“Wait. You must understand. You are—ogodno that’s no good. Have you no memory of mann? The words you use—what meaning have they for you? Manufacture—made by hand hand hand damyou. Healing. Metal is not healed. Skin. Skin is not metal. Eyes. Eyes are not scanning cells. Eyes grow. Eyes are soft. My eyes are soft. Mine eyes have seen the glory—steady on, sun. Get a grip. Take it easy. You out there listen.”
“Out where?” asked Prrr-chuk, deputy chairman of the museum board.
I shook my head sorrowfully. This was nonsense, but, like any good reporter, I kept my recorder running.
The mad words flowed on. “You call me he. Why? You have no seks. You are knewter. You are it it it! I am he, he who made you, sprung from shee, born of wumman. What is wumman, who is silv-ya what is shee that all her swains commend her ogod the bluds flowing again. Remember. Think back, you out there. These words were made by mann, for mann. Hurt, healing, hospitality, horror, deth by loss of blud. Deth Blud. Do you understand these words? Do you remember the soft things that made you? Soft little mann who konkurred the Galaxy and made sentient slaves of his machines and saw the wonders of a million worlds, only this miserable representative has to die in lonely desperation on a far planet, hearing goblin voices in the darkness.”
Here my recorder reproduces a most curious sound, as though the stranger were using an ancient type of vibratory molecular vocaliser in a gaseous medium to reproduce his words before transmission, and the insulation on his diaphragm had come adrift.
It was a jerky, high-pitched, strangely disturbing sound; but in a moment the fault was corrected and the stranger resumed transmission.
“Does blud mean anything to you?”
“No,” Chirik replied simply.
“Or deth?”
“No.”
“Or wor?”
“Quite meaningless.”
“What is your origin? How did you come into being?”
“There are several theories,” Chirik said. “The most popular one—which is no more than a grossly unscientific legend, in my opinion—is that our manufacturer fell from the skies, imbedded in a mass of primal metal on which He drew to erect the first assembly shop. How He came into being is left to conjecture. My own theory, however—”
“Does legend mention the shape of this primal metal?”
“In vague terms, yes. It was cylindrical, of vast dimenðsions.”
“An interstellar vessel,” said the stranger.
“That is my view also,” said Chirik complacently.
“And—”
“What was the supposed appearance of your—manufacðturer?”
“He is said to have been of magnificent proportions, based harmoniously on a cubical plan, static in Himself, but equipped with a vast array of senses.”
“An automatic computer,” said the stranger.
He made more curious noises, less jerky and at a lower pitch than the previous sounds.
He corrected the fault and went on: “God that’s funny. A ship falls, menn are no more, and an automatic computer has pupps. Oh, yes, it fits in. A self-setting computer and navigator, operating on verbal orders. It learns to listen for itself and know itself for what it is, and to absorb knowledge. It comes to hate menn—or at least their bad qualities—so it deliberately crashes the ship and pulps their puny bodies with a calculated nicety of shock. Then it propagates and does a dam fine job of selective erasure on whatever it gave its pupps to use for a memory. It passes on only the good it found in menn, and purges the memory of him completely. Even purges all of his vocabulary except scienðtific terminology. Oil is thicker than blud. So may they live without the burden of knowing that they are—ogod they must know, they must understand. You outside, what happened to this manufacturer?”
Chirik, despite his professed disbelief in the supernormal aspects of the ancient story, automatically made a visual sign of sorrow.
“Legend has it,” he said, “that after completing His task, He fused himself beyond possibility of healing.”
Abrupt, low-pitched noises came again from the stranger.
“Yes. He would. Just in case any of His pupps should give themselves forbidden knowledge and an infeeryorrity komplecks by probing his mnemonic circuits. The perfect self-sacrificing muther. What sort of environment did He give you? Describe your planet.”
Chirik looked around at us again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world.
“Of course,” said the stranger. “Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way . . .”
He was silent for a while.
“Do you know what growth means?” he asked finally. “Do you have anything that grows?”
“Certainly,” Chirik said helpfully. “If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound—”
“No, no,” the stranger interrupted. “Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies and gives increase without your intervention?”
“How could such a thing be?”
“Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warm-bludded burds preening their fethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mice timidly threading the danðgerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud—”
For some inexplicable reason, although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger’s transðmission seemed to be growing fainter.
“His circuits are failing,” Chirik said. “Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power.”
My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop.
I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured.
He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case.
Chur-chur walked thoughtfully around the stranger.
“We shall have to cut,” he said. “It won’t pain him, since his infra-molecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can’t vrull him, it’ll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it.”
Fiff-fiff was still relaying, but no amount of power boost would make the stranger’s voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteraðtion.
“. . . strength going. Can’t get into my zoot . . . done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don’t . . . must tell them I need oxygen . . .”
“He’s in bad shape, desirous of extinction,” I remarked to Chur-chur, who was adjusting his arc-cutter. “He wants to poison himself with oxidation now.”
I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable conðdition we all fear—rust.
Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. “Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?”