Chapter V

Norden broke away from the men who refused to listen to his warnings as quickly as possible. Pat had already gone to her bunk, worn out completely by the brief burst of hope, and he headed for his own cubicle. There was no physical fatigue--how could there be in a robot? But his mind was dulled with too many shocks. He dropped to the bunk, and his arms came up automatically.

He forced them down, and this time he was ready when his brain tried to black out on him. The compulsions that acted on him to make him pass on his information to the Aliens were partly under his control.

He managed to sidetrack his thoughts before blacking out, and to keep his arms down. He lay there, cursing himself and the things which had created him, fighting his battle silently, until he knew he had won.

His legs were unsteady when he finally stood up. The effort of will had shocked even his motor control impulses, but the damage was not permanent, and by the time he passed Miles' darkened doorway, he was moving smoothly enough again. He saw surprised looks exchanged by his guards as they followed him back to the laboratory.

"You might as well come in," he told them. "I'll be here all night, and there's nothing secret about my work now. I think there's a deck of cards in the desk over there."

One of them looked and came back, holding the deck and grinning. "Thanks, Doc," he said. "You're all right."

For a second, Norden experienced a warming glow as he turned into his office. He could find some acceptance among men now. Then he grimaced bitterly, as he realized what they'd think of him if they knew the truth about him. It was one thing to ape humanity, quite another to belong.

The article on speculative spectra by the Japanese scientist was still on his desk, and he began poring over it. Almost at once, his mind swerved away on a flight of curiosity about the card game the men had been playing. He pulled it back, and his imagination started in on hatred of the Aliens.

He fought against that too, tempting as it was. He'd licked the compulsion to communicate with them in two hours. There was hope that he could lick the taboo against investigating into a forbidden field. The fact that it was forbidden made it doubly worth studying.

Bit by bit he traced down the mathematics, but in the end the taboo threw him. It required all the effort he could bring to the problem to follow the tricky formulae, and it couldn't be done while fighting the treachery of his own mind. He gave up in disgust, and turned to the computer.

He'd seen Pat use it often enough, and apparently his robot mind was good at memorizing. He searched through the available tapes of information until he came to one that covered the more vital aspects of Einstein's unified field theory.

He fed it in, and began adding the spectra relation data from the books, carefully storing them in the memory circuits of the machine. The mathematics of the article went in next. He made sure the material they had used to locate the screen was still active, and brought it up to date.

Finally he set the machine to deriving all possible extensions of the mathematics he couldn't handle himself.

When that was finished, there was no longer any need to worry about the taboo. The computer had done what he had failed to do, and more. He stared at the sheaf of papers. The assembled material would save years of work on extraspectral radiation. And his suspicion that magnetism was the vital link seemed to be confirmed. It appeared to be something of a universal transformer, when properly handled.

But the machine couldn't tell him what section of the Hardwick spectrum involved life. The field used by the lizards to locate each other lay well up in it, in a band relationship somewhat analogous to the X-rays of the normal spectrum. But if that failed, there was no clue to what might work.

In any new field, one fresh fact could open up tremendous stores of knowledge--but there would always be even greater ones awaiting discovery.

He put in a call to the library for more material on Janiekowski's work with the lizards, and was told that they'd have to secure a tape from Earth. Earth promised a ship with the tape, and other material he'd requested within three hours. There was no questioning of his priorities this time.

Then he glanced at the clock, and was shocked to find it already past noon. He got up impatiently, heading toward the lunch room. It was strange that Pat had failed to join him.

He found her and Miles searching for him in the cafeteria, and one look was enough. Miles motioned Norden to follow him, and led the way to his office. Once there, he closed the door, and threw the decoded dispatches down for Norden to see.

"The Aliens have narrowed the invasion area to ten million miles from Earth," he said wearily. "We've been holding out by a clever tactical subterfuge. Send out a hundred ships near each other, and the Aliens can't handle them all at once. If we're lucky, and spot the first torpedoes, we can trace them back and a few ships may survive long enough to send visual, pattern-seeking atomic torpedoes toward the Alien ship.

"But we can't get closer than a few hundred thousand miles with any life aboard a ship, because the radiation--or whatever it is they use--is fatal so long as they can detect us. You can see why Command rushed through all the screen suits they could, and struck this morning. They had to."

Norden picked up the dispatches, and scanned them grimly. Seven hundred pilots out of twice that many thousand had been screened. A third of the total number had returned--but none of the spared ships had been theoretically protected.

The Aliens had apparently not only spotted all of the protected ships, but had concentrated their torpedo fire on them. The experiment was a complete failure!

There was no use in reminding Miles that he'd tried to warn him. Earth hadn't been able to heed such warnings. He handed the papers back, his mind tormented by a picture of seven hundred men--men probably like the guards who'd called him all right--who had lost their marginal chance to live because a robot had failed. It was nonsense, his mind told him. Soldiers were meant to die. But the picture remained.

"So what happens to me now?" he asked.

"You'll try again, of course," Miles answered, apparently surprised at the question. "At least the fact that they worked that hard to eliminate the ships with the screen indicates you're on the right track."

Norden stared at him despairfully. "It's like tracing a single drop of water in the ocean--or looking for a trace of life that can be detected for millions of miles when you're in the middle of hordes of living creatures. I've been working on that already. And the only reason we _could_ detect and screen the lizard signals was because they were unique.

"Hardwick was right about that, too. You have to look for life forces where they're scarce. I need isolation from people, animals--even from germs and viruses, probably."

Pat gestured to a map on the wall. "There are the mine installations on the other side of the Moon. Would they do?"

He had no idea, but it was the best he could hope for. He nodded slowly, and she turned towards the door.

"Then what are we waiting for?" she asked. "We've got too little time now."

"You're not going, Pat," he told her. "Nobody is. I need isolation from life, remember! Besides, if there's any means of communication between here and there, I'll need you here to work the communicator."

There was a television link that was still useful, as a quick check showed. And there were ships to carry as much equipment as he needed, including two rabbits, and a male and female sand lizard in little airtight cages where oxygen could be supplied from tanks. He had no idea of what he might need, and had to take everything he could imagine as being useful.