Fred Hoyle - Element 79

The telepuppets came into their own at this stage. They were set to watch the Martian surface by electronic camera. A stream of pictures was telemetered to Earth. It soon appeared that remarkable changes were in hand. Large structures appeared, very like radio antennae. It made sense when you came to think about it. Perhaps for millions of years the Martians had lived under their glaciers without experiencing any visitation from outside. Possibly from time to time they had taken a look at the external world, finding little of interest. It was very different now, however. At last there had indeed been a visitation from outside, and the Martians were determined to find out, what the hell. NASA had succeeded, at fantastic expense, in stirring a hornet’s nest.

Yet there was nothing to worry about when the first signals came through. Attempts were made to decode them, of course, but without the slightest success. Somebody had the amusing idea of setting up a closed loop. There seemed no possibility of it doing any harm. Signals from Mars were fed directly into a terrestrial computer, the output from which was fed back to a terrestrial transmitting antenna, back to Mars. Nobody expected much to come of it, but everybody hoped for something more than a simple return of the original message. Small changes, in fact, appeared after a few days. The terrestrial computer was not returning exactly the same signals as the ones which were being fed into it. This meant the home computer was acting as an outpost for the Martians, although of course in an apparently harmless way. The Martians must have discovered something of the home computer’s function and of its basic design.

The next step was to investigate what was going on. It was necessary now to work the closed loop through the home computer with a man-made program inside it. So the loop was set up in parallel with a straightforward mathematical problem. It was a simple matter of time-sharing, the computer being used for two apparently quite distinct purposes, much as one can run two distinct human problems in the same computer at the same time. Whereas the human problems stay distinct, however, these did not. The Martian loop stopped the mathematical problem. There wasn’t any mystery about how this could happen. The Martians stopped the mathematics in exactly the same way we ourselves would do, by instructions to the computer from without. There was no difficulty about it and apparently no harm either. Indeed, it was all very encouraging, since it implied a small area of contact with the Martians. Further experiments were tried out with varying success. Other kinds of human program were used. Chess, in which the Martians took not the slightest interest, business accountancy and general data-processing, language translation, and so forth, traffic-flow problems. A lot of stuff was put on tape and the Martians were left to sort it out as best they could.

Two things occurred in quick succession. The computer started to work in earnest, in a very different fashion from its earlier sporadic behavior. Instructions were inserted for a print-out of the contents of the computer, but the print-out proved to be on a hopelessly vast scale. There was no possibility of detecting any sense in it. The other thing was that pictures from the telepuppets ceased. A meteorite might have hit one of them, but the whole lot could hardly have been hit all at exactly the same time. The Martians had evidently knocked them off, there could be no other explanation.

Preparations for meeting an invasion from Mars were now put seriously in hand. The nuclear defense capability was weighed and not found wanting. There seemed no grounds for alarm. Nobody thought to break the computer link with Mars. The link was indeed thought of as an advantage, since it could eventually give a lead to the purposes and the nature of the Martians.

The invasion came without any notice at all. The stuff was sprinkled into the terrestrial atmosphere as if from a cosmic pepper pot. The Martians treated chemistry rather as humans treat electronics, something to be worked out by rational calculation, not a subject for crude empiricism. With their vast calculating resources, the properties of complex molecules could be definitively worked out. So they knew exactly what they were doing when the stuff was sprinkled into the terrestrial atmosphere. It took the best part of three months for it to settle to ground level and to get into water supplies all over the Earth. Then there was the devil to pay. The birth rate fell to zero within a few more weeks. The human species suddenly found itself completely sterile, in fantastic contrast to its previous cornucopian fecundity. The chemical makeup of the bodies of the unfortunate scientist-explorers had given all the necessary data. The determination of a complete inhibitor of human fertility had then been a straightforward, if somewhat tedious job.

The species was left to savor the situation for a couple of months. Everybody was by then convinced that complete biological extinction was the Martian aim. Everybody settled into this belief with a dull, resigned hopelessness. Then came the first full and lucid print-out from the computer, the one in contact with the Martians. Instructions were given for the construction of several hundred robot machines. There was nothing apparently harmful in the specifications; it was obvious these robots could be physically overwhelmed at a moment’s notice if need be. Preparations for their construction were put in hand. There was nothing else to be done. The first ones off the line turned out rather jolly little fellows, with big, square boxes on top of the short, stumpy legs. They were just mobile computers, not at all complicated, even by terrestrial standards. Yet they had one special ability, they were far more efficient intermediaries between humans and the bigger computer, the one in constant contact with the Martians, than our own input-output devices could ever have been.

No sooner did the robots begin work than babies began to be born again. The total birth rate was still extremely low, far too low for any kind of stability in the human population, but it was something to find even a ray of hope in what had appeared an impossibly black situation. The game was still not played out.

Further robots were built to new specifications. They were bigger now and there were more of them. This second generation was industrially inclined. It collected scads of data. It gave rational, clear instructions on what was to be done. More and more of the new machines moved into executive offices. In evidence of the good faith of the Martians, the birth rate continued to rise little by little. Young women everywhere were much in favor of the new situation. Not only was there a better chance now of a small family, but their husbands had been ejected from the offices in which previous decades of husbands had entombed themselves. Babies had to be worked for harder, of course, but was there anything very much wrong in that?

The third robot generation was quite different again. To the jolly little communication chaps, and the efficient industrial chaps, there was now added a policeman-robot. These fellows were literally tougher than nails, much much tougher than gangsters and F.B.I. men had been, much tougher even than the agents of pure fiction. You could certainly blow them apart with high explosive, but you couldn’t knock them off with a pistol. They were much much stronger than a gorilla. With a single blow they could explode you like a bag of water.

The policemen-robots had no sense of justice, or of mercy, or of pity. Neither had they any spirit of vindictiveness, any lust for revenge or vengeance. They were not sadistic, nor did they give themselves airs. Nor did they rape your sister. They knew and cared about just one thing, instruction and obedience. So long as you obeyed an instruction you were okay. If you disobeyed, you were given one single opportunity for reconsideration. If you then obeyed, okay, if not, wham—a heavy metal ball flew at enormous speed along an arc in the style of a medieval joust.