Jack Williamson - The Humanoid Touch.pdf - Jack Williamson - widez2

THE HUMANOID TOUCH

by Jack Williamson

FOR FRED POHL

thereof in any form.

Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

383 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada,

Limited.

Printed in the United States of America

ver 1.0

DimJim

Humanoids Self-directed robots invented to serve and guard mankind.

Keth loved the suntimes. Thirty days of light and freedom, while the kind sun

climbed and paused and sank. He loved the clean smell and cool feel of the

wind and the sky's blazing wonder. In the first sharp days before the thaw,

there was ice for skates and snow for sleds, but he loved the warmer days

more. The excitement of green things shooting up, sunbuds exploding into

rich-scented bloom, great golden-sweet melons ripe at last. Best of all, he

loved the Sunset festival, with the leaves burning red, and gifts and games,

and all he wanted to eat.

The moontimes were not so nice, because the ice storms after Sunset drove

everybody back underground. Thirty days in the narrow tunnel places, where he

was always cold and just a little hungry, with lessons to learn and no fun but

the gym. He hated the dark and the cold and the black humanoids.

"Demon machines!"

Nurse Vesh used them to frighten him when he was slow to mind her. She was a

tall, skinny woman with a frowny face and cold, bony hands. Her husband was

dead on Malili, where Keth was born, and she blamed the humanoids.

"Bright black machines, shaped like men." Her voice was hushed and ugly when

she spoke about them. "Sometimes they pretend to be men. They can see in the

dark and they never sleep. They're watching and waiting, up there on the moon.

They'll get you, Keth, if you dare disobey me."

She made him fear the moontimes, when Malili either stood alone or sometimes

hung beside the red-blazing Dragon, never moving in the cold, black sky. He

could feel the cruel minds of the humanoids always fixed upon him, even

through the rock and snow above the tunnels. Sometimes in bed he woke sweating

and sick from a dream in which they had come down to punish him.

Sometimes he lay awake, wishing for a safer place to hide, or even for a way

to stop them. Men must have made them, if they were machines, though he

couldn't guess why. Perhaps when he was old enough he could build machines

strong enough to fight them.

"They'll never get me," he boasted once. "I'll find a way to beat them."

"Shhh!" Her pale eyes mocked him. "Nobody stops the hu-manoids. Ten trillion

machines swarming everywhere but here! They know everything. They can do

anything." She chilled him with her bitter, thin-lipped smile. "They'll get

you, Keth, if you don't mind me, just like they got your poor, dear mother."

He couldn't remember his mother or Malili or anything before Nurse Vesh had

come with his father back from Malili to keep him clean and dole out his

quotas and make him mind.

"What did they do—" The look on her face dried up his whisper, and he had to

get his breath. "What did they do to my mother?"

"She went looking for a braintree." Nurse Vesh didn't say what a braintree

was. "Outside the perimeter. Into jungles full of humanoids and dragon bats

and heathen nomads. Never got back. You might ask"-her voice went brittle and

high-"ask your father!"

He was afraid to ask his father anything.

"On Malili?" He shook his head, wishing he dared. "Where we came from?"

"And where my Jendre died." Her Jendre had been with his father on Malili. She

wore a thin silver bracelet with his name on it. Keth had always wondered how

the humanoids killed him, but he couldn't ask her because she cried whenever

she remembered him. "Ask your father how." Her voice began to break, and her

white face twitched. "Ask where he got that scar!"

He wanted to ask why anybody ever went to Malili. It looked too far and cold

for people. He thought it might be better just to let the humanoids keep it,

but he didn't say so now because Nurse Vesh had stopped looking at him. She

was leaning with her face against the wall, her lean body shaking. He tiptoed

away, feeling sorry for her.

His father was Crewman Ryn Kyrone. A tall, brown man who stood very straight

hi his black uniform and worked in a hidden back room where Keth couldn't go.

The steel door stayed shut, with a quick little red-blinking light to remind

his father when it wasn't locked.

Sometimes his father slept in the room and brought Nurse Vesh quota points for

his breakfast, but he was more often away on Lifecrew business. He never

talked about that, or much about anything else.

Not even about the scar, a long pale seam that zigzagged down from his hair

and split across his jaw. It changed color when he was angry, and he was often

angry. When Keth asked for more than his quota. When Keth couldn't tie his

boots correctly. When Keth was afraid to go to bed, because he knew he would

have dreadful dreams about the humanoids.

Keth knew his father must have been hurt on Malili, perhaps in a terrible

fight with the humanoids. They must be very fierce and cruel if they could

hurt a man so strong. Once he asked Nurse Vesh if his father was afraid. Her

face grew tight, and her pale eyes squinted blankly past him.

"Brave enough," she muttered. "But he knows the humanoids."

The year he was six, she sent him to the gym every morning. The other kids

seemed strange at first, because they laughed and ran and sometimes whispered

when the leader wanted quiet. They weren't afraid of anything, and they

weren't nice to him.

The leader tried to scold them once, explaining that Keth didn't know the

games because he was born on Malili, but that only made things worse. They

called him "moonbaby" and mocked the way he talked. One day a larger boy

pushed him.

"You'll be sorry!" His voice was shaking, but he didn't cry. "My father-" He

thought of something better. "The humanoids will get you!"

"Humanoids, ha!" The boy stuck out his tongue. "A silly old story."

"My nurse says—"

"So baby has a nurse!" The boy came closer^ ready to push him again. "My Dad

was an engineer in the Zone, and he says there're no humanoids there. He says

the rockrust would stop them."

Limping home through the cold tunnels, he wondered if that could be true. What

if Nurse Vesh had made up the humanoids, just to frighten him? He found her in

her room, reading a queer old printbook.

"You aren't to fight." She frowned at the blood on his cheek. "Or did you win?

Your father will be angry if you ran."

"I fell, but it doesn't hurt at all." He watched her carefully. "I was talking

to a boy. He says there are no humanoids—"

"He's a fool."

Her lips shut tight, and she opened the book to show him a humanoid. The

picture was flat and strange, but the thing in it looked real. More human than

machine, it was sleek and black and bare, as graceful as a dancer. He thought

its lean face seemed kinder than hers.

"It isn't ugly." He studied it, wishing he knew how to read the golden print

on its black chest. "It looks too nice to be bad."

"They pretend to be good." She took the old book from him and slammed it shut,

as if the humanoid had been a bug she wanted to smash. The puff of dust made

him sneeze. "If you ever fall for any of their tricks, you'll be another

fool."

He wondered how a machine could trick anybody, but she didn't say. He wanted

to ask about rockrust and how it could stop the humanoids, but she didn't like

to talk about Malili. She scrubbed his cheek and gave him his calorie quota,

which was never enough, and made him do his lessons before he went to bed.

The next summer he took a recycle route, pulling a little cart to pick up

waste metal and fiber. The tunnels were cold, and most of the tokens he earned

had to be saved for his winter thennosuit. But one day he found a bright black

ball almost the size of his fist, so shiny it made a little image of his face.

It rolled out of a trash bin, along with the bits of a broken dish and a

worn-out boot.

"A dragon's egg." Nurse Vesh shook her skinny head when he showed it to her.

"Bad luck to touch. Better throw it back in the bin."

It looked too wonderful to be thrown away, and he asked his father if it would

hatch.

"Not very likely." His father took it, frowning. "Ten million years old. But

you've no business with it, Skipper. It must be missing from some museum. I'll

see about returning it."

His father carried it back to that always-locked room and never spoke about it

again. Wondering, he used to search the moontime sky for the Dragon. It was

the sun's sister star, and perhaps the dragons had flown from nests on its

queer far planets to leave their eggs here on Kai.

It would have been exciting to watch it hatch. The baby dragon would be too

small to hurt anybody. And as lovely as the dark-shining egg, he thought, with

glittering diamond wings.

Once he dreamed that it was really hatching while he held and warmed it in his

hands. The thing that crawled out of the glassy shell wasn't a dragon; it was

a black humanoid.

Another crawled after it, out of the broken shell, and then a hundred more.

They crawled all over him, with clinging icy feet, and his terror of them

froze him so that he couldn't move or scream. He was stiff and chilled and

sweating in his berth when Nurse Vesh woke him.

He always shivered when he remembered that dream, but it had made the egg more

strangely splendid than ever. He wondered for a long time if it could still be

in his father's room. One day when he came in from his route the place was

very still. He peeked behind the curtain and saw the red light winking. He

listened and heard no sound. His father and Nurse Vesh were out.

His hand trembling, he touched the door.

Cat and Dragon Twin suns of the binary "runaway star" on whose planets the

refugee colonists tried to escape from the humanoid universe.

The apartment was a branching cave, carved deep in solid rock. His father's

room was off a long tunnel behind that faded tapestry, far at the back. It was

very secret. That was why it was hidden, and why the gray steel door was so

thick, and why the light winked to warn his father if it was ever disturbed or

left unlocked.

He almost ran when the door swung open, but nothing else happened. He listened

again, but all he could hear was his own thudding heart. He tiptoed inside to

look for the dragon's egg.

The room seemed very small and bare. A desk with a holo- phone. A shelf

stacked with huge old flatprint books. Blankets neatly folded on the narrow

cot where his father slept. A rusty strongbox, with the painted oars of the

Lifecrew peeling off the half-open door.

Breathless, he peered inside. Except for a few spilled quota tokens and a tall

brown bottle, the strongbox was empty. The dragon's egg must have gone back to

that museum. He was turning to slip away, when a picture stopped him.

A strange old flat picture, made with rough daubs of colored paint. The paint

had faded, and the silver frame was tarnished black, but the man in the

picture looked alive. Looked like his father.

The same black hair and the same straight nose. The same gray eyes, narrowed

like his father's when his father was angry. But the man in the picture had a

thick black beard, and one hand held a queer old projectile gun.

Nurse Vesh was teaching him to read, and he sounded out the symbols on the

darkened silver. Kyrondath Kyrone—

Kyrone! His breath came faster, because that was the name of the great new

starship, and his own name too. He stood a long time looking, wishing he knew

more about his father and the room and the humanoids.

He jumped when he heard somebody walking, but it was only Nurse Vesh, getting

up from her nap. He scrambled out of the room and pulled the steel door

carefully shut and went on wondering. Though she and his father never talked

about the starship with his name, he heard more about it from the holo news

and later from his history tapes.

The Kyrone had been in construction out in orbit as long as he could remember.

It was to carry people to settle planets of the Dragon, which they hoped would

be kinder worlds than Kai and Malili. Later that year, it was ready for the

flight. Nobody said that it might meet dragons, but his father tried to stop

it.

One day at lunch Nurse Vesh had the holo news on and he heard his father

speaking to a meeting. The flight had to be halted, his father said, because

the fusion engines would have a rhodomagnetic effect. The humanoids might

detect that and find the people who had fled from them to the worlds of the

Cat.

Captain Vorn followed his father on the holo, laughing at such fears. The Cat

and the Dragon were moving too fast, and the humanoids had been left a

thousand years behind. Foolish fears had kept people trapped too long on Kai

and Malili. The time had come for another bold escape.

He liked the look of Captain Vorn. A tall, lean man with cool, blue eyes and a

quick, brown smile, not afraid of anything. When he spoke next day, his

daughter Chelni was with him. She was a sturdy little girl with straight black

hair and a stubborn chin. He saw they were fond of each other. He never forgot

them.

Or the man with golden hands.

Bosun Brong, his name was. He had come from Malili to be an engineer on the

starship. The newsmen said he had been exposed to bloodrot outside the Zone

and lost his natural hands. The metal hands were shining golden levers,

graceful and powerful. The holo showed them bending steel.

In spite of his father, the building of the ship went on. He used to wish that

he had been aboard. Sometimes he dreamed of the happy new worlds the colonists

would find. Happy there, they would never be hungry or cold. Far from sinister

Malili, they needn't fear the humanoids.

For half a year, the holo carried news of the flight. When Vorn reached the

Dragon, he found seven planets. The inner worlds were too hot and dry, and the

outer ones were cold gas giants, but one in between looked fit for people.

The first lander went down toward it, and everybody waited to hear what the

pioneers reported. They never did report. All signals simply stopped. The

newsmen couldn't guess what had happened. One Bridgeman wanted to send a

rescue expedition, but the Navarch said it would take too long to build

another starship.

Jack Williamson - The Humanoid Touch.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: