beings.
“Listen to me, all of you!” I spoke in stentorian volume. “You will never succeed. Mankind, when aroused, is a formidable enemy. You will build a vast robot army, yes. But cannon will mow you down. When you try to build more robots, laughing, you will find them choking off your metal supplies. Long before you defeat their armies, they will think of a thousand things to try. It won’t work, I tell you—”
“Of course not, that way,” Steele laughed. “You underestimate my intelligence, Adam Link. There is only one way to win over humans—by the power of money! Beat them at their own game. We will manufacture atomic-power units, and sell them. We will build the industrial army that Sam Harley dreamed of. As sole builders of the atomic-power units, robots will be the money-kings of Earth!”
Madness? No. It could work that way. Frank Steele’s penetrating mind had evolved the one plan that could win Earth. As industrial dictator, Steele would have the human race under his thumb.
And dictatorship, of all possible things, was the last course in the world I wanted robots to follow.
“I denounce you as a traitor to our robot race, Frank Steele!” I said. “This is an ultimatum—I give you one hour in which to think better of your ruthless scheme.”
I TURNED away, my forty faithful robots following. I waited at the Administration Building.
“What if he doesn’t back down?” Eve asked.
I made no answer. I hated to even think of it.
Fifty-nine minutes went by, with agonizing slowness. I arose, to lead my robots to—battle!
Even as the word flashed in my mind, the battle began. Frank Steele had attacked! His robots came crashing into our midst, swinging huge iron clubs. Three of my men went down with smashed brains before we knew what had happened.
“Fight, men!” I yelled. “Fight for your lives—and the future of the robot race!” You will never know what effort it took to give that order—commanding my robots to fight their brothers. It was the first time robots were battling—against each other.
To me, at that moment, the universe seemed to give a cry of horror.
But, to be more realistic about it, it was self-defense.
My men sprang into action, with their steel fists, t snatched up a metal chair and smashed it down on a raiding robot, steeling my soul. His alloy skull cracked apart and shreds of his iridium-sponge flew through the air. I stared for a long second at his fallen, useless body. I had given him life. And I had taken it away. I felt like a father killing his own child.
But the other thought tore my soul more—civil war among the robots! It had happened, for all the preaching I had done against humans for their folly of warfare.
CHAPTER VIII
Utopia Falls
WAR it was, and perhaps a stranger, more furious struggle than humans could ever know. Steel men against steel men, each with superhuman strength. Powers were let loose against which no human army could have stood a moment. Yet there were no guns.
We were still in the large lobby of the Administration Building, where Frank Steele thought to corner us and finish us off. He had sent his whole force to win in one stroke—or had he?
Edging back, and rapidly counting, I saw there were only eighty robots in the melee. Steele had sent forty against our forty. Out of a sense of fair-play? No, not him! Where was he, and the other twenty? What plan—
Suddenly the attackers turned and fled, in a body, leaving nine dead. We stood bewildered at the sudden end of hostilities. But only for a moment.
“Quick!” I commanded. “Out the back way!”
We clattered from the building, just as it came down with a resounding crash! If we had remained within another second, we would be buried under tons of steel and concrete.
I saw what had brought the building down. Off at the other side, beyond the heap, stood the twenty missing robots. But not the robots they had been an hour before. Each had exchanged his manlike body for a workman-body. As when we had built the city, they had rivet-hands, saw-arms, crane appendages, and all the other varieties. These bodies had been stored away, when the construction was done, for future expansion of the city. Frank Steele had taken them from storage, along with the special heavy-duty batteries needed for the increased horsepower.