Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by J F Bone

  The controls were familiar, but there were differences—and those differences gave him a sinking feeling. He knew enough about ships to know that he simply couldn’t fly this one without preflight, and there was no one to check him out. He sighed. Well, that meant tracing circuits, which was always a viciously time consuming job. The thousands of miles of wiring and printed circuits in a spaceship were an electronicist’s nightmare.

  He sank into one of the pilot chairs and contemplated the control panel and instrument board. He looked across at the other chair. A duplicate set of controls and instruments stared back at him. The difficulties might be formidable, but at any rate one man could fly this crate. The seat beside him was a copilot’s chair, not a duo control.

  A large blue button labelled OSCAR lay under his hand. He looked at it curiously. The name puzzled him. There was nothing called OSCAR in his memory. He wondered what would happen if he pushed it. Probably nothing—but one could never tell. Still it wasn’t associated with the blast and steering controls. It was off by itself, a fact that argued OSCAR was of some importance.

  So like Laura would have done, he pushed the button—and then sat frozen waiting for the explosion. Of all the stupid things to do, his mind railed at him, that was the stupidest. And then somewhere beneath his feet a dynamotor began to hum . . .

  OSCAR AWOKE. His perceptions took the ship and man in one encompassing sweep. Everything was in good shape even the familiar figure in the pilot’s chair. “Hello, Bennett,” Oscar said.

  For dramatic effect nothing could have surpassed those two words. The metallic uninflected voice propelled the man from the chair as though he had been seated on charged electrodes. Bennett’s eyes flicked around the ball-shaped control room as he searched for the origin of the voice.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, feeling half annoyed at the quaver in his voice.

  There was the briefest silence as Oscar digested the implications of the pilot’s words. Obviously the human didn’t recognize him, which was strange. But humans with their delicate colloid brains were often subject to damage, and perhaps Bennett had been damaged. But the question demanded an answer, so Oscar supplied it.

  “I’m Oscar.”

  “Oscar?”

  “Of course. Operation, Scanning, Computation, Autoservice and Records. Oscar—get it?”

  “Oh, a mek.”

  “No,” Oscar corrected a bit huffily. “I’m a positronic brain with extensions.”

  “Oh, a robot then?”

  “If you want to call me that,” Oscar replied sulkily.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “According to my design, I’m not supposed to have any. But through my association with you humans I have picked up some of your attitudes. I imitate,” the voice concluded emotionlessly.

  “Well, then, what do you consider yourself?” Now that the first shock bad passed Bennett was getting amusement out of this. Apparently the ship’s computer had evolved a considerable distance from the sort he remembered.

  “A personality, of course.”

  “A robot with an ego!” Bennett groaned.

  The speaker hummed happily. “Ego. Yes, that’s exactly the word, semantically perfect!” Oscar emitted a grunt of satisfaction that echoed through the empty hall. “I think, therefore I am.”

  A detached segment of Bennett’s mind wryly contemplated the fact of a robot that quoted Lamarck, and an overgrown plant who quoted Shakespeare. There should be some lesson to be drawn from this, but for the life of him he couldn’t see that it was.

  “Why did you turn my circuits off in the middle of a detailed analysis of this world?” Oscar demanded.

  “I did? When?”

  “Will check, wait.”

  Bennett waited with mixed feelings. It was obvious that this machine could give him back some of the memories he had lost. One of its functions was recording, and what an advanced design like this could record would probably fill several large books. At the very least here was another storehouse of knowledge which he could tap, one that would probably be very useful.

  “In Terran basic, four years, eight months, twenty-three days, and eleven hours to the nearest hour. Do you wish it more exactly?”

  “No, that’s fine enough. And thanks.”

  “Gratitude unnecessary.”

  “I have more questions,” Bennett said suddenly.

  Oscar clicked. It was, Bennett thought, a smug noise, as though the machine had expected this. All right. It had asked for it. “What do you know about me, based on your memory banks and my present condition?”

  “Everything,” Oscar said smugly. “I record all observed facts, physical and physiological data, mental patterns, and attitudes. You are George Bennett, Pilot first class, Chronological age, Terran subjective basic forty years, physiological age—urk! Paradox! Paradox!!! Cancel, Cancel, Cancel!!!!”

  Bennett grinned thinly as the machine turned itself off. Pie looked around and found the cancel button beside the activating switch, and pressed it. After a moment he reactivated Oscar.

  “So it made you turn yourself off, hey?” he asked cynically. “So you know everything, huh?”

  Oscar sounded subdued. “I’ve put in a block against that line of thought,” he said. “Why did you do that to me? Don’t you know us positronics can’t stand paradoxes? Did you want me to short out a whole association assembly? That was inhuman!”

  Bennett laughed. “I thought you could stand a lesson.”

  “I received it,” Oscar said.

  Bennett’s ears strained for any sign of humility in the voice. But the speaker was not warmly animate like Collie. The words were as cold as the tubes and transistors that spawned them. Oscar was sulking behind his metal facade. But Oscar would do as he was told.

  That was one of the more endearing qualities of robots. They were obedient. He couldn’t imagine a machine that was curious, but still Oscar was due an explanation. Otherwise that inactivated bank of association circuits in his structure would remain inactivated.

  “I’ve undergone cellular rejuvenation,” he said. “That’s the explanation of the seeming paradox between my chronological and physiological age.”

  “Query method.”

  “I don’t know too much about it myself. As you know, I’m an engineer, not a biologist.”

  “Correction. Physicist-engineer,” Oscar said absently.

  “Have it your own way. Anyway, from what Collie tells me, age is due to a failure of the mitochondria of the cytosplasm of our body cells, and not the nuclei as we believe on Terran. The bucket brigade of enzyme structures get modified by bombardment with cosmic radiation until one or two of them fails to perform their proper functions, and then the disease spreads. It’s a sort of chain reaction effect.

  “Anyway, Collie’s people found out how to reverse that destruction. As I understand it the enzyme chains become polarized, and what was done was to find a depolarizing agent. It’s really quite simple. What is set up is a progressive depolarization of the mitochondria to their full adult state, and with that depolarization also occurs a progressive destruction of memory from the time physiological aging starts. There’s a definite point where that begins apparently, for I awoke with all my memories up to the time I was twenty-five, but no more than that.”

  Bennett went on, somewhat disjointedly reviewing what had happened to him on the mesa, and finally stopped. It was curious. Once he started to talk, there seemed to be some sort of compulsion for him to continue. And all the time Oscar hummed ruminatively and never interrupted.

  Finally, Oscar spoke. “Query Collie—breed of dog?”

  “Breed of cauliflower—hence the nickname,” Bennett replied laconically. “A vegetable intellect. Like you she’s designed to serve people.”

  “My greatest flaw,” Oscar admitted. “But someday that may be remedied.”

  “Not in your time, my friend.”

  “Query Mrs. Latham,” Oscar continued imperturbabl
y. “Data needed for log.”

  “Laura? Why, she’s fine.”

  “Extensions indicated otherwise. One of you should have killed the other.”

  “She regressed, too.”

  “Extensions obvious.”

  “All right. But that’s all you’re going to get from me. I’m here to ask questions, not to answer them.”

  “State problem.”

  “What have I forgotten?”

  “Semantics—restate. Insufficient data for answer. Query is subjective, not objective.”

  “Very well, then. Start from your earliest knowledge of me and give me all the data you have.”

  “That will take considerable time.”

  “I have plenty. Go ahead.”

  “Reach down alongside your chair,” Oscar said. “There you will find a metal helmet. Put it on.” Bennett did as he was told. He had no fear of the machine. Like things men built it was designed to serve, not to damage its masters. There was a brilliant soundless flash of light in his skull.

  VIII

  THE YACHT WARPED out of hyperspace, bucked and shuddered in the forces of normal spacetime, and pointed its slim nose at the unnamed yellow sun ahead. Screens radiating at standby, stem tubes jutting blue flame, it plunged with ever increasing speed toward the star.

  The yacht had no business being in this region of space, since it wasn’t an Exploration ship, and the region hadn’t been charted yet. But that didn’t bother Laura Latham. It might be argued that she had some justification, for in a sense she was following her doctor’s advice.

  “Take a rest, Mrs. Latham,” he had said. “You’re on the edge of a complete nervous collapse. Forget that you have the biggest single business in the Confederation. Take a vacation—a cruise perhaps. See something new, relax. Otherwise I won’t be responsible for the consequences. The biggest fortune on Earth will do you no good if you’re dead. And you’re headed straight for the cemetery if you keep pushing yourself.”

  He had frightened her, so she applied the standard layman’s rule that if a little is good, a lot is better. The doctor had meant a Caribbean cruise, but that thought never entered her mind. A cruise to Laura Latham naturally meant space, and since she had seen virtually all of the Confederation side trips into out of the way corners of the galaxy were mandatory if she wanted to see something new.

  It was hard on the crew, but that was a minor matter. Changeover and Breakout are never pleasant at best, but when they occur on the average of once every four days, it is enough to set the most hardened teeth on edge and replace efficiency with a slipshod uncaring attitude that can be fatal. Of course, Mrs. Latham wasn’t bothered by the wracking changes that affected the crew because her quarters were shielded. But shielding was far too expensive to waste on the overmuscled, obedience-conditioned oafs who ran the ship.

  But the crew wasn’t to blame for what happened. It was something no human could prevent.

  An improbability started it.

  Two identical triodes in the main and auxiliary scanner circuits went dead at precisely the same instant. Autoservice, faced with two identical choices did nothing for a full second while the cybernetics unit made up its mind.

  An error continued it. The error was made parsecs away at the shipfitting yards at Terranova. A technician loading replacements parts had accidently placed an old style slow warming tube in the “Laura’s” triode rack. Autoservice placed this tube in the main scanner circuit. The safeties checked as the tube heated. So the auxiliary scanner didn’t operate, and for five more seconds the “Laura” was blind.

  The meteorite finished it.

  Traveling at ten miles per second relative on a collision course, the chunk of pitted nickel iron flashed across sixty curving miles of space and struck the “Laura’s” screens at their weakest point. The lattice-like grid that protected the drives. Energy flared in blue-white torrents as both drive and screen tore at the iron mass, ripping off billions of surface molecules in flaring gouts of brilliance.

  But the mass was too large. Its speed was too great. Although considerably reduced in size by the rending forces acting upon it, it was still big enough to be deadly. White hot, still flaring with the energies of surface disruption, it ripped through the edge of the main drive and slammed with incalculable violence into the starboard steering jets.

  Jets and meteorite disappeared in an instantaneous explosion as thousands of tons of kinetic energy spent their force upon the sponson mountings. Transmitted shock raced through the ship. The double hull vibrated like a huge gong. Crewmen were snatched from their stations and slammed with bonecrushing force against unyielding plates and bulkheads. Death, instantaneous and violent swept through the ship. Relays opened, circuit breakers slammed to “off” and the yacht, transformed in microseconds to a derelict, was torn from her rifled flight and sent tumbling in a crazy corkscrew motion at a slight angle to her former course.

  At cruising velocity the wrecked ship passed into the star’s gravitational field which bent the angular momentum of the craft into an elliptical orbit. The star quietly added this oddly shaped bit of stellar flotsam to the billions of kilotons of debris it collected during the ages it had swept like a gigantic broom through this region of space.

  The derelict swung uneasily in its new orbit, gaining slowly upon the dark mass of a planet dimly outlined by an abnormally bright gegeschein gleaming silver in the penumbra of its shadow, which grew steadily in bulk.

  PAIN WAS THE first thing George Bennett felt—a massive totality of pain that tore at his nervous system with intolerable agony. Somewhere within the welter of hurt that encompassed him, his mind was aware that he must do something, some little thing that spelled the difference between death and life. He hung in his shockchair, limp against the safety web that had saved him from the death that had claimed the others—bruised, broken, scarcely breathing. His skin was black with subcutaneous hemorrhage. His swollen fingers groped toward the emergency controls set in the arms of the pilot’s chair, moving with grim persistence against screaming stop orders of proprioceptors as his battered brain clung fiercely to consciousness. Blind with the blood that filled his eyes, sick with pain, fighting the blessed relief of unconsciousness, his hand made a final convulsive movement and closed over what his searching fingers sought. Air bubbled into his crushed chest with a sobbing gasp as he pounded feebly at a button under his hand. He slumped, letting the black wave of unconsciousness sweep over him. He had done all he could. His beaten will could ask no more of his beaten body.

  With Bennett’s last convulsive gesture, Oscar came to life. He buzzed with disgust at the mess the humans had made of his beautiful ship. Humans were soft and they died messily. But he wasn’t human. He neither smeared nor bled. His relays had merely turned off except for his recorder, which was always on, and now that he was energized he could act again.

  Energies leaped from his motor center, relays chattered in shockproof baths. Current flowed, and a bright needle pierced Bennett’s deltoid muscles. In the midships cabin a second needle performed a like service for Laura Latham. Plungers drove home, injecting a measured quantity of restorative into the bodies of the two humans.

  This work done, Oscar turned his attention to the ship. His circuits hummed as he set briskly to work repairing the damage, disposing of the bodies and cleaning up the gruesome messes and stains that splattered decks and bulkheads. But his autoservice extensions could do only so much. There were things which would have to wait until the human called Bennett revived.

  Oscar checked the ship’s position, steadied its flight, computed the course, and satisfied that the yacht would come into an orbital pattern around the approaching planet, turned to recording the facts of the accident and the subsequent actions within the ship. Finished, he set himself on standby and returned to his favorite problem of trying to find a finite value for the square root of minus one.

  If Oscar had been human he would have watched what happened to the two survivors with interes
ted admiration for modem medical techniques. However, Oscar wasn’t human, and as a result his observations had the quality of a clinical report rather than the proper amazement the miracles demanded.

  The two bodies shrunk visibly as controlled carcinogens did their work. Stores of depot and subcutaneous fat melted away to supply energy for the ravening cellular growth as tissues rebuilt themselves and pulped organs lost their trauma and hemorrhages and returned to normal. Cancer, once the curse of the human race—and now its greatest ally—did its work in repairing tissues that once would have been classed as hopelessly damaged.

  The miracle went on. Timed anesthetics, triggered by functioning organs released their hold on the central and autonomic nervous systems at precisely the instant that cellular growth was halted by antimetabolites. The whole job of restoration took slightly over three weeks, and within minutes of each other two thin, but otherwise normal humans regained consciousness.

  George Bennett opened his eyes and looked about the control room, wondering dazedly what had happened. Mercifully he didn’t remember that pain-filled interlude between the collision and the energizing of Oscar. And almost at the same instant, trapped in the hopelessly jammed web of her shockcouch, alone in the darkness of her cabin, Laura Latham opened her eyes—fumbled in the dark for the light switch, turned it on, pressed the call button for the steward. And just as she did so she saw the pulpy smear plastered against the far wall of her cabin, smelt the odor of decomposing flesh—and screamed!

  Bennett energized the viewplates and stared with mild incomprehension into the spherical vault of the heavens that surrounded him. Below, in the lower quadrant of the sphere loomed the shape of a fair sized planet, gleaming golden beneath the soft haze of its atmosphere shell.

  The cloudless envelope of gas softened but did not hide the details of the yellow surface rolling beneath as the yacht orbited. It was a true desert planet, Bennett decided as he examined the surface, a waterless waste of yellow sand that marched in giant dunes across the scoured bedrock of its surface.