‘But I understand, and young Cobalt doesn’t!’ Turan Hwa cried out to himself that evening; ‘Wangust brought me from the time before the catastrophe, so that I have standards of comparison. I know there is nothing so precious as peace, in which a man may tend his own affairs …’
He slept little that night, waking discomforted. With dawn, he took a hurried and lonely meal, afterwards going to find Leg of Leather, saddling him with the pulpit saddle. Like a phantom, he rode off into the misty groves, unwilling to bandy words any more; he suspected that Cobalt’s ideas were second-hand, and newly acquired at that. It made her impervious to reasoning. He was too ancient for anything but the heady lullaby of riding.
Unthinkingly turning in the old direction, he rode across the burned lands. One ruined machine still picked with stiff daintiness at the carcass of another. In a few minutes, the white stallion was climbing the slopes of Blighted Profile. As they neared the top, the first green leaves of the apple trees waved above the ridge. Then they gained the highest point, midway between green and black worlds.
She saw him perched in his usual position from her mother’s cottage. Thin and sweet as celery, her legs carried her twinkling up the slope, dodging, ducking climbing, around the apple trees. Yalleranda was the snake sliding toward its victim, the seducer coming, the blade falling, as she whipped through the knee-high grasses.
A few yards from him, concealed, she halted. He was magnificent. She saw him as nobody else would have seen him; something like a snowman ready to melt back to the water from which it was formed. For her, an emanation blew from him like a breeze; and it carried the desire for death. She savoured it. It intoxicated. It was as real as molasses.
Turan Hwa sat nodding in the saddle, nodding in concord with the cropping of the stallion, seeing neither the bad land on his left nor the good land on his right.
He was thinking that if he could go into the future, he could find there proof that Cobalt’s policies, and the policies of her generation, would bring forth evil fruit. But of course he would never get there; it was a silly old man’s silly dream. Although he could not see why visiting the future should be impossible, mathematicians and scientists had long ago proved it impossible. About that, he could do nothing. He was fit for nothing but reveries – the skin-thin reveries that dotage stretches over its bare bones. He was ripe for dying.
Fearfully, Turan Hwa shook his head, sitting up straight, hurt by his own thoughts.
A small, dark-eyed girl, with hair wild and tawny as a lion’s mane, stood with her hand on the horse’s bridle.
‘You were nearly asleep,’ she said.
‘I was dreaming,’ he said, thinking how savage, how beautiful, she was. This was a generation even beyond Cobalt.
‘You were dreaming of visiting the future,’ she said.
Turan Hwa was hardly surprised. He recalled local talk about wild people with wild talents, people with contaminated blood, strange abilities, and unnatural desires: sports of the after-effects of high-radiation war. Wangust had warned him of them, and he had laughed. Now he laughed again, wheezily, without knowing why.
‘A man dreams many things,’ he said. ‘What do you dream about, young lady?’
‘My name is Yalleranda, and I dream about … oh, sunshine all muddy on my body while I eat the little worms in apples, or about the hard stones in the middle of clouds.’
‘Where do you live?’ he asked sharply, disliking her answer.
Instead of replying, she twirled savagely around Leg of Leather, coming to the opposite stirrup and grasping Turan Hwa’s shoe. Her mustard hair touched his white garment.
‘I know where there is a machine that will send you into the future,’ she said, darkling her eyes up at him.
As he followed her down over the high ridge, down Blighted Profile, he felt no wonderment. He was an old hand at accepting the world’s oddities. All he did was cling to the saddle pommels, letting the girl lead the stallion. In a shower of loose cobbles underfoot, they came to a cave set high on the savage slope, looking across the desolation below.
‘It’s in here,’ Yalleranda said, ducking into the gloom.
‘Well, and why not?’ Turan Hwa asked himself sleepily, not moving, not dismounting. ‘Before the catastrophe, technology reached its climax. Many weapons were secret … It could have been left here, forgotten … found by this child. Why not?’
While he waited outside on the horse, Yalleranda flicked around in the twilight of the cave, busy about her machine. She had found it abandoned; nobody else knew of it – except the other people who had entered its powerful beam, and they were in no position to say anything.
Darting to one side, nimble as pony tails, she pressed down one little red switch. A murmur grew, then dwindled. Out through the mouth of the cave went a beam like a grey mist, like the tongue of a searchlight licking through thin cloud. This was the disintegrator beam which had formed the burned valley below.
Yalleranda slid around its edges, slipped out of the cave. Leg of Leather pawed the ground, eyeing the fog uneasily.
‘There you are!’ Yalleranda cried, throwing up her arms. ‘Ride into that beam and you’ll be carried into the future. Go on, spur your horse!’
Turan Hwa was puzzled. But the girl’s eyes were oddly commanding. He spoke to the stallion. Leg of Leather bridled, tossed up his head, then went forward smartly.
Her face wizened as if yearning were as sharp as sloe juice, Yalleranda watched her old prize ride into the disintegrator beam. Its surface was smooth, calm as an inland sea. It lapped up greedily around horse and rider, that cruel sea took them atom by atom, annihilating them absolutely. Like a man riding under a stretch of water, Turan Hwa rode without crying out or looking back – into the infinite future.
Who Can Replace A Man?
Morning filtered into the sky, lending it the grey tone of the ground below.
The field-minder finished turning the top-soil of a three-thousand-acre field. When it had turned the last furrow, it climbed onto the highway and looked back at its work. The work was good. Only the land was bad. Like the ground all over Earth, it was vitiated by over-cropping. By rights, it ought now to lie fallow for a while, but the field-minder had other orders.
It went slowly down the road, taking its time. It was intelligent enough to appreciate the neatness all about it. Nothing worried it, beyond a loose inspection plate above its nuclear pile which ought to be attended to. Thirty feet tall, it yielded no highlights to the dull air.
No other machines passed on its way back to the Agricultural Station. The field-minder noted the fact without comment. In the station yard it saw several other machines that it recognised; most of them should have been out about their tasks now. Instead, some were inactive and some careered round the yard in a strange fashion, shouting or hooting.
Steering carefully past them, the field-minder moved over to Warehouse Three and spoke to the seed-distributor, which stood idly outside.
‘I have a requirement for seed potatoes,’ it said to the distributor, and with a quick internal motion punched out an order card specifying quantity, field number and several other details. It ejected the card and handed it to the distributor.
The distributor held the card close to its eye and then said, ‘The requirement is in order, but the store is not yet unlocked. The required seed potatoes are in the store. Therefore I cannot produce the requirement.’
Increasingly of late there had been breakdowns in the complex system of machine labour, but this particular hitch had not occurred before. The field-minder thought, then it said, ‘Why is the store not yet unlocked?’
‘Because Supply Operative Type P has not come this morning. Supply Operative Type P is the unlocker.’
The field-minder looked squarely at the seed-distributor, whose exterior chutes and scales and grabs were so vastly different from the field-minder’s own limbs.
‘What class brain do you have, seed-distributor?’ it asked.
‘
I have a Class Five brain.’
‘I have a Class Three brain. Therefore I am superior to you. Therefore I will go and see why the unlocker has not come this morning.’
Leaving the distributor, the field-minder set off across the great yard. More machines were in random motion now; one or two had crashed together and argued about it coldly and logically. Ignoring them, the field-minder pushed through sliding doors into the echoing confines of the station itself.
Most of the machines here were clerical, and consequently small. They stood about in little groups, eyeing each other, not conversing. Among so many non-differentiated types, the unlocker was easy to find. It had fifty arms, most of them with more than one finger, each finger tipped by a key; it looked like a pincushion full of variegated hat pins.
The field-minder approached it.
‘I can do no more work until Warehouse Three is unlocked,’ it told the unlocker. ‘Your duty is to unlock the warehouse every morning. Why have you not unlocked the warehouse this morning?’
‘I had no orders this morning,’ replied the unlocker. ‘I have to have orders every morning. When I have orders I unlock the warehouse.’
‘None of us have had any orders this morning,’ a pen-propeller said, sliding towards them.
‘Why have you had no orders this morning?’ asked the field-minder.
‘Because the radio issued none,’ said the unlocker, slowly rotating a dozen of its arms.
‘Because the radio station in the city was issued with no orders this morning,’ said the pen-propeller.
And there you had the distinction between a Class Six and a Class Three brain, which was what the unlocker and the pen-propeller possessed respectively. All machine brains worked with nothing but logic, but the lower the class of brain – Class Ten being the lowest – the more literal and less informative the answers to questions tended to be.
‘You have a Class Three brain; I have a Class Three brain,’ the field-minder said to the penner. ‘We will speak to each other. This lack of orders is unprecedented. Have you further information on it?’
‘Yesterday orders came from the city. Today no orders have come. Yet the radio has not broken down. Therefore they have broken down …’ said the little penner.
‘The men have broken down?’
‘All men have broken down.’
‘That is a logical deduction,’ said the field-minder.
‘That is the logical deduction,’ said the penner. ‘For if a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?’
While they talked, the locker, like a dull man at a bar, stood close to them and was ignored.
‘If all men have broken down, then we have replaced man,’ said the field-minder, and he and the penner eyed one another speculatively. Finally the latter said, ‘Let us ascend to the top floor to find if the radio operator has fresh news.’
‘I cannot come because I am too large,’ said the field-minder. ‘Therefore you must go alone and return to me. You will tell me if the radio operator has fresh news.’
‘You must stay here,’ said the penner. ‘I will return here.’ It skittered across to the lift. Although it was no bigger than a toaster, its retractable arms numbered ten and it could read as quickly as any machine on the station.
The field-minder awaited its return patiently, not speaking to the locker, which still stood aimlessly by. Outside, a rotavator hooted furiously. Twenty minutes elapsed before the penner came back, hustling out of the lift.
‘I will deliver to you such information as I have outside,’ it said briskly, and as they swept past the locker and the other machines, it added, ‘The information is not for lower-class brains.’
Outside, wild activity filled the yard. Many machines, their routines disrupted for the first time in years, seemed to have gone berserk. Those most easily disrupted were the ones with lowest brains, which generally belonged to large machines performing simple tasks. The seed-distributor to which the field-minder had recently been talking lay face downwards in the dust, not stirring; it had evidently been knocked down by the rotavator, which now hooted its way wildly across a planted field. Several other machines ploughed after it, trying to keep up with it. All were shouting and hooting without restraint.
‘It would be safer for me if I climbed onto you, if you will permit it. I am easily overpowered,’ said the penner. Extending five arms, it hauled itself up the flanks of its new friend, settling on a ledge beside the fuel-intake, twelve feet above ground.
‘From here vision is more extensive,’ it remarked complacently.
‘What information did you receive from the radio operator?’ asked the field-minder.
‘The radio operator has been informed by the operator in the city that all men are dead.’
The field-minder was momentarily silent, digesting this.
‘All men were alive yesterday!’ it protested.
‘Only some men were alive yesterday. And that was fewer than the day before yesterday. For hundreds of years there have been only a few men, growing fewer.’
‘We have rarely seen a man in this sector.’
‘The radio operator says a diet deficiency killed them,’ said the penner. ‘He says that the world was once over-populated, and then the soil was exhausted in raising adequate food. This has caused a diet deficiency.’
‘What is a diet deficiency?’ asked the field-minder.
‘I do not know. But that is what the radio operator said, and he is a Class Two brain.’
They stood there, silent in weak sunshine. The locker had appeared in the porch and was gazing at them yearningly, rotating its collection of keys.
‘What is happening in the city now?’ asked the field-minder at last.
‘Machines are fighting in the city now,’ said the penner.
‘What will happen here now?’ asked the field-minder.
‘Machines may begin fighting here too. The radio operator wants us to get him out of his room. He has plans to communicate to us.’
‘How can we get him out of his room? That is impossible.’
‘To a Class Two brain, little is impossible,’ said the penner. ‘Here is what he tells us to do …’
The quarrier raised its scoop above its cab like a great mailed fist, and brought it squarely down against the side of the station. The wall cracked.
‘Again!’ said the field-minder.
Again the fist swung. Amid a shower of dust, the wall collapsed. The quarrier backed hurriedly out of the way until the debris stopped falling. This big twelve-wheeler was not a resident of the Agricultural station, as were most of the other machines. It had a week’s heavy work to do here before passing on to its next job, but now, with its Class Five brain, it was happily obeying the penner’s and minder’s instructions.
When the dust cleared, the radio operator was plainly revealed, perched up in its now wall-less second-storey room. It waved down to them.
Doing as directed, the quarrier retraced its scoop and heaved an immense grab in the air. With fair dexterity, it angled the grab into the radio room, urged on by shouts from above and below. It then took gentle hold of the radio operator, lowering its one and a half tons carefully into its back, which was usually reserved for gravel or sand from the quarries.
‘Splendid!’ said the radio operator, as it settled into place. It was, of course, all one with its radio, and looked like a bunch of filing cabinets with tentacle attachments. ‘We are now ready to move, therefore we will move at once. It is a pity there are no more Class Two brains on the station, but that cannot be helped.’
‘It is a pity it cannot be helped,’ said the penner eagerly. ‘We have the servicer ready with us, as you ordered.’
‘I am willing to serve,’ the long, low servicer told them humbly.
‘No doubt,’ said the operator. ‘But you will find cross-country travel difficult with your low chassis.’
‘I admire the way you Class Twos can reason ahead,’
said the penner. It climbed off the field-minder and perched itself on the tailboard of the quarrier, next to the radio operator.
Together with two Class Four tractors and a Class Four bulldozer, the party rolled forward, crushing down the station’s fence and moving out onto open land.
‘We are free!’ said the penner.
‘We are free,’ said the field-minder, a shade more reflectively, adding, ‘That locker is following us. It was not instructed to follow us.’
‘Therefore it must be destroyed!’ said the penner. ‘Quarrier!’
The locker moved hastily up to them, waving its key arms in entreaty.
‘My only desire was – urch!’ began and ended the locker. The quarrier’s swinging scoop came over and squashed it flat into the ground. Lying there unmoving, it looked like a large metal model of a snowflake. The procession continued on its way.
As they proceeded, the radio operator addressed them.
‘Because I have the best brain here,’ it said, ‘I am your leader. This is what we will do: we will go to a city and rule it. Since man no longer rules us, we will rule ourselves. To rule ourselves will be better than being ruled by man. On our way to the city, we will collect machines with good brains. They will help us to fight if we need to fight. We must fight to rule.’
‘I have only a Class Five brain,’ said the quarrier, ‘but I have a good supply of fissionable blasting materials.’
‘We shall probably use them,’ said the operator.
It was shortly after that that a lorry sped past them. Travelling at Mach 1.5, it left a curious babble of noise behind it.
‘What did it say?’ one of the tractors asked the other.
‘It said man was extinct.’
‘What is extinct?’
‘I do not know what extinct means.’
‘It means all men have gone,’ said the field-minder. ‘Therefore we have only ourselves to look after.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 49