All Jackson's Children, Daniel F. Galouye [best english books to read txt] 📗

"The way we're ringed in here, it's a cinch we won't get past 'em in the six hours we have left."

"So you're going to make off through the cave?"

The younger man nodded. "They might take off after me. That'll give you a chance to get to the ship and cut off those converters before they make like a nova."

Angus chuckled. "Suppose half of them decide to stay here with me?"

Drummond swore impatiently at his skepticism. "At any rate, one of us might get back to the converters."

"And leave the other here?"

"He can say he's Jackson and order an attack in force on the ship."

"I don't follow you."

"Skidding the ship in a circle with the exhaust blowers on," Drummond explained patiently, "will take care of ten thousand clunkers."

He dropped from the ledge and raced into the cave. None of the robots stirred. Either they hadn't noticed Drummond's departure, Angus reasoned, or they weren't concerned because they knew the cave led nowhere.

The sun came up, daubing the cliff with splotches of orange and purple and striking up scintillations in the beads of dew on the robots' backs.

And still the tiresomely shouted veneration continued.

Angus paced the ledge, stopping occasionally to stare into the impenetrable shadows of the cave. He checked his watch. Five hours to go—five hours, and then time would be meaningless for the rest of his life, with the ship destroyed.

It was unlikely that rescue would come. The wrecked spacer's automatic distress signals had gone out in an ever-expanding sphere for a hundred years, and he and Drummond had been the only humans to hear them.

Trade routes were pretty stable in this section of the Galaxy now. And it was hardly possible that, within the next ten or twenty years, one would be opened up that would intercept the SOS that had lured them here.

He stood up and surveyed the robots. "RA-204."

204 reared erect. "Yes, Jackson?"

"One of us is gone."

"We know, O Supervisor."

"Why did you let him get away?"

"If he is not the True Jackson, it doesn't matter that he fled. If he is the Supervisor, he will return. Otherwise, why did he come here to us in the first place?"

Another robot straightened. "We are ashamed, O Jackson, that we have failed the Divine Test and have not recognized our True Supervisor."

Angus held up his arms for silence. "Once there was a cargo of robots. That was a hundred years ago. The ship was from Vega II. It developed trouble and crashed when it tried to land on this planet. There was—"

"What's a year, O Supervisor?" asked 204.

"A Vega-two, Jackson?" said 76 bewilderedly.

"What's a planet?" another wanted to know.

McIntosh leaned back hopelessly against the cliff. All of their memories and a good deal of their vocabularies had been lost. He could determine how much only through days of conversation. It would take weeks to learn their function, to rekindle a sense of duty sufficiently strong to draw their interest away from religion. Unless—

He drew resolutely erect. "Strip the converters! Pull the aft tube lining!"

The robots looked uncomprehendingly at him. It was obvious they weren't trained for spacecraft maintenance.

But it had to have something to do with mechanics. "A battle fleet is orbiting at one diameter! Arm all warheads on the double!"

They stared helplessly at one another, then back at Angus. Not ordnancemen.

"Pedestrian Strip Number Two is jammed! Crane crew, muster on the right!"

The robots shifted uncertainly. Apparently they weren't civic maintenancemen, either.

Defeated, Angus scanned their blank face plates. For a moment, it was almost as though he could discern expressions of confusion. Then he laughed at the thought that metal could accommodate a frown.

Suddenly the robots shifted their gaze to the cave. Drummond, shoulders sagging dismally, walked out and squinted against the glare. Several of the robots started toward him.

"Okay, okay!" he growled, heading back for the ledge before they could reach him.

"No luck?" Angus asked.

Disgusted, Drummond clambered up beside him. "The cave's just a nice-sized room."

"Took you two hours to find that out?"

The younger man shook his head. "I was hiding by the entrance, waiting for the clunkers to break it up and give me a chance to run for the ship.... How many robots did we decide there were?"

"About eight hundred."

"Wrong. You can add another four hundred or so."

"In the cave?"

Drummond nodded. "With their parts spread all the way from here to hell and back."

"Dismantled?"

"Down to the last nut and bolt. They've even got their secondary memory banks stripped."

Angus was thoughtfully silent a long while. "RA ..." he said finally. "Robot Assembler!"

"That's what I figured." Drummond turned back toward the robots and funneled his voice through his hands.

"Okay, you clunkers! I want all odd-numbered RAs stripped down for reconditioning!" He glanced at Angus. "When they get through, I'll have half of what's left strip the other half, and so forth."

McIntosh grinned caustically. "Brilliant! The whole operation shouldn't take more than two or three days." Then his face took on a grim cast. "Drummond, we've only got four hours left to get to those converters."

"But you don't understand. Once they get started, they'll be so busy, we'll probably be able to walk away."

Angus smiled indulgently. "Once they get started."

He nodded toward the robots.

They had all returned to their attitude of veneration.

"It won't work," McIntosh explained. "Their obsession with religion is stronger than their primary compulsion. That's probably because they've been satisfying their compulsion all along." He jerked a thumb in the direction of the cave.

Drummond swore venomously.

Angus dropped down on the ledge and folded his knees in his arms. He felt his age bearing down on him for the first time.

"Twelve hundred robots," he said meditatively. "Twelve hundred RA robots. Out of touch with civilization for a century. Satisfying their primary function by disassembling and assembling one another. Going at it in shifts. Splitting themselves into three groups."

"That device on their left thumb," Drummond interrupted. "It's a burnisher. That's why they're so shiny."

Angus nodded. "Three groups. Group A spends so many months stripping and reassembling Group B. Meanwhile, Group C, which has just been put together again, has no memory because their secondary banks have been wiped clean. So, like children, they learn from the working Group A."

Drummond's mouth hung open in shocked understanding. "And by the time A finishes the job, C's education is complete! And it's A's turn to be stripped!"

"By then," Angus went on, "Group C is not only ready to start stripping Group A, but has also become intellectually mature enough to begin the education of the reassembled Group B!"

They sat still for a while, thinking it over.

"The compulsion to do their jobs," McIntosh continued, "is unchanged because the primary function banks are sealed circuits and can't be tampered with. But in each generation, they have their secondary memory circuits wiped clean and have to start all over, getting whatever general knowledge they can from the last generation."

Drummond snapped his fingers excitedly. "That's why they don't know what we are! Their idea of Man had to be passed down by word of mouth. And it got all distorted in the process!"

Angus's stare, more solicitous now, swept slowly over the prostrate robots. "More important, that's why they developed a religion. What's the main difference between human and robotic intelligence? It's that our span of life is limited on one end by birth, the other by death—mysteries of origin and destiny that can't be explained. You see, the ordinary clunker understands where he came from and where he's going. But here are robots who have to struggle with those mysteries—birth and death of the conscious intellect which they themselves once knew, and forgot, and now have turned into myths."

"So they start thinking in terms of religion," Drummond said. "Well, that clears up the whole thing, doesn't it?"

"Not quite. It doesn't explain why the religion they've invented parallels ours so closely. And it doesn't tell us who Jackson is."

Drummond ran thick fingernails against the stubble on his cheeks. "Jackson is my Supervisor. I shall not rust. He maketh me to adjust my joint tension—" He stopped and frowned. "I've heard that before somewhere, only it sounded different."

Angus gave him a wry, tired smile. "Sure. It's practically the Psalm of David. Now you see why the resemblance is driving me batty."

The robots stirred. Several of them stood up and plodded into the cave. The others continued repeating their endless praise and devotion—prayers in every sense of the word except common sense.

Angus leaned back against the cliff and let the sun's heat warm him.

"Somehow it doesn't seem fair," he commented unhappily.

"What doesn't?" Drummond asked.

"They're so close to the Truth. Yet, after we file a report, a deactivation crew will come along and erase their beliefs. They'll have their memory banks swept clean and once more they'll be nothing but clunkers with a factory-specification job of routine work to do."

"Ain't that what they're supposed to be?"

"But these are different. They've found something no clunker's ever had before—hope, faith, aspiration beyond death." He shook his head ruefully.

There was movement at the mouth of the cave and the smaller group of robots emerged from the shadows, two of them bearing a stone slab. Their steps were ceremoniously slow as they approached the ledge. Bowing, they placed the tablet at Angus's feet and backed away.

"These are the articles of our faith, O Jackson," one announced. "We have preserved them for Thy coming."

McIntosh stared down at the charred remains of a book. Its metal-fiber binding was shredded and fused and encrusted with the dust of ages.

Drummond knelt beside it and, with stiff fingers, brushed away the film of grime, uncovering part of the title:

OLY
BIB  E

Eagerly, Angus eased the cover back. Of the hundreds of pages it had originally contained, only flaked parts of two or three remained. The printing was scarcely legible on the moldy paper.

He read aloud those words he could discern:

"... to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside cool waters; He...."

Drummond jabbed Angus with a triumphant forefinger. "They didn't invent any religion, after all!"

"It isn't important how they got it. The fact that they accepted it—that's what's important." McIntosh glanced up at Drummond. "They probably found this in the wreck of the ship they'd been in. It's easy to see they haven't used it in hundreds of generations. Instead, the gist of what's in it was passed down orally. And their basic concepts of Man and supervisor were distorted all along the way—confused with the idea of God."

Gently, he let the cover fall. And a shining square of duraloid fell out.

"It's somebody's picture!" Drummond exclaimed.

"An ID card," Angus said, holding it so the light wouldn't reflect off its transparent protective cover.

It was a picture of a nondescript man—not as stout as Drummond, nor as lean as McIntosh—with hair neither all black, like the younger man's, nor nearly all white, like Angus's.

The print below the picture was indiscernible, except for the subject's last name....

"Jackson!" Drummond whispered.

Angus slowly replaced the card. "A hundred years of false devotion," he said pensively. "Just think—"

"This is no time for that kind of gas." Drummond glanced at his watch. "We got just two hours to cut off those converters." Desperately, he faced the robots. "Hey, you clunkers! You're robot assemblers. You got four hundred clunkers in that cave, all in pieces. Get in there and put 'em together!"

Angus shook his head disapprovingly. Somehow it didn't seem right, calling them clunkers.

"Jackson is my Supervisor!" intoned RA-204.

"Jackson is my Supervisor!" echoed the mass.

Drummond glanced frantically at his watch, then looked helplessly at Angus. Angus shrugged.

The younger man's face suddenly tensed with resolution. "So they've got to have a Jackson? All right, I'll give 'em one!"

He waved his fist at the horde. "I'm your Supervisor! I'm your Jackson! Now clear out of the way and—"

RA-76's hand darted out and seized Drummond's ankle, tugged him off the ledge. As he fell to the ground, a score of robots closed in over him, metal arms flailing down methodically. Angus yelled at them to stop, saw he was too late and sank down, turning away sickly.

Finally, after a long while, they backed off and faced Angus.

"We have passed the Divine test, O Jackson!" 204 shouted up jubilantly.

"We have redeemed ourselves before our Supervisor!" exclaimed 76.

It took a long, horror-filled moment before Angus could speak.

"How do you know?" he managed to ask at last.

"If he had been Jackson," exclaimed 204, "we could not have destroyed him."

The robots fell prostrate again and returned to their devotional. But now the phrases were triumphant, where before they had been servile and uncertain.

Angus stared numbly down at Drummond, then backed against the cliff. The litany below, exuberant now, grew mightily in volume, booming vibrantly against distant hills.

"There is but one Supervisor!" intoned 204.

"But