Isaac Asimov - The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

The old man’s preoccupied reserve did not encourage questions, but Underhill, remembering that sleek black shape inside the new windows of his house, felt queerly reluctant to leave this haven from the humanoids.

“What is your work?” he ventured.

Old Sledge looked at him sharply, with dark feverish eyes, and finally said: “My last research project. I am attempting to measure the constant of the rhodomagnetic quanta.”

His hoarse tired voice had a dull finality, as if to dismiss the matter and Underhill himself. But Underhill was haunted with a terror of the black shinning slave that had become the master of his house, and he refused to be dismissed.

“What is this certain immunity?”

Sitting gaunt and bent on the tall stool, staring moodily at the long bright needle and the lead sphere, the old man didn’t answer.

“These mechanicals!” Underhill burst out, nervously. “They’ve smashed my business and moved into my home.” He searched the old man’s dark, seamed face. “Tell me — you must know more about them — isn’t there any way to get rid of them?”

After half a minute, the old man’s brooding eyes left the lead ball, and the gaunt shaggy head nodded wearily.

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Can I help you?” Underhill trembled, with a sudden eager hope. “I’ll do anything.”

“Perhaps you can.” The sunken eyes watched him though-fully, with some strange fever in them. “If you can do such work.”

“I had engineering training,” Underhill reminded him, “and I’ve a workshop in the basement. There’s a model I built.” He pointed at the trim little hull, hung over the mantel in the tiny living room. “I’ll do anything I can.”

Even as he spoke, however, the spark of hope was drowned in a sudden wave of overwhelming doubt. Why should he believe this old rogue, when he knew Aurora’s taste in tenants? He ought to remember the game he used to play, and start counting up the score of lies. He stood up from the crippled chair, staring cynically at the patched old vagabond and his fantastic toy.

“What’s the use?” His voice turned suddenly harsh. “You had me going, there, and I’d do anything to stop them, really. But what makes you think you can do anything?”

The haggard old man regarded him thoughtfully.

“I should be able to stop them,” Sledge said softly. “Because, you see, I’m the unfortunate fool who started them. I really intended them to serve and obey, and to guard men from harm. Yes, the Prime Directive was my own idea. I didn’t know what it would lead to.”

Dusk crept slowly into the shabby little rooms. Darkness gathered in the unswept corners, and thickened on the floor. The toylike machines on the kitchen table grew vague and strange, until the last light made a lingering glow on the white palladium needle.

Outside, the town seemed queerly hushed. Just across the alley, the humanoids were building a new house, quite silently. They never spoke to one another, for each knew all that any of them did. The strange materials they used went together without any noise of hammer or saw. Small blind things, moving surely in the growing dark, they seemed as soundless as shadows.

Sitting on the high stool, bowed and tired and old, Sledge told his story. Listening, Underhill sat down again, careful of the broken chair. He watched the hands of Sledge, gnarled and corded and darkly burned, powerful once but shrunken and trembling now, restless in the dark.

“Better keep this to yourself. I’ll tell you how they started, so you will understand what we have to do. But you had better not mention it outside these rooms — because the humanoids have very efficient ways of eradicating unhappy memories, or purposes that threaten their discharge of the Prime Directive.”

“They’re very efficient,” Underhill bitterly agreed.

“That’s all the trouble,” the old man said. “I tried to build a perfect machine. I was altogether too successful. This is how it happened.”

A gaunt haggard man, sitting stooped and tired in the growing dark, he told his story.

“Sixty years ago, on the arid southern continent of Wing IV, I was an instructor of atomic theory in a small technological college. Very young. An idealist. Rather ignorant, I’m afraid, of life and politics and war — of nearly everything, I suppose, except atomic theory.”

His furrowed face made a brief sad smile in the dusk.

“I had too much faith in facts, I suppose, and too little in men. I mistrusted emotion, because I had no time for anything but science. I remember being swept along with a fad for general semantics. I wanted to apply the scientific method to every situation, and reduce all experience to formula. I’m afraid I was pretty impatient with human ignorance and error, and I thought that science alone could make the perfect world.”

He sat silent for a moment, staring out at the black silent things that flitted shadowlike about the new palace that was rising as swiftly as a dream across the alley.

“There was a girl.” His great tired shoulders made a sad little shrug. “If things had been a little different, we might have married, and lived out our lives in that quiet little college town, and perhaps reared a child or two. And there would have been no humanoids.”

He sighed, in the cool creeping dusk.

“I was finishing my thesis on the separation of the palladium isotopes — a pretty little project, but I should have been content with that. She was a biologist, but she was planning to retire when we married. I think we should have been two very happy people, quite ordinary, and altogether harmless.

“But then there was a war — wars had been too frequent on the worlds of Wing, ever since they were colonized. I survived it in a secret underground laboratory, designing military mechanicals. But she volunteered to join a military research project in biotoxins. There was an accident. A few molecules of a new virus got into the air, and everybody on the project died unpleasantly.

“I was left with my science, and a bitterness that was hard to forget. When the war was over I went back to the little college with a military research grant. The project was pure science — a theoretical investigation of the nuclear binding forces, then misunderstood. I wasn’t expected to produce an actual weapon, and I didn’t recognize the weapon when I found it.

“It was only a few pages of rather difficult mathematics. A novel theory of atomic structure, involving a new expression for one component of the binding forces. But the tensors seemed to be a harmless abstraction. I saw no way to test the theory or manipulate the predicated force. The military authorities cleared my paper for publication in a little technical review put out by the college.

“The next year, I made an appalling discovery — I found the meaning of those tensors. The elements of the rhodium triad turned out to be an unexpected key to the manipulation of that theoretical force. Unfortunately, my paper had been reprinted abroad, and several other men must have made the same unfortunate discovery, at about the same time.

“The war, which ended in less than a year, was probably started by a laboratory accident. Men failed to anticipate the capacity of tuned rhodomagnetic radiations, to unstabilize the heavy atoms. A deposit of heavy ores was detonated, no doubt by sheer mischance, and the blast obliterated the incautious experimenter.

“The surviving military forces of that nation retaliated against their supposed attackers, and their rhodomagnetic beams made the old-fashioned plutonium bombs seem pretty harmless. A beam carrying only a few watts of power could fission the heavy metals in distant electrical instruments, or the silver coins that men carried in their pockets, the gold fillings in their teeth, or even the iodine in their thyroid glands. If that was not enough, slightly more powerful beams could set off heavy ores, beneath them.