Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  The flood of gamma rays blinded him. Red lights on the marble panels blinked on, and a siren began howling. He saw for a moment, through the transparent silhouettes of his arms, the interior of the concrete pit, then threw the lid down, proclaiming in a low, hoarse voice:

  “Opasnost! Gefahr! Danger! Weixian! Abunai!”

  A booming echo bounded around the room and faded away. Urm turned the upper portion of his body one hundred and eighty degrees and hastily made for the exit. The shock in his status meters brought about by the flood of radioactive particles drove him away from the concrete pillar. Of course, neither the hardest radiation nor a mighty flood of particles could do Urm the slightest harm; even spending some time in the active zone of a reactor would not threaten Urm with serious consequences. But, in creating Urm, his masters had embedded in him a tendency to stay as far away as possible from sources of intense radiation. Urm went out into the corridor, painstakingly closed the door behind him, and, stepping over the ribbed cylinder of the radiator, once again found himself on the staircase landing. Right away he saw a Human hurriedly coming down the wooden staircase.

  The Human was considerably shorter than the Master. It had on loose-fitting, light-colored clothing, and its hair was strangely long, and golden in color. Urm had never seen such people before. He drew in some air and sensed the familiar smell of white lilac. At times the Master gave off the same scent, though much more faintly.

  Half-darkness reigned on the landing, and the staircase behind the woman was brightly illuminated, so she could not immediately discern the outline of Urm’s enormous body. Rather, hearing his footsteps, she stopped and called out angrily:

  “Who’s that? It is you, Ivashev?”

  “Hello, how do you do?” said Urm huskily.

  The woman screamed. From the half-darkness a gleaming head with bulging glass eyes, excessively wide armor-plated shoulders, and thick articulated arms advanced on her. Urm set foot on the lowest step of the wooden staircase, and the woman began shrieking again.

  Never before had a Human failed to answer Urm’s greeting. But this strange, high sound, shrill, penetrating and certainly inarticulate, did not resemble any of the standard answer templates that Urm knew. Intrigued, Urm purposefully moved forward after the retreating woman. The wooden steps groaned and cracked under his feet.

  “Back!” screamed the woman.

  Urm stopped and tilted his head, listening closely.

  “Back, you monster!”

  The command “back” was familiar to Urm. According to this command, he was to turn the upper portion of his body around and take several steps in the opposite direction until he heard the command “stop.” But commands usually originated from the Master, and, besides that, Urm wanted to investigate. He once again began to ascend the steps, until he found himself in front of the entrance of a small, brightly lit room.

  “Back! Back! Back!” screamed the woman.

  By now Urm did not stop anymore, though he was going slower than he might. The room interested him: two desks, chairs, a drafting board, a bookcase, and thick folders. While he opened drawers, untied the strings on the folders and read aloud the notes that had been made in black ink in the margins of technical diagrams, the woman slipped into the room next door, hid behind the couch and grabbed the telephone handset. Urm saw this, as he had an optical receptor on the back of his head, but the small longhaired human no longer interested him. Walking across the papers spread all over the floor, he set off on his way. Behind his back the woman shouted into the telephone:

  “Nikolai Petrovich! Nikolai Petrovich, it’s me, Galya! Nikolai Petrovich, Urm broke into our office. Your Urm! Urm! Uniform, Romeo, Mike… Didn’t you hear the siren? Yes! I don’t know… When I ran into him he was coming out of the big reactor room… Yes, yes, he was in the reactor room… What? Apparently not. They already know about it at the central station.”

  Urm did not bother to listen. He went into the foyer and there stopped stock-still, redoubling the movements of his black locator horns. Something large, gleaming, and cold hung on the opposite wall. It seemed in infrared to be a grey, impenetrable square, and it flashed and shone silver in ordinary light, but this was not what confused Urm. In the strange square stood a black monstrosity with wiggling horns on its head, which was round like a schoolroom globe, and Urm could not understand just where it was located. His visual diastimeter instantly informed him that it was twelve meters, eight centimeters to the unfamiliar object, but his locator negated this report. There is no object there. There is a smooth, nearly vertical surface at a distance of... six meters, four centimeters. Urm had never before seen the like, and his locator and his visual receptors had never before given him such contradictory readings. At the beginning of his existence a desire had been inlaid in his very physical being to make everything he happened to come into contact with clear and understood. So he resolutely walked forward, noting and recording on the way the relation that had emerged: “The distance according to the visual diastimeter is equal to the distance according to the locator, divided by two”… He walked into the mirror. The glass flew apart in a clangorous rain of shards, and Urm, leaning against the wall, stopped. Clearly, there was nothing left to do here. Urm scraped at the wall, sniffed, turned; paying no attention to the police officer on duty who, white as a sheet, was hanging from the lever of the air-raid siren, and, crunching through broken glass, he strode towards the exit. The driving snow surrounded him.

  As Nikolai Petrovich was throwing down the handset, Piskunov was already in the entryway, hurriedly buttoning his fur coat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There, of course…”

  “Wait, we have to decide what to do. If that hunk of metal starts horsing around in the electrical station...”

  “It’ll be fine if it’s just the electrical station, “ Ryabkin interrupted him. “What about the lab? Or the warehouse? Or what if he drops by over here, in the village?”

  Nikolai Petrovich was thinking intensely. Piskunov shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, holding onto the doorknob.

  “We have to run over there all together,” gingerly suggested Kostenko, “Find him and… well, grab him!”

  Piskunov just winced, while Ryabkin, rooting around the rack in search of his fur coat, shouted angrily, “That’s a great idea: grab him! What do you think we should grab him by? His pants? He weighs half a ton, one of his fists can punch with a force of three thousand kilos. It’s ridiculous. You’re new here, Kostenko, so you should just keep quiet…”

  “Everybody listen,” said Korolev. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll call the dorm and raise the student trainees. You, Ryabkin, run to the motor pool… Dammit, everyone is probably at the club… Run over there anyway, find at least three drivers. We have to get the tracked bulldozers… Is that right, Piskunov?”

  “Yes, yes, and as soon as possible. But…”

  “Piskunov, you get over to the Institute. Figure out where Urm is and call the motor pool right away. Kostenko, you go with him. Clear? I just hope that devil doesn’t get through the gate!”

  Jostling and stepping on each other’s feet, they tumbled out onto the porch. Ryabkin slipped and butted his head into Kostenko’s back, and Kostenko fell on all fours with a crash.

  “Dammit, just dammit!”

  “What, your glasses?”

  “No, everything’s fine.”

  A fierce wind drove clouds of dry snow over the ground, mournfully howled in the power lines, and hummed deeply in the iron lacework of the high-voltage towers. Dim rectangles of light fell from the windows of the cottage, and all else was plunged into impenetrable darkness.

  “Well, I’m off,” said Ryabkin. “Be careful over there, friends, don’t stick your necks out if you don’t have to.”

  He stumbled again and for a minute floundered in the snowdrift, muttering obscene obscenities at the damned snowstorm, that pig of an Urm and generally all those accessory to the incident. Th
en his light-colored fur coat was glimpsed by the wicket gate before it disappeared in the eddies of swirling snow.

  Piskunov and Kostenko were left alone.

  Kostenko huddled up against the bitter cold.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “What on earth are the tractors for?”

  “And what would you recommend?” inquired Piskunov.

  “No, I just don’t understand… Do you want to destroy Urm?”

  Piskunov exhaled sharply.

  “Urm is a unique machine, the creative result of the last several years of work by the Institute of Experimental Cybernetics. Do you understand? Why would I want him destroyed?”

  He lifted up the tails of his fur coat and made his way through the snowdrift. A confused and timid Kostenko followed after him. The snow-covered field lay before them, the highway behind them. Right across the highway was the electrical station.

  So as to shorten their path, Piskunov turned off of the highway and went through the vacant lot where a foundation pit had been excavated in the fall for a new building. Kostenko could hear Piskunov muttering something as he stumbled over an ice-covered pile of bricks and rods of rebar. It was difficult going. Beyond the shroud of the snowstorm they could just make out the Institute’s sparse chain of lights.

  “Wait a second,” Kostenko said finally. “By God, it’s hard going! Let’s rest for a minute.”

  Piskunov squatted down next to him. What had happened, after all? He knew Urm like no one else at the Institute. Every little screw, every electrode, every lens of that marvelous mechanism had passed through his hands. He had thought he could calculate and predict each of his movements under any circumstances. And now this. Urm had “willfully” come out of his basement and was now strolling around the electrical station. Why?

  Urm’s behavior was governed by his “brain,” an extraordinarily complex and delicate apparatus composed of germanium-platinum foam and ferrite. While an ordinary digital machine has tens of thousands of circuits (the elementary parts that receive, store, and deliver information), Urm’s brain employed nearly eighteen million logic cells. They held the programmed reactions for a multitude of situations, for different variations of changes in circumstances, and they anticipated the execution of an enormous number of different operations. What could have influenced the “brain,” the program? Emissions from his atomic engine? No, his engine is surrounded by thick shielding made of zirconium, gadolinium, and boron steel. In practical terms, not a single neutron, not a single gamma ray could pierce the shielding. Then his receptors? No, the receptors had been in ideal working order just this evening. Then the whole of the matter is in the “brain” itself. The program. The complex new program. Piskunov himself had overseen the programming and… The programming… That was it!

  Piskunov stood up slowly.

  “A spontaneous reflex!” he said. “Of course, it’s a spontaneous reflex! I’m an idiot!”

  Kostenko looked at him fearfully.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “But I do. It’s obvious… But who would have thought? Everything was going so well.”

  “Look!” Kostenko suddenly yelled.

  He gasped and jumped to his feet. The greyish-black sky over the Institute was lit up by a tremulous blue explosion, and against this blaze, surprisingly well defined and at the same time unreal, the silhouettes of black buildings sprang up out of the whirling of the snowstorm. The sparsely lit chain of lights that defined the walls of the Institute blinked and went out.

  “It’s the transformer!” said Piskunov hoarsely. “The substation’s right across from the reactor tower. That’s were Urm is… and the guards…”

  “Let’s run!” Kostenko proposed.

  They set off running. This was no simple matter. The oncoming wind swept them off of their legs, and they tripped in holes filled with dry snow, fell, got up, and fell again.

  “Faster, faster!” Piskunov urged.

  Tears, either from the wind or from the excitement, covered his face, froze on his eyelashes as blurry little drops of ice, made it hard for him to see. He grabbed Kostenko’s arm and dragged him, still muttering hoarsely:

  “Faster, faster!”

  Apparently, the explosion over the Institute had been noticed in the village. On the outskirts, a siren began howling anxiously, the windows of the cottages where the guards were stationed lit up, and the blinding ray of a searchlight skimmed over the field. It plucked snowy barchans and the latticed pillars of the of the high-voltage towers out of the darkness, slid along the stone wall that surrounded the Institute, and, finally, came to a stop at the gate. Next to the gate small black figures moved around rapidly.

  “Who’s that… over there?” asked Kostenko, catching his breath.

  “The guards. The police, probably…” Piskunov stopped, wiped his eyes, his voice was failing him. “They’ve locked… the gate. Good thinking! That means… Urm’s still over there.”

  Apparently, the alarm had been raised. Now not one, but three searchlights were feeling along the walls of the Institute. One could see snowy whirlwinds dancing in the blue light. Through the noise and the wind’s howling the sound of shouts reached them; someone was cursing angrily. Finally, motors roared to life, the clank of treads could be heard. The gigantic bulldozers were coming out of the vehicle fleet.

  “Look, Kostenko,” said Piskunov. “Look closely. We are present at the most unusual round-up in the history of humanity. Look closely, Kostenko!”

  Kostenko looked skeptically at Piskunov. It seemed to him that tears were running down the engineer’s face. Of course, they could have been from the wind.

  Meanwhile, they could now hear the clank of treads not only from behind, but also to the right. The bulldozers were on the highway. They could already see the shaky sparks of headlights. There were five such sparks.

  “Five against one,” whispered Piskunov. “He doesn’t have a chance. His spontaneous reflex arc won’t help him here.”

  And then something suddenly changed all around them. Kostenko could not even tell right away just what had happened. As before, the snowstorm howled; as before, clouds of dry snow tore around over the ground; as before, the motors of the bulldozers roared, threatening and confident. But the searchlights were no longer gliding along the field. They had come to a dead stop at the gate. But the gate was wide open, and no one was next to it.

  “What the devil?” said Kostenko.

  “Surely he didn’t…”

  Piskunov did not finish, and, not bothering to consult one another, they set off running to the Institute. They were not two hundred meters from the gate when Piskunov, running in front, flew into a man with a rifle. The man cried out in terror and was about to flee in another direction, but Piskunov grabbed him by the shoulders and stopped him.

  “What’s happening?”

  The man crazily turned his head, clad in its police cap, swore, and finally came to his senses.

  “He broke out,” he said. “He broke out. He pushed the gate over and left. Almost stomped on Makeyev. I’m heading into the village for back-up…”

  “Where did he go?”

  The police office waved to the left without conviction.

  “That way, I think… To the highway…”

  “That means he’ll run into the tractors any minute. Let’s go.”

  They would remember what happened next for the rest of their lives. Out of the whirling snowy darkness something huge and formless came towards them, red and green blinking lights stung their eyes, and a sharp voice with no intonation pronounced,

  “Hello, how do you do?”

  “Urm, stop!” screamed Piskunov desperately.

  Kostenko saw the policeman run, saw Piskunov raise his arms and shake his fists. Then a monstrous figure, wreathed in steam, a baleful scarecrow, went past him, raising high its legs, thick as logs, and melted into the snowstorm.

  After carefully closing the door behind him, as he always did if the door wa
s not broken, Urm took a step and stopped. Everything around him was full of sounds, movements, and emanations. He saw the night as a multicolored faery kaleidoscope of radio waves. Thirteen and a half meters in front of him was a squat building with wide windows, covered with iron grating. Its walls emitted bright infrared light. From the building he heard a low, powerful hum. A million snowflakes swirled around in the air. As they settled down on Urm’s faceted sides, hot from the fire of his atomic engine, they instantly melted and vaporized.

  Urm swiveled his head and decided that the nearest and most interesting object of study could only be the squat building across the way. He found the entrance immediately, noting a path on the downwind side. Low fir trees were planted all around the building, and pausing for a moment, he broke off one of them and examined it. Then he opened the door and went in.

  Two humans were sitting next to a table in the close, narrow little room. As he appeared they leapt up and stared at him in horror. He closed the door behind him (and even threw the bolt) and stopped before them.

  “How do you do?” he said.

  “Comrade Piskunov?” one of the humans asked in confusion.

  “Comrade Piskunov has stepped out. Would you like to leave a message?” Urm informed him coolly.

  The humans did not interest him. His attention was drawn by a small, hairy creature that was cowering against the wall. Warm, alive, smells strongly, not a Human, determined Urm and said, “Hello, how do you do?”