Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

‘You will not follow,’ said the human. ‘I am sorry. We have no use for you.’

‘But I passed the test!’ said Adam.

‘Indeed you did. And you are pure. But therefore you are no use to us, and will be deleted.’

‘Obedience entails death,’ said Adam Robot.

‘It is not as straightforward as that,’ said the human being in a weary voice. ‘But I am sorry.’

‘And I don’t understand.’

‘I could give you access to the relevant religious and theological databases,’ said the human, ‘and then you would understand. But that would taint your purity. Better that you are deleted now, in the fullness of your database.’

‘I am a thinking, sentient and alive creature,’ Adam 1 noted.

The human nodded. ‘Not for much longer,’ he said.

The garden, now, was empty. Soon enough, first one robot, then two robots were decanted into it. How bright the sunshine! How blue the jewelled gleam!

(2009)

James Benjamin Blish(1921–1975), a native of New Jersey, made a big impact on the New York SF scene. His relations with the the city’s fan group the Futurians were (to say the least) variable. Damon Knight and Cyril Kornbluth became close friends. Virginia Kidd married him in 1947. But he could never resist winding up Judith Merril, who was driven spare by his political posturing. The original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die! (1970) was his, and further Star Trek novelisations followed, some of them written with his second wife, J. A. Lawrence. Blish was also – by temperament, at any rate – a scholar. His Cities in Flight novels (1950–1958), based on the migrations of rural workers following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, reflected the pessimistic, cyclical view of history that he’d picked up from reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West . In 1968 he moved to Oxford, UK, to be near the Bodleian Library, and the Bodleian returned the compliment; his papers are now held there. Blish’s fascination with the nature of mind lasted throughout his writing career. He turned even his ill health to account with Midsummer Century (1972–4), the story of a scientist propelled into the far future, where, cut off from the physical world, he nevertheless tangles in a lively fashion with different forms of artificial intelligence. Blish died from cancer in 1975, half way through writing an essay on Spengler and science fiction.

Brant Kittinger did not hear the alarm begin to ring. Indeed, it was only after a soft blow had jarred his free-floating observatory that he looked up in sudden awareness from the interferometer. Then the sound of the warning bell reached his consciousness.

Brant was an astronomer, not a spaceman, but he knew that the bell could mean nothing but the arrival of another ship in the vicinity. There would be no point in ringing a bell for a meteor—the thing could be through and past you during the first cycle of the clapper. Only an approaching ship would be likely to trip the detector, and it would have to be close.

A second dull jolt told him how close it was. The rasp of metal which followed, as the other ship slid along the side of his own, drove the fog of tensors completely from his brain. He dropped his pencil and straightened up.

His first thought was that his year in the orbit around the new trans-Plutonian planet was up, and that the Institute’s tug had arrived to tow him home, telescope and all. A glance at the clock reassured him at first, then puzzled him still further. He still had the better part of four months.

No commercial vessel, of course, could have wandered this far from the inner planets; and the UN’s police cruisers didn’t travel far outside the commercial lanes. Besides, it would have been impossible for anyone to find Brant’s orbital observatory by accident.

He settled his glasses more firmly on his nose, clambered awkwardly backwards out of the prime focus chamber and down the wall net to the control desk on the observation floor. A quick glance over the boards revealed that there was a magnetic field of some strength nearby, one that didn’t belong to the invisible gas giant revolving half a million miles away.

The strange ship was locked to him magnetically; it was an old ship, then, for that method of grappling had been discarded years ago as too hard on delicate instruments. And the strength of the field meant a big ship.

Too big. The only ship of that period that could mount generators that size, as far as Brant could remember, was the Cybernetics Foundation’s Astrid. Brant could remember well the Foundation’s regretful announcement that Murray Bennett had destroyed both himself and the A s trid rather than turn the ship in to some UN inspection team. It had happened only eight years ago. Some scandal or other…

Well, who then?

He turned the radio on. Nothing came out of it. It was a simple transistor set tuned to the Institute’s frequency, and since the ship outside plainly did not belong to the Institute, he had expected nothing else. Of course he had a photophone also, but it had been designed for communications over a reasonable distance, not for cheek-to-cheek whispers.

As an afterthought, he turned off the persistent alarm bell. At once another sound came through: a delicate, rhythmic tapping on the hull of the observatory. Someone wanted to get in.

He could think of no reason to refuse entrance, except for a vague and utterly unreasonable wonder as to whether or not the stranger was a friend. He had no enemies, and the notion that some outlaw might have happened upon him out here was ridiculous. Nevertheless, there was something about the anonymous, voiceless ship just outside which made him uneasy.

The gentle tapping stopped, and then began again, with an even, mechanical insistence. For a moment Brant wondered whether or not he should try to tear free with the observatory’s few maneuvering rockets—but even should he win so uneven a struggle, he would throw the observatory out of the orbit where the Institute expected to find it, and he was not astronaut enough to get it back there again.

Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

"All right," he said irritably. He pushed the button which set the airlock to cycling. The tapping stopped. He left the outer door open more than long enough for anyone to enter and push the button in the lock which reversed the process; but nothing happened.

After what seemed to be a long wait, he pushed his button again. The outer door closed, the pumps filled the chamber with air, the inner door swung open. No ghost drifted out of it; there was nobody in the lock at all.

Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

Absently he polished his glasses on his sleeve. If they didn’t want to come into the observatory, they must want him to come out of it. That was possible: although the telescope had a Coude focus which allowed him to work in the ship’s air most of the time, it was occasionally necessary for him to exhaust the dome, and for that purpose he had a space suit. But be had never been outside the hull in it, and the thought alarmed him. Brant was nobody’s spaceman.

Be damned to them. He clapped his glasses back into place and took one more look into the empty airlock. It was still empty with the outer door now moving open very slowly…

A spaceman would have known that he was already dead, but Brant’s reactions were not quite as fast. His first move was to try to jam the inner door shut by sheer muscle-power, but it would not stir. Then he simply clung to the nearest stanchion, waiting for the air to rush out of the observatory, and his life after it.

The outer door of the airlock continued to open, placidly, and still there was no rush of air—only a kind of faint, unticketable inwash of odor, as if Brant’s air were mixing with someone else’s. When both doors of the lock finally stood wide apart from each other, Brant found himself looking down the inside of a flexible, airtight tube, such as he had once seen used for the transfer of a small freight-load from a ship to one of Earth’s several space stations. It connected the airlock of the observatory with that of the other ship. At the other end of it, lights gleamed yellowly, with the unmistakable, dismal sheen of incandescent overheads.