As unheralded as ghosts, but as significant as a
new dawn of history, there came to Earth from distant
Ganymede's glowing crescent--three micro-androids,
minuscule beings, carrying the moot treasure of immortality.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Somebody invented the first locomotive. Then came the nuclear bomb. I
guess that people were somewhat scared of newness both times.
Mostly, it has been worse ever since.
World War III was also before my day. But then fear, the protective
emotion, played a reasonable part. So no cities were actually
vaporized. But our side came out the victors with bombers so
high-flying that they were already atom-propelled rocket ships of
space. We had artificial satellites circling the Earth, and a fortress
on the Moon.
I missed the first exploration of the solar system, too. There was hot
Mercury, carbon dioxide-smothered Venus; Mars and its ruins and quiet
colors; and what was left of Planet X, whose people destroyed the
Martians in war, though their planet itself got blown all to bits in
the same struggle, its fragments now being known as the asteroids.
The moons of Jupiter and Saturn were also invaded by men, as were the
frozen-methane-and-ammonia blizzards of Uranus and Neptune, and the
frigid mountain peaks of Pluto, farthest world of all.
There were always yarns about "Little Men" and whatnot, of course.
Yet no contemporary intelligent races were found across space. There
were just queer skeletons and dried up corpses millions of years old.
Rusting on Mars, or floating free and broken among the Asteroids,
were the remains of inventions, and other cultural evidences. Space
ships had wandered as far as Pluto during those past ages, too; and
various relics were left on this sphere or that. Scientific study of
these things meant more speed for our technical progress in medicine,
atomics, metallurgy, almost anything you could mention.
Three cheers for us, and wasn't progress wonderful? But I guess plenty
of folks felt dumb and slow and confused.
I, Charles Harver, was born in Chicago, March 9th, 2014. But in my
earliest, murky memories, Earth was only a place known from television,
picture books, and the nostalgic remarks of my parents. We had a house
and a flower and vegetable garden under a transparent airdome of dark
blue plastic. The sun would shine among the stars for what I heard was
fourteen days; then, for another two weeks the solar lamps would burn
in the dome top.
The region where we lived was called the spaceward lunar hemisphere.
Earth never shone there, but life was good. There were other kids,
and school, and the usual dreams about being a bold space wanderer,
speeding out to find unimagined marvels.
Dad was a technician in the research labs, just a few miles from our
house by tube train. I could see the walls of the buildings in the
bleak volcanic distance.
Dad used to pretend he was wrestling with me. "Charlie," he'd say,
"a kid better grow up tough and flexible these days. Not mean but
rugged--ready for anything. Don't ever go soft on me, Charlie, with all
the temptations of modern comforts. You know one thing the labs are
looking for, _already_? Yeah, a way to reach the planets of the stars!
Maybe a means--and an engine powerful enough--really _will_ be invented
to force a shortened, interdimensional path across the light-years
if the structure of space itself doesn't burst under test! Keep your
head down, kid! The work is much too dangerous to be conducted on the
densely populated Earth. There could be an awful blow."
Dad was a big, dark man. Talking like that, he looked thrilled and
scared.
* * * * *
Dad used to bring Dr. Shane Lanvin out to our house to enjoy Mother's
cooking, which, even considering the aid of a fine automatic kitchen,
was something special. Dr. Lanvin was a wispy little man with a ragged
blond mustache. He was much older than Dad; though Mom used to say that
even if he was a famous scientist, he was part child in his interests;
that he liked even toys.
"I always did enjoy things in miniature, Lillian," he'd admit.
Dr. Lanvin was an instrument specialist, which meant designing and
assembling parts that you could scarcely see, so small were they. Once
he made me a toy. It was a ball that absorbed the energy of sunshine,
and rolled after me wherever I went, in the plastic-sealed, tree-lined
streets of the lab staff housing area. Following the sounds of my
footsteps, it seemed half alive. Maybe it was a forerunner of all that
was to come.
Once Dr. Lanvin showed me a bit of quartz, like a grain of sand. It was
mounted in a little round case, fitted permanently to a powerful pocket
microscope. Through the scope you could see one flat face of the quartz
grain, glinting. Carved on it, unmistakable, were horizontal rows of
symbols.
My spine tingled. "Did you engrave them, Dr. Lanvin?" I demanded. I was
eight or nine, then.
"I could have, Buggsie," he answered, using my nickname. "With a
micro-manipulator and a diamond-chip. Only I didn't."
"Then who did?" I pursued.
"I wish I knew," he replied. "A friend of mine collected some
two thousand of these tiny, non-ferrous--not iron-bearing, that
is--meteors, floating free in the asteroid belt, and mailed them to
me. My microscope revealed this unusual one. The symbols are about
the same as those used by the beings of Planet X in their full-sized
inscriptions, before some vast nuclear charge from Mars blew up their
world. But no man can read such writing. That's about all I know--yet."
This remained almost our only information on this particular subject,
until years later.
We might all have been blown to Kingdom Come there on the Moon, had
any of the lab experiments gotten seriously out of control. There were
minor blasts. But I lived out my time there safely. I even worked
in those labs myself for several months, and by then even the stars
seemed technologically nearer. Dr. Lanvin had left the Moon, accepting
a professorship at the University of Chicago, and it was soon decided
that I'd be sent there to complete my education.
Mom said an odd thing as she and Dad saw me off at the Tycho spaceport:
"I wish we were going there, too, Charlie. I wish we had a little
country place, far off from everything, and a cow and some chickens."
"That's a primitive mouthful for a modern woman, with no idea of
modern farming, let alone such an antique setup," Dad chuckled. "Well,
sometimes I yearn for simplicity, too. We're weak, slow-adjusting
characters, left a little behind by the onrush of the times. So long,
Charlie, watch yourself. It seems funny that I, an Earthian, have a son
who'll actually have to get used to Earth."
Yes, that turned around situation, characteristic of our era, seemed
odd. I was nervous about my big, sophisticated, native planet, as if it
was an alien world! As a youngster, men had kidded me that I couldn't
even endure its huge gravity!
The new university outside Chicago proper was beautiful. As arranged, I
went to live at Dr. Lanvin's house. I adjusted to Terra, even though,
within twenty-four hours of my arrival, there was a catastrophe that
couldn't have happened in a previous age.
A freighter coming from Mars to the Chicago spaceport, couldn't
decelerate. Nobody knows completely what errors of human stupidity
were committed aboard the doomed ship under the goad of panic; but the
_Venetian Prince_ came down like a colossal meteor, fortunately in
almost open country miles from the port. Yet a town of fifteen thousand
nearby was wiped out. At Dr. Lanvin's house we felt the shock wave and
the hot wind. The western horizon glowed red. No doubt a crater will
stand for ages at the site of the crash.
As I watched from Doc's dooryard, all the loved romance of space and
the future seemed to turn sour on me.
"Disasters that afflict innovations always affect people about the
same, Charlie," Doc breathed heavily, not calling me Buggsie, now.
"Train wrecks, the sinking of an ocean liner, the crash of a great
plane. Now a space ship destroying a town. The magnitude just gets
bigger, more terrible. There'll be an investigation, terror, grief,
complaints; laws will be changed. But wider and better interplanetary
travel will go marching on, with everything else."
I got in on the ground floor of Dr. Lanvin's work in advanced robotics.
Robot devices had been used for various purposes for many years. But
Doc had invented some much improved ones. I tried handling several.
Then, like part of my obscure destiny, the chance came to really prove
one of them.
* * * * *
Fire broke out in an unrenovated warehouse near the edge of the city
one night. Doc and I drove to the scene in his autocar. There was a lot
of inflammable and possibly explosive material. Someone shouted that a
watchman had been overcome by smoke inside the building.
"Get him out, Charlie," Doc said. "Your body is more agile than mine;
your control of an artificial one will be the same."
Sitting in the car, I put the control helmet over my head. In it there
was no old fashioned television screen, and no complicated guide
levers. What the helmet did was detect and sidetrack the motor impulses
from my brain, broadcasting their pulsations by short wave radio to
the robot, which I thus guided as if it were my own form. Similarly,
sensory impressions were radioed back to the helmet, there to be
reconverted into impulses directly perceptible to the sensory centers
of my brain, without the intervention of my eyes, ears, and other sense
organs.
So, in effect I was living in a shape not handsome in a human way,
stronger than my own, and far less limited. Like a demon I stepped
out of the rear seat of the autocar on asbestos-shod feet. Propelled
by steel muscles energized by a motor drawing current from an atomic
battery, I walked past less intricately robotized fire-fighting
equipment. Through smoke that would have strangled an unprotected man,
I climbed a ladder and went through a window from which a plume of
flame belched. I felt no inconvenience whatsoever. There was a thrill
in that--like being something super.
After that I was a bit lost. But a voice growled instructions near
me--in the car, that is; I had almost forgotten that I was really
there, and not in the blazing warehouse. Muffled and harrassed, it
reached my own ears through the control helmet:
"Walk your robot inward, kid, for cripes sake! Follow a beam if there's
no floor left! There'll be a little office room...."
I knew that it must be some chief of the fire fighters who was giving
me directions.
With flames all around, I--or the machine--scrambled along a steel
support, and through an opening in an inside wall. Flames had not
penetrated there, and automatically I saw through the opaque smoke by
radio waves sent out by, and bouncing back to eyes that belonged to
the robot; parabolic antennas, they were. The images were visual and
unblurred, and lacked only color.
I found the office, and the man who had collapsed there. I pressed an
oxygen mask from my insulated pack over his face, and wrapped him in an
asbestos blanket that I carried.
"Rush to the main door of the building, kid!" the voice growled again.
"I think the wall of flame is less deep there!"
Doing it was a cinch, though I went through a hundred feet of pure fire
in two great leaps. I dropped the guy on a stretcher outside the door.
Let the medics work on him. I had to remind myself that he had been
rescued, not by me, but by a product of science.
Back at the car I made the robot polish the soot off itself with a
cloth, and then climb into the rear seat to assume an inert position
for transport, again. After that, I removed the helmet.
"Well, Charlie, another foretaste of the future, eh?" Doc said from
behind the wheel. "Make way for tomorrow...."
"Yeah," I grunted raggedly. "Like being more than human."
The guy who had been giving me directions still stood beside the car.
Somehow, I sensed that our innocent remarks were wrong things to say in
his presence. I studied him from my six-feet-three height. Growing up
in low lunar gravity, a fellow shoots up amazingly.
His face, topping a massive body, was beefy and rough and kind; but now
there was fury in it. He was like a tame bear after being baited and
confused for too long. And he'd just been through some nerve wracking
minutes of responsibility for a man's life.
"Okay, kid," he rumbled. "You and science saved that man. Thanks.
Otherwise, it's all the same. Tomorrow, and more gadgets! Nothing stays
put so a guy can understand it! The world just rushes on, till maybe
not even gravestones mean anything anymore--except when a spaceship
rubs out a town, killing my brother, his wife, and their four kids,
among the others! Pretty soon you think that the whole universe is
going to fall apart, with all the junk in it, and that there aren't
going to be any real folks anymore! When all you wanted was peace for
your family. Then you get all mixed up, and want to kill and smash
whoever and whatever makes this so. Damn! Dammit all!..."
I held my hands poised to grab him if he tried to jump me. Only his
grief kept me from calling him a fool. Yes, he might have attacked me,
except that now he went all to pieces. Big sobs wracked him.
Doc and I didn't have to do anything because two cops came and led him
away.
Doc shrugged sadly. "Neurasthenia. It's getting commoner, Charlie,"
he said. "A straw just broke another camel's back. Our friend has had
a tough time. Besides, he's one of the slow ones. Slow to adjust and
grow with his civilization. Oh, he'll probably straighten out. Or
the cerebral specialists will fix his brain. He'll be an easy going,
untroubled individual. Is it right and democratic to tamper with a
man's mind? Well, would you let him be insane, poignantly miserable,
for keeps?"
Again I had a primitive qualm. The Earth was all around me, strange,
teeming, overpopulated in spite of colonies across space. The crowd,
jubilant over the robot's demonstration, was all around us. But I bet
that every one of those people was at least a little bewildered by the
times.
"Let's drive home, Doc," I urged sharply.