The Automated Goliath

by William F. Temple

  “I feel heavy, too,” said Gerry. “And damned hungry.”

  “Heavy, that’s it—me, too,” I said. “Also, I’m beginning to feel my toes again. They’re tingling. I can wriggle them. The drug’s wearing off.”

  “I can’t feel a thing,” said Pete, staring at his feet. But soon he did. So did Gerry. But there was a paradox; as our muscles grew stronger, our legs became more difficult to move.

  Pete frowned. “Another Makkee trick? Are they reaching us with some ray?”

  “Ask George.”

  Pete tried George in Vathicanese.

  George chose to answer in English, as the sun sank from sight and we flew on into thickening dusk. He pointed to the dark horizon, and said, “Is the heavy side.”

  For the moment I thought stupidly he was referring to something akin to the Heaviside Layer, but Pete said, “The heavy side. That’s what he calls the dark side sometimes. Of course, that’s not a semantic mix-up at all! Everything is heavier on the dark side of Vathic. Gravity is more intense there—I can’t think why.”

  I rubbed my chin, and even that was an effort. “I think you’re right, Pete. But I can’t think why, either. Gravity is related to mass. Therefore, the mass must be greater on the shadowed side than on the sunlit side. That would put this planet in a state of imbalance. It would revolve eccentrically on its axis and eventually disrupt. Yet Vathic doesn’t revolve. It’s come to rest with one face turned towards its sun… the wrong face, as I see it. Surely the heavier side should be turned innermost, mass attracting mass?”

  “No comment,” said Gerry. “Not my line of country.”

  Pete said, “You’re assuming a couple of things, one of which is certainly wrong. First, that Vathic has come to rest. Maybe it has, but only in a temporary misleading sense. ‘Temporary,’ astronomically speaking, is a relative term; it can mean ages. Superficially, Vathic may appear at rest, but its inner forces—centrifugal, centripetal—must be in a state of imbalance. The earthquakes point to that. Without knowledge of cosmic history in these parts we can’t say what caused the imbalance in the first place. Perhaps some wandering heavenly body, an asteroid on the loose. Maybe just the stresses of the Alpha and Proxima system.”

  “Um. What was my other false assumption?”

  “That Vathic is a globe. Remember?—it’s an ovoid.”

  “Eggic,” said George suddenly, without relaxing his attention on the dimming, scudding landscape. “The yolkic is unchased.”

  Anyhow, that’s what it sounded like.

  We stared at him. “The yolk of the egg is not chased,” I said, attempting translation. “It still makes no sense.”

  “Not chased, unchased,” Pete muttered. He pondered. Then, “I get it. He said ‘unchaste’—in the sense of ‘loose.’ The yolk of the egg is loose. He means the heavy core of Vathic has become detached, it’s loose inside the outer shell, on the rampage. It has distorted the shape of the planet.”

  George made a gesture of assent. “Soonic hatch.”

  Gerry said uneasily, “Think he means it’ll soon break out of its shell? Please, tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Yes,” said George, answering for himself. “Nams warnic longic time. We go to Earthic—quick.”

  I looked at Pete interrogatively. He questioned George in his own language, and was answered at some length.

  Pete absorbed it, then told us, “Sure, George is no fool about material matters. When the earthquakes started, he guessed it was the beginning of the final crack-up and was plenty scared. The Nams had warned the Danics that it would probably happen in the indeterminate future, and that when it came earthquakes would be the first sign of it. Hence George’s sudden change of heart, if you could call it that. Drahk was right; George is all for himself.”

  “It beats me that the Makkees didn’t realize the state of things,” I commented.

  “Does it? It shouldn’t. You were right when you said their scientists were dopes. Besides, remember it wasn’t the Makkees’ original intention to settle here—we forced it on them unexpectedly. One presumes they’d made no thorough survey of the planet lately.”

  “Isn’t that a shame?” I said. “And now they’re stuck with it. So are we unless we can get back to the Revenge.”

  I was beginning to feel a little depressed. The increasing darkness and gravitational drag added their psychological quota here.

  George was quite unaffected, however. This was his home, ground, even if he did prefer Nam-land. I understood now his easy handling of heavy weights, his bouncing walk in a weaker gravitational field. And his flexible bodily construction was nature’s way of coping with this bone-crushing hug of gravitation, which was flattening us against the carpet. Strength was returning to our legs but we could scarcely stir.

  Drahk’s ship was so far behind now that we couldn’t distinguish it from the other blips.

  Our saucer began to decelerate. George had seen a likely refuge. After some bumpy maneuvering, the ship came to rest. Through the ports I could see black branches and leaves silhouetted against a moonless, starry sky. George opened the door and went out there. A faint breeze came through the aperture. It was very quiet outside.

  We lay helpless, pinned down, waiting and wondering.

  George returned with an armful of plumlike fruit and distributed it. It was sweet and gave one a noticeable lift. Munching, Pete questioned George, then reported to us.

  “Seems we’re hidden among a bunch of trees near the bottom of a valley. George says we’ve got to wait here for four and a half Earth hours. If the Makkees can’t locate us soon, they’ll have to abandon the chase, because their frail bodies can’t stand this Danic gravity even as well as ours. If we can outlast them, George says, our chances are good. He has a plan for getting us all back to the Revenge.”

  “What plan?” I asked.

  “He won’t say., He fears if he tells you, you may steal the plan and abandon him here. He wants to make sure of coming with us.”

  “Doesn’t trust a soul, does he? Why the precise figure of four and a half hours? We can leave directly the Makkees have gone.”

  Pete shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Gerry said, “What possible plan could there be? We’ve got to fly back—we can’t walk two steps under this gravity, quite apart from the impossible distance. And if we fly, the Makkee radar will detect us sooner or later. We’ll be chased back here again.”

  “True. But what can we do but wait?” I said.

  We waited. Our vision adjusted itself to the starlight to some extent but we could still see little.

  Presently, the silence was disturbed by a distant rumbling, which rolled nearer. The ground trembled.

  Gerry coughed nervously. “Hell, another quake?”

  I thought, with more irritation than fear, Did these things always have to happen when we were quite unable to move?

  George said, “No, notic quake.”

  He turned the TV cameras this way and that, searching, finally focussing them on the valley floor a hundred feet below us—so I judged. A bright, uncertain light was approaching along it. It seemed to be the source of the disturbance.

  “Thinkic Nam war machine,” said George.

  “Then the war isn’t over yet?” I asked, surprised.

  There was no answer. Now we could discern the outline of the thing itself. It was like a great headless tortoise, crawling deviously among the trees, avoiding the bigger, bull-dozing the smaller. A searchlight beam quested restlessly from its forepart.

  George said something quietly to Pete, who passed it to us.

  “It’s a kind of tank, thickly armored and carrying armaments. The Nams are affected by this gravitation much as we are—they can only move around in these things, at ground level, anyhow. If it detects us, it’ll probably attack us.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I whispered, and found my lips were dry.

  Suddenly, the cumbersome thing stopped right below us. The roaring cut off abruptly, the searchlig
ht snapped out.

  There was a nasty silence, inside and out.

  “If it’s going to park here, we’re sunk,” said Gerry, sotto voce.

  “It seenic something,” said George.

  It wasn’t easy to cross my fingers, but I managed it. It didn’t reassure me. I cringed, waiting for a thunderbolt.

  “Look up—overhead, through the ports,” Pete muttered.

  We looked. A dark shape, familiar merely in silhouette, was circling and recrossing the patches of sky that we could see. A Makkee saucer, only a few hundred feet up, apparently scenting our presence.

  But that we never knew for sure. Something arose with a terrific buzz from the Nam war machine and sped towards the saucer. Something like a flying torpedo.

  There was a bright explosion in the sky, and the saucer—now just a ragged shape—came dropping like a stone. The ground shook again as it landed near the lip of the valley.

  “That was a guided missile,” Pete informed us unnecessarily.

  “I only wish it was Drahk on the receiving end,” I said. “That would be poetic justice; he started the war.”

  “Justice is seldom poetic,” said Pete.

  With a roar, the war machine started up and lumbered on, the searchlight playing on trees ahead of it. George waited until the sound of it had died in the distance, then went outside. He was away some time. When he came back, he said, “Makkee saucer. All deadic. Notic Drahk, his saucer. Another.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  Presently, a weak sort of moonlight came filtering through the tree-branches. The artificial moon was rising.

  The hours dragged on. We talked little. It was tiring to keep moving one’s jaws here. At length the tiny moon became visible overhead. It looked like a nova among the dimmer stars.

  George said, “We go.”

  He backed the saucer from its hiding place, and then smoothly took off. Our ascent became swifter. The effect of this upward acceleration was murderous on us. The blood drained from our eyes, from our frontal lobes, and we passed into unconsciousness.

  I came to at last to discover myself floating like a balloon in the air inside the saucer. From too much weight, our condition had changed to no weight; we were in free fall. To one side of us was blackness tinctured with millions of untwinkling stars. To the other side—just blackness. I felt sick, dizzy, confused.

  Pete, by courtesy of George, presently explained the situation. We were stationed behind the great mirror of the artificial moon, within its back shadow. And together with it we were falling in orbit around Vathic.

  This satellite had not been manned since Drahk captured its crew. So no one knew we were there. We could fly across the sky of Nam-land, unseen, undetectable. Naturally, the satellite itself showed on Makkee radar screens—to be treated with the contempt of familiarity.

  From long experience in the station, George knew our position precisely from hour to hour. Directly we reached a calculated point on the orbit, he intended to plummet the saucer almost vertically down on Murges, like a dropped bomb. We had to gamble on reaching the Revenge before the Makkees had time to do much about it.

  This was George’s plan, and it was a good one, and it was a pity that it was entirely wasted effort.

  The moment came. We plunged down to Murges—or what had been Murges. For another earthquake had struck, and Murges was only one of many towns boiling smoke and flame from their ruins.

  The Makkees had more to concern themselves with than sitting around watching for us on radar screens.

  In our turn, we had small concern for the Makkees. We were solely concerned about the Revenge. Had the further quakes damaged it? Anxiously, we surveyed the ravaged area of Murges, seeking it. An unusually bright spot some miles from the city drew our attention. We identified it, with surprise, as a Makee saucer embedded sidewise in the earth, reflecting the sunlight like a mirror.

  “That was a nasty crash,” I observed. And we were struck by a possibility.

  Gerry voiced it. “Drahk? His runabout was badly damaged.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  Then Pete pointed eagerly to a distant black pill. “The Revenge.”

  As we approached it, it looked reassuringly solid among the smashed little white houses. Yet the ground had risen in waves around it and they were split by great fissures.

  We could see no living creatures in the vicinity.

  We landed on the mutilated lawn near the Revenge. I was out first, unsteady on my feet, making a new adjustment to gravity. I had George’s ray gun in my fist. The others followed slowly.

  The ramp of the ship was down, just as we had left it. I mounted it cautiously, crouching, and peeped in. One solitary Makkee was in there, turning the dials.

  My nerves and muscles hardened, and I became ice-cold.

  “Never mind it, Drahk. You won’t get anywhere. And you’re not going anywhere.”

  He went still, then turned slowly. He was unarmed, and his clothing was spattered with amber fluid. There was a gash on his cheek bone, and that was amber too. I realized that for the first time I was seeing Makee blood.

  He said, “That is a reasonable prediction, but experience is teaching me that it is absurd for anyone to predict anything.”

  The reedy voice held no more emotion than artificial speech concocted from electronic wave patterns.

  Tin here to settle the account, Drahk. Come on out.”

  I backed down the ramp, keeping him covered as he followed.

  He said, “The matter was almost settled for you only a little while ago. My damaged ship crashed when I was on my way back here. I escaped death by the merest chance. I had to make my way here on foot. The earthquakes have destroyed transport and communications. Very soon they will destroy this planet.”

  “I know that.”

  A roll of thunder seemed to run the length of the horizon. Drahk listened. As it faded, he said, “More of my people are being killed over there.”

  “They have the ships they came in,” I said shortly. “They can leave.”

  “Those that could leave, have left—including my useless technicians. Many ships were destroyed. Many Makkees have not been able to escape.”

  “The universe will be enriched by their loss.”

  Drahk looked at me inscrutably. “With Prospero’s ship and its like your people can win the universe from the Makkees. But not without certain essential knowledge—which planets my people occupy, where the key points are, what strategy will succeed against them. I can give you this knowledge—in exchange for my life.”

  I heard Pete gasp. Gerry muttered, “Stinking little traitor 1”

  I said, “You rayed Sarah Masters to death because she betrayed the Makkees. It is fitting, therefore, that you receive the same punishment for the same crime.”

  My finger began to tighten on the trigger button.

  Drahk said quickly, “That is what you call justice. Makkees do not understand justice. Any Makkee in my place would say what I have said. Did any of them delay to search for me when I crashed? No! Self-preservation is our law. I killed Sarah simply because she had chosen to work against us. But I am willing to work with you. So what reason can there be for killing me? It is against your own interests.”

  I realized finally that it was impossible for me to try to see through a Makkee’s eyes. And Drahk could not be made to see through ours. Historically, philosophically, even biologically our races were literally worlds apart.

  By what right, except that of conquest, could I judge him by the ethics of the human race? He was born without kindness, sympathy or mercy.

  Pete stepped beside me. He put a hand on the ray gun, and said, “He’s a swine—granted. And I know just now badly you feel about Sarah. But don’t use this thing. Make it quick—and have done. Use this.”

  He eased the ray gun from my hand, replaced it with a needle-pistol. I stared down at it, then at Drahk, who waited silently.

  Then I whispered to Pete. He nodded.
“Good.”

  He went back and spoke to George, who climbed back into the flying saucer. A few seconds later, the saucer began slowly to rise. From a height of maybe fifteen feet, George jumped from the open door, landing with a characteristic bounce.

  The saucer sailed steadily up into the blue, the last one operating on Vathic, and now leaving it forever.

  Drahk watched it go.

  I motioned the other three. They filed past Drahk into the Revenge.

  I said, “Drahk, back there in Murges you condemned yourself. Regarding bargaining, you told me, I could not rely on any promise you might make. You chose to seize this planet. I shall not take it from you. You may remain in possession.”

  He made no answer. I entered the ship. As the ramp rose, I looked back at the lone, small figure and the wide background of wreckage. I felt almost a pang of pity—knowing at the same time how he would have gibed again at my sentimentalism.

  The ramp door closed, cutting short another deep death-cry from doomed Vathic.

  I turned my attention to the dials.

  We returned to solid, placid Earth.

  And now I sit here and wonder whether I should be right to impose my own restlessness on my fellow men and lead the big crusade against the Makkee empire. Or whether to leave them in peace, to nourish their souls in their new cultures.

  The Napoleons, and would-be Napoleons, are born with this problem as much a part of them as their hearts and lungs. Only some have more conscience than others.