by Jerry eBooks
All she had to do was smile at Junior and let him follow her around.
Carefully suppressing her shudders, Lola prepared breakfast the next morning and then went about her packing.
The robot followed her upstairs, clanking and creaking.
“Oil me,” Lola heard him say.
That was the worst moment. But she had to go through with it.
“Can’t you wait until Duke gets back tonight?” she asked, striving to keep her voice from breaking. “He always oils you.”
“I want you to oil me, Lola,” persisted Junior.
“All right.”
She got the oil-can with the long spout and if her fingers trembled as she performed the office, Junior didn’t notice it.
THE robot gazed at her with his immobile countenance. No human emotion etched itself on the implacable steel, and no human emotion altered the mechanical tones of the harsh voice.
“I like to have you oil me, Lola,” said Junior.
Lola bent her head to avoid looking at him. If she had to look in a mirror and realize that this nightmare tableau was real, she would have fainted. Oiling a living mechanical monster! A monster that said, “I like to have you oil me, Lola!” After that she couldn’t finish packing for a long while. She had to sit down. Junior, who never sat down except by command, stood silently and regarded her with gleaming eye-lenses. She was conscious of the robot’s scrutiny.
“Where are we going when we leave here, Lola?” he asked. “Far away,” she said, forcing her voice out to keep the quaver from it.
“That will be nice,” said Junior. “I don’t like it here. I want to see things. Cities and mountains and deserts. I would like to ride a roller coaster, too.”
“Roller coaster?” Lola was really startled. “Where did you ever hear of a roller coaster?”
“I read about it in a book.”
“Oh.”
Lola gulped. She had forgotten that this monstrosity could read, too. And think. Think like a man.
“Will Duke take me on a roller coaster?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Lola.”
“Yes.”
“You like Duke?”
“Why—certainly.”
“You like me?”
“Oh—why—you know I do, Junior.”
The robot was silent. Lola felt a tremor run through her body.
“Who do you like best, Lola? Me or Duke?”
Lola gulped. Something forced the reply from her. “I like you,” she said. “But I love Duke.”
“Love.” The robot nodded gravely.
“You know what love is, Junior?”
“Yes. I read about it in books. Man and woman. Love.” Lola breathed a little easier.
“Lola.”
“Yes?”
“Do you think anyone will ever fall in love with me?” Lola wanted to laugh, or cry. Most of all, she wanted to scream. But she had to answer.
“Maybe,” she lied.
“But I’m different. You know that. I’m a robot. Do you think that makes a difference?”
“Women don’t really care about such things when they fall in love, Junior,” she improvised. “As long as a woman believes that her lover is the smartest and the strongest, that’s all that matters.”
“Oh.” The robot started for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To wait for Duke. He said he would come back today.” Lola smiled furtively as the robot clanked down the hallway stairs.
That was over with. Thinking back, she’d handled things rather well. In a few hours Duke would return. And then—good-by, Junior!
Poor Junior. Just a silver stooge with a man’s brain. He wanted love, the poor fish! Well—he was playing with fire and he’d be burned soon enough.
LOLA began to hum. She scampered downstairs and locked up, wearing her gloves to avoid leaving any telltale fingerprints.
It was almost dark when she returned to her room to pack. She snapped on the light and changed her clothes.
Junior was still downstairs, patiently waiting for Duke to arrive.
Lola completed her preparations and sank wearily onto the bed. She must take a rest. Her eyes closed.
Waiting was too much of a strain. She hated to think of what she had gone through with the robot. That mechanical monster with its man-brain, the hateful, burring voice, and steely stare—how could she ever forget the way it asked, “Do you think anyone will ever fall in love with me?”
Lola tried to blot out recollection. Just a little while now and Duke would be here. He’d get rid of Junior. Meanwhile she had to rest, rest . . .
Lola sat up and blinked at the light. She heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Duke!” she called.
Then she heard the clanking in the hallway and her heart skipped a beat.
The door opened very quickly and the robot stalked in.
“Duke!” she screamed.
The robot stared at her. She felt his alien, inscrutable gaze upon her face.
Lola tried to scream again, but no sound came from her twisted mouth.
And then the robot was droning in a burring, inhuman voice.
“You told me that a woman loves the strongest and the smartest,” burred the monster. “You told me that, Lola.” The robot came closer. “Well, I am stronger and smarter than he was.”
Lola tried to look away but she saw the object he carried in his metal paws. It was round, and it had Duke’s grin.
The last thing Lola remembered as she fell was the sound of the robot’s harsh voice, droning over and over, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” The funny part of it was, it sounded almost human.
THE END
Competition
E. Mayne Hull
Artur Blord had a very delicate situation on his hands. His enemies didn’t really hate him; they just distrusted his abilities, and thought sudden death and public ridicule would make a good cure. They forced a deal from him—they thought.
The four men in the idling plane sat quiet now, watching.
The debarkation of the space freighter from Earth was in full swing. People were packing out onto the landing platforms, carrying suitcases. One of the men in the airabout sneered:
“These immigrant freighters certainly pack them in.”
The big man said, “That’s why they call them freighters; they handle human cargoes—”
“Look, Mr. Delaney,” a third man cut in excitedly. “There’s a girl, a screamer if I ever saw one.”
The big man was silent; his steel-gray eyes narrowed on the girl who had paused twenty feet away. She had dark-brown hair, a thin but determined face and a firm, lithe body. She carried one small suitcase.
“She is pretty and does stand out,” he admitted cautiously. His gaze followed the girl, as she turned and walked slowly toward the distant exit. Abruptly, he nodded.
“She’ll do. Pick her up and bring her to my apartment.”
He climbed out of the plane, watched it glide off after the girl, then stepped into a private Speedster that instantly hurtled off into the sky.
Evana Travis walked along the Pedestrian Way toward the exit not even vaguely aware of the machineful of men that followed her. She was trembling a little from the excitement of the landing, but her mind was still hard on the trip that had now ended.
She hadn’t, when she came right down to it, utterly hadn’t expected so much bigness. Figures never had had much meaning for her; and growing up in a world where people said, “Why, that’s only a thousand light-years!”—somehow that had made of space an area as limited in a different way as Earth.
The very name—Ridge Stars—had a cozy sound. The picture of the system in her mind was of an intimately related group of suns pouring a veritable blaze of light into the surrounding heavens. Immigration-appeal folders did nothing to discourage her opinion.
The first shock came on the twelfth day out when the loud-speakers blared that t
he Ridge was new visible to the naked eye.
It was all two hundred light-years of it, spread across the heavens. There were one hundred ninety-four suns in the group, seventy of them as large or larger than Sol—at least so the announcer shouted. Evana saw only pin points of light in a darkness the intensity of which was but faintly relieved by a sprinkling of more remote stars.
Grudgingly, she recognized that there was a resemblance to a ridge—and then all thought of the physical aspect of the stars ended, as the announcer said:
“—a vote will shortly be taken as to which planet of which sun every passenger of this ship will be landed on. The majority will decide and all must abide by the decision. Good-by for new.”
Literally, her mind reeled. Then she was fighting through the packed corridors and decks. She reached the captain’s cabin, and began her protest even as the door was banging shut behind her:
“What kind of outrage is this? I’m going to my sister’s on the third planet of the Doridora sun. That’s what I bought my ticket for, and that’s where I’m going, vote or no vote.”
“Don’t be such an innocent,” said the young man who sat behind the big desk in one corner of the small room.
Evana stared at him. “What do you mean?”
His grinning face mocked her. He had blue eyes and a space-tanned face, and he looked about thirty. He said: “You’re in space now, sister, far from the rigid laws of Earth. Where you’re going atomic engineering is building a man-controlled universe, fortunes are made and lost every day, people die violently every hour, and the word of the big operators is the final authority.” He stopped. He stared at Evana sardonically. He said:
“It’s a game, beautiful. That’s what you’ve been caught up in. All the improvements in working conditions on Earth and other static planets during the past fifty years were designed to prevent wholesale immigration to the newer worlds of the Galaxy. The governments of the Ridge Star planets and other star groups have had to develop cunning counterants, including cutting the price of the trip to less than cost. That explains why it’s impossible to do anything but dump each shipload en masse. This cargo, for instance, is headed for Delfi II.”
“But,” Evana gasped, “there’s going to be a ballot taken as to which planet we land on. The announcer said—”
The young man roared with laughter. “Oh, sure.” The mirth faded from his face. “And it’s going to be all fair and square, too—pictures of each planet, short educational talks, an elimination vote every time four planets have been discussed—absolutely straight merit will decide the issue. But Delfi II will be selected because it’s Delfi’s turn, and so we’re showing that planet to advantage, while the seamier sides of other planets get top billing this trip. Simple, eh?”
As Evana stood there too stunned to speak, he went on, “Delfi’s a grand place: Endless jobs for everybody. Its capital city, Suderea, has four million population, with ninety buildings of more than a hundred stories—oceans, rivers, mountains, a grand climate—Oh, it’s a great world!
“You’ll hardly believe me, but there are men out in the Ridge Stars whose names are synonyms for money or power; and the greatest of them all is a young Norwegian-Englishman named Artur Blord. He’s a byword. You’ll hear his name in every town and village. In less than ten years he’s made an astronomical fortune by outsmarting the big shots themselves. They exploit men; he exploits them. Why—”
“But you don’t understand”—she felt desperate—“my sister expects me!”
His answer was a shrug. “Look, lady, the Ridge Star governments have offered a prize for the invention of an interstellar drive that won’t infringe existing Earth patents, but until that prize is won the only way you’ll ever get off Delfi II would be to get in good with some private owner of a spaceship. There just isn’t any public transport.
“And now”—he stood up—“I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here in my cabin until that ballot has been taken. It’s my policy to be honest with those who complain, but it means restrictions for them. Don’t get alarmed! I have no personal designs on you, even though you wouldn’t have a single comeback if I did have. But a man like myself with seventeen wives on as many planets, thirty-eight kids and a soft heart can’t afford to get mixed up with any more women.”
He went out; the door clicked behind him—and now seven days later here was the unwanted world of Delfi II.
Evana paused uncertainly, at the great gate of the landing field. For a moment, as she stood there, staring down at the city below and the blue sheen of the sea beyond, she felt constricted, cold with dread.
There was a sound behind her. Rough hands smashed across her mouth, grabbed her arms. She was lifted bodily through a door into a wingless plane—that curled up into the air like smoke rising from a chimney.
Masked men—how heavy they were! Their very weight resisted her feeble efforts to claw free. She felt the slight bump as the plane landed. Then she was in a room, falling toward a couch.
She had not the faintest idea whether she had been flung down, or had collapsed. But lying down made things easier. The agony of exhaustion faded. The salty taste in her mouth, product of her terrible struggling, began to go away. Her vision came slowly back into focus.
She saw that she was in a magnificently furnished living room and—with a gasp Evana clawed to a sitting position—standing a dozen feet away, staring at her, was a powerful-looking man wearing a mask.
“Ah,” said the man, “coming back to life, are you? Fine.”
He moved in a leisurely fashion toward a table which stood against one wall. There were liquor bottles on it, glasses and other odds and ends. He looked over his shoulder; and Evana was aware of hard gray eyes peering at her from the mask slits.
“What’ll you have, baby?” he said.
It was an abrupt recognition of the kind of mask he wore that throttled her scream in her throat. There was the exact bulge at the mouth that she had seen so often in movies, the bulge that was the machine which disguised the wearer’s voice.
The reality of a voice-dissolver mask was so unreal that a wild laughter gurgled from Evana’s lips. She stopped the laughter as she realized the hysteria in it, and found her voice.
“I want to know the meaning of this!” she gulped. “I’m sure there must be some mistake. I—”
The big man swung around on her. “Look, kid, quit babbling. There’s been no mistake. I picked you up because you’re a pretty and intelligent-looking girl. You’re going to make a thousand stellors for yourself, and you’re going to make it whether you like it or not. Now, stop looking like a scared fool.”
Evana tried to speak—and couldn’t. It took a long moment to realize why: Relief! Relief so tremendous that it hurt deep down like a thing badly swallowed. Whatever was here, it wasn’t death.
The bottom came back into her world; and then the man was speaking again, saying:
“What do you know of the Ridge Stars?”
She stared blankly. “Nothing.”
“Good.” He loomed above her, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction. He went on, “What was your occupation on Earth?”
“I was a mechanical-filing-system operator.”
“Oh!” His tone held disappointment in it. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “The employment agency will put an educator on you, and make you into a passable private secretary in one hour.”
It was like listening to a code message without knowing the key. Helplessness surged through her; and she had a sudden, vivid picture of herself sitting here in this room three thousand light-years from Earth minutes after her landing, with a masked man mouthing meaningless words at her.
Abruptly, there was no doubt at all that this was what the stories back on Earth had meant, the stories that said that on the far planets the frontiers extended right into the biggest of the cities. The crude kidnaping of her from an interstellar landing held couldn’t be anything but frontier.
Her mind spun to a h
alt; and she saw that the man was fumbling in his pocket. He drew out a small white card. He said:
“Here’s the name of your hotel. As soon as you’re registered, go to the Pair Play Employment Agency—I’ve written the address on the back of the card—and they’ll take care of you.”
Evana took the card blankly, stuffed it unread into her purse. With widened eyes, she watched the man, as he picked up a small package from among the bottles on the table. She took the package with limp fingers when he held it out, heard him say:
“Put this in your purse, too. There’s a note inside that explains everything you need to know. Don’t be too shocked.
Remember, there’s a thousand stellors in it for you, if everything goes smoothly.” It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem reasonable. The man couldn’t be such a fool as to let her walk out of here now, out of this apartment, trusting her to do as he wanted after she had gone out into the obscuring labyrinth of a vast city. And yet—
“Two more things,” the man said in a silky tone, “and then you can leave. First, have you ever heard of seven-day poison?”
He leaned forward a little as he spoke the words; there was an intensity in his manner that, more even than his words, brought a curdling chill. She gasped, “It’s the poison that feeds on the blood; and on the seventh day undergoes a chemical change that—”
She saw the syringe in his hand then, and with a thin scream leaped to her feet. The man yelled:
“Grab her!”
She had forgotten the other men. They held her as the needle stabbed into her left leg above the knee.
The needle withdrew; the men let her go; and she half-fell, half-sank to the floor from sheer reaction. She sat there, nursing, as the man said:
“The beauty of that poison is that it can be made like a lock pattern, in many thousands of slight variations—but the only antidote must have as its base a dose of the original poison, which as you can see is in my possession.
“Now, don’t get hysterical.” His tone was brutal. “I’ll make up the antidote, and it’ll be here after you’ve accomplished what I want.”
“But I don’t know where ‘here’ is!” Evana cried desperately. “Suppose something happens to you—