The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Read online

  Leda Crannon thought it over. “Well, assuming all that, I imagine that it would eventually ruin Snookums. He’s built to experiment, and if he’s kept from experimenting for too long, he’ll exceed the optimum randomity of his circuits.” She swallowed. “If he hasn’t already.”

  “I thought so. And so did someone else,” said Mike thoughtfully.

  “Well, for Heaven’s sake! What is this system?” Leda asked in sudden exasperation.

  “You’re close,” said Mike the Angel.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Theology,” said Mike. “He was pumped full of Christian theology, that’s all. Good, solid, Catholic theology. Bishop Costin’s mathematical symbolization of it is simply a result of the verbal logic that had been smoothed out during the previous two thousand years. Snookums could reduce it to math symbols and equations, anyway, even if we didn’t have Bishop Costin’s work.”

  He showed her the book from Mellon’s room.

  “It doesn’t even require the assumption of a soul to make it foul up a robot’s works. He doesn’t have any emotions, either. And he can’t handle something that he can’t experiment with. It would have driven him insane, all right. But he isn’t insane.”

  Leda looked puzzled. “But—”

  “Do you know why?” Mike interrupted.

  “No.”

  “Because he found something that he could experiment with. He found a material basis for theological experimentation.”

  She looked still more puzzled. “What could that be?”

  “Me,” said Mike the Angel. “Me. Michael Raphael Gabriel. I’m an angel—an archangel. As a matter of fact, I’m three archangels. For all I know, Snookums has equated me with the Trinity.”

  “But—how did he get that idea?”

  “Mostly from the Book of Tobit,” said Mike. “That’s where an archangel takes the form of a human being and travels around with Tobit the Younger, remember? And, too, he probably got more information from the first part of Luke’s Gospel, where Gabriel tells the Blessed Virgin that she’s about to become a mother.”

  “But would he have figured that out for himself?”

  “Possibly,” said Mike, “but I doubt it. He was told that I was an angel—literally.”

  “Let me see that book,” she said, taking The Christian Religion and Symbolic Logic from Mike’s hand. She opened it to the center. “I didn’t know anyone had done this sort of work,” she said.

  “Oh, there was a great fuss over the book when it came out. There were those who said that the millennium had arrived because the truth of the Christian faith had been proved mathematically, and therefore all rational people would have to accept it.”

  She leafed through the book. “I’ll bet there are still some who still believe that, just like there are some people who still think Euclidian geometry must necessarily be true because it can be ‘proved’ mathematically.”

  Mike nodded. “All Bishop Costin did—all he was trying to do—was to prove that the axioms of the Christian faith are logically self-consistent. That’s all he ever claimed to have done, and he did a brilliant job of it.”

  “But—how do you know this is what Snookums was given?”

  “Look at the pages. Snookums’ waldo fingers wrinkled the pages that way. Those aren’t the marks of human fingers. Only two of Mellon’s other books were wrinkled that way.”

  She jerked her head up from the book, startled. “What? This is Lew Mellon’s book?”

  “That’s right. So are the other two. A Bible and a theological dictionary. They’re wrinkled the same way.”

  Her eyes were wide, bright sapphires. “But why? Why would he do such a thing, for goodness’ sake?”

  “I don’t know why it was done,” Mike said slowly, “but I doubt if it was for goodness’ sake. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of this hanky-panky yet, I don’t think.

  “Leda, if I’m right—if this is what has been causing Snookums’ odd behavior—can you cure him?”

  She looked at the book again and nodded. “I think so. But it will take a lot of work. I’ll have to talk to Fitz about it. We’ll have to keep this book—and the other two.”

  Mike shook his head. “No can do. Can you photocopy them?”

  “Certainly. But it’ll take—oh, two or three hours per book.”

  “Then you’d better get busy. We’re landing in the morning.”

  She nodded. “I know. Captain Quill has already told us.”

  “Fine, then.” He stood up. “What will you do? Simply tell Snookums to forget all this stuff?”

  “Good Heavens no! It’s too thoroughly integrated with every other bit of data he has! You might be able to take one single bit of data out that way, but to jerk out a whole body of knowledge like this would completely randomize his circuits. You can pull out a tooth by yanking with a pair of forceps, but if you try to take out a man’s appendix that way, you’ll lose a patient.”

  “I catch,” Mike said with a grin. “Okay. I’ll get the other two books and you can get to work copying them. Take care.”

  “Thanks, Mike.”

  As he walked down the companionway, he cursed himself for being a fool. If he’d let things go on the way they were, Leda might have weaned herself away from Snookums. Now she was interested again. But there could have been no other way, of course.

  CHAPTER 19

  The interstellar ship Brainchild orbited around her destination, waiting during the final checkup before she landed on the planet below.

  It was not a nice planet. As far as its size went, it could be classified as “Earth type,” but size was almost the only resemblance to Earth. It orbited in space some five hundred and fifty million miles from its Sol-like parent—a little farther away from the primary than Jupiter is from Sol itself. It was cold there—terribly cold. At high noon on the equator, the temperature reached a sweltering 180° absolute; it became somewhat chillier toward the poles.

  H2O was, anywhere on the planet, a whitish, crystalline mineral suitable for building material. The atmosphere was similar to that of Jupiter, although the proportions of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen were different because of the lower gravitational potential of the planet. It had managed to retain a great deal more hydrogen in its atmosphere than Earth had because of the fact that the average thermal velocity of the molecules was much lower. Since oxygen-releasing life had never developed on the frigid surface of the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. It was all tied up in combination with the hydrogen of the ice and the surface rocks of the planet.

  The Space Service ship that had discovered the planet, fifteen years before, had given it the name Eisberg, thus commemorating the name of a spaceman second class who happened to have the luck to be (a) named Robert Eisberg, (b) a member of the crew of the ship to discover the planet, and (c) under the command of a fun-loving captain.

  Eisberg had been picked as the planet to transfer the potentially dangerous Snookums to for two reasons. In the first place, if Snookums actually did solve the problem of the total-annihilation bomb, the worst he could do was destroy a planet that wasn’t much good, anyway. And, in the second place, the same energy requirements applied on Eisberg as did on Chilblains Base. It was easier to cool the helium bath of the brain if it only had to be lowered 175 degrees or so.

  It was a great place for cold-work labs, but not worth anything for colonization.

  * * * *

  Chief Powerman’s Mate Multhaus looked gloomily at the figures on the landing sheet.

  Mike the Angel watched the expression on the chief’s face and said: “What’s the matter, Multhaus? No like?”

  Multhaus grimaced. “Well, sir, I don’t like it, no. But I can’t say I dislike it, either.”

  He stared at the landing sheet, pursing his lips. He looked as though he were valiantly restraining himself from asking questions about the other night’s escapade—which he was.

  He said: “I just don’t like to land
without jets, sir; that’s all.”

  “Hell, neither do I,” admitted Mike. “But we’re not going to get down any other way. We managed to take off without jets; we’ll manage to land without them.”

  “Yessir,” said Multhaus, “but we took off with the grain of Earth’s magnetic field. We’re landing across the grain.”

  “Sure,” said Mike. “So what? If we overlook the motors, that’s okay. We may never be able to get off the planet with this ship again, but we aren’t supposed to anyway.

  “Come on, Multhaus, don’t worry about it. I know you hate to burn up a ship, but this one is supposed to be expendable. You may never have another chance like this.”

  Multhaus tried to keep from grinning, but he couldn’t. “Awright, Commander. You have appealed to my baser instincts. My subconscious desire to wreck a spaceship has been brought to the surface. I can’t resist it. Am I nutty, maybe?”

  “Not now, you’re not,” Mike said, grinning back.

  “We’ll have a bitch of a job getting through the plasmasphere, though,” said the chief. “That fraction of a second will—”

  “It’ll jolt us,” Mike agreed, interrupting. “But it won’t wreck us. Let’s get going.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Multhaus.

  * * * *

  The seas of Eisberg were liquid methane containing dissolved ammonia. Near the equator, they were liquid; farther north, the seas became slushy with crystallized ammonia.

  The site picked for the new labs of the Computer Corporation of Earth was in the northern hemisphere, at 40° north latitude, about the same distance from the equator as New York or Madrid, Spain, would be on Earth. The Brainchild would be dropping through Eisberg’s magnetic field at an angle, but it wouldn’t be the ninety-degree angle of the equator. It would have been nice if the base could have been built at one of the poles, but that would have put the labs in an uncomfortable position, since there was no solid land at either pole.

  Mike the Angel didn’t like the idea of having to land on Eisberg without jets any more than Multhaus did, but he was almost certain that the ship would take the strain.

  He took the companionway up to the Control Bridge, went in, and handed the landing sheet to Black Bart. The captain scowled at it, shrugged, and put it on his desk.

  “Will we make it, sir?” Mike said. “Any word from the Fireball?”

  Black Bart nodded. “She’s orbiting outside the atmosphere. Captain Wurster will send down a ship to pick us up as soon as we’ve finished our business here.”

  The Fireball, being much faster than the clumsy Brainchild, had left Earth later than the slower ship, and had arrived earlier.

  “Now hear this! Now hear this! Third Warning! Landing orbit begins in one minute! Landing begins in one minute!”

  Sixty seconds later the Brainchild began her long, logarithmic drop toward the surface of Eisberg.

  Landing a ship on her jets isn’t an easy job, but at least an ion rocket is built for the job. Maybe someday the Translation drive will be modified for planetary landings, but so far such a landing has been, as someone put it, “50 per cent raw energy and 50 per cent prayer.” The landing was worse than the take-off, a truism which has held since the first glider took off from the surface of Earth in the nineteenth century. What goes up doesn’t necessarily have to come down, but when it does, the job is a lot rougher than getting up was.

  The plasmasphere of Eisberg differed from that of Earth in two ways. First, the ionizing source of radiation—the primary star—was farther away from Eisberg than Sol was from Earth, which tended to reduce the total ionization. Second, the upper atmosphere of Eisberg was pretty much pure hydrogen, which is somewhat easier to ionize than oxygen or nitrogen. And, since there was no ozonosphere to block out the UV radiation from the primary, the thickness of the ionosphere beneath the plasmasphere was greater.

  Not until the Brainchild hit the bare fringes of the upper atmosphere did she act any differently than she had in space.

  But when she hit the outer fringes of the ionosphere—that upper layer of rarified protons, the rapidly moving current of high velocity ions known as the plasmasphere—she bucked like a kicked horse. From deep within her vitals, the throb began, a strumming, thrumming sound with a somewhat higher note imposed upon it, making a sound like that of a bass viol being plucked rapidly on its lowest string.

  It was not the intensity of the ionosphere that cracked the drive of the Brainchild; it was the duration. The layer of ionization was too thick; the ship couldn’t make it through the layer fast enough, in spite of her high velocity.

  A man can hold a red-hot bit of steel in his hand for a fraction of a second without even feeling it. But if he has to hold a hot baked potato for thirty seconds, he’s likely to get a bad burn.

  So it was with the Brainchild. The passage through Earth’s ionosphere during take-off had been measured in fractions of a second. The Brainchild had reacted, but the exposure to the field had been too short to hurt her.

  The ionosphere of Eisberg was much deeper and, although the intensity was less, the duration was much longer.

  The drumming increased as she fell, a low-frequency, high-energy sine wave that shook the ship more violently than had the out-of-phase beat that had pummeled the ship shortly after her take-off.

  Dr. Morris Fitzhugh, the roboticist, screamed imprecations into the intercom, but Captain Sir Henry Quill cut him off before anyone took notice and let the scientist rave into a dead pickup.

  “How’s she coming?”

  The voice came over the intercom to the Power Section, and Mike the Angel knew that the question was meant for him.

  “She’ll make it, Captain,” he said. “She’ll make it. I designed this thing for a 500 per cent overload. She’ll make it.”

  “Good,” said Black Bart, snapping off the intercom.

  Mike exhaled gustily. His eyes were still on the needles that kept creeping higher and higher along the calibrated periphery of the meters. Many of them had long since passed the red lines that marked the allowable overload point. Mike the Angel knew that those points had been set low, but he also knew that they were approaching the real overload point.

  He took another deep breath and held it.

  * * * *

  Point for point, the continent of Antarctica, Earth, is one of the most deadly areas ever found on a planet that is supposedly non-inimical to man. Earth is a nice, comfortable planet, most of the time, but Antarctica just doesn’t cater to Man at all.

  Still, it just happens to be the worst spot on the best planet in the known Galaxy.

  Eisberg is different. At its best, it has the continent of Antarctica beat four thousand ways from a week ago last Candlemas. At its worst, it is sudden death; at its best, it is somewhat less than sudden.

  Not that Eisberg is a really mean planet; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune can kill a man faster and with less pain. No, Eisberg isn’t mean—it’s torturous. A man without clothes, placed suddenly on the surface of Eisberg—anywhere on the surface—would die. But the trouble is that he’d live long enough for it to hurt.

  Man can survive, all right, but it takes equipment and intelligence to do it.

  When the interstellar ship Brainchild blew a tube—just one tube—of the external field that fought the ship’s mass against the space-strain of the planet’s gravitational field, the ship went off orbit. The tube blew when she was some ninety miles above the surface. She dropped too fast, jerked up, dropped again.

  When the engines compensated for the lost tube, the descent was more leisurely, and the ship settled gently—well, not exactly gently—on the surface of Eisberg.

  Captain Quill’s voice came over the intercom.

  “We are nearly a hundred miles from the base, Mister Gabriel. Any excuse?”

  “No excuse, sir,” said Mike the Angel.

  CHAPTER 20

  If you ignite a jet of oxygen-nitrogen in an atmosphere of hydrogen-methane, you get a flame that
doesn’t differ much from the flame from a hydrogen-methane jet in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. A flame doesn’t particularly care which way the electrons jump, just so long as they jump.

  All of which was due to give Mike the Angel more headaches than he already had, which was 100 per cent too many.

  Three days after the Brainchild landed, the scout group arrived from the base that had been built on Eisberg to take care of Snookums. The leader, a heavy-set engineer named Treadmore, who had unkempt brownish hair and a sad look in his eyes, informed Captain Quill that there was a great deal of work to be done. And his countenance became even sadder.

  Mike, who had, perforce, been called in to take part in the conference, listened in silence while the engineer talked.

  The officers’ wardroom, of which Mike the Angel was becoming heartily sick, seemed like a tomb which echoed and re-echoed the lugubrious voice of Engineer Treadmore.

  “We were warned, of course,” he said, in a normally dismal tone, “that it would be extremely difficult to set down the ship which carried Snookums, and that we could expect the final base to be anywhere from ten to thirty miles from the original, temporary base.” He looked round at everyone, giving the impression of a collie which had just been kicked by Albert Payson Terhune.

  “We understand, naturally, that you could not help landing so far from our original base,” he said, giving them absolution with faint damns, “but it will entail a great deal of extra labor. A hundred and nine miles is a great distance to carry equipment, and, actually, the distance is a great deal more, considering the configuration of the terrain. The.…”

  The upshot of the whole thing was that only part of the crew could possibly be spared to go home on the Fireball, which was orbiting high above the atmosphere. And, since there was no point in sending a small load home at extra expense when the Fireball could wait for the others, it meant that nobody could go home at all for four more weeks. The extra help was needed to get the new base established.

  It was obviously impossible to try to move the Brainchild a hundred miles. With nothing to power her but the Translation drive, she was as helpless as a submarine on the Sahara. Especially now that her drive was shot.