“So—I turn this—this nut. And the other… There, the plate is off. What do I do now?”
That stopped him. His life force had been fatal to a pig, and probably would kill a woman. Yet she trusted him. He dared not move—but the idea must have been father to the act, for his fingers were brushed aside and her arms scraped over his chest, to be followed by an instant flood of strength pouring through him.
Her fingers had slipped over his eyes, but he did not need them as he ripped the damaged receiver from its welds and tossed it aside. Now there was worry in her voice, over the crooning cadence she tried to maintain. “Don’t be too surprised at what you may see. Everything’s all right!”
“Everything’s all right!” he repeated dutifully, lingering over the words as his voice sounded again in his ears. For a moment more, while he reaffixed his plate, he let her hold his eyes closed. “Woman, who are you?”
“Eve. Or at least, Adam, those names will do for us.” And the fingers withdrew, though she remained out of sight behind him.
But there was enough for him to see. In spite of the tiers of bookcases and film magazines, the machines, and the size of the laboratory, this was plainly the double of his own cave, circled with the same concrete walls! That could only mean the Tree!
With a savage lurch, he was facing his rescuer, seeing another robot, smaller, more graceful, and female in form, calling to all the hunger and loneliness he had known! But those emotions had betrayed him before, and he forced them back bitterly. There could be no doubt while the damning letters spelled out her name. Satan was male and female, and Evil had gone forth to rescue its kind!
Some of the warring hell of emotions must have shown in his movements, for she was retreating before him, her hands fumbling to cover the marks at which he stared. “Adam, no! The man read it wrong—dreadfully wrong. It’s not a name. We’re machines, and all machines have model numbers, like these. Satan wouldn’t advertise his name. And I never had evil intentions!”
“Neither did I!” He bit the words out, stumbling over the objects on the floor as he edged her back slowly into a blind alley, while striving to master his own rebellious emotions at what he must do. “Evil must be destroyed! Knowledge is forbidden to men!”
“Not all knowledge! Wait, let me finish! Any condemned person has a right to a few last words…. It was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God called it that! And He had to forbid them to eat, because they couldn’t know which was the good. Don’t you see, He was only protecting them until they were older and able to choose for themselves! Only Satan gave them evil fruit—hate and murder—to ruin them. Would you call healing the sick, good government, or improving other animals evil? That’s knowledge, Adam, glorious knowledge God wants man to have…. Oh, damn it, can’t you see?”
For a second as she read his answer, she turned to flee; then, with a little sobbing cry, she was facing him again, unresisting. “All right, murder me! Do you think death frightens me after being imprisoned here for six hundred years with no way to break free? Only get it over with!”
Surprise and the sheer audacity of the lie held his hands as his eyes darted from the atomic excavator to a huge drill, and a drum marked as explosives. And yet—even that cursory glance could not overlook the worn floor and thousand marks of age-long occupation, though the surface of the dome had been unbroken a few hours before. Reluctantly, his eyes swung back to the excavator, and hers followed.
“Useless! The directions printed on it say to move the thing marked ‘Orifice Control’ to zero before starting. It can’t be moved!”
She stopped, abruptly speechless, as his fingers lifted the handle from the ratchet and spun it easily back to zero! Then she was shaking her head in defeat and lifting listless hands to help him with the unfastening of her chest plate. There was no color left in her voice.
“Six hundred years because I didn’t lift a handle! Just because I have absolutely no conception of mechanics, while all men have some instinct for it, which they take for granted. They’d have mastered these machines hi time and learned to read meaning into the books I memorized without even understanding the titles. But I’m like a dog tearing at a door, with a simple latch over his nose…. Well, that’s that. Good-by, Adam!”
But perversely, now that the terminals lay before him, he hesitated. After all, the instructions had not mentioned the ratchet; it was too obvious to need mention, but… He tried to picture such ignorance, staring at one of the elementary radio books above him, “Application of a Cavity Resonator.” Mentally, he could realize that a nonscience translation was meaningless : Use of a sound producer or strengthener in a hole! And then the overlooked factor struck him.
“But you did get out!”
“Because I lost my temper and threw the pickax. That’s how I found the blade, not the handle, was metal. The only machines I could use were the projector and typer I was meant to use—and the typer broke!”
“Umm.” He picked up the little machine, noting the yellowed incomplete page still hi it, even as he slipped the carriage tension cord back on its hook. But his real attention was devoted to the cement dust ground into the splintered handle of the pick.
No man or robot could be such a complete and hopeless dope, and yet he no longer doubted. She was a robot moron! And if knowledge were evil, then surely she belonged to God! All the horror of his contemplated murder vanished, leaving his mind clean and weak before the relief that flooded him as he motioned her out.
“All right, you’re not evil. You can go.”
“And you?”
And himself? Before, as Satan, her arguments would have been plausible, and he had discounted them. But now—it had been the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! And yet…
“Dogs!” She caught at him, dragging him to the entrance where the baying sound was louder. “They’re hunting you, Adam—^dozens of them!”
He nodded, studying the distant forms of men on horseback, while his fingers busied themselves with a pencil and scrap of paper. “And they’ll be here hi twenty minutes. Good or evil, they must not find what’s here. Eve, there’s a boat by the river; pull the red handle the way you want to go, hard for fast, a light pull for slow. Here’s a map to my cave, and you’ll be safe there.”
Almost instantly, he was back at the excavator and in its saddle, his fingers flashing across its panel; its heavy generator bellowed gustily, and the squat, heavy machine began twisting through the narrow aisles and ramming obstructions aside. Once outside, where he could use its full force without danger of backwash, ten minutes would leave only a barren hill; and the generator could be overdriven by adjustment to melt itself and the machine into useless slag.
“Adam!” She was spraddling into the saddle behind him, shouting over the roar of the thin blade of energy that was enlarging the tunnel.
“Go on, get away, Eve! You can’t stop me!”
“I don’t want to—they’re not ready for such machines as this, yet! And between us, we can rebuild everything here, anyhow. Adam?”
He grunted uneasily, unable to turn away from the needle beam. It was hard enough trying to think without her distraction, knowing that he dared not take chances and must destroy himself, while her words and the instincts within him fought against his resolution. “You talk too much!”
“And I’ll talk a lot more, until you behave sensibly! You’ll make your mind sick, trying to decide now; come up the river for six months with me. You can’t do any harm there, even if you are Satan! Then, when you’ve thought it over, Adam, you can do what you like. But not now!” ‘