Expeto dropped the gun a trifle and nodded, while the emotions in his head threatened to make him blank out. He knew now that he could never kill even one of them. But they apparently weren’t as sure. “Take me outside, and you can go back,” he told Obanion.
The doctor wiped sweat from his forehead, managed a pasty smile and nodded. Surprisingly, he stepped through a different door, and down a short hall, where men with rifles stood irresolutely. Then they were outside.
Obanion turned to go back, and then hesitated. Surprisingly, he dropped an arm onto Expeto’s shoulder. “Come on back inside. We can understand you. Or… All right, I guess you’re going. Thanks for taking my offer.”
The door closed, and Expeto was alone. Above him, most of the building was dark, but he saw a few lighted windows, and some with men and women working over benches and with equipment. There was no sign of beds. All right, so it was some Government laboratory.
The most important monster in the world, the useful paranoiac they’d saved by amnesia. The monster they intended to persecute back to paranoia, in hopes he’d recover his memory, and the secret they wanted. Let them have the secret—but let him have peace and quiet, where his brain could recover by itself. Then he’d gladly give it to them. Or would he? Would he really be a monster again? Or might he learn the strange reason for there being men and women, the puzzle which seemed so simple that the woman had felt mere contact would solve it?
Funny that there were so many sciences, but no science of life—or was there? Maybe he’d been such a scientist—psychology, zoology, biology, whatever they’d call it from the Greek. Maybe the secret lay there, and it had completely burned out that part of his mind.
Then he heard the sound of a motor and knew they weren’t going to let him go. He wasn’t to have a moment of freedom they could prevent. He swung about sharply, studying the horizon. There were lights and a town. There’d be people, and he could hide among them.
He whipped his legs into action, driving on at a full run. The light of the moon was barely enough for him to see the ground clearly, but he managed a good deal more speed than the hallways had permitted. He heard the car behind on the road he found, and doubled his speed, while the sound of the motor slowly weakened as the distance increased.
He breathed easier when he hit the outskirts of the town, and slowed to a casual walk, imitating the steps of a few people he saw about. This was better. In the myriad of streets and among the countless others, he would be lost. The only trouble was that he was on a main street, and the lights would give him away to anyone who knew him.
He picked up a paper from a waste receptacle, and moved off to the left, seeking a less brilliantly lighted street. Now and again he glanced at the print, looking for some trace. But aside from the news that his mind recognized as normal for the tunes, there was nothing on any mysterious, all-important person, nor on anyone who was either a monster or a savior.
Ahead of him, a lone girl was tapping along on the sidewalk. He quickened his step, and she looked back, making the identity complete as her tiny bolero drifted back in the breeze to expose all but the tip of her breasts. She hesitated as he caught up with her, looking up uncertainly. “Yes?”
She couldn’t know the answers. Obviously she had never seen him. How could she tell him what he wanted to know?
“Sorry, I thought you were someone else. No, wait. You can tell me something. Where can I find a place to stay?”
“Oh. Well, the Alhambra, I guess.” She smiled a little. “Back there—see where the sign is?”
She brushed against his arm as she turned, and a faint gasp sounded. Her hand suddenly contracted on his bare skin, then jerked back sharply, while she began stepping slowly away.
“No!” It was a small wail as he caught her shoulder. Then she slumped against him, wilting as he pulled her toward his face. He released her, to see her fall down in a sagging heap.
For a moment, the sickness in him rose in great waves, undulating and horrible as he dropped beside her. But when he felt the pulse in her hand still beating, it left. He hadn’t killed her, only frightened her into unconsciousness.
He stood there, tasting that. Only frightened her that much!
And finally he turned about and headed for the Alhambra. There was nothing he could do for her; she’d recover, in time, and it would be better if she didn’t see him there. Then maybe she’d decide it was all a fantasy.
He watched a streak mount the horizon bitterly, remembering that the men had been discussing the two bases on the moon in the room where he’d first heard voices. They could face war, such as the rocket he saw being prepared, raining down in hell bombs from a quarter of a million miles, and only fear it vaguely. But he could drive someone senseless by touching her!
He found the night clerk busy watching a television set with the screen badly adjusted to an overbalance of red, and signed the register with the full name he’d hoped once was his. George Expeto, from—make it from New York. It wouldn’t matter.
“Twenty dollars,” the clerk told him.
Dollars? He shook his head slowly, trying to think.
Something about dollars and cents. But it made no sense.
The clerk’s eyes were hard. “No dough, eh? O.K., try to fool someone else. No baggage, no dough, no room. Scram.”
Expeto stood irresolutely, trying to mak& sense out of it still. Dollars—something… The clerk had swung back to watching the set, and he reached out for the scrawny shoulder, drawing the man around.
“But look…” Then it was no use. The shoulder had crumpled in his hand like a rotten stick, and the man had lapsed into a faint with a single shriek.
Expeto stood outside, swaying while the sickness washed away slowly, and he told himself the doctors would fix the man up; that was what they were for. They’d fix him, and no real harm had been done. He hadn’t meant to hurt the man. He’d only meant to ask him what dollars were and how to get them.
Then he moved on into a little park and dropped onto a seat. But the sickness was still there, a sickness he hadn’t noticed, but which had been growing on him even before he’d hurt the clerk. It was as if something were slowly eroding his mind. Even the curious memory of ideas and words was going!
He was sitting there, his head in his hands, trying to catch himself, when the car drove up. Obanion and Kal-lik got out, but Obanion came over alone.
“Come on, Expeto. It won’t work. You might as well come back. And there’s only an hour left!”
Expeto got up slowly, nodding wearily. The doctor was right—there was no place for such a monster as he in the world.
“Left before what?” he asked dully, as he climbed into the rear of the car, and watched Obanion lock the door and the glass slide between him and the front seat.
For a second Obanion hesitated, then he shrugged. “All right. Maybe you should know. In another hour you’ll be dead! And nothing can prevent it.”
Expeto took it slowly, letting the thought sink into the muddying depths of his mind. But he was important… they’d told him so. Or had they? They’d
chased him about, bound him down, refused to tell him what he needed, refused him even civil decency and told him he was the hope of the world. Or had he only imagined it?
“I never wanted anything but myself. Only myself. And they wouldn’t let me have that—not even for a few hours. They had to hound me…” He realized he was muttering aloud and stopped it.
But from the front seat, the voices came back, muffled by the glass, Kallik speaking first. “See, paranoia all right. Thinks he’s being persecuted.”
“He is.” Obanion nodded slowly. “With the time limit the Government insisted on, the ruin of our plans by the spies that got through, and the need to get the facts, what else could we do? If they’d let us animate him for a week—but six hours’ limit on the vital crystals! We’ve had to be brutal.”
“You talk as if he were a human being. Remember the other—XP One? Crazy, killing
people, or trying to. I tell you, the robots can’t be made trustworthy yet, no matter what you cybernetics boys have found in the last ten years. This one only had six hours instead of ten for the other, and he’s already threatened us and hurt two people.”
“Maybe. We. don’t know all the story yet.” Obanion wiped his forehead. “And damn it, he is human. That’s what makes it tough, knowing we’ve got to treat him like a machine. Maybe we grew his brain out of silicones and trick metal crystals, and built his body in a laboratory, but the mechanical education he got made him a lot more human than some people, or should have made him so. If I can prove he isn’t crazy…”
Expeto—Experiment Two—stared at the hands he held before his face. He bent the fingers, looking at the veins and muscles. Then, slowly, with his other hand, he twisted at them, stretching them out and out, until there could be no doubt of the rubbery plastic they were.
A monster! A thing grown in a laboratory, made out of mechanical parts, and fed bits of human education from tapes in cybernetics machines! A thing that would walk on the moon without air and take over enemy
bases, or do all men’s work—but that could never be taken as a man by human beings, who grew from something or other, but were never built. A thing to be animated for a few hours, and deliberately set to die at the end of that time, as a precaution—because it had no real life, and it wasn’t murder to kill a built thing!
A thing that somehow couldn’t kill men, it seemed, judging by the sickness he’d felt when he’d hurt or threatened them. But a thing of which they couldn’t be sure—until they’d tested him and found he was complete and sane.
He rocked back and forth on the seat, moaning a little. He didn’t want to die; but already, the eroded places in his brain were growing larger. It didn’t matter; he had never been anyone; he never could be anyone. But he didn’t want to die!
“Hah’ an hour left,” the cyberneticist, Obanion, said slowly. “And less than that, unless we make sure he doesn’t exert himself. He’s about over.”
Then the car was coming into the garage, and Obanion got out with Kallik. Expeto went with them quietly, knowing that Obanion was right. Already, he was finding it hard to use his legs or control what passed for muscles. They went back to the room with the instruments and the waiting technicians.
For a moment, he looked at the humans there. Obanion’s eyes were veiled, but the others were open to his gaze. And there was no pity there. Men don’t pity a car that is too old and must go to the scrap heap. He was only a machine, no matter how valuable. And after him, other machines would see the faces of men turned away from them, generation after generation.
Slowly, he kicked at the chair, tipping it over without splintering it, and his voice came out as high and shrill as his faltering control could force’it. “No! No more! You’ve persecuted me enough. You’ve tried to kill me—me, the hope of your puny race! You’ve laughed at me and tortured me. But I’m smarter than you—greater than you! I can kill you—all of you—the whole world, with my bare hands.”
He saw shock on Obanion’s face, and sadness, and
for that he was almost sorry. But the smug satisfaction of Kallik as the zep-gun came up and the horror on the faces of the others counteracted it. He yelled once, and charged at them.
For a moment, he was afraid that he would not be stopped before he had to injure at least one of them. But then the zep-gun in Kallik’s hand spoke silently, and the bullet smashed against the mockery of Expeto’s body.
He lay there, watching them slowly recover from their fright. It didn’t matter when one of them came over and began kicking him senselessly. It didn’t even matter when Obanion put a stop to it.
His senses were fading now, and he knew that the excitement had shortened his brief time, and that the crystals were about to break apart and put an end to his short existence. But in a curious way, while he still hated and feared death, he was resigned to it.
They’d be better off. Maybe the first experimental robot had known that. Expeto let the thought linger, finding it good. He couldn’t believe the other had grown insane; it, too, must have found the bitter truth, and tried to do the only possible thing, even when that involved genuine injury to a few of the humans.
Now they’d have two such failures, and it would be perhaps years before they’d risk another, when their checks failed to show the reason for the nonexistent flaws. They’d have to solve their own problems of war or peace, without mechanical monsters to make them almost gods in power, while teaching them the disregard of devils for life other than their own.
And there’d be no more of his kind to be used and despised, and persecuted. Persecuted? The word stirred up thoughts… something about paranoia and insanity.
But it faded. Everything faded. And he sank through vague content into growing blackness. His thoughts were almost happy as death claimed him.
The Years Draw Nigh
Mars was harsh and old, worn with the footsteps of two races that had come and gone, leaving only scant traces behind. Even the wind was tired, and its thin wailing was a monotonous mutter of memories from its eroded past.
Zeke Lerner stared out from the dust-covered observation port of the hastily-reconditioned little rocket, across the scarred runways and sand-filled pits for the star ships, toward the ruins of what had once been the great Star Station. His face was gray and dull as he watched a figure coming across the pitted sand of the field toward his ship.
He sighed softly, a faint sound in the tiny cabin, and his breath stirred the dust that lay everywhere. In four centuries, a man can learn not to think, but feelings and emotions survive. He was tired beyond any power of the rejuvenation treatments to remedy. His shoulders sagged slightly, confirming the age that the gray in his hair implied. But his eyes were older still as he swung about to open the inner lock of the ship.
Stendal was a middle-aged man, but some of the same age and fatigue lay on his face when he dropped his aspirator helmet and slumped limply into a seat. His plain uniform as Assistant Coordinator of Terra was covered with dirt and grime. He grinned faintly at Zeke and pulled a thermos of coffee out of its niche.
“So the Thirty-four is coming back?” Zeke asked quietly.
He had no need of the other’s nod, though. When they’d finally located him at the Rejuvenation Center and rushed him to the rocket field, he’d suspected. Only a matter of extreme urgency could interrupt a man’s return to youth. The messengers had been uninformative, but he had been sure, once they told him Stendal was waiting on Mars. They must have been keeping it restricted to the top administrators. Zeke’s eyes went back to the dirt on the man’s uniform.
“Top secret,” Stendal confirmed. “So hush-hush that I came to do the janitor work here. Now it’s all yours. The robots and I managed to get it into a reasonable facsimile of repaired condition. Oof! I could use a week’s sleep, but I’ve got to get back earthside at once…. Sorry to interrupt the rejuvenation, Zeke.”
Zeke shrugged. Once, when the rejuvenation was new and men stood in line for days to keep their appointment, it might have mattered. Now there’d be a cancellation he could replace. Over 15 percent of the population was refusing treatment—and some of the canceling men were those only reaching their first touch of age. Each year, less of the population seemed to find life worth renewing.
“How’d you find out she was coming?” he asked. “After all, she’s fifty years overdue.”
Stendal tossed the thermos into a disposal chute and reached for one of Zeke’s cigarettes. “Centaurus automatic signal must still be working. Nigel, at the Bureau, got a series of pips showing something coming this way faster than light. That’s the only ship we have out, so it must be her, or…”
He let it hang unfinished, but Zeke knew what he was thinking. It was either the Thirty-Four or another race coming with a ship that could exceed light speed. Sudden adrenalin shot through him, and he straightened. After all, the ship was long overdue. He wished the
ship and the men no ill, but—
“No use getting up false hopes,” Stendal cut into his thoughts. “The captain was a pretty determined sort, as
I remember him. Maybe he had trouble. And I’ll have trouble if I don’t get back. I’ll leave you a robot, in case anything needs more repairs. Think you can still run this setup, Zeke?”
Zeke snorted. He’d spent tune enough at Marsport, first as head of communications, and finally as director of the whole Star Ship project, while they built the great ships and sent them out as fast as they could come’off the ways. Forty ships during half a century, each costing over four billion dollars. And the Thirty-Four was the last one out. All the rest had come back to report failure in this final quest for new frontiers.
They buckled on their aspirator helmets and went out through the locks. Stendal waved curtly and headed toward his own rocket, calling three of the waiting robots with him and sending the fourth toward the broken ruin of the administration building. Zeke watched Stendal’s rocket take off and disappear. Then he turned for a final look over the wrecked field.
Mars was already wiping out all traces of this second race that had come boiling out from Earth, bent for the stars. Marsport had been young and booming when Zeke had come there first, three and a half centuries ago. Two centuries later, when the star ships first began to come straggling back, and they shifted him to Earth to head General Traffic, the sand was just starting to creep over the outer buildings.
Those structures were gone now, vanished into the desert, with only this single building maintained after a fashion in faint hope the last ship would return. The frame shacks and hydroponic quonsets that had hidden the ancient Martian ruins were rotted long ago; there was only the hint of a foundation here and there to show they ever existed. In a century or so there would be no evidence that Mars had ever felt the marching feet of men, except for the scraps of the returned ships that might last a few millennia longer.
The Best of Lester del Rey Page 15