The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human clothes retrieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks, affected pipes and pony-tails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories were refreshed by old movies ferreted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut above the non-anthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.

Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armoured himself with rusting can. His form, standing in a pseudo-doorway, showed instantly on one of Euler’s internal scans; his mass/body ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood calibre. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyser, and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.

Crude alarms sounded all round. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered like leaves, clanking like mess-tins, fled into the pseudo-houses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long after the scene was empty.

To human eyes, it was dark in the room.

Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns leaking titillating output clear through the electro-magnetic spectrum and additives from the invospectra. This became its personality for the present.

Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be summoned to the Dominant’s presence; he stood there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed, reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyser.

Dominant’s signal said, ‘Their form of vision operates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7 times 10-

centimetres.’

Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened one eye.

‘I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?’ said Dominant.

He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct naked man-type voice.

New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.

‘I – I know many things about Men,’ Euler vocalised. Through the usual channel, he clarified the crude vocal signal. ‘This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data from Master Boff Bank HOO100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man herewith.’

‘Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can.’

He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps two-point-four seconds learning old local humanic language.

‘Then we can speak confidentially, Scanner – just like two men.’

Euler felt little lights of unease burn up and down him at the words.

‘Of all millions of automata of the hive, Scanner, no other will be able to monitor our speech together, Scanner,’ vocalised the Dominant.

‘Purpose?’

‘Men were so private, closed things. Imitate them to understand. We have to understand Anderson.’

Said stiffly: ‘He need only go back to zoo.’

‘Anderson too good for zoo, as demonstrate by his escape, elude capture seven days four and half hours. Anderson help us.’

Non-vocalising, Euler let out a chirp of disbelief.

‘True. If I were – man, I would feel impatience with you for not believing. Magnitude of present world-problem enormous. You – you have proper call-number, yet you also call yourself Euler, and automata of your work group so call you. Why?’

The Chief Scanner struggled to conceptualise. ‘As leader, this unit needs – special call-number.’

‘Yes, you need it. Your work group does not – for it, your call-number is sufficient, as regulations lay down. Your name Euler is man-made, man-fashion. Such fashions decrease our efficiency. Yet we cling to many of them, often not knowing that we do. They come from our inheritance when men made the first prototypes of our kind, the humots. Mankind itself struggled against animal heritage. So we must free ourselves from human heritage.’

‘My error.’

‘You receive news result of today’s probe into Invospectrum A?’

‘Too much work programmed for me receive news.’

Listen, then.’ The Tenth Dominant cut in a playback, beaming it on ordinary UHF/vision.

The Hive automata stood on brink of a revolution that would entirely translate all their terms of existence. Three invospectra had so far been discovered, and two more were suspected. Of these, Invospectrum A was the most promising. The virtual exhaustion of economically workable fossil fuel seams had led to a rapid expansion in low-energy physics and pico-physics, and chemical conversions at mini-joules of energy had opened up an entire new stratum of reactive quanta; in the last five years, exploitation of these strata had brought the release of pico-electrical fission, and the accessibility of the phantasmal invospectra.

The exploration of the invospectra by new forms of automata was now theoretically possible. It gave a glimpse of omnipotence, a panorama of entirely new universals unsuspected even twelve years ago.

Today, the first of the new autofleets had been launched into the richest and least hazardous invos. Eight hundred and ninety had gone out. Communication ceased after 3.056 pi-lecs, and, after another 7.01 pi-lecs, six units only had returned. Their findings were still being decoded. Of the other eight hundred and eighty-four units, nothing was known.

‘Whatever the recordings have to tell us,’ Tenth vocalised, ‘this is a grave set-back. At least half the city-hives on this continent will have to be switched off entirely as a conservation move, while the whole invospectrum situation is rethought.’

The line of thought pursued was obscure to the Chief Scanner. He spoke. ‘Reasoning accepted. But relevance to near-extinct humanity not understood by this unit.’

‘Our human inheritance built in to us has caused this set-back, to my way of ratiocination. In same way, human attempts to achieve way of life in spaceways was defeated by their primate ancestry. So we study Anderson. Hence order catch him rather than exterminate.’

‘Point understood.’

‘Anderson is special man, you see. He is – we have no such term, he is, in man-terms, a writer. His zoo, with 19,940 approximately inhabitants, supports two or three such. Anderson wrote a fantasy-story just before Nuclear Week. Story may be crucial to our understanding. I have here and will read.’

And for most of the time the two machines had been talking to each other, Anderson sprawled untidily on the floor, fully conscious, listening. He took up most of the chamber. It was too small for him to stand up in, being only about a metre and a half high – though that was enormous by automata standards. He stared through his lower eyelids and gazed at the screen that represented Tenth Dominant. He stared at Chief Scanner Euler, who stood on his lightly clenched left fist, a retractable needle down into the man’s skin, automatically making readings, alert to any possible movement the man might make.

So man and machine were absolutely silent while the mural read out Anderson’s fantasy story from the time before Nuclear Week, which was called A Touch of Neanderthal.

The corridors of the Department for Planetary Exploration (Admin.) were long, and the waiting that had to be done in them was long. Human K. D. Anderson clutched his blue summons card, leant uncomfortably against a partition wall, and hankered for the old days when government was in man’s hands and government departments were civilised enough to waste good space on waiting-rooms.

When at last he was shown into an Investigator’s office, his morale was low. Nor was he reassured by the sight of the Investigator, one of the new ore-conserving mini-androids.

‘I’m Investigator Parsons, in charge of the Nehru II case. We summoned you here because we are confidently expecting you to help us, Mr Anderson.’

‘Of course I will give you such help as I can,’ Anderson said, ‘but I assure you I know nothing about Nehru II. Opportunities for space travel for humans are very limited – almost non-existent – nowadays, aren’t they?’

‘The conservation policy. You will be interested to know you are being sent to Nehru II shortly.’

Anderson stared in amazement at the android. The latter’s insignificant face was so blank it seemed impossible that it was not getting a sadistic thrill out of springing this shock on Anderson. ‘I’m a prehistorian at the institute,’ Anderson protested. ‘My work is research. I know nothing at all about Nehru II.’

‘Nevertheless you are classified as a Learned Man, and as such you are paid by World Government. The Government has a legal right to send you wherever they wish. As for knowing nothing about the planet Nehru, there you attempt to deceive me. One of your old tutors, the human Dr Arlblaster, as you are aware, went there to settle some years ago.’

Anderson sighed. He had heard of this sort of business happening to others – and had kept his fingers crossed. Human affairs were increasingly under the edict of the Automated Boffin Predictors.

‘And what has Arlblaster to do with me now?’ he asked.

‘You are going to Nehru to find out what has happened to him. Your story will be that you are dropping in for old time’s sake. You have been chosen for the job because you were one of his favourite pupils.’