The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “Yet, though many Youngers were created, it was soon seen that their numbers would never reach the total our race had had on that other star. For of radium, the life-giving element which gives conscious being to our brain-units, there was a limited supply in this sun system.

  “It was debated for a while whether to leave this radium-impoverished system and seek another, richer in this element. But the Elders of that time had had enough of age-long travel through the endless void. They did not relish the idea of again seeking and seeking through space for a sun with planets. For perhaps you know that only one out of 100,000 stars has a family of satellites.”

  Tumilten nodded. “Why did our race leave its other home?”

  “For two reasons,” replied Zonzi. “First, because all the available radium had been finally used up. And second, because the parent sun was burning out and becoming dark and cold. And without the energy of a sun to feed its many machines, the race could not thrive.

  “Some there were who advocated a harnessing of the terrible power of atomic-energy to replace sun power. But after the awful explosion of an entire planet, with thousands of our people living on it, through the escaping of an atomic-power vortex, the Elders would have no more to do with such a wild, treacherous source of power. No, they must have the safe and gentle sun power, and for that they had to go out in search of a young and hot star with a family of planets.”

  Hardly had Zonzi paused when Tumilten came up with another eager question—“But where had our race come from previous to that? Had they come from still another star-family, again leaving a cooled and dying sun for a newer and hotter one? Or is it true—as certain legends go—that our race was created by another, a strangely non-mineral form of intelligent life?”

  Zonzi waved two of his prehensile tentacles as if startled, or shocked. “Careful what you say, Tumilten,” he admonished.

  “But is that true?” persisted the Younger. “Your knowledge as Keeper of History comes from the lore contained in the indelible records of the Books. Surely you have read in those Books of that ultimate beginning of our race?”

  Zonzi again twitched his fore-tentacles, this time as if in hesitation of what to say. If his mechanical features had been able to register emotion, he would have looked grave and thoughtful.

  Finally he spoke—“There are some things in the Books it is best to leave unheralded. We, the Keepers of History, are under oath not to reveal the greater secrets of the past to the Youngers.” He waved a tentacle negatively. “No, Tumilten, your question must remain unanswered.”

  Tumilten knew it was useless to press the point. Close though he and Zonzi were to each other, there was yet a barrier between them—the barrier between all Elders and Youngers. The Youngers were the doers of the race, the runners of machines. The Elders were the thinkers, the ones to guide the greater destiny of the race, in company with the allwise Ancients.

  Tumilten was an anomaly as a Younger. He wanted to plumb the misted past, speculate on the equally misted future. And he wanted to think. . . .

  Zonzi gazed at his companion with wonder. What strange spark existed in his brain-unit, so newly formed from cold, unreasoning mineral? He had been created but a thousand years before, and already his brain had become subtle and quickened, as if he had been an Elder of many millennia of existence.

  “Well,” said Tumilten at length, with a tone that among humans would have been called a sigh. “Go on, Zonzi, with the history of our race since it has been here in this star-family.”

  “FROM the ninth planet,” continued Zonzi, “our race gradually worked inward, as the central sun slowly cooled through the ages. The eighth planet, then the seventh, and then the sixth. The sixth had no less than ten satellites of its own—tiny bodies that had been ripped from its molten surface during the cataclysmic event that had formed this family of planets. Grandchildren of the sun they were, and three of them yielded large deposits of radium, thus allowing our race to increase its numbers.

  “We Youngers of that time—all Elders now—were privileged to witness one of the grandest sights of all time. It was the formation of the rings of the sixth planet. The nearest planetoid to the mother planet, hovering for long ages on the danger line, finally slipped its slowing orbit too close, and the titanic gravitation of the primary planet tore it into shredded fragments. That was a memorable sight!”

  Zonzi paused in memory of it, then went on—“Time moved on, the sun cooled more, and our race moved inward to the fifth planet, the giant of them all, with nine satellites. We took up our abode on one of the planetoids, as the primary itself was too stormy and violent. But on the central planet we found large deposits of radium and we built a huge encampment for its recovery. To ward off the cyclonic, corrosive storms, we built the great counter-eddy machine, fed by the planet’s inner store of heat. It still stands today, although the radium supplies are depleted. And it will stand for future ages, this great Red-spot, site of our giant counter-eddy machine.

  “From the giant fifth planet, led by our race’s constant need for the stronger rays of the central sun, we went to the fourth. In going there we passed the belt of asteroids, those broken pieces of a world which mark another vain attempt to harness the demoniac energy of the atom. But a few hundred years before a nameless experimenter had blown himself and an entire planet to bits.

  “But to go on, our race spread itself over the fourth planet, a small one and almost barren of radium, so that we could only stay long enough to build enormous sluice-ways in which the poor ores could be worked for what little radium there was. These large sluice-ways represent a great engineering achievement. Water from the polar caps was pumped down these enormous canals, and chemicals added which caused the radium to dissolve from the heaps of sand thrown in. Then the radium-rich water was run into great vats at the junctions of the canals, and here worked for the metal itself. A great achievement.”

  Zonzi curled and uncurled a tentacle before going on—“From the fourth planet we came to this, the third. And now we are faced with a shortage of radium. All the outer planets have been depleted, this planet is quite radiumless, and its satellite is scarred with our mine shafts seeking the metal.

  “Our race, Tumilten, is faced with a crisis—a crisis greater than any other in our history, save one. That other crisis was when that star which was our people’s previous homeland burned dim and our machines began to idle for lack of sun power. Thus our race left its age-old home to seek a new one. But at least they had sufficient radium to renew each and every brain-unit during that frightfully long journey through the void at the speed of light.

  “In this present crisis, we shall not have enough. The Elders who have explored the two inner planets for radium found little. Thus, when our final plans have been laid, and the huge ark to carry us through space is built, many brain-units will have to remain—to become uncreated; to become inanimate mineral matter.

  “It will be soon now that our race—those chosen—will plunge into the abysm of eternal space, to seek a new homeland among die uncounted stars.”

  THE strange thought-voice faded away and a click announced the end of that episode. I’ve tried to give what we heard—or absorbed mentally—as we heard it. But I find that our language is simply incapable of expressing the message’s true form. At least the gist of it is there.

  Walker and I blinked as though we had awakened from a deep sleep, then stared at each other in a sudden flood of amazement at what we had just heard.

  “We can have a gin chaser for that,” I muttered. I ran to the window, gulped in fresh air, and stared quickly around. “Just wanted to make sure Earth was still here,” I added with a lame chuckle.

  Walker stood staring at the metal ball in fascination.

  “That thing has dynamite in it,” he murmured softly; “mental dynamite—enough to blow up our civilization’s pet belief that mankind is the only reasoning race ever to exist. And look at the mysteries it explains—the rings of Saturn, the Red-sp
ot of Jupiter, the canals of Mars, the craters of the moon!”

  “Not to mention the odd scarcity of radium on Earth,” I added.

  “I have an idea, though,” continued Walker thoughtfully, “that a bigger surprize is ahead—in the episodes following. Something relating directly to human life. Have you noticed the speaker—the one who made this record—seems to be telling it from a broadened viewpoint? There are numerous allusions to the abstract, and a general comparing to ’organic’ or ’carbonaceous’ life. The narrator is obviously taking an analytical attitude toward the people he is telling about.”

  “But who is doing the telling?” I wanted to know.

  “I think Tuformiltuten himself.”

  “Who?” I asked sharply. “Do you mean Tumilten?”

  Walker stared at me wide-eyed for a moment, then chuckled.

  “All right—Tumilten. Although I got it as Tuformiltuten! The name, if you got it, is simply a number in syllables, one up in the millions, but too condensed for us to figure out. To me it was a word that registered as two-four-million-two-ten. To you it was the slurred Two-miliion-ten. Anyway, whichever we call him, it is he that is telling the story, because he is analyzing himself more closely than anyone else could, and his viewpoint is from the future.”

  “Eh? How do you figure that?” I asked skeptically. “I took it that the record was made as the events happened.”

  Walker shook his head. “No, because there are too many abstract tie-ups. In the first episode we saw, Tumilten or Tuformiltuten, called himself a philosopher in a race totally without philosophy—an obvious interpolation from afterthought.”

  Well, it took us ten minutes to straighten that out, because you see I hadn’t got that “only philosopher in a race totally without philosophy” at all. And it turned out that the versions we had heard were somewhat different, although in broad detail they were identical. The versions I have written down are a composite of what both of us got. I will have to admit my versions were skimpier than Walker’s, and I’m free in admitting that his mind is more sensitive, more embracing than mine. Thus he “heard” more.

  This leads to the conclusion that the message itself is far more detailed than the human mind can interpret. Either the time-factor is different between the robot’s vision of the events and ours, or his mind is simply more highly organized. I can’t be the judge of that.

  Walker went on with his idea, which had become almost an obsession—“Probably Tumilten—if he is truly the narrator —is bringing the series of episodes to some climax; of that I’m almost certain. Taking them in their chronological order, episode one—the last we saw—gives the history and origin of the robot race. Episode two relates Tumilten’s gradual build-up of philosophy—remember it stretches out for fifteen years—from what he had heard from Zonzi. And episode three reveals that Tumilten, in escaping the universal ‘uncreating,’ is destined to be the last and only robot left on Earth.”

  Walker has that kind of mind—a keen organ that gropes behind the obvious for hidden mental delicacies.

  “Now, what will be the outcome of this?” he almost whispered. “Tumilten, a strange mechanical being able to reason in the abstract, in his possession a record of dark secrets of the past. What will result!”

  * * * * *

  THE next evening I entered Walker’s small electrical workshop in a curious state of bemusement.

  “I say, Bill,” I spoke from the doorway, “did we dream what we heard last night? And the night before? This morning when I woke up, and all through the day at the office, I kept wondering if we had really heard anything! You know, when you burned out our coil last night trying to get what would have been episode four, we got a minute of idiotic babbling from the metal ball.”

  “Yes, it must have a charging unit inside that holds juice for a minute or so.”

  “Well,” I went on, “maybe all we heard was that same babbling, and we just imagined we had received an intelligible record! Self-hypnotism, you know.” Walker looked up witheringly. “Come in, you purple skeptic. I’ll bet you’re a mass of black and blue from pinching yourself.”

  “Well, it’s easier not to believe.” Walker snorted. “It was easier not to believe Galileo at first, too. And Darwin, and Einstein, and all the other new ideas that ever jolted this hard-headed old world. You’ve heard the old saw——”

  “Truth is stranger than fiction,” I said in chorus with him. “I know,” I went on, and I can tell you I was dead serious, “but still maybe the thing’s a hoax, a trick that someone devised——”

  “And then dug a hole in the middle of the Sahara Desert to bury his gadget, knowing someone by the name of William Walker would come along and——”

  Walker broke off with a growl. “Enough of that. Come here, now, and let’s tune in episode four. After replacing the burned-out coil this morning, I tried, to get the messages myself, but no go. It was just a jumble of flat images and twisted thoughts. It takes two minds to co-ordinate the record, as it takes two legs to walk.”

  A minute later we were seated entranced before the metal ball which was radiating thought-waves, in some inexplicable way, into our minds. And because the imperfections that are inherent in eyes and ears and spoken words were passed by, we were able to grasp and know things we might never have understood through the five senses.

  If only I could find the words to transmit those things faithfully to paper! But there are no such words. . . .

  TUMILTEN stood alone, of his race, on Earth!

  An hour before he had watched the space-ship bearing all the Elders and Ancients, and one million of the Youngers, lift hissingly into the sky and then plunge furiously away. It would be many ages before they would land again on a world—perhaps not till millions of years had gone by. In that time the Ancients would undoubtedly die, and the Elders would become Ancients, and the Youngers, Elders. And if, by some cosmic mischance, they did not find a haven in time, they would die to the last one!

  Tumilten’s mechanical frame shuddered. Dying—fading out—was so unheard-of a thing among Youngers and Elders. Only the Ancients, those who had lived for almost countless eons, died, with their brain-units completely enervated. They died not for lade of radium, these Ancients, but simply because the delicate cores of their brain-units had atrophied to mineral dust.

  Intricate machines, robots, though they were, these creatures from another star, and as such ageless through constant renewal of worn-out parts—yet they knew death; a long-coming but nevertheless inescapable death, that resulted from the common failing of all things purely mineral—the slow tendency of atoms to disintegrate into the dust of energy. They could renew tentacles, fuel, tiny wires, and all the conglomerate of their mechanical bodies, but they could not renew the pulsing core of their brain-units, which, although protected from all normal disintegrating agencies, could not escape the hand of time—and the falling apart of matter. Radium was but the larger symbol of what happened to all matter—a slow disintegration that was almost swift as measured by these long-living machine intelligences.

  And in their incredibly long lives, individual evolution was correspondingly slow. As a result, the progress of the race was infinitely slower. And it came to Tumilten, standing there alone, that this was an unforgivable defect of his people. His race, his kind, had existed for a space of time measured by the births and deaths of hoary-old stars. Yet in that tremendous span of time they had not improved their lot to any extent; had not, for instance, found a way to harness atomic power, or to break from the chains of radium-restricted rejuvenation.

  Their science had been a restricted science, dealing only with mechanical improvements of their machine bodies and cities. They had not pierced to the center of the earth, or explored the world of atoms. They had not tabulated the wonders of biological life, or the phenomena of sexual reproduction, or any of the other manifold mysteries of things around them. Even those great projects they had carried out—the canals of planet four, the Red-spot on fi
ve—had been but to find radium, to create more Youngers, more machines. . . .

  “Where,” Tumilten asked, “where would there be another life, another race, that would have the ability to burst free die chain of the strictly material, and seek knowledge for its own sake? That would do things for the mere doing? That would even war among itself because of cross purposes that would arise from different and new ideas?”

  Where was there a form of life that would display its kinship to the general universe by following the law of change? His own robot race, spawned eons before, was long antedated, was a static form of life that had no place in the present cosmos. This was proved alone by the fact that every 1700 years half of any given amount of all the radium in the universe changed into lower elements. Their race, dependent on radium for conscious life, was doomed by this mathematical progression of material change.

  The law of change!

  The day would come when radium would exist, in all the cosmos, in only little specks dotted here and there, and beyond gleaning. And the stars did not manufacture, in their furnace cores, radium any longer, for the balance of distributed energy between matter and space had changed . . . change! . . . the immutable law! . . .

  Tumilten gave up his speculations suddenly. He kicked at a scurrying rodent that ran by and asked it—“Will this new life come from you? But you have no intelligence; you are just an animated carbonaceous jelly.”

  The little beast, attracted perhaps by the bright glint of sun on metal, stopped and sat up on a mound of earth and peered with bright little eyes at the mechanical man.

  Looking into its eyes, Tumilten was vaguely stirred.

  “And yet, it may be from your kind after all! I see—I see something of a dawning intelligence behind your visioning orbs. But”—he deprecated then—“will the one who has created you think of creating something more than you?” And Tumilten did not know, at the time, that its creator was not a material being, and that the creator’s name was Nature. . . .