Chapter VI

Tinker was through the tunnel and up beside the girl again in a new speed record for Asteroid Y-335 A. She was crouched behind a wall, as good as her word. He tugged at her, and the two of them raced through the tunnels again to the electronic-brain building.

“Faster!” he urged through the helmet radio. “We don’t want to run into any robots here!”

She gasped something in protest, but he didn’t bother to answer. Then they were scrambling up through the hatchway into the computer’s own building, and he breathed more easily.

“Now,” he said. “We wait. Drake’s following his script like a little angel. He _had_ to take a look at that thing. If it was real, he had to know it, for we might have been able to build another.”

“I know,” said the girl, sobbing for breath. “But Tinker, what now? He’ll just get back in the ship, and we’ll be as badly off as ever.”

“Wait,” said Tinker tensely. He was feeling a reaction now; this was the key moment. He glanced beseechingly at the computer tubes, winking their little electronic messages. He said, with a voice that shook slightly, “I don’t like playing God. I’ve never known what it was deliberately to take a human life before.”

“Life?” the girl demanded. “When did you take anybody’s life?”

Lights flared up in the computer brain in a blaze, and died again. They flared more brightly, erratically; and the machine seemed to tremble slightly.

Tinker sighed a long weary sigh. “Just now,” he said, and began to rip out the additional control circuits he had so frantically installed. “We can go up now. Drake’s dead.”

Tinker made the girl wait in the shed for a moment. Then he came back, walking slowly, and said, “All right, Siria. Let’s go.”

She followed him in silence to the space ship. There was no sign of Drake, nothing but the meandering robots, their heads tucked underneath their arms. When they were in the ship and Siria looked back at the asteroid they were leaving, she thought she saw--

“Tinker,” she said in a voice that shook. “Look back there, where the ship was--”

He said somberly, “Yes, Siria. That’s Drake. The robots took care of him.”

“Impossible!” she said. “The robots can’t conceivably harm a human being! Every control circuit ever designed has--”

“Has its weaknesses, Siria,” Tinker said. “I made a few changes. No--don’t interrupt. I couldn’t make them attack Drake. But I could change their repair instructions. I put in a new circuit describing a new repair problem--crystalline neurosis.

“It was easy enough, for the basic condition was already in the memory tanks. Robot’s head stuck on shoulder. Too many static bursts accepted as repair signals, with a resultant neurotic behavior pattern on the part of the robot affected. That was all standard. The only change I made was to describe a new type of robot.” He swallowed. “One that looked like--like a human being in a space suit. I knew about it, so I kept us out of sight. Drake didn’t.”

“Tinker!” cried the girl.

He nodded. “So they--repaired him. And the way to repair a stuck apex-mounted receptor, of course, is to take it off and dismember it.” They were silent for a moment while Tinker slipped the little ship into a landing next to the spacehouse. Both were looking gray.

“The computer knew something was wrong,” he said, “when they got the--the apex-mounted receptor apart. It wasn’t a standard design. So it blew fuses; and that’s when I knew it was over.”

He helped her wordlessly out of the ship, through the landing tube, into the spacehouse, and tripped the emergency distress signal that would bring the space patrol and the Company’s ships arrowing toward them through the interplanetary night.

And then, for the first time, he pushed back her helmet and looked at her.

“Beautiful,” he said. “I knew you’d be beautiful.”

Transcriber’s Note:

This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, January 1956 (Vol.
4, No. 6). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but
minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.