The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  He stared into the niche, trying to feign a casual interest in those tortured demons of black stone, sleeping. He tried to keep his face relaxed, tried to slow his noisy breathing, desperately tried to drive his mind to useful planning.

  He saw that he must have help. Alone, there was little hope that he could reach the vault. He must have aid to plan some ruse, to shake off his keepers and stand them off until he could press a firing key. But who was left to help him?

  Urgent questions burned in his brain, but he dared not ask them now—for the machine might read his desperate intent. He mopped his palms, and drew a longer breath, and carefully studied those dark shapes of twisted stone.

  “Interesting view,” he commented blankly.

  “That is a world to which we came too late,” whined the small machine. “Intelligence arose there half a million years ago, liberated energies which it failed to control, and so destroyed itself. Those dark pinnacles are the ruins of a city, whose builders died for want of the Prime Directive.”

  “That so?”

  Claypool looked again, and now he could see the shape of fused and blackened walls, the bulk of crumbled towers. He tried in vain to imagine that vanished magnificence, before it was burned and shattered into dark desolation.

  But that lost race had been lucky, he thought. For the unknown builders at least were cleanly dead—which was a good deal better, he felt bitterly, than being buried alive under the smothering burden of the Prime Directive.

  He stood gazing past those tumbled, monstrous ruins, toward a dusty red horizon, seeing nothing. His eyes had narrowed with frantic speculation. He had to reach the old search building, and that hidden vault—and one false step might betray the last hope of man.

  “I think I’ll take a walk.” He turned from the niche, carefully casual. “Just to look at all these improvements.”

  “We are at your service, sir.”

  “I don’t want any service.”

  “But you must be accompanied, sir. Because our function is to guard you from every harm, at every instant.”

  Claypool sidled away again. Cold illness tightened his stomach, and that bitter odor of the walls, touched with Ruth’s perfume, caught his throat so “that he could scarcely breathe. But he fought the terror in him, the mad urge to open flight or open battle—for they were the ways to oblivion.

  “You appear uneasy, sir,” purred the attentive machine. “Do you feel unwell?”

  “No!” Struck with instant panic, he halted his slow retreat. “A little tired, perhaps. I only need to rest. I suppose there’s a room for me?”

  “Certainly, sir. In the east wing. This way, please.”

  He followed the gliding machine. Some unseen relay opened another sliding panel, to let them into a huge, high chamber. Shining murals showed dancing sun-browned figures of lean young men and flower-decked girls, and the little humanoid explained:

  “Those are scenes of a village spring festival, in the barbaric age when the first colonists here had almost forgotten their civilization. Your wife helped us plan the building, before she took euphoride, and she selected the paintings for us to copy. She thought you would like them.”

  They were very nice, he stammered. The mention of Ruth filled his eyes with tears of angry pain, but he dared not show any such dangerous emotion. He blew his nose, and sat down wearily on an enormous easy-chair to whet the blade of his hatred.

  “Where’s all the staff?”

  Trying to seem at ease, he took a cigar out of the engraved pocket case Ruth had given him on his last birthday, clipped the end with the tiny blade in the cover, and snapped the built-in lighter.

  “I’d like to see—Now what’s this?”

  Astonishment sharpened his voice, for the small machine had snatched the cigar from his lips. It took the case, put out the light, and laid it on a little stand beyond his reach. He started up angrily, but the humanoid planted itself serenely before the stand.

  “Sir, we cannot allow you to smoke.” Its golden voice was honey-sweet. “Fire is far too dangerous in your hands, and the excessive use of tobacco has become injurious to your health.”

  He subsided bitterly, trying to swallow his fury. One cigar wasn’t worth a scene—or the risk of oblivion. And those long missiles waiting in the vault, he told himself grimly, were a good deal more dangerous than fire.

  “Perhaps I have been smoking too much,” he admitted uneasily. “But I was asking about my old associates here—where are they?”

  “The astronomers and their families all left Starmont when we closed the observatory. We have built new dwellings for them, wherever they chose to go.”

  “And the civilian technicians?” He tried to seem calm, but fear had dried his throat. “The six young men at the old search project what happened to them?”

  The machine stared blindly, eternally kind.

  “They appeared unhappy about leaving the project, and it was necessary for all of them to take euphoride. Now they have all forgotten the project, and they appear quite happy.”

  I see.” Claypool nodded bleakly. “So all the Starmont staff is goner”

  “Except one man, sir?”

  “Eh?” He sat up straight. Who is that?”

  One Mr. Ironsmith, sir.” whined the tiny machine. “He says he is quite happy here, and there was no reason for him to leave.”

  Claypool felt a pang of puzzled disquiet.

  “Young Ironsmith, eh?” The indolent young man in the computing section was not the ally he would have chosen, but he manufactured a feeble grin. “A good friend of mine. A charming fellow, and a brilliant mathematician!” He peered hopefully at the dark machine. “I’d like to see him, right away.”

  Surprisingly, the mechanical made no objection.

  “If you wish, sir.”

  It opened the door again. Another identical machine came silently to join them in the hall. Gliding alertly at his elbows, they escorted him out of the villa, and along a covered walk through the newly landscaped grounds.

  Everything seemed too precise. The lawns were all too level and neatly rectangular, the walks too painfully straight. Even the tail evergreens had been uprooted and replaced in stiff, forbidding rows.

  Oddly, however, the irregular grove about the computing section had not been disturbed. The grassy hillock had not been leveled. Sheltered among the trees, the old build-in with its common wooden walls and familiar bright red shingles seemed queerly untouched.

  And then he saw a stranger thing.

  Ironsmith came pedaling his cycle down the curving gravel path to meet them. That in itself was unaccountable—for a bicycle, as Claypool recalled from his own youth, can scratch and bruise its rider. But Ironsmith rode alone, with no mechanical to guard him.

  More disturbing still, he was smoking that underslung briar. He rode with no hands on the handlebars—in shocking defiance of the Prime Directive—holding a lighter to the pipe. Claypool’s two blind keepers must have been aware of the act, but they uttered no protest.

  The cruel unfairness of that tilled Claypool with a stunned resentment. He couldn’t understand such discrimination, but he tried to stifle his envy. For here, apparently, was one free man—free to push that button in the vault.

  “Glad to see you home, Claypool.”

  That hail of welcome had a warm genial ring. Grinning happily, Ironsmith braked the cycle to a perilous stop, alighted safely, and gave him a strong brown hand—too strong, it came to him abruptly.

  He dropped the hand, and staggered back from the boyish-seeming mathematician, speechless with a shock of horror. He tried hard to school himself, but his stomach fluttered and his knees turned weak and clammy sweat burst out on his v face. He knew that he would never dare ask for Ironsmith’s help.

  That warm handclasp had seemed too strong, and logic had struck him a cruel foul blow. If men were not allowed to go about alone, or to handle fire, or to use any dangerous machines, then the conclusions was terribly clear—Ironsmit
h was not a man.

  Shivering, he remembered little Major Steel.

  XI.

  Claypool cowered back from that careless youthful figure, leaning so idly on the cycle. A clammy stiffness grasped him, and his stomach writhed and knotted. Dark fear surged against the chains of his control.

  “Why—Claypool!” Ironsmith’s pink and boyish face showed a friendly, shocked concern. His hushed voice seemed startled, and altogether human. “Are you ill?” He reached out an anxious hand, and Claypool shrank from it, shuddering. Yet it appeared human enough. The fair skin showed a convincing pattern of pink sunburn and freckle and tan. The fine hairs looked bleached with sun.

  The nails needed trimming, and shock of that scene at the capital struck him cold again, when little Major Steel had stunned the leaders of the nation by snapping out his contact lenses and peeling off his plastic human cloak.

  An X ray might have solved the problem instantly, but Claypool was a guarded prisoner how, forbidden all such dangerous equipment. And that mechanical brain on far Wing IV had already proved its complete alertness and efficiency. Little Major Steel had never been suspected.

  Claypool could see no answer, and the enormity, of the problem staggered him. For the colorless hack in the computing section had been trusted to develop all the mathematical theory behind Project Thunderbolt itself. If Ironsmith were indeed a machine—

  A sick numbness seized him, for everything fitted too well. The ruthless machine inside this plausible and pleasant-seeming mask must have come to spy on Starmont. Even the names had a frightening likeness now—Ironsmith and Steel!

  A shuddering weakness came up through his legs, and he clutched for support at the rusty frame of Ironsmith’s bicycle—for Project Thunderbolt, he thought, must have been betrayed. And Ironsmith, he remembered, had been with him at Dragonrock, and learned the plans of White. For an instant he trembled to his sick dread of that vast efficient brain on Wing IV—and then he saw the contradiction in his logic.

  He saw that Ironsmith couldn’t be a mechanical.

  That knowledge warmed him with relief, and oddly it drained the little strength left in his knees. He clung weakly to the battered cycle, beaming at Ironsmith’s pink, astonished face with a fatuous joy.

  “I’m so glad!” he gasped. “For a moment, there, I was afraid—”

  He checked himself sharply. For the two genuine mechanicals remained at his elbows, black and alert and forever benign. He dared not say what he had feared. But his shaken brain held on to the comforting fact—Ironsmith had to be a man.

  No test of his own invention could have proved it. He could scarcely have hoped to win any game of wits, against that swift and infallible thinking machine on Wing IV But he remembered that Ironsmith had been with him at Dragonrock.

  That dispelled his terrors. White and his disciples, with their paraphysical perceptions, could distinguish disguised mechanicals. Yet they had asked Ironsmith to Dragonrock, and talked of their plans against Wing IV. That seemed proof enough of Ironsmith’s humanity.

  Claypool’s relief came out, in weak thin laughter.

  “I was afraid,” he whispered again. “For a moment I thought they had given you euphoride.” He managed to swallow his mirthless laughter. “I’m glad to see you still remember.”

  Strength came back to his wobbling knees, and he let go the bicycle frame.

  “And I’m all right.” He mopped hastily at the sweat on his face, hoping that the blind, impassive humanoid’s wouldn’t perceive the quivering of his hands. “Just a little nervous and upset. I’ve been working pretty hard, you see, and Starmont seems so different.” Trying not to shiver, he glanced back at the crown of the mountain, where once had stood the proud high dome of his old observatory. He looked quickly away from the blue roofs and splendid amber columns of the new villa there.

  “I’m going to be all right,” he insisted desperately. “I’m just a little tired, and I need to get adjusted. I’m just a little nervous. They gave that drug to Ruth, you know.” He couldn’t keep a tiny shudder from his voice. “And she almost didn’t know me.”

  The lean young mathematician was deliberately knocking the bowl of his pipe against the bicycle frame. His open face grinned at Claypool, brightly amiable. Claypool smiled feebly back, desperately glad that the other was indeed a man.

  “No, you’ve nothing at all to worry about,” Ironsmith agreed cheerily. “The humanoids are taking care of everything. All you have to do is rest. Just relax, and let them make you happy.”

  He seemed to feel no dread, himself, of euphoride.

  “It’s good to see you back at Starmont,” he went on genially. “The hill seems pretty lonely now, with the staff all gone. Won’t you come on to my rooms, and tell me how you like these new machines?” Claypool was still afraid to say how much he didn’t like the humanoids, but he accepted eagerly. For that dark moment of unutterable suspicion had left him feeling terribly alone. Now he had a desperate thirst for human company.

  “Please,” he whispered nervously. “I . . . I want to talk to you.”

  A feeble spark of hope had lit again, in the black confusion of his mind. Alone, he could see no possible way to elude the humanoids and reach that firing button in the vault. But Ironsmith was free! “Come right along.”

  They walked up the path toward the old red-shingled building among the evergreens, Ironsmith pushing his cycle. Claypool was bitterly aware of the two mechanicals that kept at his heels. Sharply he watched the youthful man ahead, still warmly grateful for his lank humanity, yet aware of a mounting envy.

  And Claypool wondered.

  They came to the door. With a rising chagrin and discontent, Claypool saw that it still had the old’ brass knob, made for a man to work. Ironsmith leaned the cycle against the wall, and showed him in. He paused in the doorway, staring around him with a bitter bewilderment.

  For the old, book-lined room was a comfortable oasis of casual human disorder, in the midst of all this sterile desert of ordered shining newness the humanoids had brought. The ancient, shabby pieces of man-made furniture needed dusting. Tobacco crumbs were spilled on the floor. At the big desk, a slide rule lay across an untidy clutter of papers, as if Ironsmith had been at work.

  But work, he thought, was outlawed now.

  “Have a cigar?” Ironsmith opened a new silver humidor. “You know I could never afford to smoke them before, but now the humanoids bring me all I want. I think these are pretty good.”

  Claypool glanced resentfully at the two small machines, following always close behind him.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, “but they won’t let me smoke.”

  “Too bad—but they know best.”

  Apologetically, Ironsmith closed the humidor, but the mellow fragrance from it had filled Claypool with a hungry craving. He sat down stiffly, and the two humanoids came soundlessly to stand behind his chair.

  He wanted desperately to beg Ironsmith’s aid, to help him smash Wing IV and set men free of this smothering dominion. But he couldn’t speak of that. He didn’t quite dare even to ask the secret of Ironsmith’s apparent special freedom. Nodding at the cluttered desk, he began indirectly:

  “Are you still working?”

  Lazily, the younger man sprawled his awkward-seeming length into a big worn chair, beside a small table where chessmen were set up in an unfinished game.

  “Not really working.” His smooth face smiled pleasantly. “Just playing around with a few ideas, that I never had time for before. The humanoids do all the routine math—though they let me keep the old machines in the computing section, for work I want to do myself.”

  “How do you manage that?” Claypool gulped at a bitter lump of jealousy. “They tell me that research is too dangerous, and useful work no longer necessary.”

  “But thinking isn’t outlawed,” Ironsmith murmured gravely. “And I believe men need to think.” He picked up the queen of the black chessmen, absently. “In the old world, we had no time. We
were all too busy running machines—until better machines set us free.”

  “Free?” Claypool blinked bitterly at the sleek mechanicals behind him. “Free for what?” Ironsmith regarded the black queen, soberly.

  “To live, I believe,” he said softly. “Take my own experience. I used to be a kind of human calculating machine. Now I have time to look for the real meaning of mathematics. I have time to follow ideas—”

  His gray honest eyes were looking far beyond the black queen, and his low voice trailed away. Claypool watched him sharply, wondering, until suddenly he sat up and replaced the queen on the board.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve another engagement now.” Ironsmith adjusted two or three pieces, in the unfinished game, and then looked up with a sympathetic smile. “But I’m sure you’ll be all right, Claypool. Just trust the Remember their Prime Directive—To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm. They can’t hurt anybody.”

  Rising reluctantly, Claypool. shrank away from the two silent things behind him.

  “It’s just that drug.” Shuddering dread broke harshly into his voice. “I can’t stand the thought of that. It’s—murder!” He gulped convulsively. “That’s what it is—murder of the mind!”

  “You’re overwrought.” Ironsmith shook his sandy head, with a cheery calm assurance. “Really, for those who fail to find their happiness in any other way, I think euphoride is a very fortunate solution.”

  Claypool stood shivering, speechless.

  “But you can avoid it, if you like,” Ironsmith told him gravely. “All you have to do is accept the humanoids, and build yourself a new way of life that fits the Prime Directive. They have had to close the physical frontiers, I know, but you can find a wider field of research still open, in the mind.”

  Claypool merely stared, bewildered.

  “I’ve an appointment, now.” Ironsmith glanced down at the waiting chessmen. “But I’d like to help you get adjusted to the humanoids—really, they’ve opened a whole new world to science. I want to help you like them. Suppose we meet again, for dinner?”