The Invincible (14 page)

The screen of the magnifier showed a gray-brownish background against which tiny rectangles stood out, grouped geometrically around a larger, steel-gray rectangle. Together with Ballmin and Gaarb, who were sitting next to him at the controls, Rohan realized that these were the vehicles of Regnar’s expedition.

Swiftly, with all precautionary measures, they landed not far from the area. The telescopic landing legs of the supercopter were still working and clicking into place simultaneously, when the crew began to lower the gangway and send off two scouting machines, well-protected by a movable force field. The interior of the crater resembled a shallow dish with a jagged rim. A black-brownish crust of lava covered the central cone of the ancient volcano.

The scouting vehicles needed a few minutes in order to cover the distance of one mile that separated them from Regnar’s group. There was excellent radio communication, no sign of interference. Rohan spoke with Gaarb, who was riding in the front vehicle.

“We’re still climbing a slight incline, we should see them any moment now,” Gaarb repeated several times. Suddenly he shouted: “Here they are! I can see them!” Then he added with a calmer voice: “Evidently everything seems to be okay there.” He counted: “One, two, three, four—all the vehicles are there. But why are they parked in the sun?”

“How about the men? Do you see any of our men?” inquired Rohan, who sat tensed in front of the mike.

“Yes. Something’s moving over there—two men. Here—another one—somebody is lying down in the shade—I can see them, Rohan!”

His voice grew distant. Rohan could vaguely hear him say something to his driver. Then came the dull echo as they shot off a smoke signal. Gaarb’s voice came on strong again.

“That was just a little salute to let them know we are here. The smoke is drifting over their way now. It will soon clear up. Jarg, hey there, Jarg! What’s the matter? Hey there, guys!”

His excited shouts were loud in Rohan’s ears. Then there was abrupt silence. A motor sprang to life, Rohan could hear the humming engines move farther and farther away until they came to a halt. Then a few hurried steps, muffled sounds of shouting, indistinct screams and then silence again.

“Hello, Gaarb, hello!” Rohan kept repeating in his mike. His lips were trembling. Footsteps approached, someone running across the sand came nearer; the loudspeaker began to crackle.

“Rohan!” Gaarb’s voice sounded strange; he was breathing hard. “Rohan! Damn it! It’s the same as with Kertelen! They’re all crazy—they don’t recognize us, they don’t talk—Rohan, can you hear me?”

“Yes, I’m listening. Are they all the same way?”

“Looks like it to me. But I can’t say yet for sure. Jarg and Terner are just going through the group to see—”

“How about their force field?”

“It’s switched off. I can’t detect it. I don’t know. They must have switched it off.”

“Any signs of a struggle?”

“No. Nothing. All the vehicles are parked here. There’s no damage. And the men are simply lying around or sitting there. You can shake them and they don’t react at all. What? What’s the matter over there?”

Rohan heard a distorted sound, interrupted by a long whining whimpering howl. Rohan gritted his teeth, trying to suppress the feeling of nausea that welled up from the pit of his stomach.

“For God’s sake, that’s Gralew!” came Gaarb’s horrified voice. “Gralew! Gralew! Don’t you recognize me?” Gaarb’s panting, amplified by the loudspeaker, seemed to fill the entire command center.

“Gralew too,” he uttered breathlessly. Then he fell silent, as if gathering new strength.

“Rohan, I don’t know if we can handle this situation by ourselves. We have to get them away from here. Send us some more men, will you?”

“Right away.”

One hour later the convoy of horror stopped below the metal body of the supercopter. Only eighteen men out of the original twenty-two that had left with the expedition had been found. The fate of the other four was unknown. Most of the group had offered no resistance and had come along peacefully. Five of the men refused to budge and had to be taken by force. They were carried aboard on stretchers, then brought to an improvised infirmary on the lower deck of the supercopter. The other thirteen men, whose rigid masklike faces were especially terrifying, were brought to an isolated room where they allowed themselves to be put to bed without any resistance. They had to be undressed. They were as helpless as newborn babies. Rohan witnessed the scene silently. He stood in the corridor between the rows of cots. He noticed that most of the men remained passive, although those that had been carried off by force continued to whine eerily.

Rohan left the incapacitated men in the care of the attending physician. He sent all the vehicles at his disposal on a search mission, trying to locate the missing four men. He had many vehicles now, as he had brought back the machines abandoned by the sick men. Now Rohan used his own men to drive these machines. He had just finished dispatching the last group when he was called back to the command center: the radio men had finally established contact with the
Invincible.

He was not at all surprised that they had succeeded in getting in touch with their “home base.” He was beyond the stage where anything could still surprise him. He gave a brief report to Horpach.

“Who is missing?” the astrogator wanted to know.

“Regnar, Benningsen, Korotko and Mead. What’s the story on the two airplanes?” Rohan now inquired in turn.

“I have no news from them.”

“And how about the cloud?”

“I sent out a patrol this morning. They just returned one hour ago. They couldn’t detect any trace of the cloud.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even the aircraft?”

“Nothing.”

Lauda knocked at the door of the astrogator’s cabin and walked in. The astrogator was making some entries on a photogrammetrical map.

“What’s the matter?” asked Horpach without lifting his head.

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Is it that urgent? We’re starting in fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t know. It seems we’re about to figure this place out,” said Lauda.

The astrogator laid aside his compasses. Their eyes met. The biologist was no younger than the commander; strange, that he was still permitted to go on space flights. Apparently he was particularly interested in it. He looked more like an old mechanic than a scientist.

“What have you figured out, then? Let’s hear it.”

“We’ve turned up living organisms in the ocean,” answered Lauda. “Life in the ocean, but none at all on land.”

“How is that? There
was
life on land. Ballmin himself found traces of it.”

“That’s right. Traces more than five million years old. But later all life on land was exterminated. What I’m about to say sounds fantastic, Astrogator, and I have next to no proof for it, but here’s the way it might have come about: imagine, once upon a time, some millions of years ago, a rocket landed here. A rocket that originated from some other system, perhaps from the region of a nova.”

Lauda spoke faster now, his voice calm and firm.

“We know for a fact, that intelligent life existed on the sixth planet of the system before the explosion of the Zeta of the Lyre constellation. These creatures had a highly developed technology. Suppose a scouting craft of the Lyre people landed here on this planet. Maybe there was a crash landing or some other catastrophe that totally wiped out the ship’s crew—a nuclear explosion, say, or a chain reaction—anyhow, there wasn’t a single living being aboard the wreck that touched down on Regis. Only robots, automated and computerized machines remained. Not the kind we have, with a trunk, a head and limbs, resembling the human body. The inhabitants of the Lyre were probably not humanoid at all in appearance, and they constructed their robots to resemble them. The robots were unharmed and left the ship. They were highly specialized homeostatic mechanisms, capable of withstanding the most difficult environmental conditions. Now they no longer had anyone to direct their activities. Perhaps those robots whose mental processes were closest to those of their creators even tried to repair the wrecked craft, although this would serve no useful purpose under the circumstances. But you know the way robots operate. A repair robot will always repair everything he’s been programed for, whether it makes sense in a given situation or not. Then a separate group of robots became independent of the others. Perhaps they were attacked by the local fauna. Lizardlike reptiles, predators, lived on the planet at that time, and certain predators will attack anything that moves. The robots fought them off and won the battle. They had to be armed for a fight like that—in other words, they adapted to local conditions as best they could. We’d have to assume, of course, that these robots were capable of producing other machines according to their specific needs of the moment. Let’s say they needed flying machines to fight off these saurians. Needless to say, I don’t know any details. I am only imagining the way the situation might have evolved under natural conditions. Maybe there were no flying reptiles here at all, only burrowing reptiles, living underground. I simply have no way of knowing. But in any event the robots would have adapted perfectly to life on the continents of this planet. They succeeded so well that they were victorious in their battle against all life forms. Including plants.”

“Plants? How do you account for that?”

“I’m not quite sure. I could advance several hypotheses, but I’d rather not. Incidentally I haven’t even mentioned the most important part yet. Hundreds of generations later the ‘offspring’ of the first mechanisms were no longer anything like the original products created by the Lyre civilization. Do you follow me? It was the beginning of an evolution of nonliving things, an evolution of machines. After all, what’s the first principle of a homeostat? To outlast, to survive under changing conditions, however difficult and hostile these conditions may be. The forms that eventually resulted from this evolution faced a peril far greater than attack by the local fauna and flora. They were forced to search out sources of energy and raw materials in order to produce spare parts and new organisms. This search led to the development of a kind of mining industry. Their ancestors—the ones who arrived with our hypothetical spaceship—must have been originally powered by some radioactive source. But there are no radioactive elements present on this planet. In other words, they no longer had access to this particular supply of power, and so were forced to find another one. This would have led to a critical shortage of power and eventually to a battle over the source of energy supply. The machines waged war on each other in a literal struggle for survival. And of course this is the basis for all evolution: survival of the fittest, due to natural selection. In this battle, the ‘intellectually’ superior mechanisms, which needed considerable amounts of energy (not least, perhaps, because of their size) were no match for the less developed but more economical and more productive machines—”

“Hold it. Aside from the fact that this all sounds like pure fantasy, isn’t it true that it is precisely the organism with the highest developed nervous system who usually wins the evolutionary battle? Even if the nervous system had been replaced in this case by an electronic system, the principle would still remain the same.”

“Correct. But only in the case of homogenous organisms that naturally evolved on the same planet—not those that arrived from other planets.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s this simple: on Earth, the biochemical prerequisites for the proper functioning of organisms have always been and still are almost always the same. Algae, amoebae, plants, animals—they’re all made up of nearly identical cells; they all have a very similar protein-based metabolism. And in view of this common basic building block, this common point of origin, what you have just outlined about the development of the machines becomes a distinguishing characteristic rather than a common one. It is not the only one, but one of the most important. However, the situation was quite different in this case. There were two types of mechanisms that landed here on Regis. The more complicated obtained their energy from their own radioactive stores of supply, while the simpler mechanisms, small repair systems, derived their power from solar cells that were recharged by sunlight. This was a tremendous advantage and made them superior to the other radioactive-powered type.”

“But the higher developed mechanisms might have robbed them of these solar batteries. And anyway, what good is all this debate? Why should we even talk about it? It may not even be worth discussing. What do you say, Lauda?”

“Quite the contrary! This is an important point! As I see it, an inanimate evolution of a most peculiar character has taken place here, due to extraordinary conditions which came about by chance. This is the way it looks to me. Two types of systems were successful in this evolutionary pattern: first, those that had made the greatest advances in miniaturization, and then those that became settled in a definite place. The first type were the beginning of these ‘black clouds.’ I believe them to be very tiny pseudo insects that, if necessary, and for their common good, can unite to form a superordinate system. This is the course taken by the evolution of the mobile mechanisms. The stationary mechanisms, on the other hand, were the starting point for this strange metallic vegetation, the ‘ruins’ of the areas we thought were cities—”

“In other words, you don’t think they are cities?”

“No, of course not. They’re merely collections of mechanisms that became stationary. Inanimate structures that self-reproduced and were outfitted with special organs to store solar energy. That seems to be the function of the small triangular plates.”

“Do you mean to tell me that the city is still vegetating?”

“No. I have the impression that this—let’s say this metallic forest—has become the victim in the struggle for existence. There’s nothing left of it but rusty scrap metal. Only one type of mechanism has survived: the mobile systems that dominates all the continents of this planet.”