Jack Williamson - The Humanoids

THE HUMANOIDS

Jack Williamson

1948

Chapter ONE

THE GRANITE-FACED sergeant of the gate detail found her standing outside the tall steel fence, looking up at him with timid, imploring eyes. She was a grimy little waif, in a cheap yellow dress. Her bare brown feet were shuffling uncomfortably on the hot asphalt, and he first thought she had come to beg for something to eat.

"Please, mister, is this the Starmont Observatory?" She seemed breathless and afraid. "May I please see the director? Dr. Clay Forester?" Her wet eyes shone. "Please, mister! It's awful important."

The sergeant scowled at her doubtfully, wondering how she had got here. She was about nine, he thought, her head too large and deeply hollowed, as if from the pinch of long famine. Her straight black hair was clipped short and primly combed. He shook his head disapprovingly, because she was far too young to be here alone. He could feel her trembling urgency, but stray urchins didn't see Dr. Forester.

"Not without a pass." She flinched from the hash rasp of his voice, and the sergeant tried to smile. "Starmont's a military reservation, see?" Seeing the trouble in her dark uplifted eyes, he tried to warm his tone. "But what's your name, sister?"

"Jane." She lifted her thin voice, stoutly. "And I've just got to see him."

"Jane? Haven't you any other name?"

"People used to call me other things, because I didn't know my really name." Her eyes fell briefly. "They called me Squeak and Insect and Little Pip, and others not so nice. But Mr. White says my really name is Jane Carter - and he sent me to see Dr. Forester."

"How'd you get here?"

The sergeant squinted past her at the narrow road beyond the fence that twisted down the flank of the solitary mountain and lay straight and black on the tawny desert below. Salt City was thirty miles away, much too far for her to have walked. But he could see no vehicle.

"Mr. White sent me," she repeated firmly. "To see -"

"Who," the sergeant broke in, "is Mr. White?"

An utter devotion illuminated her brimming eyes.

"He's a philosopher." She stumbled on the word. "He has a red, bushy beard, and he came from other places. He took me out of a bad place where people beat me, and he's awful good to me. He's teaching me tele-" She gulped. "He sent me with a paper for Dr. Forester."

"What sort of paper?"

"This." Her skinny hand came halfway out of the pocket of her dress, and the sergeant glimpsed a gray card clutched in her thin grubby fingers. "It's a message - and awful important, mister!"

"You might send it in."

"Thank you." Her thin blue face smiled politely. "But Mr. White said I mustn't let anybody see it, except Dr. Forester."

"I told you, sister -" The sergeant saw her flinch, and tried to soften his refusal. "Dr. Forester is a big man, see? He's too busy to see anybody - unless you happen to be an inspecting general, with papers from the Defense Authority. And you don't, see? Sorry, but I can't let you in."

She nodded forlornly. "Then let me - think."

For a moment she stood still, forgetting even to move her feet on the hot pavement. Her bony head tilted and her eyes half closed, as if she listened to something beyond him. She nodded, and whispered something, and turned hopefully back to the sergeant.

"Please - may I see Mr. Ironsmith?"

"Sure, sister!" He gave her a leathery smile, relieved. "Why didn't you say you knew him? Forester's hard to see, but anybody can talk to Frank Ironsmith. He ain't important, and he's a friend of mine. Come around here in the shade, and we'll call him."

Timidly silent, she came gratefully up under the narrow awning in front of the guard box. The sergeant picked up his telephone to call the observatory switchboard.

"Sure, Frank Ironsmith has a phone," came the operator's nasal whine. "He works in the computing section. Starmont 88. Sure, Rocky, he's in. He just bought me a cup of coffee, on the way to work. Just hold the line."

Ironsmith listened to the sergeant, and promised to drop right down. Waiting for him, the little girl kept a tight grip on the card in her pocket. She stooped restlessly to pick gaudy yellow blooms from a desert weed outside the fence, and then her huge eyes came uneasily back to the sergeant.

"Don't you worry, sister." He tried to smooth his drillfield voice. "Because Frank Ironsmith is a good guy, see? He don't amount to much, and probably never will - all he does is run the calculating machines in the computing section. But I know he'll try to help you."

"I do need help." She gripped the card tighter. "To get this to Dr. Forester."

"Frank will think of something." The sergeant grinned, trying to break her big-eyed solemnity. "He's plenty smart, even if he is just a clerk."

She had cocked her head again, staring past him at the lawns and the dark evergreens that made Starmont a cool oasis, and the sergeant was disturbed by a brief impression that she was listening for something besides his voice.

"Frank's all right, sister." He went on talking, because the child's odd intentness made him nervous. "And he knows plenty. Even when he stops at the canteen to drink a beer with us, he's apt to have a book along. Why, he can even read some old language he says people used to use back on the first planet."

She was looking back at him, now really listening.

"That's off somewhere in the stars, you know." He gestured vaguely at the brazen sky. "The first world, where Frank says all men came from, back in the beginning. One night he showed me the mother sun." A remembered awe echoed in his voice. "Just another star, in the big telescope."

For Starmont was not on Earth, nor Jane Carter's language English; even her name is here translated from less familiar syllables. A hundred centuries had gone since the time of Einstein and Hiroshima, and the tamed atom had powered ships to scatter the seed of man across many thousand habitable planets within a hundred light-years of Earth. Countless human cultures, isolated from one another by the long lifetimes and generations required by the best atomic ships to cross from star to star, had grown and killed themselves and sprung hardily up to invite new destruction. Caught in that ruthless repetition of history, this world - not unlike the cradle planet in chemistry and climate - had fallen with the breakdown of its mother civilization back almost to barbarism. A dozen centuries of independent progress had brought its people back about to the level of Earth at the dawn of the atomic age. Technology, however - displaying the variation more significant than the recurrence of history - was a little farther advanced, with all its social consequences. A world republic had ended the long eras of nationalistic war, but that universal state already faced new conflicts in a wider universe. For the local rediscovery of nuclear fission had set explorers and traders and envoys to voyaging in space again, their crude atomic craft carrying the virus of science to the peoples of near-by planets still too backward to have any immunity to the discontents and revolutionary ideologies generated by industrial revolution. Now, as the slow wave of progress passed its crest on this world of Jane Carter and the sergeant, the old historical cycle of rise and ruin was preparing to repeat itself again - and again with variations. Threatened with the inevitable fruit of its own exported know-how, the democratic republic was already sacrificing democracy, as it armed desperately to face a hostile new alliance of the totalitarian Triplanet Powers.

"See, sister?" The sergeant grinned encouragingly. "Frank Ironsmith's the one to help you - and here he comes, right now."

The anxious urchin looked up quickly, to see a slight young man coming down to the gate, along a shaded gravel path from a little red-shingled building among the evergreens, riding a rusty bicycle. He waved a genial greeting to the sergeant, and looked at her with gray, friendly eyes. She smiled at him uncertainly.