Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (15 page)

 
          
 
"Such as flyers and spaceships,"
interjected
Alvin
.

 
          
 
"Yes," agreed Rorden, "as well
as the great communicators that could reach the stars. All these things
vanished when they were no longer needed."

 
          
 
Alvin
shook his head.

 
          
 
"I still believe," he said,
"that the disappearance of the spaceships can't be explained as easily as
that. But to get back to the machine— do you think that the Master Robots could
help us? I've never seen one, of course, and don't know much about them."

 
          
 
"Help us?
In what
way?"

 
          
 
"I'm not quite sure," said
Alvin
vaguely. "Perhaps they could force it
to obey all my orders. They repair robots, don't they? I suppose that would be
a kind of repair. . . ."

 
          
 
His voice faded away as if he had failed even
to convince himself.

 
          
 
Rorden smiled: the idea was too ingenuous for
him to put much faith in it. However, this piece of historical research was the
first of all
Alvin
's schemes for which he himself could share much enthusiasm, and he
could think of no better plan at the moment.

 
          
 
He walked toward the Associator, above which
the robot was still floating as if in studied indifference. As he began, almost
automatically, to set up his questions on the great keyboard, he was suddenly
struck by a thought so incongruous that he burst out laughing.

 
          
 
Alvin
looked at his friend in surprise as Rorden
turned toward him.

 
          
 
"
Alvin
," he said between chuckles, "I'm
afraid we still have a lot to learn about machines." He laid his hand on
the robot's smooth metal body. "They don't share many human feelings, you
know. It wasn't really necessary for us to do all our plotting in
whispers."

 
          
 
This world,
Alvin
knew, had not been made for
Man.
Under the glare of the trichromatic
lights—so dazzling that they pained the eyes—the long, broad corridors seemed
to stretch to infinity. Down these great passageways all the robots of Diaspar
must come at the end of their patient lives, yet not once in a million years
had they echoed to the sound of human feet.

 
          
 
It had not been difficult to locate the maps
of the underground city, the city of machines without which Diaspar could not
exist. A few hundred yards ahead the corridor would open into a circular
chamber more than a mile across, its roof supported by great columns that must
also bear the unimaginable weight of Power Center. Here, if the maps spoke the
truth, the Master Robots, greatest of all machines, kept watch over Diaspar.

 
          
 
The chamber was there, and it was even vaster
than
Alvin
had imagined—but where were the machines?
He paused in wonder at the tremendous but meaningless panorama beneath him. The
corridor ended high in the wall of the chamber—surely the largest cavity ever
built by man—and on either side long ramps swept down to the distant floor.
Covering the whole of that brilliantly lit expanse were hundreds of great white
structures, so unexpected that for a moment
Alvin
thought he must be looking down upon a
subterranean city. The impression was startlingly vivid and it was one he never
wholly lost. Nowhere at all was the sight he had expected— the familiar gleam
of metal which since the beginning of time Man had learned to associate with
his servants.

 
          
 
Here was the end of an evolution almost as
long as Man's. Its beginning was lost in the mists of the Dawn Ages, when
humanity had first learned the use of power and sent its noisy engines clanking
about the world. Steam, water, wind—all had been harnessed for a little while
and then abandoned. For centuries the energy of matter had run the world until
it too had been
superseded,
and with each change the
old machines were forgotten and the new ones took their place. Very slowly,
over millions of years, the ideal of the perfect machine was approached—that
ideal which had once been a dream, then a distant prospect, and at last
reality:

 
          
 
No machine may contain any moving parts.

 
          
 
Here was the ultimate expression of that
ideal. Its achievement had taken Man perhaps a thousand million years, and in
the hour of his triumph he had turned his back upon the machine forever.

 
          
 
The robot they were seeking was not as large
as many of its companions, but
Alvin
and Rorden felt dwarfed when they stood
beneath it. The five tiers with their sweeping horizontal lines gave the
impression of some crouching beast, and looking from it to his own robot
Alvin
thought it strange that the same word
should be used for both.

 
          
 
Almost three feet from the ground a wide
transparent panel ran the whole length of the structure.
Alvin
pressed his forehead against the smooth,
curiously warm material and peered into the machine. At first he saw nothing:
then, by shielding his eyes, he could distinguish thousands of faint points of
light hanging in nothingness. They were ranged one beyond the other in a
three-dimensional lattice, as strange and as meaningless to him as the stars
must have been to ancient
Man.

 
          
 
Rorden had joined him and together they stared
into the brooding monster. Though they watched for many minutes, the colored
lights never moved from their places and their brilliance never changed.
Presently
Alvin
broke away from the machine and turned to
his friend.

 
          
 
"What are they?" he asked in
perplexity.

 
          
 
"If we could look into our own
minds," said Rorden, "they would mean as little to us. The robots
seem motionless because we cannot see their thoughts."

 
          
 
For the first time
Alvin
looked at the long avenue of titans with
some trace of understanding. All his life he had accepted without question the
miracle of the synthesizers, the machines which age after age produced in an
unending stream all that the city needed. Thousands of times he had watched
that act of creation, never thinking that somewhere must exist the prototype of
that which he had seen come into the world.

 
          
 
As a human mind may dwell for a little while
upon a single thought, so these greater brains could grasp and hold forever the
most intricate ideas. The patterns of all created things were frozen in these
eternal minds, needing only the touch of a human will to make them reality.

 
          
 
The world had gone very far since, hour upon
hour,
the first cavemen had patiently chipped their
arrowheads and knives from the stubborn stone.

 
          
 
"Our problem now," said
Rorden,
"is to get into touch with the creature. It can
never have any direct knowledge of Man, for there's no way in which we can
affect its consciousness. If my information's correct, there must be an
interpreting machine somewhere. That was a type of robot that could convert
human instructions into commands that the Master Robots could understand. They
were pure intelligence with little memory—just as this is a tremendous memory
with relatively little intelligence."

 
          
 
Alvin
considered for a moment. Then he pointed to
his own robot.

 
          
 
"Why not use it?" he suggested.
"Robots have very literal minds. It won't refuse to pass on our
instructions, for I doubt if the Master ever thought of this situation."

 
          
 
Rorden laughed.

 
          
 
"I don't suppose he did, but since
there's a machine specially built for the job I think it would be best to use
it."

 
          
 
The Interpreter was a very small affair, a
horseshoe-shaped construction built around a vision screen which lit up as they
approached. Of all the machines in this great cavern, it was the only one which
had shown any cognizance of Man, and its greeting seemed a little contemptuous.
For on the screen appeared the words:

 
          
 
STATE YOUR PROBLEM PLEASE THINK CLEARLY

 
          
 
Ignoring the implied insult,
Alvin
began his story. Though he had communicated
with robots by speech or thought on countless occasions, he felt now that he
was addressing something more than a machine. Lifeless though this creature
was, it possessed an intelligence that might be greater than his own. It was a
strange thought, but it did not depress him unduly—for of what use was
intelligence alone?

           
 
His words died away and the silence of that
overpowering place crowded back upon them. For a moment the screen was filled
with swirling mist, then the haze cleared and the machine replied:

 
          
 
REPAIR IMPOSSIBLE ROBOT UNKNOWN TYPE

 
          
 
Alvin
turned to his friend with a gesture of
disappointment, but even as he did so the lettering changed and a second message
appeared:

 
          
 
DUPLICATION COMPLETED PLEASE CHECK AND SIGN

 
          
 
Simultaneously a red light began to flash
above a horizontal panel
Alvin
had not noticed before, and was certain he must have seen had it been
there earlier. Puzzled, he bent toward it, but a shout from Rorden made him
look around in surprise. The other was pointing toward the great Master Robot,
where
Alvin
had left his own machine a few minutes
before.

 
          
 
It had not moved, but it had multiplied.
Hanging in the air beside it was a duplicate so exact that
Alvin
could not tell which was the original and
which the copy.

 
          
 
"I was watching when it happened,"
said Rorden excitedly. "It suddenly seemed to extend, as if millions of
replicas had come into existence on either side of it. Then all the images
except these two disappeared. The one on the right is the original."

 
          
 
THE C O U N C I L

 
          
 
Alvin
was still stunned, but slowly he began to
realize what must have happened. His robot could not be forced to disobey the
orders given it so long ago, but a duplicate could be made with all its
knowledge yet with the unbreakable memory-block removed. Beautiful though the
solution was, the mind would be unwise to dwell too long upon the powers that
made it possible.