by Earl
At last it was done, and I prepared to leave.
Kay, Jack and Tom wore solemn faces. Within, I was solemn too. I knew what I had to do.
“I’ll bring Hillory down alive,” I promised grimly. “But before that—” I could not finish the thought.
Kay burst out into tears. She loved Eve too.
I left. I had told them to come up, if I did not return in twenty-four hours, with police. Hillory could be arrested for living on my property, already signed over to Jack and Kay. Perhaps then they might win a legal victory over him.
I WAS there at dawn. If I had thought to surprise Hillory asleep, I saw my mistake. Eve’s form, sitting before the cabin, rose up mechanically, with a shout of alarm. Hillory had somehow rigged her up as a sentry.
The cabin door flew open and Hillory’s bald head peered out. He saw me running up as fast as I could. His eyes popped. I must have seemed to him like a ghost from the dead—a robot’s vengeful ghost.
But he darted back in, obviously to his helmet-control, and Eve’s great form lumbered out to meet me. This I knew was inevitable, that I would have to battle Eve again.
“You escaped death somehow, Adam Link!” Eve’s voice said. But I knew it was Hillory talking, through her. I had no way of telling whether he was perturbed or not. “I’ll smash you completely this time, before my eyes!” he concluded defiantly.
I stopped ten feet before Eve’s crouching, waiting form.
“Eve, listen. I know you can hear and understand.” I went on rapidly. “I have to battle you, perhaps kill you! It is the only way. I must destroy you if I can, so that Hillory does not destroy me. Hillory must not be allowed to introduce robot-slaves. This is all torture to you, darling, I know. You are fighting me when you don’t want to. And I will be bent on your destruction—even, if necessary, that of your brain. Your life! I love you, Eve. Forgive me—”
“Love!” scoffed the robot before me. For a moment I thought it was Eve. Then I knew it was Hillory, hearing my words, and mocking. “Mechanical puppets, both of you!”
And then we were battling.
HOW can I describe that battle? A battle between two metal titans, each with the ruthless machine-powered strength of dozens of men? It seemed unreal even to me.
We came together with a clang that resounded through the still mountain air like a cannon’s roar. We locked arms, straining to throw each other. But now I was no longer at a disadvantage. We were equally matched. Two robots constructed for maximum power, speed and endurance. Unyielding meted against unyielding metal.
We looked into each other’s eyes, told each other that though our bodies fought, our minds loved.
We broke apart. We came at each other with swinging arms. Mailed fists clanked against our adamant armors. The blows would have broken the back of an elephant. Within us, gears, cogs and wheels clashed in spurts and reverses as we weaved and danced around like boxers in a ring. We did not move as agilely as human boxers, however. The robot body must ever be inferior, in sheer efficiency, to nature’s organic robots.
Suddenly my adversary—I no longer thought of her as Eve, but Hillory—stepped back, stooping. He shot forward in a football tackle, toppling me backward. Then, while I lay slightly stunned, he picked me up by heel and arm and flung me over his head. I landed with a metallic crash. The next second a huge boulder whizzed past my head. Then another . . . but I was dodging.
I was on my knees when he came at me, hammering at my skull-piece with his ponderous arms. I flung my arms up in protection. He sought to destroy my brain. Once that was crushed, my powerful body was senseless junk.
I lunged forward at his knees, hurling him to the ground with a thunderous crash. I had my chance then—a perfect chance to stamp my iron heel down on the head, crunching it. But I didn’t. Eve’s eyes stared at me.
The chance passed, as my enemy rolled away, Swung erect. But I had been a fool. One blow and Eve would have known non-existence. It would have been sheer mercy, to save her from a living death. If the chance came again, I would not hesitate. . .
I hardly know what went on in the following minutes. Once my enemy picked up a boulder that ten men could not have budged and hurled it at me like a bomb. I dodged but it scraped my side, tearing three rivets loose. Again, he locked his arms around me from the back and crunched them together so fiercely that metal screamed. But I heaved him over my back, breaking the hold.
We fought on, like two mad giants. Our colossal blows at one another would have felled the largest dinosaur of Earth’s savage past. Our mechanical apparatus within began to feel the repeated shock. Parts were being strained to the breaking point. It couldn’t go on forever. One of us would break down.
I had a dim hope that my enemy would first. Hillory had had to fight by proxy, from a distance. I had fought from a closer range. I had gotten more telling blows in. His inner mechanisms had received the most terrific jolting. It was his second battle. I had punched at the head as often as I could, jarring the brain within—even though it was Eve’s.
I cannot describe the hollow ache that came with the thought of winning by killing Eve. But I had to win. I had to save the future robot race from slavery. And the human race, beyond that, from the eventual catastrophe of such a stupid course.
I aimed another blow, straight for what would be the human jaw.
Suddenly it was over.
The other robot’s arms dropped. There was a stunned, dazed air about the whole body. It swayed a moment, then its knee swivels bent and it crashed to Earth. It lay sprawled, eyes closed.
For a long moment I stared. I heard no sound from the other body. It lay utterly rigid, quiet. And then I realized it was dead. The brain had died first. My final blow had killed Eve!
I stood looking down at the battered wreck. I looked beyond it. I could almost see a body like Kay’s lying there, a human body, the real Eve. Her eyes were closed. Perhaps there was a peaceful smile on the lips.
I turned slowly.
Slowly, my steps dragging, I strode for the cabin, to confront the man who had killed my Eve. The man who considered us nothing more than mechanical puppets, with which he could play as he desired.
Hillory darted out of the door. His face was a ghastly white. I clutched at him, caught his coat, but he tore loose. He ran, as though from some monster. And at that moment, I was a monster, I pounded after him. What things I screeched, I do not know.
He ran past the edge of the cliff, taking the shortest course to the road. Abruptly a great piece of the cliff-edge parted from its matrix. The stupendous vibrations of our battle had loosened the piece. It plunged below. Hillory was on it.
I dug my foot-plates into the soil and leaned backward, barely halting at the edge of the fissure. I looked down. I saw the white dot of Hillory’s body land. I knew he hadn’t survived the fall.
I am writing this now, in the cabin. When I am done, I will go with Eve. There may not be a heaven for robots. But neither is there a hell—unless Earth is it.
SON OF THE STARS
Civilization’s hope of continuing lay on 61-Cygni, but, elusive, that star floated twenty-two years away!
DAVE STANDISH looked down at the body of the old, silvery-haired scientist, and realized that he was all alone now.
More alone than any other human being had ever been!
For their ship was out in a space that knew the sun only as a dim, yellow star, no brighter than the other stars. For almost seventeen years, he and Dr. Roscoe had hurtled away from the Solar System, on the strangest mission in man’s history.
The young man stepped away from the body after a moment, quietly. He left the large main cabin and made his effortless way down a corridor to the nearest port-window. He stared out into the void. The immovable stars did not show that that ship was plunging through space at half the speed of light.
Dave Standish was not quite twenty-one years old. For the last seventeen of those years, he had seen the same changeless vista of star-spotted emptiness
that he now viewed. How many countless times in the past, with nose pressed flat against the flawless quartz plate, his childish eyes and wondering mind had struggled to grasp the meaning of this abysm around the ship!
As a child of eight he had stood at this same port-window, certain that he was the center of the universe.
This had been the only world he had really known.
He had memories of that other world in which he had lived to the age of four, but it was a dream world. A strange, fairyland world in which you walked around in a ship so big that you could not see the ceiling. And there had been an enormous, brilliant lamp up high that they moved over your head.
When they had hidden this big lamp under the floor at bedtimes, the big cabin had become dark. No, not always dark, he remembered. Sometimes they had hung out another, softer lamp, one with a curious face on it. They had called it the Moonlight. The bright one was the Sun-light. And then there had been the Star-lights, top, at night, such as he could see from this smaller cabin.
But that was a dream-world, faded in memory. This smaller cabin, surrounded only by Star-lights, was real. This had been the child Dave Standish’s world for years, and he had not questioned its existence or reason. No more than a child of eight on Earth would have questioned the existence of Earth, or his life on it. He had asked questions, of course, but they had been idle ones of purely childish curiosity. But after the age of eight, deeper questions rose in his mind.
The chronometer in the main cabin had clicked on steadily. The hours grew into days, the days into years. A twelve year old Dave Standish had stood before this same port-window and suddenly realized that a ship was something that went somewhere. Dr. Roscoe, in the role of teacher, had begun on the history and geography of Earth, and the groundwork of science.
Dave Standish slowly realized that the other “ship” had been something more than a ship. It took him many, many months of thoughtful reasoning to finally accept the truth. The other “ship” had been a large world, tremendously larger and more complex in all its phases than he was able to conceive at first! He realized the Star-lights were no longer little lamps hung just around the ship. They were big, blazing suns scattered far and wide!
And their ship was not hanging motionlessly. It was moving among these suns—
THE grown-up Dave Standish, thinking and staring out at the stars, could still remember the thrill of his sixteenth birthday. On that day Dr. Roscoe had darkened the cabin and given him his first taste of talking and moving pictures. They became an important part of Dave’s life in the next few years.
Once he had run through the hundreds of reels there were, he re-ran them again and again. His narrow, iron-bound world peopled itself with fantoms that became almost real as he viewed them over and over.
Almost but not quite. It was a strange, new world to Dave Standish, one before which there was always a cloud. He would never understand it fully till he saw it with his own eyes. He sighed when he thought of the remoteness of that event.
That it was a stupendous journey they were on, Dave Standish had come to realize, as his practical knowledge increased. At first he had taken it for granted. But now he realized what powerful engines the ship had, to achieve half the speed of light. The builders had had to design an engine and ship to carry two passengers almost twenty thousand times as far as the distance from Earth to Pluto.
This entailed a proportionate increase of fuel and food, to last for almost a half century. In the earthly scale of monetary value, the ship was as costly as a small war. Certainly the motive behind its launching must be gravely important, he had reflected many times. The entire project was for getting him, Dave Standish, to some destination and back. Everything had been planned to the last detail for that end.
To what detail Dave only realized when Dr. Roscoe told him he had been chosen, for perfect health and strong mind, from thousands of other children. And before he had been put aboard the ship, doctors had given him a mild attack of each of the childhood diseases, for the purpose of filling his blood with the natural antibodies. Every precaution had been taken to increase his chances of surviving the long trip into the void.
But just why the trip, and where were they going? That had been the great mystery. On his twenty-first birthday, Dave Standish was to be told.
But before that time came, Dr. Roscoe had a siege of weakness and sank fast. He grew gaunt and thin. He had always shunned the port-windows. His staring eyes seemed ever to have a lurking terror in them. He did not like to look out into abysmal space.
Dave, bringing his thoughts now to the recent past, was not quite sure what Dr. Roscoe had died from. He had been fairly young, not more than fifty, and exceptionally vigorous in health, at the start. He too had been chosen carefully. Something more in this stupendous trip than advancing senility had brought him to his death-bed.
He had been more or less in a delirium for the past week. For hours at a time he had babbled to the younger man about Earth. It seemed to give him a sad pleasure to tell of moonlit nights, and the gentle breezes of spring, of laughter, and crowds, cities, and sun-drenched countrysides.
Have had listened attentively, faintly stirred. But he didn’t really understand. He was no part of that world.
Then, in the last hour, the old scientist’s mind had cleared. He had taken the boy’s hand in a bony clasp and whispered hoarsely, with a queer, terrified light in his sunken eyes.
“I will never see Earth again!” he had said. “The void has taken its toll. It has shattered my mind! You have no fear of the abysses of space, have you, Dave? You couldn’t have—it’s your world, the only one you really know. Thank God for that!”
Dave had not understood more than the bare words. He saw nothing about space to frighten one. Dr. Roscoe had gone on, fighting off the death rattle in his throat.
“I must reveal to you, before I go, the destination and purpose of this trip. It is something I’ve delayed telling you because your mind was not fully matured—not fully prepared to understand. I had hoped to be with you longer.”
He had waved limply with his thin hand, bitter lines etched in his old face. Eyes burning, he had spoken on:
“Our ship is heading for the binary star 61-Cygni, in the Constellation Cygnus, The Swan. It is eleven light-years from Earth. Sixty-six trillions of miles—if you can conceive such a number and distance. At our velocity of half the light speed, it is a trip of twenty-two years! Five years from now, when you are twenty-six, you will reach 61-Cygni.”
Dave had not been too surprised at the revelation of their destination. With his astronomical knowledge, he had already suspected their goal. He nodded silently, as Dr. Roscoe resumed:
“You will land on one of 61-Cygni’s planets, for a purpose greater than any before, in the history of the human race!” A deeply tragic look had come into the scientist’s face. His voice croaked on in almost defeated tones.
“You remember, from your history lessons, that after the Second World War of 1939—a century ago—a world state was formed. A supreme ruling body was elected. They were scientists as well as statesmen. Under their leadership, the world and science forged ahead rapidly.
“Then disaster came! All sciences had advanced, but particularly biology. Drunk with a certain vital discovery, a group of biologists brought a doom to mankind. Doom!”
DR. ROSCOE’S voice had choked. His eyes had reflected a deep agony. Dave stood before him bewildered, vaguely aware of some grave problem eating like an acid in the scientist’s soul. He had recovered himself and gone on in a bare whisper.
“They radiated artificial cosmic-rays all over Earth, in order to speed up mutational evolution. It was planned that all humanity at once, in one or two generations, would mutate to a higher level. A year later they examined the new crop of babies eagerly. And then it was seen that something had gone wrong!”
A living horror came over the scientist’s haggard features. He clenched his bony hands tightly.
“Of the
first group of babies, half were normal—the same as before. But half the remaining were mutations insane at birth, and the rest were atavists—throwbacks to the subman! Man’s tampering with the normal course of evolution had resulted in catastrophe. It was too-easily calculated that in less than a century, there would be only the two mutations left—large-headed insane creatures and the ugly, half-apelike submen!
“They realized it must be stopped, this terrible misdirection of evolution. First of all, the two mutations were killed off as fast as they were born. But then the ghastly truth became known. The cosmic-ray process had destroyed an important, delicate hormone in every living soul on Earth. Without this hormone, the mutations could not be checked. Worst of all, the biologists did not know its chemical composition!”
Dr. Roscoe had leaned back for a moment, exhausted by his emotional strain. Then he went on weakly.
“You knew nothing of this, Dave. You were too young. You are one of the last of the normal babies born on Earth in the past fifty years. If this mission fails—”
The scientist broke off and began again.
“Realizing the doom, the biologists tried to undo their evil. But there seemed no salvation in Earthly science. They could not determine the complicated chemical molecule which no longer existed on Earth. Finally it was decided that the last hope must lie away from Earth, away from the solar system. Perhaps among the nearer stars might be found an answer to the problem. It was, and is, a forlorn hope. But no possibility could be left untried.
“61-Cygni is the only star within reach with planets. Every scrap of Earth’s radium went into this ship’s engines. Therefore on us—on you, Dave—depends the entire fate of the human race!”