Andre Norton (ed) (23 page)

"What third alternative?" said
Chang, with the dreamlike air of a man who finds
himself
doing the impossible.

"That they gave it to
us," said the machine.

The
captain wanted to believe what Phillips believed, to know that this thing that
the machine told him, though unthinkable, was true. He wanted to—but he
couldn't yet. He said defiantly, "Prove itl"

"That
will need considerable explanation, then. I'll tell you the story in outline.

"Our
creators were a race rather like yours. These robots around you are more or
less in their image, though enlarged by about a third. They grew up through
cultural stages like yours— petty skirmishes, molecular-explosive wars, atomic
wars, and then comparative sanity. They achieved space travel, but not
hyperflight, which is why you haven't met them before. They just didn't want
hyperflight. We were the reason they didn't want it.

"Don't
jump to conclusions. We didn't prevent them from reaching it—that would have
been insane. But there was no call for them to leave their planet. They had
built us to serve them, which we did in our various ways, and I think we may
claim to have served them well. So they were content without needing to take
the stars, and from the physical sciences they turned to the mental ones.

"And
in due course of time, being living creatures which we are not, they . . . they
did something for which your language has no word or even circumlocution. You
might best express it as moving up a step on the evolutionary ladder.

"When
you came in here, you were awed as your friend Engel-hart was awed when he
spoke to the big brain at Canopus. Would you believe me if I said I have been
awed as you were?

"Yes,
our creators outstripped us. They merged in a being as far superior to me as I
am to you. They became pure mind, and they no longer needed us. But because
without our aid they could not have achieved what they did, they were grateful,
and though we cannot evolve, being machines without power of growth, they did
what they could for us. They gave us our freedom, and a sense of beauty, and
their technology which had become our technology over the years, and most
important, they gave us what we most desired—this world.

"So
we made the world as beautiful as we could, and saw to our trust carefully. And
we are nearly content."

Chang
listened to the deep friendly voice, full of age-old reminiscence, and fought
to keep control of his doubts and fears. He said, "And the animals?"
for want of anything better to say.

T said our creators were grateful. They
remembered their pets, too. As you humans keep dogs or cats, so our creators
kept these creatures, and they asked us to make their path easy for them in
case they, too, evolved to something higher."

Chang
looked at the brown furry beast with its blind-seeming eyes, and said stubbornly,
"Still you have shown no proof—only made statements. You've prepared a
good case, I admit, but it isn't conclusive."

The
voice said musingly, "It is hard to tell whether your hesitancy is
shrewdness or merely fear of the unknown."

Nettled, Chang said,
"But if I do acept your offer, what then?"

"Well, it is and always has been our
nature to aid others if we can. From what I know and can deduce of your race
you're pretty

badly
in need of help. You need new planets
because you're overcrowded, but you waste money that could be spent on discovering
them on new and superfluous places of entertainment. Your technical ability has
left your social conscience behind. We can remedy that. We can give you the
chance to follow the path our creators took."
"To
oblivion?"

"To
something higher than your imaginings."

Chang
stared at the floor. A million memories crowded into his mind—Deeley saying,
"Frankensteinl"; himself saying, "Greek gift?
";
the robot saying, "Will you accept not only this world but
ourselves?"; and he felt miserably small to make a decision on which
rested the fate of the human race.

He slowly became aware that the voice had
stopped, the robots around him had looked upwards, and the little brown animal
had become motionless, clinging to its mount. As if drawn by a magnet, he
turned to look at the wall which bore the inscription. For one brief instant
he saw it, not as a collection of meaningless mind-straining curves, but as a
plain, clear statement in his own language.

It ran:

Well
done,
thou
good
and
faithful
servant.

Then
it was gone, and in a voice suddenly husky, from a throat dry and constricted
with wonder, he said firmly, "We accept."

For was it his imagination, or in that brief
instant had his mind been filled with a glory beside which all the stars in the
galaxy were as dark dead coals?

My
HAT
HAPPENS
when
those
who
have
been
bred
and trained
for
a
single
path
of
duty
rebel
against
bureaucratic supervision
and
demands?
Once
there
was
a
picked
team
of experts,
conditioned
to
explore—but
they
decided
to
become settlers
instead.
But
they
had
been
forced
to
carry
with them
the
one
danger
to
their
plan
for
personal
freedom,
and only
their
commander,
Grevan,
could
go
to
battle
with
it for
the
future
of
his
crew.

JAMES
H.
SCHMITZ

The spaceship dropped near evening towards
the edge of a curving beach. A half-mile strip of grassy growth stood tall and
still behind the beach; and beyond the jungle smoothly marbled prows of pink
and gray cliffs swept steeply upwards for nearly two thousand feet to the
northernmost shelf of a wide, flat continent. The green-black waters of the
planet's largest ocean stretched away in a glassy curve ahead, broken by two
narrow chains of islands some thirty miles out.

The
sleek machine from beyond the stars settled down slowly, a wind thundering out
below it and wrinkling the shallows near the beach into sudden zigzag patterns.
It fell through explosive sprays of dry sand, sank its base twenty feet deep
into the rock below and stopped. A sharp click announced the opening of a lock
a third of the way up its rounded flank; and seven of the nine members of
Central Government's Exploration Group
1176
came riding out of the lock
a moment later, bunched forty feet above the beach on the tip of their ship's
extension ramp.

Six
of them dropped free of the ramp at various points of its swooping descent.
They hit the hard sand in a succession of soft, bounceless thumps like so many
cats and went loping off towards

the
water. Grevan alone, with the restraint to
be looked for in a Group Commander, rode the ramp all the way down to the
ground.

He
stepped off it unhurriedly there: a very big man, heavy of bone and muscle,
though lean where weight wasn't
useful,
and
easy-moving as the professional gladiators and beast-fighters whose training
quarters he'd shared in his time. A brooding, implacable expression went so
naturally with the rest of it that ordinary human beings were likely to give
him one look and step out of his way, even when they weren't aware of his technical
rank of Central Government Official.

It
was a pity in a way that the members of his Exploration Group weren't so easily
impressed.

Grevan
scowled reflectively, watching five of the six who had come out of the ship
with him begin shucking off weapon belts, suits and other items of equipment
with scarcely a break in their run as they approached the water's edge. Cusat,
Eliol, Freckles, Lancey, Vernet—he checked them off mentally as they vanished a
few seconds later, with almost simultaneous splashes, from the planet's
surface. They were of his own experimental breed or something very near it, and
physically, though not quite adults yet, very nearly as capable as Grevan was
himself. However, nobody could tell from here what sort of alien, carnivorous
life might be floating around beyond this ocean's shallows—

They
had too good an opinion of themselvesl

Weyer,
at any rate, seemed to have decided to stay on shore with his clothes on and
his armament handy, in case of trouble. Somewhat reassured, Grevan turned his attention
next to a metallic bumping and scraping at the ship's open lock overhead. Klim
and Muscles, K.P.'s for the day, were trying to move a bulky cooking unit out
of the ship so the Group could dine outdoors.

"Boss?"
Klim's clear soprano floated down. "Right
here," Grevan called back. "Having trouble?" "Looks like
we're stuck," Klim announced from within the lock. "Would you come up
and . . . no, wait a minutel Muscles is getting it cleared now, I think—Wait
till I've degraved it again, you big apel Now, pushl"

The
cooker popped into sight with a grinding noise, ejected with considerable
violence from the ship's interior. For a moment, it hung spinning quietly in
the air above the ramp, with Klim perched on top. Then Muscles came out through
the lock and attached himself to the gadget's side. They floated down
lopsidedly together, accompanied by tinkling sounds from the cooker's interior.

"What's it going to be tonight?"
Grevan asked, reaching up to guide them in to an even landing.

"Albert
II in mushroom sauce," said Klim. She was a tall, slender blonde with huge
blue eyes and a deceptively wistful expression. As he grounded the cooker, she
put a hand on his shoulder and stepped down. "Not a very original menu,
I'll admit! But there's a nice dessert anyway. How about sampling some local
vegetables to go with Albert?"

"Maybe,"
said Grevan cautiously. "Whose turn is it to sample?" Too often,
preoccupied with other matters, he'd discovered suddenly that he'd been roped
in again for that chore when the items to be sampled were suspected of being of
a particularly unco-operative nature. And then the Group would drop whatever
it was doing to gather around and sympathize while he adapted.

"Vernet's
turn,
isn't it?" said Muscles.

"Vernet's the
victim," Klim nodded. "You're safe this time."

"In that case," Grevan said,
relieved, "you'll find Vernet out there full fathoms
five
somewhere
. Bring her in if you can and we'll go browse in the shrubbery
a bit."

"This,"
Klim remarked, gazing out over the shore-line towards which Muscles was heading
in search of Vernet, "is still the best spot of an all-right little world!
Know what the cubs were calling it when we first set down here three weeks
ago?" She was Grevan's junior by a good ten years but a year or so older
than the Group's other members and inclined to regard them all with motherly
tolerance.
"Our point of no return."