The Best Of Lester Del Rey Part 27

Hal grunted in surprise. "That's odd. I hoped the supply rocket would be in.

But what are those three ships doing there?"

Sam switched back to wide-angle lenses and stared toward the side. The three ships didn't look like supply rockets. They resembled the old wreck that still stood at the far end of the crater, surrounded by the supply capsules that had been sent on automatic control to keep the stranded crew alive until rescue could be sent. The only other such ships were those used by the third expedition. But they had been parked in orbit around Earth after the end of the third expedition fifty years ago. Once the Base was established, their capacity had no longer been needed and they were inefficient for routine supply and rotation of the men here.

Before he could comment on the ships, the buzzer sounded, indicating that Base had spotted the cattrack. Sam flipped the switch and acknowledged the call.

"Hi, Sam." It was the voice of Dr. Robert Smithers, the leader of Lunar Base.

"b.u.t.t out, will you? I want to talk to Hal."

Sam could have tuned hi on the communication frequency with his own receptors, since the signal was strong enough at this distance. But he obeyed the order to avoid listening as Hal reached for the handset. There was no way to detune his audio receptors, however. He heard Hal's greeting. Then there was silence for at least a minute.

The man's face was shocked and serious when he finally spoke again. "But that's d.a.m.ned nonsense, Chief. Earth got over such insanity half a century ago. There hasn't been a sign of ... Yes, sir ... All right, sir. Thanks for not taking off without me."

He hung up the set, shaking his head. When he faced Sam, his expression was unreadable. "Full speed, Sam."

"There's trouble," Sam guessed. He threw the cat-track into its top speed of thirty miles an hour, fighting and straining with the controls. Only a robot could manage the tricky Machine at such a rate over the crude road, and it require^his full attention.

Hal's voice waV strange and harsh. "We're being sent back to Earth. Big trouble, Sam. But what can you know of war and rumors of war?"

"War was a dangerous form of political insanity, outlawed at the conference of 1998," Sam quoted from a speech that had come over the radio. "Human warfare has now become unthinkable."

"Yeah. Human war." Hal made a rough sound in his throat. "But not inhuman war, it seems. And that's what it will be, if it comes. Oh h.e.l.l, stop looking so gloomy. It's not your problem."

Sam decided against chuckling this time, though references to his set, unsmiling expression were usually meant to be a form of humor. He filed the puzzling words away in his permanent memory for later consideration.

The terminator was rushing across the lunar surface, and it would soon be night. The crater wall was already casting a shadow over most of the area. But sunlight still reached the Base, and the surrounding territory was in glaring light. The undiffused light splashed out sharply from the rocks. Seeing was hard as they neared the dome, and all Sam's attention had to be directed to his driving. Behind him, he heard Hal getting into the moonsuit to leave the cab.Sam brought the cattrack to a halt and let Hal out at the entrance to the sealed underground hemisphere of lunar rock that was the true dome. The light upper structure was simply a shield for supplies against the heat of the sun.

He drove the machine under that and cut off the motor.

As Sam emerged from the airlock, air gushed out of small cavities of his body.

But he felt no discomfort There was only the fault click of a switch inside him to tell him of the change. That switch was simply an emergency measure, designed to turn his power on if there should be a puncture of the dome while he was turned off. It might have been one of the reasons the men liked having him inside, though he hoped there were other explanations. There had been no room in the new robots for such devices.

He saw the Mark Three robots waiting just beyond the entrance as he approached it. There were tracks in the lunar dust leading to the s.p.a.ce ships half a mile away. But whatever ferrying they had done was obviously finished, and they were now merely standing in readiness. They were totally unlike him. He was bulky and mechanical, designed only for function hi the early days when men needed help on the Moon. They were almost manlike, under their black enamel, and their size and weight had been pared down to match that of the humans.

There had been thirty of them originally, but accidents had left only a few more than twenty. And of the original Mark Ones, only Sam was left.

"When do we leave?" he called to one over the radio circuit.

The black head turned slowly toward him. "We do not know. The men did not tell us."

"Didn't you ask them?" he called. But he had no need of their denial. They had not been told to ask.

They were still unformed, less than five years old, and their thoughts were tied to the education given by the computers in the creche. They lacked twenty years of his intimate a.s.sociation with men. But sometimes he wondered whether they would ever learn enough, or whether they had been too strongly repressed in training. Men seemed to be afraid of robots back on Earth, as Hal Norman had once told him, which was why they were still being used only on the Moon.

He turned away from them and went down the entrance to the inner dome. The entrance led to the great Community room, and the men were gathered there, all wearing moonsuits. They were arguing with Hal as Sam began emerging from the lock, but at sight of him the words were cut off. He stared about hi the silence, feeling suddenly awkward.

"h.e.l.lo, Sam," Dr. Smithers said finally. He was a tall, spare man of barely thirty, but seven years of re-fponsibility here had etched deep lines into his face and fwt gray in his mustache, though his other hair was still jet black. "All right, Hal. Your things are on the ship. I cut the time prettyjfine waiting for you, so we're leaving at once. No more ffl-guments.

Get out there!"

"Go to h.e.l.l!" Hal told him. "I don't desert my friends."

Other men began moving out. Sam stepped aside to let them pa.s.s, but they seemed to avoid looking at him.

Smithers sighed wearily. "Hal, I can't argue this with you. You'll go, if I have to chain you. Do you think I like this? But we're under military orders now. They're going crazy back on Earth. They didn't find out about the expected attack until a week ago, as near as I can learn, but they've already canceled s.p.a.ce. d.a.m.n it, I can't take Sam! We're at the ragged limit of available lift now, and he represents six hundred pounds of ma.s.s-more than four of the others."

Hal gestured sharply toward the outside. "Then leave four of those behind.

He's worth more than the whole lot of them."

"Yeah. He is. But my orders specify that all men and the maximum possible number of robots must be returned." Smithers twisted his lips savagely and suddenly turned to face the robot. "Sam, I'll give it to you straight. I can'ttake you with us. We have to leave you here alone. I'm sorry, but that's how it has to be."

"You won't be alone, Sam," Hal Norman said. "I'm staying."

Sam stood silently for a moment, letting it register. His circuits found it hard to integrate. He had never thought of being separated from these men who had been his life. Going back to Earth had been easy to accept; he'd gone back there once before. Little hopes and future-pictures that he hadn't known were in his mind began to appear.

But with those came memories of Hal Norman's expressed hopes and dreams. The man had showed Sam a picture of his future wife and tried to describe all that such a creature meant to a man. He'd spoken of green fields and the sea. He'd raved about Earth too often during the days they were together.

Sam moved forward toward Hal. The man saw him coming and began to back away, but he was no match for the robot. Sam held Hal's arms and closed his moonsuit, then gathered him up carefully. Hal was struggling, but his efforts did no good against Sam's determination.

"All right, Dr. Smithers. We can go now," Sam told the Chief.

They were the last to leave the dome. The little black robots were already marching across the surface, with the men straggling along behind them.

Smithers fell into step with Sam, moving as if the burden was on his back instead of in the arms of the robot. Hal had ceased struggling. He lay outwardly quiet; but through the suit, Sam's body receptors picked up sounds that he had heard only twice before on occasions he tried not to remember.

They were the sounds of a man attempting to control his weeping.

Halfway to the ship, faint words came over the radio. "Put me down, Sam. I'll go quietly."

The three moved on together. By the time they reached the ship, the others were all aboard. The Chief motioned the younger man up the ramp. For a moment, Hal hesitated. He turned toward Sam, started to make a motion, and then swung away and dashed up the ramp, his shoulders shaking convulsively.

Smithers still stood after the other had disappeared. The radio brought the sound of a sigh, before the man moved. "Thanks, Sam. That was a favor I no longer had the right to ask. And don't tell me it's all right. Nothing's right any more." He sighed again, then smiled faintly. "Remember the books?"

"I won't disturb them," Sam promised. There were a great many microbooks in the dome library, brought hi a few at a time by many men over the long years.

They were one of the few taboos; it was against orders for Sam to read any of them. A man had once told him that it was to save him from unnecessary confusion.

Smithers shook his head sharply. "Nonsense. You're going to have a lot of time to kill. The ban is off. Read any or all of them if you like. It's about all I can do for you, but you're ent.i.tled to that, at least."

He put a foot oji; the ramp and turned partly away from Sam. Then^biiiptly he swung back.

"Good-by, Sim,** he said thickly. His right hand came out and grasped that of the robot strongly. "Good-by and G.o.d bless you!"

A second later, Smithers was hurrying up the ramp. It was drawn in after him, and the great outer seal of the rocket ship began to close.

Sam ran back to the entrance of the dome to avoid the blast. The edge of darkness had touched the dome now, leaving the rockets standing in the last light as he turned to look at them. He watched the takeoff of the three heavily laden ships. They staggered up slowly, carrying the men toward the rendezvous with Earth's...o...b..tal station. It wasn't until they were beyond the range of his strongest vision that he turned into the dome. It was silent and empty around him.

He stared at the clock on the wall and at the calendar on which they had marked off the days. He hadn't found how long they would be gone. ButSmithers' words gave a vague answer-he would have a lot of time to kill. That could mean anywhere from one month to most of a year, judging by the application of similar phrases in the past. He looked at the shelves filled with microbooks for a few moments. Then he went outside, to stare through his telephoto lenses at the Earth in the sky above him. There were spots of light in the dark areas that he knew to be the cities of men.

The second day after the takeoff of the ship, Sam was watching the dark area of Earth again when some of the spots of light grew suddenly brighter. New spots of brightness rose and decayed during the hours he watched. They were far brighter than any city should have been. Other spots glowed where no cities had been before. But eventually they all faded. After that, there were no bright areas at all. As Earth turned slowly, he saw that all the cities on Earth were now dark.

It was a mystery for which he had no explanation. He went inside to try the radio that brought news and entertainment from the relay on the orbital station, but no signal was coming through. He debated calling them, but that was reserved for the decision of Smithers, and the Chief was gone.

There was no call on the fifth day, when the men should have reached the station. He knew there was no reason to expect such a call; men were not obligated to report their affairs to a robot. But his brain circuits seemed to be filled with odd future-pictures that 'kept him by the set for long hours after he knew there would be no signal for him.

Finally he got up and went to the music player. They had let him use it at times, and he felt no disloyalty to them as he found a tape that was one of his favorites and threaded it. But when the final chorus of Beethoven's Ninth reached its end, the dome seemed more empty than ever. He found another tape, without voices this time. And that was followed by another. It helped a little, but it was not enough.

It was then that he turned to the books, taking one at random. It was something about Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he started to put it back.

He had already learned enough about astronomy from the education machine. But at last he threaded it into the micro-reader and sat down to read.

It started well enough, and it was about some strange kind of man, not about astronomy. But then . . .

Sam made a strange sound, only slowly realizing that he had imitated the groan of a man for the first time in his existence. It was all madness! He knew men had never reached Mars-and couldn't reach such a Mars, because the planet was totally unlike what he knew existed. It must be some strange form of human humor. Or else there were men unlike any he had known and facts that had been kept from him. The latter seemed more probable.

He struggled through it, to groan again when it ended and he still didn't know what had happened to the strange female man who was a princess and who laid highly impossible eggs. But by then, he had begun to like John Carter, and he wanted to read more. He was confused-but even more curious than puzzled.

Eventually, he found the whole series and read them all.

It was a much;;later book that solved some of the puzzle of it forvhj$0u There was a small note before the book really begaii' THIS is A WORK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION; ANY RESEMBLANCE TO PRESENT-DAY PERSONS.

OR EVENTS IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL. He looked Up fiction in the dictionary he had seen the men use and felt better afterward.

It wasn't quite like humor, but it wasn't fact, either. It was a game of some kind, where the rules of life were all changed about in idiosyncratic ways.

The writer might pretend that men liked to kill each other or were afraid of women, or some other ridiculous idea; then he tried to imagine what might happen under such conditions. It was obviously taboo to pretend about real people and events, though some of the books had stories that used background and people that had the same names as those in reality.The best fiction of all sometimes looked like books of fact, if the writer was clever enough. History was mostly like that; there was a whole imaginary world called Rome, for instance. It was fortunate Sam had been taught the simple facts of man's progress by the education machine before he read such books.

Men, it was true, had sometimes been violent, but not when they understood all the facts or could help it.

In the end, he evolved a simple cla.s.sification. If a book made him think hard^and forced him to strain to follow it, it was fact; if it made him read faster and think less as he went through it, it was fiction.

There was one book that was hardest of all to cla.s.sify. It was an old book, written before men had gone out into s.p.a.ce. Yet it was full of carefully doc.u.mented and related facts about an invasion of flying saucers from far in s.p.a.ce. Eventually, he was forced to decide from the internal evidence that it was fact, but it left him disturbed and unhappy.

Hal Norman had referred to inhuman war, and Dr. Smithers had mentioned an attack. Could it be that the strange ships from somewhere had struck at Earth?

He remembered the brilliant lights over the cities, so much like the great ray weapons described in some of the fic- tion about s.p.a.ce war. Sometimes there were elements of truth even in fiction.

If invaders had come in great ships to fight against Earth, it might take men longer than Sam cared to think of to fight them off.

He went outside to stare at the sky. Earth still showed no sign of cities.

They must be blacked out, as they would be if flying saucers were in their skies. He searched the s.p.a.ce over the Moon, but he could find no strange craft. Then he went back inside to read through the microbook again.

It was poetry that somehow finally shoved the worry from his mind. He had tried poetry before, and given up, unable to follow it. But this time he made a discovery. He tried reading it aloud, until it began to beat at him and force its rhythm on him. He was reading Swinburne's Hymn of Man, attracted by the t.i.tle, and suddenly the words and something besides began to sing their way into his deepest mind. He went back over four lines again and again, until they were music, or all that music had tried to say and had failed.

In the grey beginning of years, in the twilight of things that began, The word of the earth in the ears of the world, was it G.o.d? was it man?

Sam went up and down the dome for most of that day, chanting to himself that the word of the earth in the ears of the world was man! Then he turned back to other poetry. None quite equaled that one experience, but most of it stirred his circuits in strange ways. A book of limericks even surprised him twice to the point where he chuckled, without realizing that he had never done that spontaneously before.

There were slightly over four thousand volumes in the little library, including the technical books. He timed them carefully, stretching them by rereading his favorites, until he finished the last at exactly midnight on the eve of the takeoff anniversary.

The next twenty-four hours he spent outside the dome, watching the Sky and staring at Earth, while his radio receptors scanned all the frequencies. There had been a lot of tim^ already killed. But there was no signal, and no rocket ship blasted down, bringing back the men.

At midnight he gave a sighing sound and went back inside the dome. In the technical section, he unlocked the controls for the atomic generator and turned it down to its lowest idling rate. He came back, turning the now dim lights off as he moved. In the main room, he put his favorite tape on the player and the copy of Swinburne in the microreader. But he did not turn them on. Instead, he dropped his heavy body quietly onto the floor before the entrance, where the men would be sure to see him when they finally returned.

Then one hand reached up firmly, and he turned himself off.3 Sam's eyes looked toward the entrance as consciousness snapped on again. There was no sign of men there. He stood up, staring about the dome, then hastened outside to stare across the floor of the crater. It lay bare, except for the old wrecked rocket ship. Men had not come back.

Inside again, he looked for something that might have fallen and hit his switch. The switch itself was still in the off position, however. And when he turned on the tape player, no sound came. It was confirmation enough.

Something had happened to the air in the dome, and his internal switch had gone into operation to turn him on automatically.

A few minutes later, he found the hole. A meteoroid the size of a pea must have hit the surface above. It had struck with enough force to blast a tiny craterlet almost completely through the dome, and internal pressure had done the rest. He secured patching material and began automatically making the repairs. There was still more than enough air in the tanks to fill the dome again.

Sam sighed as the first whisper of sound reached him from the tape player. He flipped his switch back to on position before the rising pressure negated the emergency circuit. He still had to get back to the entrance to resume his vigil. It had simply been bad luck that had aroused him before the men could return.

He moved back through the dome, hardly looking. But his eyes were open, and his mind gradually began to add the evidence. There was no way to tell how long he had been unconscious; he had no feeling of any time. But there was dust over everything-dust that had been disturbed by the outrushing air, but that had still patina-plated itself on metal firmly enough to remain. And some of the metal showed traces of corrosion. That must have taken years!

He stopped abruptly, checking his battery power. The cobalt-platinum cell had been fully charged when he lay down. Now it was at less than half-charge. Such batteries had an extremely slow leakage. Even allowing for residual conductance through his circuits, it would have taken at least thirty years for such a loss!

Thirty years! And the men had not come back.

A groan came to his ears, and he turned quickly. But it had only been his own voice. And now he began shouting. He was still trying to shout hi the airless void as he reached the surface. He caught himself, bracing his back against the dome as his balance circuits reacted to some wild impulse from his brain.

Men would never desert him. They had to come back to the Moon to finish their work, and the first thing they would do would be to find him. Men couldn't just leave him there! Only in the wild fiction could that happen, and even there only the postulated evil men would do such a thing. His men would never dream of it!

He stared up at Earth. The dome was in night again, and Earth was a great orb in the sky, glowing blue and white, with touches of brown in a few places. He saw the outline of continents through the cloud cover, and looked for the great city that must lie within the thin darkened area. There should have been lights visible there, even against the contrast of brighter illumination from the lighted are)^. But there was no sign of the city.

He sighed soundlessly again, and now he felt himself relaxing. The attackers must still be hovering there! The dangerous Ufo-things from s.p.a.ce. Men were still embattled and unable to return to him. Thirty years of that for them, and here he was losing balance over what had been only a year of his conscious time!

He faced the worst of possibilities more calmly now. He even forced himself to admit that men might have been so badly crippled by the war that they could not return to him-perhaps not for more time than he could think of. Smithershad said they were abandoning s.p.a.ce, at a time when the attack had not yet come. How long would it take to recover and regain their lost territory?

He went back into the dome, but the radio was silent. Hesitantly, he initiated a call to the orbital station. After half an hour, he gave up. The men there, if men were still there, must be keeping radio silence.

"All right," he said slowly into the silence of the dome. "All right, face it.

Men aren't coming back for a robot. Ever!"

It was a speech out of the fiction he had read, rather than out of rationality. But somehow saying it loudly made it easier to face. Men could not come to him. He wasn't that valuable to them.

He shook his head over that, remembering the time he had been taken back to Earth after twenty years out of the creche and on the Moon. The Mark One robots had all been destroyed in the accidents and difficulties of getting the Base established, except for Sam. Supposedly better Mark Two robots were sent to replace them, but those had been beset by some circuit flaws that made them more p.r.o.ne to accident and less useful than the first models. More than a hundred had been sent in all-and none had survived. It was then that they called Sara back to study him.

On Earth, deep in the security-hidden underground robot development workshops, he had been tested in every way they knew to help them in designing the Mark Three robots. And there old Stephen DeMatre had in- terviewed him for three whole days. At the end of that time, the man who had first introduced him to his work with men had put a hand on his metal shoulder and smiled at him.

"You're unique, Sam," he'd said. "A lucky combination of all the wild guesses we used in making each Mark One individually, as well as some unique conditioning while among that first Base staff. We don't dare duplicate you yet, but some day the circuit control computer is going to want to get your pattern in full for later brains. So take good care of yourself. I'd keep you here, but . . . You take care of yourself, Sam. You hear me?"