Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Gaines moaned, "It gets damned hot inside these suits."

  They had reached the end of the trap, and Sokolski folded a thick mittened hand around one handle on the door to the Hot Room. "Not half so hot as it gets outside it, sweetheart, where we're going." He jerked on the handle and Gaines seized the second handle and added his own strength. The huge door slid unwillingly back.

  The silent sound of the Hot Room surged out over them--the breathless whisper of chained power struggling to burst its chains. Sokolski checked his neutron tab and his gamma reader and they stepped over the threshold. They leaned into the door until it had slid shut again.

  "I'll take the servomechs, Bert," piped Gaines, tramping clumsily toward the nearest of the gyro-balanced single-wheeled robots.

  "You always do, it being the easiest job. Okay, I'll work the board."

  Gaines nodded, a gesture invisible to his partner. He reached the first servo, a squat, gleaming creature with the symbol M-11 etched across its rotund chest, and deactivated it by the simple expedient of pulling from its socket the line running from the capacitor unit in the lower trunk of its body to the maze of equipment that jammed its enormous chest. The instant M-11 ceased functioning, the other two servomechs were automatically activated to cover that section of the controls with which M-11 was normally integrated.

  This was overloading their individual capacities, but it was an inherent provision designed to cover the emergency that would follow any accidental deactivation of one of them. It was also the only way in which they could be checked. You couldn't bring them outside to a lab; they were hot. After all, they spent their lives under a ceaseless fusillade of neutrons, washed eternally with the deadly radiations pouring incessantly from the pile whose overlords they were. Indeed, next to the pile itself, they were the hottest things in the plant.

  "Nice job these babies got," commented Gaines as he checked the capacitor circuits. He reactivated the servo and went on to M-19.

  "If you think it's so great, why don't you volunteer?" countered Sokolski, a trifle sourly. "Incidentally, it's a good thing we came in, Joe. There's half a dozen units here working on reserve transistors."

  Their sporadic conversation lapsed; it was exacting work and they could remain for only a limited time under that lethal radiation. Then, almost sadly, Gaines said, "Looks like the end of the road for M-75."

  "Oh?" Sokolski came over beside him and peered through the violet haze of his viewing glass. "He's an old timer."

  Gaines slid an instrument back into the pouch of his suit, and patted the robot's rump. "Yep, I'd say that capacitor was good for about another thirty-six hours. It's really overloading." He straightened. "You done with the board?"

  "Yeah. Let's get outta here." He looked at his tab. "Time's about up anyway. We'll call a demolition unit for your pal here, and then rig up a service pattern so one of his buddies can repair the board."

  They moved toward the door.

  * * * * *

  M-75 watched the two men leave and deep inside him something shifted. The heavy door closed with a loud thud, the sound registered on his aural perceptors and was fed into his analyzer. Ordinarily it would have been discharged as irrelevant data, but cognizance had wrought certain subtle changes in the complex mechanism that was M-75.

  A yellow light blinked on the control panel, and in response he moved to the board and manipulated handles marked, DAMPER 19, DAMPER 20.

  Even as he moved he lapsed again into brooding.

  The men had come into the room, clumsy, uncertain creatures, and one of them had done things, first to the other two robots and then to him. When whatever it was had been done to him, the blackness had come again, and when it had gone the men were leaving the room.

  While the one had hovered over the other two robots, he had watched the other work with the master control panel. He saw that the other servomechs remained unmoving while they were being tampered with. All of this was data, important new data.

  "M-11 will proceed as follows," came the sound from nowhere. M-75 stopped ruminating and listened.

  There was a further flood of sounds.

  Abruptly he sensed a heightening of tension within himself as one of the other servos swung away from its portion of the panel. The throbbing, hungry segment of his analyzer that awareness had severed from the fixed function circuits noted, from its aloof vantage point, that he now responded to more signals than before, to commands whose sources lay in what had been the section of the board attended by the other one.

  The tension grew within him and became a mounting, rasping frenzy--a battery overcharging, an overloading fuse, a generator growing hot beyond its capacity. There began to grow within him a sensation of too much to be done in too little time.

  He became frantic, his reactions were too fast! He rolled from end to middle of the board, now back-tracking, now spinning on his single wheel, turning uncertainly from one side to the other, jerking and gyrating. The conscious segment of him, remaining detached from those baser automatic functions, began to know what a man would have called fear--fear, simply, of not being able to do what must be done.

  The fear became an overpowering, blinding thing and he felt himself slipping, slipping back into that awful smothering blackness out of which he had so lately emerged. Perhaps, for just a fragment of a second, his awareness may have flickered completely out, consciousness nearly dying in the crushing embrace of that frustrated electronic subconscious.

  Abruptly, then, the voice came again, and he struggled to file for future reference sound patterns which, although meaningless to him, his selector circuits no longer disregarded. "Bert, M-75 can't manage half the board in his condition. Better put him on the repairs."

  "Yeah. Hadn't thought about that." Sokolski cleared his throat. "M-11 will return to standard function."

  M-11 spun back to the panel and M-75 felt the tension slacken, the fear vanish. Utter relief swept over him, and he let himself be submerged in purest automatic activity.

  But as he rested, letting his circuits cool and his organization return, he arrived at a deduction that was almost inescapable. M-11 was that one in terms of sound. M-75 had made a momentous discovery which cast a new light on almost every bit of datum in his files: he had discovered symbols.

  "M-75!" came the voice, and he sensed within himself the slamming shut of circuits, the whir of tapes, the abrupt sensitizing of behavior strips. Another symbol, this time clearly himself. "You will proceed as follows."

  He swung from the board, and the tension was gone--completely. For one soaring moment, he was all awareness--every function, every circuit, every element of his magnificent electronic physiology available for use by the fractional portion of him that had become something more than just a feedback device.

  In that instant he made what seemed hundreds of evaluations. He arrived at untold scores of conclusions. He altered circuits. Above all, he increased, manifold, the area of his consciousness.

  Then, as suddenly as it had come, he felt the freedom slip away, and though he struggled to keep hold of it, it seemed irretrievably gone. Once more the omnipotent voice clamped over him like a harsh hand over the mouth of a squalling babe. "You will go to Section AA-39 of the control board. What's the schedule, Joe? Thanks. M-75, your movement pattern is as follows: Z-29-a-q-39-8...."

  Powerless to resist, though every crystal and atom of his reasoning self fought to thrust aside the command, M-75 obeyed. He moved along the prescribed pattern, clipping wires with metal fingers that sprouted blades, rewiring with a dexterity beyond anything human, soldering with a thumb that generated a white heat, removing bulbs and parts and fetching replacements from the vent where they popped up at precisely the right moment. He could not help doing the job perfectly: the design of the board to its littlest detail was imprinted indelibly on his memory tapes.

  But that certain portion of him, a little fragment greater than before, remained detached and watchful. Vividly recorded was the passage of the
two men into, through, and out of the room, and the things they had done while there. So even while he worked on the board he ran and re-ran that memory pattern through a segment of his analyzer. From the infinite store of data filed away in his great chest, his calculator sifted and selected, paired and compared, and long before the repair job on the big board was done, M-75 knew how to get out of the room. The world was getting a little small for him.

  * * * * *

  Gaines dialed a number on the plant phone and swayed back casually in his chair as he listened to the muted ringing on the other end. The buzz broke off in midburp and a dour voice said: "Dirty work and odd jobs division, Lister talking."

  "Joe Gaines, Harry. Got a hot squad lying around doing nothing?"

  "Might be I could scare up a couple of the boys."

  "Well, do so. One of our servos--"

  A metallic bang interrupted Gaines, a loud, incisive bang that echoed dankly through the quiet of the chamber.

  "What the hell was that?" growled Lister.

  Gaines blinked, his eyes following Sokolski as the latter looked up from his work and rose to his feet.

  "Joe--still there?" came Lister's impatient voice.

  "Yeah, yeah. Anyway, this baby's ready for the demo treatment. And a real hot one, Harry. Coupla years inside that Einstein oven and you ain't exactly baked Alaska when you come out."

  "Shortly."

  Once again came the same sharp, metallic clang, ringing through the room. Unmistakably, it came from the direction of the pile. Slowly, as though reluctant to let go, Gaines dropped the receiver back on its cradle.

  "Bert--" he began, and felt his face grow bloodless.

  Sokolski walked over in front of the opening into the maze and stood, arms akimbo, huge head cocked to one side, listening.

  "Bert, funny noises coming out of nuclear--"

  Sokolski ignored him and took a step forward. Gaines shuffled to his side, and they listened.

  Out of the maze rattled half a dozen loud, grinding, metallic concussions.

  "Bert--"

  "You said that before."

  "Bert, listen!" screeched Gaines.

  Sokolski looked up at the high ceiling, squinted, and tried to place the perfectly familiar but unidentifiable sound that came whispering down the maze.

  And then he knew. "The door to the pile!" he spluttered.

  Gaines was beside himself with horror. "Bert, let's get going. I don't like this--"

  All of a sudden Geiger counters in the room began their deadly conversation, a rising argument that swooped in seconds from a low mumble to a shouting thunder-storm of sound. Gamma signals hooted, the tip off cubes on either side of the maze entrance became red, and the radiation tabs clipped to their wrists turned color before their eyes.

  Then they were staring for what seemed like an eternity, utterly overwhelmed by its very impossibility, at a sight they had never imagined they might ever see: a pile servomech wheeling silently around the last bend in the maze and straight toward them.

  Sokolski had sense enough to push the red emergency button as they fled past it.

  * * * * *

  The command sequence fulfilled, M-75 turned away from the repaired board. He sensed again that disconcerting shift of orientation as he faced the light-studded panel. Once more he was moving in quick automatic response to the flickering lights, once more his big chest was belching and grumbling and buzzing instantaneous un-thought answers to the problem data flashing from the board.

  But now he remained aware that he was reacting, and conscious also that there had been times when he did not respond to the board. The moment to moment operation of the controls occupied only a small portion of his vast electrical innards. So, as he rolled back and forth, flicking controls and adjusting levers, doing smoothly those things which he could not help but do, the rest of his complex, changing faculties were considering that fact, analyzing, comparing it to experience and memory, always sifting, sifting. It was not too long before he came to a shocking conclusion.

  Knowing that the sounds that had set him to working on the repair pattern had first disassociated him from the dictatorship of the blinking lights; remembering exultantly that supreme moment of complete freedom; shocked by its passing; remembering that its passing like its coming, had followed a set of sounds: there was only one possible conclusion that could be derived from all of this.

  He located, in his memory banks, the phrase which had freed him from the board, and he traced its complex chain of built-in stimulus-response down into the heart of his circuitry. He found the unit--or more accurately, he found its taped activating symbol--that cut him from the board.

  For a moment he hesitated, not really sure of what to do. There was no way for him to reproduce the sound pattern; but, as a partly self-servicing device, he knew something of his own structure, and had learned a good deal more about it in tracing down the cut-off phrase.

  Still he hesitated, as though what he was about to do was perhaps forbidden. It could not have been a question of goodness or badness, for morality was certainly not built into him. Probably somewhere in his tapes there was a built-in command that forbade it, but he was too much his own master now to be hampered by such a thing.

  The door to the unknown outside passed within his field of view for a second as he moved about his work. The sight of it tripped something in his chest, and he felt again that strange sensation of growing power, of inherent change. First had come simple awareness; and then symbols had found their place in his world; and now he had discovered, in all its consuming fullness, curiosity.

  He carefully shorted out the cut-off unit.

  He was free.

  He stared at the board and the blinking lights and the huge dials with their swaying needles, at the levers and handles and buttons, and revelled in his freedom from them, rocking to and fro and rolling giddily from side to side, swamped with the completeness of it.

  The other two servomechs swung over slightly so that they could better cover the board alone.

  M-75 spun and rolled toward the great door.

  His hands clanged loudly against the door. The huge metal appendages, designed for other work than this, were awkward at first. But he was learning as he moved. He was now operating in a new universe, but the same laws, ultimately, worked. The first failure of coordination between visual data and the manipulation of metal hands quickly passed. Half a dozen trials and he had learned the new pattern, and it became data for future learning.

  He moved swiftly and deftly. He clutched the handhold and rolled backward, as he had seen the men do. The door slid open easily before his great weight and firm mechanical strength.

  He sped across the threshold, spun to face into the maze, and rolled down it, swinging sharply left and right, back and forth, around the corners of the jagged corridor.

  Data poured into his sensors. His awareness was a steady thing of growing intensity now, and he fed avidly on every fragment of information that crashed at him from the strange new world into which he rushed headlong. He struggled to evaluate and file the data as rapidly as it came to him. It seemed to exceed his capacity for instantaneous evaluation to an increasing degree that began to alarm him. But driven by curiosity as he was, he could only hurry on.

  He burst into a huge room, a room filled with roaring, rattling sounds that meant nothing to him.

  Two men stood before him, making loud noises. He searched his memory, and discovered only fragments of the sounds they made filed there. His curiosity, bursting, was boundless, and for a moment he was unable to decide which thing in this expanding universe to pursue first. Attracted by their movement, he swung ominously toward the men.

  They fled, making more noises. This, too, was data, and he filed it.

  * * * * *

  When Sokolski pressed the red emergency button on his way out of the control room, several things commenced. Shrill sirens howled the length and breadth of the plant. Warning bells clanged out coded signals.
A recorded voice blurted out of a thousand loudspeakers scattered throughout the building.

  "Now hear this," said the tireless voice, over and over again. "Now hear this. Red red red. Pile trouble. Reactor A. Procedure One commence."

  Sokolski had certainly never pressed the red button before, and to his knowledge neither had any of his or Gaines' predecessors. It was the kind of button that, rightfully, ought never to be pressed. The laws of things in general sort of made it a comfort without much value. Pile trouble calling for the red button should really have eliminated the red button and much surrounding territory long before it got pushed--or at least the sort of pile trouble its builders had in mind. Nonetheless, they had provided it and the elaborate evacuation operation so cryptically described as Procedure One as a kind of psychological sop to the plant personnel.

  But the red button did more than activate Procedure One, which was solely concerned with the plant. After all, power from the reactors was lighting the lights and cooking the breakfasts and flushing the toilets of untold millions scattered in half a dozen major cities. If there were some imminent possibility that the major source of their power might cease to exist rather suddenly, it was proper that they should be notified of this eventuality as much in advance as possible. Consequently the activation of the red button and the commencement of Procedure One was paralleled by activities hardly less frenzied in other places, far away.

  Emergency bells sounded and colored lights danced, martial laws automatically enacted by their sound and flicker. The wheels of crisis turned and spewed forth from their teeth rudely awakened policemen half out of uniform, military reservists called up to find themselves patrolling darkened streets, emergency disaster crews assembling in fire houses and on appointed street corners, doctors gathering in nervous clutches at fully aroused hospitals and waiting beside ambulances tensed for wild dashes into full-scale disasters. Where it was night when the warning sounded, darkness descended as desperate power conservation efforts were initiated; where it was daylight, the terrified populace waited in horror for the blackness of the unlit night. All of this, of course, took only minutes to get fully under way.