To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (39 page)

“What happened served the bastard right,” muttered Grimes.

“I’m inclined to agree with you, Lieutenant. But we are all of us no more than pawns insofar as Federation policy is concerned. Or, perhaps, Alberto was a knight—in the chess sense of the word, although the German name for that piece,
springer,
would suit him better.

“Alberto was employed by the Department of Socio-Economic Science, and directly responsible only to its head, Dr. Barratin. Dr. Barratin is something of a mathematical genius, and uses a building full of computers to extrapolate from the current trends on all the worlds in which the Federation is interested. Doncaster, I need hardly tell you, is such a world, and the League of Life is a current trend. According to the learned Doctor’s calculations, this same League of Life will almost certainly gain considerable influence, even power, in that sector of the Galaxy, under the leadership of your Miss Madigan . . .”

“She’s not
my
Miss Madigan, sir. Unfortunately.”

“My heart fair bleeds for you. But, to continue. To Dr. Barratin the foreign and colonial policies of the Federation can all be worked out in advance like a series of equations. As you will know, however, equations are apt, at times, to hold undesirable factors. Alberto was employed to remove such factors, ensuring thereby that the good Doctor’s sums came out. He was known to his employers as the Subtracter . . .”

“Very funny,” said Grimes. “Very funny. Sir.”

“Isn’t it?” Damien was laughing unashamedly. “But when things went so very badly wrong on Doncaster, Barratin couldn’t see the joke, even after I explained it to him. “You see, Grimes, that
you
were a factor that wasn’t allowed for in the equation. Alberto travelled to Doncaster in
your
ship, a Serpent Class Courier.
You
were with Miss Madigan when Alberto tried to . . . subtract her.

“And you were captain of the
Adder!
”

The Tin Messiah

“I’m afraid, Lieutenant,”
said Commodore Damien, “that your passenger, this trip, won’t be able to help out in the galley.”

“As long as he’s not another assassin, he’ll do me,” said Grimes. “But I’ve found, sir, that anybody who likes to eat also likes now, and again, to prepare his own favorite dishes . . .”

“This one does. All the time.”

Grimes looked at his superior dubiously. He suspected the Commodore’s sense of humor. The older man’s skull-like face was stiffly immobile, but there was a sardonic glint in the pale grey eyes.

“If he wants galley privileges, sir, it’s only fair that he shares, now and again, what he hashes up for himself.”

Damien sighed. “I’ve never known officers so concerned about their bellies as you people in the
Adder.
All you think about is adding to your weight . . .” Grimes winced—as much because of the unfairness of the imputation as in reaction to the pun. The Couriers—little, very fast ships—did not carry cooks, so their officers, obliged to cook for themselves, were more than usually food-conscious.
Adder’s
crew was no exception to this rule. Damien went on, “I’ve no doubt that Mr. Adam would be willing to share his . . . er . . . nutriment with you, but I don’t think that any of you, catholic as your tastes may be, would find it palatable. Or, come to that, nourishing. But who started this particularly futile discussion?”

“You did, sir,” said Grimes.

“You’ll never make a diplomat, Lieutenant. It is doubtful that you’ll ever reach flag rank in this Service, rough and tough spacemen though we be, blunt and outspoken to a fault, the glint of honest iron showing through the work-worn fabric of our velvet gloves . . . H’m. Yes. Where was I?”

“Talking about iron fists in velvet gloves, sir.”

“Before you side-tracked me, I mean. Yes, your passenger. He is to be transported from Lindisfarne Base to Delacron. You just dump him there, then return to Base forthwith.” The Commodore’s bony hand picked up the heavily sealed envelope from his desk, extended it. “Your Orders.”

“Thank you, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

“Yes. Scramble!”

Grimes didn’t exactly scramble; nonetheless he walked briskly enough to where his ship, the Serpent Class Courier
Adder,
was berthed. Dwarfed as she was by the bigger vessels about her she still stood there, tall, proud and gleaming. Grimes knew that she and her kind were referred to, disparagingly, as “flying darning needles,” but he loved the slenderness of her lines, would not have swapped her for a hulking dreadnought. (In a dreadnought, of course, he would have been no more than one of many junior officers.) She was
his.

Ensign Beadle, his First Lieutenant, met him at the airlock ramp, saluted. He reported mournfully (nobody had ever heard Beadle laugh, and he smiled but rarely), “All secure for lift off, Captain.”

“Thank you, Number One.”

“The . . . the passenger’s aboard . . .”

“Good. I suppose we’d better extend the usual courtesy. Ask him if he’d like the spare seat in Control when we shake the dust of Base off our tail vanes.”

“I’ve already done so, Captain. It says that it’ll be pleased to accept the invitation.”

“
It
, Number One.
It!
Adam is a good Terran name.”

Beadle actually smiled. “Technically speaking, Captain, one could not say that Mr. Adam is of Terran birth. But he is of Terran manufacture.”

“And what does he eat?” asked Grimes, remembering the Commodore’s veiled references to the passenger’s diet. “A.C. or D.C.? Washed down with a noggin of light lubricating oil?”

“How did you guess, Captain?”

“The Old Man told me, in a roundabout sort of way. But . . . A passenger, not cargo . . . There must be some mistake.”

“There’s not, Captain. It’s intelligent, all right, and it has a personality. I’ve checked its papers, and officially it’s a citizen of the Interstellar Federation, with all rights, privileges and obligations.”

“I suppose that our masters know best,” said Grimes resignedly.

It was intelligent, and it had a personality, and Grimes found it quite impossible to think of Mr. Adam as “it.” This robot was representative of a type of which Grimes had heard rumors, but it was the first one that he had ever seen. There were only a very few of them in all the worlds of the Federation—and most of that few were of Earth itself. To begin with, they were fantastically expensive. Secondly, their creators were scared of them, were plagued by nightmares in which they saw themselves as latter day Frankensteins. Intelligent robots were not a rarity—but intelligent robots with imagination, intuition, and initiative were. They had been developed mainly for research and exploration, and could survive in environments that would be almost immediately lethal to even the most heavily and elaborately armored man.

Mr. Adam sat in the spare chair in the control room. There was no need for him to sit, but he did so, in an astonishingly human posture. Perhaps, thought Grimes, he could sense that his hosts would feel more comfortable if something that looked like an attenuated knight in armor were not looming tall behind them, peering over their shoulders. His face was expressionless—it was a dull-gleaming ovoid with no features to be expressive with—but it seemed to Grimes that there was the faintest flicker of luminosity behind the eye lenses that could betoken interest. His voice, when he spoke, came from a diaphragm set in his throat.

He was speaking now. “This has been very interesting, Captain. And now, I take it, we are on trajectory for Delacron.” His voice was a pleasant enough baritone, not quite mechanical.

“Yes, Mr. Adam. That is the Delacron sun there, at three o’clock from the center of the cartwheel sight.”

“And that odd distortion, of course, is the resultant of the temporal precession field of your Drive . . .” He hummed quietly to himself for a few seconds. “Interesting.”

“You must have seen the same sort of thing on your way out to Lindisfarne from Earth.”

“No, Captain. I was not a guest, ever, in the control room of the cruiser in which I was transported.” The shrug of his gleaming, metal shoulders was almost human. “I . . . I don’t think that Captain Grisby trusted me.”

That, thought Grimes, was rather an odd way of putting it. But he knew Grisby, had served under him. Grisby, as a naval officer of an earlier age, on Earth’s seas, would have pined for the good old days of sail, of wooden ships and iron men—and by “iron men” he would not have meant anything like this Mr. Adam . . .

“Yes,” the robot went on musingly, “I find this not only interesting, but amazing . . .”

“How so?” asked Grimes.

“It could all be done—the lift off, the setting of trajectory, the delicate balance between acceleration and temporal precession—so much . . . faster by one like myself . . .”

You mean
“
better
”
rather than faster,
thought Grimes,
but you’re too courteous to say it.

“And yet . . . and yet . . . You’re flesh and blood creatures, Captain, evolved to suit the conditions of just one world out of all the billions of planets. Space is not your natural environment.”

“We carry our environment around with us, Mr. Adam.” Grimes noticed that the other officers in Control—Ensign von Tannenbaum, the Navigator, Ensign Beadle, the First Lieutenant, and Lieutenant Slovotny, the radio officer—were following the conversation closely and expectantly. He would have to be careful. Nonetheless, he had to keep his end up. He grinned. “And don’t forget,” he said, “that Man, himself, is a quite rugged, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, all-purpose robot.”

“There are more ways than one of reproducing,” said Mr. Adam quietly.

“I’ll settle for the old-fashioned way!” broke in von Tannenbaum.

Grimes glared at the burly, flaxen-headed young man—but too late to stop Slovotny’s laughter. Even Beadle smiled.

John Grimes allowed himself a severely rationed chuckle. Then: “The show’s on the road, gentlemen. I’ll leave her in your capable hands. Number One. Set Deep Space watches. Mr. Adam, it is usual at this juncture for me to invite any guests to my quarters for a drink and a yarn . . .”

Mr. Adam laughed. “Like yourself, Captain, I feel the occasional need for a lubricant. But I do not make a ritual of its application. I shall, however, be very pleased to talk with you while you drink.”

“I’ll lead the way,” said Grimes resignedly.

In a small ship passengers can make their contribution to the quiet pleasures of the voyage, or they can be a pain in the neck. Mr. Adam, at first, seemed pathetically eager to prove that he could be a good shipmate. He could talk—and he did talk, on anything and everything. Mr. Beadle remarked about him that he must have swallowed an encyclopedia. Mr. McCloud, the Engineering Officer, corrected this statement, saying that he must have been built around one. And Mr. Adam could listen. That was worse than his talking—one always had the impression of invisible wheels whirring inside that featureless head, of information either being discarded as valueless or added to the robot’s data bank. He could play chess (of course)—and on the rare occasions that he lost a game it was strongly suspected that he had done so out of politeness. It was the same with any card game.

Grimes sent for Spooky Deane, the psionic communications officer. He had the bottle and the glasses ready when the tall, fragile young man seeped in through the doorway of his day cabin, looking like a wisp of ectoplasm decked out in Survey Service uniform. He sat down when invited, accepted the tumbler of neat gin that his captain poured for him.

“Here’s looking up your kilt,” toasted Grimes coarsely.

“‘A
physical
violation of privacy, Captain,” murmured Deane. “I see nothing objectionable in that.”

“And just what are you hinting at, Mr. Deane?”

“I know, Captain, that you are about to ask me to break the Rhine Institute’s Privacy Oath. And this knowledge has nothing to do with my being a telepath. Every time that we carry passengers it’s the same. You always want me to pry into their minds to see what makes them tick.”

“Only when I feel that the safety of the ship might be at stake.” Grimes refilled Deane’s glass, the contents of which had somehow vanished.

“You are . . . frightened of our passenger?” Grimes frowned. “Frightened” was a strong word. And yet mankind has always feared the robot, the automaton, the artificial man. A premonitory dread? Or was the robot only a symbol of the machines—the
mindless
machines—that with every passing year were becoming more and more dominant in human affairs?

Deane said quietly, “Mr. Adam is not a mindless machine.”

Grimes glared at him. He almost snarled, “How the hell do you know what I’m thinking?”—then thought better of it. Not that it made any difference.

The telepath went on, “Mr. Adam has a mind, as well as a brain.”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“Yes. He broadcasts, Captain, as all of you do. The trouble is that I haven’t quite got his . . . frequency.”

“Any . . . hostility towards us? Towards humans?”

Deane extended his empty glass. Grimes refilled it. The telepath sipped daintily, then said, “I . . . I don’t think so, but, as I’ve already told you, his mind is not human. Is it contempt he feels? No . . . Not quite. Pity? Yes, it could be. A sort of amused affection? Yes . . .”

“The sort of feelings that we’d have towards—say—a dog capable of coherent speech?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“I could be wrong, Captain. I most probably am. This is the first time that I’ve eavesdropped on a non-organic mind. There seems to be a strong sense of . . . mission . . .”

“
Mission?
”

“Yes. It reminds me of that priest we carried a few trips back—the one who was going out to convert the heathen Tarvarkens . . .”

“A dirty business,” commented Grimes. “Wean the natives away from their own, quite satisfactory local gods so that they stop lobbing missiles at the trading post, which was established without their consent anyhow . . .”