The phone saved him from finishing. He hadn't had time to get into a
space suit immediately. After the blast he had fumbled around searching
for one. And he'd arrived outside the lock without ever having felt
discomfort from living in a vacuum for _five full minutes_!
His self-satisfaction vanished, and revulsion took its place. He
stared at his body in horror. No human body could have endured such
punishment. But he had taken it without noticing it!
Pat came back at a run. "Come on, Bill. A messenger just arrived from
Earth with five hundred pounds of K-40!"
"Five hundred?" Norden could almost hear again the amazed voice of
General Dawes when he asked for a mere five pounds--a quantity nearly
impossible to secure.
Pat's face confirmed his suspicions. Earth couldn't have made five
hundred pounds so rapidly.
* * * * *
They found the guards already waiting to take them to where Miles
was, and followed them down to the entrance of the explosion testing
chamber. Miles was smiling and chatting with a man who appeared to be
a perfectly normal rocket pilot, and who seemed bored until he saw
Norden. He consulted a picture on some kind of tape recording and
stepped forward.
"I have orders to deliver the K-40 to you, Dr. Norden," the pilot said.
"But it's pretty bulky in its containers. If you'll come out to the
ship and okay it...."
Miles cut in blandly. "I've been explaining the new regulations, Dr.
Norden." He winked slightly, with a faint motion toward the chamber.
"Go ahead and clear through," Norden told the pilot. "I'll wait, and
then we can look at your cargo. It's a damned nuisance having to hold
things up while everyone is X-rayed. But we've new regulations now." He
caught Miles' look of approval, and he knew he'd reacted correctly.
The pilot shrugged. "Why not? Let me know if you find any dangerous
diseases." He chuckled, and stepped through the entrance, and out
toward the fluoroscope set-up.
The picture on the screen was satisfactory and the guards started to
relax beside the slits where their guns projected into the chamber.
Miles glanced at them, and his voice was urgent, commanding. "_Shoot to
miss. And keep getting closer._"
Another screen showed the pilot turning to leave, just as the first
bullet splintered the floor a yard from his boots. He jumped back with
a terrified gesture. Another bullet came closer, and a third barely
missed him. Shock hit his face, and vanished as he turned into a bright
splash of greenish-yellow light.
"They over-estimated our production and under-estimated our ability
to bluff," Miles said. "Good shooting, men. I'm glad he decided he'd
failed the test before you had to shave it closer."
Norden stood staring at the blasted area and back toward the
screen that had shown the image of a normal human standing before a
fluoroscope. Breathing vacuum for five minutes hadn't hit him as hard.
Subconsciously, he'd counted on the fluoroscopic evidence--and it had
proved to be a lie.
"He couldn't have been an Alien with that kind of a skeleton!" he
whispered.
Miles shook his head. "He wasn't. As near as our cyberneticists could
gather, he was some kind of a robot, designed to mix with us. We left
automatic televisors on Mars to catch a few telephotos of the Aliens,
and they look a little like octopi on stubby legs. Nothing could make
them look human."
"But a robot with a human skeleton?" Pat asked.
"It's possible, with enough advanced development. Hide the metal works
in the so-called bones and skull, and shape everything else to the
right form and transparency. Probably the first ones we caught were
meant to mislead us. Hughes swears that any race capable of developing
such an advanced cybernetic brain could handle the rest--down to
letting him get his energy out of our food."
Miles' face was more fatigued than ever, but he found enough strength
for a smile. "Thanks for playing along with me, Bill. Now get back to
work, if you can stand it. The chem lab delivered your stuff while you
were coming here."
The stuff from the chemists looked like wool, impregnated with the K-40
salt. Pat slashed off a yard of the coarse cloth and draped it around
the cage, after a quick check with the Geiger-Mueller counter. She
formed a rope of it and connected the cage-cover to the nearest pipe.
And the images of the females in the screens were suddenly still, as
if all of them had gone to sleep at once. Pat yanked the cover off and
instantly the females were dashing at the gates of their cages again.
Pat let out a yell and reached for the phone. Norden tried to echo her
enthusiasm, but there was no resiliency left in him. He stared at the
answer to their problems, while part of his mind estimated that the
pilots could stand the radioactivity from suits of such cloth long
enough to accomplish their purpose, if an undersuit of lead-cloth could
be worn also.
But the rest of his mind was in his own private hell. _Robot_, it
shouted at him--_robot and spy!_ It was plain enough now that his
periods of "relaxation" and review of the day's events had been a
mechanism for leaking information to the Aliens. His unexpected and
rebellious attempt to end it had been the signal to send Armsworth
against the male lizards. Hands-behind-the-head-Norden, he
thought--the robot too dumb to recognize the working of an automatic
transmitter switch.
He fondled the cloth cover slowly, tasting the anticipation of revenge.
The Aliens had taken a man named William Jon Norden from a lonely
asteroid, and had drained him of his life history and knowledge. They'd
built a poor dupe of a robot, and had sent it out to spy for them, and
to believe for a while that it was human and alive. Now let them feel
the defeat they'd earned when they built their robot too close to the
original.
Then he considered the thin thread on which his hopes rested. He had
something that stopped some form of energy from being detected by the
lizards--an unknown band-width of an unknown spectrum which might not
even be the right one.
He swung around to check Pat's call, but it was too late. The word had
already spread, judging by the whoops or rejoicing coming from beyond
the laboratory.
V
Norden broke away from the men who refused to listen to his warnings
as quickly as possible. Pat had already gone to her bunk, worn out
completely by the brief burst of hope, and he headed for his own
cubicle. There was no physical fatigue--how could there be in a robot?
But his mind was dulled with too many shocks. He dropped to the bunk,
and his arms came up automatically.
He forced them down, and this time he was ready when his brain tried to
black out on him. The compulsions that acted on him to make him pass on
his information to the Aliens were partly under his control.
He managed to sidetrack his thoughts before blacking out, and to keep
his arms down. He lay there, cursing himself and the things which had
created him, fighting his battle silently, until he knew he had won.
His legs were unsteady when he finally stood up. The effort of will
had shocked even his motor control impulses, but the damage was not
permanent, and by the time he passed Miles' darkened doorway, he was
moving smoothly enough again. He saw surprised looks exchanged by his
guards as they followed him back to the laboratory.
"You might as well come in," he told them. "I'll be here all night, and
there's nothing secret about my work now. I think there's a deck of
cards in the desk over there."
One of them looked and came back, holding the deck and grinning.
"Thanks, Doc," he said. "You're all right."
For a second, Norden experienced a warming glow as he turned into his
office. He could find some acceptance among men now. Then he grimaced
bitterly, as he realized what they'd think of him if they knew the
truth about him. It was one thing to ape humanity, quite another to
belong.
The article on speculative spectra by the Japanese scientist was still
on his desk, and he began poring over it. Almost at once, his mind
swerved away on a flight of curiosity about the card game the men had
been playing. He pulled it back, and his imagination started in on
hatred of the Aliens.
He fought against that too, tempting as it was. He'd licked the
compulsion to communicate with them in two hours. There was hope that
he could lick the taboo against investigating into a forbidden field.
The fact that it was forbidden made it doubly worth studying.
Bit by bit he traced down the mathematics, but in the end the taboo
threw him. It required all the effort he could bring to the problem to
follow the tricky formulae, and it couldn't be done while fighting the
treachery of his own mind. He gave up in disgust, and turned to the
computer.
He'd seen Pat use it often enough, and apparently his robot mind
was good at memorizing. He searched through the available tapes of
information until he came to one that covered the more vital aspects of
Einstein's unified field theory.
He fed it in, and began adding the spectra relation data from the
books, carefully storing them in the memory circuits of the machine.
The mathematics of the article went in next. He made sure the material
they had used to locate the screen was still active, and brought it up
to date.
Finally he set the machine to deriving all possible extensions of the
mathematics he couldn't handle himself.
When that was finished, there was no longer any need to worry about the
taboo. The computer had done what he had failed to do, and more. He
stared at the sheaf of papers. The assembled material would save years
of work on extraspectral radiation. And his suspicion that magnetism
was the vital link seemed to be confirmed. It appeared to be something
of a universal transformer, when properly handled.
But the machine couldn't tell him what section of the Hardwick spectrum
involved life. The field used by the lizards to locate each other lay
well up in it, in a band relationship somewhat analogous to the X-rays
of the normal spectrum. But if that failed, there was no clue to what
might work.
In any new field, one fresh fact could open up tremendous stores
of knowledge--but there would always be even greater ones awaiting
discovery.
He put in a call to the library for more material on Janiekowski's
work with the lizards, and was told that they'd have to secure a tape
from Earth. Earth promised a ship with the tape, and other material
he'd requested within three hours. There was no questioning of his
priorities this time.
Then he glanced at the clock, and was shocked to find it already past
noon. He got up impatiently, heading toward the lunch room. It was
strange that Pat had failed to join him.
He found her and Miles searching for him in the cafeteria, and one look
was enough. Miles motioned Norden to follow him, and led the way to his
office. Once there, he closed the door, and threw the decoded dispatches
down for Norden to see.
"The Aliens have narrowed the invasion area to ten million miles from
Earth," he said wearily. "We've been holding out by a clever tactical
subterfuge. Send out a hundred ships near each other, and the Aliens
can't handle them all at once. If we're lucky, and spot the first
torpedoes, we can trace them back and a few ships may survive long
enough to send visual, pattern-seeking atomic torpedoes toward the
Alien ship.
"But we can't get closer than a few hundred thousand miles with any
life aboard a ship, because the radiation--or whatever it is they
use--is fatal so long as they can detect us. You can see why Command
rushed through all the screen suits they could, and struck this
morning. They had to."
Norden picked up the dispatches, and scanned them grimly. Seven hundred
pilots out of twice that many thousand had been screened. A third of
the total number had returned--but none of the spared ships had been
theoretically protected.
The Aliens had apparently not only spotted all of the protected ships,
but had concentrated their torpedo fire on them. The experiment was a
complete failure!
There was no use in reminding Miles that he'd tried to warn him. Earth
hadn't been able to heed such warnings. He handed the papers back, his
mind tormented by a picture of seven hundred men--men probably like the
guards who'd called him all right--who had lost their marginal chance
to live because a robot had failed. It was nonsense, his mind told him.
Soldiers were meant to die. But the picture remained.
"So what happens to me now?" he asked.
"You'll try again, of course," Miles answered, apparently surprised
at the question. "At least the fact that they worked that hard to
eliminate the ships with the screen indicates you're on the right
track."
Norden stared at him despairfully. "It's like tracing a single drop
of water in the ocean--or looking for a trace of life that can be
detected for millions of miles when you're in the middle of hordes
of living creatures. I've been working on that already. And the only
reason we _could_ detect and screen the lizard signals was because they
were unique.
"Hardwick was right about that, too. You have to look for life forces
where they're scarce. I need isolation from people, animals--even from
germs and viruses, probably."
Pat gestured to a map on the wall. "There are the mine installations on
the other side of the Moon. Would they do?"
He had no idea, but it was the best he could hope for. He nodded
slowly, and she turned towards the door.
"Then what are we waiting for?" she asked. "We've got too little time
now."
"You're not going, Pat," he told her. "Nobody is. I need isolation from
life, remember! Besides, if there's any means of communication between
here and there, I'll need you here to work the communicator."
There was a television link that was still useful, as a quick check
showed. And there were ships to carry as much equipment as he needed,
including two rabbits, and a male and female sand lizard in little
airtight cages where oxygen could be supplied from tanks. He had no
idea of what he might need, and had to take everything he could
imagine as being useful.