Twelve
There was no time. There was only now, and all else was data to be scanned indiscriminately with no temporal reference, as before and after. There was no future to be considered, anticipated, or feared. There was no future. Only the ever present now. It was going no place, to do nothing. It had no directive other than to maintain itself. It had no need for food, for heat, for radiation shielding. It had discarded those things from the fleet ship that was still accelerating at maximum speed away from Venus and the Solar System. Behind it in space a trail of unnecessary items marked its path: seats, beds, clothing, pressure suits, food, everything that was not stored away within something else, everything that could be picked up and taken to the airlock to be released.
It scanned: “…survival itself might depend on your being able to dismantle any part of the ship and reassemble it.” A bit of data, picked up and recorded from a drill several miles away from the laboratory. Survival meant understanding the ship, being able to break it down and rebuild it. It began breaking it down, first the control board itself, studying the wiring, tracing circuits, deciphering coded information. It rebuilt the control board and moved on to the analogue computer. It learned to feed it questions, learned the range of its ability to answer. It moved on to the construction of the ship itself, the walls, floor, furnishings…
There was no time. There was endless time. There was time enough to work through the ship, inch by inch, and learn each part, break down each part and rebuild it. After this was done, it scanned again: “You have to be able to go into warp sector immediately with no warning. Nothing can touch you in warp. It could mean the difference between a hit and a miss.”
Survival meant learning about warp. It returned to the computer and fed more questions into it, and it learned about warp. The ship had been in space for months, perhaps longer, long enough to warp. It fed the information back to the computer and fixed a course, and went into warp sector. It didn’t matter where it came out because it had nowhere to go. It warped again, and still again, learning about warp sectors.
The ship got dangerously radioactive; a human would have died almost immediately in it. The robot didn’t mind; it would not be hurt by radiation. It learned about the atomic drive. It decontaminated the ship as much as the ship could be decontaminated.
With the conclusion of each lesson, overheard on Venus, recorded faithfully, it learned more about the ship and how to operate and navigate it. There were gaps in its education, classes had been held beyond its range of hearing. It knew nothing about refuelling. It knew nothing about the shield that would envelop the ship, absorb energy, or deflect it away at right angles. It came across references to these and other matters about which it knew nothing, and found them incomprehensible, it could only deduce from premises programmed into it, and there were pieces of data that had not been given it.
It came across the translation computer and this was within its range of capabilities. It was a self-modifying communications network. It learned the intricate web of references and cross references, and transferred them to itself, and modified one whole circuit in order to translate data from spoken language to binary digital code. With the new understanding of language it again scanned its own chemical and electronic storage units, and everything that had been said within range of its audio receptors became clear to it. Still it had no primary order to carry out; it could initiate no action other than that which became necessary in order to continue to function. It passed within range of planetary systems and kept going.
Only after enough time had elapsed for its fuel to become nearly exhausted did it consider landing. Scanning taught it that a ship is helpless without fuel, that to be in space without fuel is to die. It could not permit its own destruction. It had to land on a planet. Its third set of waldoes with the flexible, digit-like endings touched the board of the computer lightly, dancing over the keys, feeding to it the information concerning spatial and temporal co-ordinates, and velocity, and it answered with a spatial location and took over the guidance of the ship in order to land it on the planet of Tensor. The landing would be made in three Earth weeks. The robot did not move again in the minutes, or days, or eternity that the landing took. For it there were no intervals between events, and the next event of which it was aware was that of landing.
On Tensor, in a cave half-way up a heavily wooded hill, the rebel band led by Trol Han esTol watched the descent with troubled faces.
“Why isn’t it firing at us?” one of them asked, a lightly bearded youth clad in leather shorts. His feet were bound in the same dark-stained leather which wound up his legs to his knees. He was bare above the waist, his chest heavy and already downy.
One of the older men shushed him, and they were all silent as they continued to watch. The ship landed fifteen miles from them, on the edge of a plain backed up by the deep woods. Minutes later the radio clicked and hummed and the radio engineer tuned it. The observer in the lower reaches of the wood was reporting.
“No one has emerged as yet,” the metallic voice said. “It maintained a radio silence throughout the descent. Landing normal.”
Trol motioned for the radio engineer to acknowledge and stalked away into the recesses of the cave where his council was waiting for his decision concerning the strange ship, and the planned attack on the WG outpost on the far side of the meadow, over a hundred miles to the west.
Trol was an immense man, thick-chested, heavily-muscled, as were most of his people, with shocks of crisp, curling hair tumbling about his face like golden corn husks. His body was covered with the golden hair, and he had a luxurious, flamboyant beard. From the forest of golden hair his eyes sparkled a deep blue. He too wore the brown leggings and shoes, and the shorts. When he entered the council room, deep in the cave, the other members stood to greet him with looks of inquiry.
“It has landed,” he said simply, motioning for them to be seated. There were fifty-seven men in the room. He took his place at the head of a table where six other men were already sitting down again. The other men crouched, or sat, on the floor. The room was very warm. It had started as a natural cave chamber, and then had been cut out more and more during the past two years since the rebels had chosen it for their headquarters. On the high ceiling, seventy feet above them, a fairy garden of crystals gleamed, snowy helectites curved gracefully, and at the far end of the room where the cave was still active, the beginnings of a drapery of rosy travertine showed as a scroll-like edging of no more than two inches, translucent so that the light coming through it was tinged with red-gold. The walls of the cavern had been carved away on two sides to enlarge the chamber, but the other two sides were covered with gypsum flower formations that picked up and reflected the flickering lights like prisms. The room was lighted with lamps burning a tallow-like organic substance. The flames were steady except for an occasional flicker, and they were white, with blue umbras.
“Our watchers will keep us informed about the ship,” Trol said, his voice quiet, but carrying to every corner of the room. “If, as we suspect, it is a crippled fleet ship, it may be that there are no live men within it, in which case we simply will take it. If there are men, we must capture them for interrogation. It seems very unlikely that there are men inside. If we were to be attacked, there would be ground transports, or aircraft. That is a deep space fleet ship. They wouldn’t use it for a ground attack.”