“Hear what?”
“The front door. I thought I heard it open just now.”
“We’re all cracking up,” Carmichael said dully. He cursed the salesman at Marhew, he cursed the inventor of cryotronic robots, he cursed the day he had first felt ashamed of good old Jemima and resolved to replace her with a new model.
“I hope I’m not intruding, Mr. Carmichael,” a new voice said apologetically.
Carmichael blinked and looked up. A wiry, ruddy-cheeked figure in a heavy peajacket had materialized in the middle of the living room. He was clutching a green metal toolbox in one gloved hand. He was Robinson, the robot repairman.
Carmichael asked hoarsely, “How did you get in?”
“Through the front door. I could see a light on inside, but nobody answered the doorbell when I rang, so I stepped in. Your doorbell’s out of order. I thought I’d tell you. I know it’s rude—”
“Don’t apologize,” Carmichael muttered. “We’re delighted to see you.”
“I was in the neighborhood, you see, and I figured I’d drop in and see how things were working out with your new robot,” Robinson said.
Carmichael told him crisply and precisely and quickly. “So we’ve been prisoners in here for six days,” he finished. “And your robot is gradually starving us to death. We can’t hold out much longer.”
The smile abruptly left Robinson’s cheery face. “I thought you all looked rather unhealthy. Oh, damn, now there’ll be an investigation and all kinds of trouble. But at least I can end your imprisonment.”
He opened his toolbox and selected a tubular instrument eight inches long, with a glass bulb at one end and a trigger attachment at the other. “Force-field damper,” he explained. He pointed it at the control box of the privacy field and nodded in satisfaction. “There. Great little gadget. That neutralizes the effects of what the robot did and you’re no longer blockaded. And now, if you’ll produce the robot—”
Carmichael sent Clyde off to get Bismarck. The robutler returned a few moments later, followed by the looming roboservitor. Robinson grinned gaily, pointed the neutralizer at Bismarck and squeezed. The robot froze in midglide, emitting a brief squeak.
“There. That should immobilize him. Let’s have a look in that chassis now.”
The repairman quickly opened Bismarck’s chest and, producing a pocket flash, peered around in the complex interior of the servomechanism, making occasional clucking inaudible comments.
Overwhelmed with relief, Carmichael shakily made his way to a seat. Free! Free at last! His mouth watered at the thought of the meals he was going to have in the next few days. Potatoes and Martinis and warm buttered rolls and all the other forbidden foods!
“Fascinating,” Robinson said, half to himself. “The obedience filters are completely shorted out, and the purpose nodes were somehow soldered together by the momentary high-voltage arc. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, you know.”
“Neither had we,” Carmichael said hollowly.
“Really, though—this is an utterly new breakthrough in robotic science! If we can reproduce this effect, it means we can build self-willed robots—and think of what that means to science!”
“We know already,” Ethel said.
“I’d love to watch what happens when the power source is operating,” Robinson went on. “For instance, is that feedback loop really negative or—”
“No!” five voices shrieked at once—with Clyde, as usual, coming in last.
It was too late. The entire event had taken no more than a tenth of a second. Robinson had squeezed his neutralizer trigger again, activating Bismarck—and in one quick swoop the roboservitor seized neutralizer and toolbox from the stunned repairman, activated the privacy field once again, and exultantly crushed the fragile neutralizer between two mighty fingers.
Robinson stammered, “But—but—”
“This attempt at interfering with the well-being of the Carmichael family was ill advised,” Bismarck said severely. He peered into the toolbox, found a second neutralizer and neatly reduced it to junk. He clanged shut his chest plates.
Robinson turned and streaked for the door, forgetting the reactivated privacy field. He bounced back hard, spinning wildly around. Carmichael rose from his seat just in time to catch him.
There was a panicky, trapped look on the repairman’s face. Carmichael was no longer able to share the emotion; inwardly he was numb, totally resigned, not minded for further struggle.
“He—he moved, so fast!” Robinson burst out.
“He did indeed,” Carmichael said tranquilly. He patted his hollow stomach and sighed gently. “Luckily, we have an unoccupied guest bedroom for you, Mr. Robinson. Welcome to our happy little home. I hope you like toast and black coffee for breakfast.”
Ozymandias
The same November 1958 issue of Larry Shaw’s Infinity that contained “There Was An Old Woman” included this one also, under the pseudonym of “Ivar Jorgenson,” a name which really belonged to a writer named Paul W. Fairman but through complicated maneuverings, which are described thoroughly in my collection In the Beginning, had become attached to me. (Attached to the point where a really dreadful novel by Fairman that was published under the Jorgenson byline, or rather “Jorgensen,” as he preferred to spell it, is occasionally presented to me at a science-fiction convention to be autographed. I always decline to take credit for it on the grounds that it wasn’t my work, and I hope they believe me.) “Ozymandias” was one of—good God—eighteen short stories and magazine articles that I turned out in January, 1958. And not the worst of them, either. My lifelong preoccupation with archaeology again shows through here.
~
The planet had been dead about a million years. That was our first impression, as our ship orbited down to its sere brown surface, and as it happened our first impression turned out to be right. There had been a civilization here once—but Earth had swung around Sol ten-to-the-sixth times since the last living being of this world had drawn breath.
“A dead planet,” Colonel Mattern exclaimed bitterly. “Nothing here that’s of any use. We might as well pack up and move on.”
It was hardly surprising that Mattern would feel that way. In urging a quick departure and an immediate removal to some world of greater utilitarian value, Mattern was, after all, only serving the best interests of his employers. His employers were the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. They expected Mattern and his half of the crew to produce results, and by way of results they meant new weapons and military alliances. They hadn’t tossed in 70 per cent of the budget for this trip just to sponsor a lot of archaeological putterings.
But lucky for our half of the outfit—the archaeological putterers’ half—Mattern did not have an absolute voice in the affairs of the outfit. Perhaps the General Staff had kicked in for 70 per cent of our budget, but the cautious men of the military’s Public Liaison branch had seen to it that we had at least some rights.
Dr. Leopold, head of the non-military segment of the expedition, said brusquely, “Sorry, Mattern, but I’ll have to apply the limiting clause here.”
Mattern started to sputter. “But—”
“But nothing, Mattern. We’re here. We’ve spent a good chunk of American cash in getting here. I insist that we spend the minimum time allotted for scientific research, as long as we are here.”
Mattern scowled, looking down at the table, supporting his chin on his thumbs and digging the rest of his fingers in hard back of his jawbone. He was annoyed, but he was smart enough to know he didn’t have much of a case to make against Leopold.
The rest of us—four archaeologists and seven military men; they outnumbered us a trifle—watched eagerly as our superiors battled. My eyes strayed through the porthole and I looked at the dry windblown plain, marked here and there with the stumps of what might have been massive monuments millennia ago.
Mattern said bleakly, “The world is of utterly no strategic conse
quence. Why, it’s so old that even the vestiges of civilization have turned to dust!”
“Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours,” Leopold returned implacably.
Exasperated, Mattern burst out, “Dammit, why? Just to spite me? Just to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the man of war?”
“Mattern, I’m not injecting personalities into this.”
“I’d like to know what you are doing, then? Here we are on a world that’s obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why, if not out of spite?”
“We’ve made only the most superficial reconnaissance so far,” Leopold, said. “For all we know this place may be the answer to many questions of galactic history. It may even be a treasure-trove of superbombs, for all—”
“Pretty damned likely!” Mattern exploded. He glared around the conference room, fixing each of the scientific members of the committee with a baleful stare. He was making it quite clear that he was trapped into a wasteful expense of time by our foggy-eyed desire for Knowledge.
Useless knowledge. Not good hard practical knowledge of the kind he valued.
“All right,” he said finally. “I’ve protested and I’ve lost, Leopold. You’re within your rights in insisting on remaining here one week. But you’d damned well better be ready to blast off when your time’s up!”
It had been foregone all along, of course. The charter of our expedition was explicit on the matter. We had been sent out to comb a stretch of worlds near the Galactic Rim that had already been brushed over hastily by a survey mission.
The surveyors had been looking simply for signs of life, and, finding none, they had moved on. We were entrusted with the task of investigating in detail. Some of the planets in the group had been inhabited once, the surveyors had reported. None bore present life.
Our job was to comb through the assigned worlds with diligence. Leopold, leading our group, had the task of doing pure archaeological research on the dead civilizations; Mattern and his men had the more immediately practical job of looking for fissionable material, leftover alien weapons, possible sources of lithium or tritium for fusion, and other such militarily useful things. You could argue that in a strictly pragmatic sense our segment of the group was just dead weight, carted along for the ride at great expense, and you would be right.
But the public temper over the last few hundred years in America had frowned on purely military expeditions. And so, as a sop to the nation’s conscience, five archaeologists, of little empirical consequence so far as national security mattered, were tacked onto the expedition.
Us.
Mattern made it quite clear at the outset that his boys were the Really Important members of the expedition, and that we were simply ballast. In a way, we had to agree. Tension was mounting once again on our sadly disunited planet; there was no telling when the Other Hemisphere would rouse from its quiescence of a hundred years and decide to plunge once more into space. If anything of military value lay out here, we knew we had to find it before They did.
The good old armaments race. Hi-ho! The old space stories used to talk about expeditions from Earth. Well, we were from Earth, abstractly speaking—but in actuality we were from America, period. Global unity was as much of a pipedream as it had been three hundred years earlier, in the remote and primitive chemical-rocket era of space travel. Amen. End of sermon. We got to work.
The planet had no name, and we didn’t give it one; a special commission of what was laughably termed the United Nations Organization was working on the problem of assigning names to the hundreds of worlds of the galaxy, using the old idea of borrowing from ancient Terran mythologies in analogy to the Mercury-Venus-Mars nomenclature of our own system.
Probably they would end up saddling this world with something like Thoth or Bel-Marduk or perhaps Avalokitesvara. We knew it simply as Planet Four of the system belonging to a yellow-white FS IV Procyonoid sun, Revised HD Catalogue # 170861.
It was roughly Earthtype, with a diameter of 6100 miles, a gravity index of .93, a mean temperature of 45 degrees F. with a daily fluctuation range of about ten degrees, and a thin, nasty atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide with wisps of helium and hydrogen and the barest smidgeon of oxygen. Quite possibly the air had been breathable by humanoid life millions of years ago—but that was millions of years ago. We took good care to practice our breathing-mask drills before we ventured out of the ship.
The sun, as noted, was an FS IV and fairly hot, but Planet Four was a hundred eighty-five million miles away from it at perihelion, and a good deal further when it was at the other swing of its rather eccentric orbit; the good old Keplerian ellipse took quite a bit of punishment in this system. Planet Four reminded me in many ways of Mars—except that Mars, of course, had never known intelligent life of any kind, at least none that had troubled to leave a hint of its existence, while this planet had obviously had a flourishing civilization at a time when Pithecanthropus was Earth’s noblest being.
In any event, once we had thrashed out the matter of whether or not we were going to stay here or pull up and head for the next planet on our schedule, the five of us set to work. We knew we had only a week—Mattern would never grant us an extension unless we came up with something good enough to change his mind, which was improbable—and we wanted to get as much done in that week as possible. With the sky as full of worlds as it is, this planet might never be visited by Earth scientists again.
Mattern and his men served notice right away that they were going to help us, but reluctantly and minimally. We unlimbered the three small halftracks carried aboard ship and got them into functioning order. We stowed our gear—cameras, picks and shovels, camel’s-hair brushes—and donned our breathing-masks, and Mattern’s men helped us get the halftracks out of the ship and pointed in the right direction.
Then they stood back and waited for us to shove off.
“Don’t any of you plan to accompany us?” Leopold asked. The halftracks each held up to four men.
Mattern shook his head. “You fellows go out by yourselves today and let us know what you find. We can make better use of the time filing and catching up on back log entries.”
I saw Leopold start to scowl. Mattern was being openly contemptuous; the least he could do was have his men make a token search for fissionable or fusionable matter! But Leopold swallowed down his anger.
“Okay,” he said. “You do that. If we come across any raw veins of plutonium I’ll radio back.”
“Sure,” Mattern said. “Thanks for the favor. Let me know if you find a brass mine, too.” He laughed harshly. “Raw plutonium! I half believe you’re serious!”
We had worked out a rough sketch of the area, and we split up into three units. Leopold, alone, headed straight due west, towards the dry riverbed we had spotted from the air. He intended to check alluvial deposits, I guess.
Marshall and Webster, sharing one halftrack, struck out to the hilly country southeast of our landing point. A substantial city appeared to be buried under the sand there. Gerhardt and I, in the other vehicle, made off to the north, where we hoped to find remnants of yet another city. It was a bleak, windy day; the endless sand that covered this world mounted into little dunes before us, and the wind picked up handfuls and tossed it against the plastic dome that covered our truck. Underneath the steel cleats of our tractor-belt, there was a steady crunch-crunch of metal coming down on sand that hadn’t been disturbed in millennia.
Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Gerhardt said, “I hope the ship’s still there when we get back to the base.”
Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree from the University of Kansas and had put in some time o
n their field staff with distinction, or so his references said.
I said, “What the hell do you mean?”
“I don’t trust Mattern. He hates us.”
“He doesn’t. Mattern’s no villain—just a fellow who wants to do his job and go home. But what do you mean, the ship not being there?”
“He’ll blast off without us. You see the way he sent us all out into the desert and kept his own men back. I tell you, he’ll strand us here!”
I snorted. “Don’t be a paranoid. Mattern won’t do anything of the sort.”
“He thinks we’re dead weight on the expedition,” Gerhardt insisted. “What better way to get rid of us?”
The halftrack breasted a hump in the desert. I kept wishing a vulture would squeal somewhere, but there was not even that. Life had left this world ages ago. I said, “Mattern doesn’t have much use for us, sure. But would he blast off and leave three perfectly good halftracks behind? Would he?”
It was a good point. Gerhardt grunted agreement after a while. Mattern would never toss equipment away, though he might not have such scruples about five surplus archaeologists.
We rode along silently for a while longer. By now we had covered twenty miles through this utterly barren land. As far as I could see, we might just as well have stayed at the ship. At least there we had a surface lie of building foundations.
But another ten miles and we came across our city. It seemed to be of linear form, no more than half a mile wide and stretching out as far as we could see—maybe six or seven hundred miles; if we had time, we would check the dimensions from the air.
Of course it wasn’t much of a city. The sand had pretty well covered everything, but we could see foundations jutting up here and there, weathered lumps of structural concrete and reinforced metal. We got out and unpacked the power-shovel.
An hour later, we were sticky with sweat under our thin spacesuits and we had succeeded in transferring a few thousand cubic yards of soil from the ground to an area a dozen yards away. We had dug one devil of a big hole in the ground.