The Automated Goliath

by William F. Temple

  “You’ll never persuade Nunn to step into your ‘copter, Pete,” said Gerry. “He’s scared green of heights. Also depths, widths, and lengths.”

  “When the true scientific mind is hot on the track, it knows not fear,” Pete smiled.

  “You know not Nunn,” said Gerry drily.

  Soon after Pete had gone, Nunn—a small, old man who always seemed to be trying to look smaller and older than he really was—shuffled across the sand to us.

  “Mr. Magellan, I’m afraid I don’t feel very well. My stomach has been giving me trouble for some time now—”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said sympathetically. “I’ve been watching the way you covered up so that you could finish your work. Believe me, I’m grateful. So I’m going to rush you to the best stomach specialist in London, Bob Norris. He’s a personal friend of mine. I’ll have him meet the helicopter—Butler will fly you up, of course—so’s there’s no delay. I don’t want to disturb you, but it may very well be appendicitis verging on the acute—”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think it’s that bad, Mr. Magellan.”

  “Maybe not, but we can’t afford to take chances at your age, Nunn,” I said cheerfully. “Be ready to leave at two o’clock. Take a toothbrush. Don’t worry—Bob Norris will whip out the appendix, or whatever, before you even know he’s slit you open.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Nunn miserably. He wavered, then shuffled off, shrunken and very, very old.

  “You’re a damn sadist, Charles.”

  “And a damn liar, Gerry. Oh, well, we don’t get much fun these days.”

  Nunn had to fly with Pete, of course, and a long week later I got a visaphone call.

  “We’ve done it, we’ve got the sequence,” said Pete’s triumphant but blurry image. “Give us another couple of days to dope out the manual, and then—”

  I didn’t hear the rest, for Gerry shouted through the hut’s open doorway, “Charles—there’s a flying saucer coming our way.”

  I rushed out into the sunshine. The sea was near blue as the sky, and the one silver dot on the all-blue background caught the eye immediately. It was traveling high and fast, coming in from over the Atlantic.

  “A saucer—are you sure?”

  “It’s a Makkee-type saucer, no doubt of it,” said Gerry.

  His eyes were far keener than mine, and I trusted them.

  “Drahk,” I said, and though I’d wanted this moment, the thrill which went through my nerves was chilling.

  “Hell, we haven’t even a pistol on the Island,” said Gerry. “He’s caught us with our pants down.”

  We watched the silent oncoming saucer.

  Suddenly, I said, “It’s altering course slightly. Away from us. It’ll pass over well to the north.”

  “Could be a feint, old man, so watch it.”

  We did, until it was heading away from us over the mainland, up the long foot of England.

  “He thinks I’m in London,” I said, and ran back into the hut. Pete was still hanging on.

  “What the devil’s going on down there, Charles?”

  I told him quickly, and added, “Get the radar men onto him. Report tracking to me.”

  We had preserved a modest radar net around London against the threat of Drahk’s return.

  “Wilco,” said Pete, and was gone.

  “Actually,” said Gerry, “on second thought, it’s just as well we’re here. The power’s on and we can raise Prospero’s force-screen against him. But surely he hasn’t come alone. I guess that’s just a lone scout cruising ahead of a whole fleet. Probably not even manned, just telemetering information back.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  We didn’t have long to wait. Pete came on again, breathlessly. “The saucer’s crashed—in Windsor Great Park. It’s a wreck. Picked the biggest tree in the park to smash into. I’ve got some chaps investigating. Be back anon.”

  Gerry and I looked at each other.

  “That,” I said, “doesn’t sound like Drahk.”

  “It was a Makkee saucer—I’ll swear to it.”

  “Let’s wait for the next report before we start guessing.”

  At last Pete came back. “Almost certainly a Makkee saucer. Only one occupant. They’ve got him out alive and they’re bringing him to me. A white man, they said, but very odd and clearly from another planet. He’s a bit bruised and shaken, that’s all. What do you make of it?”

  “Offhand—nothing,” I said.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot—he’s asking for you by name. But he can’t speak English. Ill be back.”

  Pete was off again.

  I said, “I don’t know whether Pete’s deliberately trying to confuse me, but one thing’s for sure—I feel confused.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Gerry, and proferred me a cigarette. “Bite hard on this meantime.”

  Chapter 10

  The wait was so long this time I feared the uncertain communications had broken down. When the screen did become live, it framed two faces. One was Pete’s. The other was so distorted that momentarily I thought there was interference on the line.

  It was like a wax face beginning to melt and run. Every feature drooped, particularly the tapir-like nose. There was gray fur over the skull which I assumed to be a cap, and then found it wasn’t. The brows were just hairless ridges. The eyes were red as a stoplight: one was encircled by a black bruise. The rest of the face was flour-white.

  The being spoke a single word: a long one, full of clicks. “His name,” Pete informed us. “But we call him George.”

  “Magellanic,” said George. “Your name,” said Pete.

  “But is it?” I said dubiously. “It could refer to the Magellanic Cloud—a nebula. Maybe he comes from those parts.”

  “No, Charles, the sound originates from his glottis. The ‘ic’ suffix crops up in his language all the time. Don’t let it mislead you—he’s sober. But not, I think, overbright. He’s a bit of a nut.”

  “Got any idea why he’s come—or from where?”

  “No. As I said, he doesn’t understand English. He keeps pointing to the sky and repeating your name. Maybe he’s trying to warn us that the Makkees are coming back.”

  “But how the devil did he get hold of my name?” Pete shrugged. “Looks as though he must have had some contact with the Makkees.”

  “In which case,” I said, “it’s imperative we understand what he’s saying.”

  “Magellanic,” George said urgently, fixing me with his bright ruby eyes. An enormous hand, which seemed to have too many fingers, passed blurrily across the screen.

  “He’s pointing heavenward again,” said Pete absently, and then, suddenly, “Let me have him for a few days, Charles. I guarantee to learn enough of his lingo to understand him. It can be done through Uvova.”

  “But what about the manual?”

  “Oh, Nunn can handle that. I’ll still be able to give him some help.”

  “All right, but hurry it up. I’m tired of kicking my heels here.”

  “Mag—” began George, but Pete switched him off halfway.

  “George seems to be a man of few words,” Gerry commented. “It shouldn’t take Pete long to learn ‘em all.”

  It didn’t, in fact, but time being relative the next few days spent in killing it were interminable to me. Gerry and I nearly wore out a deck of cards. And in the aggregate I spent hours gazing at the shineless hull of the Revenge, wishing childishly that it could carry me through time as well as space… back to her.

  Irrationally, I’d come to regard time as an enemy. Had it been on my side, I could have saved Sarah. That small piece of it which had interposed itself between us had separated us eternally.

  I craved to lose myself in action of a kind which might lead me to pick up Drahk’s trail.

  Then one day Pete visaphoned and sent me half crazy with hope.

  He said, “I’ve got most of the story from George. It’s quite a story, so I’m flying hi
m down to you right away. The manual’s finished. I’ll bring that along, too. George knows where Drahk is, Charles, and he’s on our side against him and the Makkees. If we can only get the ship to operate, he’ll guide us to Drahk.”

  For a moment I just couldn’t speak.

  Then I said, gruffly, “111 be waiting.”

  The helicopter was carrying a full load when it came—Pete, Nunn, and George. Nunn was out first, looking green. He handed me a thick little notebook and went at a tottering run to the lavatory block. Flying, or the fear of it, always made him literally sick.

  Then Pete emerged and attempted to-v-give George a helping hand on the short ladder. George disdained it and jumped. When he landed his long legs bent almost in semicircles to absorb the shock. He looked momentarily like a pair of callipers. His arms and legs were jointless, flexible as lengths of rubber hose. He was comic-grotesque. His white face, black eye, and furry head gave me the impression of a panda bear. The only prosaic thing about him was the black one-piece suit.

  His walk, as he approached me, was an indescribable bouncy sway.

  He seized my reluctant hand, wrapping seven or eight tentacle-like fingers around it. They were ice cold and I tried not to shudder. His red eyes burned into mine.

  “Magellanic, gladic to meetic you.”

  His voice was thick, slurry, but apart from the involuntary additions, the pronunciation was good.

  “You speak English now?” I asked.

  “Yes, most goodie.”

  “Where is Drahkr

  George pushed a long finger at the sky, near to the zenith.

  “Vathic.”

  Pete supplied, “That’s George’s home planet, in the system around Alpha Centauri and Proxima. It seems when the Makkee fleet bound for Earth learnt from Drahk that we were up in arms against them, they turned aside and landed on Vathic instead. So we’re partly responsible for George’s people being engulfed by the Makkees. George himself escaped, being a man of unusual spirit.”

  “My whiskey is goodie,” George remarked.

  I raised an eyebrow at Pete.

  “Whiskey—spirit,” he said. “Afraid you’ll have to get used to that sort of thing. It was a rush job. We went through the usual performance of pointing at things for nouns, acting out verbs, saying the appropriate words. Then I recorded Vathic words and their English equivalents on tape, and fed ‘em into Uvova. When I spoke basic English into a mike, Uvova would search out the relevant sections of tape and play them through a speaker. So we were able to hold conversations through Uvova—and incidentally memorize quite a few words.”

  “That was smart,” said Gerry. “But George seems to have memorized the wrong ones.”

  “Not his fault,” said Pete. “An electronic brain can’t distinguish between, say, ‘mine,’ possessive, or ‘mine,’ explosive, or ‘mine,’ subterranean. A word like ‘shy’ might be translated as ‘throw’ instead of ‘bashful,’ or ‘palm’ as ‘hand’ instead of ‘tree.’ And so on.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, it makes for laughs. But perhaps we’d better hear George’s story over a glass of spirit.”

  We settled in my hut and I got out the bottle.

  “I’ll tell it,” said Pete. “George’s English might confuse you.”

  He half emptied his glass, and began. He said the planet Vathic didn’t rotate on its axis. Therefore, one face of it was turned perpetually sunward and the other was always in shadow. George sometimes described the sides as “the light and the dark,” sometimes as “the light and the heavy”—another example of semantic confusion.

  This planetary division had bred two distinct races—the sun-dwellers, the Nams; and the people of the shadows, the Danics. George was a Danic, as his white skin, denied sunlight, testified. The Nams were golden-brown people, taller and more rigid of frame.

  The twilight frontier was accepted as a social as well as natural division. If a Nam crossed it into Danic territory, he was killed. And vice versa. Peace had been maintained for centuries by observing strictly the rule that the frontier was inviolable.

  George, sitting shapeless on a couch, said, “It is bestic that way. If we do not crossic the splitting line one on his each, then we do not crossic it all on our many.”

  I looked at Pete. “Interpreter!”

  “If we don’t cross the frontier one by one, then we shan’t cross it in masses—or armies. Isolationism plus, but it has its points. Or had—until the Makkees came. They occupied the Nams’ sunlit side, subduing the Nams by mass-hypnosis, their usual technique. The Nams are scientifically well advanced—more so than the handicapped Danics—and their world is warm, comfortable, and automatic. Just what the Makkees want—the cold, dark, only partly automatic Danic half is useless to them.”

  “Half a world is better than no planet,” I said. “But aren’t they going to find it crowded, with the Nams and all?”

  “On that same point,” said Pete, “Drahk regained the prestige he’d lost through his defeat by us—apparently he was in the doghouse for some time. He came up with the idea of deporting all Nams to the Danic area. Each race is already more or less conditioned to kill members of the other on sight. The Nams will have this idee-fixe strengthened by hypnotic suggestion. The Danics will have to fight back in self-defense. So both the redundant races will exterminate themselves in a killing-ground which the Makkees have no use for anyhow. That’s Drahk’s neat solution.”

  Gerry asked shrewdly, “How did George get to know all this? I can’t see the Makkees taking him into their confidence.”

  “It was this way,” said Pete. “Recently, the Danics had put a satellite in orbit around Vathic, a huge mirror with living quarters attached for maintenance. Orbital time—twenty hours, so for ten hours out of twenty, Danicland had an artificial moon. It supplied only a weak general light, but it helped.”

  “For us, it is lottic moonshine,” George observed earnestly.

  “He means it’s very bright moonlight, to Danic eyes, though it would seem feeble to,ours. George was a technician in this satellite. Drahk attacked it by flying saucer, captured it, and took over. He was still in the doghouse at the time, and had been given the job no other Makkee wanted—to investigate conditions on the cold, dark side of Vathic. He side-stepped the assignment to some extent by pumping George for information. And made George guide him in the saucer to some of the more important centers.

  “When Drahk returned to Nam-land to make his report, he took George along. The Makkees spoke poor Vathicanese; George had picked up a smattering of Makkee and was useful as an interpreter. Drahk hadn’t yet conceived his face-saving idea, and was still a social outcast. He had no one to confide in but George, and sometimes he let his tongue run on—about Earth, and how he was now in trouble because his plans had been thwarted by an Earth leader named Magellan.

  “But when he had his big idea, and was reinstated as a Makkee leader, he ran at the mouth once too often. He boasted to George about how he’d regained his rank. And why. Until then, George hadn’t realized how ruthless the Makkees could be. This planned genocide horrified him.

  “In indulgent moments, Drahk had given him lessons in handling the flying saucer, perhaps with the idea of keeping George on as a reserve pilot. George was a good technician and his space station job had taught him a lot about astronomy. One day, alone in the pilot’s cabin, he came across charts marked with the course to Earth from Alpha Centauri. Also maps of Earth, including one of England with London ringed—London, where lived the Earth leader, Magellan.

  “He decided to escape to Earth and summon the mighty Magellan to come and crush the Makkees again—and perhaps save the Danics from total extinction. He prepared a cache of food, watched for an opportunity. It came, he took it. The saucer’s top speed was near to that of light. The trip took four and a half years, though it didn’t seem nearly so long to him because of the relativity effect. Rather typically of George, it ended in anticlimax; he misjudged the saucer’s height and hit
a tree. End of saucer. Might have been the end of George, too, if he’d possessed any bones to break. He got away with a black eye.”

  “An honorable wound,” I said and nerved myself to reach out and grasp George’s chilly, flabby hand. “Yes, I’ll come back to Vathic with you, George. I will punish Drahk, I promise. Later, all the Makkees. But I cannot take an army to Vathic yet, because I have only one ship.”

  “Killic Drahk,” said George.

  I nodded. “I’m glad we feel the same way about it.”

  I took the little notebook manual from my pocket and ‘ studied it.

  Presently I said, “This seems straightforward enough. I see no reason why we shouldn’t start for Vathic today. Why, with luck we could even be back today, too. The round trip is nine years by saucer—but no time at all by the Revenge.”

  Pete frowned. “Isn’t that rather like going off the thirty-foot board before you’ve learned to swim?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly how I learned to swim.” Oh.” Pete was taken aback. Then he said hesitantly, “I was thinking maybe we should make a trial run to the moon or, say, Venus. The margin for error widens with the distance.”

  “I can’t see that footling little trips within the solar system can be anything but a waste of time,” I said. “When it comes right down to it, the Alpha Centauri voyage will still remain one big leap of faith. We might as well make it to begin with.”

  Pete shrugged. Gerry asked, “How do we know the atmosphere on Vathic is breathable?”

  “It can’t be all that different from Earth,” I said, “or else George here would be in trouble. If he can stand the change of atmosphere, so can we.” I added irritably, “Look, I only want to see Drahk for a few minutes. That’ll be enough.”

  “I can understand your impatience, Charles,” said Pete, “but this spur of the moment stuff—things are liable to get overlooked. How about arms, for instance? Do you really think you’ll get a chance to get near enough to Drahk to grab him with your bare hands?”

  I’d forgotten there wasn’t a gun on the island. I chewed my thumbnail undecidedly.

  “All right,” said Pete with a sigh, “I might as well tell you it occurred to me to bring a few needle-guns back from town. They’re in the ‘copter. I’ll—”