Mind Webs - The Eternal Machine

Mind-web.

Welcome to a half hour of Mind-web's short stories from the worlds of speculative fiction

This is Michael Hanson.

The Mind-web story this evening is by William Spencer, his tale called The Eternal Machines,

from New Writings in SF-2, edited by John Carnell, published by Bannon, copyright 1964.

Roscoe checked the scope again.

The big shuttle ship was arcing and smoothly on a reentry curve.

The speck of light on the screen indicating her position was crossing the hairlines of

range and altitude at pre-programmed intervals.

It was going to be a routine landing.

The process of landing was completely automated.

There was really nothing for Roscoe to do.

He had seen too many of these unmanned shuttle ships come shimmering in for a landing on

the dusty gray surface of the planet, watched them settling on a cone of flame blistering

down through unsteady waves of boiling atmosphere, observed the trullis of spider-relegs extending

on pneumatic joints, the pads of their extremities feeling for a firm purchase on the treacherously

hot slag, then the long ramp telescoping outs and the automatic lift trucks beginning

to shuttle up and down with their loads.

So many ships had come and gone that the event no longer excited any particular emotion

in him, or did it.

Perhaps if he was completely honest with himself, it did affect him in a subliminal way.

Roscoe mentally brushed the question aside.

For fourteen years, the nearest he had been to home was a pale flickering image coming

faintly over the interplanetary communications channel, a garbled sound, voices distorted

and chopped around by the dust and ionization bands of many million miles of space.

Roscoe flipped switches on the control panel with unnecessary vigor.

Damity didn't regret his decision to take over his warden of chaos, but ain't selected

for the outermost planet at the time of its discovery had taken on an unconscious irony

in the light of its subsequent use.

All right, so he had got just about the lonelyest job in the whole system?

He liked it that way.

He, Roscoe, was the sole human inhabitant of chaos, a trillion tons of planet with several

million tons of assorted junk littering the large part of its sterile surface.

Chaos was the municipal rubbish dump of the whole system.

Only they didn't call it a rubbish dump anymore, it went by some polite new name, spoiled

tip, in filled zone, that was it.

Robot ships shuttled in regularly from the more favored planets of the system, bringing

with them a capacity load of obsolete and unwanted junk of all kinds, battered and bent relics

of metal and polymer, crystal and fiber outmoded before they could be outworn.

The cast-offs from a machine-dominated culture in which only the latest devices, the newest

techniques, the most get-ahead styling were acceptable and civilized circles.

The dented detritus of the march of progress, a march that was breaking into a run.

The ships came in, unloaded their quarter of junk, and scooped up a load of high grade,

now will be a mor, then they were off again.

Roscoe looked out now at the ship, safely sitting on the landing apron, enshrouded in

shimmering waves of heat, and saw that the automatic crux were already engaged in their

work of shuttling to and fro up and down the ramp.

He checked off the entry in the arrivals log, and began to close down the control room for

the night.

There was nothing more he needed to do.

A job of unloading would carry on without intermission through the hours of darkness as

the truck strained back and forth following the sonic sensors in their sensitive noses.

He could safely turn in.

In the morning, according to schedule, the big freighter would have left.

Another ship, come and gone in the dozens of identical grey ships that wear his sole

companions and visitors on this lonely planet with its sterile surface, unquickened by life

of any kind, wrapped in an inert atmosphere of nitrogen, krypton, and argon.

Roscoe patted through into the living quarters attached to the control dome.

They have the functional, unlovely air that any accommodation tends to have when a man

runs it purely for his own convenience without regard for appearances.

On the table by the window was a tumble of old books piled up in apparent disorder, mostly

old-fashioned histories of technology and out-of-date manuals and catalogs.

The collection revealed Roscoe's sole self-indulgence is one concession to human weakness.

Usually, the ship's brought in a few new reference books and each visit a sealed package

being specially ferried over in one of the trucks and left just outside the airlock of

the control dome.

Roscoe's superiors at system headquarters indulged in his odd obsession, despite its

unmotor share.

Everybody needed to have a small hobby, and this much was granted.

And Roscoe was a good warden.

The best they had had for the greater part of a century.

He never complained about the loneliness or requested home leave.

One day, they were going to have quite a difficult job, replacing him.

It was three hours after dawn when Roscoe rose again, the light streaming into the sleeping

quarters through the round window in a babble of electronic music coming from the time sequencer.

The big freighter had gone, and it would be three days before another came smoldering

in down the landing beam.

Each day on chaos was thirty-five hours long, the sun gleamed to pale disc through the

high layer of grey dust that hid the stars at night.

He had three days of solitude, over a hundred hours of complete isolation, or if you prefer

to look at it that way, three days when he was undisputed king of the planet.

There was no one to challenge his authority, not even an intelligent robot.

Roscoe finished a leisurely breakfast, and then rode one of the utility trucks out through

the dumps, which surrounded the landing zone and occupied vast tracks of the planet's surface.

As the truck rolled along the dusty, metal-drode, Roscoe watched the walls of junk slipping past

on either side.

A debris of civilization lay piled up in fantastic profusion.

A tangle of broken domestic gadgets, dead robots crashed, jet planes bruised, rotor

craft, fragments of electronic subunits, communications gear, mangled computers.

His daily rides through the junk tips had become Roscoe a Solomon deeply satisfying ritual.

His route took him a couple of miles in a zigzag course through the grid of intersecting

roadways that criss-crossed the dumps until near one of the lesser intersections he stopped

the truck and switched off the motor.

Clambering down from the cabin, he walked through an inconspicuous gap in the nearest

ridge of debris.

Through the gap, hidden from the roadway, there was a clearing about 200 yard square.

Roscoe had arranged some time past for the ground in this area to be left clear of junk.

He had done so by the somewhat devious expedient of temporarily reciting the sonic beacons,

which gave the dump trucks from the freighters there, coordinates on the surface of the planet.

The cleared space had become Roscoe's own private retreats, an oasis of order in the

midst of piled up disorder.

Here, he could pursue his obsession undisturbed.

Under the loving care of a dedicated collector, he had reassembled some of the original machines

from the dumps, salvaging the part here and joining the part there in the inert atmosphere

of the planet, these specimens of human technological equipment might last well over a million years.

Roscoe walked slowly through his lines of specimens.

Roscoe strolled over towards an infrared communicator of obsolete design.

He rubbed his hand over its flank.

This was one of his favorites.

He pressed a recessed key that brought it to life.

The machine, after emitting a few brief crackles and coughs through an audio panel in its

side, began to recite a poem.

Broken fragments after brief glory discarded.

Now, with longing, we remember our first subterranean sleep.

There was the merits in waking us at all.

The communicator had scanned the words from a memory bank into which Roscoe had written

them some years earlier.

As the machine read them, it simultaneously transmitted them down, a modulated infrared

beam across the clearing.

At the far side of the clearing was another similar machine.

The beam hit its receptors and the message was read down into the second machine's memory.

One minute later, the second machine beamed the message back again.

This mechanized conversation continued to shuttle back and forth until Roscoe switched

the communicators off.

Roscoe, who felt no need for human discourse, derived the kind of rye pleasure from the sterile

gossiping of machines.

But after three cycles had been completed, he grew tired of the repetitions and stopped

the communicators.

Near the center of the clearing was a computer complex, a sprawling assembly of units of

differing design and vintage which Roscoe had coupled together after a certain amount

of modification.

He remembered the problem which he had fed into a drain as last visit and went over in

its direction.

The computer, scanning the air restlessly with its hypersonic probes emitted a shrill,

whistling noise indicating that it had sensed his approach.

Good morning, Roscoe.

You would like the answer to your problem now?

The probability of a meteor obliterating this area on the basis of the data you gave.

The answer is one hit should occur every ten to the nineteenth years.

Have you any problem for today?

No, you may return to a resting state.

Roscoe turned away, fully satisfied with the answer.

There was nothing to worry about.

Ten to the nineteenth years.

At that rate, it would have to be a very unlucky meteor indeed that smashed his collection

before that time in the unthinkably remote future when even the inert atmosphere of chaos

had corroded the machines to unrecognizable masses of crumbling rust.

Roscoe's personal image of himself took on a new posture of assurance in the light

of this information.

He was the custodian of the most durable museum in the system, perhaps even in the entire

cosmos.

When the men who had first made them were forgotten dust, these machines would still be standing

in a macular completeness.

Roscoe knew that he could not share the longevity of the machines, but although his

lifespan, measured against the cosmic scale, was only a moment, he was preparing to perpetuate

his own image for as long as the museum lasted.

His genius, the far-sightedness of the man who had created a memorial to outlasts the

entire human race, should surely not be entirely lost to posterity.

So at any rate, Roscoe modestly thought.

He went over to the video rostrum where the master recorder was located, usually made

a point of not leaving the museum without putting a few memorable thoughts for the day on

the tape.

Revealing a few new facets of himself to the wandering gaze of future generations, Roscoe

ran his fingers over the selector buttons, flipping through some of his early masterpieces

of communication, which did he want of you today?

That was it, tape E 73 291, summing up the whole situation admirably, just about the

best thing he had done.

He had to wait a few moments while the capsule was being sorted out and loaded onto the tape

deck.

Then the colored image of himself, a few years younger but still recognizably, Roscoe, began

to speak from the video display screen.

So I came to the conclusion that man was consuming the vital raw materials of the cosmos at an

outrageous rate, greedily feeding on minerals and fossil deposits which he could not possibly

replace, accelerating the process of entropy with reckless haste.

Man is behaving, in fact, like a spoiled child confronted with the mountainously huge

cream cake, he just goes on eating and eating becoming utterly insensitive in the long run

to the taste of what he's eating, losing sight of any enjoyment, consumed simply by the

urge to consume, becoming, in fact, no more admirable than a fat worm eating its way through

an immense bulk of timber.

The point of the exercise, if there is one, has become completely lost in the overwhelming

and reflects compulsiveness of the whole business.

Man has even lost sight of the time process, and since his existence has become meaningless,

he has no urge to distill the significance of his experience and preserve it for future

generations of man, or for the beings who will come later when man has finally disappeared

from the cosmos.

So I, Roscoe, conceived the need for a perpetual memorial to the folly and extravagance of man.

The face, Roscoe's face but full of youthful enthusiasm and idealism faded from the screen.

Roscoe nodded thoughtfully as the tape was shuffled back to its proper position in the

store.

Then after positioning the numerous microphones and canaries to a satisfaction, he mounted

the rostrum and began to dictate yet another installment of his interminable memoirs.

So Roscoe worked away, cutting, recasting, and editing his tape, working painstakingly

towards the final perfection of expression that, always in the end, escaped him.

While he did so, events were taking place above his head that would have surprised him.

High above the dust veiled atmosphere of chaos in the outer reaches of the planet's gravitational

field, a spacecraft was in difficulties.

Mand spacecraft were forbidden to land on chaos.

Their approach might easily have interfered with the work of the automatic craft, shuttling

in and out with their rich loads of niobium.

The homecomer, a 600-ton interplanetary short haul craft with three-man crew, was having

trouble with a couple of vernier motors, and the captain of the ship Dr. Graves had taken

the opportunity of putting her into orbit around the convenient mass of chaos while he and

his plasma specialist did some investigating.

Working in pressure suits outside the hull, they uncoupled the motors from their mounts

and brought them through the main airlock, maneuvering the halfton masses of metal with

comparative ease in their weightless, though not their nurseless condition.

The process of stripping down the high-temperature section could not be hurried and took them

all of three hours.

When they had parts laid out on an almost surgically clean bench, it was clear that all the main

refractor rays were badly cracked.

What do you say, Dale?

Graves asked his plasma expert, a young technologist rubbed his chin.

It looks like a tough job and a tricky one, too.

To do it properly, we need more equipment than we're carrying the board, the ship.

So, we either call up a repair ship, or is there an alternative?

I think in the possibility of landing on a planet, they must have repair facilities down

there, hardly the navigator intervened at this point and told them that only official

ships were permitted to land on chaos.

Now, why the band?

Luckily, the entire pundits made of niobium, they mined it down there for the whole system.

Niobium, well, that's no problem, will just bleep out an ultimate distress signal and

they'll have to give us a landing beam, they're compelled to do so by international law.

Don't forget that.

It's as simple as that.

I'm certainly not waiting around three or four days for a repair ship.

The young man glanced at each other unusually.

As Graves getting too old for the job, he had displayed several irrational quirks lately

in his temper scene, if anything, to be getting shorter.

Ultimate distress?

Or isn't that pushing it a little when we're only missing a couple of verniars?

The trouble with the verniars could have been avoided if Graves had taken account of

the obvious symptoms earlier on, hardly thought privately.

Dr. Graves made a gesture of impatience.

Now, worry about the law of problem when I come to it.

Just you send out the signal, that's all.

He turned his back, effectively closing the conversation.

Roscoe ran through the new tape again with mingled feelings of pleasure and regret.

Pleasure because there were undoubtedly some good things in it, well said.

Regret, because he was aware still of the many imperfections that he had failed to eliminate.

Perhaps the next time he came to the museum side, he might do a little more polishing.

Roscoe looked round once more at the ranks of metallic forms.

Then as he walked back towards the gap in the enclosing wall of debris, his ears caught

a distant rumble.

Thunderstorms were rare on chaos.

To his train deer, this sounded more like a remote roar of rocket motories, but surely

the next ship was not due for another couple of days.

Flipping the control in his pocket communicator, Roscoe interrogated the control center, which

he had left in charge of the automatic program.

The coated response told him that an unidentified ship was coming in on emergency procedure.

The roar of the landing ship grew louder.

Roscoe reached the roadway where he left his transport.

He'd better get back to the landing zone as soon as possible.

Maybe if these people were coming in on an emergency routine, they would need help as

soon as they landed.

He was fully equipped, back at control headquarters, with all essential medical and surgical gear,

as well as a portable diagnostic computer.

Roscoe was about to climb aboard the truck and start the motor when the descending ship

broke through cloud base a few thousand feet up.

Roscoe paused, half in half out of the truck, and watched the big ship as it lumbered

downward, staggering through the concentric waves of sound and heat that shuddered from

the laboring motories.

The ship was descending the last few hundred feet now, and he became vividly aware of

the ship's last bulk as it leaned across the sky crazily, crabbing sideways in a way

that caused Roscoe to dive into the cabin of the truck, and crash to start the motor

head craning over his shoulders he did so to keep the looming ship in view.

He had a wild notion that he would be able to run for it in the truck, escaping from

under the searing, the hot hole, the vast ship, which now seemed to end to blow out most

of the sky.

Then he saw where the ship was going to crash, where the impact of the massive hole must

come.

Roscoe, who left out of the truck, shouting at the top of his lungs, he started to run

back into the clearing through the gap, gesticulating and roaring at the ship, the noise of the

shots were lost in the monumental roar of the motors as the enormous hole carrained

in above his head.

The man inside the ship braced in their contoured couches against the inevitable impact,

go on their screens, Roscoe running forward madly, but now they were unable to influence

the outcome one way or another.

The ship struck a few yards from the center of Roscoe's museum.

Great waves of flame engulfed it, and there were a series of sharp explosions as those

of the exhibits which had not been destroyed by impact, were gutted by the flame.

When the shaken man from the interior of the ship clambered out in their space suits

and walked unsteadily across the scorched ground, there were only a few sparse tongues

of flame licking at the twisted skeletons of those machines which had contained combustible

material.

They found Roscoe lying face downwards near the gap, and when they turned him over they

could see where a splinter of metal from an exploding machine had pierced his visor

and gashed his forehead.

After a few minutes of persistent effort, when it was clear that his ascitation would

not succeed, Dr. Graves turned to his companions and spread the open palms of his hands outwards

in a gesture of hopelessness.

The three of them stood for a moment in a leaden trance, looking around them at the

remains of Roscoe's smashed museum.

The machines still retained in their twisted destruction a sense of watered arrangement,

tank upon rank, contrasting with the confused piles of debris surrounding them, hardly approached

one of the nearest relics which towered above him in an attitude that might have suggested

to an imaginative eye, a grotesque kind of supplication, pleading for justice from whatever

powers were in control of the cosmos, but it suggested nothing of the kind of Harley.

He was merely trying to decipher what the original purpose of the machine had been.

He was looking at the funerary relic of the infrared communicator, but the design was

so outmoded that Harley, who had no taste for antiquarian studies, could make nothing of it.

He was about to turn away having lost interest in the problem and some obscure electro-mechanical

process in the remains of the machine.

It could have been warping induced by the aggressive cooling of the scorched shell, caused

the communicator to snap into action.

Once again, the discs in the memory bank began to rotate, but their records had been

irreparably damaged by the heat and by shockwaves from the explosions nearby.

The most the communicator could manage was a kind of strangled cough and then broken

교첳.

A pause, another cough, and again broken, broken, broken, broken, broken.

Harley turned to his companions with a puzzled grin on his face, and then he turned back

back to the communicator.

Broken Roman.

Right.

Broken Roman.

Right.

Broken Roman.

Right.

Harley stepped closer to the machine.

Damn stupid thing.

He said without any particular emotion in his voice.

He gave the flank of the communicator a sharp kick

with a space boot.

And it lapsed finally into silence.

So, look.

I'm going to do a little bit of it,

and then I'll do it.

OK.

OK.

OK.

Right.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

OK.

You've heard William Spencer's story, the Eternal Machines, copyright 1964, a tale that

appears in new writings in SF2, edited by John Carnell, published by Bantam.

This is Michael Hanson, technical operation for this broadcast by Rich Grody.

And Web's is a production of WHA Radio and Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin

extension.