by Earl
NIGHT came. I had to stop and stay still in the dark. I leaned against a tree motionlessly. For a while I heard little Terry snooping around in the brush for something to eat. I heard him gnawing something. Then later he curled up at my feet and slept. The hours passed slowly. My thoughts would not come to a conclusion about the recent occurrence. Monster! Why had they believed that?
Once, in the still distance, I heard a murmur as of a crowd of people. I saw some lights. They had significance the next day. At dawn I nudged Terry with my toe and we walked on. The same murmur arose, approached. Then I saw you, a crowd of you, men with clubs, scythes and guns. You spied me and a shout went up. You hung together as you advanced.
Then something struck my frontal plate with a sharp clang. One of you had shot.
“Stop! Wait!” I shouted, knowing I must talk to you, find out why I was being hunted like a wild beast. I had taken a step forward, hand upraised. But you would not listen. More shots rang out, denting my metal body. I turned and ran. A bullet in a vital spot would ruin me, as much as a human.
You came after me like a pack of hounds, but I outdistanced you, powered by steel muscles. Terry fell behind, lost. Then, as afternoon came, I realized I must get a newly charged battery. Already my limbs were moving sluggishly. In a few more hours, without a new source of current within me, I would fall on the spot and—die.
And I did not want to die!
I knew I must find a road to the city.
I finally came upon a winding dirt road and followed it in hope. When I saw a car parked at the side of the road ahead of me, I knew I was saved, for Dr. Link’s car had had the same sort of battery I used. There was no one around the car. Much as a starving man would take the first meal available, I raised the floorboards and in a short while had substituted batteries.
New strength coursed through my body. I straightened up just as two people came arm-in-arm from among the trees, a young man and woman. They caught sight of me. Incredulous shock came into their faces. The girl shrank into the boy’s arms.
“Do not be alarmed,” I said. “I will not harm you. I—”
There was no use going on, I saw that. The boy fainted dead away in the girl’s arms and she began dragging him away, wailing hysterically.
I left. My thoughts from then on can best be described as brooding. I did not want to go to the city now. I began to realize I was an outcast in human eyes, from first sight on.
Just as night fell and I stopped, I heard a most welcome sound. Terry’s barking! He came up joyfully, wagging his stump of tail. I reached down to scratch his ears. AH these hours he had faithfully searched for me. He had probably tracked me by a scent of oil. What can cause such blind devotion—and to a metal man!
Is it because, as Dr. Link once stated, that the body, human or otherwise, is only part of the environment of the mind? And that Terry recognized in me as much of mind as in humans, despite my alien body? If that is so, it is you who are passing judgment on me as a monster who are in the wrong. And I am convinced it is sol I hear you now—shouting outside—beware that you do not drive me to be the monster you call me!
THE next dawn precipitated you upon me again. Bullets flew. I ran. All that day it was the same. Your party, swelled by added recruits, split into groups, trying to ring me in. You tracked me by my heavy footprints. My speed saved me each time. Yet some of those bullets have done damage. One struck the joint of my right knee, so that my leg twisted as I ran. One smashed into the right side of my head and shattered the tympanum there, making me deaf on that side.
But the bullet that hurt me most was the one that killed Terry!
The shooter of that bullet was twenty yards away. I could have run to him, broken his every bone with my hard, powerful hands. Have you stopped to wonder why I didn’t take revenge? Perhaps I should! . . .
I was hopelessly lost all that day. I went in circles through the endless woods and as often blundered into you as you into me. I was trying to get away from the vicinity, from your vengeance. Toward dusk I saw something familiar—Dr. Link’s laboratory!
Hiding in a clamp of bushes and waiting till it was utterly dark, I approached and broke the lock on the door. It was deserted. Dr. Link’s body was gone, of course.
My birthplace! My six months’ of life here whirled through my mind with kaleidoscopic rapidity. I wonder if my emotion was akin to what yours would be, returning to a well-remembered place? Perhaps my emotion is far deeper than yours can be! Life may be all in the mind. Something gripped me there, throbbingly. The shadows made by a dim gas-jet I lit seemed to dance around me like little Terry had danced. Then I found the book, “Frankenstein,” lying on the desk whose drawers had been emptied. Dr. Link’s private desk. He had kept the book from me. Why? I read it now, in a half hour, by my page-at-a-time scanning. And then I understood!”
But it is the most stupid premise ever made: that a created man must turn against his creator, against humanity, lacking a soul. The book is all wrong.
Or is it? . . .
As I finish writing this, here among blasted memories, with the spirit of Terry in the shadows, I wonder if I shouldn’t.
It is close to dawn now. I know there is not hope for me. You have me surrounded, cut off. I can see the flares of your torches between the trees. In the light you will find me, rout me out. Your hatred lust is aroused. It will be sated only by my—death.
I have not been so badly damaged that I cannot still summon strength and power enough to ram through your lines and escape this fate. But it would only be at the cost of several of your lives. And that is the reason I have my hand on the switch that can blink out my life with one twist.
Ironic, isn’t it, that I have the very feelings you are so sure I lack?
(signed) Adam Link.
SCIENCE ISLAND
A Cold-Blooded Scientific Napoleon with the Brain of a Genius and a Body of Metal Threatens to Dominate Mankind!
BATHED in the soft glow of a tropic moon, the island looked peaceful and quiet to Don Mason. There was certainly no inkling in his mind of the incredible menace lurking beneath its slumbering surface.
He was standing beside Helen Montry at the rail of her uncle’s yacht, drinking in the cool night breezes. It had been a long, hot cruise of three thousand miles from San Francisco, with a single stop at Honolulu.
Helen Montry stiffened suddenly and leaned forward over the rail, straining her eyes toward shore.
“Look, Don,” she said pointing. “Isn’t that some sort of glow at the center of the island, behind the cliff? This island is supposed to be uninhabited, yet it looks like a light, or group of lights.”
“Probably just the moon’s reflection on smooth rock formations,” Don Mason returned casually. He slipped an arm around the girl. “There is a much lovelier reflection in your eyes,” he added softly.
Helen Montry squeezed his arm but continued to stare at the island bulking mysteriously against the backdrop of star-stippled sky.
“I’ve noticed that glow, too,” another voice broke in behind them. “Very odd—”
They started. Dr. Raoul Montry, Helen’s uncle, had approached silently. Don Mason straightened, though he was off duty and out of uniform, and saluted.
The luxury of a comfortable inheritance at birth had not prevented Raoul Montry from becoming a hardworking scientist, and his private researches in biology had gained him great professional distinction.
His deep-set eyes now held a queer look of anticipation.
“Perhaps this is the place!” he murmured. He turned to the young first mate. “I’ve informed the captain that you’ll take me ashore in the launch, first thing in the morning.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” said Mason crisply. He hesitated, then went on. “But may I ask, sir, what you expect to find on a deserted island halfway between the Philippines and Hawaii?”
HE was wondering, too, why they had practically scoured this region of the Pacific near the Phoenix Islands. They had stopped at a hal
f dozen bits of land, as though on an intensive search for something of which only Dr. Montry was aware. Mason hardly expected an illuminative answer. Men of the crew were not supposed to ask the yacht’s owner his business.
But Dr. Montry surprised him.
“I think I’ll tell you, Mason,” he said slowly. “You’re an intelligent young man, and I like you. I think Helen agrees with me on that.” He smiled at the girl’s quick blush and went on with a serious note in his voice.
“I’m looking for Dr. Arndt Knurd, formerly my collaborator in biological research. He vanished five years ago from our laboratory, taking with him all our notes and formulae on a new discovery. And, incidentally, a hundred thousand dollars of my money. I’ve had private investigators trying to pick up his trail since the disappearance. Just last month they traced him. Or rather, got wind of huge shipments of apparatus sent from Melbourne to some unnamed island in the Phoenix group. That’s why we’re here; to find which island—and Dr. Knurd.”
“But why, sir, after five years?” Mason asked. He knew it wasn’t the money. “That discovery—it was an important one?”
The scientist nodded.
“Vital,” he said. “We developed a method of transplanting living brains—we used dogs—into an artificial medium of life, disconnected entirely from the rest of the body. We made electrically-motivated robot bodies, with living canine brains operating them almost as deftly as their natural bodies. We had devised a way of transmitting nerve-impulses along wires.”
Mason felt the girl shudder against him. He knew his skin was crawling a little too at the rather gruesome account.
“And you think,” he said, “that Dr. Knurd came to this island, or some island, to—well, to do what?”
“That’s what I wonder!” Dr. Montry’s kindly eyes looked deeply worried. “My agents also found out that he had contacted four other scientists. They have disappeared from public life. Professor Harkman, the famous metallurgist, was one. Dr. Yorsky, well-known Russian surgeon, another. And Walsh and Hapgood, engineer and physicist respectively. For five years these scientific minds have been together, on some island. What does it mean? Dr. Knurd himself is the—well, unscrupulous sort. He may—”
A sharp intake of breath from Helen interrupted.
“What’s that?” Her trembling arm pointed toward the sheer cliff back of the island’s broad beach. “Something is moving there—”
The men stared. A formless shadow, pierced by what seemed to be greenly gleaming eyes, moved across the cliff’s unlighted background. They could not make out its shape or size. The glow of the mysterious eyes deepened and its twin beams seemed to stab out toward them and focus on the boat.
Don Mason sensed danger. A strange feeling of lassitude had stolen through his body. In a flash he knew that the twin-beam was bringing them paralysis! But even as his hand darted for the automatic in his pocket, he felt his fingers go limp.
Helen gave a choked scream and folded up on the deck floor. Dr. Montry, panting, was trying to drag himself along the rail with muscles that had turned to water. Hoarse shouts came from below, from the crew’s quarters.
Cursing and trying to fight the gripping paralysis, Mason felt his legs turn to rubber. The deck came up into his face, like a club. He did not feel the blow. His whole body was numb. And the numbness was creeping insidiously into his brain.
He made one last effort, with a groan, and then gave up as a blot of inkiness crushed his mind. . . .
Don Mason lay still for a while when he came back to dreamy consciousness. He still felt numb, and wasn’t quite sure that he was wide awake yet. He was even more uncertain when he moved his eyes and started to look around.
His first blurred glance left him with a sinking sensation of unnatural smallness which Mason vaguely attributed to the dizzy reaction of consciousness. He closed his eyes for a moment and then cautiously opened them again. His eyes focused on a shelf diagonally across from where he lay, a shelf which held laboratory flasks that appeared to be several feet high!
Mason blinked. Were his eyes deceiving him? Those flasks shouldn’t normally be more than about a half a foot in size.
His eyes moved slightly downward, and they grew wide with astonishment as they fastened on an instrument. The instrument was simply and unmistakably a microscope—but a microscope which appeared to be as large as himself!
Still feeling hazy and numb, Mason started to think, slowly and ponderously. Something was obviously wrong, totally illogical. It was crazy. A microscope was a microscope and should be only a foot or so long. Yet, unless his eyes were deceiving him, here was a microscope that appeared to be as large as himself. Ah, that was it! Appeared to be. Then his eyes were deceiving him! But what was causing the illusion?
Suddenly and startlingly, his brain flashed to full consciousness. Relativity! Of course! With a terrified feeling of helplessness, Mason realized that the reason the microscope was so large was because he was somehow so small! The microscope was as large as he was, all right, he told himself wryly—but he was only a foot high!
Mason forced himself to look further, and everything he saw seemed to verify his conclusions. He appeared to be in a gigantic chamber of rock without windows. He was lying on the cold stone floor, with Helen beside him. The girl, too, he observed, was his subnormal size. Bright electric lights unnaturally far ahead shone down, revealing a long huge table on which lay various implements of gross size, among them the microscope. It was a laboratory, Mason realized, a normal laboratory with everything in it looking colossal to his reduced self.
His gaze turned further, toward the end of the great table, and what he saw there made him draw his breath in sharply. Two figures were standing near the table—two monstrous-looking forms of copper-red metal!
Robots! Mechanized travesties of the human shape, with elongated cylindrical heads and bodies, jointed legs and arms. Both of them towered incredibly high from Mason’s supine view.
Robots and a laboratory! The mystery of it brought a sharp unease, almost a hysterical terror, to Mason’s dizzied mind. It was obviously some of Dr. Knurd’s work, from what Dr. Montry had told him about Knurd. The scientist had stolen the secret of robot brain-control. He had come to this remote island, evidently to apply the method to human-sized robots.
Mason had already taken it as a matter of course that the two robots he saw were controlled by human brains. There was no other possibility. His mind raced on, almost without his volition. What was Knurd’s purpose behind such a coldly scientific act? What was his reason for reducing his captives—or at least Mason himself and Helen so far—to such insignificant proportions? Just how he had accomplished it was relatively unimportant.
THERE had been deep rumbling sounds in Mason’s ears since he had awakened. He listened closely now, realizing they were the mechanical voices of the robot-men.
“I think you are close to success, Professor Harkman,” boomed one robot’s voice. He straightened up from the instrument over which he had been bending. “Those metallo-organisms you’ve created are unquestionably alive.”
Don Mason listened with a beating heart. Professor Harkman, one of the four Dr. Montry had mentioned! Harkman was, or had been, the world’s foremost metallurgist. He had long been an advocate of the theory of metallic life. How did he and this discovery fit into the puzzle of this underground cavern of science?
“Yes, Dr. Knurd,” replied the other robot. “They are alive.”
Mason caught his breath. So the first robot was the thieving Dr. Knurd himself! He had had himself made into a robot. His own scheming, clever brain lay within the metal body, controlling it as though it were his nature-given body. That made the whole situation still more perplexing and Mason wondered just how astounding the answer to it all was.
He listened further, not making the slightest move as yet.
The second robot, whose controlling brain had been that of Professor Harkman, continued.
“Yes, alive. Micro-organisms
composed mainly of iron! As far back as 1927, Dr. Molisha of Japan described the ‘toxothrix,’ a germ, found in air, whose weight was fifty percent iron. Before that, only the red corpuscles of animal blood were known to carry iron. Stanford University confirmed Molisha’s report in 1928. I was one of the men who followed his interesting research. I went further. I thought of mutating the toxothrix into a virulent metal-germ. I’ve succeeded here! This is a great thrill to me—”
“Yes, yes,” cut in Dr. Knurd. His uninflected robot-voice could not express impatience, but it was implied. “Go on with your work, Professor. The germs must breed faster—as fast as pneumococci, for instance. When you produce that germ-culture, we will have the great force with which to conquer the world! Then, as practically eternal metal supermen, we will rule mankind for ages!”
Mason’s brain reeled a little. Incredible as it sounded, that was the aim Dr. Knurd had had in mind with his theft of the robot secret. Rule of mankind! The man was a monomaniac—a cold-blooded, scientific Napoleon.
The robot-form of the metallurgist hesitated, with a stoppered culture tube in its hand.
“It may be dangerous to go on,” he said warningly. “If it multiplies as fast as most organic germs, no metal it ‘diseased’ could stand up against it. It would eat into the strongest, toughest steel. If it were dispersed throughout the world, in a few months all metals would rot to powder and collapse. And don’t forget, Dr. Knurd, we are made of metal!”
“Don’t worry about such details,” retorted the other robot. “I’m a biologist. I’ll know how to handle the germs. I’ll find a way to send them into opposing armies without danger to ourselves. Think of it, Professor, a bomb bursting in their midst. A cloud of germs dispelling through their air. All their metallic implements of warfare turning to ‘diseased’ dust as the metal-germs voraciously attack all metals within reach. Their cannon crumpling and their aircraft rising a few feet, then diving earthward like broken toys!”