Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction

by Sam Moskowitz

"I do not know how long I sat there. And then something whispered in my mind.

  " 'We sought you at the television machine.'

  "I leaped from the bench and stared wildly about me.

  "It was floating in the air—a shining dirigible of metal, ruby-red in that light, twenty feet long, perhaps ten in diameter, bright, warm orange light gleaming from its ports. I stared at it in amazement.

  " 'It—it worked!' I gasped.

  " 'The beam carried barely enough energy to energize the amplifiers when it reached Neptune, however,' replied the creature in the machine.

  "I couldn't see him—I knew I wasn't hearing him, but somehow that didn't surprise me.

  "Your oxygen has almost entirely given out, and I believe your mind is suffering from lack of oxygen. I would suggest you enter the lock; there is air in here.'

  "I don't know how he knew, but the gauges confirmed his statement. The oxygen was pretty nearly gone. I had perhaps another hour's supply if I opened the valves wide—but it was a most uncomfortably near thing, even so.

  "I got in. I was beaming, joyous. There was life. This universe was not so dead as I had supposed. Not on Earth, perhaps, but only because they did not choose! They had space ships! Eagerly I climbed in, a strange thrill running through my body as I crossed the threshold of the lock. The door closed behind me with a soft shush on its soft gaskets, locked, and a pump whined somewhere for a moment; then the inner door opened. I stepped in— and instantly turned off my alcohol burners. There was heat—heat and light and air!

  "In a moment I had the outer lacings loose, and the inner zipper down. Thirty seconds later I stepped out of the suit, and took a deep breath. The air was clean and sweet and warm, invigorating, fresh-smelling, as though it had blown over miles of green, Sun-warmed fields. It smelled alive, and young.

  "Then I looked for the man who had come: for me. There was none. In the nose of the ship, by the controls, floated a four-foot globe of metal, softly glowing with a warm, golden light. The light pulsed slowly or swiftly with the rhythm of his thoughts, and I knew that this was the one who had spoken to me.

  " 'You had expected a human?' he thought to me. 'There are no more. There have been none for a time I cannot express in your mind. Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago.”

  "I looked at him and wondered. Where was he from? Who—what—what manner of thing? Was it an armor-incased living creature or another of the perfect machines?

  "I felt him watching my mind operate, pulsing softly in his golden light. And suddenly I thought to look out of the ports. The dim red suns were wheeling across those ports at an unbelievable rate. Earth was long since gone. As I looked, a dim, incredibly dim, red disk suddenly appeared, expanded—and I looked in awe at Neptune.

  "The planet was scarcely visible when we: were already within a dozen millions of miles. It was a jeweled world. Cities—the great, perfect cities—still glowed. They glowed in soft, golden light above, and below, the harsher, brighter blue of mercury vapor lighted them.

  "He was speaking again. 'We are machines—the ultimate development of man's machines. Man was almost gone when we came.

  " 'With what we have learned in the uncounted dusty megayears since, we might have been able to save him. We could not then. It was better, wiser, that man end than that he sink down so low as he must, eventually. Evolution is the rise under pressure. Devolution is the gradual sinking that comes when there is no pressure—and there is no end to it. Life vanished from this system—a dusty infinity I cannot sort in my memory—my type memory, truly, for I have complete all the memories of those that went before me that I replace.

  But my memory cannot stretch back to that time you think of—a time when the constellations———

  " 'It is useless to try. Those memories are buried under others, and those still buried under the weight of a billion centuries.

  " 'We enter'—he named a city; I cannot reproduce that name—'now. You must return to Earth though in some seven and a quarter of your days, for the magnetic axis stretches back in collapsing field strains. I will be able to inject you into it, I believe.'

  "So I entered that city, the living city of machines, that had been when time and the universe were young.

  "I did not know then that, when all this universe had dissolved away, when the last sun was black and cold, scattered dust in a fragment of a scattered universe, this planet with its machine cities would go on—a last speck of warm light in a long-dead universe. I did not know then.

  " 'You still wonder that we let man die out?' asked the machine. 'It was best. In another brief million years he would have lost his high estate. It was best.'

  " 'Now we go on. We cannot end, as he did. It is automatic with us.'

  "I felt it then, somehow. The blind, purposeless continuance of the machine cities I could understand. They had no intelligence, only functions. These machines—these living, thinking, reasoning investigators—had only one function, too. Their function was slightly different—they were designed to be eternally curious, eternally investigating. And their striving was the more purposeless of the two, for theirs could reach no end. The cities fought eternally only the blind destructive-ness of nature; wear, decay, erosion.

  "But their struggle had an opponent forever, so long as they existed. The intelligent—no, not quite intelligent, but something else—curious machines were without opponents. They had to be curious. They had to go on investigating. And they had been going on in just this way for such incomprehensible ages that there was no longer anything to be curious about. Whoever, whatever designed them gave them function and forgot purpose. Their only curiosity was the wonder if there might, somewhere, be one more thing to learn.

  "That—and the problem they did not want to solve, but must try to solve, because of the blind functioning of their very structure.

  "Those eternal cities were limited. The machines saw now the limit, and saw the hope of final surcease in it. They worked on the energy of the atom. But the masses of the suns were yet tremendous. They were dead for want of energy. The masses of the planets were still enormous. But they, too, were dead for want of energy.

  "The machines there on Neptune gave me food and drink —strange, synthetic foods and drinks. There had been none on all the planet. They, perforce, started a machine, unused in a billion years and more, that I might eat. Perhaps they were glad to do so. It brought the end appreciably nearer, that vast consumption of mine.

  "They used so very, very little, for they were so perfectly efficient. The only possible fuel in all the universe is one—hydrogen. From hydrogen, the lightest of elements, the heaviest can be built up, and energy released. They knew how to destroy matter utterly to energy, and could do it.

  "But while the energy release of hydrogen compounding to the heavy elements is controllable, the destruction of matter to energy is a self-regenerative process. Started once, it spreads while matter lies within its direct, contiguous; reach. It is wild, uncontrollable. It is impossible to utilize the full energy of matter.

  "The suns had found that. They had burned their hydrogen until it was a remnant so small the action could not go on.

  "On all Earth there was not an atom of hydrogen—nor was there on any planet, save Neptune. And there the store was not great. I used an appreciable fraction while I was there. That is their last hope. They can see the end now.

  "I stayed those few days, and the machine is came and went. Always investigating, always curious. But there is in all that universe nothing to investigate save the one problem they are sure they cannot solve.

  "The machine took me back to Earth, set up something near me that glowed with a peculiar, steady, gray light. It would fix the magnetic axis on me, on my location, within a few hours. He could not stay near when the axis touched again. He went back to Neptune,
but a few millions of miles distant, in this shrunken mummy of the solar system.

  "I stood alone on the roof of the city, in the frozen garden with its deceptive look of life.

  "And I thought of that night I had spent, sitting up with the dead man. I had come and watched him die. And I sat up with him in the quiet. I had wanted some one, any one to talk to.

  "I did then. Overpoweringly it came to me I was sitting up in the night of the universe, in the night and quiet of the universe, with a dead planet's body, with the dead, ashen hopes of countless, nameless generations of men and women. The universe was dead, and I sat up alone—alone in the dead hush.

  "Out beyond, a last flicker of life was dying on the planet Neptune—a last, false flicker of aimless life, but not life. Life was dead. The world was dead.

  "I knew there would never be another sound here. For all the little remainder of time. For this was the dark and the night of time and the universe. It was inevitable, the inevitable end that had been simply more distant in my day—in the long, long-gone time when the stars were mighty lighthouses of a mighty space, not the dying, flickering candles at the head of a dead planet.

  "It had been inevitable then; the candles must burn out for all their brave show. But now I could see them guttering low, the last, fruitless dregs of energy expiring as the machines below had spent their last dregs of energy in that hopeless, utterly faithful gesture—to attempt the repair of the city already dead.

  "The universe had been dead a billion years. It had been. This, I saw, was the last radiation of the heat of life from an already-dead body—the feel of life and warmth imitation of life by a corpse. Those suns had long and long since ceased to generate energy. They were dead, and their corpses were giving off the last, lingering life heat before they cooled.

  "I ran. I think I ran—down away from the flickering, red suns in the sky. Down to the shrouding blackness of the dead city below, where neither light, nor heat, nor life, nor imitation of life bothered me.

  "The utter blackness quieted me somewhat. So I turned off my oxygen valves, because I wanted to die sane, even here, and I knew I'd never come back.

  "The impossible happened! I came to with that raw oxygen in my face. I don't know how I came—only that here is warmth and life.

  "Somewhere, on the far side of that bismuth coil, inevitable still, is the dead planet and the flickering, guttering candles that light the death watch I must keep at the end of time."

  A LOGIC NAMED JOE

  by

  Murray Leinster

  IT WAS ON the the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and

  on the fifth Laurine come into town, and that afternoon I saved civilization. That's what I figure, anyhow. Laurine is a blonde that I was crazy about once, and crazy is the word, and Joe is a logic that I have stored away down in the cellar right now. I had to pay for him because I said I busted him, and sometimes I think about turning him on and sometimes I think about taking an axe to him. Sooner or later I'm gonna do one or the other. I kinda hope it's the axe. I could use a couple million dollars, sure!—and Joe'd tell me how to get or make them. He can do plenty! But so far I've been scared to take a chance. After all, I figure I really saved a civilization by turning him off.

  The way Laurine fits in is that she makes cold shivers run up and down my spine when I think about her. You see, I've got a wife which I acquired after I had parted from Laurine with much romantic despair. She is a reasonable good wife, and I have some kids which are hellcats but I value them. If I have sense enough to leave well enough alone, sooner or later I will retire on a pension and Social Security and spend the rest of my life fishing contented and lying about what a great guy I used to be. But there's Joe. I'm worried about Joe.

  I'm a maintenance man for the Logics Company. My job is servicing logics, and I admit modestly that I am pretty good. I was servicing televisions before that guy Carson invented his trick circuit that will select any of seventeen million other circuits, in theory there ain't no limit, and before the Logics Company hooked it into the tank-and-integrator set-up they were using them as business-machine service. They added a vision screen for speed, and they found out they'd make logics. They were surprised and pleased. They're still finding out what logics will do, but everybody's got them.

  I got Joe, after Laurine nearly got me. You know the logics setup; You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over and whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecasting comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" and the screen blinks and sputters and you're hooked up with the logic in her house and if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House during Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R selling for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big building full of all the facts in creation and all the recorded telecasts whatever was made-and it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country-and anything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it and you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, and keeps books, and acts as consulting chemist, physicist, astronomer, and tealeaf reader, with a "Advice to Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense.

  Logics are all right, though. They changed civilization, the highbrows tell us. All on accounts the Carson Circuit. And Joe should have been a perfectly normal logic, keeping some family or other from wearing out its brains doing the kids' homework for them. But something went wrong in the assembly line. It was something so small that precision gauges didn't measure it, but it made Joe a individual. Maybe he didn't know it at first. Or maybe, being logical, he figured out that if he was to show he was different from other logics they'd scrap him. Which woulda been a brilliant idea. But anyhow, he come off the assembly line, and he went through the regular tests without anybody screaming shrilly on finding out what he was. And he went right on out and was dully installed in the home of Mr. Thaddeus Konlanovitch at 119 East Seventh Street, second floor front. So far, everything was serene.

  The installation happened late Saturday night. Sunday morning the Korlanovitch kids turned him on and seen the Kiddie Shows. Around noon their parents peeled them away from him and piled them in the car. Then they come back in the house for the lunch they'd forgot and one of the kids sueaked back and they found him punching keys for the Kiddie Shows of the week before. They dragged him out and went off. But they left Joe turned on.

  That was noon. Nothing happened until two in the afternoon. It was the calm before the storm. Laurine wasn't in town yet, but she was coming. I picture Joe sitting there all by himself, buzzing meditative. Maybe he run Kiddie Shows in the empty apartment for awhile. But I think he went kinda remote-control exploring in the tank. There ain't any fact that can be said to be a fact that ain't on a data plate in some tank somewhere-unless it's one the technicians are digging out and putting on a data plate now. Joe had plenty of material to work on. And he must started working right off the bat.

  Joe ain't vicious, you understand. He ain't like one of these ambitious robots you read about that make lip their minds the human race is inefficiant and has got to be wiped out and replaced by thinking machines. Joe's just got ambition. If you were a machine, you'd wanna work right, wouldn't you? That's Joe. He wants to work right. And he's a logic. And logics can do a lotta things that ain't been found out yet. So Joe, discovering the fact, begun to feel restless. He selects some things us dumb humans ain't thought of yet, and begins to arrange so logics will be called on to do
them.

  That's all. That's everything. But, brother, it's enough!

  Things are kinda quiet in the Maintenance Department about two in the afternoon. We are playing pinochle. Then one of the guys remembers he has to call up his wife. He goes to one of the bank of logics in Maintenance and punches the keys for his house. The screen sputters. Then a flash comes on the screen.

  "Announcing new and improved logics service! Your logic is now equipped to give you not only consultive but directive service. If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!"

  There's a pause. A kinda expectant pause. Then, as if reluctantly, his connection comes through. His wife answers and gives him hell for something or other. He takes it and snaps off.

  "Whadda you know?" he says when he comes back. He tells us about the flash. "We shoulda been warned about that. There's gonna be a lotta complaints. Suppose a fella asks how to get ridda his wife and the censor circuits block the question?"

  Somebody melds a hundred aces and says:

  "Why not punch for it and see what happens?"

  It's a gag, ci' course- But the guy goes over. He punches keys. In theory, a censor block is gonna come on and the screen will say severely, "Public Policy Forbids This Service." You hafta have censor blocks or the kiddies will be asking detailed questions about things they're too young to know. And there are other reasons. As you will see.

  This fella punches, "How can I get rid of my wife?" Just for the fun of it. The screen is blank for half a second. Then comes a flash. "Service question: Is she blonde or brunette?" He hollers to us and we come look. He punches, "Blonde." There's another brief pause. Then the screen says, "Hexymetacryloaminoacetifle is a constituent of green shoe polish. Take home a frozen meal including dried pea soup. Color the soup with green shoe polish. It will appear to be green-pea soup, HexymetacryloaminOacetifle is a selective poison which s fatal to blonde females but not to brunettes or males of any coloring. This fact has not been brought out by human experiment, but is a product of logics service. You cannot be convicted of murder. It is improbable that you will be suspected."