“Why haven’t they burned us out already? They could burn the whole mountain if they wanted to. They’ve got the laser for it, and the fire bombs… Whatever it would take…”
Burn… destroy. The disequilibrium it experienced supplied the connection, and the laser turned on, touched the rock at the end of the passage and vaporised it. The laser went off. It waited.
“My God!” the interpreter whispered. “What happened? Why did it do that?”
Luo put aside his fear. Brusquely he said, “Delayed response. I don’t know why. At least we know now that it does take verbal orders. Maybe we still can get that outpost before the reinforcements get here and get us.”
Its ability to abstract was growing. It understood “get us” as meaning destroy us. It was part of “us”. When the interpreter ordered it to come, it moved along the passages on its wheels, switching to the treads outside on the rocky ground. The next test of the laser demonstrated that it had an effective range of two miles.
They worked feverishly with it after that, a team busy with it around the clock, testing its abilities, adding new ones. It was taught to hurl bombs, and had an effective range of over a mile; it was taught to use the laser as an interceptor, knocking stones from the sky effortlessly, even when they rained from twenty hands simultaneously. None of them touched it.
And when they were not actively teaching it, it continued to learn, recording, tracking, assimilating constantly. The supply of data in the chemical units grew, and as cross references became more and more complex, circuits were reassigned to relieve some of the load. One entire circuit was reserved for data that thus far served no useful purpose in the second order purpose of maintaining self. This circuit stored bits of poetry, bird songs, the soft voices of men singing of loneliness, data about light reflections and sunsets, data about growing things, the spiral of unfolding flowers, unfurling leaves, mosses heavy and velvety with water glistening on them. They continued to direct it in World Group English, but everything said within its audio range was recorded to be transferred later to the chemical units. It learned of war and killing, and all the various names that try to hide the fact of killing. It learned that the enemy must be destroyed, subdued, captured, countered; all these things to it meant the enemy must be killed. It learned that in order to continue to live, one first must kill the enemy, and for the first time it had a glimmering of a first order purpose.
For two days the men made their way from the cavern, through the forests, to take up their positions grouped about the compound of the WG forces. The relief ship had been spotted in space, a message had been smuggled from the port to the rebel bands. The relief ship would land in six days. The battle must take place before it got within firing range. The third day the motored contingent left the cave, and rolling along with it was the robot. It understood this part. In the camp was the fuel it needed for the spaceship. In the camp was the enemy that must be killed before the enemy destroyed it.
Through the interpreter it was given its orders: the weapons must be destroyed; the shells must not be allowed to hit the men; the lasers they would start to use must be destroyed at the origin…
The rebels numbered seven hundred men; inside the compound there were four hundred fighting men. The commander learned of the assault only when the air was thick with shells and grenades. The rebels had no modern weapons, only those things they had been able to forge in the two years since the arrival of the WG forces. The commander felt more irritation at the attack than unease. He ordered full return of the fire, responding with weapons of superior fire power, but not different in kind. He also ordered immediate air cover and bombings if they should prove necessary. The rebels were still miles away in the forests, hiding behind the virtually impenetrable walls of the trees. The defence of the compound was under the control of a master computer that directed laser fire to intercept the incoming bombs, so actually the compound was in no danger. However, he knew he would have to hold a full inquiry about the attack, determine how the rebels had got within range without detection, where they had got their weapons, et cetera. It was a bloody bore.
He paused to watch the aeroplanes leaping in a vertical ascent into the cobalt sky, and there, one by one, vanishing in a puff of smoke and steam. Two of them were gone before he could bring himself to admit what he was seeing, and by then it was too late. If he had put through a message for help in the first three minutes of the attack, the rebels might have been routed, if not by his troops, then by arriving reinforcements, but he had not put through such a call. He had been contemptuous of the weapons and the ability of the rebels to use them. He had been unsuspecting about the laser they had managed to get, and he never would have been able to admit belief in their ability to use a laser correctly. In all instances he had judged wrongly.
The rebels had started to fire before they were in range so that the robot would be able to track the return fire and destroy the weapons firing on them. Within the robot the computer worked, tracking, and the laser turned to the source of the shells, burned through the compound walls, through buildings, men, vehicles, to the guns themselves to play over them, turning them red, then white, then leaving nothing at all. The WG computer had been programmed to intercept only; it did not search out the other laser, but merely touched shell after shell in the air. Before the commander could get the computer director on the screen of his communications unit, the WG computer was touched by the red light, and where it had been a cloud of steam arose. The red light touched other pieces of equipment and there were no more communications facilities in the base. The infra-red of the robot found men, who were the enemy, and the men ceased to exist. By the time Trol caught up with it, along with Luo and the interpreter, less than fifty men remained in the WG base. The robot stopped firing at a command from Luo. It waited.
There was fuel in the base. They would teach it about fuels and then it would replenish the supply in its ship. It scanned: “A ship is useless without a full supply of fuel at all times.” It would wait until they taught it about fuel.
Luo took the robot inside the base with him and placed it in a storeroom where he left it. He was needed, as were all the men, for the task of cleaning out the base, transporting everything they could see back to the mountain cave. Trol was busy with the records and for the first time came to realise what the reinforcements were that the outpost had been expecting.
“It’s one of those energy screens that they used on their ships,” he said to Luo, showing him the orders and specifications. His blue eyes blazed. “With such a screen, and the robot, we could drive all of them off Tensor before they could even know what hit them!”
“We’d have to re-establish contact, keep up the illusion that all is well…”
“We can say a lightning storm struck…”
In the storeroom the robot stood unmoving. The compound was five miles long, four miles wide; it could record everything taking place within the walls. It became aware of the properties of atomic engines, of fuel conversion, using almost any material at hand. It tested its knowledge about the enemy and found that it had no reference as to how the enemy differed from other men. It could not distinguish the enemy by itself. It scanned furiously seeking a clue to the identification of the enemy. The enemy was that which wanted to destroy it. Many men tried to destroy it. Many men were the enemy. Which ones? It had no data that allowed it to group them. It must wait. There was no time between events, merely the recording that never ceased while there was anything to be recorded.
There was no time between events. Luo returned with equipment. A plane had arrived, the enemy from the plane had been destroyed, things had been stored, were being taken now to the mountain cave. Luo had more of the same equipment. The robot recorded; its receptors were aware of things being done to it. Each receptor added its bit of information and a picture emerged. Some of its circuits were being dismantled. The circuit to the laser pulsed; the feedback probed as it scanned and decided this was not a threat. Luo touched a button and energy flowed through the new equipment; it could sense the drain. One pair of waldoes hung uselessly, the circuit pre-empted; the second pair had a weakened flow of energy, and the third, the flex-able digits, had been tampered with so that the energy it would have required in order to activate them was inaccessible, shorted out.