This time the response was immediate. Both man and woman spoke at once.
Then the woman smiled and nodded to the man to talk for both of them.
It was just a curious sing-song humming for the rest of them, but
Ernest listened with rapt attention and apparent comprehension, though
not without strain.
Finally the man stopped.
"What did he say?" Rosco demanded.
"Let me get the rest of it first," Ernest said. He spoke to the man
briefly. His expression became grave as he listened to the reply.
"Well, come _on_!" Doc said impatiently. "Give us a translation."
"All right," Ernest said. He looked troubled. "These two are the
only ones left of their race. The rest are dead--de-activated. The
others--the other race--left the planetoid some time ago."
Ernest spoke again to the man. Listening to his reply, he found
it difficult to think of him as non-human. There was a sadness, a
fatalism, in his eyes, yet a dignity that came only with humanity. Only
a hairline separated these two from mankind.
The impatience of the others made Ernest interrupt, so he could give
them a resumé.
"As I said, they're the last. They survived only because they'd made
a pilgrimage to a kind of underground shrine. The signals that killed
the others didn't reach them through the layers of rock. Apparently the
shrine had something to do with a planned revolt against the electronic
law that governed them.
"It was an insidious law," Ernest went on, "with built-in enforcement.
Any infraction could be punished instantly from central control in
the palace. The infraction would trigger a shock wave, tuned to the
individual frequency of the offender. The intensity of the wave was
geared to the seriousness of the offense. Treason meant death from the
strongest wave of all--the one that turned them to dust."
"Absolute rule," Doc said. "Pretty hopeless."
"Yes, in one way. But paradoxically they had an infinite amount of
freedom of speech. You see that in their verses. No one was punished
for what he said--only for what he did. I suppose it had to be that
way, otherwise there'd have been wholesale slaughter."
"Which there was, at the end," Doc pointed out. "Who do you think
exercised the control that killed all the others?"
"We did," Ernest said. "We killed them."
* * * * *
"We killed them?" Doc said. "You're crazy!"
"You'd better explain yourself, Hotaling," the skipper said. "Stop
talking in riddles."
"Aye, aye, sir. When I say we killed them, I don't mean directly or
deliberately. And of course I don't mean killed, since they were all
androids. But we de-activated them by triggering some mechanism when
our ship came to the planetoid their masters had left."
"Hold on," the skipper said. "Now you're going too fast. Since they
were androids, and were created, the important thing is to find out
where these creators went--and whether it was last month or ten
thousand years ago."
Ernest spoke to the couple.
"It was a long time before we came," he translated. "They don't know
how long--their feeling of time is vague. They kept no records of their
own and because there were no children they have no conception of
generations. They were created adults, in various stages of maturity.
As for who the others were--they were the Masters, with a capital M;
gods, almost, in their view, with absolute power over them."
"Where did they go?" the skipper asked. "And why? Let's try to get more
facts and less philosophy."
"They went looking for a better world, where conditions for life
would be more favorable. Whether that means for the Masters or for
their creations isn't clear. Nobody consulted them. They'd been
given experimental life, only it was more a loan than a gift, to be
foreclosed if they displeased the Masters or in any way threatened
their experiment.
"The Masters were like themselves in appearance. Whether they were air
breathers isn't clear because these two have no conception of what
breathing is. The Masters did wear elaborate costumes but whether these
were breathing suits or merely the trappings of their superiority is a
question.
"I asked if the Masters were trying to create a new set of bodies
for themselves, possibly because their own were breaking down or
were diseased. The answer to that, like the answer to so many other
questions, is that they simply don't know."
There was a commotion at the doorway. The soldier on guard there made
a futile grab at something. The something was the puppet-like creature
Ernest had named Andy, which evaded him and ran into the room. It
jumped lightly to the table, faced the old couple and pointed both its
arms at them.
Their expressions, as they regarded the puppet, were of sorrowful
resignation. The man clasped the woman's hand.
The puppet spoke, in a brief piercing hum. There was an instant of
quiet, then the dullest of popping sounds. The couple, who one second
had seemed as alive as any of the Earthmen, the next second were little
mounds of gray powder on the chairs and under the chairs.
The lieutenant burst in, followed by the sergeant. "The Andy doll got
out of the cage!" he cried. "Did it come in here?"
"Did it come in here?" the skipper mimicked. "Get out, lieutenant, and
take your comic-opera soldiers with you." To the technicians at the
table he yelled: "Grab that obscene thing!"
The doll, grabbed from several directions, was torn apart, spilling out
a reddish-brown spongelike substance.
Something else came out, too: a perforated disk the size of a fist.
Rosco retrieved it as it rolled along the table, then quickly dropped
it in an ash tray.
"The damn thing's hot," he said.
Doc Braddon, still looking stunned, asked Ernest: "What did the doll
say to them before it destroyed them?"
"It was a sort of law-enforcing robot. They told me about it. A kind
of custodian the Masters left behind to keep things in line." Ernest
stared dully at the empty chairs.
"It said:
"_You hid, and I
Now bid you die!_"
Rosco toyed with the ash tray in which he'd put the disk. "There's
a clue to the Masters right in this gadget," he said. "Maybe it's
simply a servo-mechanism that was set once and has been functioning
automatically ever since. But on the other hand it may still be linked
directly to the Masters."
"Good point," the skipper said. "Give it a run-through for what it's
worth. If it does give us a line on where they got to, I'll ask the
Flagship for permission to track them down."
Doc Braddon said to Ernest: "You said the Masters were godlike. You're
not implying anything supernatural?"
"No. That was the androids' view, not mine. As a race of almost-people
created in a laboratory they naturally held their creators in a certain
awe. They hoped for liberation, and even tried to do something about
it; but they knew it was futile. The Masters built them so they'd turn
to dust if they misbehaved and when they left they fixed it so the
vibrations of any spaceship other than their own would do the same
thing--presumably so their creations wouldn't fall into other hands.
The sad thing is that the almost-people knew it. One of their verses
went:
"_If comes the ship to make us free,
It killeth you, it killeth me._"
"Do you mean we could have saved them if we'd come in with engines
silent?" the skipper asked.
"I don't know," Ernest said. "They certainly didn't think much of their
potential. There's a fatalism, a sense of thwarted destiny running all
through their literature. Their hope died on the vine, so to speak. If
you can stand one more of their verses, this one might sum up their
philosophy:
"_This they give to us they make:
They give us thirst, deny the slake._"
* * * * *
The skipper was silent for a time, staring down at the little mounds of
gray dust.
Then he said to his technicians:
"You've done a good job, all of you. We'll send a coordinated report
to the Flagship tomorrow and stand by for orders. In the meantime, if
there's anyone here with an honest physical thirst, I'd be glad to have
him join me in slaking it in my cabin. No offense implied, Ernest."
"None taken, sir."