Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  “What now, Hector?” she said resignedly as she walked down the centre of the lab. The robot was near the open pit at its far end, ready to supervise the retrieval of the covers and their subsequent replacement. “What are you going to do with us?”

  “That name, please. I never liked it.” The right-hand claw came up and made a derisory little gesture, a throwaway of nothing. The voice might be Adam’s, but the personality beneath seemed still to belong more to the Captain.

  “I thought he was supposed to be some kind of hero.”

  “For a time. But in the end he was a loser. He was killed by Achilles, and his body was dragged around the walls of Troy behind his murderer’s chariot. Is that a worthwhile end for a hero? To be thrown to the dogs to be mauled? No, I don’t think Hector’s a very good name at all.”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “Adam. I think Adam will be considerably more appropriate, don’t you?”

  “Stop it!” she said, shocked by the Demigod’s presumption. “And stop using his voice!”

  “Not his voice. My voice. Or at least, it soon will be. For the moment I’ll admit that I’m only borrowing it, but the time will soon come when I take it over completely. You see, we’re brainlinked, Adam and I. And when he’s a drained and empty shell, and I speak to you with his voice and share all your secrets with you — well, you may reject me now, but I think you’ll have to accept me when the time comes.”

  “No. Never!”

  “I understand your feelings, believe me. The Captain has a lot to answer for—I know he presented me in the worst possible light, but the choice wasn’t mine, and try as I might I know I can never overcome that with you. But I want you to consider this. When I came to Saturn Three I was blank, unrecorded, nothing in my mind apart from what was put there through the link. You can’t hold me responsible for what I did, Alex, surely you must understand that. My body, Adam’s body—they’re just vehicles for intellects and concepts. And when his intelligence fully inhabits my mind, drives out the Captain and everything bad that he put in—won’t you love me exactly as you love him now?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then you’ll condemn him to an agony he doesn’t deserve. Because it will be him, Alex, walking and talking in this metal body. He’ll give you all the consideration and affection he ever did. Reject him then and it will be no different from rejecting him now.”

  “You really expect me to believe all this?”

  “But why should I lie to you? I need you to understand. And think about this, Alex; he’s so much older than you, and his body can’t hold together forever. And when it comes to a choice of having him survive in me or lose him as he is, I think you can see the only sensible course to take. His memories will be continuous, his feelings will persist as before. All I ask is that I should be allowed to share.”

  “This is monstrous. I don’t believe you can have any idea of what it is you’re suggesting.”

  “Monstrous?” said not-Adam, with apparent sadness. “Yes, I suppose it is. But it’s the only option that’s been given to me.”

  There was a noise behind Alex, and she saw that the robot suddenly looked beyond her to the lab door. Turning, she saw with relief that it was Adam.

  “You’re late, Adam,” the Demigod said. Adam didn’t move into the lab, but hesitated in the shattered doorway with one hand on the frame. “Hear this now and remember it. Don’t ever be late again when I call you.”

  “You don’t call anything around here, Hector.” As Adam stepped forward in his own time Alex noticed that he’d changed his clothes. He looked untidy, as if the uniform jumpsuit was a couple of sizes too large for him, but he walked down the lab with an air of confident command. “And you will call me Major. I’m the base commander, and you’ll do well to bear that in mind.”

  The sensor lowered a little, took in the rank flashes on Adam’s shoulders. Then, as if shaking off some short-lived preoccupation, it reared up again.

  “Please don’t be awkward, Adam. I admit I expected something like this, but it will do you no good at all.” Hector’s left hand came up, and Alex saw for the first time that it held the jack-connection probe that was the transmitting component of the brain link, delicately angled between opposable claws.

  “Adam, don’t go near him!” she said urgently, but Adam was already past her and he waved her back so savagely that she dared not argue.

  “Considering your attitude,” Hector went on, “this may be a suitable opportunity to find out whether brain link programming can actually be a two-way affair. I’ve made certain modifications in the wave transmitter so that it can now act as a partial resonator. It will be useful to have some more definite assurance of your obedience.”

  “Keep talking, Captain.” Hector, who was about to do just that, was pulled up short by the name. “Yes,” Adam went on, “that’s who you really are. That’s who you’ll always be.” He arrived at the edge of the pit and stopped, just out of the robot’s reach. “No escape from him, Hector. He’s there in your head, and that’s where he’ll stay.”

  “We’ll have to see,” Hector said calmly. “Come here.”

  Adam smiled.

  “Please,” Alex began, unable to watch this wary game with danger in silence, but Adam cut her off with a sideways glance. When his eyes returned to Hector, he was smiling again.

  “No deal, Captain,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t wish to damage you,” Hector warned, stepping forward and reaching for Adam with his right claw. “Don’t make this more difficult.”

  Adam didn’t pull back, but he flinched as the claw took a grip on his shoulder. It squeezed the muscle and sinew above his collar-bone, fitting directly into a pattern of bruises which betrayed the fact that Adam had been held in exactly the same way at some time in the recent past. Hector tried to turn him, but he set his teeth and resisted so that the robot had to take a sideways step to reach around with the probe.

  “It’s not your fault, Hector,” Adam said. The robot was having difficulty; he couldn’t hold the probe and remove the plastic cap with the same claw, but the other was holding Adam steady.

  Adam’s hand was on Hector’s shoulder, seeming to pull him in close rather than fend him off. With the other hand he took hold of the supporting frame of the Demigod’s outstretched arm, and without warning hoisted himself off the floor.

  Hector staggered forward as he became unexpectedly top-heavy, but he corrected with a step that banged his metal knee-joint hard into Adam’s leg. They were inches away from the lip of the waste pit, but Hector was taking Adam’s extra weight with no trouble.

  Adam held his grip on arm and bodyshell, and tried to climb. The claw on his shoulder pushed him down but Hector was beginning to wobble, unable to make adequate compensation for the unexpected shifts of balance; now Adam had got a grip on the turret housing, and Hector began to panic. He was leaning forward at an increasing angle, servos screaming to resist, and Adam was, slowly but surely, toppling him towards the pit.

  Alex wanted to cry out, to beg Adam to stop, but she knew that it would be futile. Even if Hector could be tipped once more into the waste pit the deep silt would not hold him for long, as they already knew; but there was a real danger that Adam might be drowned, or else injured by the robot’s threshing about.

  Hector managed to force Adam away, the claw on his shoulder biting deep to rip him free and throw him into the pit. Adam swung out and saw the floor pass from beneath him but he got a hold with both hands on Hector’s outstretched arm, and when the claw released he hung on.

  The Demigod was taken by surprise. As the claw had opened his servos had cut to prevent him falling backwards as Adam’s weight was unloaded, but it didn’t happen. Adam clung to the limb, feeling through it that the whole of the robot’s body was falling towards him and had passed the point of recovery. Only then did he let go, and man and machine fell together towards the slime.

  Alex ran to the edge and looked
down, hoping she could find some way to reach Adam and get him clear before he could be hurt. Hector had vanished beneath the surface of the mud almost immediately but there was a heaving and boiling that indicated his efforts to get back to the surface. Adam was swimming, irrationally tearing at his upper clothing to be free of it.

  “I’ll get a cable or something,” she shouted to him.

  “No, Alex, please,” he gasped. “Get out of the lab!”

  His tunic split as he turned over in the thick mud. He managed to get his arm out of one of the sleeves. There was blood on his shoulder where the robot’s grasp had broken the skin, and Alex could see the reason for the poor fit of the uniform; Adam was wearing a makeshift harness of crossed equipment belts. Both belts had a number of the highly explosive red quarry grenades fastened to them, and a continuous run of wire appeared to link all the grenades together.

  “No, Adam,” she cried, “no!”

  “For the last time, get out of the lab!”

  Something broke the surface only a couple of feet away from him. It was Hector’s eye apparatus, and it shook itself free of obscuring filth before swinging around and fixing on him. A claw erupted through the mud and made a grab, but missed. Adam didn’t wait for another opportunity, but dived down towards where he now knew Hector to be.

  Alex was thrown back as the section of floor on which she was standing lifted at an angle. The open pit before her was an overflowing geyser, a flood of waste hurling itself at the ceiling of the lab and raining down on to everything around her. Every floor section had buckled at the pressure from beneath, but the roar of the multiple explosion was softened, somehow muted by the sluggish reaction of its sloppy medium.

  The floor dropped more or less back into place but the rain continued for several seconds, splattering and peppering every exposed surface with fragmented wet pellets. The silence that followed was absolute, until the lifeline sounds of Saturn Three began to filter back into her awareness.

  She crawled to the edge of the pit and looked in, afraid of what she might see but unable to resist. The pit was empty, excavated right down to the riveted plates at its base. Of Adam and Hector there was no sign at all.

  FIFTEEN

  It was difficult to know what to do. There was a dark emptiness inside that she knew would eventually fill and become grief, but until that time her calmness was almost an embarrassment to her. She showered to rid herself of the covering of slurry that she’d acquired in the lab explosion and dressed in a clean jumpsuit. Then, with her hair still damp, she went through to the general living quarters and sat on a lay-low.

  It wouldn’t matter that she had no control over the station’s communications. When no acknowledgement was received on the platform to the information scans that were sent with great frequency to make the most of their time out of shadowlock, then an investigation would surely follow. She’d be lifted, and she’d be sent—where?

  Alex didn’t want to stay in Saturn Three, although the strength of Adam’s presence in its corridors and work areas would make the leaving more difficult. But she could take Adam’s memory with her, leaving the ghosts of Hector and James to prowl the tunnels alone. This, and the prospective realisation of what might prove to be a dangerous dream, would make the departure a little less hard to bear.

  She eased back on the lay-low, and gazed despondently at the ceiling. The area’s camera was trained on her.

  It was a coincidence that she should choose to sit directly in the line of the camera’s last angle. It shouldn’t bother her, but it did. She decided to move to another lay-low.

  The camera tracked her as she crossed the room.

  She stopped, and the camera stopped. She began to shake her head in slow disbelief. Hector couldn’t have survived; even if his body had not been mangled and ruined by the clutch of grenades his brain tissue would never have withstood the blast.

  “Hector?” she said. “Is that you?”

  When she took a step towards the door the camera stayed immobile, as if the intelligence behind it was sheepishly hoping to compensate for its discovery with a period of deceptive stillness.

  She checked the com room but there was nobody, the only sign that it had even been visited in the last few hours being the swivel chair that Adam had dragged over to the console. This gave her a momentary elation which was quickly beaten down by rationality; if she was so sure that Hector had been destroyed there was no possible hope for Adam, pressing himself and his deadly harness close to the robot’s chest.

  The corridor camera moved with her as she went towards the sleeping quarters they had shared. There was nobody there, no sign of interference with the station commander’s spy-eye console. The p.a. speaker was live, but there was no sound other than a low hiss coming from it; and though she spoke out loud, calling to Hector and Adam a number of times, there was no hint of a reply.

  Steadily and with full self-control she set out to check out the complete corridor complex of the station. It was not so large and rambling that she found any part of it unfamiliar, but never before had she set out to cover it in one continuous tour, and certainly there were some tunnels leading to disused quarters that she’d never had occasion to visit more than once or twice. She went into each room, checked every possible compartment, and even kept an eye on the grating underfoot as she moved from one place to another. Sometimes cameras motored to follow her, but mostly they were still. It was as if the directing intellect behind them lacked the energy to manage more than one shot every few minutes, but whose intellect, she wondered, and where? Each turn and intersection betrayed nothing more remarkable than yet more tunnel and corridor spaces—no broken metal carcass pulling itself along, no torn and bloody Adam. She’d been there, only a few yards from the explosion. She’d crawled to the edge of the pit and looked over, and there had been nothing. Adam had probably been dissolved by the close heat of the grenades, and Hector had almost certainly been ripped into a shrapnel too fragmentary ever to be re-assembled.

  Before the lab door, she hesitated. Of all the station, the two miles or more of convoluted and winding corridor, this was the one section that she had repeatedly avoided. When she had walked out she had been upright and without tears, a promise of strength that she had made in silence to Adam. She wasn’t sure that she could do so well a second time. But then the wall camera had made a weak attempt to turn and cover her, and this had aided her resolve. She stepped through the peeled-back door.

  The lab was as she had left it. Most of the benches were collapsed or overturned, and some of the tanks were split and empty. The lighting was patchy and uneven due to the spattering of mud that had been thrown across most of the panels; in fact there was little that had escaped such a coating, the far-flung streaks of mud radiating outwards from the open pit and stencilled into a star-pattern on the floor where sufficiently large objects had intercepted the rain. The hydroponics tanks were ruined, close as they had been to the explosion, but the experiments could be restarted by the next crew—assuming that Survey didn’t decide to close the station down. Until then, the loss of the minor oxygen output of the tanks would be insignificant.

  After a few minutes of walking around and looking at the floor she came across a twist of metal that was almost recognisable. She picked it up carefully and found that it was a part of one of the robot’s claws, bent and compressed out of shape. After this find her luck seemed to improve and she came across a number of identifiable components—none, thankfully, that could be ascribed to Adam, but a search of perhaps an hour yielded a respectable heap of scrap which she piled in the middle of the lab floor. When she decided that she’d amassed enough she returned and began to sort through the pieces. She almost enjoyed the dull, undemanding work. It allowed her mind an escape from the realities of the moment, realities to which she had not yet decided her reaction. There would be grief, unhappiness, self-reproach; but for the present they held themselves back, and allowed mere preoccupation to take their place.

 
Like a palaeontologist she laid out the fragments, mapping the outline of Hector’s body and filling in the gaps with her imagination. There was a claw here, a loop of tubing there, even a complete section of the turret mechanism. The largest pieces of all were curled shreds of the golden body shell and there, in their midst, was the prize; a chunk of glass crystal with embedded wires which could only be from the Demigod’s ruined braincase.

  Hector had been blown right apart, there could be no doubt about it. The varied evidence before her showed that no single part of the robot had remained intact, no crippled shell that could be hiding in some unchecked corner and gathering strength to reach for her again. The signs and motions of surveillance could be no more than shadows of the Demigod’s occupying dominance of the internal systems of Saturn Three.

  The lab camera was on her again, she noted with irritation. She found an upturned box and dragged it over, stepping on to it and reaching for the lens; the camera tried to pull away, but she easily overcame the servo mechanism and held the apparatus still with one hand whilst reaching for the focus ring with the other. She gave the ring a sharp twist to its fullest extent, defocusing the tube and effectively blinding the camera. The ring started to rotate weakly back to its former position, but she gave it another twist and this time it stayed in place.

  Alex wasn’t afraid; it was as if Hector had drained off his rightful supply of terror, and these feeble after-images of menace could raise no response from her. The robot had claimed that the body was no more than a vehicle for the intellect, a medium through which the mind could express itself. In this way the Demigod had tried to claim some right to considerations of humanity, and had even supposed that he might, by becoming a copy of Adam’s intellect and destroying the original, gain access to her affections. Was it possible that the reverse had somehow happened and that Hector, by imposing his will on the station computer to take control of its subsidiary systems, had forced the machine into a model of himself?