XIV
It didn't take as long as Mohammed Matsui expected. They found thefissionables magazine, and in it plenty of plutonium, eachsubcritical slug in a five-hundred-pound collapsium canister. Therewere repair-robots, and they only had to replace the cartridges in thepower units of three of them. They sent them inside thecollapsium-shielded death-to-people area--transmitter robots, to relaywhat the others picked up through receptors wire-connected with theoutside; foremen-robots, globes a yard in diameter covered with hornsand spikes like old-fashioned ocean-navy mines; worker-robots, in avariety of shapes, but mostly looking like many-clawed crabs.
Neither the converter nor the reactor had sustained any damage whilethe fissionables were burning out. So the robots began tearing outreactor-elements, and removing plutonium slugs no longer capable ofsustaining chain reaction but still dangerously radioactive. Nuclearreactors had become simpler and easier to service since the First Dayof the Year Zero, when Enrico Fermi put the first one into operation,but the principles remained the same. Work was less back-breaking andmuscle-straining, but it called for intense concentration on screensand meters and buttons that was no less exhausting.
The air around them began to grow foul. Finally, the air-analyzersquawked and flashed red lights to signal that the oxygen had droppedbelow the safety margin. They had no mobile fan equipment, or time tohunt any; they put on their fishbowl helmets and went back to work.After twelve hours, with a few short breaks, they had the reactorsgoing. Jerry Rivas and a couple of others took a heavy-duty lifter andwent looking for conversion mass; they brought back a couple of tonsof scrap-iron and fed it to the converters. A few seconds after it wasin, the pilot lights began coming on all over the panels. They tooktwo more hours to get the oxygen-separator and the ventilator fansgoing, and for good measure they started the water pumps and theheating system. Then they all went outside to the ship to sleep. Thesun was just coming up.
It was sunset when they rose and returned to the building. Theairlocks opened at a touch on the operating handles. Inside, the airwas fresh and sweet, the temperature was a pleasantly uniform 75degrees Fahrenheit, the fans were humming softly, and there wasrunning hot and cold water everywhere.
Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, and the three tramp freighter fo'c'sle handstook lifters and equipment and went off foraging. The rest of themwent to the communications center to get the telecast station, theradio beacon, and the inside-screen system into operation. There werea good many things that had to be turned on manually, and more thingsthat had been left on, forty years ago, and now had to be repowered orreplaced. They worked at it most of the night; before morning, almosteverything was working, and they were sending a signal acrosstwenty-eight million miles to Storisende, on Poictesme.
It was late evening, Storisende time, but Rodney Maxwell, who musthave been camping beside his own screen, came on at once, which is tosay five and a half minutes later.
"Well, I see you got in somewhere. Where are you, and how iseverything?"
Then he picked up a cigar out of an ashtray in front of him and litit, waiting.
"Port Carpenter; we're in the main administration building," Conn toldhim. He talked for a while about what they had found and done sincetheir arrival. "Have you an extra viewscreen, fitted for recording?"he asked.
Five and a half minutes later, his father nodded. "Yes, right here."He leaned forward and away from the communication screen in front ofhim. "I have it on." He gave the wave-length combination. "Ready toreceive."
"This is about all we have, now. Views we took coming in, from theship and a scout-boat." He started transmitting them. "We haven't sentin any claims yet. I wasn't sure whether I should make them forAlpha-Interplanetary, or Litchfield Exploration & Salvage."
"Don't bother sending in anything to the Claims Office," his fathersaid. "Send anything you want to claim in here to me, and I'll haveSterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong file them. They'll be made for a newcompany we're organizing."
"What? Another one?"
His father nodded, grinning. "Koshchei Exploitation & Development;we've made application already. We can't claim exclusive rights to thewhole planet, like the old interstellar exploration companies didbefore the War, but since you're the only people on the planet, we cancome pretty close to it by detail." He was looking to one side, at theother screen. "Great Ghu, Conn! This place of yours all togetherbeats everything I ever dug, Force Command and Barathrum Spaceportincluded. How big would you say it is? More than ten miles in radius?"
"About five or six. Ten or twelve miles across."
"That's all right, then. We'll just claim the building you're in, now,and the usual ten-mile radius, the same as at Force Command. We'llclaim the place as soon as the company's chartered; in the meantime,send in everything else you can get views of."
They set up a regular radio-and-screen watch after that. CharleyGatworth and Piet Ludvyckson, both of whom were studying astrogationin hopes of qualifying as space officers after they had a realspaceship, elected themselves to that duty; it gave them plenty oftime for study. Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, with whomever they couldfind to help them, were making a systematic search. They looked firstof all for foodstuffs, and found enough in the storerooms of threerestaurants on the executive level to feed their own party in gourmetstyle for a year, and enough in the main storerooms to provision anarmy. They even found refrigerators and freeze-bins full of meat andvegetables fresh after forty years. That surprised everybody, for thepower units had gone dead long ago. Then it was noticed that they werecovered with collapsium. Anything that would stop cosmic rays was ahundred percent efficient as a heat insulator.
Coming in, the first day, Conn had seen an almost completed hypershipbulking above the domes and roofs of Port Carpenter in the distance.He saw it again on screen from a pickup atop the central tower. Assoon as the party was comfortably settled in the executive apartmentson the upper levels, he and Yves Jacquemont and Mack Vibart and SchalkRetief, the construction engineer, found an aircar in one of thehangars and went to have a closer look at her.
She had all her collapsium on, except for a hundred-foot circle at thetop and a number of rectangular openings around the sides. YvesJacquemont said that would be where the airlocks would go.
"They always put them on last. But don't be surprised at anything youfind or don't find inside. As soon as the skeleton's up they put thearmor on, and then build the rest of the ship out from the middle. Itmight be slower getting material in through the airlock openings, butit holds things together while they're working."
They put on the car's lights, lifted to the top, and let down throughthe upper opening. It was like entering a huge globular spider's web,globe within globe of interlaced girders and struts and braces,extending from the center to the outer shell. Even the spider washome--a three-hundred-foot ball of collapsium, looking tiny at thevery middle.
"Why, this isn't a ship!" Vibart cried in disgust. "This is just theoutside of a ship. They haven't done a thing inside."
"Oh, yes, they have," Jacquemont contradicted, aiming a spotlighttoward the shimmering ball in the middle. "They have all the enginesin--Abbott lift-and-drive, Dillingham hyperdrives, pseudograv, powerreactors, converters, everything. They wouldn't have put on theshielding if they hadn't. They did that as soon as they had theoutside armor on."
"Wonder why they didn't finish her, if they got that far," Retiefsaid.
"They didn't need her. They'd had it; they wanted to go home."
"Well, we're not going to finish her, not with any fifteen men,"Retief said. "One man has only two hands, two feet and one brain; hecan only handle so much robo-equipment at a time."
"I never expected we'd build a ship ourselves," Conn said. "We came tolook the place over and get a few claims staked. When we've done that,we'll go back and get a real gang together."
"I don't know where you'll find them," Jacquemont commented. "We'llneed a couple of hundred, and they ought all to be graduate engineers.We can't do this job with farm-tram
ps."
"You made some good shipyard men out of farm-tramps on Barathrum."
"And what'll you do for supervisors?"
"You're one. General superintendent. Mack, you and Schalk are a coupleof others. You just keep a day ahead of your men in learning the job,you'll do all right."
Vibart turned to Jacquemont. "You know, Yves, he'll do it," he said."He doesn't know how impossible this is, and when we try to tell him,he won't believe us. You can't stop a guy like that. All right, Conn;deal me in."
"I won't let anybody be any crazier than I am," Jacquemont declared,and then looked around the vastness of the empty ship with itslacework of steel. "All you need is about ten million square feet ofdecks and bulkheads, an air-and-water system, hydroponic tanks andcarniculture vats, astrogation and robo-pilot equipment, about which Iknow very little, a hyperspace pilot system, about which I knownothing at all.... Conn, why don't you just build a new Merlin? Itwould be simpler."
"I don't want a new Merlin. I'm not even interested in the originalMerlin. This is what I want, right here."
He told his father, by screen, about the ship. "I believe we canfinish her, but not with the gang that's here. We'll need a couple ofhundred men. Now, with the supplies we've found, we can stay hereindefinitely. Should we do more exploring and claim some more of theseplaces, or should we come home right away and start recruiting, andthen come back with a large party, start work on the ship, and exploreand make further claims as we have time?" he asked.
"Better come back as soon as possible. Just explore Port Carpenter,find out what's going to be needed to finish the ship and whatfacilities you have to produce it, and get things cleaned up a littleso that you can start work as soon as you have people to do it. I'morganizing another company--don't laugh, now; I've only startedpromotioneering--which I think we will call Trisystem & InterstellarSpacelines. Get me all the views you can of the ship herself and ofthe steel mills and that sort of thing that will produce material forfinishing her; I want to use them in promotion. By the way, has she aname?"
"Only a shipyard construction number."
"Then suppose you call her _Ouroboros_, after Genji Gartner's oldship, the one that discovered the Trisystem."
"_Ouroboros II_; that's fine. Will do."
"Good. I'll have Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong make application for acharter right away. We'll have to make Alpha-Interplanetary one of thestockholding companies, and also Koschchei Exploitation & Development,and, of course, Litchfield Exploration & Salvage...."
It was a pity there really wasn't a Merlin. If this kept on nothingelse would be able to figure out who owned how much stock in what.
They found the on-the-job engineering office for the ship in a smalldome half a mile from the construction dock. Yves Jacquemont and MackVibart and Schalk Retief moved in and buried themselves to the ears inspecifications and blueprints. The others formed into parties of threeor four, and began looking about production facilities for material.There was a steel mill a mile from the construction site; it wasalmost fully robotic. Iron ore went in at one end, and finished sheetsteel and girders and deck plates came out at the other, and a dozenmen could handle the whole thing. There was a collapsium plant; therewere machine-shops and forging-shops. Every time they finishedinspecting one, Yves Jacquemont would have a list of half a dozen moreplants that he wanted found and examined yesterday morning at thelatest.
Some of them were in a frightful mess; work had been suspended andeverybody had gone away leaving everything as it was. Some were inperfect order, ready to go into operation again as soon as power wasput on. It had depended, apparently, upon the personal character ofwhoever had been in charge in the end. The nuclear-electric power unitplant was in the latter class. The man in charge of it evidentlyhadn't believed in leaving messes behind, even if he didn't expect tocome back.
It was built in the shape of a T. One side of the cross-strokecontained the cartridge-case plant, where presses formed sheet-steelcylinders, some as small as a round of pistol ammunition and some thesize of ten-gallon kegs. They moved toward the center on a productionline, finally reaching a matter-collapser where they were plated withcollapsium. From the other side, radioactive isotopes, mostlyreactor-waste, came in through evacuated and collapsium-shieldedchambers, were sorted, and finally, where the cross-arm of the Tjoined the downstroke, packed in the collapsium cases. The productionline continued at right angles down the long building in which theapparatus which converted nuclear energy to electric current wasassembled and packed; at the end, the finished power cartridges cameoff, big ones for heavy machines and tiny ones for things like handtools and pocket lighters and razors. There were stacks of them, inall sizes, loaded on skids and ready to move out. Except for theminute and unavoidable leakage of current, they were as good as theday they were assembled, and would be for another century.
Like almost everything else, the power-cartridge plant was airtightand had its own oxygen-generator. The air-analyzer reported the oxygeninsufficient to support life. That was understandable; there were alot of furnaces which had evidently been hot when the power was cutoff; they had burned up the oxygen before cooling. They put on theiroxygen equipment when they got out of the car.
"I'll go back and have a look at the power plant," Matsui said. "Ifit's like the rest of this place, it'll be ready to go as soon as thereactors are started. I wish everybody here had left things likethis."
"Well, we'll have to check everything to make sure nothing was left onwhen the main power was cut," Conn said. "Don't do anything back theretill we give you the go-ahead."
Matsui nodded and set off on foot along the broad aisle in the middle.Conn looked around in the dim light that filtered through the dustyglass overhead. On either side of the central aisle were twoproduction lines; between each pair, at intervals, stood massivemachines which evidently fabricated parts for the power cartridges.Over them, and over the machines directly involved in production,were receptor aerials, all oriented toward a stubby tower, twentyfeet thick and fifty in height, topped by a hemispherical dome.
"That'll be the control tower for all the machinery in here," hedecided. "Anse, suppose you and I go take a look at it."
"We'll take a look at the machines," Rivas said. "Clyde, you and I canwork back on the right and then come down on the other side. You knowanything about this stuff?"
"Me? Nifflheim, no," Nichols said. "I know a robo-control when I seeone, and I know whether it's set to receive or not."
There was a self-powered lift inside the control tower. Conn and Anserode it to the top and got out, Anse snapping on his flashlight. Itwas dark in the dome at the top; instead of windows there wereviewscreens all around it. Five men had worked here; at least, therewere four chairs at four intricate control panels, one for each of thefour production lines, and a fifth chair in front of a number ofcommunication screens. There was a heavy-duty power unit, turned off.Conn threw the switch. Lights came on inside, and the outsideviewscreens lit.
They were examining the control-panels when Conn's belt radio buzzed.He plugged it in on his helmet. It was Mohammed Matsui.
"There's one big power plant back here," the engineer said. "Right inthe middle. It only powers what's in front of it. There must beanother one in either wing, for the isotope plant and thecartridge-case plant. I'll go look at them. But the power's been cutoff from the machines in the main building. There's four big switches,one for each production line--"
He was interrupted by a shout, almost a shriek, from somewhere. Itsounded like Jerry Rivas. A moment later, Rivas was clamoring:
"Conn! What did you turn on? Turn it off, right away!"
Anse jumped to the switch, pulling it with one hand and getting on hisflashlight with the other. The lights went out and the screens wentdark.
"It's off."
"The dickens it is!" Rivas disputed. "There are a couple of bigsupervisor-robots circling around, and a flock of workers...."
At the same time, Clyde Nichols began cursing. Or ma
ybe he waspraying; it was hard to be certain.
"But we pulled the switch. It was only the lights and viewscreens inhere, anyhow."
"It didn't do any good. Pull another one."
Matsui, back at the power plant, was wanting to know what was wrong.Captain Nichols stopped cursing--or praying?--and said, "Mutiny,that's what! The robots have turned on us!"
He knew what had happened, or was almost sure he did. A radio impulsehad gone out, somehow, from the control tower. Something they hadn'tchecked, that had been left on. There was just enough current-leakagefrom the units in the robots to keep the receptors active for fortyyears. The supervisor-robots had gone active, and they had activatedthe rest. Once on, cutting the current from the control tower wouldn'tturn them off again.
"Put the switch in again, Anse; the damage is done and you won't makeit any worse."
When the screens came on, he looked around from one to another. Thetwo supervisors, big ovoid things like the small round ones they hadused in repairing the power reactors the first day, were circlingaimlessly near the roof, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise,dodging obstructions and getting politely out of each other's way. Atlower altitude, a dozen assorted worker-robots were moving about, andmore were emerging from cells at the end of the building. Sweepers,with rotary brooms and rakes, crablike all-purpose handling robots, acouple of vacuum-cleaning robots, each with a flexible funnel-tippedproboscis and a bulging dust-sack. One tiling, a sort of special jobdesigned to get into otherwise inaccessible places, had a twenty-foot,many-jointed, claw-tipped arm in front. It passed by and slightly overthe tower, saw Clyde Nichols, and swooped toward him. With a howl,Nichols dived under one of the large machines between two productionlines. A pistol went off a couple of times. That would be Jerry Rivas.Nobody else bothered with a gun on Koshchei, but he carried one assome people carry umbrellas, whether he expected to need it or not andbecause he would feel lost without it.
That he took in at one glance. Then he was looking at the controlpanels. The switches and buttons were all marked for machine-controlin different steps of power-unit production. That was all for the bigstuff, powered centrally. There weren't any controls for lifters orconveyers or other mobile equipment. Evidently they were handled outin the shop, from mobile control-vehicles. He did find, on thecommunication-screen panel, a lot of things that had been left on. Hesnapped them off, one after another, snapping them on when a screenwent dark. There were fifteen or twenty robots, some rather large, inthe air or moving on the floor by now.
"We can't do anything here," he told Anse. "These are theshop-cleaning robots. They were the last things used here when theplace closed down, and the two supervisors were probably controlledfrom a vehicle, and it's anybody's guess where that is now. When youthrew that switch, it sent out an impulse that activated them. They'rerunning their instruction-tapes, and putting the others through alltheir tricks."
Three more shots went off. Jerry Rivas was shouting: "Hey, whattayaknow! I killed one of the buggers!"
There were any number of ways in which a work-robot could be shot outof commission with a pistol. All of them would be by the purest ofpure luck. The next time we go into a place like this, Conn thought,we take a couple of bazookas along.
"Turn everything off and let's go. See what we can do outside."
Anse put on his flashlight and pulled the switch. They got into thelift and rode down, going outside. As soon as they emerged, they saw arectangular object fifteen feet long settle over their aircar, letdown half a dozen clawed arms, and pick it up, flying away with it. Ithad taped instructions to remove anything that didn't belong in theaisleway; it probably asked the supervisor about the aircar, and thesupervisor didn't return an inhibitory signal, so it went ahead. Connand Anse both shouted at it, knowing perfectly well that shouting wasfutile. Then they were running for their lives with one of thecrablike all-purpose jobs after them. They dived under the slightlyraised bed of a long belt-conveyer and crawled. Jerry Rivas firedanother shot, somewhere.
The robots themselves were having troubles. They had done all the workthey were supposed to do; now the supervisors were insisting that theydo it over again. Uncomplainingly, they swept and raked andvacuum-cleaned where they had vacuum-cleaned and raked and swept fortyyears ago. The scrap-pickers, having picked all the scrap, were goingover the same places and finding nothing, and then getting deflectedand gathering a lot of things not definable as scrap, and thencircling around, darting away from one another in obedience to theirradar-operated evasion-systems, and trying to get to the outside scrappile, and finding that the doors wouldn't open because the dooropeners weren't turned on, and finally dumping what they were carryingwhen the supervisors gave them no instructions.
One of them seemed to have dumped something close to where ClydeNichols was hiding; if his language had been a little stronger, itwould have burned out Conn's radio. Their own immediate vicinity beingfor the moment clear of flying robots, Conn and Anse rolled from underthe conveyer and legged it between the two production lines.Immediately, three of the crablike all-purpose handling-robots sawthem, if that was the word for it, and came dashing for them, followedby a thing that was mostly dump-lifter; it was banging its bin-lid upand down angrily. About fifty yards ahead, Jerry Rivas stepped frombehind a machine and fired; one of the handling-robots flashed greenfrom underneath, went off contragravity, and came down with a crash.Immediately, like wolves on a wounded companion, the other two pouncedupon it, dragging and pulling against each other. That was a hunk ofjunk; their orders were to remove it.
The mobile trash-bin went zooming up to the ceiling, reversed withintwenty feet of it and came circling back to the ground, to go zoomingup again. It had gone crazy, literally. It had been getting too manycontradictory orders from its supervisor, and its circuits wereoverloaded and its relays jammed. Rats in mazes and human-type peoplein financial difficulties go psychotic in very much the same way.
The two surviving all-purpose robots were also headed for a paddedrepair shop. They had come close enough to each other to activatetheir anticollision safeties. Immediately, they flew apart. Then theirorder to pick up that big piece of junk took over, and they startedforward again, to be bounced apart as soon as they were within fivefeet of one another. If left alone, their power units would run downin a year or so; until then, they would keep on trying.
Soulless intelligences, indeed! Then it occurred to him that for thepast however-long-it-had-been he hadn't heard from Mohammed Matsui. Hejiggled his radio.
"Ham, where are you? Are you still alive?"
"I'm back at the power plant," Matsui said exasperatedly. "There's abig thing circling around here; every time I stick my head out, hemakes a dive at me. I didn't know robots would attack people."
"They don't. He just thinks you're some more trash he's been told togather up."
Matsui was indignant. Conn laughed.
"On the level, Ham. He has photoelectric vision, and a picture of whatthat aisle is supposed to look like. When you get out in it, he knowsyou don't belong there and tries to grab you."
"Hey, there's a lot of junk in here in a couple of baskets at theconverter. Say I chuck one out to him; what would he do?"
"Grab it and take it away, like he's taped to do."
"Okay; wait a minute."
They couldn't see the archway to the power plant, or even the robotthat had Matsui penned up, but after a few minutes they saw it soaringaway, clutching a big wire basket full of broken boxes and otherrubbish. It headed for the mutually repelling swarm of robots aroundthe door that wouldn't open for them. Conn and Anse and Jerry rantoward the rear, joined by Clyde Nichols, who popped up from behind apile of spools of electric wire. They made it just before thecoffin-shaped thing that had carried off the aircar came over toinvestigate.
"You want to be careful back there," Matsui told them, as they startedtoward the temporary safety of the power plant. "All thereactor-repair robots are there; don't get _them_ on the warpathnext."
/>
Of course! There were always repair-robots at a power plant, to gointo places no human could enter and live. Behind the collapsiumshielding, they wouldn't have been activated.
"Let's have a look at them. What kind?"
"Standard reactor-servicers; the same we used at the administrationcenter."
Matsui opened the door, and they went into the power plant. Conn andMatsui put on the service-power and activated the two supervisors;they, in turn, activated their workers. It was tricky work gettingthem all outside the collapsium-walled power-plant area; each workerhad to be passed through by the supervisor inside, under Matsui'scontrol. Because of the close quarters at which they worked inside thereactor and the converter, they weren't fitted with anticollisionrepulsors, and, working under close human supervision, they all hadaudiovisual pickups. It took some time to get adequate screens set upoutside the collapsium.
Finally, they were ready. Their two supervisors went up to theceiling, one controlled by Conn and the other by Matsui. The larger,egg-shaped shop-labor supervisors were still moving in irregularorbits; those of the workers still able to receive commands weretrying to obey them, and the rest were jammed in a swarm at the otherend.
First one, and then the other of the labor-boss robots were captured.They were by now at the end of what might, loosely, be called theirwits. They weren't used to operating without orders, and had beensending out commands largely at random. Now they came to a stop, andthen began moving in tight, guided circles; one by one, the workerrobots still able to heed them were brought to ground and turned off.That left the swarm at the door. The worker-robots under directcontrol of the power-plant supervisors went after them, grappling themand hauling them down to where Anse and Jerry Rivas and CaptainNichols could turn them off manually.
The aircar was a hopeless wreck, but its radio was still functioning.Conn called Charley Gatworth, who called a gang under Gomez, workingnot far away; they came with another car.
It took all the next day for a gang of six of them to get the placestraightened up. Neither Conn nor Gomez, who was a roboticist himself,would trust any of the workers or the two supervisors; theirexperiences out of control had rendered them unreliable. They took outtheir power units and left them to be torn down and repaired later.Other robots were brought in to replace them. When they were through,the power-unit cartridge plant was ready for operation.
Jerry Rivas wanted to start production immediately.
"We'll have to go back to Poictesme pretty soon," he said. "We don'twant to go back empty. Well, I know that no matter what we dug up, andwhat we could sell or couldn't sell, there's always a market forpower-unit cartridges. Electric-light units, household-applianceunits, aircar and airboat units, any size at all. We run that plant atfull capacity for a few days and we can load the _Harriett Barne_full, and I'll bet the whole cargo will be sold in a week after we getin."