The Cosmic Computer

by H. Beam Piper

  X

  They sent a snooper in first; it picked up faint radiation leakagefrom inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. Thetunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infraredvision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeepfollowed, Anse Dawes piloting and Conn at the snooper controlswatching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loadedwith men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They hadcut screen-and-radio communication with the outside; they weren't evenusing inter-vehicle communication.

  At length, the snooper emerged into a big cavern, swinging slowly toscan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular; it wasnatural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth.There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all batteredand in poor condition, dusty and cobwebbed: the spaceport junkheap. Apassage, still large enough for one of the gunboats, led deeper intothe mountain toward the crater. They sent the snooper in and, after awhile, followed.

  They came to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, theywere marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shroudedobjects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they foundevidence of recent investigation.

  Beyond was another passage, almost as wide as the Mall in Litchfield;even the _Lester Dawes_ could have negotiated it. According to theplans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open craterbeyond. Anse turned the jeep into a side passage, and Conn recalledthe snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan, it led to another naturalcavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The otherhalf was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep; above this and just underthe ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions.

  The snooper reported visible light ahead; fluoroelectric light fromone of the upper passages, and firelight from the pit. Theair-analyzer reported woodsmoke and a faint odor of burning oil. Hesent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit.

  A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, somehundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat,squatted or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the soundbox.

  "Who the blazes are they?" Anse whispered. "I can't see any way theycould have gotten down there."

  They were in rags, and they weren't armed; there wasn't so much as aknife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the otherjeep forward.

  "Prisoners," he said. "I think they were hauled down here on a scow,shoved off, and left when the fighting started. Cover me," he told themen in the lorries. "I'm going down and talk to them."

  Somebody below must have heard something. As Anse took the jeep overand started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving,the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gatheringup clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, themen in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women andchildren.

  They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was atall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man witha black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with adirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a capon which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by theemblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words CHIEF.And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girlin baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others, she was dirty,but in spite of the rags and filth, Conn saw that she was beautiful.Black hair, dark eyes, an impudently tilted nose.

  They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed toperplexity and then hope.

  "Who are you?" the tall man with the gray beard asked. "You're none ofthis gang here."

  "Litchfield Exploration & Salvage; I'm Conn Maxwell."

  That meant nothing; none of them had been near a news-screen lately.

  "What's going on topside?" the man with the bandaged head and the fourstripes on his sleeve asked. "There was firing, artillery andnuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloodymurderers out?"

  "We're working on it," Conn said. "I take it they aren't friends ofyours?"

  Foolish Question of the Year; they all made that evident.

  "They took my ship; they murdered my first officer and half my crewand passengers...."

  "They burned our home and killed our servants," the girl said. "Theykidnapped my father and me...."

  "They've been keeping us here as slaves."

  "It's the Blackie Perales gang," the tall man with the gray beardsaid. "They've been making us work for them, converting a blasted tubof a contragravity ship into a spacecraft. I beg your pardon, CaptainNichols; she was a fine ship--for her intended purpose."

  "You're Captain Nichols?" Anse Dawes exclaimed. "Of the _HarrietBarne_?"

  "That's right. The _Harriet Barne's_ here; they've been making us workon her, to convert her to an interplanetary craft, of all idioticthings."

  "My name's Yves Jacquemont," the man with the gray beard said. "I'm aretired hyperspace maintenance engineer; I had a little business atWaterville, buying, selling and rebuilding agricultural machinery.This gang found out about me; they raided and burned our village andcarried me and my daughter, Sylvie, away. We've been working for themfor the last four months, tearing Captain Nichols' ship down andarmoring her with collapsium."

  "How many pirates are there here?"

  That started an argument. Nobody was quite sure; two hundred and fiftyseemed to be the highest estimate, which Conn decided to play safe byaccepting.

  "You get us out of here," Yves Jacquemont was saying. "All we want isa chance at them."

  "How about arms? You can't do much with clubs and fists."

  "Don't worry about that; we know where to get arms. The treasurehouse, where they store their loot. There's plenty of arms andammunition, and anything else you can think of. They've used us tohelp stow the stuff; we know where it is."

  "Anse, you remember those scows we saw, in the big room before we cameto the broad passage? Take four men in the jeep; have them lift two ofthem and bring them here. Then, you get out to the end of the tunneland call the _Lester Dawes_. Tell them what's happened, tell them theycan get gunboats all the way in, and wait to guide them when theyarrive."

  When Anse turned and climbed into the jeep, he asked Yves Jacquemont:"Why does this Perales want an interplanetary ship?"

  "He's crazy!" Jacquemont swore. "Paranoid; megalomaniac. He talks oforganizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band andmaking himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweaponson Koshchei--I suppose there are, at that--and he wants to get a lotof planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators." He lowered hisvoice. "Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'dblow the _Harriet Barne_ up as soon as he got her out of atmosphere."

  He talked for a while to Jacquemont and his daughter Sylvie, and toNichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There wasevidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could bebuilt, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and acollapsed-matter producer. The _Harriet Barne_ was gutted, half torndown, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. Itmight be possible to continue the work on her and take her to space.

  Then the two scows floated over the top of the pit and began lettingdown. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men inone and the women and children in the other. At the top, he took overthe remaining jeep, getting Jacquemont, his daughter, and the twocontragravityship officers in with him.

  "Up to the top," Jacquemont said. "Take the middle passage, and turnright at the next intersection."

  As they approached the section where the pirates stored their loot,the sound of guns and explosions grew louder, and they began pickingup radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled andincomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking amongthemselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their owncommunication equipment; nobody would notice
it.

  The treasure room looked like a giant pack rat's nest. Cases andcrates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels. Machinery. Household andindustrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and beganrummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open; ina moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybodywas smoking. The pirates evidently hadn't issued any tobacco rationsto their prisoners.

  And they found arms and ammunition, began ripping open cases, handingout rifles, pistols, submachine guns. The prisoners grabbed them evenmore hungrily than the cigarettes. Sylvie Jacquemont took charge ofthe ammunition; she had three men opening boxes for her, while shepassed out boxes of cartridges and made sure that everybody hadammunition to fit their weapons. A ragged man who might have been afarm-tramp or a rich planter before his capture had gotten a bale ofcloth open and was tossing rags around while the chief engineerinspected weapons and showed people how to clean out the cosmoline andfill their spare magazines.

  Conn collected a few of his own party.

  "Let's look these robots over," he said. "Find about half a dozen wecan load with blasting explosive and send ahead of us oncontragravity."

  They found several--an electric-light servicer, a couple ofwall-and-window washers, a serving-robot that looked as if it had comefrom a restaurant, and an all-purpose robo-janitor. In the passageoutside, they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite andpackages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap-iron and other junkaround the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons,the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessaryand a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jacquemont, with asubmachine gun slung from one shoulder and a canvas bag of sparemagazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing.

  "Well, look what you're doing to him!" she mock-reproached. "That's adirty trick to play on a little robot!"

  He grinned at her. "You and my mother would get along. She alwaystreats robots like people."

  "Well, they are, sort of. They aren't alive--at least, I don't thinkthey are--but they do what you tell them, and they learn tricks, andthey have personalities."

  That was true. He didn't think robots were alive, either, thoughbiophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned downto defining life. Robots could learn, if you used the term looselyenough. And any robot with more than five hundred hours service pickedup a definite and often exasperating personality.

  "I've been working with them, and tearing them down and fixing them,ever since I was in pigtails," she added.

  The half-dozen natural leaders among the prisoners--Jacquemont and hisdaughter, the two _Harriet Barne_ officers, and a couple ofothers--bent over the photoprinted plans Conn had, located theirposition, and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead.Sylvie Jacquemont could handle robots; she would ride in the frontseat of the jeep while he piloted. Vibart, the chief engineer, andYves Jacquemont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow withthe fighting men. One lorry of his own party would follow the jeep;the other would bring up the rear.

  He snapped on the screen and punched the ship combination. StefanJorisson appeared in it.

  "Hi, Conn! You all right?" He raised his voice. "Conn's on-screen!"

  His father appeared at Jorisson's shoulder and, a moment later, KlemZareff.

  "Well, we're in, all right," he said. "We just picked up an army,too." He swung the jeep to get the crowd in the pickup, explaining whothey were. "Did you hear from Anse?"

  "Yes, he just screened in," Rodney Maxwell said. "He said a gunboatcan get in."

  "That's right; clear into the crater."

  "Well, we're going to put three of them inside," Zareff told him."_Werewolf_, _Zombi_, and _Dero_. And a troop carrier with fifty men;flamethrowers, portable machine guns, bomb-launchers; regularspecial-weapons section. What can you do where you are?"

  "Here? Nothing. We're going to work around to the other side of thecrater, and then find a vertical shaft and go up topside and make asmuch disturbance as we can."

  "That's it!" Zareff approved. "Pull them off balance; as soon as weget in, we'll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour;it's going to take time getting to the tunnel-mouth without beingspotted from above."

  He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and theother lorry, followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead likea pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark andsilent and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that theprisoners had never gotten into this section; the _Harriet Barne_ wasa mile or so to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise offiring from outside became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop whichseemed to have been abandoned in the middle of some rush job thathadn't really been necessary. They came to a place even the snoopercouldn't enter, choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponicseed-plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. Theyemerged into outside light, in vast caves a mile high and open ontothe crater, and looked across the floor that had been leveled andvitrified to the other side, three and a half miles away.

  He didn't know whether to be more awed by the original eruption thathad formed the crater or by the engineering feat of carving thesedocks and ship-berths, big enough for the hugest hyperspaceship, intoit.

  At first, he had been afraid of getting into position too soon beforethe task force from outside could profit by the diversion. Then hebegan to worry about the time it was taking to get halfway around thecrater. He could hear artillery thundering continuously above. Exceptat the very beginning of the battle, there had been little gunfire. Hewondered if both sides were running out of lift-and-drive missiles, orif the fighting had gotten too close for anybody to risk using nuclearweapons.

  He was also worrying about the women and children among the releasedprisoners.

  "Why did the pirates bother with them?" he asked Sylvie.

  "They used the women and some of the old men to do housekeepingchores for them," she said. "Mostly, though, they were hostages; ifthe men didn't work, Perales threatened to punish the women andchildren. I wasn't doing any housework; I'm too good a mechanic. I washelping on the ship."

  "Well, what'll I do with them when the fighting starts? I can't takethem into battle."

  "You'll have to; it'll be the safest place for them. You can't leavethem anywhere and risk having them recaptured."

  "That means we'll have to detach some men to cover them, and that'llcut our striking force down." He whistled at the sound-pickup of hisscreen and told his father about it. "What do I do with these people,anyhow?"

  "You're the officer in command, Conn," his father told him. "Yourdecision. How soon can you attack? We're almost through to thecrater."

  "There's a vertical shaft right above us, and a lot of noise at thetop. We'll send up a couple of bomb-robots to clear things at theshaft-head and follow with everything we have."

  "Noncombatants and all?"

  He nodded. "Only thing we can do." An old quotation occurred to him."'If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs.'"

  He wondered who'd said that in the first place. One of the oldPre-Atomic conquerors; maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would have said, "Ifyou want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage." Maybe it wasCaesar.

  "We'd better send Gumshoe Gus up, first," Sylvie suggested.

  "You handle him. Take a quick look around, and then pull him back.We'll need him later." It was the first time he'd ever caught himselfcalling a robot "him," instead of "it." He thought for a second, andadded: "Give your father and Mr. Vibart the controls for the twowindow-washers; you handle the snooper."

  He gave more instructions: Yves Jacquemont to turn his bomb-robotright, Vibart to turn his left; the two lorries to follow the jeep upthe shaft, the scows to follow. Then he leaned back and looked at thescreens that had been rigged under the top of the jeep. A circle oflight appeared in one, growing larger and brighter as the snooperapproached the top of the shaft; two more
came on as the bomb-robotsfollowed.

  "All right; follow me," he said into the inter-vehicle radio, andstarted the jeep slowly up the shaft.

  The snooper popped out of the shaft, onto a gallery that had been cutinto the solid rock, fifty feet high and a hundred and fifty across,with a low parapet on the outside and the mile-deep crater beyond.There were a few grounded aircars and lorries in sight, and a mediumairboat rested a hundred or so feet on the right of the shaft-opening.Fifteen or twenty men were clustered around it, with a lifter loadedwith ammunition. They looked like any crowd of farm-tramps. Suddenly,one of them saw the snooper, gave a yell, and fired at it with arifle. Sylvie pulled it back into the shaft; her father and the chiefengineer sent the two bomb-robots up onto the gallery. The right-handrobot sped at the airboat; the last thing Conn saw in its screen was aface, bearded and villainous and contorted with fright, looking outthe pilot's window of the airboat. Then it went dead, and there was aroar from above. On the other side, several men were firing straightat the pickup of the other robot; it went dead, too, and there was asecond explosion.

  In the communication screen, somebody was yelling, "Give them anotherone for Milt Hennant!" and his father was urging him to get in fast,before they recovered.

  In peace or war, screen communication was a wonderful thing. The onlytrouble was that it let in too many kibitzers.

  The gallery, when the jeep emerged onto it, was empty except forcasualties, a few still alive. The side of the airboat was caved in;the lifter-load of ammunition had gone up with the bomb. He moved thejeep to the right of the shaft and waited for the vehicles behind him,suffering a brief indecision.

  _Never divide your force in the presence of the enemy._

  There had been generals who had done that and gotten away with it, butthey'd had names like Foxx Travis and Robert E. Lee andNapoleon--Napoleon; that was who'd made that crack about omelets!They'd known what they were doing. He was playing this battle by ear.

  There was a lot of shouting ahead to the right. That meant livepirates, a deplorable situation which ought to be corrected at once.The communication screen was noisy, now; his father had gotten to thetop gallery with the three gun cutters, and was meeting resistance. Heformed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scowsnext, and the second lorry behind, and started around the gallerycounterclockwise, the snoopers and the three remaining bomb-robotsahead. They began running into resistance almost at once.

  Bullets spatted on the armor glass in front of him, spalling it andblotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better bythe show-back of his view-pickup. He used that until the pickup wasshot out. Then his father began wanting to know, from thecommunication screen, what was going on and where he was. A bomb orsomething went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to theceiling; he found that it was impossible to lift it again after itsettled to the floor of the gallery, and they all piled out to fighton foot. Sommers and his gang from the number one lorry were alsoafoot; their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting woundedinto one of the scows.

  They blew up the light-service robot to clear a nest of pirates whohad taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo-janitor up a sidepassage and exploded it in a missile-launching position on the outsideof the mountain; that produced a tremendous explosion. They beganrunning out of cartridges, and had to stop and glean more from enemycasualties. They expended their last bomb-robot, the restaurantserver, to break up another pirate resistance point.

  At length he found himself, with Sylvie and her father and one of theHome Guardsmen from Sommers' lorry, lying behind an aircar somebodyhad knocked out with a bazooka, with two dead pirates for company anda dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade.Behind, there was frantic firing; the rear-guard seemed to have runinto trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from theupper level. He wondered what his father was doing with the gunboats;since abandoning the jeep, he had lost his only means of contact.

  Suddenly, the men in front jumped up from their barricade and camerunning toward him. Been reinforced, now they're counterattacking. Hisrifle was empty; he drew his pistol and shot one of them, and then hesaw that they were throwing up their hands and yelling for quarter.This was something new.

  He looked around quickly, to make sure none of the liberated prisonersexcept Jacquemont and his daughter were around, and then called to acouple of his own men to come up and help him. While they wererelieving the pirates of their pistol belts and cartridge bandoliers,more came up, their hands over their heads, herded by a combat carfrom which Tom Brangwyn covered them with a pair of 12-mm machineguns. Tom hadn't put in an appearance before he had taken his commandoforce into the tunnel; he hadn't even known the chief of CompanyPolice was on Barathrum.

  "Well, nice seeing you," he greeted. "How did you get in?"

  "Over the top," Brangwyn told him. "Everything's caved in on the otherside. We have a quarter of the top gallery, and half of this one. Yourfather's cleaning up above. Klem's got some men working along theoutside."

  Sylvie was tugging at his arm. "Hey, look! Look at that!" she wasclamoring. "Who's she belong to?"

  He looked; the _Lester Dawes_ was coming over the edge of the crater.

  "She's ours," he said. "It's all over but the mopping up. And countingthe egg breakage."