Henry Kuttner - The Time Axis

"It's practical sir," I said. "Inanimate matter only, so far. But such matter can be transported for a thousand-mile radius. A receiver must be spotted first, though. It means interplanetary colonization one of these days – because the first space-ship can take a receiver with it and open up a pipeline for supplies. This is only the start."

"A matter-transmitter," the General said and suddenly crumpled the papers on his desk. "Armistice? We'll forget that now. GHQ will change its tune now we've got this new weapon."

"The inventor wants to use the device for peaceful purposes, sir," I said. "I heard rumors the war was over."

He looked at me. "They all do. Yes, the war was over yesterday. But well start it again."

Then I knew that I was a mutation after all – mentally. The General and I just didn't think the same way. We didn't have the same values and we never would. He hadn't matured in an atomic world.

I had. I picked up the pistol from the General's desk. His brain was obsolescent anyway.

Then I was somebody else.

"Cities?" I said to my visitor. "No, we'll never rebuild them. We won't need to."

"But the world is in ruins."

"Technology is the answer."

"You mean machines can build where men cannot?"

"Aren't they doing it?"

They were – yes. Old as I was, over a hundred – whoever I was – I could not remember a time when the planet had not been radiotoxic. Not all of it, of course. The men that were left, the survivors, gathered in the islands relatively free from the poison. Travel, even by plane, would have been too dangerous, but we had the matter-transmitters. So we were not insular. There were the colonized planets.

Still, Earth was the home. With the halftime of the radio-dust, it would be a long time before most of the planet would become habitable. Yet Earth could be rebuilt, in preparation, by machines.

"I will show you my plan," I said. "Come with me. I'll be dead long before there's a use for my Mechandroids, but that day will surely come."

He followed me along the corridor. He was a powerful man, one of the most powerful in the world, but he followed me like a young student.

"It's hard to know the best plan," he said, half to himself.

"We have a Galaxy to colonize. Human minds can't cope with that. Nor can machines. The machines must fail because they're emotionless and inhuman. What you need is a human machine or a mechanical human. A perfect blend. A synthesis. Like my Mechandroids."

I pulled back a curtain and showed him the young strong body in the glass coffin. The machines clicked and hummed from all around. The wires quivered slightly.

"This is one of my Mechandroids," I said. "They cannot reproduce; they do not breed true. But they can be manufactured. It's as though a machine had given birth to a human."

"He looks thoroughly normal."

"I chose his parents. I needed the right heredity. I selected the chromosomes most suited to my needs – and I tried time after time before I succeeded. But then this Mechandroid was born. Almost since birth he has been trained – hypnogenically – educated, indoctrinated, by the thinking-machines.

"He has been taught to think as accurately as a machine. The human brain is theoretically capable of such discipline but the experiment has never been tried before to this extent. Mechandroids, I believe, can solve all human problems, and solve them correctly."

"Machine-trained?" he said doubtfully. "Machines must serve men. They must free men, so that the capacity of the human brain may be fulfilled. These Mechandroids will smooth the path, so that man may follow the highest science – that of thought."

"There's no danger?" he asked, looking at the silent Mechandroid.

"There's no danger," I said.

Then I was somebody else.

Saturn blazed in the sky above me, blotting out half the firmament, as I fled down the twisting street from the Mechandroid. I had to find somebody who knew what to do. But nobody seemed alive in the city. Nobody but the silent striding creature that was pursuing me.

Homecoming, eh? I was Vega-born. I was sixteen. I'd taken the great jump across interstellar space in the matter-transmitter with my Age Group – nine of them – for the Earth tour and, because all Solar tours start with the outer planets, we'd stepped out of the matter-receiver in Titan.

Then everything happened at once, too fast for me to follow. The Mechandroid came running toward us – and we began to fall, one by one. So we scattered. With my usual bad luck, I managed to blunder right into a group of the Mechandroids who were working at something.

They were in a big room, gathered around a table where a body lay. Above the table was a shining web – a neural matrix, hooked up to a matter-transmitter. I knew enough about basic physics to get some idea of what was happening and I stopped right there, like a statue, watching.

The Mechandroids were making a super-Mechandroid – if that's the term. People had talked about the possibility. Everybody, I guess, was a little afraid, because the Mechandroids were plenty smart and if they worked out a collateral mutation – they're individually sterile – why, then, a super-Mechandroid would be horribly powerful and dangerous.

For the Mechandroids can be controlled, but a super-Mechandroid couldn't.

They said, not long ago, that they weren't capable of solving certain galactic problems and they wanted to go ahead and build what they called a second-stage Mechandroid. Of course they were forbidden.

But the body on the table before me, under the shining neural web, was a super-Mechandroid in the making. If a thing like that – with all its potential intelligence and lack of emotion – came alive it would be too dangerous to think about.

I turned around and started running again. I kept on running. Once I heard a scream, pretty far away.

If the only way the Mechandroids could build their second-stage Mechandroid was to destroy every human in the Titan city – why, that was the logical solution. So that's what they'd done. I passed an Exploratory Station and took a minute to go in and grab a vacuum suit. Carrying it, I headed for a gate in the great dome that covered the city.

Two hours later I was sitting on a mountainside half a mile away, looking down on the dome and wondering how long my air would last. I felt pretty lonesome with Saturn dropping toward the horizon and only the dark and the stars around me.

After awhile I saw the ships come. You don't see many ships these days but I knew what they were. Half a dozen of them came down silently out of the blackness and hovered above the city and a moment later there wasn't any city – just a big burst of light and sound and energy.

I sent up my SOS rockets and got picked up. On the trip back I heard a lot of talk about how we were going to get the Mechandroids under tight control and keep them there. Supervision for every one of the creatures. No chance to get together and make a super-Mechandroid.

I guess I didn't enjoy Earth as much as I'd thought. It had been rebuilt and most of the radioactivity was gone. There was just one machine-city left – a museum these days. But the planet seemed small.

Of course we started out from Earth in the beginning. But now we've got the Galaxy.

Then I was somebody else.

I was Job Paynter.

Every individual is expendable, but the race is not. I am not, but not unnecessarily. My value to the solar community is high. And why not? I am competent in my work – general integration, Seventh Galactic Sector, Earth-based. (I am competent, or was until we opened that cavern under the mountain on Earth, and found Job Paynter asleep there. No, I am competent still. Puzzled but able to find an answer when all the returns are in. Meanwhile I must think objectively about this mystery. I must think objectively.)