“I—hope not,” Eight answered. “But something happened to the race that was here, and perhaps-”
“There is work to be done,” Nine interrupted. “We must examine every inch of this area. Perhaps we may find the rusted bodies of the former inhabitants. At first, I had hoped we would find them alive, but after seeing all those deserted cities, I am afraid we will find no living intelligence. But it may be we will find records.”
~ * ~
Slowly, under the unwinking sun overhead, they pressed forward among the ruins, Nine in the lead, then Eight, then Seven. Around them the air, stirred by the pressure of an unknown force, moved restlessly. A wind went with them, as though it, too, quested among tumbled masonry and piles of brick dust for some friend of the long-gone past. Silently, the wind went among the haunted debris. Eight felt it passing, a force touching him with a thousand invisible fingers, a force that could not be seen but only felt.
Eight stared at the ruins, wondering what manner of creatures had once moved among them. The rusted bones of the steel framework of buildings, steel that crumbled at the touch, casing stones upended, the greenish color of corrosion on copper. He tried to imagine the millions of inhabitants going about this city. He saw their glistening metal bodies moving along the streets, floating upward beside the bulk of the buildings. He saw them bringing stone and forging steel, creating a city under that yellow sun. And at night, he saw them looking up at the stars, at that strange dead satellite hovering in the black sky. He wondered if they had ever visited that satellite. They must have visited it, he decided, if not in reality, then in dreams. And possibly the stars beyond. For the towers of their cities had pointed at the stars.
Little metal men. Slowly Eight’s imagination failed him. Somehow he could not populate this silent city with little metal men. He shook his head. He could see the dream, but not the dreamers.
Nine stood in front of a pile of masonry. The rains, the heat of summer, the cold of uncounted winters, had brought down the stones from the top. Nine stared sombrely at the dark opening between the tumbled blocks. He spoke. “I’m going in there.”
Seven and Eight followed.
Darkness folded in around them—a stirring, whispering darkness. A beam of light flashed from Nine’s forehead, smashed against the darkness, illumined the walls of what looked like a tunnel.
Under their feet the dust exploded in little gray clouds. Abruptly the tunnel widened into a circle with three other arteries branching out. Broad doors opened in the arteries, doors that now were closed. Staring, Nine pushed against one of the doors, and it crumbled with the pressure, opened into a small room that was totally bare. Nine stepped into it, and the floor crumbled. He shot down into gloom, but instantly his descent slowed as he flicked on the device that bent gravity. He hesitated, then allowed himself to float down into the darkness. His voice whispered over the radio beam and Seven and Eight followed him.
Nine looked up at them as they came down. “That little room was used to carry the former inhabitants up into the building. See, there is the mechanism. Whoever they were, they did not know how to control gravity or they would not have needed this device.”
Neither Eight nor Seven answered, and Nine poked forward into the gloom, the bright beam from his light splashing from dozens of sturdy columns that supported the bulk above. His voice called and Seven and Eight moved toward him.
“Here is a machine,” Nine spoke. “Or is it—one of our early life-forms?”
~ * ~
Eight stared at the rust-flecked wheels, the crumbling, corroded bulk of the motor housings, the gears falling away into ruin. This, a robot-! He rebelled at the thought. Yet it was hard to know where mechanism left off and robot began. The dividing line was thin. You took inanimate metal and the pressure of exploding force; you worked the metal into a thousand different parts and you confined the force; you added a brain that was in itself a force-field capable of receiving and retaining impressions—and you had a robot. You left out the brain—and you had a machine.
Seven, prying among the mechanism, whispered. “It is one of our primitive life-forms—one of the early upward steps. All the fundamentals of robot construction are here. Wheels turn, work is done.”
“No,” Eight shook his head. “A robot is more than that. This—this is only a machine, unintelligently carrying out reactions its nature set for it. I don’t know what those reactions could have been, but I am certain it was not a robot. It was fixed in this place, for one thing, and, for another, I see no signs of brain control.”
“A robot is a machine,” Seven answered. “A logical machine. There is no doubt about it. Perhaps the control was in some other part of the building.”
Nine stirred protestingly. “I—I am inclined to agree with Eight. See, this was only a pump, designed to force water, or some other liquid, through the building. Here is the pressure chamber, and this, I think, was a crude electric motor. But it was only a machine.”
“We, ourselves, are only highly developed machines,” Seven persisted. “Our operation can be explained purely in terms of mechanics. When you attempt to make us more than machines, you become illogical. True, this is a machine. It is also a primitive robot form, for the two terms mean the same thing. There are many links missing between it and us, but perhaps we may find those links-”
“But how?” Eight asked. “In the beginning how could lifeless, dead metal build itself into the first machine?”
Seven started to answer, hesitated, stared at Eight and then his gaze wandered off into the gloom of this cavern. His light smashed into the darkness, drove a clean channel through the murk, yet always the darkness crept in around the edges of the beam, and always, when the light moved, the darkness came back.
“I—I don’t know the answer to that,” Seven spoke. “Perhaps the Universe was different millions of years ago. But I don’t know. Nobody knows. However, we have found one link in the chain. Maybe we will find others.”
Eight kept his thinking to himself. There was little to be gained in disputing Seven. And, after all, Eight saw that Seven was right. Or partly right. Robots were machines, fundamentally. Yet they were something more than machines. Machines could not dream. In Eight’s mind was the wild wonder—where had robots acquired their ability to dream? To what did that ability point?
Eight did not speak. He followed Seven and Nine. He watched, and thought.
They went out of the basement, went back to the floor where they had entered, forced their way up through the silent building. Dust, and furniture that became dust when they touched it, and, corroded metal, were in the rooms above, but of the race that had lived there they found no sign.
~ * ~
On through the city they went. Seven crowed exultantly over the wreck of a huge bulk that had turned on its side. An engine, with eight huge driving wheels, and Seven, digging in the dust, uncovered the remnants of the track on which the wheels had run.
“Another link,” Seven gloated. “A higher form, possessing the ability to move.”
“But not to think,” Nine still protested. “It ran on a track. There must have been another, separate intelligence guiding it.”
“What of it? Perhaps so—perhaps not. Perhaps the intelligence that guided it was the final robot form.” Again Seven suddenly ceased talking, and again Eight could feel the pulse of his troubled thinking. Final robot form-
“There was another, totally different, life-form here,” Eight spoke slowly, marshaling his vague thoughts. “A life-form that created and used these machines. But that life has vanished, utterly, leaving no trace of itself, except the ruins of its cities, the wreckage of its machines.”
“But what?” Nine gulped.
“What could have destroyed it? I have no idea. Only vaguely can I sense its existence, through the evidence that it once shaped a world to meet its needs. I have seen nothing that will give me a clue to its nature—or its death. Perhaps a new form of corrosion developed, destroying it. Perhaps—— But I can�
��t see the answer.”
They moved on through the ruins. The slow sun dropped down toward the horizon. The silent wind, searching among the haunted ruins, went with them.
“Look!” Nine called.
They stood in an open space in front of a squat metallic structure that had resisted the rain and the snow. But Nine was not pointing at the building. He moved forward, bent over an object half buried in the mold.
Seven gasped. “A robot. Almost an exact model of us. Here, at last, is final proof!”
Eagerly they bent down, scraping away the soil. Quickly, they uncovered the figure. Perhaps ten feet tall, it was more than twice their size. Eight saw it was a robot. Seven had been right, after all, and here was proof. Those machines had somehow managed to develop intelligence and to evolve into sentient beings.
Somehow the crude ore had shaped and forged itself.
And yet this figure differed from the true robot form. Eight saw the difference as they uncovered it. The hopes rising in his mind failed.
“No—it isn’t one of us. It’s only a statue.”
Cast of solid metal, covered by a thin film of corrosion, the statue lay, its feet still attached to a part of the pedestal that had served as a base from which, in some long-gone time, it had toppled. Eight stared at it, not heeding Seven’s thinking which came over the radio beam. Seven was insisting that even if it was a statue—a lifeless thing—the form showed that robots had developed here. Otherwise they would not have made a statue in this shape.
Eight recognized the logic of Seven’s statement, but the sight of the statue stirred again those vague rebellious thoughts, and in his mind was the feeling that the statue represented something more, that it was more than a replica of form—that it was the embodiment of an idea. But what that idea was, he could not grasp. Slender and graceful, yet with the suggestion of strength, it lay on the ground, a fallen god with head uplifted and arm outstretched. Eight’s thinking became clearer. Yes, it was a fallen god, or the representation of a fallen god, and his mind went back to the builder, the designer, the artist who had dreamed of this figure and had then created in metal a figure adequate to his dreaming. The artist was gone, the statue had fallen. Eight wondered about the dream-
~ * ~
His turgid thinking burst into clarity like a jet of suddenly spouting water. Ever since he had seen this world from afar, especially since he had seen the wreckage of all those mighty cities, he had wondered about the dream of the race that had lived and built here. The fate of the race had never saddened him: all things rusted into ruin eventually, all material things, all logical things. Only a dream might achieve immortality, only a dream could start in slime and go onward to the end of Time. But the dream of this race—whatever that dream had been—appeared to have died. Some catastrophe had overtaken them before they had grown strong enough to forge their dream into an immortal shape. Eight sighed, and the photocells that were his eyes lost luster.
He did not notice that Seven and Nine had left him, were forcing an entrance into the building, until Nine’s sharp call brought him to his feet.
There was only one large room, Eight saw. It had been a laboratory or a workshop. Benches, machinery, tools were crumbling, just as everything else on this planet was crumbling, just as the dream of the race had crumbled-
Nine’s voice, heavy with awe, echoed through the room.
“I—I can read it! It’s our language!”
The written language of the robots, here on this forgotten planet circling an insignificant sun in a lost corner of the Universe ! Eight felt the trembling pulse of currents flowing in his mind. They had found their past; they had found their ancestors. All the other evidence could be explained away, but not this.
Ancestors, forebears, those who had gone before, those who had labored to build for the benefit of some unknown descendant. Had the machine, the lever, and the wheel somehow been their forebears? Or had there been an alien form preceding the machine?
A metal plate, inches thick, supported on heavy metal pillars. A tough metal, almost completely rust-resistant.
Now Man dies. A mutant bacteriophage, vicious beyond imagination, is attacking, eating, destroying all living cells, even to dead animal matter.
There is no hope of escape on earth. The only hope is to flee from earth. Tomorrow we blast our first rocket ship off for Mars, ourselves in suspended animation to withstand the acceleration, the ship manned by Thoradson’s robots.
It may be we shall live again. It may be we shall die.
We go, and may God go with us.
Thus the record ended. Nine’s raspy voice faded, and for a second the echoes came back from the dark corners of the room. Then there was silence. Seven shifted his feet.
“Man,” he spoke. “Man. That is a word for which we have no meaning.”
“Perhaps,” Eight spoke softly, “perhaps it was the name of the life-form that created us.”
~ * ~
Seven did not answer, and Nine, too, was silent. A wind came into the room, moved restlessly, and went out again. The silence held. Seven stared at the metal plate, picking out the words one by one.
“It must be you are right,” he said. “See, they use the word —robot.” Wonder grew in his voice, and then disgust mingled with the wonder. “An organism—an animal—Yet obviously they must have created us, used us as slaves. They manned their ship with robots.”
Eight stirred but said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“That,” Nine whispered, “is why we are unable to find a link between the machine and us. They developed the machine, used it. They provided the intelligence. Finally they built machines with some kind of intelligence. It must have been late in their history, and they built very few of them. Perhaps they were afraid. There are so many links missing it is hard to know. But certainly, in a sense, they were our ancestors-”
“Yes,” Eight agreed. “In a sense that seems-”
“But they started for a near-by planet,” Seven protested. “Our sun is light-years distant. How did they ever get there?”
“They may have missed their aim. Or perhaps the robots rebelled and took the ship elsewhere, and in landing smashed it, only five of them managing to escape.”
“I don’t believe that,” Seven said. “You have no proof of it.”
“No,” Eight admitted. “No. We don’t even know what happened to the men on the ship.”
They stood again outside the building, three little metal men. Out yonder in the west the sun was dipping below the horizon. A soft dusk was coming down, hiding the barren world, and still the lonely wind was stirring in the shadows.
Eight saw the statue lying on the ground and vague thoughts stirred within his mind. “They may have eaten grass,” he said. “They may have eaten the flesh of other animals; they may have been weaklings; they may have arisen out of slime, but somehow I think there was something fine about them. For they dreamed, and even if they died-”
The robot bent over. Tiny, ageless, atom-fed motors within him surged with an endless power. The robot lifted the dream of an age-dead man and set the statue back on its feet.
The three returned to their ship, and it lifted, following its path out to the stars. The proud, blind eyes of a forgotten statue seemed to follow it.
<
~ * ~
While Dr. Craig’s reaction to the problem of the Plague was to flee earth, Simon Ames remained. After the Plague had subsided and war broke out he attempted to put his solution into effect.
INTO THY HANDS
by Lester del Rey
S
IMON Ames was old, and his face was bitter as only that of a confirmed idealist can be. Now a queer mixture of emotions crossed it momentarily, as he watched the workmen begin pouring cement to fill the small opening of the domelike structure, but his eyes returned again to the barely visible robot within.
“The last Ames’ Model 10,” he said ruefully to his son. “And even then I couldn�
�t put in full memory coils! Only the physical sciences here; biologicals in the other male form, humanities in the female. I had to fall back on books and equipment to cover the rest. We’re already totally converted to soldier robots, and no more humanoid experiments. Dan, is there no way conceivable war can be avoided?”
The young Rocket Force captain shrugged, and his mouth twitched unhappily. “None, Dad. They’ve fed their people on the glories of carnage and loot so long they have to find some pretext to use their hordes of warrior robots.”
“The stupid, blind idiots!” The old man shuddered. “Dan, it sounds like old wives’ fears, but this time it’s true; unless we somehow avoid or win this war quickly, there’ll be no one left to wage another. I’ve spent my life on robots, I know what they can do—and should never be made to do! Do you think I’d waste a fortune on these storehouses on a mere whim?”
Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04] Page 20