by Hank Davis
They sat in a circle, seeming to regard each other. They might have been sitting there for one hour or for a million years. On Calypso, without atmosphere, metal does not rust or apparatus deteriorate.
Steve stared at them for a long time. They were quite impossible. Then he suddenly moved forward purposefully. From one standpoint, nothing that he could do was worthwhile because nothing could change his fate. If he took one of these robots back to the ship, though, and examined its workings, he would at least have an occupation. He might keep himself sane.
He looked at all of them and heaved one to his shoulder. Examination might tell where it came from. At least it would be a sort of technical solitaire he could play until his air ran out. He had no faintest idea that the robots could affect his personal future, except by providing a sort of game of patience he might play like any other condemned man.
He went back to the space-cruiser, pleased with the robot as a thing to investigate, but nagged by the fact that he was here on Calypso to die, and nothing else really mattered. He left the robot in the airlock for a while. A puddle of furiously boiling liquid air formed about its feet as air filled the lock. The robot had been at the normal temperature of Calypso—say eight degrees absolute—and it took time to warm up. But presently Steve carted it into the main cabin and set to work to find out what made it tick.
In ten minutes he knew he was looking at the absolute perfection of engineering design. Half of it was unintelligible, of course, but the thing had muscles, which were of flexible plastic with a magnetizing coil about them. They shortened in exact proportion to the magnetizing current. It had eyes which were not scanners, but lenses focused directly on a flat close spiral of infinitely fine wire, it had what must have been tactile nerves which were almost microscopically small variable-resistance units.
The whole interior of the robot was contrived to slide out as units, once the torso was opened, whether for examination or for replacement. The power was undoubtedly electric and it was generated by a thermo-unit Steve could not begin to understand.
He spent half a Calypsian day in mere examination, being careful to remove nothing. It was absorbing. It was fascinating. He discovered an enormous number of things he could see the use of, but whose workings he could not fathom. In the skull case, for example, a thick sheath of fine wires from all over the robot led to a mass of black substance with a faintly visible external pattern of crystal-outlines on it. It was apparently the coordinating factor for the operation of the robot. There was a minute bit of apparatus with a recognizable variable condenser adjusted by a tiny “muscle.” That must be a short-wave radio unit for communication.
In spite of these mechanical details, however, the robot had an extraordinarily manlike look when it was closed up again. The head was not round, but a laterally flattened ovoid, set on a turnable neck, with the highest part at the rear. But for its slender gracefulness, the robot might have been taken for a suit of golden armor, designed by a genius for an impossibly wiry human being. And it was small. Its total height was under five feet.
“Whoever designed you,” said Steve warmly, “did a job of work! I understand about ten percent of your works! If I had you back on Earth, we’d make some real machines!”
The thing was motionless. But it looked amazingly human. Erect, it would have a gallant briskness in its air.
“I’m going to see if I can’t start you going,” said Steve suddenly. “You can’t do any harm, anyhow!”
Power was derived from a thermo-generator, far ahead of anything similar that Steve knew of. It was the logical power-unit for a robot, though. No battery will store as much power as its own weight of fuel will yield. Steve had seen where fuel from a tiny double tank had been fed through a hairlike capillary tube to what must have been a catalyzing-chamber.
He set to work with a tiny brazing-torch and a wisp of platinized asbestos. An hour later he carefully funneled almost a full pint of rocket fuel into the robot’s tank. With a platinum catalyst, the temperature attained would be relatively low and the efficiency ridiculously small, but it should work. He made as careful an adjustment as he could and closed the torso.
The golden figure stirred. Its arms and legs shifted from slackness to something like tenseness. The head came around. The robot, in effect, sat up. It looked at him, and all about the cruiser’s cabin, and then sharply back at him.
“Hello!” said Steve, grinning, though his heart pounded oddly. “I’m Steve Baring. Who are you?”
The golden figure made no sound. It suddenly occurred to Steve that he had seen no signs of either hearing-apparatus or of sound-producing means in the robot’s works. For a machine designed to operate in airlessness, of course, sound would not exist.
“Oh-oh!” said Steve. “You don’t talk. Want to look around?”
He stood up. He beckoned. The golden figure stood, with a complete effortlessness that was grace itself. Steve led the way to a port and pointed. The golden figure tilted its head and stared out. It looked back at Steve. It was extraordinarily like a living thing. There was no jerkiness in any movement. There was no clumsiness.
“If you are remote-controlled,” said Steve, “the lad who’s running you knows his stuff! But somehow, I don’t think you are. Let’s look around.”
He led the way to the control room. The robot followed, sure-footed and light upon its feet. Steve halted suddenly. The robot moved to one side to give him space to move. It looked from him to the instruments and to the star map. It regarded the star map steadily for several seconds. It was nearer the door back into the cabin, and when Steve moved toward the door it stepped aside to let him lead the way. It was incredibly like the courtesy of a reasoning being. Steve jumped a little.
He did not know whether he felt idiotic or frightened, but either sensation was preferable to continued contemplation of his predicament as a castaway on Calypso. He led the way to the tiny engine room. The robot followed with light, sure steps.
It was glittering golden metal. It was all graceful smooth lines and strictly functional curves. It was a thing of beauty, with the crestlike metal spur which must be a radio antenna giving it a trace of cockiness that was irresistibly appealing.
It scrutinized the drive, its twin vision devices moving back and forth among the fuel pumps, the catalyzers, and the field-generator which turned the catalyzed but still relatively inert organic compound into the continually detonating stuff which drove the ship—when one had enough of it to count.
The robot looked, but always it paid close attention to Steve. It was so lifelike that it actually had a manner. It was absorbed, it was brisk and it was—well—human.
“I’d give a half-hour of my oxygen to know how they made that black stuff in your brain case,” Steve mused.
He crossed the cabin and took out a volume of the Celestial Pilot with its orbit-constants for all the larger bodies of the solar system, landing-ports and regulations for the different planets, and photographs of all moons and most of the asteroids from every possible angle of approach.
“Your eyes ought to take this stuff,” said Steve. “Let’s see if I can get a reaction out of you.”
He flipped the pages to the photographs of Calypso and pointed outside. The robot regarded the pictures attentively. Steve pointed out the photographs of Jupiter, recognizable from its huge disk overhead. Then he turned to a map of the Jovian system of satellites.
The robot looked up at him. With a curiously tentative pressure it took the book into its own hands and fumbled with the pages. It caught the trick of turning them and went through the entire pilot from beginning to end, disregarding the text, but eagerly regarding the photographs and maps.
Steve sat down. He lighted a cigarette and smoked reflectively, putting the lighter on the table beside his chair. He watched the robot with a curious mingling of pleasure and wistfulness.
“Fella,” said Steve wryly, “you intrigue me. You can’t do me any harm because my killing’s already attende
d to. You can’t harm other humans, because you can’t get off Calypso with what fuel’s left in this ship. And anyhow, the stuff in your fuel tank will run out presently. So you and I can be chummy. I need a friend to chat with, right now. You’re elected.”
The robot looked at him, having seen his movement. It put down the book and waited. Steve grinned wryly again.
“Maybe you know some games?” he asked humorously.
The robot looked at the bookshelves, reached out, took a book, and offered it to Steve with a quaint air of asking permission.
“Go ahead!” said Steve. “Maybe you’re only a glorified set of clockworks, but I like your manners. Wait a minute, though! That’s a novel, with no pictures. I’ll find something.”
He hunted. He found a suitable book. He opened it and fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. The robot crossed the cabin and came back with the lighter he’d put down beside his chair. Steve’s jaw dropped.
“Now, what the devil! You’re human!”
He showed the robot pictures. Once or twice he sketched diagrams—talking busily the while—to make some illustration clear. Presently the robot seemed able to go on by itself. Steve sat back and watched with a sort of quasi-parental pride as the robot looked at pictures.
He fell asleep in his chair, while pondering the problem of how to establish two-way communication with his mental protégé. So far, it was only one-way. He could tell the robot things, in a limited way, but the robot could not communicate in return.
When he awoke, the robot was gone. And on the table beside him was a tiny bit of copper tubing with a wisp of platinized asbestos inside it. It was the improvised catalyzer he’d spent an hour on the day before, to fit the robot’s thermo-generator to use rocket fuel.
“Jupiter!” said Steve sourly. “That dummy figured I must’ve opened him up and fueled him, so he opened himself up to see. And he didn’t like my work and took it out and went home.”
Then he heard the airlock. It was being worked with precision and exact knowledge. There were footsteps on the metal plating. The outer door closed. There was the soughing sound of air admitted.
The robot came lightly into the cabin, clothed in mist. It carried a round, flat object in its hands. It regarded the frosting which formed upon it because of its temperature, and looked at Steve, and made what could only be described as a deprecatory gesture. It put the flat object down and waited patiently.
“You’ve been out a long time!” said Steve, growling in spite of an illogical elation at the robot’s return. “You had to, to get that cold! You should’ve used a suit.”
But he was extraordinarily cheered. He was in the almost unthinkable situation of a man with no purpose and no plans. He could have none. He was waiting to die when his air ran out. So the robot was companionship or it was nothing. He stood up and looked at the flat thing the robot had brought.
“An apple for teacher, eh?” he growled again. “Let’s see what it is.”
He turned a heater on robot and flat object together. In minutes the frost vanished from both. But it did have a tendency to return as the unwarmed inner mechanisms took heat from the outer surface.
The robot pointed to the flat thing. Pictures formed under a transparent dial. It was a vision-plate; a television receiver. And it showed Steve’s face, speaking. He wasn’t speaking. It showed the pages of the Celestial Pilot being turned, one by one. They weren’t being turned. Then it showed Steve, without a spacesuit, walking on the airless outer surface of Calypso. He wasn’t. He hadn’t.
“Good Lord!” said Steve explosively. “I get it! I think in words, and short waves will carry ’em. You think in pictures, and short waves will carry them too! I get it! We talk two-way now!”
He settled down zestfully to talk with the only companion he could possibly have before his air ran out. Talking was an involved process, involving sketches and hastily-looked-up photographs on Steve’s part, and pictures coming into view on the flat dial, on the part of the robot. It probably should have resulted in a marvelously educational technical session for Steve, but instead it brought the unfolding of a story.
It began with the picture of a planet, which was frost and ice from pole to pole. The pale, bluish light of a distant sun played upon it faintly. But that picture melted into another, of a snow-clad city of such infinitely graceful lines and such perfect grouping of masses that it was breathtaking. And that, in turn, melted into other pictures within the city, which was peopled by brisk, gallantly erect and lightly stepping metal figures such as the one who now stood beside Steve Baring.
There were flying things which descended swiftly to the city, and others which took off and went away, and then a swift panorama of planets upon planets, and suns upon suns, and brisk bright metal figures everywhere, but always the visiscreen image returned to the frozen planet and the city which had been shown first of all.
Then there was a picture of a small object alone in space. It was a spaceship, and it moved, because the pattern of stars behind it changed slowly. But presently it wavered upon the screen. It ceased to point steadily in one direction. It careered crazily about among the stars. It made monstrous swoops and cavortings. And then—superimposed upon the image of the crazily darting ship—there came a picture of a giant double star, its components seemingly motionless. The twin stars moved visibly, faster and faster about each other until their movement in their orbit was a mere blur, while still the spaceship hung itself crazily about.
The motion of the phantom double star ceased, and the spaceship was seen to be tumbling slowly and purposelessly through space.
“That first was your home planet,” said Steve, nodding. “And you’re telling me that the controls of your spaceship went haywire, just like mine, and the ship was acting up so crazily you couldn’t control it for as long as it took that double star to spin about itself all those times—”
He felt that he had failed to notice something. But the pictures began again. He saw inside the spaceship, now. Six space-suited figures regarded utterly cryptic machinery and worked precisely upon it, repairing it, evidently. Then one of them opened its torso and removed the half of its own fuel tank. It applied that tiny tank to a larger tank beside the contrivance just repaired.
A picture showed the spaceship moving steadily. Another figure seeming to disembowel itself to provide fuel for the ship, and still others. Then the spaceship came down in a clumsy landing on Calypso. It was a bad landing, a crash landing. The spaceship buckled and spouted odd parts.
Six golden figures spread out from the wreckage, desperately searching. After a long time they met again. They had found nothing. They entered a shallow cave beside a monstrous irregular monolith. Then the screen ceased to move, with six golden figures seated in the cave.
“You got control again,” said Steve, “when the fuel in your main tanks ran out. Like me. But you had to use the stuff your bodies run on to power it to a landing, and Calypso was the best you could do. You must’ve figured it mighty close, to crash-land like you did. Then you couldn’t take off. Again like me. So you sat down and—well—died, like I’m going to do. Only I came along and brought you back to life.”
The robot looked at him. Steve said sourly, “And now you’re asking me to wake up the rest of your friends, huh? I’ll think about it.”
He felt a curious, somber jealousy. He had no plans. He could have none. He could only act upon impulse, because reason had no sense to it now, and he wanted company for his lonely last hours. Now, with one robot active, he had company of a sort. If he fueled all the rest, they would be company for each other, but he would be an interloper. He would be left out. He would be more lonely than before, because he would see these brisk metal figures in a companionship he could not share. So he was jealous.
He rather anxiously brought out a vision-record and put it on the projector to entertain the robot who was his guest. The golden figure watched intently. When the first record was finished, it watched hopefully for ano
ther. It watched the insertion of the record and the starting of the projector. When that was ended, it briskly changed to a third record without fumbling.
“Jupiter!” said Steve, “You’ve got brains! A robot wouldn’t’ve thought of bringing a visiplate to talk with! But you are a robot!”
He fumbled for a cigarette. The robot handed him his case. There was no hint of servility in the act. It went back to the watching of the vision records.
Steve felt an angry resentment within him. He had wakened the robot to life, and in a sense it was at his mercy and would share his fate. He would live while he had air, and it would live while he supplied it with fuel. When he died, it would die. It was reasonable enough that it should devote itself to him. But it must feel an added loneliness because it could have the companionship of its fellows, which Steve denied it.
Steve said, “Jupiter!” in a disgusted voice. He got up and climbed into his spacesuit. He came back to the cabin to say, “Stay here!” and reinforced the command with gestures. He went out the airlock and over to the line of footsteps he had first followed. He followed them for the second time.
“Sentimental fool!” he muttered. “He’s a machine. A machine can’t be lonely! I’m giving him a personality like people do with dogs and babies!”
But he went on because reason was no longer reasonable. In his situation, only impulses had meaning, because only impulses made a difference. He knew where he was headed for, and the way to the irregular monolith and the shallow cave did not seem long.
When he saw the asymmetrical opening of the cave he felt an absurd but pleasurable warming of his heart. He was being absurd, getting a machine to be company for another machine. But he was going to die and he felt uncomfortable at the thought of being unkind even to a machine.
He reached the shallow cave. He turned on his helmet-light. And the cave was empty.
For a moment he was shocked numb. Then came a fierce anger. He saw the whole thing at once. The robot in the space-cruiser had gone out the airlock only partly to get the vision-plate it had brought back. Essentially, it had gone out to share its fuel with these others! And it hadn’t been alone or lonely. All the time it was with him, it had been in communication with its fellows by shortwave radio!