My Best Science Fiction Story

by Leo Margulies

  Payne paused doubtfully. “I don’t think I can build one.” He wondered if it would do any good to pretend he could’.

  “That’s all right.” AL 76 could almost feel the positronic paths of his brain weaving into a new pattern, and experienced a strange exhilaration. “I can build one.” He looked into Payne’s de-luxe doghouse, and said, “You’ve got all the material here that I need.”

  Randolph Payne surveyed the junk with which his shack was filled: eviscerated radios, a topless refrigerator, rusty automobile engines, a broken-down gas range, several miles of frayed wire, and, taking it all together, fifty tons or thereabouts of the most heterogeneous mass of old metal as ever caused a junkman to sniff disdainfully.

  “Have I?” he said, weakly.

  Two hours later, two things happened practically simultaneously. The first was that Sam Tobe of the Petersboro branch of U. S. Robot & Mechanical Men, Inc., received a visiphone call from one Randolph Payne of Hannaford. It, concerned the missing robot and Tobe, with a deep-throated snarl, broke connection half-way through, and ordered all subsequent calls to be re-routed to the sixth assistant vice-president in charge of buttonholes.

  This was not really unreasonable in Tobe. During the past week, although Robot AL 76 had dropped from sight completely, reports had flooded in from all over the Union as to the robot’s whereabouts. As many as fourteen a day came— usually from fourteen different states.

  Tobe was damn tired of it, to say nothing of being halfcrazy just on general principles. There was even talk of a Congressional investigation, though every reputable Roboticist and Mathematical Physicist on Earth swore the robot was harmless.

  In his state of mind, then, it is not surprising that it took three hours for the General Manager to pause and consider just exactly how it was that this Randolph Payne had known that the robot was slated for Lunar Station 17; and, for that matter, how he had known that the robot’s serial number was AL 76. Those details had not been given out by the company.

  He kept on considering for about a minute and a half and then swung into action.

  However, during the three hours between the call and the action, the second event took place. Randolph Payne, having correctly diagnosed the abrupt break in his call as being due to general skepticism on the part of the plant official returned to his shack with a camera. They couldn’t very well argue with a photograph, and he’d be damned if he’d show them the real thing before they came across with the cash.

  AL 76 was busy with affairs of his own. Half of the contents of Payne’s shack was littered over about two acres of ground and in the middle of it, the robot squatted and fooled around with radio tubes, hunks of iron, copper wire, and general junk. He paid no attention to Payne, who, sprawling flat on his belly, focused his camera for a beautiful shot.

  And at this point it was that Lemuel Oliver Cooper turned the bend in the road and froze in his tracks as he took in the tableau. The reason for his coming in the first place was an ailing electric toaster that had developed the annoying habit of throwing out pieces of bread forcefully, but thoroughly untoasted. The reason for his leaving was more obvious. He had come with a slow, mildly cheerful, spring-morning saunter. He left with a speed that would have caused any college track coach to raise his eyebrows and purse his lips approvingly.

  There was no appreciable slackening of speed, until Cooper hurtled into Sheriff Saunders’ office minus hat and toaster and brought himself up hard against the wall.

  Kindly hands lifted him and for half a minute he tried speaking before he had actually calmed down to the point of breathing, with, of course, no result.

  They gave him whiskey, and fanned him, and when he did speak, it came out something like this: “—monster—seven, feet tall—shack all busted up—poor Rannie Payne—” and so on.

  They got the story out of him gradually: how there was a huge metal monster, seven feet tall, maybe even eight or nine, out at Randolph Payne’s shack; how Randolph Payne himself was on his stomach, a “poor, bleeding, mangled corpse”; how the monster was then busily engaged in wrecking the shack out of sheer destructiveness; how it had turned on Lemuel Oliver Cooper, and how he—Cooper—had made his escape by half a hair.

  Sheriff Saunders hitched his belt tighter about his portly middle and said, “It’s that there machine man that got away from the Petersboro factory. We got warning on it last Saturday. Hey, Jake, you get every man in Hannaford County that can shoot and slap a depitty’s badge on him. Get them here at noon. And listen, Jake, before you do that, just drop in at the widder Payne’s place and slip her the bad news gentle-like.”

  It is reported that Miranda Payne, having been acquainted with events, paused only to make sure that her “ex”-husband’s insurance policy was safe, and to make a few pithy remarks concerning his danged foolishness in not taking out double what he had, before breaking out into as prolonged and heart-wringing a wail of grief as ever became a respectable widow.

  It was some hours later that Randolph Payne—unaware of his horrible mutilation and death—viewed the completed negatives of his snapshots with satisfaction. As a series of portraits of a robot at work, they left nothing to the imagination. They might have been labeled: “Robot Gazing Thoughtfully at a Vacuum Tube,” “Robot Splicing Two Wires,” “Robot Wielding Screw-Driver,” “Robot Taking Frigidaire Apart with Great Violence” and so on.

  As there now remained only the routine of making the prints themselves, he stepped out from beyond the curtain of the improvised dark-room for a bit of a smoke and a chat with AL 76.

  In doing so, he was blissfully unaware that the neighboring woods were verminous with nervous farmers armed with anything from an old colonial relic of a blunderbuss to the portable machine-gun carried by the sheriff himself. Nor, for that matter, had he any inkling of the fact that half a dozen roboticists, under the leadership of Sam Tobe, were smoking down the highway from Petersboro at better than a hundred and twenty miles an hour—for the sole purpose of having the pleasure and honor of his acquaintance.

  So while things were jittering towards a climax, Randolph Payne sighed with self-satisfaction, lit a match upon the seat of his pants, puffed away at his pipe, and looked at AL 76 with amusement.

  It had been apparent for quite some time that the robot was more than slightly lunatic. Randolph Payne was himself an expert at home-made contraptions; having built several that could not have been exposed to daylight without searing the eyeballs of all beholders; but he had never even conceived of anything approaching the monstrosity that AL 76 was concocting.

  It would have made the Rube Goldbergs of his day die in convulsions of envy. It would have made Picasso quit art in the sheer knowledge that he had been hopelessly surpassed. It would have soured the milk in the udders of any cow within half a mile of it.

  In fact, it was gruesome!

  From a rusty and massive iron base that faintly resembled something Payne had once seen attached to a second-hand tractor, it rose upward in rakish, drunken swerves, through a bewildering mess of wires, wheels, tubes, and nameless horrors without number, ending in a megaphone arrangement that looked decidedly sinister.

  Payne had the impulse to peek in the megaphone part, but refrained. He had seen far more sensible machines explode suddenly and with violence.

  He said, “Hey, Al.”

  The robot looked up. He had been lying flat on his stomach, teasing a thin sliver of metal into place. “What do you want, Payne?”

  “What is this?” He asked it in the tone of one referring to something foul and decomposing, held gingerly between two ten-foot poles.

  “It’s the Disinto I’m making—so I can start to work. It’s an improvement on the standard model.” The robot rose, dusted his knees clankingly, and looked at it proudly.

  Payne shuddered. An “improvement”! ! No wonder they hid the original in caverns on the Moon. Poor satellite! Poor dead satellite! He had always wanted to know what a fate worse than death was. Now he knew.
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  “Will it work?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s got to. I made it, didn’t I? I only need one thing now. Got a flashlight?”

  “Somewheres, I guess.” Payne vanished into the shack and returned almost immediately.

  The robot unscrewed the bottom and set to work. In five minutes, he had finished, stepped back, and said, “All set. Now I get to work. You may watch if you want to.”

  A pause, while Payne tried to appreciate the magnanimity of the offer. “Is it safe?”

  “A baby could handle it.”

  “Oh!” Payne grinned weakly and got behind the thickest tree in the vicinity. “Go ahead,” he said, “I have the utmost confidence in you.”

  AL 76 pointed to the nightmarish junkpile and said, “Watch!” His hands set to work—

  The embattled farmers of Hannaford County, Virginia, weaved up upon Payne’s shack in a slowly tightening circle. With the blood of their heroic colonial forebears pounding in their veins—and goose-flesh trickling up and down their spines —they crept from tree to tree.

  Sheriff Saunders spread the word. “Fire when I give the signal—and aim at the eyes.”

  Jacob Linker—Lank Jake, to his friends, and Sheriff’s Deputy to himself—edged close. “Ya think mebbe this machine man has skedaddled.” He did not quite manage to suppress the tone of wistful hopefulness in his voice.

  “Dunno,” grunted the sheriff. “Guess not, though. We woulda come across him in the woods if he had, and we haven’t.”

  “But it’s awful quiet, and it ’pears to me as if we’re gettin’ close to Payne’s place.”

  The reminder wasn’t necessary. Sheriff Saunders had a lump in his throat so big it had to be swallowed in three installments. “Get back,” he ordered, “and keep your finger on the trigger.”

  They were at the rim of the clearing now, and Sheriff Saunders closed his eyes and stuck the corner of one out from behind the tree. Seeing nothing, he paused, then tried again, eyes open this time.

  Results were, naturally, better.

  To be exact, he saw one huge machine man, back towards him, bending over one soul-curdling, hiccupy contraption of uncertain origin and less certain purpose. The only item he missed was the quivering figure of Randolph Payne, embracing the tree next but three to the nor’-nor’-west.

  Sheriff Saunders stepped out into the open and raised his machine-gun. The robot, still presenting a broad metal back, said in a loud voice—to person or persons unknown—“Watch!” and as the Sheriff opened his mouth to ki-yi a general order to fire—metal fingers compressed a switch.

  There exists no adequate description of what occurred afterwards, in spite of the presence of seventy eyewitnesses. In the days, months, and years to come not one of those seventy ever had a word to say about the few seconds after the sheriff had opened his mouth to give the firing order. When questioned about it, they merely turned apple-green and staggered away.

  It is plain, however, that, in a general way, what did occur was this.

  Sheriff Saunders opened his mouth; AL 76 pulled a switch; the Disinto worked—and seventy-five trees, two barns, three cows and the top three-quarters of Duckbill Mountain whiffed into rarefied atmosphere. They became, so to speak, one with the snows of yesteryear.

  Sheriff Saunders’ mouth remained open for an indefinite interval thereafter, but nothing—neither firing orders nor anything else—issued therefrom. And then—

  And then, there was a stirring in the air, a multiple ro-o-o-o-oshing sound, a series of purple streaks through the atmosphere radiating away from Randolph Payne’s shack as the center—and of the members of the posse, not a sign.

  There were various guns scattered about the vicinity, including the sheriff’s patented nickel-plated, extra-rapid-fire, guaranteed-no-clog, portable machine gun. There were about fifty hats, a few half-chomped cigars, and some odds and ends that had come loose in the excitement—but of actual human beings there were none.

  Except for Lank Jake, not one of those human beings came within human ken for three days, and the exception in his favor came about because he was interrupted in his comet-flight by the half-dozen men from the Petersboro factory, who were charging into the wood at a pretty fair speed of their own.

  It was Sam Tobe that stopped him, catching Lank Jake’s head skillfully in the pit of his stomach. When he caught his breath, Tobe asked, “Where’s Randolph Payne’s place?”

  Lank Jake allowed his eyes to unglaze for just a moment. “Brother,” he said, “just you follow the direction I ain’t going.”

  And with that, miraculously, he was gone. There was a shrinking dot, dodging trees on the horizon, that might have been him, but Sam Tobe wouldn’t have sworn to it.

  That takes care of the posse; but there still remains Randolph Payne, whose reactions took something of a different form.

  For Randolph Payne, the five-second interval after the pulling of the switch and the disappearance of Duckbill Mountain was a total blank. At the start he had been peering through the thick underbrush from behind the bottom of the trees; at the end, he was swinging wildly from one of the top-most branches. The same impulse that had driven the posse horizontally, had driven him vertically.

  As to how he had covered the hundred fifty feet from roots to top—whether he had climbed, jumped, or flown, he did not know—and he didn’t give a particle of a damn.

  What he did know was that property had been destroyed by a robot temporarily in his possession. All visions of rewards vanished and were replaced by trembling nightmares of hos— tile citizenry, shrieking lynch mobs, lawsuits, murder charges, and what Mirandy Payne would say. Mostly what Mirandy Payne would say.

  He was yelling wildly and hoarsely. “Hey, you robot, you smash that thing, do you hear? Smash it good! You forget I ever had anything to do with it. You’re a stranger to me, see? You don’t ever say a word about it. Forget it, you hear?”

  He didn’t expect his orders to do any good; it was only reflex action. What he didn’t know was that a robot always obeyed a human order except where carrying it out involved danger to another human.

  AL 76, therefore, calmly and methodically, proceeded to demolish his Disinto into rubble and flinders.

  Just as he was stamping the last cubic inch under foot, Sam Tobe and his contingent arrived, and Randolph Payne, sensing that the real owners of the robot had come, dropped out of the tree head-first and made for regions unknown feet-first.

  He did not wait for his reward.

  Austin Wilde, Robotieal Engineer, turned to Sam Tobe and said, “Did you get anything out of the robot?”

  Tobe shook his head and snarled deep in his throat. “Nothing. Not a damn thing. He’s forgotten everything that’s happened since he left the factory. He must have gotten orders to forget, or it couldn’t have left him so blank. What was that pile of junk he’d been fooling with?”

  “Just that. A pile of junk—but it must have been a Disinto before he smashed it, and I’d like to kill the fellow who ordered him to do that, by slow torture. Look at this!”

  They were part of the way up the slopes of what had been Duckbill Mountain—at that point, to be exact, where the top had been sheered off; and Wilde put his hand down upon the perfect flatness that cut through both soil and rock.

  “What a Disinto,” he said. “It took the mountain right off its base.”

  “What made him build it?”

  Wilde shrugged, “I don’t know. Some factor in his environment—there’s no way of knowing what—reacted upon his Moon-type positronic brain to produce a Disinto out of junk. It’s a million to one against our ever stumbling upon that factor again now that the robot himself has forgotten. We’ll never have that Disinto.”

  “Never mind. The important thing is that we have the robot.”

  “The hell you say.” There was poignant regret in his voice. “Have you ever had anything to do with the Disintos on the Moon. They
eat up energy like so many electronic hogs and won’t even begin to run till you’ve built up a potential of better than a million volts. But this Disinto worked differently. I went through the rubbish with a microscope, and would you like to see the only source of power of any kind that I found?”

  “What was it?”

  “Just this! And we’ll never know how he did it.”

  And Austin Wilde held up the source of power that had enabled a Disinto to chew up a mountain in half a second—two flashlight batteries!

  Grief of Bagdad - Arthur K. Barnes

  Pete Manx Rides the Magic Carpet Back to an Ancient City—and It’s No Caliphornia Stunt!

  “No,” said Pete Manx, “Never again. This is my final word.”

  Dr. Horatio Mayhem smiled sadly, glancing about his famous laboratory at Plymouth University with its welter of apparatus ranging from huge dynamos to the most delicate detector, and most sensitive selectors, all subsidiary to the incredible Time Chair. He nodded.

  “Yes, my boy. I understand your aversion to making any more trips into the historical Past. You have been a um—lodestone for violent trouble …”

  “Something always happens to me!” exclaimed Pete. “What if I sh’d get bumped off in the Past? Nix. No more o’ that stuff for me.”

  “Quite right, my son. And yet—” Mayhem’s benign tone and dreamy stare at the ceiling were pure barn. “I would never have invited you here again, Pete, knowing it to be a place of strange memories, except that occasionally in our lives there arise demands that transcend all selfish personal considerations. Do you follow me?”

  “No, but I smell something fishy.” “Tut, tut.” Mayhem signaled surreptitiously to Professor Belleigh Aker, who waited beside the door to the office. Quickly Aker leaned over a portable phonograph, then flung open the door. A burst of martial music filled the lab, a flag unfurled in the doorway, and into the room marched a middle-aged man in officer’s uniform.