by C. L. Moore
On the other side of the door sudden tumult broke out. Steel feet thudded, men shouted, equipment crackled and spat. The shouting rose to a crescendo and fell silent. The double doors crashed open and Ego stood on the threshold, facing the calculators. Here and there on his steel body spots of dull heat were fading. He was smeared with stains of oil and blood, and his searchlight eye swept around the room with a controlled speed that yet had something frantic in it. Ego looked at the calculators and the calculators placidly ticked on, rolling out unheeded data under the jaws of their typewriters as every man in the room faced the robot.
In the open doorway behind Ego the squad sergeant stumbled into sight, blood across his face, the nozzle of a sonic-gun in his hand.
“No,” Conway said. “Wait. Stand aside, Broome. Let Ego get to the calculators.”
He paid no attention to the buzz of shocked response. He was looking at Ego with almost hypnotized attention, trying to force the cogs of his own thinking to mesh faster. There was still a chance. Just a shadow of a chance, he knew that. And if he let Ego at the calculators and Ego failed, he wasn’t sure he could interfere in time to save anything. But he had to try. A line of dialogue out of something he couldn’t identify floated through his mind. Yet I will try the last. Some other desperate commander in his last battle, indomitable in the face of defeat. Conway grinned a little, knowing himself anything but indomitable. And yet—I will try the last.
Ego still stood motionless in the doorway. Time moves so much slower than thought. The robot still scanned the computers and thought with complex tickings to himself. Conway stepped aside, leaving the way clear. As he moved he saw his own image swim up at him from the stained surfaces of the robot body, his own gaunt face and hollow eyes reflected as if from a moving mirror smeared with oil and blood, as if it were he himself who lived inside the robot’s body, activating it with his own drives.
Ego’s pause on the threshold lasted only a fraction of a second. His glance flicked the calculators and dismissed them one by one, infinitely fast. Then, as Broome had done, Ego wheeled to the analogue computer and crossed the floor in three enormous strides. Almost contemptuously, without even scanning it, he ripped out the programminogse. He slapped a blank tape into the punching device and his fingers flickered too fast to watch as he stamped his own questions into the wire. In seconds he was back at the computer.
Nobody moved. The mind was dazzled, trying to follow his speed. Only the computer seemed fast enough to keep pace with him, and he bent over the typewriter of the machine tautly, one machine communing with its kinsman, and the two of them so infinitely faster than flesh and blood that the men could only stand staring.
Nobody breathed. Conway—because thought is so fast—had time to say to himself with enormous hopefulness, “He’ll find out the answer. He’ll take over now. When the new assault starts he’ll handle it and win, and I can stop trying any more…”
The stream of printed answers began to pour out under the typewriter bar, and Ego bent to read. The bright cone of his sight bathed the paper. Then with a gesture that was savage as a man’s, he ripped off the tape as if he were tearing out a tongue that had spoken intolerable worlds. And Conway knew the computer had failed them, Ego had failed, Conway had gambled and lost.
The robot straightened up and faced the machines. His steel hands shot out in a furious, punishing motion, ready to rip the computers apart as he had already ripped the other machines which had failed him.
Conway in a voice of infinite disillusion said, “Ego, wait. It’s all right.”
As always when you spoke its name, the robot paused and turned. And faster than data through the computers there poured through Conway’s mind a torrent of linking thought. He saw his own image reflected upon the robot’s body, himself imprisoned in the reflection as Ego was jailed in a task impossible to achieve.
He realized that he understood the robot as no one else alive could do, because only he knew the same tensions. It was something the computers couldn’t deduce. But it was something Conway had partly guessed all along, and forbidden himself to recognize until the last alternative failed and he had to think for himself.
Win the war was the robot’s basic drive. But he had to act on incomplete information, like Conway himself, and that meant that Ego had to assume responsibility for making wrong decisions that might lose the war, which he was not allowed to do. Neither could he shift responsibility as the computers could, saying, “No answer—insufficient data.” Nor could he take refuge in neurosis or madness or surrender. Nor in passing the duty on to someone else, as Conway had tried to do. So all he could do was seek more knowledge furiously, almost at random, and all he could want was——
“I know what you want,” Conway said. “You can have it. I’ll take over, Ego. You can stop wanting, now.”
“Want——” the robot howled inhumanly, and paused as usual, and then rushed on for the first time to finish his statement, “—to stop wanting!”
“Yes,” Conway said. “I know. So do I. But now you can stop, Ego. Turn yourself off. You did your best.”
The hollow voice said much more softly, “Want to stop… ” and then hovering on the brink of silence, “… stop want… ” It ceased. The shivering stopped. A feel of violence seemed to die upon the air around the robot, as if intolerable tensions had relaxed at last inside it. There was a series of clear, deliberate clickings from the steel chest, as of metallic decisions irrevocably reached, one after another. And then something seemed to go out of the thing. It stood differently. It was a machine again. Nothing more than a machine.
Conway looked at his own face in the motionless reflection. The robot couldn’t take it, he thought. No wonder. He couldn’t even speak to ask for relief, because the opposite of want is not want, and when he said the first word, its negative forced him to want nothing, and so to be silent. No, we asked too much. He couldn’t take it. Meeting his own eyes in the reflection, he wondered if he was speaking to the Conway of a long minute ago. Perhaps he was. That Conway couldn’t take it either. But this one had to, and could.
Ego couldn’t act on partial knowledge. No machine could. You can’t expect machines to face the unknown. Only human beings can do that. Steel isn’t strong enough. Only flesh and blood can do it, and go on.
“Well, now I know,” he thought. And it seemed strange, but he wasn’t as tired as he had been before. Always until now there had been Ego to fall back on if he had to, but something he must not try until he reached the last gasp. Well, now he had reached it. And Ego couldn’t carry the load.
He laughed gently to himself. The thought that had chilled him came back and he looked at it calmly. Maybe win the war was impossible. Maybe that paradox was what had stopped Ego. But Conway was human. It didn’t stop him. He could accept the thought and push it aside, knowing that sometimes humans really do achieve the impossible. Maybe that was all that had kept them going this long.
Conway turned his head slowly and looked at Broome.
“Know what I’m going to do?” he asked.
Broome shook his head, the bright eyes watchful.
“I’m going to bed,” Conway said. “I’m going to sleep. I know my limitations now. The other side’s only flesh and blood too. They have the same problems we have. They have to sleep too. You can wake me up when the next attack starts. Then I’ll handle it—or I won’t. But I’ll do my best and that’s all anybody can do.”
He moved stiffly past Ego towards the door, pausing for a moment to touch his palm against the motionless steel chest. It felt cold and not very steady against his hand.
“What do I mean, only flesh and blood?” he asked.
EXIT THE PROFESSOR
WE Hogbens are right exclusive. That Perfesser feller from the city might have known that, but he come busting in without an invite, and I don’t figger he had call to complain afterward. In Kaintuck the polite thing is to stick to your own hill of beans and not come nosing around where you’re not wa
nted.
Time we ran off the Haley boys with that shotgun gadget we rigged up—only we never could make out how it worked, somehow—that time, it all started because Rafe Haley come peeking and prying at the shed winder, trying to get a look at Little Sam. Then Rafe went round saying Little Sam had three haids or something.
Can’t believe a word them Haley boys say. Three haids! It ain’t natcheral, is it? Anyhow, Little Sam’s only got two haids, and never had no more since the day he was born.
So Maw and I rigged up that shotgun thing and peppered the Haley boys good. Like I said, we couldn’t figger out afterward how it worked. We’d tacked on some dry cells and a lot of coils and wires and stuff and it punched holes in Rafe as neat as anything.
Coroner’s verdict was that the Haley boys died real sudden, and Sheriff Abernathy come up and had a drink of corn with us and said for two cents he’d whale the tar outa me. I didn’t pay no mind. Only some damyankee reporter musta got wind of it, because a while later a big, fat, serious-looking man come around and begun to ask questions.
Uncle Les was sitting on the porch, with his hat over his face. “You better get the heck back to your circus, mister,” he just said. “We had offers from old Barnum hisself and turned ’em down. Ain’t that right, Saunk?”
“Sure is,” I said. “I never trusted Phineas. Called Little Sam a freak, he did.”
The big solemn-looking man, whose name was Perfesser Thomas Galbraith, looked at me. “How old are you, son?” he said.
“I ain’t your son,” I said. “And I don’t now, nohow.”
“You don’t look over eighteen,” he said, “big as you are. You couldn’t have known Barnum.”
“Sure I did. Don’t go giving me the lie. I’ll wham you.”
“I’m not connected with any circus,” Galbraith said. “I’m a biogeneticist.”
We sure laughed at that. He got kinda mad and wanted to know what the joke was.
“There ain’t no such word,” Maw said. And at that point Little Sam started yelling, and Galbraith turned white as a goose wing and shivered all over. He sort of fell down. When we picked him up, he wanted to know what had happened.
“That was Little Sam,” I said. “Maw’s gone in to comfort him. He’s stopped now.”
“That was a subsonic,” the Perfesser snapped. “What is Little Sam—a short-wave transmitter?”
“Little Sam’s the baby,” I said, short-like. “Don’t go calling him outa his name, either. Now, s’pose you tell us what you want.”
He pulled out a notebook and started looking through it.
“I’m a—a scientist,” he said. “Our foundation is studying eugenics, and we’ve got some reports about you. They sound unbelievable. One of our men has a theory that natural mutations can remain undetected in undeveloped cultural regions, and——” He slowed down and stared at Uncle Les. “Can you really fly?” he asked.
Well, we don’t like to talk about that. The preacher gave us a good dressing-down once. Uncle Les had got likkered up and went sailing over the ridges, scaring a couple of bear hunters outa their senses. And it ain’t in the Good Book that men should fly, neither. Uncle Les generally does it only on the sly, when nobody’s watching.
So anyhow Uncle Les pulled his hat down further on his face and growled.
“That’s plumb silly. Ain’t no way a man can fly. These here modern contraptions I hear tell about—’tween ourselves, they don’t really fly at all. Just a lot of crazy talk, that’s all.”
Galbraith blinked and studied his notebook again.
“But I’ve got hearsay evidence of a great many unusual things connected with your family. Flying is only one of them. I know it’s theoretically impossible—and I’m not talking about planes—but——”
“Oh, shet your trap.”
“The medieval witches’ salve used aconite to give an illusion of flight—entirely subjective, of course.”
“Will you stop pestering me?” Uncle Les said, getting mad, on account of he felt embarrassed, I guess. Then he jumped up, threw his hat down on the porch, and flew away. After a minute he swooped down for his hat and made a face at the Perfesser. He flew off down the gulch and we didn’t see him fer a while.
I got mad, too.
“You got no call to bother us,” I said. “Next thing Uncle Les will do like Paw, and that’ll be an awful nuisance. We ain’t seen hide nor hair of Paw since that other city feller was around. He was a census taker, I think.”
Galbraith didn’t say anything. He was looking kinda funny. I gave him a drink and he asked about Paw.
“Oh, he’s around,” I said. “Only you don’t see him no more. He likes it better that way, he says.”
“Yes,” Galbraith said, taking another drink. “Oh, God. How old did you say you were?”
“Didn’t say nothing about it.”
“Well, what’s the earliest thing you can remember?”
“Ain’t no use remembering things. Clutters up your haid too much.”
“It’s fantastic,” Galbraith said. “I hadn’t expected to send a report like that back to the foundation.”
“We don’t want nobody prying around,” I said. “Go way and leave us alone.”
“But, good Lord!” He looked over the porch rail and got interested in the shotgun gadget. “What’s that?”
“A thing,” I said.
“What does it do?”
“Things,” I said.
“Oh. May I look at it?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll give you the dingus if you’ll go away.”
He went over and looked at it. Paw got up from where he’d been sitting beside me, told me to get rid of the damyankee, and went into the house. The Perfesser came back. “Extraordinary!” he said. “I’ve had training in electronics, and it seems to me you’ve got something very odd there. What’s the principle?”
“The what?” I said. “It makes holes in things.”
“It can’t fire shells. You’ve got a couple of lenses where the breech should—how did you say it worked?”
“I dunno.”
“Did you make it?”
“Me and Maw.”
He asked a lot more questions.
“I dunno,” I said. “Trouble with a shotgun is you gotta keep loading it. We sorta thought if we hooked on a few things it wouldn’t need loading no more. It don’t, neither.”
“Were you serious about giving it to me?”
“If you stop bothering us.”
“Listen,” he said, “it’s miraculous that you Hogbens have stayed out of sight so long.”
“We got our ways.”
“The mutation theory must be right. You must be studied. This is one of the most important discoveries since——” He kept on talking like that. He didn’t make much sense.
Finally I decided there was only two ways to handle things, and after what Sheriff Abernathy had said, I didn’t feel right about killing nobody till the Sheriff had got over his fit of temper. I don’t want to cause no ruckus.
“S’pose I go to New York with you, like you want,” I said. “Will you leave the family alone?”
He halfway promised, though he didn’t want to. But he knuckled under and crossed his heart, on account of I said I’d wake up Little Sam if he didn’t. He sure wanted to see Little Sam, but I told him that was no good. Little Sam couldn’t go to New York, anyhow. He’s got to stay in his tank or he gets awful sick.
Anyway, I satisfied the Perfesser pretty well and he went off, after I’d promised to meet him in town next morning. I felt sick, though, I can tell you. I ain’t been away from the folks overnight since that ruckus in the old country, when we had to make tracks fast.
Went to Holland, as I remember. Maw always had a soft spot fer the man that helped us get outa London. Named Little Sam after him. I fergit what his name was. Gwynn or Stuart or Pepys—I get mixed up when I think back beyond the War between the States.
That night we chewed the rag. Paw being in
visible, Maw kept thinking he was getting more’n his share of the corn, but pretty soon she mellowed and let him have a demijohn. Everybody told me to mind my p’s and q’s.
“This here Perfesser’s awful smart,” Maw said. “All perfessers are. Don’t go bothering him any. You be a good boy or you’ll ketch heck from me.”
“I’ll be good, Maw,” I said. Paw whaled me alongside the haid, which wasn’t fair, on account of I couldn’t see him.
“That’s so you won’t fergit,” he said.
“We’re plain folks,” Uncle Les was growling. “No good never come of trying to get above yourself.”
“Honest, I ain’t trying to do that,” I said. “I only figgered——”
“You stay outa trouble!” Maw said, and just then we heard Grandpaw moving in the attic. Sometimes Grandpaw don&8217;t stir for a month at a time, but tonight he seemed right frisky.
So, natcherally, we went upstairs to see what he wanted.
He was talking about the Perfesser.
“A stranger, eh?” he said. “Out upon the stinking knave. A set of rare fools I’ve gathered about me for my dotage! Only Saunk shows any shrewdness, and, dang my eyes, he’s the worst fool of all.”
I just shuffled and muttered something, on account of I never like to look at Grandpaw direct. But he wasn’t paying me no mind. He raved on.
“So you’d go to this New York? ’Sblood, and hast thou forgot the way we shunned London and Amsterdam—and Nieuw Amsterdam—for fear of questioning? Wouldst thou be put in a freak show? Nor is that the worst danger.”
Grandpaw’s the oldest one of us all and he gets kinda mixed up in his language sometimes. I guess the lingo you learned when you’re young sorta sticks with you. One thing, he can cuss better than anybody I’ve ever heard.
“Shucks,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”
“Thou puling brat,” Grandpaw said. “’Tis thy fault and thy dam’s. For building that device, I mean, that slew the Haley tribe. Hadst thou not, this scientist would never have come here.”