by Eando Binder
“By the President himself!” he finished. “We need you, Adam Link. You’re our last hope. We’re stumped, and we’ve come to you as the last possibility to avert what may be catastrophe for our nation!”
“Explain!” I demanded, half dazed.
“First of all, I must swear you to utter secrecy. None of this must leak out to public channels. Have I your word?”
I nodded. At his hesitation, I added, “I never lie. That is a human trait.” He took that without argument, and went on in a rush.
“The story is this. A month ago, a certain destroyer of the United States fleet passed San Domingo on routine patrol. San Domingo island is our possession, as you probably know. The captain saw a strange thing on the headland—a new fort!
“The fort had not been there a month before. It had not been commissioned by our government. Whose fort was it?”
“Obviously that of a foreign power,” I put in. “They sneaked it in right under your noses!”
The operative shook his head.
“Impossible. Our fleet has been on emergency patrol since the trouble in Europe started. It would take a whole convoy of supply ships to put up such a fort. No convoy could brazenly sneak through our tight neutrality patrol.”
“Then they dropped the material and men from the skies, by aircraft,” I said impatiently.
“That’s what we’re afraid of,” Joe Trent nodded. “Natives at the other side of the island reported seeing a great lighted ship come down one night. It meant that a foreign power had established a foothold in our hemisphere!”
“So what?” I snapped. It seemed so childish, these human doings. “Since you discovered the fort before they operated from it, it’s simply a matter of destroying it.”
“We tried,” Trent responded. “The destroyer shelled the fort, when it refused to answer by radio. We had the right. It’s our soil. The fort seemed unharmed. Other ships came, to try, including heavy cruisers. Eventually three battleships steamed there, and shelled it with the biggest guns known to naval science.”
He paused and went on in a whisper-
“Not one shell took effect. Not one chip was knocked off that fort!”
MY IMPATIENCE vanished. This was really something.
“You suspect what?” I asked.
“The New Weapon!” he groaned. “Or call it the New Defense. A certain foreign enemy—I need not name him—has established himself in an impregnable base from which to operate against us. Any day—blitzkrieg on America!”
His face went haggard, now.
“You’re the last hope, Adam Link. We thought of you, when all else failed. You have a super-brain, some say. We don’t know. Can you help us?”
How can I describe the overwhelming thrill that shot through my iridium-sponge brain? Humans sought my help! They had hounded me, balked me, sneered at me. Now they begged at my knees. Moments like this were rare.
Should I refuse? Should I send him away, as they had so often turned me aside? What did it matter to me whether one group or another of humans ruled here? But suddenly, a horrible picture flashed in my mind. Regimented robots under the command of a hard, ruthless master! He would not ignore me. He would use me—in frightful ways.
“I’ll try to help,” I said. “Where do I go?”
“Thank Heaven!” Joe Trent said. “Everything has been arranged. I’ll take you in my car to the nearest airport. There a fast plane is waiting to take us to Key West, one of our naval bases. At Key West, a warship will take us to San Domingo.”
“Come, Eve,” I said. “We will look over this mysterious fort that cannot be destroyed.”
FORTY-EIGHT hours later, the battleship X steamed in the night to the headland of San Domingo island. In the grey dawn, a fort slowly took visible form on the coast. I was on the bridge with the captain, the fleet commander, and Joe Trent. All the warship’s crew were at guns and battle stations, ready for any attack from the fort.
“There it is!” Trent said in nervous tones. “It’s within striking distance of the whole eastern seaboard. It must be destroyed.”
I looked the mysterious fort over. Even from our distance of five miles, the closest they dared go, the fort loomed like a mighty man-made mountain. Through binoculars, it was a dome shaped structure with a solid rampart of metal facing the sea. From recessed apertures bristled ugly cannon snouts.
“They haven’t fired back one shot, yet,” Trent informed. “They don’t have to, since our shells are useless. Adam, what’s the answer?”
But I was thinking, silently.
The fleet commander, at my side seemed nettled at my presence. It was a slap in his face. He signaled his fleet to stand by, while the battleship shelled the fort, once again.
The great 18-inch cannon bellowed, shattering the dawn silence. I watched shell after shell explode against that wide rampart, with no more effect than peas shot by a child.
“Look out!” I yelled suddenly. “One of the enemy guns is moving and aiming for us!”
“Nonsense!” barked the rear admiral, not knowing of my sharp mechanical vision and mathematical brain. “Continue firing.”
That gun at the fort spoke. Livid flame belched from it. Five seconds later, one of our destroyer escort folded in the middle and sank.
“They’re firing back for the first time!” Trent screamed. “God—look!”
In rapid succession, three more destroyers sank. Each was nearer to our battleship, as though the enemy gunners were toying with us. Then a shot came that seemed to stove in the entire side of our flagship.
Concussion threw me against the bridge rail with such force that my body-plates creaked. I thrust out both hands, catching the admiral with one, Trent with the other, before they catapulted into the sea.
The well-trained crew did not panic. Life-boats lowered systematically into the water. Before the huge battle-wagon heeled over and sank, its entire living compliment were safe. I was in a life-boat with the admiral and Trent.
They had thrust a life-belt around me, uselessly. No life-belt could stop me from sinking like a stone, if once I fell into the sea.
I knew fear in that moment. If the enemy followed up the sinkings with shrapnel, they could wipe us out totally. But they didn’t. No more shots came, and the last destroyer, behind a smoke screen, picked up all survivors and steamed us to Key West.
The world does not know of this—any of this.
AT DAWN the next day, a formidable fleet sailed to San Domingo. Six battleships, eighteen cruisers and sixty destroyers. They rained a hell of destruction on the fort that had at last bared its fangs. Half the day they shelled, before answer came, as though the enemy disdained slaughter. Then, despite smoke screens, maneuvers, and all the tricks known to naval warfare, seven craft were picked off at twelve miles from the fort, by its deadly guns.
I saw all this from an observation plane, with Trent.
“Senseless sacrifice,” I said. “Stationary fort guns are always superior to naval guns.”
The fleet withdrew, realizing that too. And when the smoke cleared, there was the fort, with not a distinguishable mark on it.
The American forces had not given up. A horde of aircraft passed us, and began dropping bombs. Dive bombing, invented by America, was used. The enemy anti-aircraft retaliated. They picked off bombers with steady, incredible precision. The American forces withdrew.
And again, when the smoke cleared, the fort-dome lay undamaged, sparkling in the sun. No conceivable base could have withstood that hammering from the air. This one did.
Three days later, the final assault was tried. A co-ordinated attack by land, sea and air. This had been in preparation for a month, since the fort was discovered. The other attacks had been preliminary.
First the naval forces hurled over tons of shells, from their extreme range behind dense smoke screens. One little crack in the dome might mean victory. At the same time, the air force bombed relentlessly, from high up, with bomb-sights envied by the world.
Then, at a prearranged time, the barrage ceased, and the waiting land forces attacked directly. They came at the back of the fort, from the island’s interior. Tanks formed the spearhead, rumbling forward with spitting guns. Behind followed shock troops. If the stupendous shelling and bombing had opened one little crack, one means of entry, they would invade the fort and finish the battle within.
From our observation plane, we saw a strange sight. A barrage from the enemy shattered the first line of tanks. They simply blew to bits. The second wave roared up—to the same fate. The third and last line of tanks gallantly charged—and stalled! Stalled dead, as though their crews had fallen asleep.
It was the same with the shock troops. It took magnificent courage to charge, against what they had seen. But I suppose they were filled with a blinding rage at this maddening enemy.
Three waves of men tried to crack the nut. Two waves went down like mown grass. The third wave fell, but limply, as though gassed or paralyzed. And then the rest of the soldiers, their morale finally broken, fled in complete rout.
I saw one more thing, before falling dusk obscured vision. Figures scurried from the fort, carrying the limp men in, as prisoners. And the undamaged tanks were driven inside, with their unconscious crews.
THE battle was over. America had been defeated by land and sea and air! You will find no record of this, I repeat. There could be no official declaration of war, since the enemy had not yet been identified. I think the sunken ships have been ascribed to sabotage, for public consumption.
“The best is absolutely impregnable!” Trent moaned. “Perhaps this was the final test, for their New Defense. And their New Weapon, some kind of gas. Now the enemy can hack away at America’s defense lines at its leisure!”
He looked at me.
“This is where you come in, Adam Link. We’re stumped, with our human methods. Are there any methods you, as a robot, can try?”
I shook my head, and Joe Trent wept. Yes, he wept. For he knew that his country was doomed.
“Adam!” Eve said sadly. “Isn’t there anything we can do, as robots?”
There was still faint hope in Trent’s hollow eyes.
But I shook my head again.
“Trent,” I said. “Advise the government to send one tank up to the fort. Have it fly a white flag. It will be a commission to ask the enemy its terms!”
“God!” Trent said hopelessly. “I guess you’re right. But suppose they ruthlessly destroy the tank—and go on, wishing complete invasion?”
“I want to go with the tank,” I said. “Eve and I, disguised as humans. If they destroy the tank—” I shrugged. “If they let us in, to talk, fine. You see, I want to get inside that fort!”
Joe Trent stared.
“There’s one human method left,” I finished. “Sabotage—but by robots!”
CHAPTER II
The Enemy Is Revealed
IT WAS daybreak.
One tank, a huge 25-ton monster, rumbled slowly toward the back of the fort. From the conning tower waved a large white flag. There were six humans in the tank—to the casual eye. Two were the crew, one at the controls, one at the guns. Two men were high officials whom I cannot name, empowered to receive and deliver the enemy’s terms to the United States government.
The remaining two were Eve and myself. Again, as once before, we were disguised as humans. Flesh-colored plastics hid our metal bodies. Skillfully molded pseudo-features gave us the appearance of two rather stocky, poker-faced thugs. Eve was a “man” too. The disguise was a deception that might not hold up more than an hour or so.
But I wanted to get within the fort. Once within, I would see what could be done.
But there was the chance that the enemy would simply annihilate us.
“If that happens, Eve,” I murmured to her. “Farewell! Our short sojourn among humans will be over in a flash of glory, though unsung.”
“Goodbye, dearest!” she returned, against that eventuality.
The humans with us in the tank were grim, pale. Would the enemy receive us? Or would they blast us to atoms, so that there would be no excuse for not going ruthlessly on, invading the continent?
Our answer came with one swift sweep of the scythe of Death. The universe split open in a rending crash. The tank crumpled like a cracked walnut. A shell from some large-calibre gun had struck directly. A second shot exploded within, flinging the riddled bodies of six dead humans out like broken debris.
No, four dead humans.
Two of the original six flew fifty feet through the air, landing among bushes with a metallic clang. Eve and I should have been killed, too, except that after the first shell, we had leaped with snap-reflexes. We were already sailing out of the split tank when the second shell hit. Its concussion merely blew us into the bushes.
To the enemy, it must have seemed we were destroyed, too. Well they knew no human beings could survive those two direct hits. They were right. No humans could. But Eve and I, with hard metal beneath our false human disguise, were no more than shaken up by the concussion and landing on the ground.
Still, we lay stunned, hardly aware for a minute that we were alive. Dents were in the metal beneath our human clothing, from flying pieces of the shattered tank. But we lived.
I moved my mirror-eyes and saw Eve lying ten feet away, flat on her back. Her hand twitched as she was about to spring up, happy to be saved.
“Hsst!” I whispered. “Don’t move, you little fool. Let them think we’re dead humans!”
THUS we lay still. We were in full view of the fort. If we had moved the slightest, they would see it. But it was simple for us to automatically shut down our internal locomotor center. We were then “dead” from the neck down. We lay as completely inert as any corpse.
We lay that way all day, motionless.
The enemy did not come out. They let the bodies lay, to rot, as all the troops they had slaughtered lay rotting further back, The utter heartlessness and brutality of the enemy enraged me. Those Europeans must be monsters. I felt like springing up again, denouncing them in stentorian tones.
But that would be sheer folly. We must wait for night, get in the fort, and fulfill our mission. Fate had lent us a finger, so far.
Night fell, at long last. When the deepest darkness had arrived, I signalled Eve and we cautiously arose, hiding behind bushes.
No light hung outside the fort. And no light shone from any aperture or window. They had built the fort as solidly as a half-shell of steel set down squarely on the ground. Certainly it was the queerest structure we had ever seen or heard of.
I estimated its dimensions from its bulking curve against the star-filled sky. No less than a half-mile in diameter, and 2000 feet high! Colossal engineering had been required to erect it. They must have worked on it months and months. Yet Joe Trent swore it hadn’t been there a month before.
I shrugged.
“Let’s get in, Eve,” I whispered. “I want to meet these amazing humans who have done miracles in engineering and warfare both.”
Get in, but how? Sheer blankness of wall mocked us. I strode close to the structure, in shadow, and rapped on it slightly. Metal? But it gave no ring, only a dull thud. Not wood, certainly. Some kind of plastic, harder than steel? It must be harder than tungsten-steel, to withstand all the bombarding I had seen.
“With bases like these to work from, Eve,” I said, “they can easily conquer all Earth. This must be a long-range plan by the European dictators to rule the world. We must get in and spike this place some way. Anyway!”
But we stood baffled before the adamant structure.
Fate again leaned our way.
WE THREW ourselves flat as a sudden glow fell around us. Had we been spied? But then I saw the light was only a reflection bouncing down from some greater light at the dome’s peak. This light shafted like a searchlight beam straight into the sky, with an intensity that drilled through scattered clouds. It must be visible for hundreds of miles.
�
�I see,” I told Eve. “It’s a signal beacon, for their supply and reinforcement ships from across the ocean. One or more must be due to land.”
A moment later, a giant airship dropped from the sky, of an advanced design I had never seen before. A stratosphere ship, undoubtedly, with its wide wings. The enemy had certainly planned for complete control of Earth.
It dropped almost silently, as if the motors, too, were of a new design that were superbly muffled for swift, silent work. It landed, with the shortest landing run I had ever heard of, not a hundred feet from where we crouched.
At the same time, amazingly, one whole section of the dome soundlessly raised, like the flap of a tent. The ship trundled in, with scarcely a whirr of its motors.
Two robots trundled in after it, with scarcely a whirr of their motors. It was the chance we had been waiting for. We were inside!
We scurried to a corner of the dim hangar, flattening against the wall like two motionless shadows.
I congratulated myself, but too soon.
Radiance burst through the room, as some central light clicked on. The glare revealed us plainly. Half-blinded, we noticed figures stepping from the plane. They were facing us.
They could not fail to see us, against the bare wall.
Worst of all, the pitiless lare would reveal the imperfections of our human disguise. And the blasting of the tank had knocked off bits of our plastic, further exposing us. The enemy would know us instantly for robots, and probably destroy us as dangerous. Our mission was nipped in the bud!
Hopelessly, I looked around the hangar. The huge sliding door had shut fast, sealing us in. No other door was open. We were caught. Yes, we could run around, kill those here if necessary, but the rest would know then with whom they dealt. They would besiege us in this room. A fairsized gun would blow us to bits with a direct hit.
Trapped! Our only hope had been to get in, and seek hiding before we were seen. Now, with this light on, and no egress from the chamber, we were caught.