“At what range?”
“It’s a violet laser, therefore with a very small angle of divergence from the line of incidence. So the range will be, for all practical purposes, limited to the field of vision; since the horizon here on a level plane is at a distance of two kilometers, two kilometers at the very least will be the range of fire.”
“We will be receiving special mining lasers of six times that power,” Achanian put in.
“But that is only what the Americans call overkill,” McCork replied with a smile. “Such power will provide no advantage in a duel with the Setaur’s laser.”
Someone asked whether it wouldn’t be possible to destroy the automaton from aboard some cosmic vessel. McCork declared himself not qualified to answer; Achanian meanwhile glanced at the sign-up sheet and said:
“We have here a navigator first class. Pirx … would you care to comment on this?”
Pirx got up.
“Well, in theory, a vessel of medium tonnage like my
McCork nodded.
“But this is sheer speculation,” Pirx continued. “The vessel would have to be somehow brought into position, and a small target like the Setaur, which really isn’t any larger than a man, could always have time to move out of the way, unless it were immobilized. The lateral velocity of a vessel maneuvering near the surface of a planet, within its field of gravity, is quite small; sudden pursuit maneuvers are completely out of the question. The only remaining possibility, then, would be to use small units, say, the Moon’s own fleet. Except that the thrust here would be weak and of not very high temperature, so perhaps if you used one of those crafts as a bomber instead… But for precision bombing you need special instruments, sights, range-finders, which Luna Base doesn’t have. No, we can rule that out. Of course it will be necessary, even imperative, to employ such small machines, but only for reconnaissance purposes—that is, to pinpoint the automaton.”
He was about to sit down when suddenly a new idea hit him.
“Oh, yes!” he said. “Jump holsters. Those you could use. I mean—you would have to have people who knew how to use them.”
“Are they the small, individual rockets one straps on over the shoulders?” asked McCork.
“Yes. With them you can execute jumps or even sail along without moving; depending on the model and type, you get from one to several minutes aloft and reach an altitude of fifty to four hundred meters.”
Achanian stood.
“This may be important. Who here has been trained in the use of such devices?”
Two hands went up. Then another.
“Only three?” said Achanian, “Ah; you, too?” he added, seeing that Pirx, who now saw what was coming, had also raised his hand. “That makes four. Not very many… Well ask among the ground crew. Gentlemen! This is—it goes without saying—strictly a voluntary mission. I really ought to have begun with that. Who wants to take part in the operation?”
A slight clatter ensued, for everyone present was standing up.
“On behalf of Control, I thank you,” said Achanian. “This is fine… And so we have seventeen volunteers. We will be supported by three units from the lunar fleet, and in addition will have at our disposal ten drivers and radio operators to help man the transporters. I will ask you all to remain here, and you”—he turned to McCork and Pirx —“please come with me, to Control.”
Around four in the afternoon Pirx was sitting in the turret of a large caterpillar transporter, jolted by its violent motions. He was wearing a full suit, with the helmet on his knees, ready to put it on at the first sound of the alarm, and across his chest hung a heavy laser, the butt of which poked him unmercifully; in his left hand he had a map, and he used the right to turn a periscope, observing the long, spread-out line of the other transporters, which pitched and tossed like boats across the debris-strewn tracts of the Sea of Tranquillity. That desert “sea” was all ablaze with sunlight and empty from one black horizon to the other. Pirx received reports and passed them on, spoke with Luna Base 1, with the officers of the other machines, with the pilots of the reconnaissance modules, whose microscopic exhaust flames every so often appeared among the stars in the black sky; yet with all of this he still couldn’t help feeling at times that he was having some kind of highly elaborate and silly dream.
Things had happened with increasing frenzy. He wasn’t the only one to whom it seemed that Construction had succumbed to something like panic. For, really, what could one halfwit automaton do, even armed with a light- thrower? So when at the second “summit meeting,” right at noon, there began to be talk of turning to the UN, at least to the Security Council, for “special sanction,” namely permission to bring in heavy artillery (rocket launchers would be best), and possibly even atomic missiles—Pirx objected, along with others, that in that way, before they got anywhere, they would be making complete asses of themselves in front of all Earth. Besides, it was obvious that for such a decision from the international body they would have to wait days if not weeks, and meanwhile the “mad robot” could wander off God knows where. Once it was hidden in the inaccessible rifts of the lunar crust, you wouldn’t be able to get at it with all the cannons in the world; it was essential to act decisively and without delay.
It became clear then that the biggest problem would be communications, which had always been a sore point in lunar undertakings. Supposedly, there existed about three thousand different patents for inventions designed to facilitate communications, ranging from a seismic telegraph (using microexplosions as signals) to “Trojans,” stationary satellites. Such satellites had been placed in orbit last year, but they didn’t improve the situation one bit. In practice the problem was solved by systems of ultrashortwave relays set on poles, a lot like the old pre-Sputnik television transmission lines on Earth. This was actually more reliable than communication by satellite, because the engineers were still racking their brains over how to make their orbiting stations unsusceptible to solar storms. Every single jump in the activity of the sun, and the resultant “hurricanes” of electrically charged high-energy particles that tore through the ether, immediately produced a static that made it difficult to maintain contact— sometimes for several days.
One of those solar “twisters” was going on right now, so messages between Luna Base 1 and Construction went by way of the ground relays, and the success of Operation Setaur depended—to a large degree, at least—on the “rebel’s” not taking it into its head to destroy the girdered poles that stood, forty-five of them, on the desert separating Luna City from the cosmodrome near the construction site. Assuming, of course, that the automaton would continue to prowl in that vicinity. It had, after all, complete freedom of movement, requiring neither fuel nor oxygen, neither sleep nor rest; in all, it was so self-sufficient that many of the engineers for the first time fully realized how perfect was this machine of their own making—a machine whose next step no one could foresee.
The direct Moon-Earth discussions which had begun at dawn between Control and the firm Cybertronics, including the staff of Setaur’s designers, went on and on; but not a thing was learned from them that hadn’t already been said by little Dr. McCork. It was only the laymen who were still trying to talk the specialists into using some great calculator to predict the automaton’s tactics. Was the Setaur intelligent? Well, yes, in its own fashion. That “unnecessary”—and at the present moment highly dangerous—“wisdom” of the machine angered many participants in the action; they couldn’t see why in hell the engineers had bestowed such freedom and autonomy on a machine made strictly for mining tasks. McCork calmly explained that this “intellectronic redundancy” was, in the current phase of technological development, the same thing as the excess of power generally found in all conventional machines and engines: it was an emergency reserve, put there in order to increase safety and dependability of function. There was no way of knowing in advance all the situations in which a machine, be it mechanical or informational, might find itself. And therefore no one really had the foggiest notion of what the Setaur would do. Of course the experts, including those on Earth, had telegraphed their opinions; the only problem was that these opinions were diametrically opposed. Some believed the Setaur would attempt to destroy objects of an “artificial” nature, precisely like the relay poles or high-tension lines; others thought, on the contrary, that it would expend its energy by firing at whatever stood in its path, whether a lunar rock or a transporter filled with people. The former were in favor of an immediate attack for the purpose of destroying it; the latter recommended a wait-and-see strategy. Both were in agreement on one thing only, that it was absolutely vital to keep track of the machine’s movements.
Since early morning the lunar fleet, numbering twelve small units, had patrolled the Sea of Tranquillity and sent continual reports to the group defending the construction site, which in turn was in constant contact with
