The Second Randall Garrett Megapack Page 56

  The Eisberg base had to be built around Snookums, who was, after all, the only reason for the base’s existence. And, too, the power plant of the Brainchild had been destined to be the source of power for the permanent base.

  It wasn’t too bad, really. A little extra time, but not much.

  The advance base, commanded by Treadmore, was fairly well equipped. For transportation, they had one jet-powered aircraft, a couple of ’copters, and fifteen ground-crawlers with fat tires, plus all kinds of powered construction machinery. All of them were fueled with liquid HNO3, which makes a pretty good fuel in an atmosphere that is predominantly methane. Like the gasoline-air engines of a century before, they were spark-started reciprocating engines, except for the turbine-powered aircraft.

  The only trouble with the whole project was that the materials had to be toted across a hundred miles of exceedingly hostile territory.

  Treadmore, looking like a tortured bloodhound, said: “But we’ll make it, won’t we?”

  Everyone nodded dismally.

  * * * *

  Mike the Angel had a job he emphatically didn’t like. He was supposed to convert the power plant of the Brainchild from a spaceship driver into a stationary generator. The conversion job itself wasn’t tedious; in principle, it was similar to taking the engine out of an automobile and converting it to a power plant for an electric generator. In fact, it was somewhat simpler, in theory, since the engines of the Brainchild were already equipped for heavy drainage to run the electrical systems aboard ship, and to power and refrigerate Snookums’ gigantic brain, which was no mean task in itself.

  But Michael Raphael Gabriel, head of one of the foremost—if not the foremost—power design corporations in the known Galaxy, did not like degrading something. To convert the Brainchild’s plant from a spaceship drive to an electric power plant seemed to him to be on the same order as using a turboelectric generator to power a flashlight. A waste.

  To make things worse, the small percentage of hydrogen in the atmosphere got sneaky sometimes. It could insinuate itself into places where neither the methane nor the ammonia could get. Someone once called hydrogen the “cockroach element,” since, like that antediluvian insect, the molecules of H2 can insidiously infiltrate themselves into places where they are not only unwelcome, but shouldn’t even be able to go. At red heat, the little molecules can squeeze themselves through the crystalline interstices of quartz and steel.

  Granted, the temperature of Eisberg is a long way from red hot, but normal sealing still won’t keep out hydrogen. Add to that the fact that hydrogen and methane are both colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and you have the beginnings of an explosive situation.

  The only reason that no one died is because the Space Service is what it is.

  Unlike the land, sea, and air forces of Earth, the Space Service does not have a long history of fighting other human beings. There has never been a space war, and, the way things stand, there is no likelihood of one in the foreseeable future.

  But the Space Service does fight, in its own way. It fights the airlessness of space and the unfriendly atmospheres of exotic planets, using machines, intelligence, knowledge, and human courage as its weapons. Some battles have been lost; others have been won. And the war is still going on. It is an unending war, one which has no victory in sight.

  It is, as far as we can tell, the only war in human history in which Mankind is fully justified as the invading aggressor.

  It is not a defensive war; neither space nor other planets have attacked Man. Man has invaded space “simply because it is there.” It is war of a different sort, true, but it is nonetheless a war.

  The Space Service was used to the kind of battle it waged on Eisberg. It was prepared to lose men, but even more prepared to save them.

  CHAPTER 21

  Mike the Angel stepped into the cargo air lock of the Brainchild, stood morosely in the center of the cubicle, and watched the outer door close. Eight other men, clad, like himself, in regulation Space Service spacesuits, also looked wearily at the closing door.

  Chief Multhaus, one of the eight, turned his head to look at Mike the Angel. “I wish that thing would close as fast as my eyes are going to in about fifteen minutes, Commander.” His voice rumbled deeply in Mike’s earphones.

  “Yeah,” said Mike, too tired to make decent conversation.

  Eight hours—all of them spent tearing down the spaceship and making it a part of the new base—had not been exactly exhilarating to any of them.

  The door closed, and the pumps began to work. The men were wearing Space Service Suit Three. For every environment, for every conceivable emergency, a suit had been built—if, of course, a suit could be built for it. Nobody had yet built a suit for walking about in the middle of a sun, but, then, nobody had ever volunteered to try anything like that.

  They were all called “spacesuits” because most of them could be worn in the vacuum of space, but most of them weren’t designed for that type of work. Suit One—a light, easily manipulated, almost skin-tight covering, was the real spacesuit. It was perfect for work in interstellar space, where there was a microscopic amount of radiation incident to the suit, no air, and almost nil gravity. For exterior repairs on the outside of a ship in free fall a long way from any star, Spacesuit One was the proper garb.

  But, a suit that worked fine in space didn’t necessarily work on other planets, unless it worked fine on the planet it was used on.

  A Moon Suit isn’t a Mars Suit isn’t a Venus Suit isn’t a Triton Suit isn’t a.…

  Carry it on from there.

  Number Three was insulated against a frigid but relatively non-corrosive atmosphere. When the pumps in the air lock began pulling out the methane-laden atmosphere, they began to bulge slightly, but not excessively. Then nitrogen, extracted from the ammonia snow that was so plentiful, filled the room, diluting the remaining inflammable gases to a harmless concentration.

  Then that mixture was pumped out, to be replaced by a mixture of approximately 20 per cent oxygen and 80 per cent nitrogen—common, or garden-variety, air.

  Mike the Angel cracked his helmet and sniffed. “Guk,” he said. “If I ever faint and someone gives me smelling salts, I’ll flay him alive with a coarse rasp.”

  “Yessir,” said Chief Multhaus, as he began to shuck his suit. “But if I had my druthers, I’d druther you’d figure out some way to get all the ammonia out of the joints of this suit.”

  The other men, sniffing and coughing, agreed in attitude if not in voice.

  It wasn’t really as bad as they pretended; indeed, the odor of ammonia was hardly noticeable. But it made a good griping point.

  The inner door opened at last, and the men straggled through.

  “G’night, Chief,” said Mike the Angel.

  “Night, sir,” said Multhaus. “See you in the morning.”

  “Yeah. Night.” Mike trudged toward the companionway that led toward the wardroom. If Keku or Jeffers happened to be there, he’d have a quick round of Ŭma ni tō. Jeffers called the game “double solitaire for three people,” and Keku said it meant “horses’ two heads,” but Mike had simply found it as a new game to play before bedtime.

  He looked forward to it.

  But he had something else to do first.

  Instead of hanging up his suit in the locker provided, he had bunched it under his arm—except for the helmet—and now he headed toward maintenance.

  He met Ensign Vaneski just coming out, and gave him a broad smile. “Mister Vaneski, I got troubles.”

  Vaneski smiled back worriedly. “Yes, sir. I guess we all do. What is it, sir?”

  Mike gestured at the bundle under his arm. “I abraded the sleeve of my suit while I was working today. I wish you’d take a look at it. I’m afraid it’ll need a patch.”

  For a moment, Vaneski looked as though he’d suddenly developed a headache.

  “I know you’re supposed to be off duty now,” Mike said soothingly, “but I don’t want to
get myself killed wearing a leaky suit tomorrow. I’ll help you work on it if—”

  Vaneski grinned quickly. “Oh no, sir. That’ll be all right. I’ll give it a test, anyway, to check leaks. If it needs repair, it shouldn’t take too long. Bring it in, and we’ll take a look at it.”

  They went back into the Maintenance Section, and Vaneski spread the suit out on the worktable. There was an obvious rough spot on the right sleeve. “Looks bad,” said Vaneski. “I’ll run a test right away.”

  “Okay,” said Mike. “I’ll leave it to you. Can I pick it up in the morning?”

  “I think so. If it needs a patch, we’ll have to test the patch, of course, but we should be able to finish it pretty quickly.” He shrugged. “If we can’t, sir, you’ll just have to wait. Unless you want us to start altering a suit to your measurements.”

  “Which would take longer?”

  “Altering a suit.”

  “Okay. Just patch this one, then. What can I do?”

  “I’ll get it out as fast as possible, sir,” said Vaneski with a smile.

  “Fine. I’ll see you later, then.” Mike, like Cleopatra, was not prone to argue. He left maintenance and headed toward the wardroom for a game of Ŭma ni tō. But when he met Leda Crannon going up the stairway, all thoughts of card games flitted from his mind with the careless nonchalance of a summer butterfly.

  “Hullo,” he said, pulling himself up a little straighter. He was tired, but not that tired.

  Her smile brushed the cobwebs from his mind. But a second look told him that there was worry behind the smile.

  “Hi, Mike,” she said softly. “You look beat.”

  “I am,” admitted Mike. “To a frazzle. Have I told you that I love you?”

  “Once, I think. Maybe twice.” Her eyes seemed to light up somewhere from far back in her head. “But enough of this mad passion,” she said. “I want an invitation to have a drink—a stiff one.”

  “I’ll steal Jeffers’ bottle,” Mike offered. “What’s the trouble?”

  Her smile faded, and her eyes became grave. “I’m scared, Mike; I want to talk to you.”

  “Come along, then,” Mike said.

  * * * *

  Mike the Angel poured two healthy slugs of Pete Jeffers’ brandy into a pair of glasses, added ice and water, and handed one to Leda Crannon with a flourish. And all the time, he kept up a steady line of gentle patter.

  “It may interest you to know,” he said chattily, “that the learned Mister Treadmore has been furnishing me with the most fascinating information.” He lifted up his own glass and looked into its amber depths.

  They were in his stateroom, and this time the door was closed—at her insistence. She had explained that she didn’t want to be overheard, even by passing crew members.

  He swizzled the ice around in his glass, still holding it up to the light. “Indeed,” he rambled on, “Treadmore babbled for Heaven knows how long on the relative occurrence of parahydrogen and orthohydrogen on Eisberg.” He took his eyes from the glass and looked down at the girl who was seated demurely on the edge of his bunk. Her smile was encouraging.

  “He said—and I quote”—Mike’s voice assumed a gloomy, but stilted tone—“normal hydrogen gas consists of diatomic molecules. The nuclear, or proton, spin of these atoms—ah—that is, of the two atoms that compose the molecule—may be oriented in the same direction or in opposite directions.”

  He held a finger in the air as if to make a deep philosophical point. “If,” he said pontifically, “they are oriented in the same direction, we refer to the substance as orthohydrogen. If they are oriented in opposite directions, it is parahydrogen. The ortho molecules rotate with odd rotational quantum numbers, while the para molecules rotate with even quantum numbers.

  “Since conversion does not normally occur between the two states, normal hydrogen may be considered—”

  Leda Crannon, snickering, waved her hand in the air. “Please!” she interrupted. “He can’t be that bad! You make him sound like a dirge player at a Hindu funeral. What did he tell you? What did you find out?”

  “Hah!” said Mike. “What did I find out?” His hand moved in an airy circle as he inscribed a flowing cipher with a graceful Delsarte wave. “Nothing. In the first place, I already knew it, and in the second, it wasn’t practical information. There’s a slight difference in diffusion between the two forms, but it’s nothing to rave about.” His expression became suddenly serious. “I hope your information is a bit more revealing.”

  She glanced at her glass, nodded, and drained it. Mike had extracted a promise from her that she would drink one drink before she talked. He could see that she was a trifle tense, and he thought the liquor would relax her somewhat. Now he was ready to listen.

  She handed him her empty, and while he refilled it, she said: “It’s about Snookums again.”

  Mike gave her her glass, grabbed the nearby chair, turned it around, sat down, and regarded her over its back.

  “I’ve lived with him so long,” she said after a minute. “So long. It almost seems as though I’ve grown up with him. Eight years. I’ve been a mother to him, and a big sister at the same time—and maybe a maiden aunt. He’s been a career and a family all rolled in together.” She still watched her writhing hands, not raising her eyes to Mike’s.

  “And—and, I suppose, a husband, too,” she continued. “That is, he’s sort of the stand-in for a—well, a somebody to teach—to correct—to reform. I guess every woman wants to—to remake the man she meets—the man she wants.”

  And then her eyes were suddenly on his. “But I don’t. Not any more. I’ve had enough of it.” Then she looked back down at her hands.

  Mike the Angel neither accepted nor rejected the statement. He merely waited.

  “He was mine,” she said after a little while. “He was mine to mold, to teach, to form. The others—the roboticists, the neucleonicists, the sub-electronicists, all of them—were his instructors. All they did was give him facts. It was I who gave him a personality.

  “I made him. Not his body, not his brain, but his mind.

  “I made him.

  “I knew him.

  “And I—I—”

  Still staring at her hands, she clasped them together suddenly and squeezed.

  “And I loved him,” she finished.

  She looked up at Mike then. “Can you see that?” she asked tensely. “Can you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Mike the Angel quietly. “Yes, I can understand that. Under the same circumstances, I might have done the same thing.” He paused. “And now?”

  She lowered her head again and began massaging her forehead with the finger tips of both hands, concealing her face with her palms.

  “And now,” she said dully, “I know he’s a machine. Snookums isn’t a he any more—he’s an it. He has no personality of his own, he only has what I fed into him. Even his voice is mine. He’s not even a psychic mirror, because he doesn’t reflect my personality, but a puppet imitation of it, distorted and warped by the thousands upon thousands of cold facts and mathematical relationships and logical postulates. And none of these added anything to him, as a personality. How could they? He never had a personality—only a set of behavior patterns that I drilled into him over a period of eight years.”

  She dropped her hands into her lap and tilted her head back, looking at the blank white shimmer of the glow plates.

  “And now, suddenly, I see him for what he is—for what it is. A machine.

  “It was never anything but a machine. It is still a machine. It will never be anything else.

  “Personality is something that no machine can ever have. Idiosyncrasies, yes. No two machines are identical. But any personality that an individual sees in a machine has been projected there by the individual himself; it exists only in the human mind.

  “A machine can only do what it is built to do, and teaching a robot is only a building process.” She gave a short, hard laugh. “I couldn’t even
build a monster, like Dr. Frankenstein did, unless I purposely built it to turn on me. And in that case I would have done nothing more than the suicide who turns a gun on himself.”

  Her head tilted forward again, and her eyes sought those of Mike the Angel. A rather lopsided grin came over her face.

  “I guess I’m disenchanted, huh, Mike?” she asked.

  Mike grinned back, but his lips were firm. “I think so, yes. And I think you’re glad of it.” His grin changed to a smile.

  “Remember,” he asked, “the story of the Sleeping Beauty? Did you want to stay asleep all your life?”

  “God forbid and thank you for the compliment, sir,” she said, managing a smile of her own. “And are you the Prince Charming who woke me up?”

  “Prince Charming, I may be,” said Mike the Angel carefully, “but I’m not the one who woke you up. You did that yourself.”

  Her smile became more natural. “Thanks, Mike. I really think I might have seen it, sooner or later. But, without you, I doubt.…” She hesitated. “I doubt that I’d want to wake up.”

  “You said you were scared,” Mike said. “What are you scared of?”

  “I’m scared to death of that damned machine.”

  Great love, chameleon-like, hath turned to fear,

  And on the heels of fear there follows hate.

  Mike quoted to himself—he didn’t say it aloud.

  “The only reason anyone would have to fear Snookums,” he said, “would be that he was uncontrollable. Is he?”

  “Not yet. Not completely. But I’m afraid that knowing that he’s been filled with Catholic theology isn’t going to help us much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he has it so inextricably bound up with the Three Laws of Robotics that we can’t nullify one without nullifying the other. He’s convinced that the laws were promulgated by God Himself.”

  “Holy St. Isaac,” Mike said softly. “I’m surprised he hasn’t carried it to its logical conclusion and asked for baptism.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I’m afraid your logic isn’t as rigorous as Snookums’ logic. Only angels and human beings have free will; Snookums is neither, therefore he does not have free will. Whatever he does, therefore, must be according to the will of God. Therefore Snookums cannot sin. Therefore, for him, baptism is both unnecessary and undesirable.”