The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper (read out loud books TXT) 📖

a pity there really wasn't a Merlin. If this kept on nothing else would be able to figure out who owned how much stock in what.

They found the on-the-job engineering office for the ship in a small dome half a mile from the construction dock. Yves Jacquemont and Mack Vibart and Schalk Retief moved in and buried themselves to the ears in specifications and blueprints. The others formed into parties of three or four, and began looking about production facilities for material. There was a steel mill a mile from the construction site; it was almost fully robotic. Iron ore went in at one end, and finished sheet steel and girders and deck plates came out at the other, and a dozen men could handle the whole thing. There was a collapsium plant; there were machine-shops and forging-shops. Every time they finished inspecting one, Yves Jacquemont would have a list of half a dozen more plants that he wanted found and examined yesterday morning at the latest.

Some of them were in a frightful mess; work had been suspended and everybody had gone away leaving everything as it was. Some were in perfect order, ready to go into operation again as soon as power was put on. It had depended, apparently, upon the personal character of whoever had been in charge in the end. The nuclear-electric power unit plant was in the latter class. The man in charge of it evidently hadn't believed in leaving messes behind, even if he didn't expect to come back.

It was built in the shape of a T. One side of the cross-stroke contained the cartridge-case plant, where presses formed sheet-steel cylinders, some as small as a round of[Pg 118] pistol ammunition and some the size of ten-gallon kegs. They moved toward the center on a production line, finally reaching a matter-collapser where they were plated with collapsium. From the other side, radioactive isotopes, mostly reactor-waste, came in through evacuated and collapsium-shielded chambers, were sorted, and finally, where the cross-arm of the T joined the downstroke, packed in the collapsium cases. The production line continued at right angles down the long building in which the apparatus which converted nuclear energy to electric current was assembled and packed; at the end, the finished power cartridges came off, big ones for heavy machines and tiny ones for things like hand tools and pocket lighters and razors. There were stacks of them, in all sizes, loaded on skids and ready to move out. Except for the minute and unavoidable leakage of current, they were as good as the day they were assembled, and would be for another century.

Like almost everything else, the power-cartridge plant was airtight and had its own oxygen-generator. The air-analyzer reported the oxygen insufficient to support life. That was understandable; there were a lot of furnaces which had evidently been hot when the power was cut off; they had burned up the oxygen before cooling. They put on their oxygen equipment when they got out of the car.

"I'll go back and have a look at the power plant," Matsui said. "If it's like the rest of this place, it'll be ready to go as soon as the reactors are started. I wish everybody here had left things like this."

"Well, we'll have to check everything to make sure nothing was left on when the main power was cut," Conn said. "Don't do anything back there till we give you the go-ahead."

Matsui nodded and set off on foot along the broad aisle in the middle. Conn looked around in the dim light that filtered through the dusty glass overhead. On either side of the central aisle were two production lines; between each pair, at intervals, stood massive machines which evidently fabricated parts for the power cartridges. Over them, and over the machines directly involved in production, were[Pg 119] receptor aerials, all oriented toward a stubby tower, twenty feet thick and fifty in height, topped by a hemispherical dome.

"That'll be the control tower for all the machinery in here," he decided. "Anse, suppose you and I go take a look at it."

"We'll take a look at the machines," Rivas said. "Clyde, you and I can work back on the right and then come down on the other side. You know anything about this stuff?"

"Me? Nifflheim, no," Nichols said. "I know a robo-control when I see one, and I know whether it's set to receive or not."

There was a self-powered lift inside the control tower. Conn and Anse rode it to the top and got out, Anse snapping on his flashlight. It was dark in the dome at the top; instead of windows there were viewscreens all around it. Five men had worked here; at least, there were four chairs at four intricate control panels, one for each of the four production lines, and a fifth chair in front of a number of communication screens. There was a heavy-duty power unit, turned off. Conn threw the switch. Lights came on inside, and the outside viewscreens lit.

They were examining the control-panels when Conn's belt radio buzzed. He plugged it in on his helmet. It was Mohammed Matsui.

"There's one big power plant back here," the engineer said. "Right in the middle. It only powers what's in front of it. There must be another one in either wing, for the isotope plant and the cartridge-case plant. I'll go look at them. But the power's been cut off from the machines in the main building. There's four big switches, one for each production line—"

He was interrupted by a shout, almost a shriek, from somewhere. It sounded like Jerry Rivas. A moment later, Rivas was clamoring:

"Conn! What did you turn on? Turn it off, right away!"

Anse jumped to the switch, pulling it with one hand and getting on his flashlight with the other. The lights went out and the screens went dark.[Pg 120]

"It's off."

"The dickens it is!" Rivas disputed. "There are a couple of big supervisor-robots circling around, and a flock of workers...."

At the same time, Clyde Nichols began cursing. Or maybe he was praying; it was hard to be certain.

"But we pulled the switch. It was only the lights and viewscreens in here, anyhow."

"It didn't do any good. Pull another one."

Matsui, back at the power plant, was wanting to know what was wrong. Captain Nichols stopped cursing—or praying?—and said, "Mutiny, that's what! The robots have turned on us!"

He knew what had happened, or was almost sure he did. A radio impulse had gone out, somehow, from the control tower. Something they hadn't checked, that had been left on. There was just enough current-leakage from the units in the robots to keep the receptors active for forty years. The supervisor-robots had gone active, and they had activated the rest. Once on, cutting the current from the control tower wouldn't turn them off again.

"Put the switch in again, Anse; the damage is done and you won't make it any worse."

When the screens came on, he looked around from one to another. The two supervisors, big ovoid things like the small round ones they had used in repairing the power reactors the first day, were circling aimlessly near the roof, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, dodging obstructions and getting politely out of each other's way. At lower altitude, a dozen assorted worker-robots were moving about, and more were emerging from cells at the end of the building. Sweepers, with rotary brooms and rakes, crablike all-purpose handling robots, a couple of vacuum-cleaning robots, each with a flexible funnel-tipped proboscis and a bulging dust-sack. One tiling, a sort of special job designed to get into otherwise inaccessible places, had a twenty-foot, many-jointed, claw-tipped arm in front. It passed by and slightly over the tower, saw Clyde Nichols, and swooped toward him. With a howl, Nichols dived under one of the large[Pg 121] machines between two production lines. A pistol went off a couple of times. That would be Jerry Rivas. Nobody else bothered with a gun on Koshchei, but he carried one as some people carry umbrellas, whether he expected to need it or not and because he would feel lost without it.

That he took in at one glance. Then he was looking at the control panels. The switches and buttons were all marked for machine-control in different steps of power-unit production. That was all for the big stuff, powered centrally. There weren't any controls for lifters or conveyers or other mobile equipment. Evidently they were handled out in the shop, from mobile control-vehicles. He did find, on the communication-screen panel, a lot of things that had been left on. He snapped them off, one after another, snapping them on when a screen went dark. There were fifteen or twenty robots, some rather large, in the air or moving on the floor by now.

"We can't do anything here," he told Anse. "These are the shop-cleaning robots. They were the last things used here when the place closed down, and the two supervisors were probably controlled from a vehicle, and it's anybody's guess where that is now. When you threw that switch, it sent out an impulse that activated them. They're running their instruction-tapes, and putting the others through all their tricks."

Three more shots went off. Jerry Rivas was shouting: "Hey, whattaya know! I killed one of the buggers!"

There were any number of ways in which a work-robot could be shot out of commission with a pistol. All of them would be by the purest of pure luck. The next time we go into a place like this, Conn thought, we take a couple of bazookas along.

"Turn everything off and let's go. See what we can do outside."

Anse put on his flashlight and pulled the switch. They got into the lift and rode down, going outside. As soon as they emerged, they saw a rectangular object fifteen feet long settle over their aircar, let down half a dozen clawed arms, and pick it up, flying away with it. It had taped instructions to remove anything that didn't belong in the aisleway; it[Pg 122] probably asked the supervisor about the aircar, and the supervisor didn't return an inhibitory signal, so it went ahead. Conn and Anse both shouted at it, knowing perfectly well that shouting was futile. Then they were running for their lives with one of the crablike all-purpose jobs after them. They dived under the slightly raised bed of a long belt-conveyer and crawled. Jerry Rivas fired another shot, somewhere.

The robots themselves were having troubles. They had done all the work they were supposed to do; now the supervisors were insisting that they do it over again. Uncomplainingly, they swept and raked and vacuum-cleaned where they had vacuum-cleaned and raked and swept forty years ago. The scrap-pickers, having picked all the scrap, were going over the same places and finding nothing, and then getting deflected and gathering a lot of things not definable as scrap, and then circling around, darting away from one another in obedience to their radar-operated evasion-systems, and trying to get to the outside scrap pile, and finding that the doors wouldn't open because the door openers weren't turned on, and finally dumping what they were carrying when the supervisors gave them no instructions.

One of them seemed to have dumped something close to where Clyde Nichols was hiding; if his language had been a little stronger, it would have burned out Conn's radio. Their own immediate vicinity being for the moment clear of flying robots, Conn and Anse rolled from under the conveyer and legged it between the two production lines. Immediately, three of the crablike all-purpose handling-robots saw them, if that was the word for it, and came dashing for them, followed by a thing that was mostly dump-lifter; it was banging its bin-lid up and down angrily. About fifty yards ahead, Jerry Rivas stepped from behind a machine and fired; one of the handling-robots flashed green from underneath, went off contragravity, and came down with a crash. Immediately, like wolves on a wounded companion, the other two pounced upon it, dragging and pulling against each other. That was a hunk of junk; their orders were to remove it.[Pg 123]

The mobile trash-bin went zooming up to the ceiling, reversed within twenty feet of it and came circling back to the ground, to go zooming up again. It had gone crazy, literally. It had been getting too many contradictory orders from its supervisor, and its circuits were overloaded and its relays jammed. Rats in mazes and human-type people in financial difficulties go psychotic in very much the same way.

The two surviving all-purpose robots were also headed for a padded repair shop. They had come close enough to each other to activate their anticollision safeties. Immediately, they flew apart. Then their order to pick up that big piece of junk took over, and they started forward again, to be bounced apart