“Look!” Nine called.
They stood in an open space in front of a squat metallic structure that had resisted the rain and the snow. But Nine was not pointing at the building. He moved forward, bent over an object half buried in the mould.
Seven gasped. “A robot. Almost an exact model of us. Here, at last, is final proof!”
Eagerly they bent down, scraping away the soil. Quickly, they Uncovered the figure. Perhaps ten feet tall, it was more than twice their size. Eight saw it was a robot. Seven had been right, after all, and here was proof. Those machines had somehow managed to develop intelligence and to evolve into sentient beings.
Somehow the crude ore had shaped and forged itself.
And yet this figure differed from the true robot form. Eight saw the difference as they uncovered it. The hopes rising in his mind failed.
“No—it isn’t one of us. It’s only a statue.”
Cast of solid metal, covered by a thin film of corrosion, the statue lay, its feet still attached to a part of the pedestal that had served as a base from which, in some long-gone time, it had toppled. Eight stared at it, not heeding Seven’s thinking which came over the radio beam. Seven was insisting that even if it was a statue—a lifeless thing —the form showed that robots had developed here. Otherwise they would not have made a statue in this shape.
Eight recognized the logic of Seven’s statement, but the sight of the statue stirred again those vague rebellious thoughts, and in his mind was the feeling that the statue represented something more, that it was more than a replica of form—that it was the embodiment of an idea. But what that idea was, he could not grasp. Slender and graceful, yet with the suggestion of strength, it lay on the ground, a fallen god with head uplifted and arm outstretched. Eight’s thinking became clearer. Yes, it was a fallen god, or the representation of a fallen god, and his mind went back to the builder, the designer, the artist who had dreamed of this figure and had then created in metal a figure adequate to his dreaming. The artist was gone, the statue had fallen. Eight wondered about the dream.
His turgid thinking burst into clarity like a jet of suddenly spouting water. Ever since he had seen this world from afar, especially since he had seen the wreckage of all those mighty cities, he had wondered about the dream of the race that had lived and built here. The fate of the race had never saddened him: all things rusted into ruin eventually, all material things, all logical things. Only a dream might achieve immortality, only a dream could start in slime and go onward to the end of Time. But the dream of this race—whatever that dream had been—appeared to have died. Some catastrophe had overtaken them before they had grown strong enough to forge their dream into an immortal shape. Eight sighed, and the photo-cells that were his eyes lost luster.
He did not notice that Seven and Nine had left him, were forcing an entrance into the building, until Nine’s sharp call brought him to his feet.
There was only one large room, Eight saw. It had been a laboratory or a workshop. Benches, machinery, tools, were crumbling, just as everything else on this planet was crumbling, just as the dream of the race had crumbled.
Nine’s voice, heavy with awe, echoed through the room. “I—I can read it! It’s our language!”
The written language of the robots, here on this forgotten planet circling an insignificant sun in a lost corner of the Universe! Eight felt the trembling pulse of currents flowing in his mind. They had found their past; they had found their ancestors. All the other evidence could be explained away, but not this.
Ancestors, forebears, those who had gone before, those who had labored to build for the benefit of some unknown descendant. Had the machine, the lever and the wheel somehow been their forebears? Or had there been an alien form preceding the machine?
A metal plate, inches thick, supported on heavy metal pillars. A tough metal, almost completely rust-resistant.
Now Man dies. A mutant bacteriophage, vicious beyond imagination, is attacking, eating, destroying all living cells, even to dead animal matter.
There is no hope of escape on Earth. The only hope is to flee from Earth. Tomorrow we blast our first rocket ship off for Mars, ourselves in suspended animation to withstand the acceleration, the ship manned by Thoradson’s robots.
It may be we shall live again. It may be we shall die. We go, and may God go with us.
Thus the record ended. Nine’s raspy voice faded, and for a second the echoes came back from the dark corners of the room. Then there was silence. Seven shifted his feet.
“Man,” he spoke. “Man. That is a word for which we have no meaning.”
“Perhaps,” Eight spoke softly, “perhaps it was the name of the life-form that created us.”
Seven did not answer, and Nine, too, was silent. A wind came into the room, moved restlessly, and went out again. The silence held. Seven stared at the metal plate, picking out the words one by one.
“It must be you are right,” he said. “See, they use the word—robot.” Wonder grew in his voice, and then disgust mingled with the wonder. “An organism—an animal— Yet obviously they must have created us, used us as slaves. They manned their ship with robots.”
Eight stirred but said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“That,” Nine whispered, “is why we are unable to find a link between the machine and us. They developed the machine, used it. They provided the intelligence. Finally they built machines with some kind of intelligence. It must have been late in their history, and they built very few of them. Perhaps they were afraid. There are so many links missing it is hard to know. But certainly, in a sense, they were our ancestors—”
“Yes,” Eight agreed. “In a sense that seems…”
“But they started for a near-by planet,” Seven protested. “Our sun is light-years distant. How did they ever get there?”
“They may have missed their aim. Or perhaps the robots rebelled and took the ship elsewhere, and, in landing smashed it, only five of them managing to escape.”
“I don’t believe that,” Seven said. “You have no proof of it.”
“No,” Eight admitted. “No. We don’t even know what happened to the men on the ship.”
They stood again outside the building, three little metal men. Out yonder in the west the sun was dipping below the horizon. A soft dusk was coming down, hiding the barren world, and still the lonely wind was stirring in the shadows.
Eight saw the statue lying on the ground and vague thoughts stirred within his mind. “They may have eaten grass,” he said. “They may have eaten the flesh of other animals; they may have been weaklings; they may have arisen out of slime, but somehow I think there was something fine about them. For they dreamed, and even if they died—”
The robot bent over. Tiny, ageless, atom-fed motors within him surged with an endless power. The robot lifted the dream of an age-dead man and set the statue back on its feet.
The three returned to their ship, and it lifted, following its path out to the stars. The proud, blind eyes of a forgotten statue seemed to follow it.
THE BLUE GIRAFFE
L. Sprague de Camp
There has been much theorizing of late about the possible reaction of human and/or animal genes to radioactivity caused by atomic explosion. This bizarre tale deserves attention not alone for its speculation in the field of a dangerous new science, but also for the charming denouement which makes of it a Saki-like fairytale.
* * *
Athelstan Cuff was, to put it very mildly, astonished that his son should be crying. It wasn’t that he had exaggerated ideas about Peter’s stoicism, but the fact was that Peter never cried. He was, for a twelve-year-old boy, self-possessed to the point of grimness. And now he was undeniably sniffling. It must be something jolly well awful.
Cuff pushed aside the pile of manuscript he had been reading. He was the editor of Biological Review; a stoutish Englishman with prematurely white hair, prominen
t blue eyes, and a complexion that could have been used for painting box cars. He looked a little like a lobster who had been boiled once and was determined not to repeat the experience.
“What’s wrong, old man?” he asked.
Peter wiped his eyes and looked at his father calculatingly. Cuff sometimes wished that Peter wasn’t so damned rational. A spot of boyish unreasonableness would be welcome at times.
“Come on, old fella, out with it. What’s the good of having a father if you can’t tell him things?”
Peter finally got it out. “Some of the guys—” He stopped to blow his nose. Cuff winced slightly at the “guys.” His one regret about coming to America was the language his son picked up. As he didn’t believe in pestering Peter all the time, he had to suffer in silence.
“Some of the guys say you aren’t really my father.”
It had come, thought Cuff, as it was bound to sooner or later. He shouldn’t have put off telling the boy for so long. “What do you mean, old man?” he stalled.
“They say,” sniff, “I’m just a ‘dopted boy.”
Cuff forced out, “So what?” The despised Americanism seemed to be the only thing that covered the situation.
“What do you mean, `so what’?”
“I mean just that. What of it? It doesn’t make a particle of difference to your mother or me, I assure you. So why should it to you?”
Peter thought. “Could you send me away some time, on account of I was only ‘dopted?”
“Oh, so that’s what’s worrying you? The answer is no. Legally you’re just as much our son as if … as anyone is anybody’s son. But whatever gave you the idea we’d ever send you away? I’d like to see that chap who could get you away from us.”
“Oh, I just wondered.”
“Well, you can stop wondering. We don’t want to, and we couldn’t if we did. It’s perfectly all right, I tell you. Lots of people start out as adopted children, and it doesn’t make any difference to anybody. You wouldn’t get upset if somebody tried to make fun of you because you had two eyes and a nose, would you?”
Peter had recovered his composure. “How did it happen?”
“It’s quite a story. I’ll tell you, if you like.”
Peter only nodded.
“I’ve told you,” said Athelstan Cuff, “about how before I came to America I worked for some years in South Africa. I’ve told you about how I used to work with elephants and lions and things, and about how I transplanted some white rhino from Swaziland to the Kruger Park. But I’ve never told you about the blue giraffe—”
In the 1940’s the various South African governments were considering the problem of a park that would be not merely a game preserve available to tourists, but a completely wild area in which no people other than scientists and wardens would be allowed. They finally agreed on the Okvango River Delta in Ngamiland, as the only area that was sufficiently large and at the same time thinly populated.
The reasons for its sparse population were simple enough: nobody likes to settle down in a place when he is likely to find his house and farm under three feet of water some fine morning. And it is irritating to set out to fish in a well-known lake only to find that the lake has turned into a grassy plain, around the edges of which the mopane trees are already springing up.
So the Batawana, in whose reserve the Delta lay, were mostly willing to leave this capricious stretch of swamp and jumble to the elephant and the lion. The few Batawana who did live in and around the Delta were bought out and moved. The Crown Office of the Bechuanaland Protectorate got around its own rules against alienation of tribal lands by taking a perpetual lease on the Delta and surrounding territory from the Batawana, and named the whole area Jan Smuts Park.
When Athelstan Cuff got off the train at Francistown in September of 1976, a pelting spring rain was making the platform smoke. A tall black in khaki loomed out of the grayness, and said: “You are Mr. Cuff, from Cape Town? I’m George Mtengeni, the warden at Smuts. Mr. Opdyck wrote me you were coming. The Park’s car is out this way.”
Cuff followed. He’d heard of George Mtengeni. The man wasn’t a Chwana at all, but a Zulu from near Durban. When the Park had been set up, the Batawana had thought that the warden ought to be a Tawana. But the Makoba, feeling chesty about their independence from their former masters, the Batawana, had insisted on his being one of their nation. Finally the Crown Office in disgust had hired an outsider. Mtengeni had the dark skin and narrow nose found in so many of the Kaffir Bantu. Cuff guessed that he probably had a low opinion of the Chwana people in general and the Batawana in particular.
They got into the car. Mtengeni said: “I hope you don’t mind coming way out here like this. It’s too bad that you couldn’t come before the rains started; the pans they are all full by now.”
“So?” said Cuff. “What’s the Mababe this year?” He referred to the depression known variously as Mababe Lake, Swamp, or Pan, depending on whether at a given time it contained much, little, or no water.
“The Mababe, it is a lake, a fine lake full of drowned trees and hippo. I think the Okavango is shifting north again. That means Lake Ngami it will dry up again.”
“So it will. But look here, what’s all this business about a blue giraffe? Your letter was dashed uninformative.”
Mtengeni showed his white teeth. “It appeared on the edge of the Mopane Forest seventeen months ago. That was just the beginning. There have been other things since. If I’d told you more, you would have written the Crown Office saying that their warden was having a nervous breakdown. Me, I’m sorry to drag you into this, but the Crown Office keeps saying they can’t spare a man to investigate.”
“Oh, quite all right, quite,” answered Cuff. “I was glad to get away from Cape Town anyway. And we haven’t had a mystery since old Hickey disappeared.”
“Since who disappeared? You know me, I can’t keep up with things out in the wilds.”
“Oh, that was many years ago. Before your time, or mine for that matter. Hickey was a scientist who set out into the Kalahari with a truck and a Xosa assistant, and disappeared. Men flew all over the Kalahari looking for him, but never found a trace, and the sand had blown over his tire tracks. Jolly odd, it was.”
The rain poured down steadily as they wallowed along the dirt road. Ahead, beyond the gray curtain, lay the vast plains of northern Bechuanaland with their great pans. And beyond the plains were, allegedly, a blue giraffe, and other things.
The spidery steelwork of the tower hummed as they climbed. At the top, Mtengeni said: “You can look over that way … west … to the other side of the forest. That’s about twenty miles.”
Cuff screwed up his eyes at the eyepieces. “Jolly good ‘scope you’ve got here. But it’s too hazy beyond the forest to see anything.”
“It always is, unless we have a high wind. That’s the edge of the swamps.”
“Dashed if I see how you can patrol such a big area all by yourself.”
“Oh, these Bechuana they don’t give much trouble. They are honest. Even I have to admit that they have some good qualities. Anyway, you can’t get far into the Delta without getting lost in the swamps. There are ways, but then, I only know them. I’ll show them to you, but please don’t tell these Bechuana about them. Look, Mr. Cuff, there’s our blue giraffe.”
Cuff started. Mtengeni was evidently the kind of man who would announce an earthquake as casually as the morning mail.
Several hundred yards from the tower half a dozen giraffes were moving slowly through the brush, feeding on the tops of the scrubby trees. Cuff swung the telescope on them. In the middle of the herd was the blue one. Cuff blinked and looked again. There was no doubt about it; the animal was as brilliant a blue as if somebody had gone over it with paint. Athelstan Cuff suspected that that was what somebody had done. He said as much to Mtengeni.
The warden shrugged. “That, it would be a peculiar kind of amusement. Not to say risky. Do you see anything funny about the others?�
�
Cuff looked again. “Yes … by Jove, one of ‘em’s got a beard like a goat; only it must be six feet long, at least, now look here, George, what’s all this leading up to?”
“I don’t know myself. Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll show you one of those ways into the Delta. But that, it’s quite a walk, so we’d better take supplies for two or three days.”
As they drove toward the Tamalakane, they passed four Batawana, sad-looking reddish-brown men in a mixture of native and European clothes. Mtengeni slowed the car and looked at them suspiciously as they passed, but there was no evidence that they had been poaching.
He said: “Ever since their Makoba slaves were freed, they’ve been going on a … decline, I suppose you would call it. They are too dignified to work.”
They got out at the river. “We can’t drive across the ford this time of year,” explained the warden, locking the car, “But there’s a rapid a little way down, where we can wade.”
They walked down the trail, adjusting their packs. There wasn’t much to see. The view was shut off by the tall soft-bodied swamp plants. The only sound was the hum of insects,
The air was hot and steamy already, though the sun had been up only half an hour. The flies drew blood when they bit, but the men were used to that. They simply slapped and waited for the next bite.
Ahead there was a deep gurgling noise, like a foghorn with water in its works. Cuff said: “How are your hippo doing this year?”
“Pretty good. There are some in particular that I want you to see. Ah, here we are.”
They had come in sight of a stretch of calm water. In the foreground a hippopotamus repeated its foghorn bellow. Cuff saw others, of which only the eyes, ears, and nostrils were visible. One of them was moving; Cuff could make out the little V-shaped wakes pointing back from its nearly submerged head. It reached the shallows and lumbered out, dripping noisily.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 90