Just outside the twenty-foot high fence surrounding the space-ground he presented himself to the hiring agency that took on repair crews for the orbiting guard posts.
‘You already have my name on your list,’ he said to the clerk. ‘I have taken aptitude tests.’
The clerk consulted his papers. ‘So you have. I see you passed an examination in space welding. And in control unit repair. We could have used you before.’
‘I have only now decided to undertake the work. What rates are you offering?’
‘They’ve gone up,’ the clerk boasted. ‘Half an imperial a trip.’
‘Not enough. I require at least double that.’
‘In that case, friend, goodbye.’
Inwardly Jasperodus cursed his weak bargaining position. ‘Very well,’ he said impatiently, ‘I agree to your derisive payment.’
The clerk was offhandedly indignant as he filled out the entry slip. ‘It’s better than you’ll get anywhere else,’ he said. ‘Almost human rates.’
‘For a street sweeper. And you neglect to mention that the destruction incidence for orbital repair crews is now one in seven.’
The clerk shrugged. ‘What do you robots want to live for anyway?’ he muttered. ‘There’s a shuttle blasting off in an hour. If you want to be on it take this to the main gate.’
Jasperodus accepted the slip, which took him through the two checkpoints guarding the base. He was directed to a corrugated iron shed a few yards inside the perimeter.
Within were a number of robots, fairly high-grade constructs to judge by their appearance, who stood about silently or conversed desultorily in low tones. A fatalistic air filled the hut. The eyes of the robots were listless.
The one-in-seven ratio, Jasperodus thought. They were all aware of it.
But not quite all his fellow crew members were robots. A slight, hunch-shouldered man stepped forward to greet him, smiling up at him nervously from a seamed, fortyish face.
‘Know you, don’t I?’
‘We have met,’ Jasperodus said distantly.
‘Yeah, I remember. In Subuh. I live there.’ The man spoke with an attempt at cockiness. He sported a conceit that had recently become fashionable: his fingers held a tiny bowl filled with burning aromatic herbs, the smoke of which he drew into his mouth through a stem.
Ostentatiously he blew out a streamer of the inhaled smoke. Then he looked at Jasperodus again, frowning as if with a sudden memory, and seemed to become uneasy. A nervous tic started up on the left side of his face. He looked away, his gaze becoming vacant and withdrawn.
Jasperodus was familiar with his type, which was a species of social throw-out known as slotmen, an analogy referring to the delivery slot of a vending machine. Due to personality difficulties, a deep feeling of inadequacy, or simply to repeated failure in the field of human relations, they had fallen from the company of human beings and preferred to live among robots, to whom they need not feel inferior. The delivery chute of this process was the suburb of Subuh.
With unconscious robots slotmen could feel at ease. Among men they quickly went to pieces. Jasperodus looked upon them with disdain. In turn they were generally wary of him. In fact during the days when he had found himself unwittingly adopting the role of a robot leader and the wild robots of Subuh were showing a tendency to gather round him, one of the slotmen had paid him an unsettling compliment.
‘You’re not like the other robots,’ the ragged creature had told him nervously. ‘There’s something different about you.’
Ignoring the slotman by his side, Jasperodus surveyed the crew robots, struck by how subdued they were. They were all caught in the psychological trap known as the double bind, he realised. The logical machine-mind did not take to gambling: odds of one in seven would normally be too much for wild robots to risk. Each had no doubt been forced into the job by desperate circumstances, probably by the need to buy a power pack before a certain date was up. Thus the decision to join the repair crew was prompted by the directive to survive, and at the same time it contradicted it – a perfect example of the double bind. Consequently they were very much depressed.
Jasperodus could not help but contrast their dejection with his own buoyant self-confidence. He remained unfrightened by thoughts of danger. Uncharacteristically for a machine, he believed in his luck.
The slotman essayed one more remark, indicating the other robots with his pipestem. ‘Quiet, ain’t they?’ he quavered.
Jasperodus nodded and deigned to reply. ‘For once it is a misfortune to be free. Freedom exacerbates a construct’s survival instinct. Were they under the orders of a master, now, they would be able to undertake this mission without suffering psychological distress.’
A door at the far end of the hut banged open. Into the room stomped two uniformed and helmeted Imperial Guardsmen.
They looked around at the gathering with bleak eyes. ‘Right, you lot,’ the sergeant began, ‘you know your business. This is the drill for today. There are malfunction signals from three orbiters. Two are surveillance satellites – nothing to that – the third is a guard post. The shuttle will be piloted from the ground, by remote, as per usual.’
Jasperodus spoke up. ‘Will the shuttle be armed?’
‘No,’ said the sergeant irritably, as though the question surprised him, ‘it will not be armed. Right, let’s get moving.’
Clanking slightly, the repair crew shuffled from the hut and walked half a mile to launch point. The shuttle was a battered vehicle that by the look of it had been converted from an old booster rocket. Clamped to it were a number of additional solid-fuel boosters to assist take-off.
They climbed a ladder to the hatch, and found themselves in a bare metal chamber large enough to admit about twenty men. Jasperodus waited to see if the guardsmen or some other supervisor would follow, but when the crew were all aboard the ladder was removed and the hatch closed itself. They were on their own.
The only furniture in the chamber consisted of two seat-couches and upon these, despite the slotman’s frantic efforts to appropriate one first, two of the robots casually draped themselves. The slotman began arguing with them, heatedly insisting on his right to a couch.
‘Away, away,’ dismissed one of the reclining robots with a wave of his hand. ‘I am an old construct. I cannot withstand sudden shocks as well as I might.’
‘At least you will not suffer broken bones and burst blood vessels!’ complained the slotman. ‘Give me that couch – it was meant for me, not for you!’
‘The acceleration is not so terrible. You can endure it.’
Jasperodus came over. ‘You look sturdy enough to me,’ he told the stubborn robot. ‘Get off that couch and leave it to this weak creature of flesh and bone. He is a true human being who possesses a soul, and not as you are, merely a candidate for the junkyard.’
The robot glared at Jasperodus, eyes glowing with resentment. But he obeyed, reluctantly quitting the couch which the slotman then occupied with alacrity.
‘Thanks,’ he grinned.
Jasperodus turned away. A klaxon sounded deafeningly in the confined space, warning of imminent departure. The robots sat down on the floor, leaning against the bulkhead, and Jasperodus, presuming this to be a precaution against the stress of blast-off, followed suit. The slotman, he noticed, was stuffing cotton-wool in his ears and holding it in place with his fingers.
An explosion sounded from below. The shuttle shuddered, the walls vibrated, and the crew chamber was suddenly filled with a shattering din as both the main liquid-fuel motor and the solid-fuel assist pods roared into life.
The vessel lifted, swaying as its inadequate stabilisers sought to gain balance. For a short time nothing more seemed to be happening; then Jasperodus became aware of a steadily growing pressure pushing at him from below. The chamber tilted: they were hurtling at an angle towards space.
Some minutes later the terrifying racket ceased abruptly. The shuttle was in free fall.
One robot more
dented and older than the rest rose from the floor and sailed through the air to the other side of the cabin where he opened a wall locker. Jasperodus moved his body gingerly and found the absence of gravity less novel than he had expected. He adapted to it easily, controlling himself by means of light touches on wall, floor or ceiling.
Other robots were amusing themselves by performing zero-g acrobatics. Jasperodus pulled himself to the single porthole. Through it he saw the shining curve of the Earth. Cloud and sea glinted with a pure brilliance, while on the opposite side extended the blackness of the void. For long moments he stared at the vision, struck by innumerable unvoiced thoughts.
The old robot at the wall locker turned to face them. ‘I am your ganger,’ he announced in a firm voice. ‘Attend to our division of labour.’ Calling each crew member by name or number he began to allocate task functions, pulling equipment from the locker as he did so.
‘Jasperodus: I recall that you are competent in control unit repair and space welding. As this is your first trip we will restrict you to space welding for the moment.’ And from the locker’s cavernous interior came a welding set which Jasperodus strapped to himself.
The slotman received a microcircuitry rig and a spacesuit with special visual attachments. By now they were approaching the first rendezvous, jolted occasionally as the controller on the ground applied thrust to correct their course.
Jasperodus positioned himself once more by the window. Soon the malfunctioning guard post hove into view. In shape it was like a fat barrel, banded as if with coopers’ hoops, but additionally equipped with missile launcher racks. As they jockeyed closer the barrel occluded clouds of stars. Beyond, in the upper left quarter of Jasperodus’ field of vision, was the radiant white Moon.
The hiss of close-range manoeuvring jets sounded through the walls of the chamber. The guard post loomed up and blotted out everything else. Then the shuttle’s hatch opened slightly, bleeding air into space until the interior of the chamber was a vacuum. It opened fully; the ganger urged his crew through it.
Outside, they floated across a few yards of space to a larger square hatch, still bolted tight, in the side of the guard post. One robot missed his direction and went sailing off into the void, limbs flailing desperately, whereupon the ganger jetted after him using a hand-held thruster and dragged him back.
The bolts released, the hatch was pulled open. The repair crew flowed into the interstices and chambers that riddled the interior of the big barrel-shape and began their inspection.
The post was unmanned and was designed to help protect imperial space routes – and imperial territory too if need be – by means of automatic response against enemy encroachments. Peering over the shoulders of the trained robots who were examining the systems boards, Jasperodus saw that it was currently quite defunct. Not a launcher or a gun was operative. The robots muttered among themselves. The repairs would take some hours.
Jasperodus relaxed. He did not think there would be much work for him today. In fact, now he thought of it, the size of the crew was altogether supernumerary to the task in hand. Wild robots were so cheap to hire that they could be used in redundant numbers, just in case something unforeseen should arise.
He wandered through the guard post, observing everything with interest. Once he was called upon to spot-weld back in place a plate that had been removed, a service that took him approximately forty-five seconds.
An hour later an unexpected commotion ran through the post. The robots began hurrying hither and thither in agitation, gesticulating wildly. Jasperodus stopped one such witless construct and touched heads with him so as to converse in the airless medium.
The robot’s voice vibrated tinnily through the metal of his cranium. ‘A Borgor cruiser! We are doomed! Doomed!’ With a wail the construct broke away and propelled himself deeper into the guard post in an attempt to flee.
Pushing aside yet more panicking robots, Jasperodus made his way back to the primary service area into which the main hatch gave access. There he found four robots, including the ganger, huddled closely together.
The slotman, however, had adopted a surprisingly different posture. He stood upright in the hatchway, fully exposed to the starlight. Cautiously Jasperodus approached the opening and peered over the rim. Glinting darkly against the starry background was the lobed, bulbous form of a foreign spaceship. It gyrated slowly and he could see the crescent of Rendare, one of the chief states of the Alliance, painted on its flank. Clearly it was contemplating attack and perhaps had not quite realised that the guard post was defenceless.
The slotman was staring at the cruiser, eyebrows raised in an expression of melancholy. Jasperodus could guess at his state of mind: imminent death came as an unexampled opportunity for sad self-pity and, at the same time, was something of a relief.
But he ignored the human and returned to the robots, pressing his head against the ganger’s. ‘Can weapons be made functional?’ he grated.
‘Not in time! Nothing to do but wait for extinction!’
The ganger, like all the others, was in the grip of despair. Jasperodus turned and launched himself back towards the hatch. As he did so a shell from the Borgor cruiser shot through the opening, passed over Jasperodus’ shoulder – though he didn’t see it – and through the ganger’s chest. Not until it had also penetrated the bulkhead behind him did it explode. The bulkhead bulged, spat itself into fragments, and the robots crouching with the ganger caught the whole barrage. The metal pieces tore into their bodies, leaving them moving feebly.
Their bulk largely protected Jasperodus and the slotman from the effects of the blast. Shrapnel and jagged metal hurtled silently past Jasperodus, one or two pieces scoring his limbs.
Instinctively the slotman clung to the side of the hatchway, paralysed, his mouth open with fright. Jasperodus sailed past him, steadied himself in the opening, then gained the outside and planted his feet on the exterior of the guard post. One powerful spring with his legs and he was soaring towards the open hatch of the shuttle which still floated a few yards away, tethered by guidelines.
In seconds he was alone in the empty crew chamber of the shuttle. It seemed odd that no one else had sought this refuge, which on the face of it offered the only possibility of escape. But then, perhaps the others had a more realistic appraisal of how much ground control would be prepared to help them. Robots, slotman and the battered shuttle were all expendable, practically throw-away items, and in the prospect of losing the important guard post – if ground control was even aware of what was going on yet – they would simply be forgotten.
He glanced at the ceiling, judging the position the chamber occupied in the length of the rocket. It was almost certain that originally the shuttle had been built with a cockpit, which probably was still there.
He flicked himself to the ceiling and activated the nozzle of the cutting torch which was part of his welding kit … The thin metal sheeting curled apart in the heat of the torch. While it was still hot Jasperodus tore it open further with his hands and then attacked a second layer of sheeting separated by a gap of a few inches.
Moments later he was levering himself into a small darkened cabin in the nose of the shuttle. Using the light of the cutting torch he took stock of it. There was a pilot’s seat, padded and harnessed, a large bank of instruments, several screens including a large one with cross hairs directly in front of the seat.
He leaned close, half-guessing, half-reading the function of the various controls by their markings. Never had his mind worked so fast … There had to be some point at which the controls were overridden by the signals transmitted from the ground … He ripped open a panel. Behind it he saw a junction box with a cutout switch, paralleled by a similar arrangement leading in the direction of the radio receiver. He immediately moved both switches.
The lights came on.
The big television screen sprang into life also. It showed the view from the nose of the shuttle. In the upper right-hand corner hovered the bow o
f the Borgor cruiser.
Jasperodus strapped himself into the pilot’s seat. Gyros … here they were. As he experimented with the levers the picture on the screen shifted with the rotation of the vessel, until he brought the intersection of the cross hairs into line with the Borgor cruiser. It appeared to be taking no further action, but was still waiting for some response to its opening shot.
By his knee Jasperodus noticed that a speaker was just perceptibly vibrating in the vacuum created by his rupturing the floor of the cabin. He placed his hand against it, but had to tune up his hearing to make out the words that were conducted up his arm.
‘You there! Put that craft back on remote and get out of that cockpit!’
Ignoring the command, Jasperodus fumbled for the ignition switch, first opening the throttle to full.
The rocket motor blasted out at full power. On the screen the enemy cruiser ballooned briefly – and then was blotted out.
Although it travelled only a few hundred yards the shuttle attained a velocity of several hundred miles per hour by the time of impact. It ploughed into the belly of the cruiser. The structure of neither vessel was rigid enough to hold together under such a shock: both broke up, but even as the shuttle disintegrated its nose retained enough momentum to carry it right through to the opposite wall of the Rendare ship.
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 14