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by Ivan Howatd (ed. )


  “We can’t be sure, of course,” he said. “Another eighty years, perhaps, the robot tells me; perhaps longer.”

  She sat silently for several moments. Then she said: “Eighty years, Gansha Cye, what about the population problem?”

  “Problem?”

  Problem? He wasn’t at all sure what she meant. And was he mistaken, or had her interest in him—her supposed interest in him, he corrected himself firmly—changed from one of equal to equal—and he’d granted her that status readily—to a point where she was suddenly asking credentials of him? That last question smelled more of test than of inquiry.

  But that, of course, was ridiculous. He admitted that he was tired, and probably not up to par; but she was, after all, only a young woman—even if she did resemble Lorri.

  Did she? He looked at her more closely, puzzled. No—no, not physically. Still, there was that same look in her eyes. Not a resemblance to the old man, but a similarity.

  He realized she was quite aware of his scrutiny, and smiled quickly. “I’m sorry, my dear; I’m quite tired, and I’m afraid I didn’t understand your last remark.”

  “Well, there are only so many of us,” she explained readily enough. “It seems to me we’re stretching rather thin already. I’d think there’s a limit to what we can do—that a spaceship would require an effort beyond the capabilities of our labor force.”

  And now she was explaining to him. Politely enough, but explaining. Still, he had missed the point, hadn’t he?

  He’d have to restore her good opinion of his intellectual resources. And he thought he had an answer. “Well,” he said, “the population will certainly have grown in eighty years, don’t you think?”

  She looked at him with her eyebrows arched. “Not enough.”

  She was right, he realized, and wondered if he were blushing visibly. Strange, he’d never before thought of that; somehow, he’d always vaguely assumed that machinery, having replaced human muscles in practically all fields, would continue to multiply each villager’s abilities to a point where the village technology could be sustained at any level. But this was simply not true. It became a question, not of strength, but of operation. There was a definite limit to how many things one man could do at a time.

  But he told her what he told himself. “I’m sure that’ll be worked out,” he said; “I’ll ask the robot.”

  “I see.” She gave him a peculiar look, and there was a dawning comprehension of something in her eyes, though Tyrrel could not decide what he might have said to put it there.

  “Gansha Lorn was a great man, wasn’t he?” she said now, apparently at random.

  “The greatest we have had,” Tyrrel answered truthfully, the old sorrow rising to soften the set of his lips.

  “And the robot’s been a tremendous help, hasn’t he?”

  “We’d be far behind our present level without him; he knows so much…”

  “I see,” she said again, again as though she truly saw, her mind reaching far past the superficial point and grasping the fundamental truth beyond it. She half-turned on the seat, a new expression hovering over her face, and Tyrrel suddenly realized how slowly the car was moving, and how unimportant it was that it move any faster—or even move at all.

  But Lara Sem did not seem as mysteriously shocked as he was by this discovery. Rather, she acted as though…As though what she was doing was something that had to be done.

  They sat oddly apart on the hill.

  “Lara—I…”

  “Never mind, Tyrrel,” she said kindly. “It’s one of the things Lorri would have understood,’* she went on in a voice that was so low he caught only parts of what she was saying. “Lorri! There was a man. He despised them all. Clods. He hated stupidity; I can understand that. But he picked the prettiest woman in the village, nevertheless. A man!”

  Tyrrel heard the scorn in her voice, even if the words were incomprehensible. “I picked for blood. Yes, you’ve got good blood in you, Tyrrel—somewhere. Your pretty mother won out in you, but how will it be with a child of yours? With Lorn’s blood and mine?”

  Tyrrel stared at her, frightened. What was she babbling? What did it mean?

  “How was I to know?” she went on. “I saw Lorri in your face, and thought he was in your brain, as well. And then I found out. ‘What population problem?’ It was too late to stop, then.” Her voice touched hysteria. “But it’s a tragedy that it has to be a robot that does your thinking for you.”

  He could not understand her. Literally and figuratively, her words were incomprehensible; she sounded almost like Lorri in his last delirium.

  The memory of that day, coupled with this experience, was abruptly too much for him. He remembered too well the feeling of complete, grief-stricken loss, of utter abandonment. And those last minutes, when the man who had been almost a father to him had babbled like a demented fool…

  He discovered himself running down the hillside, back toward his car, his heart pumping, his face chilly with sweat, without a word or cry of farewell.

  The robot heard the car drive up, finally, and wondered what had happened to delay Tyrrel so long. But all his data files and prediction circuits—all the weight of past evidence, of countless suggestions unquestioningly accepted by the man, of endless insignificant preoccupations on Tyrrel’s part—now combined to bring forth the decision that there could not possibly be any significance in his lateness.

  And it was probably just as well that Tyrrel apologized hastily and then lay down on his mat, pale and weak-looking, and paid no attention to the robot, for the program instituted today was the only one that the robot had feared the man might question.

  Today he had told the engineering groups about servomechanisms.

  III

  The robot asked, years later, “Tyrrel, have you ever thought of marriage?” They stood looking at the town square in the sunlight.

  Tyrrel shook his head. “No,” he answered honestly enough, “I never have; I haven’t the time and energy to spare.”

  The robot nodded slowly. “I suppose you’re right.” He nodded again, in the direction of a woman who was crossing the town square with a child walking beside her. “It’s best to leave that to your people; besides, it’d be an awkward situation if you had a son. People might expect that you’d want him to succeed you.”

  “Yes, it would,” Tyrrel agreed.

  “That was Elin Lara, wasn’t it?” the robot commented. “There was a short time, a few years ago, when I halfthought you’d taken a special liking to her. But then she married Elin, of course.”

  “Yes, she did,” Tyrrel said. “I spoke to her once or twice. A strange girl.”

  There was nothing in the data-files to indicate that Tyrrel had ever lied to him, by omission or commission. At any rate, the robot was no longer as concerned with checking the actions of the townsmen as he once had been; it was too late now for his purposes to be defeated, no matter what the people did.

  The servomechanical civilization was inevitable—if the Earthmen stayed away.

  IV

  Tyrrel looked up from the slip in his hand. “Dorni Elin, eh?” The square-faced young man with the searching green eyes stood across the desk from Cye. “Yes, Gansha Cye,” he said. “My aircraft landed only an hour ago.”

  Tyrrel looked at him. I wonder if he knows, he thought. He has Lara’s eyes—he pulled his own eyes away from the light that Domi’s reflected—yes, and her manner, too. He felt a spasm of something flutter through his nervous system. But he has my face.

  He did not know what to do, or say. He had no conception of how to react in such a situation, for he was, at heart, a simple man with only one great secret locked into his soul—and now, with the secret resurrected, he had no more idea of how to face it than he would have known how to speak to Lara, had she stood there in Domi’s place.

  “I knew your mother, at one time,” he finally managed. How will he take that?

  The young man moved his head in Lara’s—still?�
�familiar gesture. “I hadn’t known,” he said. “How is she? I understand she’s still a designer in the Aerodynamics Section. I haven’t had time to see her.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t—don’t see her much,” Tyrrel stumbled. He dropped his eyes to the desk top and twisted his fingers behind his back.

  As if I were the boy, and he were I, he thought suddenly, savagely, in reaction to the grip around his chest.

  “Well,” he said a moment later in a stauncher voice, “we’ve certainly got a use for a servomechanical engineer around here.” Why had Dorni chosen that particular field, he wondered. “What I can’t understand is why you ever shipped out to that mining colony in the first place.”

  Dorni shrugged. “Kid stunt, I suppose; got sick of looking at the same patch of landscape all the time.”

  Tyrrel looked at him sharply. Somehow, it didn’t seem reasonable to believe that Dorni had ever made a foolish decision in his life. He made a noncomittal sound, and picked his personal communicator up from the desk. He pulled the aerial out, energized the switch, and waited for power to build up in the transmitter.

  “Suppose you have a talk with Robot?” he said while he waited. Dorni jerked his head sideward again. “Be fine,” he said.

  “Central,” the tinny voice rattled in his ear.

  Tyrrel grimaced and moved the earpiece slightly away. “This is Gansha Cye,” he said; “I want to talk to Robot.”

  “Which robot, sir?”

  “The robot, blast you,” Tyrrel bellowed, expending all his nervous energy in one charged bundle.

  He looked at Dorni and smiled. He wasn’t a bad-looking boy. Fine stuff. And he had Cye’s face. “Think you’ll get around to improving these things someday?” Tyrrel asked with a chuckle.

  “I intend to,” Dorni answered gravely.

  The robot walked quietly into Tyrrel’s office and saw Domi. The effortless and inhumanly precise stride did not change, but his circuits hummed with rephrases and new computations. He stopped beside the desk and studied Tyrrel.

  So, somehow, the man had done it after all. The robot felt a slight annoyance at never having completed his study of human psychology. He’d known how to handle Tyrrel, and that should have been enough—except that he hadn’t handled Tyrrel where it had counted most.

  Well, it was too late now. The boy was a completely unknown quality; the only thing to do now was to wait, and watch. If all this had been deliberate, it had been cleverly done. The boy had grown up where he wouldn’t be seen or noticed.

  Now he had come back to the city. Why?

  The villagers were a small group, and a young group. The genius strain that seemed to persist in cropping out in all humanoid races had not had time to diffuse. Tyrrel had been the product of his mother’s dominant “normal” genes, but Lara Sem’s characteristics, combined with Lor-ri’s recessive strain, had produced—specifically, what?

  The robot looked back at Domi. There was no mistaking the slow fire that burned behind those eyes. The question was, what would his motivations be? To what purpose. would that mind be turned, now, with the unknown deadline of the Earthmen’s return almost beaten?

  Tyrrel said, “Robot, this is Dorni Elin; he’s a new servomechanical engineer for your groups.”

  And once more the currents raced along the robot’s circuits. Servomechanical engineer! The boy, the unfathomable, the genius—was going to help him!

  Tyrrel watched them leave his office, his eyes and face blank.

  The robot hadn’t guessed, of course. He’d been watching carefully, and he had seen no signs of hesitation or uncertainty in Robot’s manner. His own expression, Tyrrel knew, had betrayed nothing.

  He looked at Domi’s record in the file on his desk. It had taken the boy just five years to make the mining colony completely automatic. Obviously, here was someone with all the high capabilities that would be needed to complete Lorri’s plan.

  Tyrrel smiled quietly, more at peace with himself than he had been in many years. Perhaps, someday, his line would produce someone to equal Lorri himself.

  V

  For the first five years that Dorni worked as a servo-engineer in the city, the Robot watched him and his work closely. The one dominant probability in the Robot’s mind had been that Dorni was the center of some sort of long-range plan to install him as Gansha after Tyrrel’s death. But there were too many points against this.

  For one thing, even Tyrrel had made no great effort to designate a successor. It was fairly obvious that he was prejudiced in his son’s favor—the Robot wondered what Domi, unaware of their kinship, thought of the frequent conferences Tyrrel had with him—but the Gansha was largely ineffectual. Moreover, there was Domi’s attitude, as well.

  Domi, apparently, wanted nothing but to be a good servomechanical engineer. He ate and slept briefly and hurriedly, working almost constantly, moving from one installation to another in a series of rapid flights in his personal helicopter, which he had rigged into almost full servomechanical operation. One industry after the other was being rendered completely automatic, fitted with appropriate variations of the controls that Dorni had designed for the mining colony.

  That was Domi’s field, obviously. As the Robot’s data files reviewed Domi’s record for him, he realized just how dangerous an opponent the boy could have been, if he had turned his energies to politics or social sciences—things which, fortunately, were only rudimentary in this society.

  But, after those first five years, there could no longer be any doubt that all of Domi’s genius was being channeled into only one direction, that of turning the village culture into a completely servomechanical civilization. And there could be no doubt that this was not just a skillful game, but a complete singleness of purpose so sincere that it rivalled the Robot’s own.

  Rivalled? The Robot chuckled in his mind. Augmented.

  Not because he did not know the scheduled figure, but because he wanted to enter it as data, the Robot checked the production on the GP robots. So far, aside from all the feedback and master-slave units, twelve copies of himself had been built.

  VI

  Dorni was seventy-four; Tyrrel was one hundred and sixteen. The Robot had been on Sathrea for ninety years, and the Earthmen still had not come. True, the ninety Sathrean years had only been seventy-six years Terran, but it seemed reasonable to assume that they would return shortly.

  Dorni sighed. Well, let them come. If they stayed away another five years, that was all right, too; but if they weren’t here shortly after that, he might have to do something about the Robot himself. He looked across the desk at Tyrrel’s leathery face and prayed the Gansha wouldn’t die before then.

  Tyrrel knew that Dorni was looking at him, but he could not read the significance of the man’s expression. He recalled that Dorai’s ability to make his face a mask had troubled him, in the beginning of their relationship. Now…He moved his hand, expressing his feelings to himself in a gesture of acceptance. He had known the Robot for so many years—a lack of obvious emotion was not as disconcerting as it had been.

  He felt his own face slacken into sadness; he still called these occasional meetings with Domi, perhaps out of sheer habit. He had never achieved what he had dreamed of with his son—the son who still did not know his real father, and now, never would. What was the purpose in telling him? He was sunk into his tools and drawing boards, fascinated by his machines and Autobrains; he had, so many times, refused the Ganshard that Tyrrel had hinted could be his.

  And yet, Tyrrel knew why he still called his son into his office and spent hours in talking to him. There was still the hope that someday, for some reason or the other, Dorni would finally look up and say, “All right, Gansha Cye. I’ve been wrong all these years; I’ll train one of my assistants to become Chief Engineer in my place, and “I’ll let you nominate me for the Ganshard.” But the words were never said, except in his mind, and*in his dreams.

  Once more. He was an old man; he had to try once more. “Domi?


  Dorni smiled faintly, and shook his head. “Pm sorry, Gansha Cye; all I’ve ever wanted to do was to become Chief Engineer.”

  He always knows, Tyrrel thought. Is there something special about my voice or my face as I say it?

  He relapsed into silence, feeling the old, familiar thoughts and feelings washing over him.

  So long since the Robot had come and Gansha Lord had died. He distinguished, among all the other emotions, the one that had been growing stronger in him since that time on the hill with Lara. Always, he had had someone to share the burden with. There had been Lorri, and then the Robot—Robot, now, as he almost had to be thought of, with so many other robots—and then there had been hope of Domi.

  But Dorni had not fulfilled his dream; it was still the Robot who understood him best. And the Robot was paying less and less attention to him, as the culture expanded and there were so many other things to attend to.

  Perhaps, if he had told Domi. If, sometime through the past years, he had claimed his son, and the son had acknowledged the father…

  He almost told him, then. He started to speak, but the thought that it was far too late stopped him, and he asked, “Have you ever thought about the Robot, Domi?” instead.

  Tyrrel wondered why he had phrased the question in that particular way. Then he reviewed his thoughts, and knew that it had sprung out of his loneliness and disappointment. His son would not succeed him, would not even truly become his friend, and the Robot was leaving him more and more alone. If he could not understand his son, he could at least discover why the Robot’s attitude had slowly changed.

  “There’s not much to think about, as far as the Robot’s concerned,” Dorni said. “Why?”

  “Not much to think about!” The statement had almost shocked him, he realized. “We owe him a tremendous debt—almost as large a one as we owe Lorri, may he rest. And yet, no one knows why he has done all this for us. No one can possibly understand why he does the things he does, or what motivates him. We can only accept him, remembering that he has always worked for our benefit. Isn’t that true?” he added, knowing that he was hoping it was not, that Dorni could at least tell him that much.

 

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