C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"They—"

The replay broke off. That was all. There weren't any sound-effects, not even the customary strangled wail, and glad enough Bartok was for that. Apparently she had been caught using the transceiver, and it had been smashed. Bartok straightened himself out tiredly. He'd kept the world fairly well up while the invasion was going on; there were others capable to take over now that the real crisis was past and there was nothing to do but wait for the taking-over by whatever the incredibly soulless creatures were that could ray all the life of a planet out of existence without a qualm.

He was getting old anyway. Time to make room for younger men. He might have a fling now as any time at applied mortality. He was going to build himself a cruiser and streak out to Arided and Babe.

His experience with the invaders was substantially the same as Babe's, though he reasoned—and correctly—that they would adjust for detection of a mine-field laid in a smoke-screen. Therefore he trotted out something so antiquated in concept that the invaders would surely have forgotten it, if ever they had known the device.

In the neighborhood of the first invasion port, the star in Cygnus, he encountered the phenomena Babe had described—utterly scrambled fields. Experimentally he held an electromagnet to a bit of steel. First there was no reaction, then the steel slid to the magnet. Then it hurled away from it like a bullet!

Throughout his experiments he hadn't failed to keep a lookout. The chime that signaled foreign bodies rang just once, and he trotted out his modernized version of the ancient Greek fire, forerunner of explosives. He squirted the blazing stuff through his rear jets in a wide-open pattern, obscuring the sight of him more effectively than any fog-cloud could have done. When his simpler instruments told him that the ship tailing him was quite lost in the Greek fire, he sprayed out a flock of tiny, powerfully explosive pellets.

There was one blast and it was all over; the tailing ship was dispersed through space, and whatever had been its crew was lost beyond repair.

Having effected this, Bartok set his motors to idling in the direction of the invasion star and lit a cigarette, waiting in almost perfect calm to be detected and taken in tow.

He did not have long to wait; there were half a dozen ships on him in twenty minutes. They clamped onto him what he realized must be the perfected tractor ray, so long celebrated in song and story and never yet seen on any spaceway till now.

As the tractors dragged him through space towards Arided he inspected very closely the ships that were applying it. They were six in number; as Babe had said, they were remarkable for the fact that they were quite open, being no more than a power-unit around which was built a framework containing emplacements for weapons of all sorts and conditions. There were catwalks as well, up and down which scuttled nasty things about the size and very nearly the shape of men.

Bartok was baffled by the metallic sheen of the things, when it hit him that they were robots. "Damned clever," he mused. "Damned clever indeed. They don't need air, they don't need a commissariat; all they need is orders and oil. I wish we'd thought up that gag a few centuries ago!"

They landed him skillfully and easily on the fourth planet. As Bartok looked about he realized slowly that Babe hadn't been under any hallucinations when she'd sworn that the engineering works that had been run up were the most remarkable things in the unknown universe.

There were towers everywhere, great patches of concrete for landing and servicing ships; long lines of them hanging in the air waiting for room. Not one square inch of ground space except narrow catwalks could be seen free of any mechanism. What was not transmission gears was solar engine; what was not solar engine was unimaginably complex calculators clicking and buzzing away as robots stalked among them to tear off results and deliver them to the nearest building.

Bartok got out of his ship; immediately a gang of robots sprang to attention after the fashion of a guard of honor. Bartok had never seen robots before; there were enough hands to do the work of the colonial system and the social problems that would have been raised caused any experimentation with robots to be frowned on by the Executive Committee. And where was the Executive Committee today? God only knew. It was a very sure bet that if any of it was left, this residue would be mopped up by the despised and strictly forbidden mechanical men.

Somebody had beaten the colonial system to the punch. But who could it be?

Commander Bartok nearly swooned when a robot-in-command came up to him and said in perfect, though toneless, English: "Pray excuse this temporary detention, Wing Commander. I can assure you that it shall be terminated in a brief while."

The brief while extended itself into three days before they would tell him what was going on. During that time he had the run of a delightful apartment which lacked only books and magazines for his comfort and relaxation. Apparently to substitute for them the robot-in-chief, or whoever was in charge, sent in robots whose specialty was brilliant conversation and repartee.

On the third day there entered the usual loquacious metal man. "Your bed is rumpled," he greeted Bartok. "I presume your feelings are the same at this opposite situation?"

"Opposite?" said Bartok, knowing from past experiences that the creature would explain some elaborately buried pun or double meaning in his greeting, which it did. There was some complex word-play with "smoothing the way" and "weighing the smooth," likewise a series of faintly ribald jests concerning the metal men themselves.

Bartok, bored though he was, could not but admire the intensive manner in which they went about working a subject, whether the unified field theory or the technique of the double-take. He hadn't the ghost of a chance of holding up his own end of the conversation with this copper-plated specialist in the whimsical and amusing. He realized glumly that he wasn't specialized. He could crack a joke that would be a fairly good joke, but not half as funny or well-timed as the robot conversationalists; he could plan an attack, but not half as deadly as the robot fighters.

"Man," said Bartok, "is on the way out."

"Weight out the consequences," snapped the creature promptly, "and you'll find your remark substantially correct. Man too is correct—or, to put it differently, wrecked at the core."

"Where did you learn English?" asked Bartok feebly. He still didn't know. And on the answer to that question hung, he felt, a great deal.

But before the robot could make some horrible pun about "Where" and

"wear out," one of the larger metal men entered, with a grave salutation to Bartok.

"I," it said, "am math-minder 817. Come with me, please. Subtend angularly this surd improperly vectorial." Piercing through the mathematical metaphors, Bartok realized that he was to say good-bye to the conversationalist, because he was going on a long journey.

"It's been nice meeting you," he said helplessly.

"Thanks," said the conversationalist. "And it's been nice metalling you."

Another pun, worked in double reverse—surely a fitting note upon which to terminate the strange intellectual companionship of the cheerfully intent killer Bartok and the grimly humorous time-passer, chat-minder 32.

In the corridor the math-minder volunteered: "Bartok, you unfortunate particle, you're going to investigate some teleology."

"That being the science of first causes," brooked the Commander. "Do you mean that at last I'm getting to see your chief?"

"Not chief. First cause, I think you said. Accelerate through this aperture." The robot's paw gently shoved him through a very heavy metal door. Bartok found himself face-to-face with a very young man.