by Jerry
ON THE concrete-and-lead crater that housed the Venus ship there was a ladder, leading up the sheer walls to the compartment-amidships.
Tom paused at the foot of the ladder. Tom said, “I hope you understand this baby, Curt.”
Curt’s smile was bleak. “I understand it—all of it. Tom, I helped design it and build it. Give my regards to the gang.”
Dr. Reslone was coming along from the radio tower. He said, “The fog’s lifting, Curt, I guess it’s the word.” He came over to grip Curt’s hand.
Curt said, “You lads act like I’m not coming back. I’m in the hands of friends. At least one. Right, Vera?” Tom looked at her and back at Curt. Then he turned abruptly and walked off.
Curt said, “Tom’s sentimental. Loaded and ready, Doctor?”
“Loaded and ready. I—well . . .” He too turned and walked away.
Vera said, “What’s the matter with them?”
“They just don’t have faith in you, honey. But I do. And you have faith in me, haven’t you?”
“Complete faith,” she said. “What other course have you—lover?”
They went up the ladder together and into the passenger compartment. Below them, a mile down the plain, the control operator set the first phase of the propulsive blast into operation. Then, seconds later, the giant rocketshaped sheath of glowing admium began to leave its crater.
Then the white glare of its propulsive tail blast, brightening the entire county. And then it was a comet in the sky, growing smaller and smaller and smaller.
* * * * *
In his office there were tears in the Old Man’s eyes. His lined face was twisted in anguish.
His secretary said, “Some reporters, sir.”
He nodded. “I’ll talk to them.”
The first one said, “Sir, we’ve a story regarding some kind of rocket that left the New Mexico—”
“A space-ship,” the Old Man said, “carrying one of our agents. One of our best agents, gentlemen. And a martyr.”
“Martyr?” One of the writers said. “You mean, sir . . .?”
“I mean he’s directing the space-ship with a ton of a new explosive in its nose. An explosive, gentlemen, that will blast a planet into gas. The planet is Venus and when the ship reaches it there will be no more Venus. And that’s all I have to say today.”
“But, sir . . .”
The Old Man raised his hand. “Gentlemen, he’s been—he’s been all the son I’ve ever known. And though I’m proud of him today you’ll understand, I hope, there are times when a man has no words.”
They left and his secretary came in. She said, “He knew, then, about the explosive?”
“He knew. He was a strange lad, Donna. A little too big and a little too bright for our world. And too much alone. He couldn’t have any destiny but this.”
REAPING TIME
A. Bertram Chandler
It was already dark when they came to the city. The sky, save for a low bar of sullen crimson overhanging the low hills to the westward, was overcast. The road along which they had come glimmered pallidly, stretched behind them broad and straight to the very edge of the featureless grey plain. Before them, solidly ugly valves of dull metal between two squat black towers, was the gate.
‘Are you sure there is no mistake?’ asked the woman.
She looked up at the forbidding portal, at the black, harshly utilitarian architecture beyond. Few lights, and those, dim and furtive, broke the monotony of straight perpendicular lines, of geometrical masses upheaved darkly against darkness. And there was no sound from the city, no joyful clamour of bells, no music of plucked strings and singing voices. There was, perhaps, the merest tremor of the air, a vibration felt rather than heard, a distant throbbing as of some great and well-tended machine.
‘Are you sure there is no mistake?’ she said.
‘No,’ replied the man confidently. ‘This—’ and he flung out an almost possessive hand, ‘is better, perhaps, than we were led to believe. It has no tinsel prettiness. It has . . . dignity.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the woman. ‘There is dignity.’
And with the words the harsh, strong lines of her face and body took added strength, and harshness, as did those of the man. They were, this husband and wife, worthy citizens of the place to which they were come. Worthier far than many they had known who had let some softness, some weakness, bar them forever from even so much as setting foot upon the road.
Slowly, silently, the gates swung open. Deliberately, not looking beck, the man stepped forward—his woman, as was proper, a pace or so to the rear. Behind them the gates shut. There was something irrevocable about their closing. There was the merest suggestion of an unmusical clang.
To their right, as they entered, was a door, open, in the dexter tower. Light streamed from it, was reflected brightly from the black, polished pavement. There was movement inside the gatehouse, a shadow that shifted across the source of illumination. Then all was still again, end the bright light in the tower glared unwinking through the open doorway.
Confidently, his heels ringing on the polished pavement, the man walked towards the only sign of life that they had so far seen. No less confidently his woman followed. They hesitated on the threshold of the gatehouse—but this was due to physical rather than to psychological reasons. The harsh brilliance of the unshaded lamp was cruel to eyes long inured to semi-darkness. But it was not long before they were able to see, albeit dimly at first, the desk behind which sat the Gatekeeper. And then they saw the Gatekeeper himself, in his drab, monkish habit, and the Book before him, and the text, lurid orange on black, on the wall behind him. Its sentiments, harshly uncompromising, did much to dispel the mistrust the hooded robe had inspired in the man and woman. It was the woman who repeated the words, unctuously—As a man sows, so shall he surely reap . . .
‘Yes,’ agreed the Gatekeeper. ‘Surely . . .’
It was not the words so much as the tone in which they were spoken the faintly mocking voice and the eyes, brightly sardonic, peering out from beneath the cowl—that caused the mistrust to return. And there was, although both the pilgrims stared ill-manneredly, no sign of a beard.
‘He must be off duty,’ whispered the woman. ‘His relief maybe . . .’
‘It could be. If we’re to believe all we’re told they’ve had some rather queer types here . . .’
The Gatekeeper ignored them. With practiced bands be flipped over the pages of the Book. He asked, in a dry official voice—‘John and Sara Goode?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Let me see . . . Your qualifications for entry?’
‘They are in your records.’
‘True . . .’ The slim hands still turned the heavy, thick pages, hat more slowly now. They paused, hovered over the open book. Then ‘Your temperance work?’
‘My wife and myself were indefatigable labourers in that corner of the Lord’s vineyard. It was largely due to our efforts that our town exercised the right of local option . . .’
‘And that certain of your fellow citizens poisoned themselves with what is known. I believe, as rotgut?’
‘We would not know. That is a matter for their conscience. It . . .’
An upraised hand cut him short The eyes under the cowl twinkled shrewdly. The voice, grimly humorous, quoted—‘‘And wine that maketh glad the heart of man . . .’
‘Strong drink is a mocker,’ came the ready reply.
‘He is testing us.’ whispered the woman.
‘And wasn’t there a wedding feast, once, where the water was turned into wine?’
‘The wine in those days’ the answer came glibly, ‘was no more than unfermented fruit juices.’
‘H’m. There’s something here about Sunday cinemas. I trust that in your campaign against this form of entertainment you were concerned chiefly about the low artistic quality of the films?’
‘That was no concern of ours. It was breaking the Sabbath, and that we could not tolerate.’
‘There were always the churches,’ the woman put in primly.
‘True,’ sighed the Gatekeeper. ‘There are always the churches . . . . .’
Another page turned slowly under his slim, strong, hand. Then, and his voice was no longer humorous—‘There was a girl—young, silly, parentless, a servant in your household. There was a young airman lonely, far from home. There was one of the Sabbaths that you strove to bring to your community no cheap plush comfort of the cinema, no warm, friendly hotel lounge—only a long walk over the moors, the two young people alone together. and the sweeping searchlights and the muttering gunfire to the north reminding the young man of the fate that would be his. He would have married her, I think—but he fell in dames over Berlin.
‘That girl—she needed an older woman then, someone on whom she could lean in her trouble. You turned her out. Do you know what happened to her?’
The woman replied.
‘We neither know nor care. She was the Scarlet Woman. She had no place in a Christian household.’
‘There was One who said,’ remarked the Gatekeeper quietly, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone . . .’
‘And we are without sin,’ cried the woman, pride lending what was almost beauty to her severe features. ‘We have neither lied, stolen, nor committed adultery. We have honoured the name of the Lord and kept it holy. We have kept the Sabbath.’
‘Then you may enter into the Master’s presence.’
The Gatekeeper rose, his feet clicking curiously on the polished floor. His cowl fell back, and for the first time they saw his horns . . .
1952
INSTINCT
Lester del Rey
The trouble with an instinct is that if s a ritual—something that started sometime with a purpose. The purpose is lost; the reason for the purpose is lost, and only the ritual remains . . .
Senthree waved aside the slowing scooter and lengthened his stride down the sidewalk; he had walked all the way from the rocket port, and there was no point to a taxi now that he was only a few blocks from the bio-labs. Besides, it was too fine a morning to waste in riding. He sniffed at the crisp, clean fumes of gasoline appreciatively and listened to the music of his hard heels slapping against the concrete.
It was good to have a new body again. He hadn’t appreciated what life was like for the last hundred years or so. He let his eyes rove across the street toward the blue flame of a welding torch and realized how long it had been since his eyes had really appreciated the delicate beauty of such a flame. The wise old brain in his chest even seemed to think better now.
It was worth every stinking minute he’d spent on Venus. At times like this, one could realize how good it was to be alive and to be a robot.
Then he sobered as he came to the old bio-labs. Once there had been plans for a fine new building instead of the old factory in which he had started it all four hundred years ago. But somehow, there’d never been time for that. It had taken almost a century before they could master the technique of building up genes and chromosomes into the zygote of a simple fish that would breed with the natural ones. Another century had gone by before they produced Oscar, the first artificially made pig. And there they ‘seemed to have stuck. Sometimes it seemed to Senthree that they were no nearer recreating Man than they had been when they started.
He dilated the door and went down the long hall, studying his reflection in the polished walls absently. It was a good body. The black enamel was perfect and every joint of the metal case spelled new techniques and luxurious fitting. But the old worries were beginning to settle. He grunted at Oscar LXXII, the lab mascot, and received an answering grunt. The pig came over to root at his feet, but he had no time for that. He turned into the main lab room, already taking on the worries of his job.
It wasn’t hard to worry as he saw the other robots. They were clustered about some object on a table, dejection on every gleaming back. Senthree shoved Ceofor and Beswun aside and moved up. One look was enough. The female of the eleventh couple lay there in the strange stiffness of protoplasm that had died, a horrible grimace on her face.
“How long—and what happened to the male?” Senthree asked.
Ceofor swung to face him quickly. “Hi, boss. You’re late. Hey, new body!”
Senthree nodded, as they came grouping around, but his words were automatic as he explained about falling in the alkali pool on Venus and ruining his worn body completely. “Had to wait for a new one. And then the ship got held up while we waited for the Arcturus superlight ship to land. They’d found half a dozen new planets to colonize, and had to spread the word before they’d set down. Now, what about the creatures?”
“We finished educating about three days ago,” Ceofor told him. Ceofor was the first robot trained hi Sen-three’s technique of gene-building and the senior assistant. “Expected you back then, boss. But . . . well, see for yourself. The man is still alive, but he won’t be long.”
Senthree followed them back to another room and looked through the window. He looked away quickly. It had been another failure. The man was crawling about the floor on hands and knees, falling half the time to his stomach, and drooling. His garbled mouthing made no sense.
“Keep the news robots out,” he ordered. It would never do to let the public see this. There was already too much of a cry against homovivifying, and the crowds were beginning to mutter something about it being unwise to mess with vanished life forms. They seemed actually afraid of the legendary figure of Man.
“What luck on Venus?” one of them asked, as they began the job of carefully dissecting the body of the female failure to look for the reason behind the lack of success.
“None. Just another rumor. I don’t think Man ever established self-sufficient colonies. If he did, they didn’t survive. But I found something else—something the museum would give a fortune for. Did my stuff arrive?”
“You mean that box of tar? Sure, it’s over there hi the corner.”
Senthree let the yielding plastic of his mouth smile at them as he strode toward it. They had already ripped off the packing, and now he reached up for a few fine wires in the tar. It came off as he pulled, loosely repacked over a thin layer of wax. At that, he’d been lucky to sneak it past customs. This was the oldest, crudest, and biggest robot discovered so far—perhaps one of the fabulous Original Models. It stood there rigidly, staring out of its pitted, expressionless face. But the plate on its chest had been scraped carefully clean, and Senthree pointed it out to them:
“MAKEPEACE ROBOT, SER. 324MD2991. SURGEON.”
“A mechanic for Man bodies,” Beswun translated. “But that means . . .”
“Exactly.” Senthree put it into words. “It must know how Man’s body was built—if it has retained any memory. I found it in a tarpit by sheer accident, and it seems to be fairly well preserved. No telling whether there were any magnetic fields to erode memories, of course, and it’s all matted inside. But if we can get it to working . . .”
Beswun took over. He had been trained as a physicist before the mysterious lure of the bio-lab had drawn him here. Now he began wheeling the crude robot away. If he could get it into operation, the museum could wait. The recreation of Man came first!
Senthree pulled x-ray lenses out of a pouch and replaced the normal ones in his eyes before going over to join the robots who were beginning dissection. Then he switched them for the neutrino detector lenses that had made this work possible. The neutrino was the only particle that could penetrate the delicate protoplasmic cells without ruining them and yet permit the necessary millions of tunes magnification. It was a fuzzy image, since the neutrino spin made such an insignificant field for the atomic nuclei to work
on that few were deflected. But through them, he could see the vague outlines of the pattern within the cells. It was as they had designed the original cell—there had been no reshuffling of genes in handling. He switched to his micromike hands and began the delicate work of tracing down the neuron connections. There was only an occasional mutter as one of the robots beside him switched to some new investigation.
The female should have lived! But somewhere, in spite of all their care, she had died. And now the male was dying. Eleven couples—eleven failures. Senthree was no nearer finding the creators of his race than he had been centuries before.
Then the radio in his head buzzed its warning and he let it cut in, straightening from his work. “Senthree.”
“The Director is in your office. Will you report at once?”
“Damn!” The word had no meaning, but it was strangely satisfying at times. What did old Emptinine want . . . or wait again, there’d been a selection while he was on Venus investigating the rumors of Man. Some young administrator—Arpeten—had the job now.
Ceofor looked up guiltily, obviously having tuned in.
“I should have warned you. We got word three days ago he was coming, but forgot it in reviving the couple. Trouble?”
Senthree shrugged, screwing his normal lenses back in and trading to the regular hands. They couldn’t have found out about the antique robot. They had been seen by nobody else. It was probably just sheer curiosity over some rumor that they were reviving the couple. If his appropriation hadn’t been about exhausted, Senthree would have told him where to go; but now was hardly the time, with a failure on one hand and a low credit balance on the other. He polished his new head quickly with the aid of one of the walls for a mirror and headed toward his office.
But Arpeten was smiling. He got to his feet as the bio-lab chief entered, holding out a well-polished hand. “Dr. Senthree. Delighted. And you’ve got an interesting place here. I’ve already seen most of it. And that pig—they tell me it’s a descendant of a boar out of your test tubes.”