I, Robot

Silence fell. This time, silence that lasted.

‘Master,’ said the robot, ‘we are here.’

‘Eh?’ Powell snapped out of a semidrowse. ‘Well, get us out of here – out to the surface.’

They found themselves in a tiny substation, empty, airless, ruined. Donovan had inspected a jagged hole in the upper reaches of one of the walls by the light of his pocket flash.

‘Meteorite, do you suppose?’ he had asked.

Powell shrugged. ‘To hell with that. It doesn’t matter. Let’s get out.’

A towering cliff of a black, basaltic rock cut off the sunlight, and the deep night shadow of an airless world surrounded them. Before them, the shadow reached out and ended in knife-edge abruptness into an all-but-unbearable blaze of white light, that glittered from myriad crystals along a rocky ground.

‘Space!’ gasped Donovan. ‘It looks like snow.’ And it did. Powell’s eyes swept the jagged glitter of Mercury to the horizon and winced at the gorgeous brilliance.

‘This must be an unusual area,’ he said. ‘The general albedo of Mercury is low and most of the soil is gray pumice. Something like the Moon, you know. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

He was thankful for the light filters in their visiplates. Beautiful or not, a look at the sunlight through straight glass would have blinded them inside of half a minute.

Donovan was looking at the spring thermometer on his wrist. ‘Holy smokes, the temperature is eighty centigrade!’

Powell checked his own and said: ‘Um-m-m. A little high. Atmosphere, you know.’

‘On Mercury? Are you nuts?’

‘Mercury isn’t really airless,’ explained Powell, in absentminded fashion. He was adjusting the binocular attachments to his visiplate, and the bloated fingers of the insosuit were clumsy at it. ‘There is a thin exhalation that clings to its surface – vapors of the more volatile elements and compounds that are heavy enough for Mercurian gravity to retain. You know: selenium, iodine, mercury, gallium, potassium, bismuth, volatile oxides. The vapors sweep into the shadows and condense, giving up heat. It’s a sort of gigantic still. In fact, if you use your flash, you’ll probably find that the side of the cliff is covered with, say, hoar-sulphur, or maybe quicksilver dew.

‘It doesn’t matter, though. Our suits can stand a measly eighty indefinitely.’

Powell had adjusted the binocular attachments, so that he seemed as eye-stalked as a snail.

Donovan watched tensely. ‘See anything?’

The other did not answer immediately, and when he did, his voice was anxious and thoughtful. ‘There’s a dark spot on the horizon that might be the selenium pool. It’s in the right place. But I don’t see Speedy.’

Powell clambered upward in an instinctive striving for a better view, till he was standing in unsteady fashion upon his robot’s shoulders. Legs straddled wide, eyes straining, he said: ‘I think … I think— Yes, it’s definitely he. He’s coming this way.’

Donovan followed the pointing finger. He had no binoculars, but there was a tiny moving dot, black against the blazing brilliance of the crystalline ground.

‘I see him!’ he yelled. ‘Let’s get going!’

Powell had hopped down into a sitting position on the robot again, and his suited hand slapped against the Gargantuan’s barrel chest. ‘Get going!’

‘Giddy-ap!’ yelled Donovan, and thumped his heels, spur fashion.

The robots started off, the regular thudding of their footsteps silent in the airlessness, for the nonmetallic fabric of the insosuits did not transmit sound. There was only a rhythmic vibration just below the border of actual hearing.

‘Faster!’ yelled Donovan. The rhythm did not change.

‘No use,’ cried Powell, in reply. ‘These junk heaps are only geared to one speed. Do you think they’re equipped with selective flexors?’

They had burst through the shadow, and the sunlight came down in a white-hot wash and poured liquidly about them.

Donovan ducked involuntarily. ‘Wow! Is it imagination or do I feel heat?’

‘You’ll feel more presently,’ was the grim reply. ‘Keep your eye on Speedy.’

Robot SPD 13 was near enough to be seen in detail now. His graceful, streamlined body threw out blazing highlights as he loped with easy speed across the broken ground. His name was derived from his serial initials, of course, but it was apt, nevertheless, for the SPD models were among the fastest robots turned out by the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corp.

‘Hey, Speedy,’ howled Donovan, and waved a frantic hand.

‘Speedy!’ shouted Powell. ‘Come here!’

The distance between the men and the errant robot was being cut down momentarily – more by the efforts of Speedy than the slow plodding of the fifty-year-old antique mounts of Donovan and Powell.

They were close enough now to notice that Speedy’s gait included a peculiar rolling stagger, a noticeable side-to-side lurch – and then, as Powell waved his hand again and sent maximum juice into his compact head-set radio sender, in preparation for another shout, Speedy looked up and saw them.

Speedy hopped to a halt and remained standing for a moment – with just a tiny, unsteady weave, as though he were swaying in a light wind.

Powell yelled: ‘All right, Speedy! Come here, boy.’

Whereupon Speedy’s robot voice sounded in Powell’s earphones for the first time.

It said: ‘Hot dog, let’s play games. You catch me and I catch you; no love can cut our knife in two. For I’m Little Buttercup, sweet Little Buttercup. Whoops!’ Turning on his heel, he sped off in the direction from which he had come with a speed and fury that kicked up gouts of baked dust.

And his last words as he receded into the distance were, ‘There grew a little flower ’neath a great oak tree,’ followed by a curious metallic clicking that might have been a robotic equivalent of a hiccup.

Donovan said weakly: ‘Where did he pick up the Gilbert and Sullivan? Say, Greg, he … he’s drunk or something.’

‘If you hadn’t told me,’ was the bitter response, ‘I’d never realize it. Let’s get back to the cliff. I’m roasting.’

It was Powell who broke the desperate silence. ‘In the first place,’ he said, ‘Speedy isn’t drunk – not in the human sense – because he’s a robot, and robots don’t get drunk. However, there’s something wrong with him which is the robotic equivalent of drunkenness.’

‘To me, he’s drunk,’ stated Donovan, emphatically, ‘and all I know is that he thinks we’re playing games. And we’re not. It’s a matter of life and very gruesome death.’

‘All right. Don’t hurry me. A robot’s only a robot. Once we find out what’s wrong with him, we can fix it and go on.’

‘Once,’ said Donovan, sourly.

Powell ignored him. ‘Speedy is perfectly adapted to normal Mercurian environment. But this region’ – and his arm swept wide – ‘is definitely abnormal. There’s our clue. Now where do these crystals come from? They might have formed from a slowly cooling liquid; but where would you get liquid so hot that it would cool in Mercury’s sun?’

‘Volcanic action,’ suggested Donovan, instantly, and Powell’s body tensed.

‘Out of the mouths of sucklings,’ he said in a small, strange voice, and remained very still for five minutes.

Then, he said, ‘Listen, Mike, what did you say to Speedy when you sent him after the selenium?’

Donovan was taken aback. ‘Well damn it – I don’t know. I just told him to get it.’