“Let us introduce ourselves,” it said. “I am Joe and the other one is Ivan.”
“I am Cynthia,” said Cynthia, “and the other one is Fletcher.”
“Why don’t you run from us?”
“Because we’re not afraid,” said Cynthia. I could tell from the way she said it she was very much afraid. “Because,” I said, “there’d be no use of running.” “We are two old veterans,” said Joe, “long home from the wars and most desirous of doing what we can to help rebuild a peaceful world. We have wandered very far and the few humans we have found have had no interest in what we might do for them. In fact, it seems they have a great aversion to us.”
“That is understandable,” I said. “You, or others like you, probably shot the hell out of them before the war came to an end.”
“We shot the hell out of no one,” said Joe. “We never fired a shot in anger. Neither one of us. The war was done with before we got into it.” “And how long ago was that?”
“By the best computation that we have, a little over fifteen hundred years ago.” “Are you sure of that?” I asked.
“Very sure,” said Joe. “We can calculate it more closely if it means that much to you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Fifteen hundred is quite close enough.”
And so, I told myself, O’Gillicuddy’s fraction of a second had turned out to be more than eighty centuries.
“I wonder,” said Cynthia, “if either one of you recall a robot by the name of Elmer . . .” “Elmer!”
“Yes, Elmer. He said he was a supervisor of some sort on the building of the last of the war machines.” 5 “How do you know Elmer? Can you tell me where he 1 is?”
“We met him,” I said, “in the future.” “That can’t be true,” said Joe. “You do not meet people in the future.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “We’ll tell it to you sometime.” “But you must tell me now,” said Joe. “Elmer is an ancient friend. He worked on me. Not on Ivan. Ivan is a Russian.’
It was quite apparent there was no way to get away from them. Ivan hadn’t said a word, but Joe was set to talk. Having finally found someone who would listen to him, he was not about to quit.
“There isn’t any sense of you standing out there and us Jjsitting here,” said Joe. “Why don’t you come aboard?” A panel slid down in his front and a stairway came telescoping out. When the panel slid down it revealed a small, lighted room.
“It’s a mechanic’s berth,” said Joe. “Place for the mechanics to stay and be protected if they have to work on , me. Not that I suspect any of them ever did with any war machine. They never did with me, of course, but I don’t : think they did with many of the others, either. When something happened to us it was usually pretty bad. It took a lot to send us running for repairs. By the time we came to run there wasn’t too much left. Few of us, I imagine, ever made it back to home. That was the tradition in those days. Of course we were self-repairing, to a degree at least. We could keep ourselves in operation, but we couldn’t do too much when the damage got too massive. “Well, come on aboard.” “I think it will be all right,” said Cynthia. ,; I wasn’t as sure as she was.
“Of course it will be all right,” boomed Joe. “It is quite f jcomfortable. Small, but comfortable. If you are hungry, I have the capacity to mix you nourishment. Not very tasty, I suppose, but with some value as a nutrient. A quick snack for our hypothetical mechanic if he should get hungry on the job.”
“No, thank you very much,” said Cynthia. “We just now had lunch.”
We climbed the stairs into the room. There was a table in one corner, a double-decker bunk, a couch along one wall. We sat down on the couch. The place was, as Joe had said, small, but comfortable.
“Welcome aboard,” said Joe. “I am very glad to have you.”
“One thing you said interests me,” said Cynthia. “You said Ivan is a Russian.”
“Ah, yes, indeed he is. I suppose you think that the Russian was an enemy, as he surely was. But how we came together is the story of our life. Once I had been fitted out and made ready for the war, loaded with munitions and all equipment tested, I set out across Canada and Alaska for the Bering Strait, traveling underwater for a few short miles to reach Siberia. I reported back occasionally on my progress, but not too often, for to do so might have meant detection. I had been given certain objectives, of course, and one by one I reached them, to find in every instance they had been neutralized. Shortly after I reached the first objective I could not raise the homeland and, in fact, after that, I never raised home base. I was quite cut off. At first I thought it was only a temporary failure of communications, but after a time concluded that there was something much more significant than communication failure. I wondered if my country had been finally beaten to its knees or if the few military centers might have gone even deeper underground, but whatever might be the reason for the failure, I told myself, I would carry out my duty. I was a patriot, a true-blue patriot. You understand the term?”
“I am a history student,” Cynthia told him. “I understand the concept.”
“So, driven by my bitter patriotism, I went on. I visited all my assigned objectives and they all had been reduced. I did not stop there. I prowled, seeking what in those days were called targets of opportunity. I monitored the atmosphere for signals that might betray hidden bases. But there were no signals, neither ours nor theirs. There were no targets of opportunity. At times. I came upon small communities of people who ran or hid from me. I did not bother them. As targets, they were too insignificant. You do not use a nuclear charge to kill a hundred people. Especially when the death of those hundred would have no possible tactical advantage. All I found were ruined cities in which still might live tiny, pitiful huddles of humanity. I found a blasted countryside, great craters, miles across, blasted to the bedrock, drifting clouds of poison, miles of once-rich land reduced to nothing-occasional clumps of dead or dying trees and not a blade of grass. There is no way to tell you how it was, no way for you to imagine how * it might have been.
“So I turned homeward, going slowly, for there was no hurry now and I had much to think about. I shall not bur-den you with the thoughts, the sorrow, and the guilt. I was a patriot no longer. I had been cured of patriotism.”
“There is one thing that puzzles me,” I said. “I know there is more than one of you-human beings, that is. Perhaps several of you. Yet you speak of yourself as I.”
“There was at one time,” Joe said, “five of us, five men who were willing to sacrifice their bodies and their positions as human beings to man a war machine. There was a professor of mathematics, a most distinguished scholar; a military man, a general of the armies; an astronomer of considerable repute, a former stockbroker, and the last a most unlikely choice, one might think-a poet.”
“And you are the poet?”
“No,” said Joe. “I don’t know what I am. I think I am all five of us together. We are separate minds no longer. We have become, in some strange way we cannot understand, a single mind. I am amazed at times that I, as this single mind, still can recognize myself as one or another of the five of us, but each time I have this sense of recognition it is not actually the recognition of another, but rather of myself. As if interchangeably and at different times I can be any one of us. But mostly I am not any one of us, but all of us together,
“It is the same with Ivan, although there were only four’ of him. But now there likewise is only one of him.”
“We are leaving Ivan out of the conversation,” said Cynthia.
“Not at all,” said Joe. “He is a most active listener. He could speak either for himself or through me if he had the wish. Do you wish so, Ivan?”
A deeper, thicker voice said, “You tells it so well, Joe. Why don’t you go ahead?”
“Well, as I was telling you,” said Joe, “I was heading home, I had come to a stretch of prairie that seemed to go on forever. Steppe-land, I suppose. It was bleak and lonely and there seemed no end to it. It was there that I spotted old Ivan, here. He was far away and not much more than a speck, but when I used a telescopic optic, I knew what he was-an enemy of mine. Although, to tell the truth, by that time it was rather difficult to think in terms of enmity. Rather, I felt a thrill at just knowing that out there on the plain was something like myself. Strange identity, perhaps, but identity. Ivan told me later that he had much the same reaction, but the point was that neither one of us could know what the other thought. So we both began maneuvering and we both were rather tricky. There were a couple of times when I had Ivan in my sights and could have unloaded on him, but something held me back and I couldn’t do it. Ivan, for some screwy Russian reason, has never been willing to admit that the same thing happened with regard to me, but I am sure it did. Ivan was too good a war machine for it not to happen. But, anyway, there were the two of us, sashaying back and forth, and after a day or two of this, it got ridiculous. So I said something to this effect: OK, let’s break it off. We know damn well neither of us wants to fight. We’re probably the only two surviving war machines and the war is over and there is no longer any need of fighting, so why can’t we be friends. Old Ivan, he didn’t protest none, although it took a little time for him to agree to it, but finally he did. We rumbled straight toward one another, moving slow and easy, until we bumped noses. And we just sat there, nose to nose, and we stayed there, I don’t know how long-maybe days or months or years. There wasn’t really anything that we could do. The jobs we’d had had disappeared. There was in the entire world no longer any need of war machines. So we stayed out on that God-forsaken plain, the only living things there were for miles around, with our noses bumped together. We talked and we got to know one another so well that finally for long periods there was no need to talk.