by Various
The vessel took off, rose straight through the atmosphere for about forty miles, and then hung, idly circling Earth, awaiting clearance before launching into the pulse drive. A full course between Earth and Grismet had to be plotted and cleared by the technicians at the dispatch center because the mass of the vessel increased so greatly with its pulsating speed that if any two ships passed within a hundred thousand miles of each other, they would at least be torn from their course, and might even be totally destroyed.
Wilkins had proposed a pinochle game, and he and Jordan sat playing in the control room.
The pilot had been winning and he was elated. "Seventy-six dollars so far," he announced after some arithmetic. "The easiest day's pay I made this month."
Jordan shuffled the cards and dealt them out, three at a time. He was troubled by his own thoughts, and so preoccupied that he scarcely followed the game.
"Spades, again," the pilot commented gleefully. "Well, ain't that too bad for you." He gave his cigar a few chomps and played a card.
Jordan had been looking out of the window. The ship had tilted and he could see without rising the rim of Earth forming a beautiful geometric arc, hazy and blue in its shimmering atmosphere.
"Come on, play," the pilot said, impatiently. "I just led an ace."
Jordan put down his cards. "I guess I better quit," he said.
"What the devil!" the pilot said angrily. "You can't quit like that in the middle of a deal. I got a flush and aces."
"I'm sorry," Jordan said, "but I'm going to lie down in my cabin until we are given clearance."
He opened the door of the little room and went into the hall. He walked down past his own cabin and stopped in front of another door, a new one that was sheathed in permallium. He hesitated a few moments; then he snapped open the outside latch and walked in, letting the door swing closed behind him.
* * * * *
Hall lay unmoving in the middle of the floor, his legs and arms fastened in greaves of permallium.
Jordan was embarrassed. He did not look directly at the robot.
"I don't know whether you want to talk to me or not," he started. "If you don't want to, that's all right. But, I've followed you since you landed on Earth, and I don't understand why you did what you did. You don't have to tell me, but I wish you would. It would make me feel better."
The robot shrugged--a very human gesture, Jordan noted.
"G-go ahead and ask me," he said. "It d-doesn't make any difference now."
Jordan sat down on the floor. "The boy was the one who gave you away. If not for him, no one would have ever known what planet you were on. Why did you let the kid get away?"
The robot looked straight at the agent. "Would you kill a child?" he asked.
"No, of course not," Jordan said a little bit annoyed, "but I'm not a robot either." He waited for a further explanation, but when he saw none was coming, he said: "I don't know what you were trying to do in that powerhouse at Ballarat, but, whatever it was, that old man couldn't have stopped you. What happened?"
"I l-lost my head," the robot said quietly. "The alarm and the lights rattled me, and I got into a p-panic."
"I see," said Jordan, frustrated, not really seeing at all. He sat back and thought for a moment. "Let me put it this way. Why do you stutter?"
Hall smiled a wry smile. "Th-that used to be a m-military secret," he said. "It's our one weakness--the one Achilles heel in a m-machine that was meant to be invulnerable."
He struggled to a sitting position. "You see, we were m-made as s-soldiers and had to have a certain loyalty to the country that m-made us. Only living things are loyal--machines are not. We had to think like human beings."
Jordan's brows contracted as he tried to understand the robot.
"You mean you have a transplanted human brain?" he asked incredulously.
"In a way," Hall said. "Our b-brains are permallium strips on which the mind of some human donor was m-magnetically imprinted. My mind was copied f-from a man who stuttered and who got panicky when the going got rough, and who couldn't kill a child no matter what was at s-stake."
Jordan felt physically ill. Hall was human and he was immortal. And according to galactic decree, he, like his fellows, was to be manacled in permallium and fixed in a great block of cement, and that block was to be dropped into the deep silent depths of the Grismet ocean, to be slowly covered by the blue sediment that gradually filters down through the miles of ocean water to stay immobile and blind for countless millions of years.
Jordan arose to his feet. He could think of nothing further to say.
He stopped, however, with the door half open, and asked: "One more question--what did you want with the electrical generator plants on Earth?"
Slowly and without emotion Hall told him, and when he understood, he became even sicker.
* * * * *
He went across to his cabin and stood for a while looking out the window. Then he lit a cigarette and lay down on his bunk thinking. After a time, he put out the cigarette and walked into the hall where he paced up and down.
As he passed the cell door for about the tenth time, he suddenly swung around and lifted the latch and entered. He went over to the robot, and with a key that he took from his pocket, he unlocked the greaves and chains.
"There's no point in keeping you bound up like this," he said. "I don't think you're very dangerous." He put the key back in his pocket.
"I suppose you know that this ship runs on an atomic pile," he said in a conversational tone of voice. "The cables are just under the floor in the control room and they can be reached through a little trap door."
Jordan looked directly into Hall's face. The robot was listening with great intentness.
"Well," the agent said, "we'll probably be leaving Earth's atmosphere in about fifteen minutes. I think I'll go play pinochle with the pilot."
He carefully left the door of the cell unlatched as he left. He walked to the control room and found Wilkins, a dry cigar butt clenched between his teeth, absorbed in a magazine.
"Let's have another game," Jordan said. "I want some of that seventy-six dollars back."
Wilkins shook his head. "I'm in the middle of a good story here. Real sexy. I'll play you after we take off."
"Nothing doing," Jordan said sharply. "Let's play right now."
Wilkins kept reading. "We got an eighteen-hour flight in front of us. You have lots of time."
The agent snatched the magazine out of his hands. "We're going to play right now in my cabin," he said.
"You quit when I have aces and a flush, and now you come back and want to play again. That's not sportsmanlike," Wilkins complained, but he allowed himself to be led back to Jordan's cabin. "I never saw anybody so upset about losing a miserable seventy-six bucks," was his final comment.
* * * * *
The robot lay perfectly still until he heard the door to Jordan's cabin slam shut, and then he arose as quietly as he could and stole out into the hall. The steel of the hall floor groaned, but bore his weight, and carefully, trembling with excitement inside of his ponderous metallic body, he made his way to the control room. He knelt and lifted the little trap door and found the naked power cable, pulsating with electrical current.
In a locker under the panel board he found a length of copper wire. It was all he needed for the necessary connection.
Since his capture, his fellows on Grismet had been silent with despair, but as he knelt to close the circuit, their minds flooded in on him and he realized with a tremendous horror that there were now nineteen, that all except he had been bound and fixed in their eternal cement prisons.
"We are going to have our chance," he told them. "We won't have much time, but we will have our chance."
He closed the circuit and a tremendous tide of electric power flowed into his head. Inside that two-inch shell of permallium was a small strip of metal tape on whose electrons and atoms were written the borrowed mind of a man. Connected to the tape was a minute
instrument for receiving and sending electromagnetic impulses--the chain by which the mind of one robot was tied to that of another.
The current surged in and the tiny impulses swelled in strength and poured out through the hull of the ship in a great cone that penetrated Earth's atmosphere in a quadrant that extended from Baffin land to Omaha, and from Hawaii to Labrador. The waves swept through skin and bone and entered the sluggish gelatinous brain of sentient beings, setting up in those organs the same thoughts and pictures that played among the electrons of the permallium strip that constituted Jon Hall's mind.
All nineteen clamored to be heard, for Hall to relay their voices to Earth, but he held them off and first he told his story.
* * * * *
The Casseiopeian delegate to the Galactic Senate was at the moment finishing his breakfast. He was small and furry, not unlike a very large squirrel, and he sat perched on a high chair eating salted roast almonds of which he was very fond.
Suddenly a voice started talking inside of his head, just as it did at that very second inside the heads of thirteen billion other inhabitants of the northwest corner of Earth. The Casseiopeian delegate was so startled that he dropped the dish of almonds, his mouth popping open, his tiny red tongue inside flickering nervously. He listened spellbound.
The voice told him of the war on Grismet and of the permallium constructed robots, and of the cement blocks. This, however, he already knew, because he had been one of the delegates to the Peace Conference who had decided to dispose of the robots. The voice, however, also told him things he did not know, such as the inability of the robots to commit any crime that any other sane human being would not commit, of their very simple desire to be allowed to live in peace, and most of all of their utter horror for the fate a civilized galaxy had decreed for them.
When the voice stopped, the Casseiopeian delegate was a greatly shaken little being.
* * * * *
Back on the ship, Hall opened the circuit to the nineteen, and they spoke in words, in memory pictures and in sensations.
* * * * *
A copter cab driver was hurrying with his fare from Manhattan to Oyster Bay. Suddenly, in his mind, he became a permallium robot. He was bound with cables of the heavy metal, and was suspended upside down in a huge cement block. The stone pressed firmly on his eyes, his ears, and his chest. He was completely immobile, and worst of all, he knew that above his head for six miles lay the great Grismet Ocean, with the blue mud slowly settling down encasing the cement in a stony stratum that would last till the planet broke apart.
The cab driver gasped: "What the hell." His throat was so dry he could scarcely talk. He turned around to his fare, and the passenger, a young man, was pale and trembling.
"You seeing things, too?" the driver asked.
"I sure am," the fare said unsteadily. "What a thing to do."
* * * * *
For fifteen minutes, over the northwest quadrant of Earth, the words and the pictures went out, and thirteen billion people knew suddenly what lay in the hearts and minds of nineteen robots.
* * * * *
A housewife in San Rafael was at the moment in a butcher shop buying meat for her family. As the thoughts and images started pouring into her mind, she remained stock-still, her package of meat forgotten on the counter. The butcher, wiping his bloodied hands on his apron froze in that position, an expression of horror and incredulity on his face.
When the thoughts stopped coming in, the butcher was the first to come out of the trancelike state.
"Boy," he said, "that's sure some way of sending messages. Sure beats the teledepths."
The housewife snatched her meat off the counter. "Is that all you think of," she demanded angrily.
"That's a terrible thing that those barbarians on Grismet are doing to those ... those people. Why didn't they tell us that they were human." She stalked out of the shop, not certain what she would do, but determined to do something.
* * * * *
In the ship Hall reluctantly broke off the connection and replaced the trap door. Then he went back to his cell and locked himself in. He had accomplished his mission; its results now lay in the opinions of men.
* * * * *
Jordan left the ship immediately on landing, and took a copter over to the agency building. His conversation with his superior was something he wanted to get over with as soon as possible.
The young woman at the secretary's desk looked at him coldly and led him directly into the inner office. The chief was standing up in front of the map of the galaxy, his hands in his pockets, his eyes an icy blue.
"I've been hearing about you," he said without a greeting.
Jordan sat down. He was tense and jumpy but tried not to show it. "I suppose you have," he said, adding, after a moment, "Sir."
"How did that robot manage to break out of his cell and get to the power source on the ship in the first place?"
"He didn't break out," Jordan said slowly. "I let him out."
"I see," the chief said, nodding. "You let him out. I see. No doubt you had your reasons."
"Yes, I did. Look--" Jordan wanted to explain, but he could not find the words. It would have been different if the robots' messages had reached Grismet; he would not have had to justify himself then. But they had not, and he could not find a way to tell this cold old man of what he had learned about the robots and their unity with men. "I did it because it was the only decent thing to do."
"I see," the chief said. "You did it because you have a heart." He leaned suddenly forward, both hands on his desk. "It's good for a man to have a heart and be compassionate. He's not worth anything if he isn't. But"--and he shook his finger at Jordan as he spoke--"that man is going to be compassionate at his own expense, not at the expense of the agency. Do you understand that?"
"I certainly do," Jordan answered, "but you have me wrong if you think I'm here to make excuses or to apologize. Now, if you will get on with my firing, sir, I'll go home and have my supper."
The chief looked at him for a long minute. "Don't you care about your position in the agency?" he asked quietly.
"Sure I do," Jordan said almost roughly. "It's the work I wanted to do all my life. But, as you said, what I did, I did at my own expense. Look, sir, I don't like this any better than you do. Why don't you fire me and let me go home? Your prisoner's safely locked up in the ship."
For answer the chief tossed him a stellogram. Jordan glanced at the first few words and saw that it was from Galactic Headquarters on Earth. He put it back on the desk without reading it through.
"I know that I must have kicked up a fuss. You don't have to spell it out for me."
"Read it," the chief said impatiently.
Jordan took back the stellogram and examined it. It read.
To: Captain Lawrence Macrae Detection Agency, Grismet.
From: Prantal Aminopterin Delegate from Casseiopeia Chairman, Grismet Peace Committee of the Galactic Senate.
Message: You are hereby notified that the committee by a vote of 17-0 has decided to rescind its order of January 18, 2214, directing the disposal of the permallium robots of Grismet. Instead, the committee directs that you remove from their confinement all the robots and put them in some safe place where they will be afforded reasonable and humane treatment.
The committee will arrive in Grismet some time during the next month to decide on permanent disposition.
Jordan's heart swelled as he read the gram. "It worked," he said. "They have changed their minds. It won't be so bad being discharged now." He put the paper back on the desk and arose to go.
The chief smiled and it was like sunlight suddenly flooding over an arctic glacier. "Discharged? Now who's discharging you? I'd sooner do without my right arm."
He reached in a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of old Earth bourbon and two glasses. He carefully poured out a shot into each glass, and handed one to Jordan.
"I like a man with a heart, and if you get away with it, why th
en you get away with it. And that's just what you've done."
He sat down and started sipping his whisky. Jordan stood uncertainly above him, his glass in his hand.
"Sit down, son," the old man said. "Sit down and tell me about your adventures on Earth."
Jordan sat down, put his feet on the desk and took a sizable swallow of his whisky.
"Well, Larry," he started, "I got into Earth atmosphere about 2:40 o'clock--"
* * *
Contents
EXILE FROM SPACE
By Judith Merril
Who was this strange girl who had been born in this place--and still it wasn't her home?...
I don't know where they got the car. We made three or four stops before the last one, and they must have picked it up one of those times. Anyhow, they got it, but they had to make a license plate, because it had the wrong kind on it.
They made me some clothes, too--a skirt and blouse and shoes that looked just like the ones we saw on television. They couldn't make me a lipstick or any of those things, because there was no way to figure out just what the chemical composition was. And they decided I'd be as well off without any driver's license or automobile registration as I would be with papers that weren't exactly perfect, so they didn't bother about making those either.
They were worried about what to do with my hair, and even thought about cutting it short, so it would look more like the women on television, but that was one time I was way ahead of them. I'd seen more shows than anyone else, of course--I watched them almost every minute, from the time they told me I was going--and there was one where I'd seen a way to make braids and put them around the top of your head. It wasn't very comfortable, but I practiced at it until it looked pretty good.