by Earl
* * * * *
HE WAS the last in the line. Six million and more of the metal-bodied, mineral-brained creatures had preceded him. The brain-units of each of them had been destroyed after the precious capsule of activating radium had been removed. The radium was to be added to the stores aboard the space-ship.
Tumilten saw them open the hinged receptacle in the head of the robot in front of him, take out the small radium-phial, and then reduce the brain-unit to a molten blob with a sharp ray of heat. He shuddered mentally. That was death! A sudden erasure almost unknown among his people, except at rare times like this. Ordinarily one lived on and on, for thousands of years, till the final last “fading out,” when the brain-unit had burned itself completely out with radium.
The operator of the heat ray turned his multiple eyes on Tumilten. He telepathized, “Come, you. You are the last.” No sympathy, no slightest spark of feeling. The operator had been ordered by the Council to destroy six million brain-units, and there could be no such thing as pity for those doomed. The thing the Council had stressed was that they be sure to retrieve every radium-capsule before using the heat ray.
Tumilten took one step forward, then two backward. The operator looked at him with what might have been surprize.
“Tumilten does not want to be rayed out!” said Tumilten.
“What nonsense is this?” returned the operator. “The Council commands it. You have the cross-mark of the Unchosen on your frontlet. Come here and be rayed.”
Tumilten spoke for himself again: “Why should Tumilten be rayed out? He wants to live!”
“Why? Why?” snapped back the operator impatiently. “Foolish one, because there is a shortage of radium. In that long journey through space in search of a new home, only the Chosen few can be supplied with radium. These six million capsules will help to keep them renewed till they find a haven.”
The telepathized voice seemed to soften a trifle from its metallic indifference. “It is nothing, Younger. A fleeting moment of heat and it is over. You were created and now you are to be uncreated. After you are rayed, the ray will be turned on its operator, who is also of the Unchosen. Come——”
But Tumilten was thinking otherwise. With a click of internal machinery he whirled, and ran; ran with the smooth speed of high-powered machinery. The operator stood for a moment in perplexity, then swung his heat ray toward the escaping robot.
Tumilten, his four triply jointed legs propelling him forward with ponderous velocity, saw the sands around him curl up and cake and run together. The heat ray was on his legs. Pain came to him, not as a physical sensation, but merely as the coded clicking of a thermocouple in his chest. It was warning him that his internal heat was reaching a dangerous point.
But he ran on, even though he knew his fuel tank might at any instant blow up and destroy him. In another moment he had gone beyond the range of the ray and was safe. He stopped then and looked back. He saw the operator stare at him impassively, then quickly raise the ray to his own head.
The operator had carried out his duty except in one detail. The escape of Tumilten was the exceptional detail.
WE SAT spellbound before the metal ball as the thought-images ended abruptly with a faint click and the pulsing carrier wave came into being. Then with a soundless click, the episode we had just witnessed began again.
Walker snapped off the current and lit a cigarette with trembling fingers.
“That was great!” he exclaimed. “Before, trying it alone, it was a meaningless jumble of superimposed impressions to me. But with our two minds—possibly en rapport since we were both concentrating on the one thing—we got—well, perspective. Which simply means each of us not only received the thought-message direct, but also by reflection from the other’s brain.”
That was just like Walker, to be more interested in rationalizing the experience we had just had, than in analyzing the phenomenon. For my part, I must confess I was awed.
“Lord!” I gasped. “It’s unbelievable! We were seeing and hearing things long since done!”
“Not just seeing and hearing,” said Walker, expelling a cloud of smoke to the ceiling. “That was living it! But then I always reasoned telepathy should be something like that. The senses are just imperfect instruments of the brain. Mind-to-mind contact—this sort of thing—eliminates the clumsier sensory means of communication. Think of it, Cliff, we’ve lived an episode in some other creature’s life!”
I shook my head dazedly. “And what a creature! It wasn’t human, Bill. It was a soulless, thinking machine—a robot!” I shuddered Involuntarily. “How can a wholly mechanical creature think like a human being? Present-day science wouldn’t admit of a reasoning robot.”
“Present-day science wouldn’t admit of hypersensory telepathy either,” returned Walker dryly. “Yet there we have it in that metal ball. This whole thing—we’ve got to make up our minds to it, no matter how fantastic—goes beyond our science. But why be as superstitious as the hardhead who said ‘There ain’t no such an animal’ when seeing the giraffe?”
I had begun pacing the room excitedly, trying to keep from feeling that the whole world of accepted things had fallen out at the bottom. A robot! A thinking machine! Fantastic, ridiculous, impossible! I found myself shaking my head vehemently as though arguing with someone.
“What it is,” said Walker soberly, “is an episodic record of the life of a creature whose race once lived on Earth—totally unsuspected by our present civilization.” A yawn escaped his lips. “Come back a few more evenings and we’ll run through this whole story. I’m too tired to go on tonight.”
THE next evening I went early to Walker’s place, eager to get on with our bizarre experiment. I had had one or two qualms through the day that I had dreamed about last night. My humdrum office routine failed to take my mind off the event.
Without preamble, Walker had me sit before the apparatus.
“I’ve already set the coils for a higher frequency and therefore a different episode,” he informed me. “Did you notice that in the last, the whole thing seemed to have been told or narrated by someone? Maybe the series of records leads to some conclusion or denouement.”
He knifed a switch. After a phonograph-like period of scratchings, the sudden panorama of mental images again sprang into our minds. I speak for Walker, for we afterward found we both saw the identically same things, though our interpretations of what we heard—by telepathy, I mean—were always to be slightly at variance.
The scene we seemed to see in front of our eyes was again desert-like. In the foreground were two of the robot creatures, conversing. Then, as before, sound came to us—the undertone of smooth, intricate machinery. Then came a gradual fusing of minds, till we no longer knew ourselves as William Walker and Cliff Darrell, but identified ourselves completely with an alien mind. . . .
* * * * *
A CLEAR bell-note rang inside the brains of the two conversing robots. Eight times it sounded.
“The eighth period,” said Tumilten. “Tumilten must leave you, Zonzi, to go on duty. You will come here again tomorrow?”
“If there is not other business,” returned the Elder. “Any time now the Ancients Supreme may call a Council of all Elders, in the Hall of the Twelve. When it comes, this Council will last for days. And when it is over, the plans for the great space journey will be completed.”
They separated without any form of good-bye greeting. Tumilten moved his quadrupedal metal body toward the nearby city. Zonzi clambered into his small, ovoid airship and sped silently away. They had met out in the open wastes of the desert because they liked to be alone with each other.
In a few minutes Tumilten had reached the city, which housed only one kind of machinery—that for making wire. All kinds of wires were made here, cable-thick, filament-thin, of every kind of metal, and even of non-metals, and for all uses conceivable in a completely mechanized civilization.
Tumilten stalked unhurriedly into the bowels of this hissing, thundering
Vulcan city, and made his way finally down a corridor crowded with other robots. They were of all sizes and shapes, but all had the same head-pieces. And inside the solidly armored heads, all had the same brain-units.
Tumilten did a number of things that would have bewildered an organic being. In one well-stocked room he removed a small battery from his middle and replaced it with a fresh one. In another chamber he slid open a tiny door in his head and replaced the capsule of radium-salt with another. In another room an attendant removed his tentacles and replaced them with short, strong arms of steel with claws at the ends. Last of all, he poured a thick, creamy oil into cups in his shoulders.
Then, all prepared like an overhauled engine, he passed by means of various moving stairways and elevators to a gigantic room filled with sparkling, hissing, thundering machinery that would have deafened and blinded a carbonaceous creature. For a moment he stood stock-still, gazing abstractedly at the numerous mechanical figures tending these machines.
When the bell-note struck nine times in his, and in all others’, brain-units, he strode on his four triply-jointed legs toward one of the machines. The robot who had been there left as soon as Tumilten had stepped before the control-system with its multitudinous levers and dials.
Then for fifty hours Tumilten tended the machine, unsweating, tireless, his reactions as quick and fresh at the end of that period as at the start. In all this he was no different from all his fellow Youngers in other cities. But in one thing, perhaps, he was different—he had the thoughts of an Elder.
Of an Elder? Perhaps the thoughts of an Ancient. Perhaps, even, thoughts new to their race altogether! For he was wondering where their race had sprung from. Their race had come from another star, it was said. But who or what had created them?
Youngers were created by Elders; these Elders by other Elders; these by others before. But where was the beginning? Who had created the first Younger? All life was creation. Therefore, who had created the first of their race? Had it been, as the legend went—even these machine-creatures had legends—that another form of life had created them? It was a secret Zonzi knew, but would not give out. It was a secret that Tumilten’s super-quickened brain-unit wanted to know.
It was three work-periods later that Tumilten knew that the Elders had finished their council and had laid their final plans for search of a new home. A elide in his brain-unit, and a voice spoke to him in their intricate language which was half in mathematical symbols. It was a command to leave the city of wire-machines and go immediately to the main city of the Elders.
Mechanically, without thought of questioning the strange command, Tumilten went to the city’s air-exit, to find himself in company with a hundred other Youngers, all going to the same destination and obeying the same summons. Arriving at their destination, they were immediately set to work on what Tumilten knew was a giant space-ship.
These Youngers at work on the ship, drawn in small groups from every city in their closely clustered community, did not complain when their work-periods were lengthened. Nor was there any explanation. It was not till Youngers had lived for thousands of years that they sought answer to what the Elders and Ancients commanded them to do. And by the time they sought such answers, they were ready to be made Elders.
And that marked the main fault of these mechanical creatures—a tediously slow evolution of the individual mind.
The giant space-craft was completed in fifteen years. All other preparations had been in the meantime completed, and the day came when the Twelve Ancients, speaking as one, addressed the many millions of Youngers.
“Youngers, our race is to seek a new home in the void,” spoke the Supreme Voice, reaching to every brain-unit by broadcast telepathy. “Unfortunately, due to radium shortage, only a chosen number can leave. All the Elders are of the Chosen, but only one million of the Youngers. Most of you Youngers must be a sacrifice to this great venture. You are to be uncreated, and your brain-units to be destroyed so that we may take along your radium capsules. A white cross-mark will be placed on the frontal plates of those not chosen.”
That was all. A day later Tumilten saw the emissary of the Council pass among the ranks of Youngers, with an instrument that blazoned a white crossmark on certain of them. It was Zonzi himself.
ZONZI raised the instrument as he came to Tumilten.
“You are not of the Chosen,” he announced, with something akin to sadness in his manner. “The Council chose purely by lot.”
Tumilten, of mixed reactions, said simply: “Tumilten would only wish that before the end he might know of those greater secrets of the past.”
Zonzi extended a tiny square box of metal. “That was anticipated, Tumilten. Since you are to be uncreated so soon, there can be no harm in revealing the past arcana of our race. There are thought-recorded for you here all those things from the Books.”
Tumilten took the tiny machine almost reverently.
Mechanical Elder looked at mechanical Younger. A spark of something unmechanical passed between them; something their hard race had known little of—personal friendship.
Then without further word, Zonzi marked the white cross on the Younger and stepped away. Tumilten watched him blazon the indelible cross on others and gradually move down the line. The Younger looked at the thought-recorder for a moment and then stuffed it into his chest storage space.
WHEN the images had ceased, Walker turned to me after shutting off the current.
“The chronology of these two episodes is reversed,” he said. “Obviously, the first scene we saw, last night, represented the carrying out of the Council’s general slaughter of the Youngers. If I increase the frequency again, I’ll get a still earlier episode. I hope so, because it would probably clear up what seems to be rather mysterious goings-on right now. Another half-hundred turns on the secondary ought to do it.”
As he prepared to switch in the extra coil—he had previously had a number of them ready for that purpose—I held up a hand. “Wait a minute,” I pleaded. “Don’t be in such a hurry about it. Let me get my breath.”
“Okay,” laughed Walker. He could be so calm about such things. A real, honest-to-goodness ghost materializing in his presence would simply send him scampering for a camera and an electroscope. He laughed again.
“Look,” he said, displaying the last joint of his little finger with the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. “That’s how much mankind knows of the universe. Each little crumb of new knowledge we gather startles us, but if we could once perceive the body of the All—our present science would seem like childish puttering.”
“You’ve said that before,” I grunted. “But tell me one thing. Where does this robot race fit in the scheme of evolution?”
“Doesn’t.” Walker was at the window, staring out at the endless stream of traffic. “You know, this has set me thinking on that very thing. Evolution fails to account, in the last analysis, for the quite sudden uprise of intelligence. We have to assume that after Nature had fooled around with various forms of life for a half-billion years, she suddenly came up with a mutation that could reason, evolving in a short fifty or one hundred thousand years. The Survival of the Fittest angle has the paradox in it of saying that homo survived not because of, but in spite of, intelligence. Because while beetle-browed Neandertal and equally unfit Heidelberg flourished, brain meant nothing against brawn. The Mutation or Sport theory of accounting for the genus homo, on the other hand, doesn’t easily explain where the first species sapiens found a mate to carry on his particular strain.”
“What are you driving at?” I asked impatiently. Walker had a habit of wandering around with words.
He shrugged. “I don’t know, myself. Just inner doubts I’ve had for a long time. But this record of a mechanical creature of at least prehistoric times may give us some startling clues.”
“You mean it may have a connection with earthly life?—with man and evolution?” I snorted. “He’s from some other world—some utterly alien form of life.�
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Little though I knew it, I was right—and wrong, too.
Walker damped his cigarette. “We’ll find out soon enough. We’ll tune in the next ‘recording’ of the metal ball. Whoever or whatever made this thought-record, made it with a purpose in mind, I’m sure of that.”
He knifed a group of switches that cut another coil into his secondary, increasing the frequency of his Tesla field. Then he snapped on the generator and motioned for me to get into place.
I got into my seat with avid eagerness, wondering what further strange things would reveal themselves to us. Walker fed current into his coils. The now familiar hiss of the “carrier” wave came again. A moment later there was the sudden flash of images that carried with them sound and feeling and thought. I don’t know how else to describe the very completeness of our contact in the. thought-messages.
In a rapport that made us one with the narrator, we became aware of listening to a language of clear, lucid thought, rather than words. Every nuance of expression was understandable, as if the speaker were using the universal tongue of the atoms that compose all things. . . .
* * * * *
“WHEN this sun was a younger star,” said the ultra-voice, “and all its planets had been but newly spewed from its seething, white-hot surface by the influence of a passing star, our people came from the outer void.”
Tumilten, of the Youngers, listened eagerly. Zonzi of the Elders was one of the Keepers of History. His knowledge of their people’s past went way back to the dim times when they had lived on the planets of another star. It was his privilege to sit periodically in council with the twelve Ancients; those twelve who had lived on that other world, and whose ages ran into incredible figures. Yet what is time to a creature of metal?
“Housed in a gigantic space-ship,” went on Zonzi, “our predecessors—including of course the Twelve—spanned the enormous void between that other star and this one, and finally landed on the ninth and outermost planet. There our race took up its normal course of existence, finding suitable minerals and materials to make replacement parts for their bodies. In a short time they began creating a group of Youngers to replace those of the Ancients who had faded out during the tremendous journey.