The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Page 33

  “What?” he squealed. “What?”

  “I said,” Wygor repeated, “that the report has come back from the pesticide column! They’ve found no trace of any such animal as we’ve described! They’re nowhere to be found, in or near the clearing!”

  “I think,” said Dodeth very calmly, “that I’ll take a little trip over to the Brightside and take up permanent residence there. It’s going to be pretty hot for me around here before long.”

  And he cut the connection without waiting for Wygor’s answer.

  * * * *

  The armored car jounced across the grassland at high speed. Behind it, two more cars followed, each taking care not to run exactly in the tracks of the one ahead, so that there would be as little damage as possible done to the grass.

  In the lead car, Dodeth Pell watched the forest loom nearer, wondering what sort of madness he would find there this time. Beside him, the Eldest Keeper dozed gently, in the way that only the very young or the very old can doze. It was just as well; Dodeth didn’t feel much like talking.

  This time, as they approached the clearing, he didn’t bother to tell the car to stop two miles away. If the animals were gone, there was no point in being cautious. All through the wooded area, he could see occasional members of the pesticide robots. He told the car to stop at the base of the little rise that he used before as a vantage point. Then, without further preliminaries, he got out of the car and marched up the slope to take a look at the clearing. Overhead, the burning spark of the Yellow Sun cast its pale radiance over the landscape.

  At the ridge, he stopped suddenly and ducked his head. Then he grabbed his field glasses and took a good look.

  The animals had built themselves a few crude-looking shelters out of the logs, but he hardly noticed that.

  There were four of the animals, in plain sight, standing guard!

  The others were obviously inside the rude huts, asleep!

  Great galloping fungus blight! Was he out of his mind? What was going on around here? Couldn’t the robots see the beasts?

  “That’s very odd,” said the voice of the Eldest Keeper in puzzled tones. “I thought the robots said they’d gone away. Lend me your field glasses.”

  As he handed the powerful glasses over to the Keeper, who had followed him up the hill, Dodeth said: “I’m glad you can see them. I thought maybe my brain had been short-circuited.”

  “I can see them,” said the Eldest Keeper, peering through the glasses. Then he handed them back to Dodeth. “Let’s get back down to the car. I want to find out what’s going on around here.”

  At the car, the Eldest Keeper just scowled for a moment, looking very worried. By this time, the other two cars had pulled up nearby, discharging their cargo of two more Keepers apiece. While the Eldest Keeper talked in low tones with his colleagues, Dodeth stalked over to one of the pesticide robots who was prowling nearby.

  “Found anything useful?” he asked sarcastically, knowing that sarcasm was useless on a robot.

  “I’m not looking for anything useful, sir. I’m looking for the animals we are supposed to destroy.”

  “You come over and tell the Eldest Keeper that,” Dodeth said.

  “Yes, sir,” the robot agreed promptly, rolling along beside Dodeth as he returned to where the Keepers were waiting.

  “What’s going on here?” the Eldest demanded curtly of the robot. “Why haven’t you destroyed the animals?”

  “Because we can’t find them, sir.”

  “What’s your name?” the Eldest snapped.

  “Arike, sir.”

  “All right, Arike,” said the Eldest somewhat angrily. “Stand by for orders. You’ll repeat them to the other robots, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the robot.

  “All right, then,” said the Eldest. “First, you take a run up that hill and look into that clearing. You’ll see those creatures in there all right.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve seen those creatures in there.”

  The Eldest Keeper exploded. “Then get in there and obey your orders! Don’t you realize that their very existence threatens the life of all of us? They must be eliminated before our whole culture is destroyed! Do you understand? Obey!”

  “Yes, sir,” said the robot. His voice sounded odd, but he spun around and went to pass the word on to the other robots. Within minutes, more and more of the pesticide robots were swarming towards and into the clearing. They could hear rumbling noises from the clearing—low grunts that were evidently made by animals who were trapped by the encircling robots.

  And then there was a vast silence.

  Dodeth and the Keepers waited.

  Not a shot was fired.

  It was as though a great, sound-proof blanket had been flung over the whole area.

  * * * *

  “What in the Unknown Name of the Universal Motivator is going on around here?” said Dodeth in a hushed tone. He wondered how many times he had asked himself that.

  “We may as well take a look,” said the Eldest Keeper.

  Two hundred pesticide robots were ranged around the perimeter of the clearing, their weapons facing inward. Not a one of them moved.

  Inside the circle of machines, the twenty wygorex stood motionless, watching the ring of robots. Now and then, one of them gave a deep, coughing rumble, but otherwise they made no noise.

  Dodeth Pell could stand it no longer. “Robots!” He shouted as loudly as he could, his voice shrill with urgency. “I order you to fire!”

  It was as though he hadn’t said a word. Both robots and wygorex ignored him completely.

  Dodeth turned and yelled to one of the patrol robots that was standing nearby. “You! What’s your name?”

  “Arvam, sir.”

  “Arvam, can you tell what it is those things have done to the robots?”

  “They haven’t done anything, sir.”

  “Then why don’t the robots fire as they’ve been told?” Dodeth didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but he was badly frightened. He had never heard of a robot behaving this way before.

  “They can’t, sir.”

  “They can’t? Don’t they realize that if those things aren’t killed, we may all die?”

  “I didn’t know that,” said the patrol robot. “If we do not kill them, then you may be killed, and you have ordered us to kill them, but if we obey your orders, then we will kill them, and that will mean that you won’t be killed, but they will, so we can’t do that, but if we don’t then you will be killed, and we must obey, and that means we must, but we can’t, but if we don’t we will, and we can’t so we must but we can’t but if we don’t you will so we must but we can’t but we—” He kept repeating it over and over again, on and on and on.

  “Stop that!” snapped Dodeth.

  But the robot didn’t even seem to hear.

  Dodeth was really frightened now. He looked back at the five keepers and scuttled toward them.

  “What’s wrong with the robots?” he asked shrilly. “They’ve never failed us before!”

  The Elder Keeper looked at him. “What makes you think they’ve failed us now?” he asked softly.

  Dodeth gaped speechlessly. The Eldest didn’t seem to be making any more sense than the patrol robot had.

  “No,” the Keeper went on, “they haven’t failed us. They have served us well. They have pointed out to us something which we have failed to see, and, in doing so, have saved us from making a catastrophic error.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Dodeth.

  “I’ll explain,” the Elder Keeper said, “but first go over to that patrol robot and tell him quietly that the situation has changed. Tell him that we are no longer in any danger from the wygorex. Then bring him over here.”

  * * * *

  Dodeth did as he was told, without understanding at all.

  “I still don’t understand, sir,” he said bewilderedly.

  “Dodeth, what would happen if I told Arvam, here, to fire on you?”r />
  “Why…why, he’d refuse.”

  “Why should he?”

  “Because I’m human! That’s the most basic robot command.”

  “I don’t know,” the Eldest said, eying Dodeth shrewdly. “You might not be a human. You might be a snith. You look like a snith.”

  Dodeth swallowed the insult, wondering what the Eldest meant.

  “Arvam,” the Eldest Keeper said to the robot, “doesn’t he look like a snith to you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Arvam agreed.

  Dodeth swallowed that one, too.

  “Then how do you know he isn’t a snith, Arvam?”

  “Because he behaves like a human, sir. A snith does not behave like a human.”

  “And if something does behave like a human, what then?”

  “Anything that behaves like a human is human, sir.”

  Dodeth suddenly felt as though his eyes had suddenly focused after being unfocused for a long time. He gestured toward the clearing. “You mean those…those things…are…human?”

  “Yes sir,” said Arvam solidly.

  “But they don’t even talk!”

  “Pardon me for correcting you sir, but they do. I cannot understand their speech, but the pattern is clearly recognizable as speech. Most of their conversation is carried on in tones of subsonic frequency, so your ears cannot hear it. Apparently, your voices are supersonic to them.”

  “Well, I’ll be fried,” said Dodeth. He looked at the Elder Keeper. “That’s why the robots reported they couldn’t find any animal of that description in the vicinity.”

  “Certainly. There weren’t any.”

  “And we were so fooled by their monstrous appearance that we didn’t pay any attention to their actions,” said Dodeth.

  “Exactly.”

  “But this makes the puzzle even worse,” said Dodeth. “How could such a creature evolve?”

  “Look!” interrupted one of the other Keepers, pointing. “Up there in the sky!”

  All eyes turned toward the direction the finger pointed.

  It was a silvery speck in the sky that moved and became larger.

  “I don’t think they’re from our World at all,” said the Eldest Keeper. He turned to the patrol robot. “Arvam, go down and tell the pesticide robots that there is no danger to us. They’re still confused, and I have a feeling that the humans in that ship up there might not like it if we are caught pointing guns at their friends.”

  As Arvam rolled off, Dodeth said “Another World?”

  “Why not?” asked the Eldest. “The Moon, after all, is another World, smaller than ours, to be sure, and airless, but still another World. We haven’t thought too much about other Worlds because we have our own World to take care of. But there was a time, back in the days of the builders of the surface cities, when our people dreamed such things. But our Moon was the only one close enough, and there was no point in going to a place which is even more hellish than our Brightside.

  “But suppose the Yellow Sun also has a planet—or maybe even one of the more distant suns, which are hardly more than glimmers of light. They came, and they landed a few of their party to make a small clearing. Then the ship went somewhere else—to the dark side of our Moon, maybe, I don’t know. But they were within calling range, for the ship was called as soon as trouble appeared.

  “We don’t know anything about them yet, but we will. And we’ve got to show them that we, too, are human. We have a job ahead of us—a job of communication.

  “But we also have a great future if we handle things right.”

  Dodeth watched the ship, now grown to a silvery globe of tremendous size, drift slowly downward toward the clearing. He felt an inward glow of intense anticipation, and he fidgeted impatiently as he waited to see what would happen next.

  He rippled a stomp.

  THE FOREIGN HAND TIE (1961)

  From Istanbul, in Turkish Thrace, to Moscow, U.S.S.R., is only a couple of hours outing for a round trip in a fast jet plane—a shade less than eleven hundred miles in a beeline.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Raphael Poe had no way of chartering a bee.

  The United States Navy cruiser Woonsocket, having made its placid way across the Mediterranean, up the Aegean Sea, and through the Dardanelles to the Bosporous, stopped overnight at Istanbul and then turned around and went back. On the way in, it had stopped at Gibraltar, Barcelona, Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, and Athens—the main friendly ports on the northern side of the Mediterranean. On the way back, it performed the same ritual on the African side of the sea. Its most famous passengers were the American Secretary of State, two senators, and three representatives.

  Its most important passenger was Mr. Raphael Poe.

  During the voyage in, Mr. Raphael Poe remained locked in a stateroom, all by himself, twiddling his thumbs restlessly and playing endless games of solitaire, making bets with himself on how long it would be before the ship hit the next big wave and wondering how long it would take a man to go nuts in isolation. On the voyage back, he was not aboard the Woonsocket at all, and no one missed him because only the captain and two other Navy men had known he was aboard, and they knew that he had been dropped overboard at Istanbul.

  The sleek, tapered cylindroid might easily have been mistaken for a Naval torpedo, since it was roughly the same size and shape. Actually, it was a sort of hybrid, combining the torpedo and the two-man submarine that the Japanese had used in World War II, plus refinements contributed by such apparently diverse arts as skin-diving, cybernetics, and nucleonics.

  Inside this one-man underwater vessel, Raphael Poe lay prone, guiding the little atomic-powered submarine across the Black Sea, past Odessa, and up the Dnieper. The first leg, the four hundred miles from the Bosporous to the mouth of the river, was relatively easy. The two hundred and sixty miles from there to the Dnepropetrovsk was a little more difficult, but not terribly so. It became increasingly more difficult as the Dnieper narrowed and became more shallow.

  On to Kiev. His course changed at Dnepropetrovsk, from northeast to northwest, for the next two hundred fifty miles. At Kiev, the river changed course again, heading north. Three hundred and fifty miles farther on, at Smolensk, he was heading almost due east.

  It had not been an easy trip. At night, he had surfaced to get his bearings and to recharge the air tanks. Several times, he had had to take to the land, using the caterpillar treads on the little machine, because of obstacles in the river.

  At the end of the ninth day, he was still one hundred eighty miles from Moscow, but, at that point, he got out of the submarine and prepared himself for the trip overland. When he was ready, he pressed a special button on the control panel of the expensive little craft. Immediately, the special robot brain took over. It had recorded the trip upstream; by applying that information in reverse—a “mirror image,” so to speak—it began guiding itself back toward Istanbul, applying the necessary corrective factors that made the difference between an upstream and a downstream trip. If it had made a mistake or had been discovered, it would have blown itself to bits. As a tribute to modern robotics and ultra-microminiaturization, it is a fact that the little craft was picked up five days later a few miles from Istanbul by the U.S.S. Paducah.

  By that time, a certain Vladimir Turenski, a shambling not-too-bright deaf mute, had made his fully documented appearance in Moscow.

  * * * *

  Spies, like fairies and other such elusive sprites, traditionally come in rings. The reason for this circumstructural metaphor is obscure, but it remains a fact that a single spy, all by himself, is usually of very little use to anybody. Espionage, on any useful scale, requires organization.

  There is, as there should be, a reason for this. The purpose of espionage is to gather information—preferably, useful information—against the wishes of, and in spite of the efforts of, a group—usually referred to as “the enemy”—which is endeavoring to prevent that information from getting into other hands than their own. Such activities obviously imply
communication. An espioneur, working for Side A, who finds a bit of important information about Side B must obviously communicate that bit of information to Side A or it is of no use whatsoever.

  All of these factors pose complex problems.

  To begin with, the espioneur must get himself into a position in which he can get hold of the information he wants. Usually, that means that he must pass himself off as something he is not, a process which requires time. Then, when he gets the information he is after, he must get it to his employers quickly. Information, like fish, becomes useless after a certain amount of time, and, unlike fish, there is no known way of refrigerating it to retard spoilage.

  It is difficult to transmit information these days. It is actually easier for the espioneur to transmit it than to get it, generally speaking, but it is difficult for him to do both jobs at once, so the spy ring’s two major parts consist of the ones who get the information from the enemy and the ones who transmit it back to their employers.

  Without magic, it is difficult for a single spy to be of any benefit. And “magic,” in this case, can be defined as some method by which information can be either obtained or transmitted without fear of discovery by the enemy. During World War I, a competent spy equipped with a compact transistorized short-wave communications system could have had himself a ball. If the system had included a miniature full-color television camera, he could have gone hog wild. In those days, such equipment would have been magic.

  All this is not à propos of nothing. Mr. Raphael Poe was, in his own way, a magician.

  It is not to be supposed that the United States of America had no spy rings in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics at that time. There were plenty of them. Raphael Poe could have, if it were so ordained, availed himself of the services of any one or all of them. He did not do so for two reasons. In the first place, the more people who are in on a secret, the more who can give it away. In other words, a ring, like a chain, is only as strong as its weakest section. In the second place, Raphael Poe didn’t need any assistance in the first place.