_Hater of the Metal Men_
Ferdinand Stone, physicist extraordinary, hated the robot men of
metal scientifically; and, if such an emotion can be so described,
dispassionately. Twenty years before this story opens--in 2991, to be
exact--he had realized that the automatons were beyond control and that
in the inevitable struggle for supremacy man, weak as he then was and
unprepared, would surely lose.
Therefore, knowing that knowledge is power, he had set himself to the
task of learning everything that there was to know about the enemy
of mankind. He schooled himself to think as the automatons thought;
emotionlessly, coldly, precisely. He lived as did they; with ascetic
rigor. To all intents and purposes he became one of them.
Eventually he found the band of frequencies upon which they
communicated, and was perhaps the only human being ever to master their
mathematico-symbolic language; but he confided in no one. He could
trust no human brain except his own to resist the prying forces of
the machines. He drifted from job to position to situation and back to
job, because he had very little interest in whatever it was that he was
supposed to be doing at the time--his real attention was always fixed
upon the affairs of the creatures of metal.
Stone had attained no heights at all in his chosen profession because
not even the smallest of his discoveries had been published. In fact,
they were not even set down upon paper, but existed only in the
abnormally intricate convolutions of his mighty brain. Nevertheless,
his name should go down--_must_ go down in history as one of the
greatest of Humanity's great.
It was well after midnight when Ferdinand Stone walked unannounced into
the private study of Alan Martin, finding the hollow-eyed admiral of
the Earth space-fleet still fiercely at work.
"How did you get in here, past my guards?" Martin demanded sharply of
his scholarly, gray-haired visitor.
"Your guards have not been harmed; I have merely caused them to fall
asleep," the physicist replied calmly, glancing at a complex instrument
upon his wrist. "Since my business with you, while highly important, is
not of a nature to be divulged to secretaries, I was compelled to adopt
this method of approach. You, Admiral Martin, are the most widely known
of all the enemies of the automatons. What, if anything, have you done
to guard the Fleet against them?"
"Why, nothing, since they have all been destroyed."
"Nonsense! You should know better than that, without being told. They
merely want you to think that they have all been destroyed."
"What? How do you know that?" Martin shouted. "Did you kill them? Or do
you know who did, and how it was done?"
"I did not," the visitor replied, categorically. "I do know who
did--a Russian named Narodny. I also know how--by means of sonic and
super-sonic vibrations. I know that many of them were uninjured
because I heard them broadcasting their calls for attention after
the damage was all done. Before they made any definite arrangements,
however, they switched to tight-beam transmission--a thing I have been
afraid of for years--and I have not been able to get a trace of them
since that time."
"Do you mean to tell me that you understand their language--something
that no man has ever been able even to find?" demanded Martin.
* * * * *
"I do," Stone declared. "Since I knew, however, that you would think
me a liar, a crank, or a plain lunatic, I have come prepared to offer
other proofs than my unsupported word. First, you already know that
many of them escaped the atmospheric waves, because a few were killed
when their reproduction shops were razed; and you certainly should
realize that most of those escaping Narodny's broadcasts were far too
clever to be caught by any human mob.
"Secondly, I can prove to you mathematically that more of them must
have escaped from any possible vibrator than have been accounted
for. In this connection, I can tell you that if Narodny's method of
extermination could have been made efficient I would have wiped them
out myself years ago. But I believed then, and it has since been
proved, that the survivors of such an attack, while comparatively few
in number, would be far more dangerous to humanity than were all their
former hordes.
"Thirdly, I have here a list of three hundred and seventeen airships;
all of which were stolen during the week following the destruction
of the automatons' factories. Not one of these ships has as yet been
found, in whole or in part. If I am either insane or mistaken, who
stole them, and for what purpose?"
"Three hundred seventeen--in a week? Why was no attention paid to such
a thing? I never heard of it."
"Because they were stolen singly and all over the world. Expecting some
such move, I looked for these items and tabulated them."
"Then--Good Lord! They may be listening to us, right now!"
"Don't worry about that," Stone spoke calmly. "This instrument upon my
wrist is not a watch, but the generator of a spherical screen through
which no robot beam or ray can operate without my knowledge. Certain of
its rays also caused your guards to fall asleep."
"I believe you," Martin almost groaned. "If only half of what you
say is really true I cannot say how sorry I am that you had to force
your way in to me, nor how glad I am that you did so. Go ahead--I am
listening."
Stone talked without interruption for half an hour, concluding:
"You understand now why I can no longer play a lone hand. Even though I
cannot find them with my limited apparatus I know that they are hiding
somewhere, waiting and preparing. They dare not make any overt move
while this enormously powerful Fleet is here; nor in the time that it
is expected to be gone can they hope to construct works heavy enough to
cope with it.
"Therefore, they must be so arranging matters that the Fleet shall not
return. Since the Fleet is threatened I must accompany it, and you must
give me a laboratory aboard the flagship. I know that the vessels are
all identical, but I must be aboard the same ship you are, since you
alone are to know what I am doing."
"But what could they do?" protested Martin. "And, if they should do
anything, what could you do about it?"
"I don't know," the physicist admitted. Gone now was the calm certainty
with which he had been speaking. "That is our weakest point. I have
studied that question from every possible viewpoint, and I do not
know of anything they can do that promises them success. But you must
remember that no human being really understands a robot's mind.
"We have never even studied one of their brains, you know, as they
disintegrate upon the instant of cessation of normal functioning. But
just as surely as you and I are sitting here, Admiral Martin, they will
do something--something very efficient and exceedingly deadly. I have
no idea what it will be. It may be mental, or physical, or both: they
may be hidden away in some of our own ships already...."
* * * * *
Martin scoffed. "Impossible!" he exclaimed. "Why, those ships have been
inspected to the very skin, time and time again!"
"Nevertheless, they may be there," Stone went on, unmoved. "I am
definitely certain of only one thing--if you install a laboratory
aboard the flagship for me and equip it exactly according to my
instructions, you will have one man, at least, whom nothing that the
robots can do will take by surprise. Will you do it?"
"I am convinced, really almost against my will." Martin frowned
in thought. "However, convincing anyone else may prove difficult,
especially as you insist upon secrecy."
"Don't try to convince anybody!" exclaimed the scientist. "Tell them
that I'm building a communicator--tell them I'm an inventor working on
a new ray-projector--tell them anything except the truth!"
"All right. I have sufficient authority to see that your requests are
granted, I think."
And thus it came about that when the immense Terrestrial Contingent
lifted itself into the air Ferdinand Stone was in his private
laboratory in the flagship, surrounded by apparatus and equipment of
his own designing, much of which was connected to special generators by
leads heavy enough to carry their full output.
Earth some thirty hours beneath them, Stone felt himself become
weightless. His ready suspicions blazed. He pressed Martin's
combination upon his visiphone panel.
"What's the matter?" he rasped. "What're they down for?"
"It's nothing serious," the admiral assured him. "They're just waiting
for additional instructions about our course in the maneuvers."
"Not serious, huh?" Stone grunted. "I'm not so sure of that. I want to
talk to you, and this room's the only place I know where we'll be safe.
Can you come down here right away?"
"Why, certainly," Martin assented.
"I never paid any attention to our course," the physicist snapped as
his visitor entered the laboratory. "What was it?"
"Take-off exactly at midnight of June nineteenth," Martin recited,
watching Stone draw a diagram upon a scratch-pad. "Rise vertically at
one and one-half gravities until a velocity of one kilometer per second
has been attained, then continue vertical rise at constant velocity. At
6:03:29 AM of June twenty-first head directly for the star Regulus at
an acceleration of exactly nine hundred eighty centimeters per second.
Hold this course for one hour, forty-two minutes, and thirty-five
seconds; then drift. Further directions will be supplied as soon
thereafter as the courses of the other fleets can be checked."
"Has anybody computed it?"
"Undoubtedly the navigators have--why? That is the course Dos-Tev gave
us and it _must_ be followed, since he is Admiral-in-Chief of our
side, the Blues. One slip may ruin the whole plan, give the Reds, our
supposed enemy in these maneuvers, a victory, and get us all disrated."
"Regardless, we'd better check on our course," Stone growled,
unimpressed. "We'll compute it roughly, right here, and see where
following these directions has put us." Taking up a slide-rule and a
book of logarithms he set to work.
"That initial rise doesn't mean a thing," he commented after a while,
"except to get us far enough away from Earth so that the gravity is
small, and to conceal from the casual observer that the effective
take-off is still exactly at midnight."
* * * * *
Stone busied himself with calculations for many minutes. He stroked his
forehead and scowled.
"My figures are very rough, of course," he said puzzledly at last,
"but they show that we've got no more tangential velocity with respect
to the sun than a hen has teeth. And you can't tell me that it wasn't
planned that way purposely--and _not_ by Dos-Tev, either. On the other
hand, our radial velocity, directly toward the sun, which is the only
velocity we have, amounted to something over fifty-two kilometers per
second when we shut off power and is increasing geometrically under
the gravitational pull of the sun. That course smells to high heaven,
Martin! Dos-Tev never sent out any such a mess as that. The robots
crossed him up, just as sure as hell's a man-trap! We're heading into
the sun--and destruction!"
Without reply Martin called the navigating room. "What do you think of
this course, Henderson?" he asked.
"I do not like it, sir," the officer replied. "Relative to the sun we
have a tangential velocity of only one point three centimeters per
second, while our radial velocity toward it is very nearly fifty-three
thousand meters per second. We will not be in any real danger for
several days, but it should be borne in mind that we have no tangential
velocity."
"You see, Stone, we are in no present danger," Martin pointed out, "and
I am sure that Dos-Tev will send us additional instructions long before
our situation becomes acute."
"I'm not," the pessimistic scientist grunted. "Anyway, I would advise
calling some of the other Blue fleets on your scrambled wave, for a
check-up."
"There would be no harm in that." Martin called the Communications
Officer, and soon:
"Communications Officers of all the Blue fleets of the Inner Planets,
attention!" the message was hurled out into space by the full power
of the flagship's mighty transmitter. "Flagship _Washington_ of the
Terrestrial Contingent calling all Blue flagships. We have reason to
suspect that the course which has been given us is false. We advise
you to check your courses with care and to return to your bases if you
disc...."