by Earl
CHAPTER VII
War in Utopia!
WE waited. We held the heart of the city, the downtown section. They were in the residential sections. Would they think better of their folly, and send a delegation to us, to talk things over? I found myself praying, to the High Powers of the universe who watched over humans and robots alike. Praying that I had not once again brought down the name Frankenstein on the robot race.
I was alone in my office. I had sent Eve away, wishing solitude.
I was aware suddenly that I heard her voice, low and distant. In the quiet, shutdown city, sounds carried well. It came from the tower, above.
“No, Frank,” she was saying. “You mustn’t talk that way. Adam will think a way out.”
I had experienced ail human emotions before. Jealousy, recently. Now it crept over me like a black tide. I made my way swiftly but silently up the steps, and peered out on the tower balcony, below which the city was spread. Again there was a full moon, overhead.
And two glinting metal bodies close together, talking.
“I hate to say this, Eve. But I think your Adam is going to pieces. What’s more, I think lie mismanaged the whole business from the start—Jetting Harley go on till he smashed things. Adam ruined Utopia!”
Eve jerked back.
“Don’t say such horrid things, Frank! It’s not true.”
“Come, come,” Frank Steele snapped. “Adam botched up the whole robot problem from the start. From the day he was created. You can’t reason with humans. They are imbeciles. But they can be handled easily—in a way I’ve figured out!”
“What do you mean?” Eve asked, startled.
Steele’s microphonic voice changed to a sort of husky rumble.
“I mean that I love you, Eve! Leave Adam. Come with me. Together we’ll rule humans. Many of the robots are with me. Eve—”
IT was like a rifle shot. Eve’s hand swept around, slapping Steele’s metal cheek with a ringing clang. Eve is mentally a human girl. It was natural for her to do what she did, as any flesh-and-blood girl would.
“Beast!” she hissed. “I love Adam, as I will to the end of time!”
My thoughts were curious, at the moment. Dr. Charles Link had fashioned a being of metal—but one that acquired human emotions. Even they mighty emotion of love. More than once it had manifested itself. A human girl had once fallen in love with me, a metal man. Also a metal girl. But for the first time, this triangle had come up. A metal man striving for Eve’s love.
“What!” Frank Steele seemed entirely taken aback. “You lie! All those hours we spent together—”
“Were only to make Adam jealous,” Eve told him bitingly. “You mean nothing to me, Frank Steele.”
He stood for a moment, rocking. A robot’s alloy face shows no emotion, but I could feel the frustrated rage fuming in his mind. He leaped at her, arms upraised for smashing blows.
I leaped quicker. I dealt him a staggering blow at the side of the head. He stumbled back, then whirled like a beast at bay. With insane fury, he came at me.
My own robot attacking me! Not moving, I looked at him—this being I had created. This being who had—by the mockery of fate—become my Frankenstein monster! Appropriate, indeed, had been the name he chose for himself—“Frank! Short for Frankenstein, you know!”
Still couldn’t believe it.
“Stop!” I said. “I forgive you your words, Steele. You didn’t really mean them. We’ve all been a little upset lately—”
For answer, he dove at my legs. I was taken unawares. I toppled backwards, smashing through the light grill railing of the balcony. I fell twenty stories, with Eve’s scream ringing in my ears.
The universe seemed to explode in one rending crash, as I struck the pavement—head-first! The second before my mind blinked out, I knew that I would never awaken again. For my iridium-sponge brain would be crushed to atoms.
THEN how was it that my brain again blinked into being?
That was the question I asked myself, as I opened my eyes and realized I was alive. Eve stood over me, and a group of other robots. How long had I been unconscious?
“Thank Heaven you’ve come to, dear!” Eve half sobbed. “Ten, long, terrible hours I’ve waited!”
“Ten hours?” I said. “But what saved me? I landed on my head.”
“Number Nine,” Eve said. “He was below the tower, looking up and watching. He caught you. Saved you from smashing to the pavement itself. As it was, the jolt knocked your electron-center dead for ten hours.”
I bounced up, with no more than a few dents in my body, and my head a little twisted to the side from a loose neck cable.
“Where’s Number Nine?” I asked gratefully.
The robots hung their heads.
“He fell back so hard from cushioning your fall,” Eve said in a low voice, “that his head cracked against the stone. His brain—”
She didn’t have to say it. His iridium-sponge must be sprayed over a ten-foot circle, as mine would have been. I hung my head, too, honoring the. passing of Number Nine. For once in his short, bewildered life he had thought quickly—and beat the swiftest of all foes, Death. For. me! And so many times I had shouted at him, scolded him—
Useless recriminations, now.
“Frank Steele?” I demanded. “Where is he. We have a little unfinished business—” I stopped and went cold. Why were the robots fidgeting nervously? Why was Eve looking at me in stark horror?
“Adam,” she said, “prepare yourself. After Steele threw you down, he thought you were dead, as we all did. He came below and proclaimed himself the new robot leader. He announced his plan—to rule Earth! When he left, sixty of the robots followed him. Forty of us stayed behind. Then we found you alive.”
I digested what I had heard. Steele leading sixty robots in a war against the human race! I had to stop it.
“Where is he?”
“At the power-house.”
“Come.”
WE marched to the power-house. A robot sentry was on the steps outside, but more to guard against human intervention than robots. He stared at me, in the lead, then darted within.
Frank Steele emerged a second later, all his robots at his back. His amazement at seeing me alive was great, but controlled. I explained in brief phrases.
“Now,” I said, “your short reign is over. And for what you spoke, I sentence you to death. You men back of him—grab him! Deliver him to me.”
But not robot moved, back of him.
“They accept me as leader, Adam,” Steele crowed, “whether you are dead or alive. They believe, as I do, that you are a has-been. And that robots have only one place in the world of humans—as rulers!” I forgave them, the robots who had listened to such words, even as he spoke. They had seen the worst of human nature, recently. They had seen the humans foolishly trample their own Paradise into the dirt. Small wonder that they believed now robots must rule these pitiful beings.
“Listen to me, all of you!” I spoke in stentorian volume. “You will never succeed. Mankind, when aroused, is a formidable enemy. You will build a vast robot army, yes. But cannon will mow you down. When you try to build more robots, laughing, you will find them choking off your metal supplies. Long before you defeat their armies, they will think of a thousand things to try. It won’t work, I tell you—”
“Of course not, that way,” Steele laughed. “You underestimate my intelligence, Adam Link. There is only one way to win over humans—by the power of money! Beat them at their own game. We will manufacture atomic-power units, and sell them. We will build the industrial army that Sam Harley dreamed of. As sole builders of the atomic-power units, robots will be the money-kings of Earth!”
Madness? No. It could work that way. Frank Steele’s penetrating mind had evolved the one plan that could win Earth. As industrial dictator, Steele would have the human race under his thumb.
And dictatorship, of all possible things, was the last course in the world I wanted robots to follow.
“I denounce you as a traitor to our robot race, Frank Steele!” I said. “This is an ultimatum—I give you one hour in which to think better of your ruthless scheme.”
I TURNED away, my forty faithful robots following. I waited at the Administration Building.
“What if he doesn’t back down?” Eve asked.
I made no answer. I hated to even think of it.
Fifty-nine minutes went by, with agonizing slowness. I arose, to lead my robots to—battle!
Even as the word flashed in my mind, the battle began. Frank Steele had attacked! His robots came crashing into our midst, swinging huge iron clubs. Three of my men went down with smashed brains before we knew what had happened.
“Fight, men!” I yelled. “Fight for your lives—and the future of the robot race!” You will never know what effort it took to give that order—commanding my robots to fight their brothers. It was the first time robots were battling—against each other.
To me, at that moment, the universe seemed to give a cry of horror.
But, to be more realistic about it, it was self-defense.
My men sprang into action, with their steel fists, t snatched up a metal chair and smashed it down on a raiding robot, steeling my soul. His alloy skull cracked apart and shreds of his iridium-sponge flew through the air. I stared for a long second at his fallen, useless body. I had given him life. And I had taken it away. I felt like a father killing his own child.
But the other thought tore my soul more—civil war among the robots! It had happened, for all the preaching I had done against humans for their folly of warfare.
CHAPTER VIII
Utopia Falls
WAR it was, and perhaps a stranger, more furious struggle than humans could ever know. Steel men against steel men, each with superhuman strength. Powers were let loose against which no human army could have stood a moment. Yet there were no guns.
We were still in the large lobby of the Administration Building, where Frank Steele thought to corner us and finish us off. He had sent his whole force to win in one stroke—or had he?
Edging back, and rapidly counting, I saw there were only eighty robots in the melee. Steele had sent forty against our forty. Out of a sense of fair-play? No, not him! Where was he, and the other twenty? What plan—
Suddenly the attackers turned and fled, in a body, leaving nine dead. We stood bewildered at the sudden end of hostilities. But only for a moment.
“Quick!” I commanded. “Out the back way!”
We clattered from the building, just as it came down with a resounding crash! If we had remained within another second, we would be buried under tons of steel and concrete.
I saw what had brought the building down. Off at the other side, beyond the heap, stood the twenty missing robots. But not the robots they had been an hour before. Each had exchanged his manlike body for a workman-body. As when we had built the city, they had rivet-hands, saw-arms, crane appendages, and all the other varieties. These bodies had been stored away, when the construction was done, for future expansion of the city. Frank Steele had taken them from storage, along with the special heavy-duty batteries needed for the increased horsepower.
How diabolically clever Steele had been! While his forty robots engaged us, the terrific clatter had cloaked their weakening of the building. The workmen bodies had swiftly wrenched out a cornerstone here, a strategic beam there, an important key-support elsewhere. Then the crane and tractor men had exerted their full powers, pushing and yanking and pulling against the building till it cracked apart like a half-sawed plank.
Steele saw that he had failed to crush us under the collapsed ruin. He leaped to the top of the pile and gazed down at us on the other side.
“I’ve declared war on you, Adam Link! I won’t rest till I’ve destroyed you and all your robots—except Eve. Come on, men!”
They came running for open attack. I calculated the chances. Our 38 against their 52, the odds now stood. No chance for us, in hand to hand battle. I gave the order and we retreated. Or rather we ran—and scattered. We lurked behind hedges and trees in the wide park space. Steele sent his men to ferret us out.
A swift arm swinging a metal club wrenched from park benches—a micro-phonic groan—the metallic clang of a lifeless metal body falling as junk. Indian fighting. Ambush. It was my only chance.
Steele lost three men that way, pursuiting us into the park, till he thought better of it. He called them off. They congregated beyond the park and headed back for the power-plant. There Frank Steele would hatch other plans to wipe us out.
I CALLED my men around me, in the respite. I pointed to where groups of humans, here and there, peered from a distance, having watched this battle of giants.
“We must get them out of the city,” I said. “Frank Steel will trample them down in his eagerness to get us. Besides, it is not well for humans to see robots warring.” Besides that, they were only too willing to leave—to get away from these metal warriors who would stamp humans flat if they got in the way. By a grapevine that rustled through their residential section, they heard of the trucks being brought out of garages, that would bear them to safety. Run by gasoline rather than electric power, the trucks were not stalled as all else in Utopia City was.
All night long my robots drove back and forth, delivering humans within walking distance of the railroad junction which was our nearest contact with the outside world. Frank Steele did not bother us. Night battling was out of the question.
At dawn, Utopia was empty of humans.
Sam Harley and Jed Tomkins were in the last truck to leave.
“Utopia, bah!” Harley said in parting. “I knew it wouldn’t work. Shouldn’t have been fool enough to come, in the first place. Utopia, bah!”
“Shut up,” Jed Tomkins snapped. “If anybody ruined it, you did.” He turned to me. “So long, Adam Link. Thanks for trying. I’m going to watch the papers. If you ever advertise again, I’ll be back!”
The truck vanished into the night. I turned back to Utopia City. I think I laughed, in a grinding sort of way.
Utopia City was a battleground, now. A trampled Eden. Paradise Lost.
I WILL try to give a clear picture of what has been entered in my private journal of robot history as the First Robot War. And I hope the last.
To force our faction to face his superior force, Frank Steele had his workmen contingent systematically raze the city. We would have no hiding places, for a drawn-out defense. Starting at one end of town, they began leveling building after building.
The robots had been builders, a few months before. Now they became wreckers. And they worked with appalling swiftness. Houses and towers toppled like tenpins. Soon the downtown section began to go, its greater structure measuring their length with thunderous crashes, as the metal termites undermined their foundations.
Utopia City melted before our eyes, into dusty heaps of utter ruin.
“Oh, Adam!” Eve moaned. “It was so beautiful, so wonderful. Can’t we stop them?”
I tried, in several desperate ways. Gathering the trucks, we stormed down on them like a panzer division, trying to run them over, machine against machine. In counter-attack, Frank Steele sent his men out in the electric autos. He still had the atomic-power unit in operation, feeding them ether-borne power.
With full speed, the little cars rammed into our trucks, smashing them. Robots jumped out of the combined wreckage, to come at each other hammer-and-tongs. Again, in the equality of hand-to-hand struggle, I could not win. And his cranemen, picking off a man of mine here and there, would grip them in their long pincers, swing them around, and hurl them high in the air to land as utter debris.
I lost ten more men, to their seven, before I withdrew.
I next tried bombarding the wrecking crew, as they worked on the side of buildings, exposed. My robots hurled great stone blocks, to dislodge them. Frank Steel sent out a covering force, and their barrage of concrete bombs rained back at us. Again I had to withdraw
.
I tried burning them out, setting flame to park trees when the wind was right. The wall of fire swept to the building they were demolishing. Eager tongues of flame licked at them, but it only served to weaken the building faster. The wrecking robots were unharmed except for an oxide coating on their metal bodies.
UTOPIA CITY came down stone by stone.
In one day, it was more than three-quarters razed. I knew that at the next dawn, Frank Steele would have me cornered. He would level the last few structures, and then I would have to face him in the open, either at the city-site or out on the desert.
One building still stood, in the desolate center of town—the power-plant. Within was the undamaged atomic-power unit. Frank Steele must be still working on the blue-print, before he destroyed the only existing model. With the blueprints, after victory over me, he could build a new city—Robot City, center of robot dictatorship.
All night long I stared at the building, symbol of the greatest achievement of Adam Link, inventor.
I laughed harshly. Symbol of Utopia’s fall!
At dawn I spoke to my remaining 25 robots.
“This will be our last stand, men. We are outnumbered. Fight as you’ve never fought before. If we die, we have died nobly!”
As the gray of dawn burst into red glare, the enemy appeared. A grim, silent, formidable phalanx of 45. We took our stand in the open. No use to run.
The two lines came to grips, with a resounding clash, like two lines of armored knights of Medieval times. Robot fought robot, with mighty metal clubs no human could have lifted. A battle of metal Sampsons, before which the mightiest dinosaurs of a past age might have fled, screaming in terror.
The din must have reverberated as distant thunder far out into the desert. Gears clashed, cogs whined, wheels spun screechingly as the full mechanical powers of Herculean machine-men were exerted. Rivets, bolts, springs, cracked body-plates flew for yards as the club blows took toll. Often a robot Would fight as he went down piecemeal. An arm shattered, and he would use his other arm. His side ripped out, he would turn his protected side. A leg off, he would hop. Both legs off, he would wield his club from a lying position till finally his antagonist battered his remaining arm to shreds. Then, at last helpless, he would await the final blow—to his brain.