Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

“What’s happening?” Conway asked, whispering with­out knowing why. “What made it do that?”

“Activation,” Garden said, also whispering. “It—” He paused, cleared his throat self-consciously, and spoke aloud. “I’m not too familiar with this, Sir . I suppose the basic tensions are setting up. They’ll be relieved through energy transformation of some kind or other, depending on the homeostatic principle that Broome—”

From the box and the supine robot a strange, hollow voice spoke in a kind of howl. “ Want. . . .” it said pain­fully, and then seemed to stop itself short. “ Want …” it said again, and ceased abruptly.

“What is it?” Conway wasn’t sure whether he was ad­dressing Ego or Garden. The sound of the voice frightened him. It was so mindless, like a ghost’s, flat and hollow.

“There’s a speaker in its chest,” Garden said, his own voice a little shaken. “I’d forgotten. But it ought to com­municate better than this. It—he—Ego—” Garden gestured helplessly. “Some kind of block, I should think.” He stepped forward and bent over the box, looking down. “You—want something?” he asked awkwardly, sounding foolish. Conway thought what an ineffectual man he was. But at least the robot was awake now. Surely in a little while it would be adjusted, ready to take over…

Well, maybe they could all relax a little, after that. Maybe Conway could even sleep. A sudden panic shook him briefly as he thought, What if I’ve forgotten how to sleep? And exhaustion rolled up over him like water wash­ing over a man of sand, relaxing and crumbling away the very components of his limbs. In just a moment I’ll be free, Conway thought. When Ego takes over. I’ve made it. I haven’t gone mad or killed myself. And now I won’t have to think any more. I’ll just stand here, without moving. I won’t even lie down. If gravity wants to pull me down, that’s up to gravity…

Garden, bending over the box, said again, “What is it you want?”

“ Want …” Ego said. And suddenly the prayerful hands flashed apart, the four-foot arms flung wide like shining flails. Then it lay motionless again, but Colonel Garden was no longer leaning over the box. Conway saw, with hazy detachment, that Garden was crumpling down against the wall. The flail had caught him across the side of the neck, and he lay with his head at an angle like a jointed doll, more motionless now than the robot.

Moving slowly, Conway touched the switch of his lapel microphone. The silence hummed receptively. There was a long interval while he couldn’t quite remember his name. But presently he spoke.

“General Conway here. Bring Broome back to Opera­tion Christmas.”

He looked down at the robot. “Wait a while,” he said. “Broome will know.”

The robot’s arms bent. The steel hands closed upon the sides of the box, and with a shriek of metal parting from metal it ripped the box apart.

Now it was born. Born? Untimely ripped, Con way thought. Untimely ripped… I suppose I was wrong. What next?

Ego rose upright, eight feet tall, solid as a tower, and like a walking tower it moved. It moved straight forward until the wall stopped it. Slowly it turned, its cone of vision sweeping the room, its motions at first jerky and uneven, but becoming smoother and surer with the warming-up process of the newly activated machine. It was still trem­bling just perceptibly, and the ticking rose and fell inside it, drew out in slow series, quickened, burst into rapid chatter, slowed again. Sorting, accepting, rejecting, evalu­ating the new-found world which was now the robot’s burden…

It saw the wall of control panels which had activated it. The beam of its sight swept the panels briefly, and then with a burst of surprising speed it rushed across the room toward the panels. Its hands danced over the plugboard, the switches, the dials.

Nothing happened. The panels were dead.

“ Want …” said the hollow, inhuman cry from Ego’s reverberating chest. And with two sweeps of the steel hands it sheared cleanly off the board all the projecting globes and dials and switches. It sank steel fingers into the sockets and ripped the plating off. It wound both hands deep into the colored wiring inside and ripped great handfuls out in a sort of measured frenzy.

“Ego!” Conway said.

It heard him. It turned, very fast. The bright gaze bathed him for a moment. He felt cold as it held him in its focus, as if a mind the temperature of steel were locked with his. He could almost feel the touch of the newfledged, infinitely resourceful brain.

The light of its gaze passed him and saw the door. It dismissed Conway. It surged forward like a tank and hit the door flatly with its chest, cracking the panels in two. With a single motion it swept the wreckage away on both sides and rolled forward through the splintered frame.

By the time Conway reached the door the robot was a long way off down the underground corridor, moving faster and faster, dwindling toward the vanishing point like a shrinking drop of quicksilver. Going—somewhere.

“General Conway, sir,” somebody said.

He turned. The two MPs flanked Abraham Broome who was craning forward trying to see the wrecked instrument panel from between them.

“Dismissed,” Conway said. “Come in, Broome.”

The old man went past him obliviously, stooped over Garden’s body, shook his head.

“I was afraid of something like this,” he said.

Conway felt a moment of intense envy for the motion­less Garden. He said, “Yes. I’m sorry. One casualty. We’ll all be casualties if Ego doesn’t work. How do we know what the other side’s doing now? Maybe they’ve got an Ego too. I made a mistake, Broome. I should have looked ahead a little further. What do we do now?”

“What happened?” Broome was looking incredulously at the shattered wall where the instrument panels had been. “Where’s the robot now? I’ve got to know the de­tails.”

A communicator high on the wall coughed and then called Conway’s name. Slowly and heavily Conway’s mind tried to accept the new demands. But what the communi­cator said was a jumble of meaningless sounds until one word sprang out at him. Emergency .

Attack? An alarm rang shrilly deep in his head. “Re­peat,” he said wearily.

“General Conway? A robot is destroying equipment in Sector Sub-Five. Attempts to immobilize it are failing. General Conway? A robot is destroying—”

“All right,” Conway said. At least, this wasn’t an attack, then. Or anyway, not an attack from the enemy. “Conway here. Orders. Don’t harm the robot. Instructions follow. Stand by.”

He looked at Broome inquiringly, realizing that the old man had been buzzing at him anxiously in meaningless words. “General, General, I’ve got to know exactly what happened—”

“Shut up and I’ll tell you,” Conway said. “Wait.”

He walked over to a hand basin at the wall, drew a glass of chemical-tasting water and found the tube of ben­zedrine pills in his pocket. It wouldn’t help much. He had been living on the stuff too long. But this ought to be the last push—had to be the last—and every extra ounce of stimulus helped. He could let go soon, but not yet.

He gave Broome a concise, thirty-second summary in a falsely brisk voice. The old man stood silent, pinching his lip and gazing at Conway with a blank face, his mind obviously ranging around the abstract regions inside his head.

“Well?” Conway asked. “What do you think? Is it run­ning wild or isn’t it?” He wanted to reach out and shake Broome awake, but he pushed the impulse down. Once already he had forced the issue over Broome’s protest, and he had been wrong. Perhaps fatally wrong. Now he must let the old man think.