His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"Remember what I said about the human brain, Babe? It's bigger and better than any thinking-machinery, however elaborate. It's Nature's way, which is often best. Nature's way was to smash the protean and perform a simple operation that substituted Allistair's brain for its impulse-mechanism."

"What happens then?" she asked. "Not that I question that he ought to die in a good cause. He was a nice kid, but it was a flagrant piece of criminal negligence, monkeying with robots."

"Agreed. So he makes retribution in the best way he can. Those damned protean machines control about half a billion robots apiece after they manufacture them." He shuddered briefly as he remembered what the protean had looked like. Bartok has expected a neat, man-sized robot; instead it had been a million cubic feet of solid machinery.

The Commander yawned. "So, having taken over this protean's control factors with his own brain, he is in a position at last to direct the creatures he made. Of course he'll use his robots to fight the other robots. Here comes the first contact."

Far to the rear of the speedy craft there was a titanic flaring of lights and colors as two fighting ships met. Unimaginable forces roared from the searchlight-shaped projectors, impinged spectacularly on thinly glowing ray-screens. The ray screens went down after about three minutes of brilliant resistance and the ship vanished in a puff of vapor.

"Ugh! Disintegrators!" said the girl. "So they really had them!"

"Why not? To the mechanical mind everything is possible except commonsense. Instead of negotiating with Allistair they'll be confident of their superiority. And, fire for fire, they are stronger. Also their tactics are perfect. But young Allistair's tactics are bound to be faulty, which means that his ships will show up where they couldn't possibly be and blow whole protean units to hell and gone. His fire-control has the edge on them in that it's unpredictable."

Babe's eyes were astern, on the colossal battles going on; on the forces being released that made a Fleet flagship's biggest big guns seem feeble. "This part of space," she said, "will never be the same. It'll be like trying to plot a course inside the orbit of Mercury. I suggest that you proclaim that fact to the world."

Bartok grinned. "More speed," he said. "I wouldn't want to be caught in one of their fireballs. See that?" He pointed excitedly at a moving fleck of light that had separated itself from a monster flying fort just off the ground. "That thing's as big as Ceres—and it's explosive. More speed, Babe, if you value my hide."

"I do," she said shortly. "The colonial system, or what's left of it, is going to need a firm hand to tide over the stresses and strains of this robots'

war."

"It shouldn't last for more than a few years," said Bartok. "When a force like that gets split, they haven't got time for anything else. And don't fret about the colonial system. There's a lot left of it yet, and it's right in the palm of my hand."

Babe MacNeice looked hard at the Commander. "If any other man," she said, "told me that, I'd make it a point to blow up this ship before we touched Earth. But I think you can be trusted."

"Algol ahead," said Bartok, pointing to a star-disk off the bow. "The outposts of empire, where they're chewing their nails about the strange noises and flashes to be seen and heard over the communications systems. We'll have to evacuate them nearer Alpha Centauri or thereabouts. Can't chance one of those fireballs hitting a planet of the system!"

He reached for a recorder and began barking orders into the mouthpiece. Before the cylinder was half grooved he had—verbally—

evacuated three galactic sectors, reorganized the Intelligence Wing, scrapped the now-obsolete graving-docks where no battlewagon would ever dock again, converted the lighters and tenders of the Fleet into freight ships for emergency use, and begun to draft a new constitution for the All Earth and Colonies Federation.

"That," said Babe happily, "is the way I like to hear you talk."

Algol loomed ahead.

The Adventurers

[Science Fiction Quarterly, Feb 1955]

It was a fair-to-middling afternoon at the Adventurers Club. Cleveland was not pre-blitz London, so it looked little enough like a club; instead of oak paneling, the walls were a bilious green plaster. The waiters were not ancient and subservient Britons, but mostly flippant youths in overstarched mess-jackets; they wore chronometer wristwatches and finger-rings. The Club did not radiate the solid certainty of the fixed and immovable, which is supposed to be such a comfort to the English.

It had, as a matter of fact, been established in its present two floors of a business district office building for only three months, having been evicted from a Lake Boulevard loft-building destined to be torn down and replaced by a garage and parking lot. The Adventurers, however, had done their best in the brief quarter-year to make the place homey.