If that sounds like moral wishy-washiness, so be it. I’d rather be considered wishy-washy than be considered an enemy of knowledge. There are always some risks in making discoveries; but we’d still be living in caves and eating our meat raw if somebody, somewhere along the line, hadn’t taken the risk of using his brain. The big difference here is that these gadgets aren’t the products of slow, patient human toil, developed within the context of our civilization. They’re coming to us all in one shot as hand-me-downs from a vastly more mature and complex race. Whether we’re capable of handling such things at this stage in our development is yet to be seen.
I repeat: it’s not our decision to make. Like Pontius Pilate in that episode in the Near East twenty-four centuries ago, we wash our hands of the matter and accept no blame for what follows. It’s our job to find things, and we can’t help it if they may be dangerous.
Somehow, though humans are a chimpo lot, I’m not really worried. If we haven’t succeeded in blowing ourselves up by A.D. 2376, we’re probably going to make out all right.
Maybe.
It’s January 14, and we’ve made contact with the cruiser. It’ll be landing shortly to pick us up. We won’t go immediately to McBurney’s Star; the cruiser has its own route to consider. But it will take us (and Ludwig’s ship, riding piggyback through ultraspace) to the Aldebaran system, where we can hire an outbound ultradrive ship to get us where we want to go.
The stash from the mercury mine isn’t going to cover all this. We’d better come up with a uranium mountain the next time.
Three weeks more have passed since I last put down this cube. It’s February 8, and we’ve just completed a two-day stop at Aldebaran IX. Aldebaran is a big red thing, rather handsome, and it has a pack of planets, several of them colonized. We didn’t sightsee. We didn’t even land, in fact. Dr. Schein handled the whole thing by radio, arranging for an immediately outbound ultraspace cruiser to take us to McBurney’s Star. We are currently hanging in orbit around Al-debaran IX in Nick Ludwig’s ship, waiting for the cruiser to come up and meet us; Nick will once again piggyback his little ship to the cruiser and off we’ll
go.
This is the first time we’ve been within reach of a TP communications net since leaving Higby V. So Dr. Schein has sent a full report on our discoveries back to Galaxy Central. I hope everybody is duly croggled by the amazing news.
I wish I had been able to find some excuse for putting a skull-to-skull call through to you, Lorie. I want so much to say hello, to tell you what a grand time I’m having, how well we’re doing. But you know that private chitchat by TP is prohibitively expensive, especially calling Earth from Aldebaran. My biggest hope is that you’ve taken part in the relay work on some of our messages and that you know a little of what we’re up to.
We leave tonight for McBurney’s Star. They calculate that we’ll be there by the end of the month.
February 30
Right on the old zogger! Here it is the last day of the month, and here we are in orbit around the fourth world of the McBurney system. The ultradrive crew, as usual, didn’t stay even for a peek. More fools they.
The view is fabulous. You can sposh your mind looking at that planet from up here, maybe ten thousand kilometers out in space. The survey team that whizzed through this system in 2280 ought to be resurrected and flayed for failing to spot what’s down there on McBurney IV.
It’s a complete planet-wide city of the High Ones. Not a crumpled ancient relic, but a clean, functioning, perfectly preserved living city. We can see vehicles moving, construction under way, lights going on and off.
What we can’t see are any High Ones. We’ve given the planet a thorough scanning in the hour since we got here, and Dihn Ruuu has had a look with its own scanning equipment, which is superior to ours. We and the robot conclude that McBurney IV is populated by plenty of robots. But if there are any Mirt Korp Ahm down there, they’re hidden from view.
Dihn Ruuu, faithful to the end, tells us stubbornly that we’re going to find High Ones here. For once we’re all in agreement that the robot’s wrong. It seems pretty clear to us that McBurney IV is another case of machines in perpetual motion: a planet inhabited by robots with an infinite life-span, waiting as Dihn Ruuu waited for the masters to come back. The masters, though, have been extinct for upward of half a billion years, but since the robots haven’t been programmed to consider such a possibility, they just go on and on and on about their chores, keeping the place in good trim, waiting, waiting, waiting some more.
We may be all wrong, naturally. What the zog: we may very well find the High Ones still in business on McBurney IV after all this time. This trip has produced so many surprises already that it isn’t safe to rule out any possibility. Nevertheless, I don’t really think the Mirt Korp Ahm have survived into our own era. And, as I said many months ago, I’m not sure I’d like to run into them if they did. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever found myself face to face with one of the superbeings who built this civilization. Fall flat on my snout and pay homage, I guess. It would be something like meeting a god. My company manners aren’t up to meeting gods.
We’ll know soon enough, because Dihn Ruuu is now trying to make radio contact with his fellow robots on the planet below, so that they don’t blast us out of the sky as we try to land. If all goes well we’ll be going into our entry orbit within the hour.
Dihn Ruuu has obtained landing permission for us. We’re on our way down.
FIFTEEN
March 10,
2376 McBurney IV
We didn’t make a powered landing; the robots wouldn’t let us. Communicating with Dihn Ruuu via the ship’s radio, they ordered us to cut our engines and submit to proxy control from below.
Mild crisis.
“Like zog I will,” Nick Ludwig shouted. “Turn my ship over to unknown alien forces? Risk everybody’s life? Either I land this on my own heat or I’m not landing!”
Dihn Ruuu said, “They refuse to permit anything else. You must realize that they have no knowledge of your competence as a pilot. All they see is a strange ship.”
Nick blustered some more. Dr. Schein mildly suggested that Nick had better give in. When Nick threatened to turn around and leave, Dr. Schein just as mildly began to talk about breach of contract. He brought up in an oblique way the question of the piece of the mercury mine that we had promised the spaceman, and other likesuch variosities. Nick yielded. He looked like he was ready to go nova, but he yielded.
Some five thousand meters from planetfall he cut the engines and we slipped back into a parking orbit. Then the robots grabbed us from below. As if yanking on us with a giant magnet, they pulled us out of orbit and guided us down. We were completely inertialess: just floating toward McBurney IV under no means of acceleration, but making a pretty good velocity. Nick Ludwig invited us up front to look at his instruments. I’ve never seen a man more perplexed. “What are they going to do?” he asked. “Catch us in a net? We’re building up speed at what looks like a one-g acceleration, but where’s the acceleration? Where are the laws of physics?”
Repealed, I guess. All the tonnage of our ship was nothing more than a straw on the wind, a sliver of iron in a magnetic field. We went down and down and down in a dreamy way and came to rest, gently, easily, in the precise center of a huge bullseye target where we were surrounded by gaunt, spidery rings of instruments, stretching away for hundreds of meters on every side. Golden loops and coils and towers and cross-hatched antennae hemmed us in: the equipment that had plucked us from the sky and set us down, no doubt. Nick Ludwig, pale and dazed, stared at all this in distress. It was an article of faith for poor Nick that planetary landings were to be made according to the principles of Newton, with thrust balancing pull, de-celeration canceling acceleration. But this landing was pure magic. Inertialess acceleration indeed!