The gray monster fell silent, immersed in what thoughts no one knew, and the scientists set out to obey his orders. Baxter, the British chemist, followed Penrose, the lantern-jawed, saturnine American engineer and inventor, as he made his way to the furthermost cubicle of the section.
“I say, Penrose, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind?”
“Go ahead. Ordinarily it’s dangerous to be a cackling hen anywhere around him, but I don’t imagine that he can hear anything here now. His system must be pretty well shot to pieces. You want to know all I know about Roger?”
“Exactly so. You have been with him so much longer than I have, you know. In some ways he impresses one as being scarcely human, if you know what I mean.
Ridiculous, of course, but of late I have been wondering whether he really is human. He knows too much, about too many things. He seems to be acquainted with many solar systems, to visit which would require lifetimes. Then, too, he has dropped remarks which would imply that he actually saw things that happened long before any living man could possibly have been born. Finally, he looks – well, peculiar – and certainly does not act human. I have been wondering, and have been able to learn nothing about him; as you have said, such talk as this aboard the planetoid was not advisable.”
“You needn’t worry about being paid your price; that’s one thing. If we live – and that was part of the agreement, you know – we will get what we sold out for. You will become a belted earl. I have already made millions, and shall make many more.
Similarly, Chatelier has had and will have his women, Anandrusung and Nishimura their cherished revenges, Hartkopf his power, and so on.” He eyed the other speculatively, then went on: “I might as well spill it all, since I’ll never have a better chance and since you should know as much as the rest of us do. You’re in the same boat with us and tarred with the same brush. There’s a lot of gossip, that may or may not be true, but I know one very startling fact. Here it is. My great – great – grandfather left some notes which, taken in connection with certain things I myself saw on the planetoid, prove beyond question that our Roger went to Harvard University at the same time he did. Roger was a grown man then, and the elder Penrose noted that he was marked, like this,” and the American sketched a cabalistic design.
“What!” Baxter exclaimed. “An adept of North Polar Jupiter – then?”
“Yes. That was before the First Jovian War, you know, and it was those medicine-men – really high-caliber scientists – that prolonged that war so . . . “
“But I say, Penrose, that’s really a bit thick. When they were wiped out it was proved a lot of hocus-pocus . . .”
“If they were wiped out,” Penrose interrupted in turn. “Some of it may have been hocus-pocus, but most of it certainly was not. I’m not asking you to believe anything except that one fact; I’m just telling you the rest of it. But it is also a fact that those adepts knew things and did things that take a lot of explaining. Now for the gossip, none of which is guaranteed. Roger is supposed to be of Tellurian parent age, and the story is that his father was a moon-pirate, his mother a Greek adventuress. When the pirates were chased off the moon they went to Ganymede, you know, and some of them were captured by the Jovians. It seems that Roger was born at an instant of time sacred to the adepts, so they took him on. He worked his way up through the Forbidden Society as all adepts did, by various kinds of murder and job lots of assorted deviltries, until he got clear to the top – the seventy-seventh mystery . . .”
“The secret of eternal youth!” gasped Baxter, awed in spite of himself.
“Right, and he stayed Chief Devil, in spite of all the efforts of all his ambitious sub-devils to kill him, until the turning-point of the First Jovian War. He cut away then in a space-ship, and ever since then he has been working – and working hard – on some stupendous plan of his own that nobody else has ever got even an inkling of. That’s the story. True or not, it explains a lot of things that no other theory can touch. And now I think you’d better shuffle along; enough of this is a great plenty!”
Baxter went to his own cubby, and each man of gray Roger’s cold-blooded crew methodically took up his task. True to prediction, in five days a planet loomed beneath them and their vessel settled through a reeking atmosphere toward a rocky and forbidding plain. Then for hours they plunged along, a few thousand feet above the surface of that strange world, while Roger with his analytical detectors sought the most favorable location from which to wrest the materials necessary for his program of construction.
It was a world of cold; its sun was distant, pale, and wan. It had monstrous forms of vegetation, of which each branch and member writhed and fought with a grotesque and horrible individual activity. Ever and anon a struggling part broke from its parent plant and darted away in independent existence; leaping upon and consuming or being consumed by a fellow creature equally monstrous. This flora was of a uniform color, a lurid, sickly yellow. In form some of it was fern-like, some cactus-like, some vaguely treelike; but it was all outrageous, inherently repulsive to all Solarian senses. And no less hideous were the animal-like forms of life which slithered and slunk rapaciously through that fantastic pseudo-vegetation. Snake-like, reptile-like, bat-like, the creatures squirmed, crawled, and flew; each covered with a dankly oozing yellow hide and each motivated by twin common impulses – to kill and insatiably and indiscriminately to devour. Over this reeking wilderness Roger drove his vessel, untouched by its disgusting, its appalling ferocity and horror.
“There should be intelligence, of a kind,” he mused, and swept the surface of the planet with an exploring beam. Ah, yes, there is a city, of sorts,” and in a few minutes the outlaws were looking down upon a metal-walled city of roundly conical buildings.
Inside these structures and between and around them there scuttled formless blobs of matter, one of which Roger brought up into his vessel by means of a tractor.
Held immovable by the beam it lay upon the floor, a strangely extensile, amoeba-like, metal-studded mass of leathery substance. Of eyes, ears, limbs, or organs it apparently had none, yet it radiated an intensely hostile aura; a mental effluvium concentrated of rage and of hatred.
“Apparently the ruling intelligence of the planet,” Roger commented. “Such creatures are useless to us; we can build machines in half the time that would be required for their subjugation and training. Still, it should not be permitted to carry back what it may have learned of us.” As he spoke the adept threw the peculiar being out into the air and dispassionately rayed it out of existence.
“That thing reminds me of a man I used to know, back in Penobscot.” Penrose was as coldly callous as his unfeeling master. “The evenest-tempered man in town – mad all the time!”
Eventually Roger found a location which satisfied his requirements of raw materials, and made a landing upon that unfriendly soil. Sweeping beams denuded a great circle of life, and into that circle leaped robots. Robots requiring neither rest nor food, but only lubricants and power; robots insensible alike to that bitter cold and to that noxious atmosphere.
But the outlaws were not to win a foothold upon that inimical planet easily, nor were they to hold it without effort. Through the weird vegetation of the circle’s bare edge there scuttled and poured along a horde of the metal-studded men – if “men” they might be called – who, ferocity incarnate, rushed the robot line. Mowed down by hundreds, still they came on; willing, it seemed to spend any number of lives in order that one living creature might once touch a robot with one out-thrust metallic stud. Whenever that happened there was a flash of lightning, the heavy smoke of burning insulation, grease, and metal, and the robot went down out of control. Recalling his remaining automatons, Roger sent out a shielding screen, against which the defenders of their planet raged in impotent fury. For days they hurled themselves and their every force against that impenetrable barrier, then withdrew: temporarily stopped, but by no means acknowledging defeat.
Then while Roger and his cohorts directed affairs from within their comfortable and now sufficiently roomy vessel, there came into being around it an industrial city of metal peopled by metallic and insensate mechanisms. Mines were sunk, furnaces were blown in, smelters belched forth into the already unbearable air their sulphurous fumes, rolling mills and machine shops were built and were equipped; and as fast as new enterprises were completed additional robots were ready to man them. In record time the heavy work of girders, members, and plates was well under way; and shortly thereafter light, deft, mufti-fingered mechanisms began to build and to install the prodigious amount of precise machinery required by the vastness of the structure.