by E. C. Tubb
THE MAN FROM YESTERDAY AND THE
MACHINE THAT RULED TOMORROW
He had been the first space-flier but his ship had missed the moon and gone on ... to drift silent, frigid, and forgotten. Centuries later the derelict was found, its pilot defrosted and returned to life.
He might have had a hero’s welcome on Earth, if there had been room for a hero and for an extra man. But there was neither. The world was a watchwork realm with everything exactly in its place. A perfect thinking machine ran the perfect state. There could be no place for his kind of unpredictable daring.
So he had to be eliminated. But between the decision and the action was a gap that cybernetic marvel could not overcome. For this man’s personal memories of the past contained the innermost secret of the MECHANICAL MONARCH—and the key to its control.
Turn this book over for
second complete novel
E. C. TUBB is described as “a tall, humorous Londoner who concentrates upon the human element in his stories, rather than the mechanistic.” A reader of science-fiction for many years, he tried his hand at story-writing with success sufficient enough to enable him to turn from salesman to professional writer three years after his first efforts. His tales are well-known in his native England and in the past couple of years have begun to appear in American markets. Until just recently he was the editor of the British periodical Authentic Science-Fiction.
Mr. Tubb has a wide knowledge of astronomy, physics, electronics and kindred sciences which enhance the realism of his novels. Ace Books published his first U. S. novel THE SPACE-BORN (D-193) a year ago.
The Mechanical Monarch
by
E. C. TUBB
ACE BOOKS, INC.
23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
the mechanical monarch
Copyright ©, 1958, by Ace Books, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
twice upon a time
Copyright ©, 1958, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
CHAPTER I
From the gentle slope of the foothills Poker Flats stretched like a frozen sea beneath the cold light of a near-full Moon. Shadows blotched the surface, black pools against the gray-white, thrown from swelling dunes and wind-blown rock, collecting in ebon patches and inky channels, etching the unevenness of the desert. They made an odd pattern those shadows, an irregular polka-dot pattern of light and dark, strange, a little alien, almost disturbing in the deep silence of the night.
Watching them, Curt Rosslyn could almost imagine that he was no longer on Earth.
He leaned against a crumbling boulder, a slight man, not tall, not heavily built, but with a litheness and easiness of movement that betrayed hidden strength. Behind him the Organ Mountains reared their jagged crests against the star-shot sky, and far out across the wastes of Poker Flats, dim lights gleamed for an instant, gleamed and died like the fading embers of forgotten hope.
He sighed a little, his gray eyes clouded with dreams as he stared at the shadowed desert and the worn mountains. Mars must be something like this, he thought. Or perhaps the airless craters of the Moon, or even the sun-scorched side of distant Mercury. He sighed again, tilting his head and staring up towards the burning glory of the heavens, idly tracing the well-remembered constellations.
The Big Dipper, Polaris the Pole Star, and the sprawling length of Draco. The regular shape of Cassiopeia and the angular shape of Andromeda with its misty nebula. Crossshaped Bootes, and the scintillant cluster of the Pleiades. Glowing Fomalhaut, and the splendour of Vega. Low on the horizon Rigel and Betelgeuse blazed in the glory of Orion,
warning of the winter to come, and above all, glowing like a tracery of shimmering gems, the heart-stopping splendour of the Milky Way.
He knew them all, had known them for as long as he could remember, and the familiar constellations felt like old friends. He had squinted at them through the lenses of his first crude telescope. Then, after many weary hours, he had stared at them with the aid of a hand-ground mirror and the extra power of his six-inch reflector had opened new worlds of glory. He had seen the satellites of Jupiter, the transit of Venus and Mercury, studied the “canals” of Mars and walked in imagination on the dusty sea bottoms of the Moon. The Moon? He smiled up at it, winking at the splotched face of the satellite, then, obeying the warning of finely-tuned reflexes, turned and stared over the desert.
Light and sound came towards him.
Twin streamers of brilliance stabbed across the desert, dispelling the shadows and ruining the alien atmosphere with the harsh reality of common-sense. The headlights swung and dipped, rose towards the stars and veered from rock and heaped dunes of arid sand. With the approach of the headlights the sound of the jeep sent flat echoes from the age-old heights of the Organ Mountains, and Curt sighed, relaxing against his boulder and fumbling in his pockets for cigarettes.
“Rosslyn?”
“Yes.” Curt threw away his butt and stepped towards the vehicle. “Comain?”
“That’s right.” A tall, lean, almost emaciated figure unfolded itself from behind the wheel and in the starlight Curt could see the pale face and thick lensed spectacles of his friend. “Time to go back, Curt. I volunteered to collect you, the driver was busy winning a hundred dollar pot.”
“I could have waited.” Curt stared at the stars again, almost forgetting that he was no longer alone. “Beautiful aren’t they?”
“Yes.” Something in the tall man’s voice made Curt glance at him, then look away. “They’re clean and bright and wonderful, Curt—and they’re waiting. New worlds, new peoples, new ideals and cultures. New frontiers, Curt, and we’re on the threshold of opening the way.”
“Perhaps, but it won’t be for a long time yet.”
“No, Curt. The first step is always the hardest. First we have to break the gravitational drag, lift a ship from the surface and keep it off. Once we have done that the rest must follow. First a trip around the Moon and back again. Then an actual landing on the satellite. After that, Mars, Venus, even Mercury and Jupiter. It may take time, Curt, but it will be done.”
The tall man fell silent as he stared at the brilliant face of the near-full Moon. Taller than Curt, stoop shouldered, thinfaced and weak-eyed, yet his high forehead and large skull told of the intelligence residing in his ungainly body. His hands were thin and slender, the fingers long and supple, the hands of an artist, an idealist, a dreamer. Ambition burned within him, not the normal ambition of the majority of men, for wealth meant nothing to him, but the relentless ambition of the scholar. He was driven by the twin devils of curiosity and speculation. He wondered, and he built, then wondered again and built afresh. He would never stop until his eyes closed in the final sleep. He was that kind of man.
A thin wind blew across the desert, stirring the sand a little and chilling their blood. Curt shivered, then, as if ashamed of himself, tried to ignore the warnings of his body. “Better get back,” said Comain quietly. “You don’t want * to catch a cold now.”
"I won’t.”
“You shivered and it’s getting colder.” Comain started towards the jeep. “Come on, Curt.”
“I’m not cold,” said the slight man irritably. “It’s, just that they’ve starved me until I don’t own an ounce of fat.” He stared at his slender arm. “Look at me! Just skin and bone with a bit of muscle! I couldn’t knock down a midget, the shape I’m in now.”
“You know better than that.” Comain smiled ruefully as he stared at his own arm. “You’ve got muscle, trained and developed to a high pitch of efficiency. Me?” He bit his lip and continued towards the vehicle. "What do I need brawn for?"
“You don’t.” Curt fell into step with the tall man and their feet
scuffed against the desert as they walked towards the silent jeep. "And neither do I. Not with all those gadgets you built. Why, man, all I have to do is to press buttons. Those things you fitted should be able to operate the ship on their own.”
“The servo mechanisms?” Comain smiled. “They will help but they can only do what you direct them to do. The final decision must be yours.”
'He halted by the side of the jeep and folded his long body behind the wheel. Curt sat beside him, then, as they began jolting over the desert, clung to the metal frame of the windscreen.
"You know,” he said above the whine of the engine. “I should have thought it possible to build a robot pilot for the first ship. Could you do that?”
“Yes.” Comain stared before him, his weak eyes narrowed a little as he steered the vehicle over the undulating sand. He wasn’t deceived, and yet he felt grateful to Curt for easing his inner pain. They had grown up together, sharing their boyhood, discovering the stars and the mysteries of science at the same time. Both had dreamed the same dreams, weaving impossible worlds of romantic mystery with their youthful imaginations. They had argued, built, planned, even fought a little. They had helped each other, and, as the years passed, had grown closer even than brothers.
But now they had to part.
Little things had decided it. Weak eyes against perfect vision. Weight against weight, height against height, reflex against reflex. They had been tested, examined, checked—and Curt had won.
To him had fallen the honour of being the Columbus of space.
Comain had known it for more than five years now. He had watched his body, his frail, stooped, weak body, and he had known. Ambition had not died with the knowledge but had been channeled into a different path. Not for him the glories of space, but, science covered a wide field and cybernetics was something in which he could take a keen interest. And so he had turned to the design of more and more efficient machines. Small and compact, with built-in relays and predictable response to external stimuli. He had designed the controls for the space ship, the things of metal which could operate faster, better, than the muscles of any man.
And yet his hurt had been deep and something of the old pain still lingered.
“I could build a mechanical pilot,” he said. “I could build one better than any man, but were up against weight limitations, Curt, and no machine now known can do what a man can do within that limitation.”
"Good.” Curt grinned with a flash of white teeth. “I don’t care what you do later, Comain, but I’m glad that you’ve had to admit defeat now. I’ve looked forward to this for a long time and I’d hate for you to replace me with a thing of steel and wire.”
“No chance of that.” Comain swung the wheel as he guided the jeep around a jagged mound of rock. “They’re too interested in discovering just what will happen to a man out there. You’re a guinea pig, Curt, my day will come after they finally realise that the human body can’t stand high G without damage. Then we’ll have ships with the passengers in acceleration tanks and robots at the controls.”
“Maybe.” Curt grunted as the vehicle bounced and jarred his teeth. “How’s your research going on the Great Idea?” “The predictor?” The thin man shrugged. “It’ll come, Curt, it will have to come. They’ve got EINAC already and better computators will be built. One day they’ll realise that a machine able to absorb information and then to predict probable events from that information will be essential if we are to advance this civilisation,of ours.” His thin lips twisted cynically as he stared at the desert before him. “Probably the next war will do it.”
“You think that there’ll be one?”
“I do. Every thinking man does. We’ve managed to negotiate an uneasy peace but the weapons are ready, the men are waiting, and the same tensions still exist. War will come, Curt, it can’t be avoided, and, in a way, it could be a good thing.”
“A good thing! Are you crazy?”
“No. Look at it this way, Curt. Each war has brought rapid scientific advancement. The first world war brought the development of flight, the advancement of surgery, the use of strange machines. The second brought the jet engine, the atomic bomb, the proximity fuse. The third . . .” He shrugged. “Who knows? We may all die from the alphabet bombs, but if we don’t we may stumble on something quite new.”
“The predictor?”
“Naturally, but I didn’t mean that. The predictor isn’t new, and it will come, war or no war. I mean something different, new, perhaps something not even imagined yet.”
He grunted as the jeep bounced over the edge of a wide road and with a sweep of his hand disengaged the low register. The swaying headlights steadied as they spun along the smooth road and the flickering hand of the speedometer crawled across the dial as the thin man trod on the throttle.
“The Colonel was furious at your taking off like that,” he explained above the rush of displaced air. “I tried to tell him how you felt but he didn’t seem to understand.”
“The Colonel has no imagination.” Curt stared up at the brilliant Moon. “Sometimes a man just has to get off somewhere by himself. Sometimes he just can’t stand people fussing around him.” He looked at the thin man. “Can you understand what I mean?”
“I understand.” Comain thinned his lips as he nodded, then, taking one hand from the wheel, pointed ahead. “There she is!”
Light blazed before them. Light and the delicate tracery of a high wire fence. The squat bulk of a tracking station loomed on their left, the white and red warning notices ringing the area showed stark on their right, and before them
It towered like the delicate spire from some ancient dream. Smooth, glistening with streamlined perfection, needle-pointed and resting on its wide fins. Loading platforms and gantries clustered around it, but even their bulk couldn’t hide the sheer beauty of the man-made thing resting in the centre of the area. It seemed to hover on the levelled sand, like a thing without weight or substance. It soared towards the beckoning stars and the lights ringing the area shimmered in scintillating ripples from the gleaming hull.
A space ship.
Curt stared at it as he had stared at it a million times in imagination and in reality. For him it was the final realisation of ambition, the solid proof that he was not living in a dream. Before him rose the space ship, real, solid, fact. A dream made tangible, a thing of ten thousand hopes and eternal longing from countless men crystallised into something which would finally reach for the stars.
And he was its pilot.
Guards stepped forward as the jeep droned towards the high wire fence and Comain grunted as his foot moved from accelerator to brake. Lights blazed at him, forcing him to squint and shield his weak eyes, then, recognised by the guards, they droned into the wired area and towards the low bulk of the living quarters.
“Better go straight to bed if you want to dodge the Colonel,” he suggested. “Anyway, you could do with some sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.” Curt twisted in his seat as he stared at the towering space ship. “Man! How can I sleep? This is . it, Comain! This is what I’ve wanted all my life! I blast at dawn and you talk of sleep!”
“Dawn?” The thin man frowned as he glanced at his left wrist. “In four hours?”
“Is it?” Curt shrugged. “I’m not wearing a watch. Zero hour is at dawn—that’s all I care about.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Walk about perhaps, yam with the boys, play poker, anything. Don’t you realise that this is my last night on Earth? Tomorrow I'll be in space, swinging around the Moon, watching the naked stars, feeling what it’s like to be in free fall. I want to enjoy all this while I can. I’ve no time for sleep.”
“Don’t talk like that, Curt.” Comain swallowed, then grinned as he brought the jeep to a halt. “Don’t talk as if this were your last night alive I mean. You’ll be coming back. You know you will, and when you do, you’ll be a hero. Think of it, Curt. The first man to have circled
the Moon I Your name will be in every history book from now on.”
“Perhaps, but, Comain, it won’t be the same after this. Nothing will. This is all I’ve lived for and once I’ve done it, what then? Can I bear to settle down again? Or will I be altered in some way, sent insane perhaps or my body twisted with the free radiation we know is out there? I may be crippled, or blind. I may be a thing of horror, or even if space doesn’t harm me, I may die in a crash landing, die—or worse. No, Comain, as far as I’m concerned, this is my last night on Earth and I’ll be damned if I waste it in sleep.”
Lithely the slender man swung from his seat then stood, looking down at Comain.
“What are you going to do?”
“Check the radio gear again I suppose. You know that I’ll be in contact with you all the time?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be seeing you at dawn then.” Comain narrowed his eyes as he saw a tall, trimly uniformed figure emerge from one of the low huts. “Better watch it if you don’t want to see the Colonel. He’s just left his quarters.”
“Has he?” Curt grinned and moved away from the jeep. “I can do without his company for now. Be seeing you, Co-main.” He lifted an arm in a casual salute and walked rapidly from the vehicle, the shadows between the glaring arc lights hiding him from view.
Comain nodded, not answering, then, with a strangely bitter expression on his thin features, sat hugging the wheel and staring towards the glistening perfection of the waiting rocket ship. He didn’t answer the Colonel when Adams spoke to him. He didn’t seem to notice the chill wind sweeping from the desert or the fading light of the burning stars. He just sat waiting, his weak eyes clouded with thought and his stooped body lax behind the wheel.