“Huh!” He caught his breath. “Did Ironsmith’s grid—?”
Then he remembered the long gash in his scalp, and he reached up to examine it. His fingers found no wound or scar, and the hair felt oddly thick. That slow, thudding pain, he realized, was gone from his head. In fact, he felt uncommonly well.
Curiously, he fingered his face. That caked stiffness of drying blood was gone, and the bristles of unshaven beard. He wanted a mirror, and his glance went automatically to a row of buttons beside that immense amber window. He selected one, not knowing why, and punched it.
The amber light went out. The window became a mirror. He goggled at a dark stranger. For the man in the mirror was taller and younger than he had been, not quite so skinny, lean and straight and fit. The deep furrows of worry were all smoothed away, as well as the petulant twist of the lips.
And those durable gray pajamas with the impregnable rhodomagnetic snaps were gone at last. The stranger in the mirror wore a neat blue suit, with a narrow conservative stripe and buttons that his own fingers could work. Claypool grinned with relief, and the tall stranger smiled back pleasantly.
But Ruth didn’t like blue for him—
He remembered, then, with a stab of pain, that she was lost to him. A sudden sick loneliness cut through him, but the dark-haired stranger in the mirror looked gravely cheerful still, and the straight shoulders made a quiet little shrug of calm acceptance.
Then he found the plaque, hung beside the mirror on the glowing wall. A thin rectangular block of some black crystal, polished sleek and golden-veined. Across the face of it was a green-lettered message—Ruth had always used green ink, and he knew her rapid printing:
Dear Webb,
Congratulations, on this Awakening Day. We’re all three truly glad you’re well again, and we rejoice in the new felicity which you should discover now.
The Frank Ironsmiths
Felicity—that was a pet word of Ruth’s. The plaque had a slight, clean hint of Sweet Delirium. He read the message twice, and then a sudden stinging in his eyes blurred her neat green lettering.
With a painful throbbing in his throat, he found the round stud inset in the base of the plaque, and pressed it. The printing dissolved: The darkness of the crystal brightened, and the golden veinings faded.
The plaque became a window.
Beyond it, he saw a simple gay pavilion, which must have been erected by telurgy, standing on a happy landscape. The flowering trees about it were all violet flame, and light danced on far blue water, and soft green hills were topped with the silver towers of the Institute.
Frank Ironsmith and Ruth came out of that bright building, followed by a little yellow-haired girl. Ironsmith grinned at him warmly, and Ruth waved a white lace handkerchief. They hurried toward him off the picture, holding the hands of the slender child between them.
Ironsmith looked a little heavier, he thought, pink with health and calmly self-content, His smooth, sun-browned jaws moved a little, and Claypool thought he must be chewing gum. Ruth was straight and radiant, her dark hair lustrous with red lights.
They paused, in the picture. Beaming rather fatuously, he thought, Ironsmith took up the little girl. Ruth reached out to caress the yellow curls, and Claypool saw her fond and happy pride. She had never looked quite so young, lie thought, not even on their own wedding day at Starmont, never so light and Lair and gay.
The round stud clicked softly back again, and that tiny window closed itself. The polished crystal darkened, and the golden veinings knitted back. The green lettering was still erased, but that faint sweetness of Ruth’s perfume lingered heavy in the air, a somber ghost of sorrow.
That stale sweetness seemed suddenly stifling in the room. His fingers went back, automatically, to the row of buttons beside the mirror. He glimpsed himself again, a tall brown stranger, and then the mirror became a crystal window.
He punched another button, and that clear panel dropped. A fresh morning breeze cooled his face.
Ruth’s lingering thin perfume went out with the wind, and that ghost of old sadness with it. He inhaled clean air, and felt that he was free.
He turned to the window, and gaped again.
Far away, beyond the red expanse of the landing stage and below the uneven edge of the mountain’s crown, he saw the rolling vastness of the desert he had known—but now no longer a tawny desolation.
For now new lakes glinted blue in the valleys, above giant dams the humanoids must have built, and scattered villas made gay islets of bright roof-color in a new sea of tender green, and now a somber green of new-grown forest clad the higher summits, which had been bleak and bare.
Dark forests, grown since he was here!
“That grid!” he breathed. “How long?”
He was turning to call back that oddly obedient machine to answer his baffled questions, when he caught a shimmer of moving color against the sky. A little rhodomagnetic cruiser dropped silently, the oval mirror of its hull aglow with blue and green reflections and the red of the landing stage. It touched gently, and a black mechanical sprang down to help a girl alight.
He stood at the window, watching that girl, and something caught his breath. He didn’t know her, and yet something set a haunting wonder in him. Something made his pulse beat faster, and he forgot that vanished ghost of yesterday.
The girl left the humanoid waiting by the cruiser. She came obliquely across the stage, walking with a long, free, confident stride. She was tall, and splendid to him. Her flowing dress was clinging silver, scarlet-belted, and she wore a scarlet flower in her black, shining hair.
He didn’t know her name, and yet the swinging way she walked awoke a haunting recognition. He must have seen her eyes before, long and limpidly dark. And the flower in her hair, a gay badge of courage, was somehow like a tattered scrap of scarlet ribbon.
She saw him at the window. Her half-remembered face—thin-lipped and narrow, sensitive and strong, with high cheekbones—turned lovely with a smile he must have known, somewhere. She paused on the red stage, and called to him in a rich clear voice that he must have heard before.
“Hi, Webb!”
He didn’t know her name, and yet that baffled recognition took hold of him. The tall stranger he had seen in the mirror waved back to her, and leaped over the low window ledge with a young man’s effortless ease, and ran smiling eagerly to meet her. She gave him her hand, and her grasp was strong and glad.
“Do you feel all right?” But she didn’t wait for him to say. “I felt you were ready to come back,” she said happily. “So I asked Mr. White, and he told me this would be your Awakening Day. And he told me to come and welcome you—or at least he said I might.”
She saw his breathless uncertainty.
“What’s the trouble, dear?” Her laughing voice held gentle malice. “Don’t you remember me?”
He stared into her dark shining eyes.
“Dawn!” he whispered unbelievingly. “Could it be?”
“Perhaps I’ve changed a little, since you remember me.” She straightened and posed in the clinging silver and turned herself before him, tall and gay and proud, laughing at him. “How do you like it now?”
He liked her more than he could understand, but he only nodded blankly, thinking of those dark forests grown on mountains that had been cragged and barren.
“How long has it been?” he whispered faintly. “How many years?”
“This is the fiftieth Awakening Day.”
A cold wind blew on his spine.
“Awakening Day comes every year,” she said, “when those who are ready are released from the grid. A great holiday. Mr. White wanted me to stay for the celebration at the Institute tonight. He has been back for thirty years, you know. Now he’s a research man, working with Mr. Ironsmith.”
Still Claypool couldn’t speak.
“But I wouldn’t stay,” she said, “because I knew you’d be back, and I wanted to be here. Sometimes it is a little difficult and confusing, at f
irst. I came back, at Dragonrock, on the last Awakening Day, and I remember being lonely.”
He blinked at her shining loveliness, trying to understand.
“Mr. White and Mr. Ironsmith are always so busy, you see, with this new research. And our other old friends are still under the grid—Mr. White says that Mr. Graystone and Mr. Lucky should be ready in a few Awakening Days, but I’m afraid it will be a long time before poor Mr. Overstreet is out.”
Her dark head tilted, and she smiled again.
“So I’ve been waiting for you, darling, alone at Dragonrock.”
Floundering in his stunned confusion, Claypool groped for her warm hand, and let her laughing strength draw him back to sanity. He swallowed hard, and found his voice.
“Fifty years!” he whispered. “Then I’m—ninety!”
“And I am sixty,” came her soft girl’s voice. “The grid works slowly—Mr. White and Mr. Ironsmith are working now to speed up the processes. But it has healed our bodies and our minds, and it can make us young again.”
Her limpid eyes turned thoughtful.
“Darling, isn’t it strange we were so awfully wrong? And too bad we ever fought Mr. Ironsmith?”
He looked over her shoulder, at the computing section where Ironsmith used to work. The old evergreens clumped about it were taller, now, and the little red-roofed building sagged with age. Against the white-painted wall, where Ironsmith used to lean his bicycle, stood a tall memorial tablet.
Claypool nodded dazedly.
“I guess we were all of us sick and blundering and mistaken,” he said slowly. “I guess Ironsmith is a shining genius and a great hero—but still I don’t like that habit of chewing gum.”
The tall girl laughed throatily. “Darling, I’m glad you’re still you. ‘Cause I’ve been waiting for you.” Somehow, then, in her rich husky voice, he could hear a child’s clear treble, “You see, Webb, I’ve been in love with you ever since the day you carried me in your arms, and ran from that digging machine. ’Member?”
Claypool remembered. The tall youthful stranger of the mirror heard the music of her voice, and caught her hand again. He wanted flowers to give her, and swift telurgy shaped red and thornless roses from the air.
But he remembered those fifty years again, and the shock of them checked that stranger’s smiling confidence. The telurgic roses in his hand somehow had the musky odor of Sweet Delirium, and they recalled that ghost of sadness he had tried to banish.
Dawn took the flowers from his numbed hand, laughing.
“It’s no use, your fighting, dear.” Her voice had a faintly malicious bite. “And no use to dream of Ruth. ’Cause I came to see you here, right after my Awakening Day. I liked you, and I told Mr. White I wanted you, and he fixed it for me in the grid. He says you simply can’t hate me now.”
THE END.
THE HUMANOID TOUCH
The Humanoid Touch
Publication Information
Original Cover
Teaser
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
RETURN TO MAIN CONTENTS
This numbered (500 copies), limited edition was first published in October 1980 by Phantasia Press.
The humanoid—man’s ultimate mechanical triumph and perfect servant, so flawlessly effective and self-regenerative as to stifle mankind into impotence and eventual enslavement —was the invention of Jack Williamson in one of the finest science fiction novels of all times, The Humanoids.
Now, more than thirty years later, Williamson writes again of that ultra-mechanical race, this time pursuing a fugitive remnant of humans to the galactic outpost of Kai, one of two planets in the binary sun system of Cat and Dragon. Keth Kyrone, son of the one member of Kai’s ruling body who still believes in the menace of the humanoids, grows up in the shadow of that menace and inadvertently comes upon the secret force that could constitute man’s only hope of defeating the machines. As the humanoids arrive and begin to take over, manipulating mankind’s very belief in their presence, Keth undertakes the mission, sometimes alone and sometimes in concert with his discredited father, to awaken his race to what is happening to them.
Wonderfully imaginative and consistently fast-paced, The Humanoid Touch represents a marvelous return for Jack Williamson to his classic subject and one of the great touchstones of science fiction: the final confrontation of man and machine. It is a new peak for a masterful storyteller.
FOR FRED POHL
1
Humanoids Self-directed robots invented to serve and guard mankind.
Keth loved the suntimes. Thirty days of light and freedom, while the kind sun climbed and paused and sank. He loved the clean smell and cool feel of the wind and the sky’s blazing wonder. In the first sharp days before the thaw, there was ice for skates and snow for sleds, but he loved the warmer days more. The excitement of green things shooting up, sunbuds exploding into rich-scented bloom, great golden-sweet melons ripe at last. Best of all, he loved the Sunset festival, with the leaves burning red, and gifts and games, and all he wanted to eat.
The moontimes were not so nice, because the ice storms after Sunset drove everybody back underground. Thirty days in the narrow tunnel places, where he was always cold and just a little hungry, with lessons to learn and no fun but the gym. He hated the dark and the cold and the black humanoids.
“Demon machines!”
Nurse Vesh used them to frighten him when he was slow to mind her. She was a tall, skinny woman with a frowny face and cold, bony hands. Her husband was dead on Malili, where Keth was born, and she blamed the humanoids.
“Bright black machines, shaped like men.” Her voice was hushed and ugly when she spoke about them. “Sometimes they pretend to be men. They can see in the dark and they never sleep. They’re watching and waiting, up there on the moon. They’ll get you, Keth, if you dare disobey me.”
She made him fear the moontimes, when Malili either stood alone or sometimes hung beside the red-blazing Dragon, never moving in the cold, black sky. He could feel the cruel minds of the humanoids always fixed upon him, even through the rock and snow above the tunnels. Sometimes in bed he woke sweating and sick from a dream in which they had come down to punish him.
Sometimes he lay awake, wishing for a safer place to hide, or even for a way to stop them. Men must have made them, if they were machines, though he couldn’t guess why. Perhaps when he was old enough he could build machines strong enough to fight them.
“They’ll never get me,” he boasted once. “I’ll find a way to beat them.”
“Shhh!” Her pale eyes mocked him. “Nobody stops the humanoids. Ten trillion machines swarming everywhere but here! They know everything. They can do anything.” She chilled him with her bitter, thin-lipped smile. “They’ll get you, Keth, if you don’t mind me, just like they got your poor, dear mother.”
He couldn’t remember his mother or Malili or anything before Nurse Vesh had come with his father back from Malili to keep him clean and dole out his quotas and make him mind.
“What did they do—” The look on her face dried up his whisper, and he had to get his breath. “What did they do to my mother?”
“She went looking for a braintree.” Nurse Vesh didn’t say
what a braintree was. “Outside the perimeter. Into jungles full of humanoids and dragon bats and heathen nomads. Never got back. You might ask”—her voice went brittle and high—“ask your father!”
He was afraid to ask his father anything.
“On Malili?” He shook his head, wishing he dared. “Where we came from?”
“And where my Jendre died.” Her Jendre had been with his father on Malili. She wore a thin silver bracelet with his name on it. Keth had always wondered how the humanoids killed him, but he couldn’t ask her because she cried whenever she remembered him. “Ask your father how.” Her voice began to break, and her white face twitched. “Ask where he got that scar!”
He wanted to ask why anybody ever went to Malili. It looked too far and cold for people. He thought it might be better just to ten the humanoids keep it, but he didn’t say so now because Nurse Vesh had stopped looking at him. She was leaning with her face against the wall, her lean body shaking. He tiptoed away, feeling sorry for her.
His father was Crewman Ryn Kyrone. A tall, brown man who stood very straight in his black uniform and worked in a hidden back room where Keth couldn’t go. The steel door stayed shut, with a quick little red-blinking light to remind his father when it wasn’t locked.
Sometimes his father slept in the room and brought Nurse Vesh quota points for his breakfast, but he was more often away on Lifecrew business. He never talked about that, or much about anything else.
Not even about the scar, a long pale seam that zigzagged down from his hair and split across his law. It changed color when he was angry, and he was often angry. When Keth asked for more than his quota. When Keth couldn’t tie his boots correctly. When Keth was afraid to go to bed, because he knew he would have dreadful dreams about the humanoids.
Keth knew his father must have been hurt on Malili, perhaps in a terrible fight with the humanoids. They must be very fierce and cruel if they could hurt a man so strong. Once he asked Nurse Vesh if his father was afraid. Her face grew tight, and her pale eyes squinted blankly past him.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 29