Vinson stopped cold, three steps inside of the door. The vast room was
empty, the machine was gone. The aisles and aisles of neatly machined
rack and panel were bare; all that remained was the linoleum in the
aisles--
That and the floor-studs now gleamed nakedly, each with its nut placed
precisely before it on the edge of the linoleum. Far down the empty
hall a power junction box was open; its heavy switches open; its fuses
pulled. The busbars that carried power to the machine had been unbolted
and the bare end reached out like the butt of an amputated arm.
Vinson's mind could have coped with ruin from natural causes--such as
tornado or earthquake--even though the site of this building had been
carefully selected to avoid such dangers. Vinson could have accepted
unnatural ruin, such as sabotage--though again the site of the building
had been kept as secret as could be to avoid such. But this was not
destruction, either from foreign agents or the fury of nature.
This was complete dis-installation; theft; ton after ton of
ultra-complex electro-mechanical gear neatly disconnected and removed
during the course of one eight-hour period.
It was far too much to believe. Harry Vinson's mind rebelled; he reeled
dizzily, turned in a dreamlike stupor and left the room. Moments later
he was in his car and driving back to his bachelor quarters in the
city, some miles away. Vinson was still in a daze as he undressed and
got into bed.
He slept for an hour, which brought him to his regular time for
arising, and awoke feeling the aftermath of a terrifying nightmare.
He remembered himself in the grip of a gleaming mechanical monster, a
lovely, frightened girl beside him. In his hand was some sort of pistol
which shot out a futile beam at the ensnaring metal talons; he was high
in the air of some strange world, which spread out below him.... Harry
Vinson smiled grimly; the nightmare was symbolic, of course, and he
wondered just what the dream had symbolized.
To dream of eight years of work disappearing overnight ... dream
himself captured by machinery! It might be a good idea to talk to Doc
Caldwell; he could help. Harry wondered whether he might have been
working too hard, then shook his head and stopped thinking about it as
best he could. No man, Caldwell had said, should try to analyze his own
subconscious....
The nightmare memory faded, driven out of Vinson's mind by the
eagerness of watching the machine work. He made coffee, washed his cup
quickly, and in another five minutes was driving out across the wide,
open plain towards the building.
* * * * *
Narina Varada was a dark beauty, almost oriental-looking. Her features
were sensitive, changing with her mood from a laughing vitality when
pleased to a Madonna-like impassiveness when serious. In either case
she was beautiful; and when her face reflected terror the sight of it
would have moved a bronze image to compassion.
But that which menaced Narina was colder than bronze and harder than
cold steel.
Terror and wonder were in her face now. It was one thing to avoid a
machine running wild; it was something entirely different to flee from
a machine guided by someone trying to run you down. In either case the
machine has no attitude; it is merely the insensate tool. But when a
small mobile device, built to perform a routine operation, turns from
some job it is not supposed to do and drives you into a corner like a
thief interrupted in his work----
That could not be endured without terror.
There was no other human in sight but Narina; the machine had no human
guidance that she could see. It should, then, be a simple machine that
got off its tracks, out of its routine line, easily to be avoided or
stopped.
But this was no insensate structure of metal and glass. The act of an
unguided machine is far from the sentient behavior that trapped Narina
in a corner. She could see over the top, and around the sides, of the
little machine. The room was filled with rack and panels, and other
small devices swarmed along the aisles. Tongs and grapplers that were
fashioned only to make routine replacement of parts were not replacing
parts. Inexplicably, they were unfastening nuts that held the racks and
the panels to the floor. They were lifting each individual bay onto
dolly trucks and trundling them out into a field near the building--out
where Narina could not see them.
Narina could not know where they were going but she could guess. This
was an attempt at theft; the chances were high that the stolen parts
were being trundled across the field to a ship moored for the moment to
the abandoned wharf.
These were clever little machines--sort of a part of a mechanical
nervous system, she knew. Like ganglion. In the human body, a cut
finger will send a nervous impulse of pain to inform the brain that
damage has been done. The brain directs the rest of the body to apply
first aid or, in more desperate cases to seek a doctor. In this
mechanical device, the creation was superior to a human body. A damaged
part sent its impulse not to a brain for further consideration, but to
a master selector system that sent one of these little machines rolling
down set tracks to replace the defective part.
But instead of minding their business as any insensate machine should,
these same little devices were dismantling the master machine with the
utmost efficiency and were carting it away.
Narina's lip curled in anger, now; anger and jealousy replaced fear,
she knew of only one other country on earth where its citizens prided
themselves in their mechanical ability. The country where 'Goldberg'
means a complicated mechanical gadget instead of a man's name.
Anger--and now frustration--For America was not even supposed to have
an inkling of the fact that this machine was being built, let alone the
ability to control the machine's own repair devices in some completely
inexplicable manner.
Spies, she thought. And then she was forced to admit to herself that
her country's own spies had managed to ferret out enough of the secrets
of the American machine to enable her and others of her countrymen to
reproduce it.
The machine before her moved slightly ... impatience?
The tempo of work had increased, and now the last of the gleaming racks
and panels were being removed. As they were trundled out Narina saw
her captor move forward with mechanical precision. She cried out as
the tongs and grapples reached for her, lifted her from her feet, and
carried her from the room.
Across the field she was taken, to the ship she expected to be there.
Panic came, panic and then realization of complete helplessness.
For how could a machine catch a human being--when the mechanism had no
eyes!
Eyes or not, the little machines were efficient; they moved about the
cargo ship knowingly, and the finest human crew could not have made
the ship ready, and cast away, in less time. Narina, from her prison
in a small stateroom, watched the shores of her native country recede
through a porthole too small for her to wriggle through.
She took solace in bitter tears.
* * * * *
Captain Jason Charless sat idly on the grille that looked down across a
vast room full of cigar-shaped metal things with stubby wings. Behind
him was a control panel and next to it a complex computing machine.
From this room, buried deep in a man-made cavern in the mountains,
Charless--or any of his command--could calculate and then direct any
one of the horde of guided missiles to any place on earth. A millionth
of a second after it had arrived at its destination, that place would
cease to exist save as a cloud of incandescent gas, a wave of radiant
energy, and a mounting white pillar of radioactive particles.
It was a dull job; a nasty job; a job no man would accept willingly.
A policeman, Jason thought bitterly, directs his energies in many
ways besides shooting criminals. But Charless could only sit and
wait--hoping he would never be called to compute and then direct even
the smallest of these devil's eggs against an active enemy.
On the floor of that cave was a planet-staggering quantity of atomic
explosive. That it might go off did not occur to Charless. It could
not; it was impossible because he, Captain Jason Charless, held
complete and absolute control over every bit of its complex machinery
at the dials and buttons of the control panels.