Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/12

 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."

"Weigh 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.

"Hello kid," he said. "What brings you here? Captured?"

"Sort of," admitted the boy. "You're Mr. Bartok, aren't you?"

"Only in jest. Everybody calls me Barty." He was trying to put this young man at his ease; presumably he was destined for the same ordeal as he. Prestige of the genus homo demanded that he keep a stiff upper lip.

"Okay—Barty. I suppose you know why you're here?" The Commander stared in amazement. The boy- had mounted a flight of steps to a throne-like affair that took up most of one wall. "I suppose you know why you're here?"

"Wha-a-at? Son, who the hell are you?"

The boy sagged down into the seat. "Unwilling master," he said, "of the most powerful army in the universe."

ARTY!" screamed someone.

"Babe!" Bartok screamed right back, catching the girl in mid-air as she hurled herself into his arms. After a few preliminaries he demanded, "Now what goes on here?"

"I'll introduce you," said Babe MacNeice. "Barty, this is Peter Allistair, from Capella. He's a bit young—twenty—but he's all right. It's not his fault, any of it."

"How can that be?" demanded the Commander. "If you're their boss? Do you know what your ships are doing?"

The boy sagged deeper into the chair, a haunted look on his face. "I sure do," he said. "And I'd give my right arm to stop it. But they won't believe me. I made the things, but they won't believe me when I say I want them to stop their colonization."

"You and who else?" asked Bartok. "You and who else made these billion or so robots?"

"I did," said the boy defiantly. "At least I did indirectly. You know there's a law against robot-experimentation—or was. Well, I couldn't let well enough alone. I had an idea about robots, so I came to Arided, which was the least populated section that I could find, and I built the damned thing."

"Built what?"

"A robot whose function was to manufacture robots. And that was the fatal error. You know how resolute those things are in carrying out their jobs." Bartok, thinking of three days of solid punning, nodded absently. "Well, this thing would have killed me if I'd tried to stop it. It said it had a divine mission to perform. So it built another flock of robot-manufacturing robots, which did the same.

"Then they began to branch out and make ordinary fetchers, mathematical workers and a few fighters. I got interested and designed a ship from the math workers' figures. And a stray remark I dropped to one of the proteans—those are the