shooting me?"
"I'm trying to think of a way out," Huyghens said. "Add up all the
penalties for illegal colonization and I'd be in a very bad fix if you
got away and reported this set-up. Shooting you would be logical."
"I see that," said Bordman reasonably. "But since the point has come
up--I have a blaster trained on you from my pocket."
Huyghens shrugged.
"It's rather likely that my human confederates will be back here before
your friends. You'd be in a very tight fix if my friends came back and
found you more or less sitting on my corpse."
Bordman nodded.
"That's true, too. Also it's probable that your fellow-terrestrials
wouldn't cooperate with me as they have with you. You seem to have the
whip hand, even with my blaster trained on you. On the other hand, you
could have killed me quite easily after the boat left, when I'd first
landed. I'd have been quite unsuspicious. Therefore you may not really
intend to murder me."
Huyghens shrugged again.
"So," said Bordman, "since the secret of getting along with people is
that of postponing quarrels, suppose we postpone the question of who
kills whom? Frankly, I'm going to send you to prison if I can. Unlawful
colonization is very bad business. But I suppose you feel that you have
to do something permanent about me. In your place I probably should,
too. Shall we declare a truce?"
Huyghens indicated indifference.
"Then I do," Bordman said. "I have to! So--"
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and put a pocket blaster on the
table. He leaned back.
"Keep it," said Huyghens. "Loren Two isn't a place where you live long
unarmed." He turned to a cupboard. "Hungry?"
"I could eat," admitted Bordman.
Huyghens pulled out two meal-packs from the cupboard and inserted them
in the readier below. He set out plates.
"Now, what happened to the official, licensed, authorized colony here?"
asked Bordman briskly. "License issued eighteen months ago. There was
a landing of colonists with a drone-fleet of equipment and supplies.
There've been four ship-contacts since. There should be several
thousand robots being industrious under adequate human supervision.
There should be a hundred-mile-square clearing, planted with
food-plants for later human arrivals. There should be a landing-grid
at least half-finished. Obviously there should be a space-beacon to
guide ships to a landing. There isn't. There's no clearing visible from
space. That Crete Line ship has been in orbit for three days, trying
to find a place to drop me. Her skipper was fuming. Your beacon is the
only one on the planet, and we found it by accident. What happened?"
Huyghens served the food. He said drily:
"There could be a hundred colonies on this planet without any one
knowing of any other. I can only guess about your robots, but I suspect
they ran into sphexes."
Bordman paused, with his fork in his hand.
"I read up on this planet, since I was to report on its colony. A sphex
is part of the inimical animal life here. Cold-blooded belligerent
carnivore, not a lizard but a genus all its own. Hunts in packs. Seven
to eight hundred pounds, when adult. Lethally dangerous and simply too
numerous to fight. They're why no license was ever granted to human
colonists. Only robots could work here, because they're machines. What
animal attacks machines?"
Huyghens said:
"What machine attacks animals? The sphexes wouldn't bother robots, of
course, but would robots bother the sphexes?"
Bordman chewed and swallowed.
"Hold it! I'll agree that you can't make a hunting-robot. A machine can
discriminate, but it can't decide. That's why there's no danger of a
robot revolt. They can't decide to do something for which they have no
instructions. But this colony was planned with full knowledge of what
robots can and can't do. As ground was cleared, it was enclosed in an
electrified fence which no sphex could touch without frying."
Huyghens thoughtfully cut his food. After a moment:
"The landing was in the winter time," he observed. "It must have
been, because the colony survived a while. And at a guess, the last
ship-landing was before thaw. The years are eighteen months long here,
you know."
"It was in winter that the landing was made," Bordman admitted. "And
the last ship-landing was before spring. The idea was to get mines in
operation for material, and to have ground cleared and enclosed in
sphex-proof fence before the sphexes came back from the tropics. They
winter there, I understand."
"Did you ever see a sphex?" asked Huyghens. Then he said, "No, of
course not. But if you took a spitting cobra and crossed it with a
wild-cat, painted it tan-and-blue and then gave it hydrophobia and
homicidal mania at once, you might have one sphex. But not the race of
sphexes. They can climb trees, by the way. A fence wouldn't stop them."
"An electrified fence," said Bordman. "Nothing could climb that!"
"Not one animal," Huyghens told him. "But sphexes are a race. The smell
of one dead sphex brings others running with blood in their eyes. Leave
a dead sphex alone for six hours and you've got them around by dozens.
Two days and there are hundreds. Longer, and you've got thousands of
them! They gather to caterwaul over their dead pal and hunt for whoever
or whatever killed him."
He returned to his meal. A moment later he said:
"No need to wonder what happened to your colony. During the winter the
robots burned out a clearing and put up an electrified fence according
to the book. Come spring, the sphexes come back. They're curious,
among their other madnesses. A sphex would try to climb the fence just
to see what was behind it. He'd be electrocuted. His carcass would
bring others, raging because a sphex was dead. Some of them would try
to climb the fence, and die. And their corpses would bring others.
Presently the fence would break down from the bodies hanging on it,
or a bridge of dead beasts' carcasses would be built across it--and
from as far down-wind as the scent carried there'd be loping, raging,
scent-crazed sphexes racing to the spot. They'd pour into the clearing
through or over the fence, squalling and screeching for something to
kill, I think they'd find it."
Bordman ceased to eat. He looked sick.
"There were pictures of sphexes in the data I read. I suppose that
would account for--everything."
He tried to lift his fork. He put it down again.
"I can't eat," he said abruptly.
Huyghens made no comment. He finished his own meal, scowling. He rose
and put the plates into the top of the cleaner.
"Let me see those reports, eh?" he asked dourly. "I'd like to see what
sort of a set-up they had, those robots."
Bordman hesitated and then opened his traveling bag. There was
a microviewer and reels of films. One entire reel was labeled
"Specifications for Construction, Colonial Survey," which would contain
detailed plans and all requirements of material and workmanship for
everything from desks, office, administrative personnel, for use of, to
landing-grids, heavy-gravity planets, lift-capacity 100,000 earth-tons.
But Huyghens found another. He inserted it and spun the control swiftly
here and there, pausing only briefly at index-frames until he came to
the section he wanted. He began to study the information with growing
impatience.
"Robots, robots, robots!" he snapped. "Why don't they leave them where
they belong--in cities to do the dirty work, and on airless planets
where nothing unexpected ever happens! Robots don't belong in new
colonies. Your colonists depended on them for defense! Dammit, let a
man work with robots long enough and he thinks all nature is as limited
as they are! This is a plan to set up a controlled environment--on
Loren Two! Controlled environment--" He swore. "Complacent, idiotic,
desk-bound half-wits!"
"Robots are all right," said Bordman. "We couldn't run civilization
without them."
"But you can't tame a wilderness with 'em," snapped Huyghens. "You had
a dozen men landed, with fifty assembled robots to start with. There
were parts for fifteen hundred more, and I'll bet anything I've got the
ship-contacts landed more still!"
"They did," admitted Bordman.
"I despise 'em," growled Huyghens. "I feel about 'em the way the old
Greeks felt about slaves. They're for menial work--the sort of work a
man will perform for himself, but that he won't do for another man for
pay. Degrading work!"
"Quite aristocratic!" said Bordman with a touch of irony. "I take it
that robots clean out the bear-quarters downstairs."
"No!" snapped Huyghens. "I do. They're my friends. They fight for me.
No robot would do the job right!"
He growled, again. The noises of the night went on outside. Organ-tones
and hiccoughings and the sound of tack-hammers and slamming doors.
Somewhere there was a singularly exact replica of the discordant
squeakings of a rusty pump.
"I'm looking," said Huyghens at the microviewer, "for the record of
their mining operations. An open-pit operation would not mean a thing.
But if they had driven a tunnel, and somebody was there supervising the
robots when the colony was wiped out, there's an off-chance he survived
a while."
Bordman regarded him with suddenly intent eyes.
"And--"
"Dammit," snapped Bordman, "if so I'll go see! He'd--they'd have no
chance at all, otherwise. Not that the chance is good in any case."
Bordman raised his eyebrows.
"I've told you I'll send you to prison if I can," he said. "You've
risked the lives of millions of people, maintaining non-quarantined
communication with an unlicensed planet. If you did rescue somebody
from the ruins of the robot-colony--does it occur to you that they'd be
witnesses to your unauthorized presence here?"
Huyghens spun the viewer again. He stopped, switched back and forth,
and found what he wanted. He muttered in satisfaction: "They did run a
tunnel!" Aloud he said, "I'll worry about witnesses when I have to."
He pushed aside another cupboard door. Inside it were the odds and
ends a man makes use of to repair the things about his house that he
never notices until they go wrong. There was an assortment of wires,
transistors, bolts, and similar stray items.
"What now?" asked Bordman mildly.
"I'm going to try to find out if there's anybody left alive over there.
I'd have checked before if I'd known the colony existed. I can't prove
they're all dead, but I may prove that somebody's still alive. It's
barely two weeks' journey away from here. Odd that two colonies picked
spots so near!"
He picked over the oddments he'd selected:
"Confound it!" Bordman said. "How can you check if somebody's alive
some hundreds of miles away?"
Huyghens threw a switch and took down a wall-panel, exposing electronic
apparatus and circuits behind. He busied himself with it.
"Ever think about hunting for a castaway?" he asked over his shoulder.
"Here's a planet with some tens of millions of square miles on it.
You know there's a ship down. You've no idea where. You assume the
survivors have power--no civilized man will be without power very long,
so long as he can smelt metals!--but making a space-beacon calls for
high-precision measurements and workmanship. It's not to be improvised.
So what will your shipwrecked civilized man do, to guide a rescue-ship
to the one or two square miles he occupies among some tens of millions
on the planet?"
"What?"
"He's had to go primitive, to begin with," Huyghens explained. "He
cooks his meat over a fire, and so on. He has to make a strictly
primitive signal. It's all he can do without gauges and micrometers
and special tools. But he can fill all the planet's atmosphere with a
signal that searchers for him can't miss. You see?"
Bordman thought irritably. He shook his head.
"He'll make," said Huyghens, "a spark transmitter. He'll fix its
output at the shortest frequency he can contrive, somewhere in the
five-to-fifty-metre wave-band, but it will tune very broad--and it will
be a plainly human signal. He'll start it broadcasting. Some of those
frequencies will go all around the planet under the ionosphere. Any
ship that comes in under the radio roof will pick up his signal, get
a fix on it, move and get another fix, and then go straight to where
the castaway is waiting placidly in a hand-braided hammock, sipping
whatever sort of drink he's improvised out of the local vegetation."
Bordman said grudgingly:
"Now that you mention it, of course...."
"My space-phone picks up microwaves," said Huyghens. "I'm shifting a
few elements to make it listen for longer stuff. It won't be efficient,
but it will catch a distress-signal if one's in the air. I don't expect
it, though."
He worked. Bordman sat still a long time, watching him. Down below, a
rhythmic sort of sound arose. It was Sourdough Charley, snoring.
Sitka Pete grunted in his sleep. He was dreaming. In the general
room of the station Semper blinked his eyes rapidly and then tucked
his head under a gigantic wing and went to sleep. The noises of the
Loren-Two jungle came through the steel-shuttered windows. The nearer
moon--which had passed overhead not long before the ringing of the
arrival-bell--again came soaring over the eastern horizon. It sped
across the sky.
Inside the station, Bordman said angrily:
"See here, Huyghens! You've reason to kill me. Apparently you don't
intend to. You've excellent reason to leave that robot-colony strictly
alone. But you're preparing to help, if there's anybody alive to need
it. And yet you're a criminal, and I mean a criminal! There've been
some ghastly bacteria exported from planets like Loren Two. There've
been plenty of lives lost in consequence, and you're risking more.
Why the hell do you do it? Why do you do something that could produce
monstrous results to other human beings?"
Huyghens grunted.
"You're assuming there are no sanitary and quarantine precautions taken
by my partners. As a matter of fact, there are. They're taken, all
right! As for the rest, you wouldn't understand."
"I don't understand," snapped Bordman, "but that's no proof I can't!
Why are you a criminal?"
Huyghens painstakingly used a screwdriver inside the wall-panel.
He lifted out a small electronic assembly, and began to fit in a
spaghettied new assembly with larger units.
"I'm cutting my amplification here to hell-and-gone," he observed,
"but I think it'll do.... I'm doing what I'm doing," he added calmly,
"because it seems to me it fits what I think I am. Everybody acts
according to his own real notion of himself. You're a conscientious
citizen, a loyal official, a well-adjusted personality. You act that
way. You consider yourself an intelligent rational animal. But you
don't act that way! You're reminding me of my need to shoot you or
something similar, which a merely rational animal would try to make me
forget. You happen, Bordman, to be a man. So am I. But I'm aware of it.
Therefore I deliberately do things a merely rational animal wouldn't,
because they're my notion of what a man who's more than a rational
animal should do."
He tightened one small screw after another.
Bordman said:
"Oh. Religion."
"Self-respect," corrected Huyghens. "I don't like robots. They're too
much like rational animals. A robot will do whatever it can that its
supervisor requires it to do. A merely rational animal will do whatever
circumstances require it to do. I wouldn't like a robot unless it had
some idea of what was fitting and would spit in my eye if I tried to
make it do something else. The bears downstairs, now.... They're no
robots! They are loyal and honorable beasts, but they'd turn and tear
me to bits if I tried to make them do something against their nature.
Faro Nell would fight me and all creation together, if we tried to harm
Nugget. It would be unintelligent and unreasonable and irrational.
She'd lose out and get killed. But I like her that way! And I'll fight
you and all creation when you make me try to do something against my
nature. I'll be stupid and unreasonable and irrational about it." Then
he grinned over his shoulder. "So will you. Only you don't realize it."
He turned back to his task. After a moment he fitted a manual-control
knob over a shaft in his haywire assembly.
"What did somebody try to make you do?" asked Bordman shrewdly. "What
was demanded of you that turned you into a criminal? What are you in
revolt against?"
Huyghens threw a switch. He began to turn the knob which controlled the
knob of his makeshift receiver.
"Why," he said, "when I was young the people around me tried to make me
into a conscientious citizen and a loyal employee and a well-adjusted
personality. They tried to make me into a highly intelligent rational
animal and nothing more. The difference between us, Bordman, is that I
found it out. Naturally, I rev--"
He stopped short. Faint, crackling, frying sounds came from the speaker
of the space-phone now modified to receive what once were called short
waves.
Huyghens listened. He cocked his head intently. He turned the knob
very, very slowly. Bordman made an arrested gesture, to call attention
to something in the sibilant sound. Huyghens nodded. He turned the knob
again, with infinitesimal increments.
Out of the background noise came a patterned mutter. As Huyghens
shifted the tuning, it grew louder. It reached a volume where it was
unmistakable. It was a sequence of sounds like a discordant buzzing.
There were three half-second buzzings with half-second pauses between.
A two-second pause. Three full-second buzzings with half-second pauses
between. Another two-second pause and three half-second buzzings,
again. Then silence for five seconds. Then the pattern repeated.
"The devil!" said Huyghens. "That's a human signal! Mechanically made,
too. In fact, it used to be a standard distress-call. It was termed an
SOS, though I've no idea what that meant. Anyhow, somebody must have
read old-fashioned novels some time, to know about it. And so someone
is still alive over at your licensed but now smashed-up robot-colony.
And they're asking for help. I'd say they're likely to need it."
He looked at Bordman.
"The intelligent thing to do is sit back and wait for a ship, either my
friends' or yours. A ship can help survivors or castaways much better
than we can. It could even find them more easily. But maybe time is
important to the poor devils. So I'm going to take the bears and see if
I can reach him. You can wait here, if you like. What say?"
Bordman snapped angrily:
"Don't be a fool! Of course I'm coming! What do you take me for? And
two of us should have four times the chance of one!"
Huyghens grinned.
"Not quite. You forget Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley and Faro Nell.
There'll be five of us if you come, instead of four. And, of course,
Nugget has to come--and he'll be no help--but Semper may make up for
him. You won't quadruple our chances, Bordman, but I'll be glad to have
you if you want to be stupid and unreasonable and not at all rational,
and come with me."
* * * * *
There was a jagged spur of stone looming precipitously over a
river-valley. A thousand feet below, a broad stream ran westward to the
sea. Twenty miles to the east, a wall of mountains rose sheer against
the sky, its peaks seeming to blend to a remarkable evenness of height.
Rolling, tumbled ground lay between for as far as the eye could see.
A speck in the sky came swiftly downward. Great pinions spread and
flapped, and icy eyes surveyed the rocky space. With more great
flappings, Semper the eagle came to ground. He folded his huge wings
and turned his head jerkily, his eyes unblinking. A tiny harness held a
miniature camera against his chest. He strutted over the bare stone to
the highest point and stood there, a lonely and arrogant figure in the
vastness.
Crashings and rustlings, and snuffling sounds, and Sitka Pete came
lumbering out into the clear space. He wore a harness too, and a pack.
The harness was complex, because it had to hold a pack not only in
normal travel, but when he stood on his hind legs, and it must not
hamper the use of his forepaws in combat.
He went cagily all over the open area. He peered over the edge of the
spur's farthest tip, and prowled to the other side and looked down.
Once he moved close to Semper and the eagle opened his great curved
beak and uttered an indignant noise. Sitka paid no attention.
He relaxed, satisfied. He sat down untidily, his hind legs sprawling.
He wore an air approaching benevolence as he surveyed the landscape
about and below him.
More snufflings and crashings. Sourdough Charley came into view with
Huyghens and Bordman behind him. Sourdough carried a pack, too. Then
there was a squealing and Nugget scurried up from the rear, impelled
by a whack from his mother. Faro Nell appeared, with the carcass of a
stag-like animal lashed to her harness.
"I picked this place from a space-photo," said Huyghens, "to make a
directional fix from you. I'll get set up."
He swung his pack from his shoulders to the ground, and extracted an
obviously self-constructed device which he set on the ground. It had
a whip aerial, which he extended. Then he plugged in a considerable
length of flexible wire and unfolded a tiny, improvised directional
aerial with an even tinier booster at its base. Bordman slipped his
pack from his shoulders and watched. Huyghens put a pair of head-phones
over his ears. He looked up and said sharply:
"Watch the bears, Bordman. The wind's blowing up the way we came.
Anything that trails us will send its scent on before. The bears will
tell us."
He busied himself with the instruments he'd brought. He heard the
hissing, frying, background-noise which could be anything at all except
a human signal. He reached out and swung the small aerial around.
Rasping, buzzing tones came in, faintly and then loudly. This receiver,
though, had been made for this particular wave-band. It was much more
efficient than the modified space-phone had been. It picked up three
short buzzes, three long ones, and three short ones again. Three dots,
three dashes, and three dots. Over and over again. SOS. SOS. SOS.
Huyghens took a reading and moved the directional aerial a carefully
measured distance. He took another reading, shifted it yet again and
again, carefully marking and measuring each spot and taking notes of
the instrument readings. When he finished, he had checked the direction
of the signal not only by loudness but by phase, and had as accurate a
fix as could possibly be made with portable apparatus.
Sourdough growled softly. Sitka Pete whiffed the air and arose from
his sitting position. Faro Nell whacked Nugget, sending him whimpering
to the farthest corner of the flat place. She stood bristling, facing
down-hill the way they'd come.
"Damn!" said Huyghens.
He got up and waved his arm at Semper, who had turned his head at the
stirrings. Semper squawked and dived off the spur, and was immediately
fighting the down-draught beyond it. As Huyghens readied his weapon,
the eagle came back overhead. He went magnificently past, a hundred
feet high, careening and flapping in the tricky currents. He screamed,
abruptly, and screamed again. Huyghens swung a tiny vision-plate from
its strap to where he could look into it. He saw, of course, what the
tiny camera on Semper's chest could see--reeling, swaying terrain as
Semper saw it, though of course without his breadth of field. There
were moving objects to be seen through the shifting trees. Their
coloring was unmistakable.
"Sphexes," said Huyghens dourly. "Eight of them. Don't look for them to
follow our track, Bordman. They run parallel to a trail on either side.
That way they attack in breadth and all at once when they catch up. And
listen! The bears can handle anything they tangle with--it's our job to
pick off the loose ones. And aim for the body! The bullets explode."
He threw off the safety of his weapon. Faro Nell, uttering thunderous
growls, went padding to a place between Sitka Pete and Sourdough.
Sitka glanced at her and made a whuffing noise, as if derisive of her
blood-curdling sounds. Sourdough grunted. He and Sitka moved farther
away from Nell to either side. They would cover a wider front.