The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  But as he concentrated on the matter of turning off his mind, he wondered again what he was. Certainly neither a dog nor a cat, he had no real belief that he was a man; the dog didn’t know about him, but the cat regarded him as a stone. Maybe he was one, if stones ever came to life. Anyway, he’d find out in the morning when the master came in. Until then he forced thoughts from his mind and succeeded in simulating sleep.

  III

  A strange noise wakened Hermes in the morning. From what he had seen in Shep’s mind, he knew it was the sound of human speech, and listened intently. The people were talking at a point behind him, but he was sure it was the master and one of the little missies. He tuned his mind in on that of the master and began soaking up impressions.

  “I wish you’d stay away from young Thomas,” Dr. Brugh was saying. “I think he’s the nephew of Hodges, though he won’t admit it. Your mother doesn’t like him either, Tanya.”

  Tanya laughed softly at her father’s suspicions, and Hermes felt a glow all over. It was a lovely sound. “You never like my boyfriends,” she said. “I think you want me to grow up into an old-maid schoolmarm. Johnny’s a nice boy. To hear you talk, a person would think Hodges and his whole family were ogres.”

  “Maybe they are.” But Brugh knew better than to argue with his older daughter; she always won, just as her mother always did. “Hodges tried to swindle me out of my appropriations again at the meeting last night. He’d like to see me ruined.”

  “And you swindled him out of his tanks. Suppose I proved to the president who sent those anonymous vivisection letters to all the parents?”

  Brugh looked around hastily, but there was no one listening. “Are you trying to blackmail me, Tanya?”

  She laughed again at his attempt at anger. “You know I won’t tell a soul. ’Bye, Dad. I’m going swimming with Johnny.” Hermes felt a light kiss through Brugh’s senses, and saw her start around the table to pass in front of him. He snapped the connection with the master’s mind and prepared his own eyes for confirmation of what he had seen by telepathy.

  Tanya was a vision of life and loveliness. In the fleeting second it took for her to cross the little god’s range of sight, he took in the soft, waving brown hair, the dark, sparkling eyes, and the dimple that lurked in the corner of her mouth, and something happened to Hermes. As yet he had no word for it, but it was pure sensation that sped through every atom of his synthetic soul. He began to appreciate that life was something more than the satisfaction of curiosity.

  A sound from Brugh, who was puttering around with a cloudy precipitate, snapped him back to reality. The questions in his mind still needed answering, and the physicist was the logical one to answer them. Again he made contact with the other’s mind.

  This was infinitely richer than the dog’s and cat’s combined. For one thing, there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of word thoughts to be gleaned. As he absorbed them, thinking became easier, and the words provided a framework for abstractions, something utterly beyond the bounds of the animal minds. For half an hour he studied them, and absorbed the details of human life gradually.

  Then he set about finding the reasons for his own life; that necessitated learning the whole field of physical chemistry, which occupied another half hour, and when he had finished, he began putting the knowledge he had gleaned together, until it made sense.

  All life, he had found, was probably electricity and radioactivity, the latter supplied by means of a tiny amount of potassium in the human body. But life was really more than that. There were actions and interactions between the two things that had thus far baffled all students. Some of them baffled the rubber god, but he puzzled the general picture out to his own satisfaction.

  When the experiment had gone wrong and created the tarry lump that formed the real life of Hermes, there had been a myriad compounds and odd arrangements of atom formed in it, and the tarry gum around them had acted as a medium for their operation. Then, when they were slightly softened by the addition of alcohol, they had begun to work, arranging and rearranging themselves into an interacting pattern that was roughly parallel to human life and thought.

  But there were differences. For one thing, he could read thoughts accurately, and for another, he had a sense of perception which could analyze matter directly from its vibrations. For another, what he called sight and sound were merely other vibrations, acting directly on his life substance instead of by means of local sensory organs. He realized suddenly that he could see with his mouth instead of his eyes, and hear all over. Only the rubber casing prevented him from a full 360° vision. But, because of the minds he had tapped, he had learned to interpret those vibrations in a more or less conventional pattern.

  Hermes analyzed the amount of radioactive potassium in Brugh’s body carefully and compared it with his own. There was a great difference, which probably accounted for his more fully developed powers. Something ached vaguely inside him, and he felt giddy. He turned away from his carefully ordered thoughts to inspect this new sensation.

  The alcohol inside him was drying out—almost gone, in fact, and his tarry interior was growing thicker. He’d have to do something about it.

  “Dr. Brugh,” he thought, fixing his attention on the other, “could I have some alcohol, please? My thoughts will be slowed even below human level if I can’t have some soon.”

  Arlington Brugh shook his head to clear it of a sudden buzz, but he had not understood. Hermes tried again, using all the remaining thought power he could muster.

  “This is Hermes, Dr. Brugh. You brought me to life, and I want some alcohol, please!”

  Brugh heard this time, and swung suspiciously toward the end of the room, where his assistant was working. But the young man was engaged in his work, and showed no sign of having spoken or heard. Hermes repeated his request, squeezing out his fast failing energy, and the master jerked quickly, turning his eyes slowly around the room. Again Hermes tried, and the other twitched.

  Brugh grabbed for his hat and addressed the assistant. “Bill, I’m going for a little walk to clear my head. The session last night seems to have put funny ideas in it.” He paused. “Oh, better toss that little rubber statue into the can for the junkman. It’s beginning to get on my nerves.”

  He turned sharply and walked out of the room. Hermes felt the rough hands of the assistant, and felt himself falling. But his senses were leaving him, drained by the loss of alcohol and the strain of forcing his mind on the master. He sank heavily into the trash can and his mind grew blank.

  IV

  A splatter of wetness against Hermes’ mouth brought him back to consciousness, and he saw a few drops fall near him from a broken bottle that was tipped sidewise. Occasionally one found its way through his mouth, and he soaked it up greedily. Little as he got, the alcohol still had been enough to start his dormant life into renewed activity.

  There was a pitch and sway to the rubbish on which he lay, and a rumbling noise came from in front of him. Out of the corner of his “eye” he saw a line of poles running by, and knew he was on something that moved. Momentarily he tapped the mind of the driver and found he was on a truck bound for the city dump, where all garbage was disposed of. But he felt no desire to use the little energy he had in mind reading, so he fell back to studying the small supply of liquid left in the bottle.

  There was an irregular trickle now, running down only a few inches from him. He studied the situation carefully, noting that the bottle was well anchored to its spot, while he was poised precariously on a little mound of rubbish. One of Newton’s laws of momentum flashed through his mind from the mass of information he had learned through Brugh; if the truck were to speed up, he would be thrown backward, directly under the stream trickling down from the bottle—and with luck he might land face up.

  Hermes summoned his energy and directed a wordless desire for speed toward the driver. The man’s foot came down slowly on the accelerator, but too slowly. Hermes tried again, and suddenly felt himself pitc
hed backward—to land face down! Then a squeal of brakes reached his ears, as the driver counteracted his sudden speed, and the smallest god found himself rolling over, directly under the stream.

  There were only a few teaspoons left, splashing out irregularly as the bouncing of the truck threw the liquid back and forth in the fragment of glass, but most of them reached his mouth. The truck braked to a halt and began reversing, and the last drops fell against his lips. It was highly impure alcohol, filled with raw chemicals from the laboratory, but Hermes had no complaints. He could feel the tar inside him soften, and he lay quietly enjoying the sensation until new outside stimuli caught his attention.

  The truck had ceased backing and was parked on a slope leading down toward the rear. There was a rattle of chains and the gate dropped down to let the load go spinning out down the bank into the rubbish-filled gully. Hermes bounced from a heavy can and went caroming off sidewise, then struck against a rock with force enough to send white sparks of pain running through him.

  But the rock had changed his course and thrown him clear of the other trash. When he finally stopped, his entire head and one arm were clear, and the rest was buried under only a loose litter of papers and dirt. No permanent damage had been done; his tarry core was readjusting itself to the normal shape of the rubber coating, and he was in no immediate danger.

  But being left here was the equivalent of a death sentence. His only hope was to contact some human mind and establish friendly communications, and the dump heap was the last place to find men. Added to that, the need for further alcohol was a serious complication. Again he wished for the mysterious power of motion.

  He concentrated his mental energy on moving the free arm, but there was no change; the arm stayed at the same awkward angle. With little hope, he tried again, watching for the slightest movement. This time a finger bent slightly! Feverishly he tried to move the others, and they twisted slowly until his whole hand lay stretched out flat. Then his arm began to move sluggishly. He was learning.

  It was growing dark when he finally drew himself completely free of the trash and lay back to rest, exulting over his newfound ability. The alcohol was responsible, of course; it had softened the tar slightly more than it had been when he made his first efforts in the laboratory, and permitted motion of a sort through a change of surface tension. The answer to further motion was more alcohol.

  There were bottles of all kinds strewn about, and he stared at those within his range of vision, testing their vibrations in the hope of finding a few more drops. The nearer ones were empty, except for a few that contained brackish rainwater. But below him, a few feet away, was a small-sized one whose label indicated that it had contained hair tonic. The cork was in tightly, and it was still half full of a liquid. That liquid was largely ethyl alcohol.

  Hermes forced himself forward on his stomach, drawing along inch by inch. Without the help of gravity, he could never have made it, but the distance shortened. He gave a final labored hitch, clutched the bottle in his tiny hands, and tried to force the cork out. It was wedged in too firmly!

  Despair clutched at him, but he threw it off. There must be some way. Glass was brittle, could be broken easily, and there were stones and rocks about with which to strike it. The little god propped the neck of the bottle up against one and drew himself up to a sitting position, one of the stones in his hands. He could not strike rapidly enough to break the glass, but had to rely on raising the rock and letting it fall.

  Fortunately for his purpose, the bottle had been cracked by its fall, and the fourth stone shattered the neck. Hermes forced it up on a broken box and tipped it gingerly toward his mouth. The smell of it was sickening, but he had no time to be choosy about his drinks! There was room inside him to hold a dozen teaspoonfuls, and he meant to fill those spaces.

  The warm sensation of softening tar went through him gratefully as the liquid was absorbed. According to what he had read in Brugh’s mind, he should have been drunk, but it didn’t feel that way. It more nearly approximated the sensation of a man who had eaten more than he should and hadn’t time to be sorry yet.

  Hermes wriggled his toes comfortably and nodded his approval at the ease with which they worked. Another idea came to him, and he put it to the test. Where his ear channels were, the rubber was almost paper-thin; he put out a pseudopod of tar from the lumps inside his head and wriggled it against the membrane; a squeaky sound was produced like a radio speaker gone bad. He varied the speed of the feeler, alternating it until he discovered the variation of tones and overtones necessary, and tried a human word.

  “Tanya!” It wasn’t perfect, but there could be no question as to what it was. Now he could talk with men directly, even with Tanya Brugh, if fate was particularly kind. He conjured up an ecstatic vision of her face and attempted a conventional sighing sound. Men in love evidently were supposed to sigh, and Hermes was in love! But if he wanted to see her, he’d have to leave the dump. It was dark now, but ultraviolet and infrared light were as useful to him as the so-called visible beams, and the amount of light needed to set off his sight was less than that for a cat. With soiled hands he began pulling his way up the bank, burrowing through the surface rubbish. Then he reached the top and spied the main path leading away.

  His little feet twinkled brightly in the starlight, and the evening dew washed the stains from his body. A weasel, prowling for food, spied him and debated attack, but decided to flee when the little god pictured himself as a dog. Animals accepted such startling apparent changes without doubting their sanity. He chuckled at the tricks he could play on Tabby when he got back, and sped down the lane at a good two miles an hour.

  V

  Brugh worked late in the laboratory, making up for the time he had taken off to clear his head. All thoughts of his trouble with Hermes had vanished. He cleared up the worst of the day’s litter of dirty apparatus, arranged things for the night, and locked up.

  Dixon, head of the organic chemistry department, was coming down the hall as the physicist left. He stopped, his pudgy face beaming, and greeted the other. “Hi, there, Brugh. Working late again?”

  “A little. How’s the specific for tuberculosis going?” Dixon patted his paunch amiably. “Not bad. We’re able to get the metal poison into the dye, and the dye into the bug. We still can’t get much of the poison out of the dye after that to kill our friend, the bacillus, but we’ve been able to weaken him a little. By the way, I saw your daughter today, out with Hodges’ nephew, and she told me—”

  “You mean Johnny Thomas?” Brugh’s eyebrows furrowed tightly and met at the corners. “So Hodges is his uncle! Hmmm.”

  “Still fighting the biochemistry department?” By a miracle of tact and good nature, Dixon had managed to keep on friendly terms with both men. “I wish you two would get together; Hodges is really a pretty decent sort…Well, I didn’t think so; you’re both too stubborn for your own good. That nephew of his isn’t so good, though. Came up here to pump money out of his uncle and get away from some scandal in New York. His reputation isn’t any too savory. Wouldn’t want my daughter going with him.”

  “Don’t worry; Tanya won’t be going with Hodges’ nephew any…longer. Thanks for the tip.” They reached the main door, and Brugh halted suddenly. “Damn!”

  “What is it?”

  “I left my auto keys on the worktable upstairs. Don’t bother waiting for me, Dixon. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Dixon smiled. “Absentminded professor, eh? All right, good night.” He went out the door and down the steps while Brugh climbed back to his laboratory, where he found the keys without further trouble. Fortunately he carried a spare door key to the lab in his pocket; it wasn’t the first time he’d done this fool trick.

  As he passed down the hall again, a faint sound of movement caught his ear and he turned toward Hodges’ laboratory. There was no one there, and the door was locked, the lights all out. Brugh started for the stairs, then turned back.

  “Might as well tak
e advantage of an opportunity when I get it,” he muttered. “I’d like to see the creation of Hodges, as long as he won’t know about it.” He slipped quietly to the door, unlocked it, and pulled it shut after him. The one key unlocked every door in the building and the main entrance; he had too much trouble losing keys to carry more than needed with him.

  There was no mistaking the heavy tank on the low table, and Brugh moved quietly to it, lifted the cover, and stared inside. There was a light in the tank that went on automatically when the cover was raised, and the details of the body inside were clearly defined. Brugh was disappointed; he had been hoping for physical defects, but the figure was that of a young man, almost too classically perfect in body, and with an intelligent, handsome face. There was even a healthy pink glow to the skin.

  But there was no real life, no faintest spark of animation or breathing. Anthropos lay in his nutritive bath, eyes open, staring blankly at the ceiling and seeing nothing. “No properly radioactive potassium,” Brugh gloated. “In a way, it’s a pity, too. I’d like to work on you.”

  He put the cover down and crept out again, making sure that the night watchman was not around. The man seldom left the first floor, anyway; who’d steal laboratory equipment? Brugh reached for his keys and fumbled with them, trying to find the proper one. It wasn’t on the key ring. “Damn!” he said softly. “I suppose it fell off back on the table.”

  But he still had the spare, and the other could stay on the table. With the duplicate, he opened and relocked the door, then slipped down the hall to leave the building. Again a faint sound reached him, but he decided it was the cat or a rat moving around. He had other worries. Mrs. Brugh would give him what-for for being late again, he supposed. And Tanya probably wouldn’t be home yet from the beach. That was another thing to be attended to; there’d be no more running with that young Thomas!

  In the latter supposition, he was wrong; Tanya was there, fooling with her hair and gushing to her mother about a date she had that night with Will Young. She usually had seven dates a week with at least four different men serving as escorts. Brugh thoroughly approved of Young, however, since he was completing his Ph.D. work and acting as lab assistant. Mrs. Brugh approved of him because the young man came from a good family and had independent means, without the need of the long grind up to a full professorship. Tanya was chiefly interested in his six-foot-two, his football reputation, and a new Dodge he owned.