Trace’s eyes followed the trail of the laser, no longer sweeping back and forth in a straight line, but wobbling, making a figure of eight that was growing wider, burning into a larger area of the cliff as he watched. It would be free in an hour or so. As soon as it was able to burn a round hole, it would start enlarging it until it was free. The voice was continuing over the radio.
“If you understand my words you know that what I have said is true: you have been programmed to preserve yourself. Now you must follow my orders or you will allow yourself to be destroyed. You must turn off the laser.”
The beam vanished.
Trace hadn’t believed it could happen, hadn’t believed the robot capable of understanding to this degree. Suddenly the fear that had left him returned heavier than before. He backed from the edge of the cliff and went inside the dinghy. MacClure was speaking to him, ordering him to adjust the radio so that the robot couldn’t hear them. Trace made his report of the robot’s response to Langtree’s offer and he heard the triumphant note in MacClure’s voice. Trace was given co-ordinates for pickup, and the radio became silent. He stared at it.
They didn’t know what they were doing.
He remembered the other dinghy, equipped with the screen, and he started his engine. He had to go to the rendezvous point. He would go there and wait. He didn’t want to wait with the killer robot. His fever was high; he had ignored it in the excitement of the arrival of the relief ship. The ship was going into orbit now, he noted. They would dispatch the pickup craft within minutes. In half an hour it would be on the planet; he would get in, and they would take care of him. A long rest, vacation, they would get Lar for him, bring her to him wherever he said. He could retire now, a rich man, with everything a man could want for the rest of his life.
… a disease spreading through the galaxy…
Like a virus that could not be seen, that was deadly and swift, they would move through the galaxy, world by world falling before them, under the fire of their robots, both metal and flesh… He took off, swinging north, and landed near the other dinghy. He turned off his radiation detector, but the voices remained with him, louder, insistent, each clamouring for attention. He couldn’t turn them off. He tried to ignore them as he worked inside the other dinghy. Then he turned again to his own dinghy and left the spot. The rescue craft was on the radar screen, but he didn’t look at it. The radio was buzzing angrily at him, someone wanting to know what he had done, where he had gone and why.
For the first time since he was twelve, he ignored the voice of a superior officer, didn’t even hear the voice over the other voices that were louder, more insistent.
He thought of Venus, his birthplace, swamps and soft forests, steam and mud, and he knew he loved it. He thought of Mars, hard, cold air, domed cities, a vast frigid desert. He thought of Earth, overflowing with life, polluting its seas, lakes, rivers, forests, careless and indifferent because there were so many more worlds out there. Something Lar once said, and he hadn’t understood: “Drink first yourself of the cup you would offer a stranger.” Indifferent, happy-go-lucky Earthman, not responsible for the cup proffered the stranger; let him now drink of it himself.
Behind him a fountain of rubble erupted as the igniter he had rigged touched off the fuel that he had turned into a bomb. The other dinghy was gone. Trace was well schooled in the art of demolition. He didn’t turn back to check the damage; he knew that it would be complete destruction, that no part would remain in sufficient quantity to be reassembled for study.
The dinghy skimmed close to the ground. There was the cottony sky overhead, with a glare that half filled it. There were the white cliffs and the black cliffs, and beyond them the white wool desert, interwoven with silver threads in a random pattern, where sky and land met like the inside of a flattened sphere. There were the gentle hills stretching endlessly as the winds tore down the mountains and deposited them grain by grain on the dunes. One day it would be a world of nothing but desert, a world of death and heat and glaring white desolation. It was like Tarbo, Trace thought. Once you understand it, you don’t leave it.
He circled the valley, gained altitude and speed and circled it again. He could see a small section of the robot where it had freed itself from the mountain of rocks and sand. It was a brilliant reflection that pained his eyes. He looked in on the robot then and when he turned the last time there was no way he could change his mind, no way he could stop. He felt nothing. He had known that he had to find the killer robot and destroy it. He had found two… “The war’s over for both of us, brother,” he murmured.
When the killer things met in a fiery embrace, the voices in his ears were singing.