by C. L. Moore
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When he woke it was still dark. He lay quiet, wondering for a confused instant where he was and why he should be awake. He could not see his watch, but there was a pre-dawn stillness in the air.
Then he saw the light beneath the door and heard the voices talking quietly beyond it. He lay in his own bed, and that was his own living room, but why the light burned and whose the voices were he could not guess.
He got up and went barefooted across the floor. He opened the door a narrow crack. There were five men in the room beyond. They sat comfortably there, talking softly, like men waiting for something—or someone.
The first face he saw was Arthur Court's.
"All right, Bradley," the Director's familiar voice said in the very instant of recognition. "All right, it's time now. Come in."
Bradley never knew whether the android could actually see through the spinning atoms of the door, or whether some sound had given his own presence away. It didn't matter. He was beyond help now. He and the race of man ...
He crossed the threshold quietly and closed the door behind him. He stood there looking at the five men in his living room. They sat perfectly motionless, their eyes on his. None of them had been smoking. None of them moved. None of them lived by the tight-strung nerves of imperfect humans, so they had no need for aimless motions. None of them was a man.
When the silence had reached a pitch just this side of being unbearable, Bradley spoke.
"What happened to Wallinger?" he asked.
"Nothing." Court smiled at him.
"Nothing? But—"
"We needed a little extra time. Wallinger got it for us. That's all."
A sudden upward flood of bitterness made Bradley's vision swim for an instant. How easily Wallinger had deceived him, then! How pitiably gullible was the illogical human brain before the resourceful logic of the machine! Wallinger had known exactly what lines of reasoning would most certainly soothe Bradley's fears to rest. And the quiet machine mind had not even lied when it spoke, for how can a machine deal in falsehood or in truth?
They needed time—for what? To repair the shattered Court, to assemble their forces, to close in. Most of all, they had needed to keep Bradley silent while they went about the business of destroying him. How? What would they do? Was there any way at all, even in this last moment, for him to outwit them? He thought there was not, but a desperate cunning made him say,
"All right, I can't stop you. Do what you like. But please, Court—please! We've worked together—you can't blame me for doing what I had to do, but we've worked together a long while. Do me one favor. Please don't let them put me in an insane asylum! It would be better if you shot me—safer for you! Anything's better than the asylum!"
He almost choked when he had to say it. No man should plead with a machine. But if it were for man's final salvation—yes, he could bring himself even to beg favors of this thing made of steel and wire. And this was his last weapon against them, this peculiarly inverted human logic which was part of folk-lore. The logic that saved Br'er Rabbit from his foes. Don't throw me into the briar-patch! If they committed him to an asylum, at least he would still be alive, at least he could still work against them. And the children knew. In time, someone would listen, if he could only stay alive.
"Please, Court, anything but the asylum!"
The android smiled. It was curious to think of the intricate little springs and wiring that drew up his face when it moved. It was appalling to realize that when Arthur Court spoke, the mind which dictated the words lay in the gleaming hollow of his chest where something made up of lights that twinkled was the essence and the soul of the machine.
"Forget it, Bradley," the android said. "It won't be the asylum."
Bradley braced himself against the door. There was one thing left to do, then. He had tried cunning, and cunning failed. He had tried everything a man could try, and everywhere he had failed.
But they should not kill him. That final choice still lay in his own hands, and he would not submit to this last indignity. If he must die, let it be of his own will, freely.
He measured the distance to the window, gathering his muscles for this final leap. There was so much he would never know, he thought despairingly. The fate of the race of man itself, for which he had fought so vainly, was beyond his knowledge now. He thought of Wallinger, so nearly human in his reactions, so convincingly human in his speech, despite this final betrayal. Perhaps, after all, Wallinger had spoken more truthfully than he knew. Perhaps they had made an android too nearly human ...
But it was too late. Wallinger's voice came back to his mind briefly, and the magnificent words of St. Paul's that begin, "Though I speak with the tongues of men ..." Wallinger had spoken with the tongue of man, but for man's destruction. There was something terrifying in the aptness of that chapter from Corinthians.
"Whether there be tongues, they shall cease, whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away—"
Blindly he thrust himself away from the door in a last desperate leap. The nearest android moved too late to intercept him. He swept the curtains aside, drew back his fist and shattered the glass that was all that parted them from the humming street twenty stories down. Man's streets, which would so soon be man's no longer ...
He lunged through the glass. He hung vertiginously over the spinning depths below. He could see the wall of the building straight downward beneath his own knees, its lines swooping dizzily inward as he swayed.
It was Arthur Court's voice that halted him.
"Wait, Bradley, wait! Not until you hear the truth!"
It stopped him on the brink, and beyond the brink, of the window. He would have thought no power on earth could reverse the terrible suction of gravity that had already laid hands on him and was swinging him out and down with the very swing of the earth's rotation. But he found he was stronger than he knew ...
Court's face was stern. Bradley stood braced against the shattered window, his knees strengthless, his head still spinning with the pull of the street below. Blank-eyed, he stared at the android across the room.
"You fool!" Arthur Court said. "Are you trying to ruin us all?"
"But I—"
"You still don't understand? You still don't know Wallinger told you the truth?"
"Wallinger—told the truth?"
"Yes—in part. Think, Bradley, think!"
He could not think. His mind had suffered too many stunning shocks for reasoning now. But he did not need to think. He had had the clue many hours ago, and until this moment he had not known. The memory came back and he heard Sue Wallinger's small voice speaking again in the quiet library. He saw her at the door as he went down the path. He remembered her gesture and her smile.
"I can tell you how many of the real kind of men in this room—one, one!"
And she had smiled at him and touched her brother's shoulder.
She had not meant anyone in that room except the human male child. He had asked about men—she touched her brother's shoulder. All the children knew—all the androids knew. Only the humans were blind—and James Bradley.
"Look down," Court's voice said, almost gently.
Bradley looked. There was blood on the floor. He felt a stinging in his hand, and dully lifted his arm to see why. He had put his fist through the window. It had not mattered, then, whether he slashed his own flesh or not. It didn't matter now ...
He saw, without surprise, without shock, only with a numbness of the mind, how the edges of his skin had parted cleanly. The slow blood welled into his cupped palm. He looked down with utter silence at the uncovered tendons of his hand, gleaming mirror-bright from every steel surface. He saw the fine, tiny, tight-curled springs draw up in perfect response when he clenched his fingers.
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"We made you too well," Arthur Court was saying. "We made you so well you're imperfect. You must be changed, Bradley. No android must be able to attack his own kind. Our survival depends on that law. Do you see now what Wal
linger was trying to tell you? The danger of a perfect humanoid is too great. And you're perfect. Answer me, Bradley—do you understand what I'm saying?"
He could not answer. He knew the truth now, but he felt exactly as he had felt before. He was a man still. His whole loyalty lay with the human kind of which he was so merciless a duplicate. Until they made that change that would alter his imperfection, he must continue this fight he had taken up for man against machine. Until they changed him from imperfect android to the perfection of the race of the machine ...
When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. St. Paul had put it all with such terrifying clarity. Though I speak with the tongues of men ... I am become as sounding brass ...
"We don't want to waste you, Bradley," Court said. "You're a fine machine. We need you badly. There's so much work to be done, and we need your help."
"No," Bradley said. "No."
And this time they could not stop him.
He didn't pause to brush the curtain aside, and the glass was already shattered. He saw again the inward-leaning wall that dropped straight for twenty stories toward the street. His knee was on the sill.
Down there would be men to see. Down there in the street they must see and they might perhaps understand the meaning of this paradox that was the android body, the steel ribs and the intricate wiring by which this flesh-clad body once had moved ...
Somewhere deep in his chest the little sparkling thing that at this moment thought as a man thinks knew an instant's wonder. "Is this the way a man feels who gives up his life for his own kind?" Bradley asked himself the futile question. "Or am I moving only as a machine moves, in blind obedience to the orders that were given me when I was made? They must have set me the problem of behaving like a human. And this is a thing men do ... not machines. Never machines."
He leaned out. The mighty drag of the earth's swing pulled him across the sill. It was not much he could do for the race in whose image he had been made, but it was all he could give them. Perhaps it might help. Perhaps it would not. That was something he would never know.
The robots crowded to the sill to watch him fall.
The End
WE SHALL COME BACK
Science Fiction Quarterly – November 1951
with Henry Kuttner
(as by C. H. Liddell)
Dim were the memories of Man's greatness in this latter day, when humanity had returned to the sea for refuge. But Ran knew there was hope, if he could fulfill his mission—if he could keep his tribe men...
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Man: An individual at the highest level of animal development, mainly characterized by his exceptional mentality. The human creature or being as representing the species.
—American College Dictionary
Man is the highest type of animal existing or known to have existed.
—Webster's New International Dictionary
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THE FIRST soundless death scream, from far away, when "the killing fires struck, exploded in red echoes in every listening mind. The little clan of humans in headlong flight down the undersea current broke for an instant into a scattering hysteria, until Ran's monitoring thought shot out to halt them.
The flurry quieted. The clan drew together, sleek, pale silver, shuddering above their shadows on the green sand of the sea-bottom. Huddling close, they heard and saw with keener senses than sight or hearing the massacre of that other, kindred tribe. The same death might be their own before evening, and they knew it.
They waited, trembling as the water rocked them, while far-off fountains of fire rained down upon the distant clan, killing wherever it touched. Without vision they could see colored stars arrowing to their targets, and the screams of the dying burst scarlet in every hearer's inward ear. Echoing dully, like a knell beneath those cries, sounded the iron heartbeat of the Destroyer. The tribe wavered when they heard it—even Ran wavered—on the edge of a threshold Ran alone had recognized long ago.
Blind, brainless animal panic urged them to scatter and run until they dropped. Instinct urged them. Reason said wait.
Then something moved tremendously through the waters—a vast, calm pulse that beat once, twice, a third time—and ceased. It was one of the "Thoughts of the Deep", impersonal as the Gulf Stream, and as mighty. The little clan was tossed for a moment upon it as if upon a wind that blew under the ocean.
Something deep in Ran's mind took courage from its calm, and drew back from the dark threshold upon which the whole tribe poised, the mindless threshold between instinct and reason, when instinct shouts so loudly and reason's voice is so cold and quiet that only a man could hear it. Not a beast—a man.
The old knowledge of duty roused itself wearily in Ran's mind again and he turned in the water, gathering in the minds of the clan. His duty was not only to his people, but to something beyond them all, beyond himself, in that unguessable future of which he knew only the legend and the promise.
He must keep them men.
They stood on the very threshold of the sea-beast, at the bottom of the long slope down which their whole race had been driven for so many milleniums, back into the waters from which they first sprang, back to the mindless unreason of the beast. And the drivers, the hunters, the killers, pressed them inexorably toward that last, low door.
Ran rose upright in the water and called the clan together, mind touching mind without words. "It's all right," he told them patiently. "They haven't found us yet. We must run; if we can reach the city we'll be safe. Don't scatter! Follow me, and keep together, and we'll all be safe."
It was, perhaps, a lie, and all but the most foolish knew it, but there are times when lies may be both more comforting than truth and more useful.
Sanctuary was where the sunken city lay, where a man might flash in and out of windows a hundred stories above the pavement, and with luck hide safely even from the bright Destroyers from the Air.
There was another kind of safety there, too, though not even Ran could name it. Somehow, in the sunken cities which their own kind had built so long ago—in another element, the tribe seemed less close to that fatal threshold. Somehow the recurrent, almost irresistible waves of impulse toward mindless action were less strong there than in the open sea.
Ran's people, in this long, dim twilight of the planet, were very near to the point where they would lay humanity aside forever. Ran himself knew, as well as any, the strong urgencies of sheer instinct in the face of danger. But he knew his responsibility, too, and he felt it strongest in the undersea cities. He had even dreamed, rocking in the darkness of the ocean nights, about such fantastic feats as turning in flight before a Destroyer and facing it resolutely as it sank through the waters toward him. Dreams in which he was not entirely Ran, but perhaps the whole tribe too, perhaps, somehow, a part of the sunken cities and Champion of the race of man.
Nothing on earth had ever faced a Destroyer—nothing that hoped to live. Yet Ran dreamed, since there was no harm in dreaming, even if sleep were a thing man could control.
Heavily he cast out the net of his thought and gathered in the tribe, interposing his own mental images between theirs and the far-off massacre reddening the waters and the listening minds. He goaded his people into motion and hurled them in an arrowing swarm down the long slope of the undersea forest, away from that distant focus of danger. His mind touched the minds of the whole group simultaneously with firm, swift, reassuring images that had no shape, being only the clan symbols for ordered flight.
THE THOUGHTS of his tribe flickered against Ran's like the touch of cold, unsteady fingers. Terror; exhaustion; the trembling thought of a silver-furred woman who had never run so long or felt such fear before; the quaver of a furry child; the wild, scattered thoughts of the foolish. And behind all these the steady, uncomplaining firmness of the older clansmen, supporting Ran's thoughts without question because they had chosen him for their leader and knew they had chosen well.
"Hurry," he told his tribe.
"Don't lag. Hurry! We can reach the city by noon if we hurry. Run, run, run! I know we're tired. When we reach the White Cleft where the mussels grow we can rest for a moment. You can make it that far; we'll rest, at the White Cleft. Run!"
The words meant nothing. He was using them as a shield to blank out the cries of the distant tribe from which no sane thoughts came, now. There were only mindless flashes, screaming with panic—the silvery arcs of seafolk darting wildly and the fiery arcs of the stars pursuing, against which no defence could stand—and the bursts of color, and the dying. Ran got no flash from their leader, if he lived; surely, he thought, all need not have died if the leader had been wise. Surely a few might have been directed into hiding, or the strongest and the children sent on ahead while the rest drew the Destroyer's fire. But these were beyond all reasoning, beyond all reach of the mind; it was sea-beasts, not men, whose deaths exploded in the thoughts of the listeners.
So Ran's tribe fled, for the best and oldest of reasons, through a clear undersea dawn that was beginning to glow green with the filtering of early sunlight from far above, where the Aliens lived and ruled the world. They knew, nothing of the Air and the Aliens, except that from them the implacable iron Destroyers came down. They knew nothing of what lay in the Great Deeps out of which the slow, calm "Thoughts" arose. They knew only their own water-world, how to hide in it, how to run for their lives when the Destroyers drove them. How, if they were lucky, to save a few when the Destroyers found them. That other tribe had not been lucky.
No thoughts came through at all, now.
Then in a flurry of churning waters, sending his message screaming ahead of him in mindless panic, a blue-silver body swept down toward them through the swaying jungle, tearing the brown leaves as he passed, blind with fear and shrieking, "Run! Run! Run!"
The clan broke its formation and spun wildly apart, searching in all directions for the danger. Ran sent his perceptions fastest and farthest and keenest, probing backward along the wake of the fugitive for an iron, torpedo-shaped thing slipping silently toward them.