Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

“Why would he want to do that?”

  “It is consonant with stalking behavior,” the computer said.

  “What makes you think—” Hellman stopped in midword. The sound of the machine’s engine had suddenly gone off.

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “He has turned off his main engine. He is on battery power now for silent running.”

  Hellman drew the laser pistol. For the first time he considered the problem of trying to bring down a large and perhaps ferocious machine with such a weapon. It takes time for even a hot laser to burn through metal. It takes time to get through deep enough to hit a vital connection, or the microprocessor itself. But if the machine were feral, if it really intended him harm, it could be on him before he could bring it down. Unless he could hit a vital spot on the first shot.

  “What’s a vital spot in a robot?” Hellman asked the computer.

  “Depends on what kind. Different kinds carry their vital gear in different compartments. So a head shot is not necessarily advisable. It might be best if you tried to reason with him.”

  “Why are we calling it ‘he’ ?”

  “Because some of us are nervous,” the computer said.

  Hellman looked around. The ground where he was now afforded many places where a determined robot of not too great size could conceal himself. Hellman stopped and’ looked around. He had the feeling that whatever was stalking him had stopped, too. He moved on, because it made him less nervous. There was a kind of hush over the land. Hellman had the impression that the grasses were waiting to see what would happen. He decided he’d better find himself some shelter. If this robot was a bad one, at least he could make a stand.

  He saw a natural outcropping of rock which leaned close to a low granite shelf. It looked like a pretty good spot. He hurried there and put himself on the other side of the rocks. Then he breathed a sigh of relief and turned around to survey his surroundings.

  The robot was behind him, about eight feet away. Hellman was frozen with shock.

  The robot had so much detail that Hellman found it difficult to make out its general shape. It was roughly rectangular, made of open-frame construction, like an Erector set, with a solid metal box about two feet to a side bolted to its interior. Wires ran from this box to its various parts. Hellman couldn’t decide at first if it moved with legs or wheels. He decided that the machine used both. It was like a cagework rectangle standing on end and tilted forward. This was a typical stance among this group of robots, he was later to find out. It seemed to have two operational centers, because there was another central box, smaller and higher up. This, he learned later, housed gearing. Two photoelectric eyes extended on stalks and swiveled down to see him. Trumpet-shaped ears swiveled in synch with the eyes. The machine stood about ten feet tall. It reminded Hellman of a living motorcycle.

  “Hi, there,” Hellman said brightly. “I am Tom Hellman and I come from the planet Earth. Who are you?”

  The robot continued to look at him. Hellman had the impression it was taking him in, trying to decide something.

  Finally it said, “Never mind about that. What are you doing here?”

  “I just came by for a visit,” Hellman said. “Got my spaceship right over there.”

  “You’d better get back to it,” the robot said. “Stay here; you got trouble. There’s a pack of hyenoids coming after you.”

  “Hyenoids? What’s that?”

  “Scavengers. Eat anything. You too if they can.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Hellman said. “It’s been nice talking to you. I guess I’d better get back.”

  Then he heard it. A low snuffling sound to his right, then a piercing bark to his left.

  “Too late now,” the robot said.

  Hellman whirled around and saw the first hyenoids. They were small open-framework machines, no more than three feet high by about four feet long. They raced along on six mechanical legs, and they had wheels too, lifted up now out of drive position. They were coming toward him, but not directly. They were slinking like hyenas were said to do, darting this way and that, taking cover behind clumps of rock and folds of earth. Hellman counted four of them. They were circling him, moving ever closer.

  “Do they eat people?” Hellman asked.

  “Anything at all, that’s what they like.”

  “Help me!” Hellman asked.

  The robot hesitated. Its photoelectric eyes flashed red and green. Hellman noticed for the first time that the robot had a long articulated tail. It was curling and uncurling now.

  “Well,” the robot said, “I don’t have much to do with humans. I’m a carhunter. We stay by ourselves.”

  “Please, help! Get me out of here!” Hellman switched on the radio and said to the ship’s computer, “Can you reason with this machine?”

  There was a short burst of static. The computer was signaling the carhunter. There was brief electrical activity, then silence, then more static.

  “I don’t know,” the carhunter said. “Your keeper says you’re all right . . .

  “My what? Oh, you mean the computer.” Hellman was going to put the robot straight as to who was boss and who was servant between him and the computer, but thought better of it. He needed this machine’s help just now, and if it pleased him to think that Hellman was kept by the computer, that was okay with him, at least until he was in a stronger position.

  “But why did the computer send you out here?” the robot asked. “He must have known it would be dangerous.”

  “Oh, well, it’s an old tradition with us,” Hellman said. “I check out the territory for the computer. I work as one of his extensions, if you know what I mean. “

  The robot pondered that for a while. Then he said, “It sounds like a good system.”

  The hyenoids were growing bolder. They were circling Hellman and the robot openly now. Their low-slung open-girderwork bodies had been painted in green, gray, and tan stripes, camouflage colors. There seemed no reason for them to have such large jaws with stainless steel teeth in them. Who would build a robot that fueled itself on the carcasses of animals it killed?

  One of them, jaws open and slavering a viscous green liquid, was edging toward Hellman now. Hellman held the laser pistol in front of him, trying to sight on a vital component. He figured they probably had redundant backup systems, stands to reason if you’re making a carnivorous model. The wear and tear would be tremendous. Not so much as on its victims, but plenty anyhow.

  “Better get up on me,” the carhunter said.

  Hellman scrambled over to the carhunter and pulled himself up its open-framework sides, straddling its back where it came to a kind of peak.

  “Hang on,” the carhunter said, and broke into a loping run, its six legs giving it a curious but not uncomfortable gait. Hellman held on tightly. The speed wasn’t so. great—perhaps fifteen to twenty miles an hour. But to falloff would leave him helpless against the pursuing pack of hyenoids.

  The hyenoids followed them through the broken country, and even managed to gain, since tight maneuvering in the little ravines and canyons was easier for the smaller, more agile beasts. One of them got close enough to take a nip at the carhunter. The carhunter extruded a long supple limb and flipped the hyenoid over on its back. The rest of the pack gave them more space after seeing that. The overturned one soon righted itself and came up again in pursuit, staying well out of reach of the carhunter’s limb. It reminded Hellman of pictures he had seen in a museum, of wolves trying to bring down a wounded elk. Only the carhunter was much more self-assured than any elk. He seemed to have no fear of the hyenoids. After a while they crossed a muddy little river, and then they were on a flat, hard-tamped plain. Here the carhunter could put down his wheels and engage his superior horsepower. Soon he had left the hyenoids far behind, and they turned back. Seeing this, the carhunter shifted to a more economical cruising speed.

  “Say when,” he said to Hellman after a while.

  “What do you mean, say when?”
r />   “Tell me when you want me to drop you off.”

  “Are you crazy?” Hellman asked. “We must be twenty miles from my spaceship. “

  “Your spaceship?”

  It was too late for Hellman to retrieve the slip. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression back there. Actually the computer works for me.”

  The carhunter slowed and came to a stop. There was nothing on all sides of them, and it stretched on forever.

  “Well, that’s an interesting twist,” the carhunter said. “Is that how it works where you come from?”

  “Well, yeah, pretty much,” Hellman said. “Look, would you do me a great favor and take me back to my spaceship.”

  “No. Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m late already for the meeting.”

  “A meeting? Is It really so important?”

  “It’s a tribal matter. It’s the only really important date in the carhunter year. It takes precedence over any other contingency. Sorry, but I just have time to make it if I proceed immediately.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “To our meeting?”

  “I’ll wait outside. I’m not trying to spy on you or anything. I just need to go somewhere until you or somebody can take me back to my ship.”

  The carhunter thought about it. “Ethics are not my strong point,” he said, “but I suppose that abandoning you to your death out here when I could without too much difficulty do something about it would be pretty unconscionable; is that correct?”

  “Perfectly correct.”

  “It takes a human being to point out that sort of thing. All I was thinking of was the extra energy I’d have to expend to save your life. I mean, what’s in it for me? That’s the way we start to think when there’s not a human around. “

  “I’m glad we can be useful to you,” Hellman said.

  “But you’re also extremely difficult to be around. Always tinkering with software. Don’t you think there’s enough uncertainty on the subatomic level without introducing it into our macro dealings?”

  “What?” Hellman said.

  “Never mind, I’m just raving. When you are a carhunter, you spend a lot of time alone. It’s a nomadic life, you know. Most of us live apart from each other. Hunting cars. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re called carhunters.”

  “Oh. What kind of cars do you hunt?”

  “All kinds. We’re carnivores, in our limited way. We eat cars. We also eat trucks and half-tracks, but they’ve been getting rare in these parts. People say the half-tracks are about hunted out. Yet my father could tell you about herds of them that stretched from hill to hill as far as the eye could see. “

  “Not like that any more, I suppose,” Hellman said, trying to fall in with the carhunter’s mood.

  “You got that right. Not that it’s too difficult to stay fed, especially now, in summer. I got me a fat old Studebaker just two days ago. You’ll find a couple of its carburetors and headlights in the bin under you and to your left.”

  Hellman could peer down through the metal wickerwork and see, in an open-topped metal box, headlights and carburetors half submerged in crankcase oil.

  “Looks pretty good, don’t it? I know you don’t eat metal yourself, but no doubt you can empathize the experience.”

  “They look tasty,” Hellman said. “Especially in all that oil.”

  “Twice-used crankcase oil. Ain’t nothing like it. I’ve spiced it up a bit with a plant that grows hereabouts. We call it the chili pepper.”

  “Yes, we have something like it, too,” Hellman said.

  “Damn small galaxy,” the carhunter said. “By the way, I’m Wayne 1332A.”

  “Tom Hellman,” Hellman said.

  “Pleased to meet you. Settle yourself in and take a good grip. We’re going to the meeting.“

  The carhunter broke into a stride, then, lowering wheels, built up speed across the flat face of the desert. But soon he slowed again.

  “What’s the matter?” Hellman asked.

  “Are you sure I’m doing the right thing, saving your life?”

  “I’m absolutely sure,” Hellman said. “You need have no doubts over that. “

  “I just wanted to be sure,” Wayne said. “Anyway, it’s best to let the others decide what to do with you. “

  Wayne 1332A started to pick up speed again.

  “What do you mean, do with me?”

  “You might be a problem for us, Tom. But I have to let the others decide. Now I need to concentrate.”

  They had reached another part of the plain. It was strewn with gigantic boulders. The carhunter needed all his skill to dodge around them at the high speed he was maintaining. Let the others decide. Hellman hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Nothing much he could do about it at present, however. And anyhow, maybe the robots at the meeting wouldn’t be so difficult.

  The sunlight had faded as they roared out of the rocky plain and into a region of low, steep hills. There was a rudimentary track leading up. Wayne took it as if he were a dirt-bike hill climber. Dirt, sand, and gravel showered Hellman as the carhunter dodged and slashed and braked and accelerated up the increasingly steep hill. At last Wayne’s wheels began to skid and he had to retract them and go entirely by pseudopod power. Hellman had to hold on extra tight, because the robot was shaking and quivering and lurching and swerving, and sometimes all of them at the same time.

  Then Wayne slewed to a sudden halt.

  Hellman said, “What is it?”

  “Lookee over there.”

  Hellman’s gaze followed the LED lights along one of the carhunter’s main support members. Off to one side, on a rough but serviceable road, a dusty old Mercedes 300 SL was moving sedately along.

  “Ain’t that a beauty!” Wayne said.

  Hellman looked and didn’t like the prospect of the carhunter hurling itself at this burly and self-reliant automobile on this hillside with its deeply tilted slant and its uneasy footing. One slip, and he and the carhunter would be at the bottom of the hill after rolling all the way. Maybe the carhunter could recover from that, but Hellman doubted a human could.

  “Hell, it’s just a car,” Hellman said. “Let’s get to the meeting, huh?”

  “That car is prime eating, and if you don’t want it I can sure use it.”

  “Let’s eat latf;r, at the meeting.”

  “Idiot, the meeting is a time of fasting. Why do you think I need a snack now?”

  “Computer!” Hellman said, turning on the radio link he had managed to hold on to through everything, probably because it was attached to his wrist by a lanyard.

  “Out of range,” the carhunter said. “Relax, I been gittin’ cars on worse terrain than this. Hang on, baby, here we got.”

  He started down the perilous slope. It was strange that at this time, just before the irrevocable launch into dangerous territory, Hellman should think of the Desdemona mystery. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t strange at all.

  Desdemona was a satellite out past Neptune orbit. It was a dreary little place, a settlement of no more than a few hundred members of a now forgotten religious sect who had gone to this place to preserve their beliefs without contamination from the rest of the world. They had taken their robots with them, of course; you couldn’t survive in the outer planets without robots and a lot of luck. They had been gatherers of Xeum, cosmic-ray residue. Due to topological peculiarities in the spacetime continuum, Desdemona happened to receive more Xeum than any other place in the solar system. But it was a bare living, because the only demand for Xeum was from scientists who were trying to find the primordial substance which generated the ultimate particle.

  The settlers of Desdemona were sober people who kept only the most minimal contact with the other worlds. Still, they couldn’t isolate themselves entirely. There were stirrings, undercurrents, and a growing demand for new products and new ways. Some of the Desdemona citizens took to spending time at Ganymede Fun
World, the pleasure satellite that had been erected in Jupiter orbit. It was a long way to go for a little fun, but go they did.

  There was dissension on Desdemona. And then, one day, a blurry and hard-to-read signal was received on Earth and other worlds. No one could decipher it, but it seemed to refer to some disaster. A relief party was sent out and found Desdemona satellite deserted. The place had been dismantled in an orderly fashion, all useful material packed away and taken. The only hint of what had happened was a letter, begun and crumpled and thrown into a corner and there ignored in the general housecleaning that preceded the departure. After some chit-chat about family and friends, there was this: “Our robots have been giving us difficulties of late, and we’re not sure what to do about it. The Elders say there’s no danger of a revolt, though some doubt the wisdom of the new override instructions that permit our robots to get around the Three Laws of Robotics. Our Chairman says this is necessary in order not to inhibit their intellectual development, but some of us wonder if we aren’t asking for a lot of trouble—”

  At that point the letter ended in mid-sentence.

  There was conjecture that the robots, freed of the restraints of the Laws of Robotics, had somehow taken control and decided to take the spaceships, and the humans from Desdemona, and go somewhere else, a place where they would not be molested by the rest of humanity. It was theoretically possible to bypass the robotics laws; intelligent robots started their life with neutral ethical values. Moral defaults and restraints had to be built in and programmed. Not everyone agreed with this program. Some people had toyed with their robots’ conditioning, hoping to get more out of the robots. Instances of this were rare, however, and were stamped out as soon as they were encountered.

  Large rewards were offered for anyone who solved the Desdemona mystery, and even larger rewards were available for anyone who discovered the present location of the Desdemona robots and their owners, the humans of Desdemona Settlement. No one had claimed this money so far, although there had been one or two false alarms.

  Hellman was pretty sure that the Desdemona robots had come to this place, whatever this planet was called. He was potentially a rich man. The only difficulty was, he was at present clinging to the side of a carhunter which was rushing down a slope to attack a Mercedes 300 SL.