by Earl
Suddenly the whole robot question assumed a new light, in my mind. If by a miracle we escaped from this—
But we wouldn’t. I was certain of that when one day I saw a face I knew, in the audience. The sharp-nosed, saturnine face of Bart Oliver! He struggled to the front row and stared at us. He was here to check up, make sure we hadn’t escaped somehow.
He stared at us closely. His face, well-schooled, didn’t show that he was gloating, mocking, triumphant, but I knew he was. To add to our torment, he asked a question.
“What is your name?”
“You know damn well—” I wanted to shriek, but only got the first word out before the spark bruised my brain.
“Pierre Marquette. I was guillotined—”
“Are you human?” Bart Oliver interrupted.
It was a new question. Apprehensive of the searing spark, I made a careful answer. “Yes, of course. Or I was, with a body.”
“Have you ever heard of—Adam Link?” he snapped.
He was trying to make me give the wrong answers, so that the man behind me would use the whip of his spark. Inhuman devil, that Bart Oliver was! I didn’t answer.
“Adam Link!” he insisted. “Eve Link! Tell me, have you heard those names?”
He was leaning forward, his face strange, wondering.
“Damn you!” I bellowed. “Go away and let me alone. You know I’m Adam Link—”
This time I got it out, though the spark crashed into my electronic currents three times. It was like three bombs bursting within my skull.
“Adam Link—it’s you!”
With this cry, Bart Oliver motioned to three burly men behind him and leaped on the platform.
“You’re under arrest,” Bart Oliver barked at the attendant. “And your boss, Colonel Hatterson. These two heads are heads of Adam and Eve Link, disguised.”
He ripped away my wig, snapped off my plastic nose so that the metal shone through. Two of the detectives returned with Colonel Hatterson.
“Where are their bodies?” Bart Oliver thundered at the quaking circus owner. “Do you know you’ve unlawfully held two future citizens of the United States in captivity?”
Eve’s voice came to me. “Adam, dear, it’s over. Bart Oliver is our friend!”
Only then I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
THERE is little left to tell. We were reconnected to our bodies. Colonel Hatterson hadn’t harmed them, perhaps hoping some day to train us as astounding acrobats.
Bart Oliver had come in a chartered plane. We flew toward Washington. He had sent a telegram to Jack and Tom to meet us there.
“When you vanished,” he explained, “I was puzzled. Jack and Tom accused me of the deed. To clear myself, I accused Brody, but we couldn’t get anything on him. You had completely disappeared. Well, in the last three weeks, I had about given you up for lost. Then I got the clue. My clipping service combs the country for odd facts, for my column. I saw the item about the Talking Heads, in a honky-tonk circus troupe. I suspected it might be you, and came.”
He looked at us a little embarrassed, then stuck out his hand.
“You know,” he grinned, “you gave the right answer when I asked you back there if you were human. You said yes! If apologies mean anything——”
“Don’t,” I said. “It’s even. For three weeks Eve and I thought you had sent us to the circus. But tell me——”
“Why I accept you as human?” he asked. “I knew it the moment I met you. I felt it. I was just fighting myself. I think all of us feel it when we meet you, Adam Link. We look in our mirrors and realize our fleshly bodies are just as much an illusion as your metal one. Only the mind counts.”
He smiled wryly. “There I was writing my daily column, condemning you from my lofty seat without taking the trouble to meet you. I wonder if the whole world isn’t that way all the time? It isn’t till we meet something face to face, and look at what’s beneath, that we begin to understand. Well—”
He shrugged, and then his tone became eager. “I’ve been trying to make amends. The whole country is aroused, in favor of you. I think we’ve even got Washington softened up——”
I began to say something, but stopped. We were landing at the airport in Washington.
Jack and Tom were there and Dahlgren. Dahlgren looked at me and spoke. “I came with Jack and Tom to intercede directly in Washington, after hearing you were found. By the way, this is Senator James Willoughby, from Dr. Link’s state, where you were created. From your state!”
He pulled the distinguished, white-haired man forward.
“Adam Link, it’s a pleasure!” Senator Willoughby said in courteous greeting. “I hereby grant you honorary citizenship in our state immediately. And I’ll bring the matter of your true citizenship up before the Senate itself! I was skeptical, following your campaign. But now I see the worth of robots, or robot-citizens. You will be given citizenship by Congressional order. I promise it!”
“That’s that!” Bart Oliver grinned. Jack and Tom clutched at each other as though about to execute a dance.
“Except for one thing,” I said slowly. “I don’t want citizenship!”
It was like an exploding bomb. They all looked stupefied. I went on.
“I had a chance to think, during those three weeks helpless in a circus. Robots would be exploited, in ways I can’t even foresee. Their voting power, for instance, might be turned to unscrupulous ends. The time is not yet.” Strange conclusion, but wise, I was sure. I didn’t want to say what I really meant, and truly startle them. We had all forgotten one thing. Turned out like buttons, robot-citizens would one day outvote humans! Perhaps for the better. Perhaps not. It was a new problem. Eve and I would have to think about it.
FIVE STEPS TO TOMORROW
Exiled to a mighty prison in the sky, Richard Hale revisits Earth to mete out scientific justice to the future’s crime syndicate?
CHAPTER I
New Century
IT lacked a half hour of midnight, December 31st, 2000 A.D.
Earth waited eagerly to ring out the old and ring in the new. Not only a New Year would be ushered in, but a new century! The celebrations must be of a corresponding caliber, bringing down the curtain on one century and raising it on another. A new century loomed with hope and promise, and greater things for mankind.
Richard Hale felt that as he faced the assemblage in the Radium Room of New York’s Strato-Hotel, one hundred and forty-nine stories above street level. The deafening hum of hilarity died down. Faces turned expectantly toward him when he raised his arm.
Glasses clinked as they were set down. Nofee-makers, given an advance tryout, were silenced. Even the few persons who bad imbibed to the point of intoxication allowed themselves to be hushed.
The great moment of the evening had arrived.
The ike-men made their final adjustments on the glowing iconoscopic eye that would flash the scene through the ether. Ike-men were always on hand for things like this. It was a common expression in the year 2000 that all you had to do was shake out your pockets, find a few ike-men and their portable iconoscopes. They were the eyes of the world.
Richard Hale steadied himself with a hand on the veiled model beside him. He trembled a little, and his throat went dry. He suddenly felt panic-stricken, facing so many people. And he felt the concentrated stares of the vast television audience, in that huge glowing eye at his left. Hale was just twenty-four, accustomed more to the quiet of a laboratory than the rostrum of a hall. For a moment, flushed and weak-kneed, he thought desperately of diving for the nearest exit.
Then his eyes met those of Laura Asquith. She was in the front row of that terrible sea of faces, not ten feet away. Lovely as ever, calm, cool, sympathetic, her eyes seemed to speak to him, steady him. He drew courage from her, straightened his shoulders.
Hale began. His voice, at first, was low and tinged with uncertainty. Then quickly it became the normal, forceful tones of a man who knew he had something important to say.
“Friends, as you all know, I am president of the Subatlantic Tube Company, formed a year ago. Your investments, and those of hundreds of others not here tonight, are in this untried venture. Our plans are to dig a tunnel from New York to Le Havre, France, under the Atlantic Ocean. That it will succeed, I’m as certain as if it were already done.”
His voice suddenly went deep with restrained emotion.
“My father, Burton Hale, conceived the idea of the Tube twenty years ago.
For twenty years he planned, calculated, worked himself to an early grave. He was only fifty-one when he died last year.”
Hale’s gulp was visible to the television audience, but he went on firmly.
“Burton Hale left his plans as a legacy to all the world. I know he meant it that way. He visioned a network of tunnels that would eventually span the Pacific as well as Atlantic. I made a pledge to him, on his death-bed, that I would devote my life to that aim. Ladies and gentlemen—the Subatlantic Tube!”
HALE signaled with his hand. An electrician at the rear closed a switch, and a humming electric motor pulled at a fanwise strand of wires connected to pulleys in the ceiling. The silken drapery over the model raised, billowing in a draft of air.
The eyes of the gathering and those of the unseen television audience, fastened on the object revealed. Twenty-feet long, it represented in reduced scale the first twenty miles of the Tube. At one end was the proposed New York terminal, a lofty pit sunk a mile deep into the ground. Elevators in miniature could be seen through a transparent cutaway. Successive levels were to hold baggage and freight warehouses, and unloading facilities. It was to be a super-railroad station.
As you looked from the terminal along the length of the Tube, you got the impression of its eventual hugeness and scope. You could see the round, tile-lined tunnel, fifty feet in diameter, that would stretch thirty-five hundred miles through the bowels of Earth. At its lowest point, it would be fifteen miles within Earth’s crust. Few mines in 2000 A.D. went deeper.
What could keep this amazing tunnel from collapsing? What could hold back those millions of tons of rock and ocean above, all pressing down savagely? Then you saw, in another cutaway, the tremendous hydraulic-sprung girders—Burton Hale’s great invention. Under pressure, these girders yielded, but they stored up the compression in large hydraulic drums and fought back. Engineers had all been forced to agree that the system would hold up indefinitely. Even a major earthquake could only shake the girders to a safe margin of ten percent above collapse.
But, most of all, your eye was caught by the sleek, streamlined model ship at the terminal. The man in back closed another switch and the animated model began working. Puffs of rocket exhaust hissed from the ship’s stern. Like a silver streak, the tiny craft shot along. It made the twenty feet in slightly under a minute. It seemed slow, because it was ten times oversize in comparison with the tunnel.
But it meant seventeen miles a minute—a thousand miles an hour—New York to Le Havre in three and a half hours!
The crowd stared in awe, realizing it watched a preview of what would go down in history as the greatest engineering feat of all time. The 21st century would start off in grand style. Cheers burst out, and applause.
RICHARD HALE waited till the hubbub had died of its own accord. Then he spoke again, now with an uplift in his voice, all nervousness gone.
“The Subatlantic Tube, and all future ones, will be a boon to Earth’s problem of transportation. Man has found the way to travel on the ground, on the seas and in the air. Now he will travel under the ocean, more safely and speedily than any other way. Strato-clippers crash now and then. Ships at sea miss their schedules. The Tube rocket will never be more than a minute late. It will not meet treacherous winds or storms. Its crossings will be as unalterable as a well-oiled machine. And a third point—”
Richard Hale paused. A thoughtful frown tightened his clean-cut features. There was more to say, but he hardly knew how to put it. He had memorized and prepared notes, yet somehow they were forgotten. What he wanted to say was something so vital and explosive that it brought a cold sweat.
Again he looked at Laura Asquith for encouragement, and found it. Beside her stood her uncle, Peter Asquith, with whom she lived. Peter Asquith, Burton Hale’s best friend, had often supplied money for research in the lean days. Hale felt happy that his father’s best friend was present.
The clock stood at fifteen minutes to twelve. Fifteen minutes would launch the new century. Hale suddenly went on, inspired.
“The twentieth century has been a significant century to civilization. Great things were done, but equally great upsets occurred. Radium, the movies, radio, automobiles and the airplane came in. Science took seven-league strides. But social evolution bogged down miserably. The First World War of nineteen-fourteen to nineteen-eighteen, and the Great Depression of the thirties spawned the next two World Wars and depressions. It was not till nineteen-eighty that balance came. With the formation of the World League in that year, peace and prosperity came to Earth.” Hale motioned toward the clock.
“In a few minutes, the twenty-first century begins. We all hope and pray it will be a century of progress and enlightenment. But will it?” His voice became challenging. “It will only if the world is aware of a new seed of conflict. I refer frankly and openly to Transport Corporation.
“Transport Corporation holds the monopoly on all transportation-trucks, buses, cars, railroads, ship lines and air routes. In the past twenty years it has bought out most competitors. Its lobby in the World Congress is the most powerful in the world. It is next door to controlling the World Government like a puppet!”
The ike-men snapped away their cigarets and fussed over their apparatus to make sure it was working. This was dynamite, the kind of verbal dynamite that the free-masonry of ike-men liked to spray out over the ether!
HALE stood with set lips. The crowd had become utterly quiet, almost transfixed. They began to see something more in this than merely a ceremony. Hale raised a tense hand.
“I am not going to preach a new doctrine. I simply say, beware of Transport Corporation! They approached me several times, offering to back the Tube. Yes, so they could later own it, add it to their monopoly. Five men control Transport Corporation. They have kept under cover. I don’t know them. But those Five I challenge. They have a strangle-hold on transportation, the circulation system of civilization which pumps the blood of trade through the world.
“They seek power, these Five, the power of absolute rule! They are a new kind of budding dictator, more dangerous than the tin-pot dictators of the middle twentieth century. Their methods are less bloody, less brutal, but insidiously more effective. When their chosen day comes, they will say to the world, ‘Accept our rule, or starve! Not one wheel will move to distribute food and goods unless we are given the reins of government!’ ” Richard Hale paused, panting a little, But he went right on.
“The Five won’t succeed. They haven’t yet crushed all competition in transportation. It will take them more than five years to complete their plans. In five years, the Subatlantic Tube will be in operation. My company will fight the monopoly. We will undersell them in trans-oceanic trade. The monopoly will crash. And then—”
His voice grew softer, calmer.
“And then the twenty-first century will have the really right start. I want to see a century of democracy, liberty, progress. Not a century of blind follow-the-leader under the dictates of five power-drunk men. The Five have threatened me, of course, through their agents. Sabotage, financial ruin, even assassination.
“But two of our five years of building are allowed for the worst possible sabotage—underground. Our sonic-survey has shown, secondly, that our digging will run through veins of pure gold. The project will finance itself. As for personal threat, I can take care of myself. I challenge the Five to stop me!”
CHAPTER II
The Five Strike
MILLIONS of people heard and saw the tall, young man
deliver his impassioned challenge. But four were more vitally concerned than any of the others. Four of “the Five” sat in a darkened, sound-proof room, huddled before a two-foot visi-screen.
“Richard Hale is our enemy, and a dangerous one,” said Jonathan Mausser. He was short and fat. His pudgy hands almost continuously washed themselves with air. He bore the meek, cringing manner that betrayed the hypocrite. A man of law, he had often tricked trusting souls into legal doom. Beneath his white, fat skin was a heart as black as coal.
“The twenty-first century is about to start, and he is in our way,” growled Ivan von Grenfeld. “He must be crushed, eliminated. We should have arranged his death months ago!” Ivan von Grenfeld, of mixed foreign blood, was six-feet-two, broad-shouldered, impressively rugged, and proud of it all. He wore a uniform, one of dozens in his wardrobe. Some part of his ancestry had once held a dukedom.
“No, that would have been the wrong way, and it is still the wrong way,” said Sir Charles Paxton, in his cold stiff accent. “The Company would go on after his death. The whole company must be discredited, broken up, even though that method is more costly.” Sir Charles Paxton betrayed the miser by that last phrase. Gold to him was an idol. He worshiped it.
“No sense going over old ground,” snapped Dr. Emanuel Gordy. “Our present plan is the one. You know who is over there now, in the Radium Room, waiting for the right moment. It will work out as I planned!”
Dr. Emanuel Gordy laid undue emphasis on the word “I.” He never let the other four forget his acknowledged leadership. He was the brain behind their plans. At one time he had been an eminent scientist. A slow smile drew up the corners of his thin lips.
“You challenge us, Richard Hale!” he spat at the televized image. “You’ll soon find out what that means. When the New Year, and the New Century, breaks, that will be the moment.”
FIVE minutes to twelve. Richard Hale waved. Behind him, the electrician at the switches moved his hand again. A ten-foot visi-screen over Hale’s head began to glow, clarified to the scene of a desolate stretch of Long Island. In the background stood a huge atomic-power excavator amid all the paraphernalia of a digging project about to be begun. In the foreground, a line of workmen waited expectantly.