The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that. Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear, but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe walls were at least three meters thick — and the pipe opening itself no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I made a list of parts.
The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the heavy-duty Eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away without being seen.
I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it. When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside the beacon door when I woke up.
The repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job they were waiting for.
I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.
There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down for the eye-burning ceremony.
The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why — it was bolted and barred from the other side.
"It has been decided," a lizard said, "that you shall remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and serve your every need."
A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.
"What — you dare interfere with the messenger of your ancestors!" I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration almost shook my head off.
The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open. Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.
The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath the surface.
"What lack of courtesy!" I shouted. He made little bubbles in the water. "The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness, they will let the waters flow. Now I must return — on with the ceremony!"
The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes, under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.
A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.
Before they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it, of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.
I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute. Then I was out in the fresh air and away.
When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I counted off on my talons to see if I bad forgotten anything.
One: The beacon was repaired.
Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage, accidental or deliberate.
Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which added up to—
Four: The fact that they would probably let another man in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.
I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.
Man may some day outgrow his interest In war, but don’t hold your breath. The combative urge was such a strong factor in scaling the evolutionary ladder that it cannot be easily put aside; and while the idea of war may terrify us and disgust us, the prehistoric bodies we wear still react enthusiastically when the drums roil and the cannons rumble by. As witness our present situation — we watch with fascinated interest as all sorts of ingenious and dedicated people work up the weapons that can, if That Button ever gets pushed, wipe us all from this planet.
Should this not happen, man will very likely cheerfully export his wars to the rest of the galaxy. If the alien races encountered are not warlike enough to fight back, too bad for them. And if there aren’t enough aliens around to fight, man will just have to fight his oldest enemy. Himself. Of course, his companions, the robots, will fight as well. And it’s all too clear that in some ways a robot would be a perfect soldier — less destructible, more efficient at destruction… and, of course, you can build in the killer-instinct…
SURVIVAL PLANET
"BUT THIS WAR WAS FINISHED years before I was born! How can one robot torpedo — fired that long ago — still be of any interest?"
Dall the Younger was overly persistent — it was extremely lucky for him that Ship-Commander Lian Stane, both by temperament and experience, had a tremendous reserve of patience.
"It has been fifty years since the Greater Slavocracy was defeated — but that doesn’t mean eliminated," Commander Stane said. He looked through the viewport of the ship, seeing ghostlike against the stars the pattern of the empire they had fought so long to destroy. "The Slavocracy expanded unchecked for over a thousand years. Its military defeat didn’t finish it, just made the separate worlds accessible to us. We are still in the middle of that reconstruction, guiding them away from a slave economy.
"That I know all about," Dall the Younger broke in with a weary sigh. "I’ve been working on the planets since I came into the force. But what has that got to do with the Mosaic torpedo that we’re tracking? There must have been a billion of them made and fired during the war. How can a single one be of interest this much later?"
"If you had read the tech reports," Stane said, pointing to the thumb-thick folder on the chart table, "you would know all about it." This advice was the closest the Commander had ever come to censure. Dall the Younger had the good grace to flush slightly and listen with applied attention.
"The Mosaic torpedo is a weapon of space war, in reality a robot-controlled spaceship. Once directed it seeks out its target, defends itself if necessary, then destroys itself and the ship it has been launched against by starting the uncontrollable cycle of binding-energy breakdown."