The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

one shoulder and a canvas bag of spare magazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing.

“Well, look what you’re doing to him!” she mock-reproached. “That’s a dirty trick to play on a little robot!”

He grinned at her. “You and my mother would get along. She always treats robots like people.”

“Well, they are, sort of. They aren’t alive⁠—at least, I don’t think they are⁠—but they do what you tell them, and they learn tricks, and they have personalities.”

That was true. He didn’t think robots were alive, either, though biophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned down to defining life. Robots could learn, if you used the term loosely enough. And any robot with more than five hundred hours service picked up a definite and often exasperating personality.

“I’ve been working with them, and tearing them down and fixing them, ever since I was in pigtails,” she added.

The half-dozen natural leaders among the prisoners⁠—Jacquemont and his daughter, the two Harriet Barne officers, and a couple of others⁠—bent over the photoprinted plans Conn had, located their position, and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead. Sylvie Jacquemont could handle robots; she would ride in the front seat of the jeep while he piloted. Vibart, the chief engineer, and Yves Jacquemont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow with the fighting men. One lorry of his own party would follow the jeep; the other would bring up the rear.

He snapped on the screen and punched the ship combination. Stefan Jorisson appeared in it.

“Hi, Conn! You all right?” He raised his voice. “Conn’s on-screen!”

His father appeared at Jorisson’s shoulder and, a moment later, Klem Zareff.

“Well, we’re in, all right,” he said. “We just picked up an army, too.” He swung the jeep to get the crowd in the pickup, explaining who they were. “Did you hear from Anse?”

“Yes, he just screened in,” Rodney Maxwell said. “He said a gunboat can get in.”

“That’s right; clear into the crater.”

“Well, we’re going to put three of them inside,” Zareff told him. “Werewolf, Zombi, and Dero. And a troop carrier with fifty men; flamethrowers, portable machine guns, bomb-launchers; regular special-weapons section. What can you do where you are?”

“Here? Nothing. We’re going to work around to the other side of the crater, and then find a vertical shaft and go up topside and make as much disturbance as we can.”

“That’s it!” Zareff approved. “Pull them off balance; as soon as we get in, we’ll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour; it’s going to take time getting to the tunnel-mouth without being spotted from above.”

He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and the other lorry, followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead like a pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark and silent and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that the prisoners had never gotten into this section; the Harriet Barne was a mile or so to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise of firing from outside became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop which seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of some rush job that hadn’t really been necessary. They came to a place even the snooper couldn’t enter, choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponic seed-plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. They emerged into outside light, in vast caves a mile high and open onto the crater, and looked across the floor that had been leveled and vitrified to the other side, three and a half miles away.

He didn’t know whether to be more awed by the original eruption that had formed the crater or by the engineering feat of carving these docks and ship-berths, big enough for the hugest hyperspaceship, into it.

At first, he had been afraid of getting into position too soon before the task force from outside could profit by the diversion. Then he began to worry about the time it was taking to get halfway around the crater. He could hear artillery thundering continuously above. Except at the very beginning of the battle, there had been little gunfire. He wondered if both sides were running out of lift-and-drive missiles, or if the fighting had gotten too close for anybody to risk using nuclear weapons.

He was also worrying about the women and children among the released prisoners.

“Why did the pirates bother with them?” he asked Sylvie.

“They used the women and some of the old men to do housekeeping chores for them,” she said. “Mostly, though, they were hostages; if the men didn’t work, Perales threatened to punish the women and children. I wasn’t doing any housework; I’m too good a mechanic. I was helping on the ship.”

“Well, what’ll I do with them when the fighting starts? I can’t take them into battle.”

“You’ll have to; it’ll be the safest place for them. You can’t leave them anywhere and risk having them recaptured.”

“That means we’ll have to detach some men to cover them, and that’ll cut our striking force down.” He whistled at the sound-pickup of his screen and told his father about it. “What do I do with these people, anyhow?”

“You’re the officer in command, Conn,” his father told him. “Your decision. How soon can you attack? We’re almost through to the crater.”

“There’s a vertical shaft right above us, and a lot of noise at the top. We’ll send up a couple of bomb-robots to clear things at the shaft-head and follow with everything we have.”

“Noncombatants and all?”

He nodded. “Only thing we can do.” An old quotation occurred to him. “ ‘If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs.’ ”

He wondered who’d said that in the first place. One of the old Pre-Atomic conquerors; maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would have said, “If you want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage.” Maybe it was Caesar.

“We’d better send Gumshoe Gus up, first,” Sylvie suggested.

“You