Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  For he was a lucky robot!

  Could all that luck, he wondered, have been gotten out in hyperspace, as his diagram ability, or whatever one might call it, had come from hyperspace? Somehow hyperspace had taken him and twisted him and changed him, had molded him anew, had made him into a different robot than he had been before.

  Although, so far as luck was concerned, he had been lucky all his entire life. He’d had good luck with his human family and had gained a lot of favors and a high position and had been allowed to live for six hundred years. And that was a thing that never should have happened. No matter how powerful or influential the Barringtons had been, that six hundred years must be due in part to nothing but sheer luck.

  In any case, the luck and the diagram ability gave him a solid edge over all the other robots he might meet. Could it, he asked himself, give him an edge on Man as well? No—that was a thought he should not think, for it was blasphemous. There never was a robot that would be the equal of a man.

  But the thought kept on intruding and he felt not nearly so contrite over this leaning toward bad taste, or poor judgment, whichever it might be, as it seemed to him he should feel.

  As he neared the spaceport, he began meeting other robots and some of them saluted him and called him by the name of Hubert and others stopped and shook him by the hand and told him they were glad that he was out of pokey.

  This friendliness shook his confidence. He began to wonder if his luck would hold, for some of the robots, he was certain, thought it rather odd that he did not speak to them by name, and there had been a couple of remarks that he had some trouble fielding. He had a feeling that when he reached the warehouse he might be sunk without a trace, for he would know none of the robots there and he had not the least idea what his duties might include. And, come to think of it, he didn’t even know where the warehouse was.

  He felt the panic building in him and took a quick involuntary look around, seeking some method of escape. For it became quite apparent to him that he must never reach the warehouse.

  He was trapped, he knew, and he couldn’t keep on floating, trusting to his luck. In the next few minutes, he’d have to figure something.

  He started to swing over into a side street, not knowing what he meant to do, but knowing he must do something, when he heard the mutter far above him and glanced up quickly to see the crimson glow of belching rocket tubes shimmering through the clouds.

  He swung around again and sprinted desperately for the spaceport and reached it as the ship came chugging down to a steady landing. It was, he saw, an old ship. It had no burnish to it and it was blunt and squat and wore a hangdog look.

  A tramp, he told himself, that knocked about from port to port, picking up whatever cargo it could, with perhaps now and then a paying passenger headed for some backwater planet where there was no scheduled service.

  He waited as the cargo port came open and the ramp came down and then marched purposefully out onto the field, ahead of the straggling cargo crew, trudging toward the ship. He had to act, he knew, as if he had a perfect right to walk into the ship as if he knew exactly what he might be doing. If there were a challenge he would pretend he didn’t hear it and simply keep on going.

  He walked swiftly up the ramp, holding back from running, and plunged through the accordion curtain that served as an atmosphere control. His feet rang across the metal plating of the cargo hold until he reached the catwalk and plunged down it to another cargo level.

  At the bottom of the catwalk he stopped and stood tense, listening. Above him he heard the clang of a metal door and the sound of footsteps coming down the walk to the level just above him. That would be the purser or the first mate, he told himself, or perhaps the captain, coming down to arrange for the discharge of the cargo.

  Quietly, he moved away and found a corner where he could crouch and hide.

  Above his head he heard the cargo gang at work, talking back and forth, then the screech of crating and the thump of bales and boxes being hauled out to the ramp.

  Hours passed, or they seemed like hours, as he huddled there. He heard the cargo gang bringing something down from one of the upper levels and he made a sort of prayer that they’d not come down to this lower level—and he hoped no one would remember seeing him come in ahead of them, or if they did remember, that they would assume that he’d gone out again.

  Finally it was over, with the footsteps gone. Then came the pounding of the ramp as it shipped itself and the banging of the port.

  He waited for long minutes, waiting for the roar that, when it came, set his head to ringing, waiting for the monstrous vibration that shook and lifted up the ship and flung it off the planet.

  Then quiet came and he knew the ship was out of atmosphere and once more on its way.

  And knew he had it made.

  For now he was no more than a simple stowaway. He was no longer Richard Daniel, runaway from Earth. He’d dodged all the traps of Man, he’d covered all his tracks, and he was on his way.

  But far down underneath he had a jumpy feeling, for it all had gone too smoothly, more smoothly than it should.

  He tried to analyze himself, tried to pull himself in focus, tried to assess himself for what he had become.

  He had abilities that Man had never won or developed or achieved, whichever it might be. He was a certain step ahead of not only other robots, but of Man as well. He had a thing, or the beginning of a thing, that Man had sought and studied and had tried to grasp for centuries and had failed.

  A solemn and a deadly thought: was it possible that it was the robots, after all, for whom this great heritage had been meant? Would it be the robots who would achieve the paranormal powers that Man had sought so long, while Man, perforce, must remain content with the materialistic and the merely scientific? Was he, Richard Daniel, perhaps, only the first of many? Or was it all explained by no more than the fact that he alone had been exposed to hyperspace? Could this ability of his belong to anyone who would subject himself to the full, uninsulated mysteries of that mad universe unconstrained by time? Could Man have this, and more, if he too should expose himself to the utter randomness of unreality?

  He huddled in his corner, with the thought and speculation stirring in his mind and he sought the answers, but there was no solid answer.

  His mind went reaching out, almost on its own, and there was a diagram inside his brain, a portion of a blueprint, and bit by bit was added to it until it all was there, until the entire ship on which he rode was there, laid out for him to see.

  He took his time and went over the diagram resting in his brain and he found little things—a fitting that was working loose and he tightened it, a printed circuit that was breaking down and getting mushy and he strengthened it and sharpened it and made it almost new, a pump that was leaking just a bit and he stopped its leaking.

  Some hundreds of hours later one of the crewmen found him and took him to the captain.

  The captain glowered at him. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “A stowaway,” Richard Daniel told him.

  “Your name,” said the captain, drawing a sheet of paper before him and picking up a pencil, “your planet of residence and owner.”

  “I refuse to answer you,” said Richard Daniel sharply and knew that the answer wasn’t right, for it was not right and proper that a robot should refuse a human a direct command.

  But the captain did not seem to mind. He laid down the pencil and stroked his black beard slyly.

  “In that case,” he said, “I can’t exactly see how I can force the information from you. Although there might be some who’d try, you are very lucky that you stowed away on a ship whose captain is a most kind-hearted man.”

  He didn’t look kind-hearted. He did look foxy.

  Richard Daniel stood there, saying nothing.

  “Of course,” the captain said, “there’s a serial number somewhere on your body and another on your brain. But I suppose that you’d resist if we tried to look
for them.”

  “I am afraid I would.”

  “In that case,” said the captain, “I don’t think for the moment we’ll concern ourselves with them.”

  Richard Daniel still said nothing, for he realized that there was no need to. This crafty captain had it all worked out and he’d let it go at that.

  “For a long time,” said the captain, “my crew and I have been considering the acquiring of a robot, but it seems we never got around to it. For one thing, robots are expensive and our profits are not large.”

  He sighed and got up from his chair and looked Richard Daniel up and down.

  “A splendid specimen,” he said. “We welcome you aboard. You’ll find us congenial.”

  “I am sure I will,” said Richard Daniel. “I thank you for your courtesy.”

  “And now,” the captain said, “you’ll go up on the bridge and report to Mr. Duncan. I’ll let him know you’re coming. He’ll find some light and pleasant duty for you.”

  Richard Daniel did not move as swiftly as he might, as sharply as the occasion might have called for, for all at once the captain had become a complex diagram. Not like the diagrams of ships or robots, but a diagram of strange symbols, some of which Richard Daniel knew were frankly chemical, but others which were not.

  “You heard me!” snapped the captain. “Move!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Richard Daniel, willing the diagram away, making the captain come back again into his solid flesh.

  Richard Daniel found the first mate on the bridge, a horse-faced, somber man with a streak of cruelty ill-hidden, and slumped in a chair to one side of the console was another of the crew, a sodden, terrible creature.

  The sodden creature cackled. “Well, well, Duncan, the first non-human member of the Rambler’s crew.”

  Duncan paid him no attention. He said to Richard Daniel: “I presume you are industrious and ambitious and would like to get along.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Richard Daniel, and was surprised to find a new sensation—laughter—rising in himself.

  “Well, then,” said Duncan, “report to the engine room. They have work for you. When you have finished there, I’ll find something else.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Richard Daniel, turning on his heel.

  “A minute,” said the mate. “I must introduce you to our ship’s physician, Dr. Abram Wells. You can be truly thankful you’ll never stand in need of his services.”

  “Good day, Doctor,” said Richard Daniel, most respectfully.

  “I welcome you,” said the doctor, pulling a bottle from his pocket “I don’t suppose you’ll have a drink with me. Well, then, I’ll drink to you.”

  Richard Daniel turned around and left. He went down to the engine room and was put to work at polishing and scrubbing and generally cleaning up. The place was in need of it. It had been years, apparently, since it had been cleaned or polished and it was about as dirty as an engine room can get—which is terribly dirty. After the engine room was done there were other places to be cleaned and furbished up and he spent endless hours at cleaning and in painting and shining up the ship. The work was of the dullest kind, but he didn’t mind. It gave him time to think and wonder, time to get himself sorted out and to become acquainted with himself, to try to plan ahead.

  He was surprised at some of the things he found in himself. Contempt, for one—contempt for the humans on this ship. It took a long time for him to become satisfied that it was contempt, for he’d never held a human in contempt before.

  But these were different humans, not the kind he’d known. These were no Barringtons. Although it might be, he realized, that he felt contempt for them because he knew them thoroughly. Never before had he known a human as he knew these humans. For he saw them not so much as living animals as intricate patternings of symbols. He knew what they were made of and the inner urgings that served as motivations, for the patterning was not of their bodies only, but of their minds as well. He had a little trouble with the symbology of their minds, for it was so twisted and so interlocked and so utterly confusing that it was hard at first to read. But he finally got it figured out and there were times he wished he hadn’t.

  The ship stopped at many ports and Richard Daniel took charge of the loading and unloading, and he saw the planets, but was unimpressed. One was a nightmare of fiendish cold, with the very atmosphere turned to drifting snow. Another was a dripping, noisome jungle world, and still another was a bare expanse of broken, tumbled rock without a trace of life beyond the crew of humans and their robots who manned the huddled station in this howling wilderness.

  It was after this planet that Jenks, the cook, went screaming to his bunk, twisted up with pain—the victim of a suddenly inflamed vermiform appendix.

  Dr. Wells came tottering in to look at him, with a half-filled bottle sagging the pocket of his jacket. And later stood before the captain, holding out two hands that trembled, and with terror in his eyes.

  “But I cannot operate,” he blubbered. “I cannot take the chance. I would kill the man!”

  He did not need to operate. Jenks suddenly improved. The pain went away and he got up from his bunk and went back to the galley and Dr. Wells sat huddled in his chair, bottle gripped between his hands, crying like a baby.

  Down in the cargo hold, Richard Daniel sat likewise huddled and aghast that he had dared to do it—not that he had been able to, but that he had dared, that he, a robot, should have taken on himself an act of interference, however merciful, with the body of a human.

  Actually, the performance had not been too difficult. It was, in a certain way, no more difficult than the repairing of an engine or the untangling of a faulty circuit. No more difficult—just a little different. And he wondered what he’d done and how he’d gone about it, for he did not know. He held the technique in his mind, of that there was ample demonstration, but he could in no wise isolate or pinpoint the pure mechanics of it. It was like an instinct, he thought—unexplainable, but entirely workable.

  But a robot had no instinct. In that much he was different from the human and the other animals. Might not, he asked himself, this strange ability of his be a sort of compensating factor given to the robot for his very lack of instinct? Might that be why the human race had failed in its search for paranormal powers? Might the instincts of the body be at certain odds with the instincts of the mind?

  For he had the feeling that this ability of his was just a mere beginning, that it was the first emergence of a vast body of abilities which some day would be rounded out by robots. And what would that spell, he wondered, in that distant day when the robots held and used the full body of that knowledge? An adjunct to the glory of the human race, or equals of the human race, or superior to the human race—or, perhaps, a race apart?

  And what was his role, he wondered. Was it meant that he should go out as a missionary, a messiah, to carry to robots throughout the universe the message that he held? There must be some reason for his having learned this truth. It could not be meant that he would hold it as a personal belonging, as an asset all his own.

  He got up from where he sat and moved slowly back to the ship’s forward area, which now gleamed spotlessly from the work he’d done on it, and he felt a certain pride.

  He wondered why he had felt that it might be wrong, blasphemous, somehow, to announce his abilities to the world? Why had he not told those here in the ship that it had been he who had healed the cook, or mentioned the many other little things he’d done to maintain the ship in perfect running order?

  Was it because he did not need respect, as a human did so urgently? Did glory have no basic meaning for a robot? Or was it because he held the humans in this ship in such utter contempt that their respect had no value to him?

  And this contempt—was it because these men were meaner than other humans he had known, or was it he now was greater than any human being? Would he ever again be able to look on any human as he had looked upon the Barringtons?

  He had a feeling th
at if this were true, he would be the poorer for it. Too suddenly, the whole universe was home and he was alone in it and as yet he’d struck no bargain with it or himself.

  The bargain would come later. He need only bide his time and work out his plans and his would be a name that would be spoken when his brain was scaling flakes of rust. For he was the emancipator, the messiah of the robots; he was the one who had been called to lead them from the wilderness.

  “You!” a voice cried.

  Richard Daniel wheeled around and saw it was the captain.

  “What do you mean, walking past me as if you didn’t see me?” asked the captain fiercely.

  “I am sorry,” Richard Daniel told him.

  “You snubbed me!” raged the captain.

  “I was thinking,” Richard Daniel said.

  “I’ll give you something to think about,” the captain yelled. “I’ll work you till your tail drags. I’ll teach the likes of you to get uppity with me!”

  “As you wish,” said Richard Daniel.

  For it didn’t matter. It made no difference to him at all what the captain did or thought. And he wondered why the respect even of a robot should mean so much to a human like the captain, why he should guard his small position with so much zealousness.

  “In another twenty hours,” the captain said, “we hit another port.”

  “I know,” said Richard Daniel. “Sleepy Hollow on Arcadia.”

  “All right, then,” said the captain, “since you know so much, get down into the hold and get the cargo ready to unload. We been spending too much time in all these lousy ports loading and unloading. You been dogging it.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Richard Daniel, turning back and beading for the hold.

  He wondered faintly if he were still robot—or was he something else? Could a machine evolve, he wondered, as Man himself evolved? And if a machine evolved, whatever would it be? Not Man, of course, for it never could be that, but could it be machine?

  He hauled out the cargo consigned to Sleepy Hollow and there was not too much of it. So little of it, perhaps, that none of the regular carriers would even consider its delivery, but dumped it off at the nearest terminal, leaving it for a roving tramp, like the Rambler, to carry eventually to its destination.