Now the man-robot came to life. The plastic substance of its face, as perfectly fleshlike in appearance as flesh could be, moved, as pseudo-muscles within it contracted or expanded. The smile broadened, showing rows of white teeth. The thorax of the robot heaved gently, as in natural breathing. A pair of hands, angular and bronzed, were raised to button shirt and vest, and to adjust tie and coat collar.
The automaton surveyed the reflection of itself, pictured in the burnished metal flank of a huge chemical vat. A small comb, deftly plied, was drawn through its curly hair in a few, swift, practiced gestures.
“Hm-m-m! Not bad, Curt Shelbey!” the robot commented.
Its voice was soft and accentless, gay. The posture of its head was just slightly and boyishly cocky. Its grin, now, bore a faint and not obnoxious trace of insolence.
Yet there was no human vanity in the soul of Iszt, who ruled the manlike marvel. And he did not truly admire his human guise. His one great satisfaction lay in the minute completeness of the imitation he had achieved. He was like an actor playing a part—the dangerous part of a treacherous agent, whose motives were still, in a broad sense, benign. That the people of one world should be wiped out in order that the inhabitants of myriad other worlds might live, was sound, if Spartan, logic.
SUDDENLY the robot’s face had gone Satanic and hard. But perhaps this was not a reflection of its guiding entity’s true emotions, but instead just another bit of acting. Iszt would not have been cruel for the sake of cruelty. Bizarre, courageous little mite that he was, he was visualizing catastrophe inconceivable—a catastrophe which he and Earth must help prevent. That it belonged to a future still a thousand years distant made no difference. For demigods see far, and they avert trouble when there is yet time.
Iszt’s robot hurried up another spiral runway, reaching at last the little room at the very apex of the polyhedron. Here was Iszt’s interstellar vehicle. It looked cylindrical, clear as glass, and only a little taller than a man. Yet there was a puzzling vagueness about it, as though its three-dimensional form possessed projections into mysterious higher dimensions.
Bearing the case of tools and instruments, the robot clambered into the vehicle’s opened top, and clamped down the conical lid.
Some remote-control device, operated from within the strange car, caused the peaked roof of the room to fold aside on a hinge. The cylinder bearing the humanlike marionette rose upward through the opening at swiftly mounting speed, a bright wisp of phosphorescence trailing in its wake.
The limitless swarm of polyhedra flickered swiftly past. Strange little ships wheeled and darted in salute to the intrepid agent who was now on his way. Odd, mighty mechanism, resting, half completed on great meteoric masses which were to be used as a source of atomic power in the tremendous task to come, dwindled swiftly behind.
“I go,” Iszt thought forcibly. “I go to do what must be done.”
He knew that his people would sense his expression of farewell, not by telepathy, exactly, but by means of a natural contact with the state of matter. It was like a sixth sense groping through dimensions unknown to man—a sense which felt and could interpret the nerve currents of the thoughts in his brain.
Iszt’s vehicle hurtled on, through the brittle clearness of the void, toward a small, distant star. Presently, after a certain velocity had been attained, the robot called Curt Shelbey pressed a control. The brooding stars blurred. Space itself seemed to bend and warp impossibly, as hidden dimensions opened before the speeding craft, affording it a shortened path across the distance.
The interstellar voyager had spent ten years on Earth, mingling with its inhabitants as one of them. But time had not obliterated, within Iszt’s strange soul, a fear and suspicion born of a thousand abysmal gaps of environment and background. Though he loved danger, though he was far more competent to cope with it than any man, Iszt was still tiny, faintly pathetic, and alone.
HAD ANNE WINTERS known the truth, her cheeks would certainly have gone ashen with terror. But she did not know the truth. Moreover, the night was beautiful and clear; the purr of the big car was soft and hypnotic; and she was in love with the hard, gay, reticent personality beside her.
There were, however, certain disquieting elements to mar this perfection—elements, that is, which she was aware of. Some of them were grimly plain to be seen, though mysterious. Others were just hunches—the promptings, perhaps, of her keen intuition.
She knew, of course, about the unprecedented things that had happened with increasing frequence all over the world, and had already caused more than a hundred thousand deaths. Terrific three-hundred-mile-an-hour winds. Electrical storms that had killed every inhabitant of several villages. Earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanic eruptions of tremendous violence, including in their ejecta vast quantities of poisonous, radioactive gas!
These were eerie, unheard-of phenomena, possessing, for the most part, because of their strangeness, the aspect of a portent.
And Anne Winters knew, too, that this man beside her—this youth who could not be more than twenty-five—was a scientist the equal of which history had never produced. He claimed understanding of the calamities that were taking place, and he had demanded extraordinary things from the world—things which it was ill-disposed to provide.
She offered Curt Shelbey a cigarette. Quite casually and naturally he thanked her and accepted.
Neither of them spoke for at least a minute after that. But she watched him closely, half sensing an unnaturalness about him that wasn’t visible. He drove the car with an easy skill. And he accomplished other common parts of life just as well. Dancing, for instance. Taking her to dinner. She had no inkling of the minute care and inventive ingenuity which enabled this thing, which she thought was human, to eat just as did other people. Not the great, but these small things, were difficult for Iszt. Nor, of course, could she have realized that all the precision which her companion exercised in his contacts with the social system around him was the product of the need for secrecy in the perpetration of a vast treacherous, deadly hoax. Discovery of that hoax might easily have dangerous and far-reaching consequences. But even Anne’s father, the brilliant Dr. Forrest Winters, did not know—
At last the girl smiled a faint, hard little smile that mismatched her delicate blond beauty.
“Curt,” she said, “I’m a fool. Fool enough to admit openly that I love you.”
Gray eyes turned toward her. There was no sign of triumph in their glance—just mild inquiry that must have been a histrionic gesture in itself, directed by an intellect that had no personal capacity to feel the emotion she had mentioned in a way that a man or a woman could understand.
ISZT KNEW his human beings quite well, after his ten years of study. He knew that his every move, every gesture, every expression had a value which must not be abused if he wished to maintain control. He sensed a bit of the nerve currents of Anne Winters’ thoughts; still he caused his robot to smile gently, and let her go on.
“I love you, Curt,” she repeated a trifle unsteadily. “That’s one reason why you worry me so much. You’ve got me puzzled, Curt. Ever since Dad took you into his laboratory—and before, even—it’s been like that. You haven’t any past—any childhood that anybody knows anything about. You say that you were hurt in an automobile accident, and that everything before that time is a blank. You look so young, and yet you’re the world’s greatest! Your dimensional and resonance theories, your mathematics, the funny, miraculous devices you build, and—oh, you know all the rest of it!
“And now—the things that are happening—those dreadful storms, and those strange eruptions—tens of thousands of people being killed every day. Fear—horrible fear! No one can even guess what it all means except you. And you can’t seem to explain. You can’t get your ideas across to the rest of us, it appears—though you try. But you say you can fix things, if you’re given the cooperation you want. And such cooperation! Trillions of dollars’ worth—the price of a dozen major wars! You
say that you can restore normalcy then—that all our troubles are caused by some gigantic cosmic unbalance which needs readjustment. Oh, if it’s true, Curt, that you’re honest, I’m glad! You’d be something like a gift of Providence then! But some folks say that you’re just trying to hold up the world—to get it to meet your terms, like an extortionist, or a madman with a club who wants absolute power. I don’t say that that’s true, Curt. But a lot of people are saying it. They think that if you were killed, all the devilish phenomena would end—that you’re the real cause of them! Tell me, Curt, what does it all mean?”
Curt Shelbey, guise of Iszt, tossed his cigarette away, and lied with a cold glibness that betrayed no hint of conscience. Iszt needed no trumped up arguments to support his position. He felt that it was right, and perfectly justified. Was he, lonely little alien from a far region, to be blamed for this attitude? After all, Earth, extending around him now in a vague, moonlit expanse must have been as repellent from his point of view as the deepest part of a black nebula must always be to a man. It was a place crawling and swarming with ghoulish life, with which, by the very nature of circumstance, it would seem almost impossible for him to have any real sympathy.
Curt Shelbey laughed gayly. “What does it all mean?” he questioned in return. “It means that the people who want me killed have the wrong idea, Anne. I am honest.”
There was sincerity in his eyes, in his tone, and in his gentle manner. For the time at least, the girl was reassured.
“I’m glad, Curt,” she murmured. “Only it isn’t safe for you to be driving along a deserted road at night like this. We haven’t any real place to go. Let’s turn around and start back for the laboratory. The police are there—they’ll guard you.”
CURT SHELBEY gave a short, hard chuckle, expressing masculine scorn. But when the next farmyard driveway was reached, he swung the nose of the big car easily into it, and backed around. With a leisurely carelessness, he started the return of what seemed an aimless jaunt, driving at a crawl.
But Iszt, hidden where, in a human form, a pair of lungs should be, had a definite purpose in coming out to this lonely rural spot, so near to Chicago, the vital, throbbing heart of the Middle West. Things that happened in great cities were noticed, had significance, and could create the fear that was the needed driving force for colossal efforts and achievements.
Iszt was not as cool as the outward aspect of his intricate mount. For many hours several of his hair-like tentacles had been not in contact with the controls of his personal robot, but with other controls, attached to an apparatus which, by delicate and far-reaching impulses, could guide other robots out there in the interplanetary vacuum. Streaking silently through those frigid, empty regions, they were drawing things Earthward with their attractive power—things from the debris-littered belt of Minor Planets.
And Iszt was waiting for the results of their activities with a painful tension. His tiny body, cold and alien to every phase of the Earthly environment, ached with that tension, which was like worry to a man.
And in his mind a million memories were surging, forming a checkered backdrop for the present. His solitary wanderings throughout the universe. The passive inertia of his own kind, which led them to accomplish their miracles with a minimum of effort on their own part. His first day on this planet, long ago—
Iszt had been without human disguise then. He’d had just a crude, mobile shell. He’d seen the forests, the oceans, the plains of Earth. The vegetation that the weird, hideous inhabitants admired so much. Green. No, it was not green to Iszt’s eyes. The sensations of each wavelength of light, were different to him than to human beings. Color is only the way a mind and eye interpret a given wavelength. And the vision centers of Iszt’s brain, and his eyes as well, were different from their human counterparts—as different, almost, as his cold flesh.
Earth he had never thought beautiful. That, of course, was a matter of heredity and conditioning, as he was aware. He had been born and reared to concepts of beauty far different from those of men. Being on Earth, to him, had some of the elements of wallowing helplessly in an oozy, disgusting liquid, filled with living slime and squirming Infusoria.
Fear had stalked him at every step during the early part of his Terrestrial adventure. But he’d blundered through, somehow. A dozen men had perished because he’d been afraid of being found out. By slow stages he'd caught on to the Terrestrial ways of doing a few things, his observations necessarily limited by the danger of discovery, which would have spoiled all his plans.
AND THEN AT LAST he’d built the robot called Curtiss Shelbey. After that the going had been easier. As Curt Shelbey he had attended a famous university. He had engaged in sports and social life, had learned science over again from the Earthly standpoint, using the nights and his summer vacations for his more important explorations and tests. Every continent and large island had known his secret, nocturnal visits. He knew the ocean deeps. His instruments had probed to the very core of the planet, aiding his mole robots which bored deep into its crust. Thus Iszt had acquired a complete and necessary knowledge of Earth’s composition—necessary in his battle against the shadowy juggernaut that threatened a universal upset.
Iszt had been happy, in spite of everything. It was the happiness of adventure and of risks and of accomplishment—one which any active human being could understand.
Now the car rolled on quietly and slowly through the moonlit night, harboring a mood and a significance far different from that which appearances expressed. For several minutes there was nothing to mar the apparent serenity and peace.
Then there came a sudden flash of incandescence from above. Soundless at first, it illuminated everything as brilliantly as the noonday sun. But the quality of its light was hard and blue and artificial in appearance, like the glare of a carbon arc.
Now came the crash, shrill and high and tinkling at the outset, sounding like the shattering of a million windows. This shaded by degrees into an all-enveloping roar, jarring and nerve-shattering. Its volume increased until it not only seemed to rend eardrums, but to tear nerves and brain tissue with its overpowering force. Several distinct and mighty concussions punctuated this Gargantuan song of calamity. The globe of incandescence streaked down, vanishing at last to the south, where Chicago lay helpless before the onslaught. The ground shuddered with the far-off impact. Night closed in again, silent once more except for a vast echo, that sounded like a heavily loaded train fading away into the distance.
Anne Winters was speechless with terror for several seconds. But at last she found her voice.
“Curt!” she gasped. “Curt! What was that? More—more of—”
He was still driving the car quite nonchalantly. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Just an unusually large meteor falling. But things like this are to be expected—now. I predicted the meteor shower last evening, sending my report to the news syndicates. Sometime very soon I’m going to be really believed in. When the texture of space is out of balance, there are repercussions everywhere. I’ll get cooperation at last. Meanwhile, the meteor shower is by no means over. We’ll—”
Another shrill, shattering scream of a descending missile rent the air, drowning the pseudo Curt Shelbey’s last words.
AND THE SOUL of Iszt felt a strange, wild thrill. His hoax would work. He knew it would work! Space out of balance.
No, what was happening wasn’t as sensational as that. All the calamities that had come to Earth during the past months were just the results of comparatively simple tricks, perpetrated by his robots. The metal moles, working underground on the internal fires of Terra, had caused the quakes and eruptions, just as the space automatons that had dragged cosmic wreckage from the path of Minor Planets were now causing the meteor shower. The radioactive gas from the volcanoes came from induced atomic breakdown in subterranean rocks. The tremendous storms were the product of intricate atmospheric tampering.
Mummery to impress dazed humanity. The inhabitants of Earth didn’t need to u
nderstand what it was all about. When they were afraid enough, they wouldn’t ask for understanding. They’d have blind faith that would lead them to quick destruction. But the galaxy would be safe once more.
The sky was alight with a dozen tumbling, flaming chunks of matter, now. One huge mass landed several miles away, striking the ground in a fountain of incandescent fire—soil, heated by the terrific impact. Air puffed outward in a hot, searing, crushing gust. The landscape trembled like a frightened monster. A group of farm buildings collapsed and began to burn.
The big car bumped over great rifts in the heaving road. Then Iszt, or Curt Shelbey, brought it to a stop in a clear, open space. For ten minutes the awful holocaust endured. Then, as abruptly as it had started, it ceased. Over Chicago, near but still a considerable number of miles away, a red glow was visible—a red glow illuminating the night, and speaking eloquently of wholesale death and destruction.
Curt Shelbey drove on again, apparently with a quiet, controlled grimness. The thing that really gave him life must have felt relief that the risk he had had to take to further his plans was past.
Suddenly, though, Iszt, endowed with far keener intuitive powers than a man, sensed the presence of a new menace—in the bushes along the road.
The warning, however, came too late. There was a little spurt of fire, a sharp report, and a high, slurring whine. The bullet—a simple bullet from a high powered Earthly rifle—struck the door of the car and drilled through.
Curt Shelbey gave a start. His fingers tightened on the wheel. Unnaturally, the grim smile on his lips did not change an iota. The expression on the inanimate face remained as unaltered as that of a classic Greek statue, shattered in a bombed museum. No visage of living flesh could have shown such an absolute lack of response.
Godson of Almarlu: A Collection of Science Fiction Novellas Page 21