Henry Kuttner - Piggy Bank

The three men beyond the trapdoor began to run forward, fire spouting from their hoses. The robot bent its legs, shifted balance, and jumped. It wasn’t at all bad for a standing broad jump. Since Argus could control his movements with the nicest accuracy, and since his metal body had strength in excess of his weight, the golden figure sprang across the ten-foot gap with inches to spare. Flame lashed out at him.

Argus moved fast-very fast. His legs were a blinding blur of speed. Ignoring the fire that played on his body, he ran toward the three men and through them. Then he slowed down to a normal walk and continued mildly on his way. The alarm siren was screaming Ballard realized, just as it died.

For Argus, the danger was over. Here and there on his metal body the gold had melted into irregular blobs. That was all.

Johnson gulped. “He must have seen the trap.”

“He felt it,” Ballard said, his voice low with fury. “Hell! If we could just immobilize Argus long enough to pour concrete on him-”

That was tried an hour later. A metal-sheathed ceiling collapsed on the robot, a ceiling of mesh metal through which concrete could be poured. Ballard simply had liquid concrete run into the room above till the platform collapsed under the weight. The robot was below-

Was below. The difference in air pressure warned Argus, and he knew what to do about it. He lunged through the door and escaped, leaving a frightful mess behind him.

Ballard cursed. “We can’t shoot concrete at the devil. If he’s sensitized to differences in air pressure-hell! I don’t know. There must be some way. Johnson! Get me Plastic Products, quick!”

A short while later Ballard was closeted with a representative of Plastic Products.

“I don’t quite understand. A quick-drying cement-”

“To be squirted out of hoses, and to harden as soon as it hits the robot. That’s what I said.”

“If it dries that quickly, it’ll dry as soon as air hits it. I think we’ve got almost what you want. A very strong liquid cementoid; it’ll harden half a minute after being exposed to air.”

“That should work. Yeah. How soon-”

“Tomorrow morning.”

The next morning, Argus was herded into one of the huge halls downstairs. A ring of thirty men surrounded the robot, each armed with a tank, filled with the quick-drying cementoid. Ballard and Johnson watched from the side lines.

“The robot’s pretty strong, sir,” Johnson hazarded.

“So’s the cementoid. Quantity will do it. The men will keep spraying the stuff on till Argus is in a cocoon. Without leverage he can’t break out. Like a mammoth in a tar pit.”

Johnson made a clicking noise with his lips. “That’s an idea. If this shouldn’t work, perhaps I-”

“Save it,” Ballard said. He looked around at the doors. Before each one was stationed a group of men, also armed with cementoid tanks.

In the center of the room stood Argus, blankly impassive, waiting. Ballard said, “O.K.,” and from thirty positions around the robot streams of cementoid converged on his golden body.

The warning siren screamed deafeningly. Argus began to turn around.

That was all. He kept turning around. But-fast!

He was a machine, and could develop tremendous power. He spun on his longitudinal axis, a blazing, shining, glittering blur of light, far too fast for the eye to follow. He was like a tiny world spinning through space-but a world has gravitation. Argus’ gravitational pull was negligible. There was, however, centrifugal force.

It was like throwing an egg into an electric fan. The streams of cementoid hit Argus, and bounced, repelled by the centrifuge. Ballard got a gob of the stuff in his middle. It had hardened enough to be painful.

Argus kept on spinning. He didn’t try to run, this time. His alarm kept screeching deafeningly. The men, plastered with cementoid, continued to squirt the stuff at Argus for a while.

But the cementoid stuck to them when it was flung back. It hardened on them. Within seconds the scene resembled a Mack Sennett pie-throwing comedy.

Ballard roared commands. His voice went unheard in the uproar. But the men did not continue their hopeless task for long. They, not Argus, were becoming immobilized.

Presently the warning siren stopped. Argus slowed down in his mad spinning. He was no longer the target of cementoid streams.

He went quietly out of the room, and nobody tried to stop him.

One man almost strangled before the hardened cementoid could be dislodged from his mouth and nostrils. Aside from that, there were no casualties, save to Ballard’s temper.

It was Johnson who suggested the next experiment. Quicksand would immobilize anything. It was difficult to introduce quicksand into the castle, but a substitute was provided-a gooey, tarry mess poured into an improvised tank twenty-five feet wide. All that remained was to lure Argus into the quicksand.

“Traps won’t work,” Ballard said glumly. “Maybe stringing a wire to trip him-”

“I think he’d react instantly to that, too, sir,” Johnson vetoed. “If I may make a suggestion, it should not be difficult to drive Argus into the pit, once he’s maneuvered into a passage leading to it.”

“How? Flame throwers again? He automatically reacts away from the most serious danger. When he came to the pit, he’d turn around and go the other way. Break right through the men.”

“His strength is limited, isn’t it?” Johnson asked. “He couldn’t pass a tank.”

Ballard didn’t see the point immediately. “A midget tractor? Not too small, though-some of the castle’s passages are plenty wide. If we got a tank just broad enough to fill the hall-a pistol that would drive Argus into the quicksand-”

Measurements were made, and a powerful tractor brought into the castle. It fitted the passage, leaving no room to spare-at least, not enough to accommodate the robot. Once Argus was driven into that particular passage, he could go only one way.

The tractor, at Johnson’s suggestion, was camouflaged, so the robot’s flight-conditioned brain would not recognize and consider it as a serious factor. But the machine was ready to roll into the passage instantly.

The trick would probably have succeeded, had it not been for one difficulty. The consistency of the artificial quicksand had been calculated carefully. It had to be soft enough to drag the robot down, and stiff enough so that Argus would be helpless. The robot could walk safely under water; that had been proved days ago, in an abortive early experiment.

So the mix had surface tension, though not enough to bear Argus’ great weight.

The robot was maneuvered into the passage without trouble, and the tractor swung after it, blocking Argus’ escape. It rumbled slowly on, driving the robot before it. Argus seemed untroubled. When he reached the edge of the artificial quicksand, he bent and tested the consistency, with one golden hand.

After that, he lay flat on his face, legs bent like a frog’s, feet braced against one wall of the passage, head pointed out over the quicksand. He thrust strongly.

Had Argus walked into the goo feet first, he would have sunk. But his weight was spread over a far larger surface area now. Not enough to sustain him indefinitely, but long enough for his purposes. He simply didn’t have time to sink. Argus skimmed over the quicksand like a skiff or a sandboat. His powerful initial thrust gave him sufficient impetus. No human could have done it, and, while Argus weighed more than a human, he had also had more strength.

So he shot out, angling across the tank, buoyed by surface tension and carried on by his impetus. The quicksand got hold at last and bogged him down, but by that time Argus’ powerful hands reached their destination, the edge of the tank. Another door was in the wall at that point, and Ballard and Johnson were standing on the threshold, watching.