Battle on Mercury

by Lester del Rey (as Erik van Lhin)

  Another glow appeared, and a second wispy shot up from Pete’s head. It was immediately followed by a third. And finally, two appeared together, separating as they shot away from Pete.

  One of those danced around Dick’s head, and this time his shout was answered by more bobbing, while the other four wispies gathered around in a half-circle, seeming to stare at the two men.

  Charlie stepped back, shaking his head inside his helmet. “Now I’ve seen everything,” he said at last. “Dead robots that go walking around, wispies all mixed together. … I might as well be on a real ripsnorter, Dick. Nobody’ll believe a word I ever say.”

  But Dick was watching Johnny, who was slipping back into the head of the robot. Pete sat up weakly and put out a hand, as if asking for help to sit up. Dick helped, bringing the back up straight, and letting the robot support itself against one of the stones, It motioned with its hands toward the chest plate, making motions as if taking that off. “Bad here,” it said. “Burned out connection.” Dick frowned, wondering just how much of the automatic and nonautomatic response circuit of the robot the wispy could handle. But if it could feel electricity, which was logical for such a creature, then there was no reason it shouldn’t know what it was saying. Behind him, he heard Charlie gulping, but he had been surprised before that Johnny hadn’t learned to make the robot talk. It would be pretty crude, of course, since the machine had a small vocabulary. But certainly talking was no more problem than walking.

  Or maybe it was. Maybe getting all the routing circuits straightened out had taken a lot more time and practice, and Johnny had been working on that whenever he got a chance until he had finally learned the trick.

  He found the hinged part of the chest plate and threw it up, taking out the little set of tools that came with the robot. In a few minutes more, the chest plate was entirely off. But he had no idea where the trouble lay.

  Something spat, and the robot jerked. It spat again, shooting out little sparks. And now he saw it. One wire, high up in the chest, had been burned through and wasn’t quite touching. He twisted it together with the little pliers, knowing that a good job would have to wait until later. But the voice came at once.

  “Good, Dick. Hard to make power jump break. Now Pete is okay.”

  It was a pretty clear explanation. The robot had been damaged only by having the main power line broken, and the wispies had found that they could short it just enough to keep the machine working.

  But it didn’t explain how they had found him, or why they had bothered bringing the robot. Then he realized that the speech itself had given the reason. To communicate, they had to have Pete.

  He put his other questions, and Pete’s voice did its best to find an answer. It seemed that the wispies had been on the constant watch for Dick, but they had been forced to do it in relays, changing off while the exhausted one went back to the hotlands for more energy. Then, when they had found Dick at last, they had come together in Pete.

  Well, he had no idea of how much help they would be, but they had found him in a tight spot again. He pointed out the silicone beasts to the wispies, but he doubted that they could help much.

  He wasn’t sure what their reaction was when he finished, but the robot nodded faintly. “All work,” it said. Then Johnny came out from the head, and Pete got up on his own power, now no more than a normal, old-style robot, waiting orders.

  “Better do something pretty quick,” Charlie suggested. “Those things out there seem to be riled up by your pretty little friends. Been yelling for blood.”

  They weren’t exactly yelling, but the silicone beasts were definitely thumping. Their tails were beating the earth, and they were leaping at the stones around with renewed fury. Something had set them off, and it might have been the arrival of the wispies.

  One of the stone shafts that had made die little enclosure suddenly cracked sharply. The gap left wasn’t quite big enough for the head monster outside, but it was a good beginning, and the silicone beast went to work with more enthusiasm than sense. Its head changed shape with every blow it delivered to the next stone, but that seemed of no great importance to it. The stone began to crack.

  Dick and Charlie moved forward, knowing they couldn’t do much at this stage, but feeling obligated to make the attempt. Dick added this to himself, feeling sick with fear; but he couldn’t show it in front of Charlie. Going against the great beasts out there seemed something like trying to chase an elephant back with a fly swatter.

  Then five blue streaks shot through the air. They seemed completely sure of themselves this time, unlike the battle they had had with the demons. They singled out the leader of the monsters and flashed down at the base of what served as his neck. There was a sudden wild threshing of the beast’s tail, and all four wispies flashed out at the end of it. The big monster quivered slightly and began to flatten out. He started to slide sideways— and then went into a complete retreat, sliding under the feet of those behind him at a steady, unchanging pace.

  One by one, starting with the largest and working down, the wispies were repeating the tactics. At the base of the neck, out at the end of the tail. Whatever they did must have seemed horrible to the monsters. As the wispies left their bodies, they also began sliding backward. Then the larger beasts were all taken care of, and only the babies remained. They seemed to receive milder treatment, since they were attacked by only one wispy at a time.

  In less than five minutes, the horde of silicone beasts had disappeared, and the wispies came back. But as usual, in their activities so far from their chief source of energy, they had been drained more than seemed good for them by the activity.

  Johnny seemed weakest, probably because he had been in chief control of the robot.

  They grouped up now, and four of them suddenly flashed at another. Dick couldn’t be sure, but it seemed logical that Johnny was the middle one. In any event, the four seemed to drain themselves to the limit, while the fifth wispy grew fatter, and began to swirl properly again.

  A second later the four were streaming away, obviously badly in need of nourishment.

  Johnny slipped into the head of Pete again, and the robot seemed to take on personality almost at once. He climbed out of the little enclosure, got onto the tractor, and backed it up for Dick and Charlie to mount. Without a word of instruction, he seemed to have grasped its principles. And while he was a long way from being a smooth driver, he seemed to be doing well enough.

  He was obviously bound in the right direction, which wasn’t too surprising, since that had been their planned line of march.

  Charlie stretched out, yawning inside the suit. “Dunno what you plan to do, Dick, but I figger on catching the rest of that shut-eye. Johnny there seems to know what he’s doing, and we got some time to kill.”

  He turned over on his back, and began snoring within a few minutes.

  Dick sat up, trying to think. He had had all the sleep knocked out of him, and was beginning to think that there was no real sense to anything. This whole trip had been crazy from the start. Two men and a wispy—with everything thrown in for good measure, and very little balance, it seemed to him. The silicone beasts left him slightly sick, and yet he couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. They had obviously been such easy marks for the wispies.

  There were more of them along the course they were traveling, but none seemed to take the initiative to start trailing the little tractor. Apparently they worked only in herds. One would start something, with as little reason as possible, and all the others would begin to join in.

  He looked at the map again, wondering how much longer it would be before he’d reach his goal. It didn’t seem possible that the trip ever could end. Like Alice in Wonderland, he expected to find himself tumbling head over heels down another stairway or through a rabbit hole the moment he turned around.

  The first sign he had that they were actually near the Relay Station was a sudden movement of the robot that jerked Dick’s head up. It had switched from two han
ds to one, and the result had not been good for the tractor. It struck a rough section, bounced, and then finally crawled back to a steady pace. But Pete was pointing, and Dick followed the direction of the finger.

  There was a larger dome, this time. Again, it had no layer of aluminum over the plastic, and it seemed almost like a ghost dome to Dick, who wondered how people could live inside a transparent dome. But the main thing was the knowledge that at last he was 011 the final lap and about to be of some use to his family and people instead of merely to robots, wispies, and assorted other creatures and life forms.

  Then the tractor sputtered and began slowing down. Pete fussed with the controls, but it did no good. The battery had given up its share of electricity, and wanted to rest. And the tractor couldn’t do anything about it.

  Charlie woke up with a start, and spotted the Station. He nodded. “Sure deserted. Well, reckon we don’t care what it’s like, just so it gets us through to East Twilight. Come on, shanks’ mare.”

  He began walking toward it, with Dick at his side and the robot in the rear. The buildings were not only deserted, but some were apparently beginning to fall to pieces. Only the big radio shack in the middle still seemed intact, and that was the main interest to Dick. If the radio worked, the town could give up the ghost immediately afterward, as far as he was concerned.

  The lock had been fixed, at least. They opened it and went through, with Pete still carrying the wispy inside him. Then they went down the dead streets.

  “Scientists from Earth killed it,” Charlie complained. “They never can leave things for our boys here to work out; they have to come over and use what we build, ruin it for any use, and then leave it like this. Shame. Five hundred people can live here. And they don’t, because our government doesn’t have money to make up for the damage done.”

  Dick stared at him doubtfully. The speech was out of keeping with Hotside Charlie. The man shrugged as he saw Dick’s eyes on him. “Forget it, Dick. Gets my dander up once in a while, I kinda get a soapbox. Used to have me an education when I was a kid, talked as dandified as anyone. Here, lessee what we got left.”

  They had come to the radio shack, and now Dick threw open the door. Once there had been a lock on that, but it had been tom off by someone who prized one of the oldest traditions of the planet—that inside a dome no lock was ever needed.

  Dick went inside, and his eyes gleamed at the machinery there. Without question, Relay Station had been given the best equipment. If any set could rouse East Twilight, this one should do the trick.

  He stopped for a moment, to stare at an automatic sender that was on. It had stopped running, but he spun it through his fingers by hand, reading the message off the tape. There was nothing new about it; it was the same message Charlie had found on the rocket ship—a message to all domes to abandon anything outside of Twilight and to go to East or West Twilight for the duration of the storm.

  Dick reached under the table for the power switch that should be there. His fingers jerked forward to flick it on, and then he frowned. This time he found it, and realized that it had already been shoved all the way forward. So, maybe it worked in reverse. He’d seen other cockeyed jobs with switches. He shoved back, but again without results.

  For a second more he frowned. This time he threw up the control panel and began juggling the switches, trying to read the meters as he tested it. But the meters all remained on dead zero, indicating that nothing was going out or coming in.

  He followed a cable from the table across the room and to another tiny room that lay behind the false partition at the rear.

  The most advanced batteries lay there, all connected properly, and with no cut-off switches between. Dick refused to believe his eyes, but he tested the batteries dully. They were drained dry. With the machine on automatic, it had been left to run on, sending out its signal as long as there was juice enough to drive the tape repeater. And now it was silent only because it hadn’t the power to repeat the message again.

  He saw the telltale coupling that spelled power from sun-cells outside. These little devices could be installed on the roof, and they would then turn the radiated heat of the sun directly into electricity. In a week or so, they could have raised the level of power up to a kick sufficient for Dick’s purpose.

  But there was no time to wait for that.

  At Dick’s request Charlie went through the building and then took off for the rest of the dome, while Pete with Johnny inside scurried the other way. This was a good-sized dome, and there would be batteries around. If not, there should be an atomic boiler and generator.

  Dick found the latter two himself, where they belonged. But the slugs had been pulled from the pile, leaving it inactive.

  Both Charlie and Pete came back with a single word: “No.” Whoever had last been in the station had felt that more power was going to be needed elsewhere and had gone about stripping the dome deliberately. Charlie angrily denounced the type of men coming into the planet now—no better than Earth lawyers and undertakers, in his own words. But his anger and Dick’s bitter sense of loss couldn’t give power to the dome. For power they would have to cut off the automatic sender and then wait a week while the batteries charged up enough to handle a full load to East Twilight.

  A week. And he had no idea now whether there was one day, or three, left for Sigma dome. But he was quite sure that it couldn’t hold out for a week.

  Chapter 16 Demon Power

  Pete laid a hand on Dick’s arm, and the boy jumped. It took time to get used to a robot that could act like a man, even when he knew that something a thousand times as alien as a robot was inside it. Or was Johnny alien? Was any intelligence really alien?

  “Sorry,” the flat voice of the robot said. “I have tried.”

  Dick blinked a little at that. The words had never been in Pete’s vocabulary. No robot knew the meaning of “I,” and the grammar was stripped to the bone. But he supposed Johnny had his own ways, once he’d solved the puzzle of the speech circuits.

  Then the first bit of a wild idea crossed Dick’s mind. “Johnny,” he asked. “Johnny, your people can suck energy from batteries, can’t they? And you can give each other the energy. Suppose you shot energy into a battery? Would that work?” Pete nodded. “It would work, Dick. But …” He left it hanging, while Charlie stared at him. “Seems to me you spooks pick up English mighty fast, Johnny,” he observed. “Yesterday, no English. An hour gone, robot English. Now you get fancy. How come? Or d’ya get a charge out of pulling monkeys out of lampshades?”

  Pete looked at him then, and this time the nod was slower. “I heard that expression forty years ago, Charles Hennessy—when you were lost once.”

  The old prospector’s face jerked suddenly. “You!” “Me,” Pete answered ungrammatically. “I was always the one, because I conceived the great idea of contacting the human race. For forty years I worked on your language, learning it. I tried to find ways of sending it through your radios, but I could not modulate it. Now, through a system of relays in a robot’s body—an old robot, not a metal one—I have found the trick of how sounds are put together in this way.”

  He paused, and thought for a minute. Then he shrugged. “I have become, I am afraid, more human than will-o’-the-wisp. And it has not been easy, when humans have hated us.”

  Charlie had had enough, but Pete sighed, almost like a man. “You gave me this idea, Charlie—when you asked for something I knew you wanted, and offered me something you knew I wanted. I began to see that you had a purpose to the noises you made. And that you men of Earth were not all monsters, like the silicone beasts who once had brains, until they felt they could make us slaves. You were a good man when you were a kid, Charlie—and by golly, you re not such a bad old duffer now!”

  “What about me?” Dick asked. “You may get a kick out of kidding Charlie, but I was asking a serious question!”

  Pete shook his head. “No. Dick, you don’t know what you ask. It would take many of us to recharg
e your batteries, and we would be weak after that. Dick, there are only eighty of my people left on all Mercury—eighty, against unknown numbers of demons. We can’t risk what you ask. I like you, and I’ve risked myself and my people time and again. But we can’t serve as living batteries. That is too dangerous. No! I came to your people for help, not to kill my race!”

  Suddenly, the glow swept out from the robot, and Johnny snapped away into the distance.

  “Mite talkative, ain’t he?” Charlie said. “But Dick, lie’s got a point. Forty years a-learning to talk with us so he can get some help against the demons and stop us killing off his people. And the first squawk out of you is for him to go make electricity ferryboats out of them.”

  Dick shrugged bitterly. He’d known that he had no right to ask it. And yet there was nothing else to do. He needed power; and he probably needed it in less than six hours, if he wasn’t to find himself without air again. There had been no oxygen tanks in Relay Station. Now Johnny, the last hope, was gone, angry because he’d had to ask too much.

  With so few of Johnny’s race left, between the constant war with the crazy demons and the ingenuity with which men had killed off good and evil alike, it had been too much. But he hadn’t known.

  He got up from the chair into which he’d sunk and tried to stop thinking about what was due to happen to all of them. But it didn’t work. Charlie suddenly came over beside him, and the old eyes were suffering with him. There were some advantages to being human besides talking—and one of them is knowing when not to talk.

  “Well,” Dick said at last, “it seems to be finished, anyhow. But I’m glad we tried.”

  There was a sharp flickering, like a row of bullets of light shot out of a machine gun. When he jerked his eyes up, he was looking at a long line of small blue spheres spread around the room, and Pete was standing up again.