Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  The thin little voice of the mike started to say, “Just leaving Sub-Five, sir through the wall. We—” But then the com-box in the laboratory behind them coughed loudly and shouted out in a metallic bellow, “Robot broke through the wall into Sub-Seventeen!” There was a tinny astonishment in its voice. “Destroying equipment in storage files—” All of this was funneled through the Communications Room, and the echoes of the complaint from Sub-Seventeen could be heard mingling confusedly through the lapel mike. Conway clicked it on and off several times.

  “Com Room!” he said into the noisy turmoil. “Find out which way the robot’s heading.”

  There was a brief pause, during which the com box behind them roared out its diminishing report of damage. Then, “It’s heading inward, sir,” the mike said thinly. “Toward Sub-Thirty.”

  Conway glanced down at Broome, who nodded and shaped a silent word with his lips. “Computers.” Conway set his jaw.

  “Start sending up heavy-duty robots to head it off.” he told the mike crisply. “Immobilize the robot if you can but don’t damage him without my orders.” He laid his hand over the lapel mike to deafen it, hearing a small, distant uproar filtering out from under his palm as he urged Broome to a trot down the long corridor where the robot had dwindled to a shining dot such a short time ago. But he was hearing his own last words repeating over and over in undiminishing echoes inside his head, “My orders my orders my orders—”

  He thought he could go on giving orders up to a point. Just long enough to get Ego under control. No longer.

  “Broome,” he said abruptly, “can the robot take over?” And he held his breath waiting for the answer, wondering what he would do if it was no.

  “I never doubted it,” Broome said. Conway let his breath out with a feeling of luxury in the sigh. But Broome went on, “If we can find out why he went wrong, of course. I have an idea, but I don’t see how I can test it—”

  “What?”

  “Maybe an iteration loop. A closed series of steps that repeat themselves over and over. But I don’t know what’s involved. He says ‘want’ and then blocks completely. I don’t know why. Some compulsion is driving him so powerfully he doesn’t even bother to open doors to get at what it is he wants. I don’t know what. My job’s to find out.”

  Conway thought to himself, “Maybe I know what.” But he didn’t explore the thought. It was too chilly in the mind, and yet so simple he wondered why Broome hadn’t thought of it. Or maybe he had

  Ego’s goal was winning the war. But suppose it was not possible to win the war?

  Conway shook his head sharply and put that idea firmly away.

  “Okay, you know your job,” he said. “Now about mine how can we stop him without harming him?” With a small fraction of his mind he noticed that he was personalizing the robot now. Ego had begun to assume an identity.

  Broome shook his head unhappily as he trotted beside Conway. “That’s one reason I was afraid to activate him.” Broome was doing it too. “He’s complex, General. I’ve got him pretty well cushioned against normal jolts, but an artificial brain isn’t like a human brain. One little injury means malfunction. And besides, he’s so fast I’m not sure what would stop him even if we didn’t have to worry about damage.”

  “There’s a limit to what I can bring up in time, anyhow,” Conway said. “What about ultrasonics? We could cripple him, maybe—”

  “Let me think about it. Ultrasonics that close might scramble something.” Broome was panting heavily from their rapid pace.

  Conway uncovered the mike. “Com Room? Get a supersonic squad in the computer room corridor fast. But wait orders. If the robot shows up don’t open fire until—”

  He broke off abruptly, having overshot the usefulness of the mike without realizing it. He was at the Com Room door and his own voice was crackling at him out of a box hanging low in the greenish gloom over the communications officer’s chair about ten feet away.

  He let the door swing shut behind him and was engulfed in noise and darkness. The big glass information panels and the colored circles of the com screens glowed bright and the faces of the men swam dimly in the gloom, high-lights picked out on their cheekbones and foreheads in gold and red, green and faint blue reflected from the instruments they tended. General Conway automatically flashed a tired glance around the boards and screens that told him what was happening on the entire Pacific Front. He saw the radar shadows of the fleet, checked the code board for wind and weather, the status panel for plane assignments. But the information meant nothing. His brain refused to accept the burden. He had only one problem now.

  “Where’s the robot?” he asked. He had to shout to make himself heard, because to the normal noise of the room with its complex of relayed voices was now added a crashing uproar Conway failed to identify for a moment.

  The communications officer nodded toward a bluish television screen at his left, part of a long row. Small and bright upon it a doll-sized robot could be seen, raging through a doll-sized storeroom. But the noise it made was life-size. It seemed to be hunting for something, and its method was frantic. It didn’t open drawers it ripped the whole side off cabinets and swept the contents out with great, rhythmic, scything motions, sending them spinning through the air. Now and then the bright cone of its glance would swerve to follow the fall of some object briefly, and twice the robot paused to snatch up items and turn them tentatively over. But clearly, whatever it wanted was not here. And as clearly, it operated on true egoism whatever it found useless it destroyed furiously. It had no referent but its own immediate need.

  “And maybe he’s right,” Conway thought. “Maybe if we can’t get him whatever he needs nothing down here is worth keeping.”

  Behind him he heard Broome and the communications officer conferring in strained voices above the tumult.

  “I don’t know,” the officer was shouting. “It tore up the library so fast we couldn’t tell what it had read and what it hadn’t. You see how it’s going now. It moves so fast—”

  Broome leaned over the communications officer’s shoulder and punched the two-way button on the intercom for Sub-Seventeen where the robot was raging.

  “Ego,” he said into the mike. “Do you hear me?”

  The robot ripped down the side of the last cabinet, swept its contents out in a rhythmic shower. Amplified over the screen they heard Broome’s voice echo back to them from the tiny greenish storeroom on the wall. The robot paused very briefly. Then it stood up straight, turned around once in a very rapid circuit that swept its cone of light across the walls.

  “Want—” its hollow voice howled, and instantly shut itself off into silence again. It crashed its hands together like something in the last extremity of desperation, and then walked straight for the wall at the corner of the room.

  The wall bent, cracked and opened. The robot stalked through and out of sight.

  It seemed to Conway that every face in the room swung around toward his, pale ovals glistening with drops of gold and red and greenish sweat in the darkness. It was up to him now. They waited for instructions.

  He wanted to lash out as the robot had lashed, tear these floating luminous screens down and smash the glowing panels with them, silence the yammering voices from the walls. Responsibilities he could not handle buzzed like hot bees around his head. It was too much, too much. A deep wave of exhaustion washed over him, followed by a wave of hysteric exhilaration, both so ghostly and so far away they hardly seemed to touch Conway at all. He was somebody else entirely, infinite distances off, with ghostly problems that had no relation to the vacuum of the here and now

  “General?” Broome’s voice said. “General?”

  Conway coughed. “The robot,” he said briskly. “We’ve got to stop him. You plotting his course so far, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. Screen Twelve.”

  Twelve was one of the hanging panels, transparent in the dark, a net of luminous gold lines on it marking the corridors, with the sect
ors showing in dim blue numerals. “The red dots are the robot, sir,” the sergeant told him.

  They watched a disembodied hand float forward from behind the screen arid add fluorescent grease-dots to the lengthening red line which had started in Broome’s lab, crossed the library and storeroom and gone out by the solid wall. They stalked now across the next three sectors, wading through the walls, as they went in an elongating luminous chain of red.

  Their goal was obvious to everyone. About seven inches ahead in the heart of the map lay a round room with bright green squares glowing around its walls. They all knew what the green squares were. They all knew how intimately their own survival hinged upon the blizzard of electronic impulses storming through those incredibly complex calculations in the computers. Every mind in the room clicked over like the computers themselves, considering what would happen when the robot reached that room.

  “The supersonic team,” Conway said crisply. “The heavy-duty robots. Where are they?”

  “The supersonics are coming up from level six, sir. About five minutes for them. The HD robots should intersect in about three minutes. You can see them in what is it? purple? on the plot panel.”

  A slow line of purple dots was moving inward down a gold-lined corridor from the periphery of the chart.

  “Too slow,” Conway said, watching the red dots which marked the footsteps of the thinking robot. Or was it thinking, now? “Anybody know if those walls between are plaster or stone?” There was a silence. Nobody did. But as they watched, the red dots paused at a gold line, rebounded twice, reversed themselves and made for a break in the line that indicated a door.

  “Stone,” Conway said. “That one, anyhow. I hope he didn’t jar anything loose trying.”

  “Maybe we’d better hope he did,” Broome said.

  Conway looked at the old man. “I’m going to stop him,” he said. “Understand? We’re not going to junk Ego. We need him too badly. I’m sorry we weren’t better prepared to handle him, but I’d do it again if I had to. We can’t wait.”

  “He’s moving fast, sir,” the communications officer said.

  Conway looked at the screen. He bit his lip painfully and then said, “Volunteers. I want somebody to jump in there and delay him. I don’t care how. Trip him. Wave a red rag in his face. Anything to gain time. Every second counts. All right, Corporal. Lieutenant, that’s two.”

  “We can’t spare any more from here,” the communications officer said.

  “All right, on your way,” Conway snapped. “Get him on the screens, sergeant.”

  Three round television screens clicked into bluish life, showing a trail of wrecked desks and smashed equipment. In the third screen Ego, looking very small and remote and innocent, was smashing himself head-on against a too-narrow door. On the last smash the door-frame gave way and Ego surged through and stalked off down the tiny, diminishing corridor beyond. On the plot board the red dots showed him only about five inches away from the calculator room.

  “But what do you want with the calculators?” Broome was murmuring as he stared after the vanishing figure on the screen. He tapped irritatingly with his nails on the metal table. “Maybe,” he said, and paused. He looked up at Conway. “I’m no good here, General. I’m going to the calculator room. I have some ideas, but the analogue computer thinks a lot faster than I do. Ego moves too fast. It may take machines to figure out machines. Anyhow, I’ll try.”

  “Go on, go on then,” Conway said. “You’ve got between five and ten minutes. After that—” He didn’t finish, but in his mind he said, “I can rest. One way or the other, I can rest.”

  The communications officer had been clicking television screens on and off, hunting. Now he said, “Look, sir! The volunteer team God, he’s tall!” The observation was spontaneous; until now the communications room hadn’t seen Ego alongside human figures.

  Ego was a stalking giant in a dimly lit corridor on the screen. The volunteers had just burst out of a corridor door ten paces ahead of him, and he towered mightily over them. You could see their tiny, scared faces no bigger than peas turned up toward the oblivious, striding giant as he followed the searchlight splash of his single eye down the hall.

  The two men must have moved at a dead run from here to there. They hadn’t had time to pick and choose, and their instructions had been ambiguous, but somewhere on the way they had snatched up a stout steel beam which now showed like a bright thread across the corridor. One man darted across the hall just ahead of the robot, and the two of them braced the beam shoulder high from opposite doorways, making a barrier across the path.

  The robot didn’t even glance at the obstacle. He struck the beam squarely, the clang echoing through the corridor and reverberating from the screen into the communications room. Ego bounced a little, recovered his balance, measured the situation and then stooped to pass under the bar. Hastily the two men lowered their burden. Again a clang and a recoil, and this time the bar bent into a deep V at the point of impact. Over the screen they heard one of the men yell as the end of the bar caught him. Ego heaved upward with both hands, stepped under the bar and stalked off down the hall.

  “Thirty seconds saved,” Conway said bitterly. “And one man down. Where are the HDs now?”

  “About a minute and a half away, sir. Coming along corridor eight. They ought to intersect just outside the calculator room door. See, on the board?”

  Slowly and heavily, it seemed to Conway, the purple dots moved against the darkness, ploddingly. A floating hand materialized and added two more red dots to the chain of Ego’s footsteps moving toward the heart of the citadel. The red dots were ahead. They were going to outstrip the purple.

  “I’m going to fail,” Conway said to himself. He thought of all the human lives here underground, wholly dependent upon him, and all the lives outside, confident that the Pacific Front was in good hands. He wondered what the commanding general on the other side was doing now, and what he would do if he knew

  “Look, sir,” the communications officer said.

  There was still one man of the volunteer team left on his feet. He hadn’t given up yet. Ego’s last heave had apparently snapped the steel bar off short at the V, leaving one end like a bent club. It must have been very heavy, but the man in the corridor was operating on a drive too intense to notice the weight. Club on shoulder, he was sprinting after Ego down the hall.

  They saw him lessen the distance between them. They saw him at the robot’s heels. Distantly they heard him shout.

  “Ego!” he called, as he had heard Broome call the name. And in answer, as the robot had answered before, Ego paused, turned, bathed the man in the cold one-eyed beam of its searchlight.

  “Want—” the strangled; metallic voice said hollowly, and stopped.

  The man with the club jumped high and smashed for the single bright eye in the robot’s forehead.

  “Is it safe?” Conway asked. “Will he hurt him, Broome?” But he got no answer. Broome had disappeared.

  On the screen the robot struck upward furiously with both hands, parrying the club just in time. The crash of impact made the screen shiver. The man had time and strength for one more swing, and this time at the height of its arc Ego seized the club and plucked it almost casually out of the man’s hands. Over his enormous steel shoulder he sent it clanging down the corridor behind him.

  Conway glanced quickly at the chart. The purple dots were gaining. The red dot at the end of Ego’s chain wavered left and right as Ego dodged the two blows of the club. Conway looked back at the screen.

  The disarmed man hesitated only briefly. Then he gathered himself and sprang straight up toward the blank steel face with its single eye. By some miracle he passed between the closing arms and locked his own arms around the steel neck. His body blinded the torch-lens of the robot’s eye, and he clung desperately, legs and arms clenched around the lurching steel tower of Ego’s body.

  From the darkness beyond their struggling figures a heavy, rhythmic thuddin
g began to be heard, making the television screen vibrate a little.

  “The heavy-duties,” Conway breathed. He glanced again at the chart, not needing it to see the line of purple dots almost at the corridor intersection now, and the red dot of Ego wavering erratically.

  The robot didn’t depend on vision alone. You could tell that by his motion. But the clinging man disturbed him. The heaving weight pulled him off balance. Ego plucked futilely at the man for an instant, staggering thirty degrees off course toward the left-hand wall. Then the steel hands got a grip on the clinging man, and the robot ripped him away easily and smoothly, with a gesture like tearing a shirt off his chest, and flung him with casual force against the wall.

  Beyond Ego, at the far end of the corridor, you could see the tall double doors of the calculator room. Ego stood for a moment as if he were collecting himself. The screen seemed to be wavering, and Conway made a futile, steadying motion toward it. The vibration was so strong now that vision blurred upon it.

  “What’s the matter?” Conway asked irritably. “Is it out of focus, or—”

  “Look, sir,” the communications officer said. “Here they come.”

  Like a walking wall the heavy robots wheeled out of the darkness at the edge of the screen, their ponderous tread making the whole scene shudder. Heavily they ground to a halt facing Ego, and stood there shoulder to shoulder across the corridor, their backs to the calculator doors.

  Ego stood for a moment quite still, but shivering all over, his single eye sweeping from left to right and back again over them, infinitely fast. Something about these units of his own kind seemed to kindle a new and compelling drive, and Ego gathered himself together and lowered his shoulders and head a little, and surged forward as if eager for battle. The HDs, locked together in an unswerving row, braced themselves and stood firm.