The speaker was sputtering with Stendal’s impatient questions, as Zeke and the men studied each other, but they gave no attention to it. Preacher Hook sighed, breaking the silence.
Zeke nodded and picked up the microphone.
“Just get the whiskey. We’ve decided to skip the rejuvenation.”
He put the microphone back on its hook carefully and headed toward the handrails that led down, with the others behind him. Ozin had the rocket waiting, and they climbed in and strapped themselves down.
Then the rockets blasted, and the last five men beyond the Earth were heading home.
Instinct
senthree waved aside the slowing scooter and lengthened his stride down the sidewalk; he had walked all the way from the rocket port, and there was no point to a taxi now that he was only a few blocks from the bio- labs. Besides, it was too fine a morning to waste in riding. He sniffed at the crisp, clean fumes of gasoline appreciatively and listened to the music of his hard heels slapping against the concrete.
It was good to have a new body again. He hadn’t appreciated what life was like for the last hundred years or so. He let his eyes rove across the street toward the blue flame of a welding torch and realized how long it had been since his eyes had really appreciated the delicate beauty of such a flame. The wise old brain in his chest even seemed to think better now.
It was worth every stinking minute he’d spent on Venus. At times like this, one could realize how good it was to be alive and to be a robot.
Then he sobered as he came to the old bio-labs. Once there had been plans for a fine new building instead of the old factory in which he had started it all four hundred years ago. But somehow, there’d never been time for that. It had taken almost a century before they could master the technique of building up genes and chromosomes into the zygote of a simple fish that would breed with the natural ones. Another century had
gone by before they produced Oscar, the first artificially made pig. And there they ‘seemed to have stuck. Sometimes it seemed to Senthree that they were no nearer recreating Man than they had been when they started.
He dilated the door and went down the long hall, studying his reflection in the polished walls absently. It was a good body. The black enamel was perfect and every joint of the metal case spelled new techniques and luxurious fitting. But the old worries were beginning to settle. He grunted at Oscar LXXII, the lab mascot, and received an answering grunt. The pig came over to root at his feet, but he had no time for that. He turned into the main lab room, already taking on the worries of his job.
It wasn’t hard to worry as he saw the other robots. They were clustered about some object on a table, dejection on every gleaming back. Senthree shoved Ceofor and Beswun aside and moved up. One look was enough. The female of the eleventh couple lay there in the strange stiffness of protoplasm that had died, a horrible grimace on her face.
“How long—and what happened to the male?” Senthree asked,
Ceofor swung to face him quickly. “Hi, boss. You’re late. Hey, new body!”
Senthree nodded, as they came grouping around, but his words were automatic as he explained about falling in the alkali pool on Venus and ruining his worn body completely. “Had to wait for a new one. And then the ship got held up while we waited for the Arcturus su-perlight ship to land. They’d found half a dozen new planets to colonize, and had to spread the word before they’d set down. Now, what about the creatures?”
“We finished educating about three days ago,” Ceofor told him. Ceofor was the first robot trained hi Senthree’s technique of gene-building and the senior assistant. “Expected you back then, boss. But… well, see for yourself. The man is still alive, but he won’t be long.”
Senthree followed them back to another room and
looked through the window. He looked away quickly. It had been another failure. The man was crawling about the floor on hands and knees, falling half the time to his stomach, and drooling. His garbled mouthing made no sense.
“Keep the news robots out,” he ordered. It would never do to let the public see this. There was already too much of a cry against homovivifying, and the crowds were beginning to mutter something about it being unwise to mess with vanished life forms. They seemed actually afraid of the legendary figure of Man.
“What luck on Venus?” one of them asked, as they began the job of carefully dissecting the body of the female failure to look for the reason behind the lack of success.
“None. Just another rumor. I don’t think Man ever established self-sufficient colonies. If he did, they didn’t survive. But I found something else—something the museum would give a fortune for. Did my stuff arrive?”
“You mean that box of tar? Sure, it’s over there hi the corner.”
Senthree let the yielding plastic of his mouth smile at them as he strode toward it. They had already ripped off the packing, and now he reached up for a few fine wires in the tar. It came off as he pulled, loosely repacked over a thin layer of wax. At that, he’d been lucky to sneak it past customs. This was the oldest, crudest, and biggest robot discovered so far—perhaps one of the fabulous Original Models. It stood there rigidly, staring out of its pitted, expressionless face. But the plate on its chest had been scraped carefully clean, and Senthree pointed it out to them.
MAKEPEACE ROBOT, SER. 324MD2991. SURGEON.
“A mechanic for Man bodies,” Beswun translated. “But that means…”
“Exactly.” Senthree put it into words. “It must know how Man’s body was built—if it has retained any memory. I found it in a tarpit by sheer accident, and it seems to be fairly well preserved. No telling whether there were any magnetic fields to erode memories, of course, and it’s all matted inside. But if we can get it to working…”
Beswun took over. He had been trained as a physicist before the mysterious lure of the bio-lab had drawn him here. Now he began wheeling the crude robot away. If he could get it into operation, the museum could wait. The recreation of Man came first!
Senthree pulled x-ray lenses out of, a pouch and replaced the normal ones in his eyes before going over to join the robots who were beginning dissection. Then he switched them for the neutrino detector lenses that had made this work possible. The neutrino was the only particle that could penetrate the delicate protoplasmic cells without ruining them and yet permit the necessary millions of tunes magnification. It was a fuzzy image, since the neutrino spin made such an insignificant field for the atomic nuclei to work on that few were deflected. But through them, he could see the vague outlines of the pattern within the cells. It was as they had designed the original cell—there had been no reshuffling of genes in handling. He switched to his micromike hands and began the delicate work of tracing down the neuron connections. There was only an occasional mutter as one of the robots beside him switched to some new investigation.
The female should have’ lived! But somewhere, in spite of all their care, she had died. And now the male was dying. Eleven couples—eleven failures. Senthree was no nearer finding the creators of his race than he had been centuries before.
Then the radio hi his head buzzed its warning and he let it cut in, straightening from his work. “Senthree.”
“The Director is in your office. Will you report at once?”
“Damn!” The word had no meaning, but it was strangely satisfying at times. What did old Emptinine want… or wait again, there’d been a selection while he was on Venus investigating the rumors of Man. Some young administrator—Arpeten—had the job now.
Ceofor looked up guiltily, obviously having tuned in.
“I should have warned you. We got word three days ago he was coming, but forgot it in reviving the couple. Trouble?”
