Johnny Hope knew the robot armies had
been created to serve Man. But war and a plague
had destroyed civilization, leaving humans as--
Slaves To The Metal Horde
By Milton Lesser
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
June 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Johnny Hope backed off warily, retreating toward the sun-dried creek
bed, a jagged brown scar across the parched grassland. He carried
no weapon and as the others closed in about him in a tightening
semi-circle his eyes darted furtively in all directions. But all the
faces were stamped, as from a mold, with uncompromising hostility.
Johnny licked his lips and said, "I want to bury them. Let me bury them
and then I'll go. I promise."
DeReggio, the mayor, brandished his club--which was an old rifle stock
with half the jagged, corroded barrel forming a handle. "Go," he said.
He took a long stride toward Johnny, then changed his mind when the
youth held his ground. "They cannot be buried, Johnny Hope. You know
your parents must be burned as the law dictates."
Blinking sweat from his eyes, Johnny felt the sun scorching down
through the glaring midsummer heat-haze. "It was the last wish of my
father," he said softly, his voice hardly more than a whisper. "That I
should take them forth from the village and bury them with a prayer for
their Christian souls."
"No!" DeReggio bellowed. He was a great-chested man with sloping
shoulders and almost no neck. "We cannot deliver their bodies to you.
We cannot let you come back into Hamilton Village and take them, for
you comforted them in their last hours and are therefore a victim of
the Plague yourself." He pointed with the rifle stock toward the far
hills, purple with distance. "Go."
Johnny shook his head, planting his feet firmly, wiping sweat-dampened
hands on the worn fabric of his denim trousers. Then he held his palms
up and said, "Where? Where is the Plague?"
"You've been contaminated."
Nearly the entire village had gathered behind their mayor now, and the
mutterings were angry. When Johnny began to walk toward them, his
hands outstretched to show no plague scars marked their skin, someone
hurled a stone. Instinctively, Johnny hunched his shoulder and caught
the missile on his collar bone. It jarred him and left an angry red
mark where the capillaries had burst beneath the skin.
Staggering back toward the creek bed, Johnny was felled by a fusillade
of stones. He crouched on all fours at the edge of the dry brown earth,
head spinning, vision blurring with pain. He expected more stones to
usher in the final blackness, but when he could again see clearly,
DeReggio's muscle-corded legs straddled him and the mayor cried,
"Enough! Let Johnny Hope depart with his life." It was a brave gesture
DeReggio had made, approaching within inches of Johnny, whose parents
had been slain by the Plague. But DeReggio and Johnny's father had been
close friends all their lives and had fought together in the last days
of World War III before the Plague brought warfare--and civilization to
an abrupt halt.
Johnny forced himself upright on trembling legs. "I thank you for my
life," he said, "but not for how you treat your dead companion-in-arms."
The color drained from DeReggio's olive-skinned face. "Think what you
will, Johnny. Think it but go while you still can. And remember that
our first concern is with the living. The dead are beyond recall and
the Plague victims can spread carnage in their wake. You know I loved
your father like a brother, and your mother...."
DeReggio and Johnny's dead mother were cousins, had been raised
together under the same roof in the long-gone days before the War.
Except for Johnny himself, the death of his parents could have
disturbed no one more than DeReggio.
"All right," said Johnny. "I'll go." There was a loud sucking in of
breaths--relief--from the crowd. "But first I have this to say. I have
visited the old, ruined cities. I have seen Philadelphia on its river
and once I went north as far as New York, the great stumps of its
buildings coming right down to the water's edge on the island called
Manhattan. I have seen these things and although I am young I tell you
this: we will not return to our greatness unless we strike out boldly
instead of sitting, huddled in fear, at the thought of the Plague."
"It is what his father always said," someone whispered from the edge of
the crowd.
"The Robots will cure the Plague," someone else, a woman, declared.
Johnny laughed and had never heard such a sound before, from his lips
or any others. "The Robots will cure nothing," he said. "Has anyone
here ever seen the Robots?"
The faltering wave of sound from the crowd was in the negative.
"I have seen them," Johnny told his people, with whom he could no
longer live. "My father wanted it that way. He sent me to the cities
and to the mysterious places between the cities, the gleaming,
white-surfaced roads which we use no longer, to see the Robots. And
I tell you this: they will not cure the Plague. If anything they'll
spread it."
* * * * *
A hushed silence fell, like a pall, on the assembly. None of them had
ever seen the Robots, but that was because it is not proper for a
mortal to see a deity. "This was the truth my father could not tell you
in his lifetime," Johnny went on. "He knew you would have laughed and
mocked--or worse. In his death I tell it to you for him. Along with his
wish to be interred in the ground, it was his final thought."
DeReggio did not look Johnny squarely in the eye. "I think you had
better go, lad. You have no right to talk like that."
Johnny shrugged, feeling the weight of a knowledge and wisdom beyond
his years. "I am twenty-three," he said. "I was an infant when the War
ended. Yet my father could teach me certain things and other things
I could see for myself because he taught me to be curious and take
nothing for granted. You could learn the same. Someday, perhaps...."
"By the Robots!" DeReggio swore softly, hissing the words almost in
Johnny's ears. "Go before you antagonize them. If they start throwing
things again, I won't be able to save you."
Johnny turned his back and squared his shoulders in a gesture
compounded as much of defiance as contempt. He told DeReggio, "At least
do one thing for me."
"If I can."
"When they are burned, say a prayer. One of the old prayers, if you
remember." Johnny did not wait for an answer. He set forth in long
strides, his sandal-shod feet powdering the sun-baked ridges on the dry
creek bed. He did not once look back over his shoulder, but now, with
the people gone and his pride no longer a barrier, he sobbed softly,
thinking of his parents who had died because they had to venture forth
from Hamilton Village to learn some of the truths which were hidden
from their people, and so had come down with the Plague. Hours later,
as the sun sank toward the western horizon and the heat of the day
became less intense, Johnny heard the distant baying of dogs as the
village hounds picked up his spoor and followed it. As prescribed by
law, Mayor DeReggio was making certain Johnny did not double back to
Hamilton Village.
He was alone in a hostile world which, in twenty years, had seen
civilization come tumbling down like a house of cards in a hurricane.
* * * * *
That night, he slept uneasily on the bare ground, the soft-footed
padding of foraging animals all around him under the dark moonless sky.
He awoke with a tremendous hunger and a parching thirst. The latter he
slaked in a swift-gushing stream which flowed clean and cool even in
the heat of midsummer. Presently he came upon a huge black hawk, its
pinions flapping, its talons sunk into the flesh of a dead cottontail
rabbit as it prepared to fly off. Johnny waved his arms and shouted,
frightening the bird of prey which rose without its breakfast, circled
uncertainly, and then wheeled off to the east, a soaring black ghost
graceful as a feather.
Johnny built a fire with brush and dry twigs and ate his meal in
silence, feeling like a scavenger. He drank again from the stream and
began to fashion himself a spear by uprooting a sapling and ripping
off its branches and rubbing its tapering top to a fine point on the
edge of a small flat boulder. He hardened the point in the embers of
his dying fire, hefted the makeshift weapon experimentally, and headed
north in the general direction of New York.
Two days later the joints of his knees and elbows began to stiffen. It
came upon him slowly and he thought it was from too much walking and
not enough food, but when the stiffness spread to ankles, wrist and
neck and giddiness struck him suddenly, he began to suspect the Plague.
It was early afternoon and he sat down at the base of a thick-trunked
oak tree, propping himself against the bole. He hurled his useless
spear away and wondered how long it would take before he sank into
the final coma and death. He ran swollen fingers across his knees and
realized they had puffed to twice their normal size. He could now feel
nothing from his knees down, and it was an effort to move his hands.
A faint purple color suffused his limbs and any doubt he may have
harbored about the Plague vanished.
DeReggio was right. Johnny tried to rise and failed, rolling over
helplessly to lie half in and half out of the cooling shade shed by
the oak. The chills rushed up from his feet, and engulfed him, followed
at once by fever. By the time he began mumbling in delirium, the sun
was going down in the west, casting long red cloud fingers into the
darkening sky.
CHAPTER II
Diane darted from the stream with a glad little cry, shaking the water
from her long, tawny hair, the droplets of water sparkling on her
bronzed skin like diamonds, the long, lithe lines of her body clothed
only in the moisture until she found her buckskin shorts and halter
and dressed. Life was comparatively simple and uncomplicated among the
Shining Ones, and she, of all their encampment, remembered no other
way. The others might look back with bitter longing or curse softly and
futilely at the silver patches of skin at elbow and knee which marked
them as survivors of the Plague, but not Diane.
So what if they were shunned by others, by the non-afflicted people
who clung so doggedly to their mean existence in the small villages?
She had but to hunt and fish and evade the bands of roving Robots lest
they conscript her in their services. The only other bane in her life
was Harry Starbuck and she could take care of herself where he was
concerned. She could....
Something stirred in the undergrowth to her left and Diane could barely
make out the flash of skin which said it was a man and not an animal.
She finished fastening her halter as if she had seen or heard nothing,
then abruptly picked up her hunting knife and said, "I hear you in
there. I'll count three and then come in after you."
She did not have to count. The bushes parted and Harry Starbuck
emerged, his skin scratched by brambles, his boyish face ridiculously
out of place atop an over-muscled body, his knees and elbows covered by
buckskin guards, an affectation common among the Shining Ones but which
Diane had always thought as silly as wearing eye patches because you
did not like the color of your eyes.
"You were watching me," Diane said angrily. "I warned you before,
Harry."
"There's no law," he boomed sullenly, his deep voice belonging to the
over-developed body and not the boyish face. "I can go where I want to."
Diane slapped the flat of her knife against her palm slowly. "Someday,"
she predicted, "this blade is going to feast on Starbuck. I mean that."
Starbuck roared his laughter. "Then I'll be careful," he promised.
"But meanwhile, you realize you can't marry anyone but a Shining One,
and who of our people suits you more than...."
"None of them suit me."
"You're young. You have no family, no close friends to protect you. I
should take you...."
Diane shrugged, then regretted it as Starbuck's small eyes feasted
hungrily on the smooth play of muscle beneath the taut, bronzed skin.
"Then go ahead, Harry. But you won't sleep nights, because I'll be
waiting and if you do sleep you can forget all about waking up. I mean
that, too."
Starbuck was still laughing. "I've half a mind to turn you over to the
Robots and let them tame you a little before I claim what I want."
Diane let her voice do the shrugging. "You can always try."
"Must we always argue?" Starbuck demanded abruptly, petulance drawing
down the corners of his lips. "I don't want to fight with you. I want
to...."
"I know what you want. You can forget it. I'm going to take a walk and
maybe do some hunting. If you'll excuse me."
"With a knife."
"I'm not hunting for wild horses."
"I think I'll go with you."
Diane scowled at him, then girdled her knife. "As you wish, but be
quiet."
Grinning, Starbuck shortened his strides and matched her pace as she
cut away from the stream and the undergrowth and headed toward the
foothills of the Pocono Mountains in the distance, where plump, juicy
rabbits hid behind every blade of grass.
* * * * *
They walked in silence, the man's steps ponderous, the girl's so quick
and lithe her bare feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. In an hour
they had reached another stream, wider than the first and running deep
with swift, cool water. Diane immediately dived in and swam, then
continued walking on the other side while Starbuck carefully searched
out a ford and splashed across with the water up to his waist. By the
time he overtook Diane she was crouching, sitting on her bare heels,
the line of her back, damp under the buckskins, a long, graceful curve.
"Take a look at this," she said, and pointed.
Starbuck looked and saw the remains of a camp fire at her feet. "Warm?"
he asked.
Diane shook her head. "But not completely cold. Several hours old.
Probably made this morning. Probably there's someone nearby."
"So what?"
"So if he's alone he's probably a Shining One and...."
"We have enough people in our camp now."
"You always think competitively, Harry. One more man won't hurt your
position in our tribe."
"Well, if he's young and if he ... well, if you...."
"I'm not promised to you or anyone, and don't forget that. Besides, it
doesn't have a thing to do with this." Diane peered expertly at the
ground and soon picked up the stranger's spoor where he had come out
of the stream himself--probably after bathing--and started out on his
day's journey.
"Come on," she said and Starbuck could either forgo her company or
follow her.
He followed.
The spoor became erratic. It wandered in circles, doubled back on
itself, seemed either headed for no goal or incapable of reaching one.
"He must have been hurt somehow," Diane mused. "He can't be very far."
"What are you so curious about?"
"Curious? I don't know. I'm just interested. I--Hello! Up there."
Diane sprinted up a short rise, leaving a surprised Starbuck pounding
along several paces behind her. She found the man lying, face down near
a large oak tree. Although it was comparatively cool, his body was
drenched with perspiration. Diane shook her head sadly at the swollen
joints and purple discolorations.
"They say it's a terrible thing," she told Starbuck as he panted up. "I
don't remember; I was a baby."
Starbuck shuddered. "I remember. Watch out, don't go near him."
"What's the matter with you? We're immune."
Starbuck nodded morosely. "Yes. Immune. But he'll die anyway, so why
don't we...."
"Why don't we take him back with us, that's what. Don't kid me, Harry
Starbuck. You're acting sympathetic only because you think I'll like
that. Well, I happen to feel sorry for this man. I think we'll feel
better if we help him."
"Help him? He's as good as dead."
"Are you dead? You had the Plague. Am I?"
"No, but maybe one out of a hundred live. That isn't much of a chance
for him."
"It's a chance, though. Here, carry him."
"What? Who, me? Now listen, Diane...."
Maybe a moon-struck Starbuck had his advantages. "Suit yourself, but
don't expect me to speak to you again, ever."
Starbuck considered this, then mumbled something under his breath which
Diane could not hear. "All right," he said finally. "But I'm telling
you it's a waste of time."
"I'll be the judge of that."
* * * * *
Still grumbling, Starbuck picked the man up by one arm and one leg,
staggered until he balanced his burden across one shoulder, then
started back down toward the stream.
"That's right," said Diane. "We could reach camp in a few hours if we
hurry."
"He'll never live through the day," said Starbuck. "I only had the
Plague a few years ago. I lived in the villages, so I know. He'll never
live through the day."
"Just keep walking. If he dies, we can bury him."
By the time they reached the stream again, Starbuck was covered with
sweat. He forded the water carefully, Diane behind him to keep the
stricken man's head above water. Despite its fever-flush, she liked the
man's face. He was young, not much older than Diane herself, with dark
hair and regular features, neither too boyish like Starbuck's, nor too
craggy like most of the older men she knew.
Occasionally the man would mutter something unintelligible, and when
they got to the other side of the stream he opened his eyes, stared at
Diane without seeing her and said in a croaking whisper, "Water."
They stopped. Starbuck dropped his burden thankfully. "I can't carry
him all the way back," he said.
"Then don't. Go ahead. I'll stay here." Diane cupped some water in
her hand, trickled it between the dry lips. She was not even aware of
Starbuck when he left.
She made a bed of leaves for the man's head and studied him. The denim
trousers suggested village life, but she never suspected otherwise. The
face still appealed to her, strong in appearance despite the fever,
yet not overbearing. She hoped the youth would recover. "This is
fantastic," Diane said aloud. "It may take days before he recovers ...
or dies." She thought of calling to Starbuck before he retreated beyond
earshot, but her pride forbade that.
Shrugging and making herself as comfortable as she could, she bathed
the man's flushed face with water.
* * * * *
Day and night, the touch of the ground, the cool water which bathed
him, the patient hands which kept the blood flowing through his swollen
joints--all became as unreal to Johnny Hope as the shadowy remembrance
of some half-forgotten nightmare. His lucid moments were few: there
was this person, face unseen but comforting; there was a little food
and all the water he wanted; and there was the fever which came and
departed, leaving an icy chill behind.
Once Johnny mumbled, "Go away. You'll catch it yourself." And there was
laughter, soft-murmuring, feminine, he thought. Was the woman insane to
expose herself so?
The fever retreated stubbornly, in no great hurry to depart. The lucid
moments became more frequent and of longer duration. The girl was
beautiful.
There came a time when Johnny sat up weakly, his back propped against
the bole of a tree. The face smiled at him. He willed the toes of his
left foot to move and watched them wiggle. He could just barely feel
them.
With long, easy strokes, the girl massaged his legs. Acutely conscious
of her now, Johnny was embarrassed. "I'm all right," he said. He
struggled to sit up but as yet had no real control over his limbs.
The girl placed the flat of her palm against his chest and pushed
gently, easing him back against the tree. "You stay still," she told
him. "You'll be up and around in a day or so, but don't hurry things."
"I ought to thank you. You're crazy. Why did you expose yourself like
this? Why...."
He watched her as she sat before him and drew her legs up, knees thrust
up. He saw the slim bronzed line of her calves and the metallic silver
of knees.
"A Shining One!" he cried, recoiling involuntarily. The Shining Ones
had survived the Plague, but remained carriers of it for all their days.
The girl smiled at him. "As are you. You're a very lucky young man to
live through this."
The silver coated his own knees, Johnny saw, and his elbows. It would
take some adjustment. All his life he had been told to walk in fear of
the Shining Ones, who often swept down on the villages, forcing the
townsfolk to flee or face the Plague, and taking what they wanted of
the stores of food and supplies.
"I see you're a little afraid of yourself. It's common enough. I was
lucky to have the Plague as an infant. I remember no other life, you
see. When you're well and strong enough to walk, I'll take you back to
our encampment."
"I don't know," Johnny said doubtfully.
"Just be patient with yourself. Adjustment will come."
"All my life they said the Shining Ones were monsters. When I was
a little boy I had to be good because my mother said otherwise the
Shining Ones would come and get me, carrying me off to kill me with the
Plague."
"You've had the Plague yourself. You've got to remember that. Besides,"
the girl laughed easily, "you're a big boy now to believe in bogey men."
"Well," Johnny continued stubbornly, "there are other things. The
Shining Ones are scavengers. They don't work themselves or grow their
own crops. Instead they invade the peaceful villages. Then the natives,
my people, have to flee or become contaminated. The Shining Ones take
all the loot they want."
"Some of us. I have been a Shining One all my life but have never
taken part in such a raid. We do not grow crops because we are not an
agricultural people. We are nomadic and hunters."
"Why?"
"The Robots," the girl told him. "Some of our people join them
voluntarily, many others are forced into bondage. If we don't keep on
the move, they'll find us. Agriculture is an impossible art when your
encampment is always on the move."
It gave Johnny food for thought, and something of the girl's own
frankness made him do his thinking aloud. "If I remain alone, I'll
be a hermit. I've seen the hermit Shining Ones wandering through the
hills, alone and friendless, wild men. If I go with you, I become
almost an enemy of my own people."
"They are no longer your people. You must realize that."
"And if I go with you, I can learn about the Robots and perhaps one
day bring the truth back to my people. Tell me, do the Robots cure the
Plague or spread it?"
"They spread it."
Johnny smiled grimly. "I will go with you."
* * * * *
Two days and half a dozen good meals later, the girl helped him to
his feet and nursed him along for his first few uncertain steps. But
strength flowed back into his legs rapidly. He was walking without
support by the time they reached the wide stream and saw the girl's nod
of silent approval as he swam across it with her, matching swift stroke
for stroke.
An hour went by and Johnny became amazed at the speed of his recovery.
He almost wanted to return to Hamilton Village and shout, "See? I
survived. I'm back." But he was a Shining One, a carrier, forever an
exile from the people and the life he knew. And his own parents were
dead, mute testimony of the havoc he might wreak among his people if
he returned to them.
They walked from the stream and shook the water from themselves and
looked at each other, wet like that, and smiled. "I don't even know
your name," said Johnny.
"It's Diane."
"I'm Johnny Hope. I want to--"
"Johnny! Get down!"
He stood there, surprised, staring foolishly. They were on a small rise
of ground above the stream. The girl, who had fallen flat even as she
hissed the command at him, was tugging at his legs. He dropped prone
beside her, although he still failed to see the reason for her sudden
alarm. She parted the undergrowth in front of them with her hands and
said the one word, "Look."
Johnny had never seen the Robots this close before. For all their
ungainly bulk they trod the ground softly, walking as he had always
seen them at greater distances, in a long, single file column. They
were huge antenna-topped creatures, their great cylindrical head
sections bigger than a man and gleaming a polished silver-blue, their
eyes, four of them evenly spaced around the cylinder a foot or so below
the antenna, white and bulging, with neither pupil nor lid, their
limbs many-jointed and metallic, various tool-ends fastened securely
instead of hands. The legs were attached to the small body, but one
fifth the size of the head; the arms came from the head itself, just
below the unblinking eyes.
"They must be twelve feet tall," Johnny whispered.
"Shh! Softly. We're close to our encampment and I don't want them to
find us. They average twelve feet, Johnny."
* * * * *
Johnny would never forget the sight. Many times he had watched the
robots parading in thin-lined silence down the long, silent roads
which men no longer used, but now he could have almost reached out and
touched them. The absolute quiet was unnerving. The Robots must have
weighed close to a ton each but walked with the stillness of stalking
jungle cats.
"Where are they going, Diane?"
"I don't know. Who understands the ways of Robots? Who can say...."
Abruptly, Diane was still. Her eyes went big and wide but she wasn't
watching the Robots.
Directly in front of her face and staring at her from unblinking eyes,
its body half-coiled and dappled with the sunlight which filtered down
through the foliage, was a copperhead. The tongue darted out in a
quick, blurring red streak, the head cleared the loose coils and swayed
slightly from side to side.
"Don't move," Johnny barely formed the words with his lips and hoped
Diane would retain her presence of mind and obey him. A sudden motion
would set the snake to striking.
The file of robots paraded by just in front of them, an occasional
joint creaking, metal skins polished to keen reflection. The copperhead
was fully coiled now, head cocked flat and ugly and perfectly still.
Johnny placed his hand on Diane's thigh and let it crawl upwards, as if
of its own volition, with an agonizing lack of speed. Now his fingers
had reached the edge of the buckskin shorts and now they climbed on the
smooth pelt. He could feel Diane trembling faintly, the motion unseen
but felt. And now his fingers climbed to the girdling belt, grasped the
haft of the hunting knife, slowly withdrew it, tiny fraction of an inch
at a time.
At last he had drawn the knife clear, easing it slowly toward his own
body. He balanced it on his palm, trying to judge the weight. He would
have only one chance, for the quick motion of his arm would make the
copperhead strike if he missed.
Sweat rolled down his forehead and into his eyes, half blinding him.
He cursed soundlessly, held his hand out flat, squinted, whipped it
forward. A sigh escaped Diane's lips.
There was an angry thrashing as the copperhead uncoiled. But the
blade had pinned it to the ground, piercing the body just below the
flat head. Ignoring the column of Robots now, Johnny crawled forward
swiftly, grasped the knife and drew it cleanly toward him. The head was
severed from the body. The body thrashed furiously, then lay still in
death. The Robots marched on, oblivious of the drama which had unfolded
at their metal-clawed feet.
The last Robot glided by, the long line retreated into the woodland,
vanished.
Diane stood up, still trembling. "It took me three days to save your
life," she said. "You saved mine in seconds."
Johnny handed her the knife. "Let's find your people," he said.