“It’s time for you to go,” rasped the red-nosed magician, “because your men are getting nervous. They imagine that we are Triplanet agents, and they’re ready to blow us up. Armstrong is watching the time, and Dodge has his rocket-launcher sighted on the tower.”
VI.
Claypool peered at his watch, and came gasping to his feet. He ran out of the dark tower room without ceremony, and stood frantically waving his hat, hoping that Armstrong and Dodge could see him through the wind-driven mist.
Behind him, Ironsmith took a more deliberate leave. He heard the easy, cheery murmur of the carefree mathematician, the hoarse alcoholic rasp of old Graystone, and White’s soft drawl. Then Dawn
Hall chuckled with pleasure, and. he heard her treble piping:
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Ironsmith. I’m awful glad you came!”
Taut with his fear that Armstrong and Dodge might fire before they could see him in the fog, Claypool peered impatiently back through the smoke-stained archway. Ash Overstreet sat motionless, somehow alarmed, staring at nothing. Little Ford was huddled over his dice. White came surging to his feet, a queerly dynamic vagabond.
“Come along!” Claypool rapped. “Before they shoot !”
But Ironsmith didn’t seem alarmed. He lingered maddeningly, to shake the trembling hand of the old magician, and murmur some farewell to White. He had turned out the pocket of his baggy slacks, to give the little girl a few coins and all his stock of chewing gum. She stood waving at him, solemn-eyed and tiny, when he came away at last.
Shuddering from a blast of the cold sea wind, Claypool turned with the younger man, and they left the tower. The gray car waiting on the mainland was dim in the fog. He kept desperately waving his hat, as they clambered hastily down the great wet stones of the broken causeway, until Ironsmith promised him easily:
“They won’t shoot.”
“How do you know?”
Grinning, Ironsmith showed him that dark bit of metal the child had brought. “The firing link, out of the launcher.” Ironsmith chuckled. “Little Dawn is pretty clever.”
They ran back along the wet narrow path, and up to the car. Claypool was breathless, and cold with sweat from something more than effort. He turned at the car, to peer back uneasily at the old round tower, high and dark in the driving fog.
“You had us worried, sir,” Dodge called in grateful relief from his launcher in the ditch beyond. “That hour was nearly up, before we ever saw you.”
In a fiat, tight voice. Claypool told him to unload the launcher and test the mechanism. He obeyed—and shouted a startled curse. The firing link was missing. His jaw dropped when Ironsmith quietly gave it to him.
“Don’t mind that now.” Claypool clung to the door of the car, shivering in the mist. “Just stow your gear, and let’s get back to Starmont. Because I think the project is going to be alerted—soon!
Claypool didn’t feel like driving. Armstrong took the wheel, and he sat with Ironsmith and the weapons behind, chilled, and stiff with fatigue, and vaguely ill from the motion of the car.
Uneasily, he studied Ironsmith.
Sprawling lazily in the seat, with his feet propped unconcernedly on the launcher tube, the young man sat watching mountain and forest with a casual interest until they dropped back to the brown monotony of the desert. Then he stretched and closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Claypool sat taut with his own apprehensions, envying the peace of the smooth-faced sleeper. Mocking uncertainty tortured him, until he had to talk. He jogged Ironsmith’s elbow, and the mathematician awoke instantly to a quiet alertness.
“I’m a physicist.” Claypool was hearse with worry. “I’m used to limiting my inquiries to phenomena that are reproducible at will, by mechanical means, under strict controls. This paraphysical stuff always upsets me.”
“I remember.” Ironsmith nodded cheerfully. “I recall a paper of yours, attacking the evidence for extrasensory action—pretty violently.”
“Just a lab report,” Claypool protested defensively. “You see, Ruth’s firm had supplied equipment for some crackpot experiment—to control the fall of dice in £ tilting frame. I felt that she was too serious about it, so I set up duplicate equipment and tried to repeat the experiment—just to show her that it was all nonsense. My results gave a curve of random distribution.”
“Which was an excellent proof of extraphysical action!” Grinning quizzically at his startled gape, Ironsmith explained: “Because any sort of extraphysical research requires a slight modification in the methods of classical physics. The experimenter is also a part of the experiment, and your negative results are a logical outcome of your negative purpose.”
Claypool stared, as if discovering a stranger. Ironsmith had never seemed much more than a convenient adjunct to the electronic calculators, serenely content with his little job. He had annoyed Claypool with his careless dress and his chewing gum and his cheerful lack of ambition. His friends were janitors and soldiers, waitresses and telephone operators. He had always showed an irritating irreverence for the established aristocracy of scholarship, and Claypool was startled into silence, now, by his unexpected cogency.
“Purpose is the key,” he went on casually. “But White has too much of the wrong sort—he is looking for weapons, instead of the truth. That’s why I think he’ll never learn enough to beat these humanoids. He hates them too hard.”
Claypool’s eyes opened wider, and narrowed again. Resentment of Ironsmith’s pleasant calm spurred him to a bitter-voiced protest:
“‘White has reasons. Pie knows these mechanicals, remember, and we don’t. I intend making a full report of his warning, to the Defense Authority. Our military forces ought to be alerted against this invasion.”
“I’d think that over, sir.” Ironsmith shook his sandy head. “Because this whole affair would seem a little odd, you realize, to anybody who wasn’t on the spot. Our own testimony wouldn’t sound very impressive to a military commission.”
His boyish face grinned brightly.
“Besides, I think these new mechanicals might turn out to be very useful. For all White said, I still can’t see any real reason to hate them, or be afraid. I really hope they come.”
That soft-voiced protest recalled the watchful doubt in Armstrong’s eves, when he first heard of the little girl’s inexplicable visit. The members of the Defense Authority might prove equally incredulous. Claypool decided to wait for better evidence.
It was twilight when the car labored up the narrow road from the desert, to the guarded fences and flood-lit buildings on the mountaintop. Claypool felt cramped and groggy with fatigue. But Ironsmith jumped lightly out when they stopped at the gate, stepped easily on his cycle, and pedaled, whistling, down the gravel path toward the computing section.
The warning came at midnight, on the tight-beam printer.
VII.
The warning was a Red Alert—which meant two missiles ready against each of the Triplanet Powers, with pilot relays set and the staff of Project Thunderbolt standing by to press the buttons and end three worlds.
A second message, five minutes later, called Claypool himself to the capital for an emergency meeting of the Defense Authority. His official plane landed in cold rain at dawn on a military field. A waiting staff car took him into a guarded tunnel. Deep in the underground sites, he came at last into a narrow room of gray concrete.
Waiting for the meeting, he sat hunched at the foot of a green-covered table, fighting a smothering claustrophobia. He hadn’t been able to sleep on the plane, tossed with nocturnal thunderstorms along an occluded front, and the flight lunch he had shared with the crew felt heavy on his stomach. He needed a bath, and a dose of bicarbonate.
Clammy in his travel-wrinkled clothing, he sat longing for the dry warmth of Starmont, and trying not to think of anything else. The air blast from a droning fan numbed him with the chilly damp of underground spaces, and a faint reek of drying paint sharpened his dull illness.
He bli
nked and started when he saw Mason Horn. The secret agent came into that long gray room, between two armed lieutenants of the Security Police. Claypool rose eagerly and called out his greeting, but Horn made only a stiff little nod and one of the lieutenants beckoned Claypool to keep away. They stood watchfully apart, at the end of the room.
Horn carried a small brown leather case, chained to his left wrist. Claypool sank back into his chair, staring at that case with a kind of terror. He had tried to doubt White’s warning, to question Overstreet’s clairvoyant prophecy. But now, he knew what that case must contain, and the knowledge was something close to madness.
One of the lieutenants saw him staring, and frowned at him sharply. He started again, and shifted his gaze, and tried to wipe the sticky moisture out of his palms. The midnight lunch began to burn his stomach, and he shuddered from the penetrating damp.
The high military and government leaders who formed the Defense Authority came in at last, surrounded with hushed, nervous little groups of their satellites. They took places at the long green table, and waited anxiously. The very silence felt heavy to Claypool, oppressive as the quarter mile of rock above.
The aged world president called out quavering greetings to a few of his cronies, and shuffled stiffly to his big chair at the head of the table. Stooped and trembling under his years and his burdens, he leaned on the arms of his solicitous military aide, one Major Steel.
This Steel was remarkably slight, even smaller than Claypool, dapper and crisply immaculate. When the president was seated, the little major came to rigid attention at his elbow, staring fixedly down the green table with sharp, unblinking eyes.
Claypool peered back uneasily, deeply troubled by the failing vigor of the president and his obvious dependence on the little officer. He recalled rumors of Steel’s phenomenal memory and efficiency, but he had never liked the little aide. Steel, he felt, had gained an undue influence, which might be dangerous in this desperate crisis.
“Gentlemen, I’ve bad news for you.”
The president’s voice faltered thinly, and his emaciated face was lax and gray. He called feebly for the report of Mason Horn.
The special agent left the two lieutenants, and stepped up briskly to the table. With thinning yellowish hair and a fat, red face, he looked more like a shoe salesman than an interplanetary spy. He unlocked the light chain, opened the brown case, and silently displayed a polished metal object the size of an egg.
“This is what I brought back.” His abrupt voice had a dry nasal tone. “It came from a Triplanet arsenal in Sector Vermillion. The president has instructed me not to reveal the technical specifications of this device. I’m just to tell you what it can do.”
The men around that long, bright-lit table, all of them withered with years and tight-faced with anxiety, leaned silently to watch. Horn’s plump careful fingers-unscrewed the flattened egg into two parts, and set them on the table. Cold light glinted from tiny screws and graduated scales.
“Huh!” The chief of staff made a kind of sniff. “Is that all?” Horn gave him a brief, amiable smile.
“Actually, sir, the device is only a fuse. The charge is formed by any matter which happens to be near. This little screw sets the radius of detonation—anything from zero to twelve yards. The shielded tests they made three years ago in Sector Vermillion showed that the mass-energy conversion is ninety-seven per cent complete.” His flat voice stopped abruptly, and an appalled silence filled that buried room. Men stared with a sick, slack-jawed fascination at the device on the table. The muted drone of the ventilator fan became a roaring, and that thin paint odor brought Claypool a mounting surge of illness.
His mind was busy converting cubic yards of rock to tons, and tons of mass to the energy equivalent. The answer staggered him. He tried to tell himself that Project Thunderbolt was still a better weapon. Yet he knew that no mass weapon was better than another. For they were absolute. Any at all was good enough.
“One of these could finish us.” With a fumbling care, Mason Horn began screwing the two small sections back together. “They can be placed in advance, and detonated by remote control, by a time fuse, or even by the penetrating radiation from a mass explosion on another planet.”
He paused, carefully locking the chain again.
“The Triplanet Powers have now had almost three years to plant these where they want them,” he added abruptly. “They may have been dropped into our seas, or sawed across the polar caps, or perhaps even smuggled into this site. No defense is possible.”
“I don’t see that.” The chief of staff cleared his throat, with a kind of bark. “They must know by now that you got away with this, and they will expect us to duplicate it. It follows that they must fear retaliation in kind. They will scarcely dare to strike—not since we know.”
“I’m afraid that fear will rather increase our danger, sir,” Horn protested flatly. “Because absolute weapons have their own explosive psychology, and I think the Triplanet Powers must now be near national hysteria. I think we should be prepared to die at any instant, sir.”
And Horn stood silent, mopping apologetically at his plump red face. Scowling, the chief of staff sat down. These brash young men, with their unbelievable weapons and their cocky pronouncements, had destroyed all his pleasure in the ancient calling of war.
Claypool wiped his palms again. He saw the mute query on the bleak gray face of the defense minister, and he shook his head. Project Thunderbolt was ready, alerted. The war heads of those long, selfguided missiles had a forty-yard detonation radius. Once they were launched, nothing could save the enemy planets. But those same blasts would also trigger enemy detonators, planted here. Claypool wrestled with that nightmare dilemma, and found no answer.
He saw the old president turn anxiously to his aide, with some question in his watery eyes. Little Major Steel nodded briskly, and helped him to his feet. Clutching the edge of the green table with trembling yellow hands, he cleared his throat uncertainly.
“An unpleasant situation, gentlemen,” he quavered laboriously. “It first appeared to offer us only the hard choice of war without hope, or peace without freedom. However—”
He paused gasping, and gulped the water the little major held for him.
“Major Steel, however, has revealed a third alternative—”
That phrase took Claypool’s breath. He remembered a pale tattered man, squatting by a smoky fire and peering through thick lenses with a queer alertness. Something drummed in his ears, and the old president’s high voice seemed far away.
“—revelation came as quite a shock to me, as you will understand.” The president nodded his drawn, cadaverous head at the dapper little aide. “But I believe we can accept Major Steel’s advice without question, because he has been my efficient right hand for twenty years.”
He coughed, leaning weakly on the table, and the brisk little officer held the glass for him to drink again.
“Major Steel offers us escape from both destruction and escape.” The old man beamed gratefully at the dapper little major. “Now I’m going to let him state the amazing facts, with only this one word of warning—he is not a human being.”
Claypool knew that he should not have been surprised. White had tried to prepare him for this, and he had always mistrusted the superhuman energy and competence of the president’s aide. Yet now, as he stared down the green table, something made him shudder. Something drew his breath away, and lifted fear-pimples on his skin.
“At your service, gentlemen.” The human vocal quality was suddenly gone from Steel’s voice, and it became a mellow silver drone. “Just a moment, if you please—because the need for this disguise has passed.”
And he slipped out of his crisp uniform. He snapped contact lenses oat of his eyes. He ripped at what had been his skin, and began peeling flesh-colored plastic from his limbs and his body in long spiral strips.
A chair fell, with a shocking crash. Claypool heard gasps of breath-taken wonder. He saw faces tur
ning stiff and gray with something close to horror. That thin paint-reek brought him another wave of nausea. Yet there was nothing horrible about the thing which emerged from that discarded human mask.
Rather, it was beautiful.
The shape of it was nearly human, but very slim and graceful. Half a head shorter than Claypool, it was nude now, and sexless. The sleek skin of it was a shining black, sheened with changing lights of bronze and blue. A yellow brand gleamed on its breast:
HUMANOID
Serial No. M8-B3-ZZ
“To Serve and Obey,
And Guard Men from Harm.”
For a moment, beside the president’s big chair, it stood quite still. Now its eyes were blank orbs of polished steel, and its high-cheeked face was fixed in a look of dark benignity. After the flashing felicity of its action, that stark immobility was somehow eerie. Rigid and blind, it yet seemed taut with alertness.
Its golden voice throbbed musically:
“Your present alarm is needless, gentlemen, because we never injure any man. The identity of Major Steel was created for your own benefit. It was necessary for us to observe the technological crisis developing here, so that our services might be offered in time.”
The defense minister had risen, still gasping.
“Mr. President!” he protested shakily. “I fail to understand this strange display. But I must remind you that our party is pledged to uphold the antimechanicals laws, to protect the working classes.”
The president merely nodded, and the machine replied:
“We bring no want or suffering to laboring men. On the contrary, our only function is to promote human happiness in every manner possible. Once established, our services will remove all class distinctions, along with war and poverty and toil and pain and crime.”
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 11