Lucky Starr And The Rings Of Saturn

"Steady, Bigman," murmured Lucky.

The little Martian hunched low in his seat, his eyes watching Devoure hotly.

Lucky said, "Let's not be childish in our attempts to frighten. Execution is not easy on a world of robots. The robots can't kill us, and I'm not sure that you or your colleagues would be willing to kill a man in cold blood."

"Of course not, if you mean by killing the chopping off of a head or the blasting in of a chest. But then there's nothing frightening in a quick death. Suppose, though, that our robots prepared a stripped-down ship. Your-uh-companion could be chained to a bulkhead on that ship by robots who will, of course, be careful not to hurt him. The ship can be fitted with an automatic pilot that will take it on an orbit away from your Sun and out of the Ecliptic. There isn't a chance in a quadrillion that it would ever be spotted by anyone from Earth. It will travel on forever."

Bigman broke in, "Lucky, it doesn't matter what they do to me. Don't you agree to anything."

Devoure said, unheeding, "Your companion will have plenty of air and there'll be a tube of water within reach if it's thirsty. Of course it will be alone and there will be no food. Starvation is a slow death, and starvation in the ultimate loneliness of space is a horrible thing to contemplate."

Lucky said, "That would be a dastardly and dishonorable way of treating a prisoner of war."

"There is no war. You are merely spies. And in any case, there is no need for it to happen, eh, Councilman? You need only sign the necessary confession that you intended to attack us and agree to confirm this in person at the conference. I am sure you will heed the beggings of the thing you have befriended."

"Beggings!" Bigman leaped, crimson-faced, to his feet.

Devoure raised his voice abruptly. "That thing is to be taken into custody. Proceed."

Two robots materialized silently at either side, and each seized an arm. For a moment Bigman writhed, and his body lifted off the floor with the intensity of his effort, but his arms were held motionless.

One of the robots said, "The master will please not resist, as otherwise the master may harm himself despite all we can do."

Devoure said, "You'll have twenty-four hours to make up your mind. Plenty of time, eh, Councilman?" He looked at the illuminated figures on the strip of decorative metal that encircled his left wrist. "And meanwhile, we will prepare our stripped ship. If we don't have to use it, as I expect we won't, why, what's labor to robots, eh, Councilman? Sit where you are; there is no use in trying to help your companion. He will not be hurt for the while."

Bigman was carried out of the room bodily while Lucky, half risen out of his seat, watched helplessly.

A light flashed on a small box on the conference table. Devoure leaned over to touch it, and a luminous tube sprang into being just above the box. The image of a head appeared. A voice said, "Yonge and I have the report that you have the Councilman, Devoure. Why were we told only after his landing?"

"What difference does that make, Zayon? You know now. Are you coming in?"

"We certainly are. We wish to meet the Councilman."

"Come then to my office."

Fifteen minutes later, two Sirians arrived. Both were as tall as Devoure; both were olive-skinned (the greater ultraviolet radiation of Sirius produced a dark skin, Lucky realized), but they were older. The cut hair of one was grizzled to steely gray. He was thin-lipped and spoke with rapid precision. He was introduced as Harrig Zayon, and his uniform made it clear he was a member of the Sirian Space Service.

The other was going somewhat bald. There was a long scar on his forearm and he had the keen look of one who had grown old in space. He was Barrett Yonge, also of the Space Service.

Lucky said, "Your Space Service is, I think, somewhat the equivalent of our Council of Science."

"Yes, it is," said Zayon gravely. "In that sense we are colleagues, though on opposite sides of the fence."

"Serviceman Zayon, then. Serviceman Yonge. Is Mr. Devoure... "

Devoure broke in, "I am not a member of the Space Service. It is not necessary that I be. Sirius can be served outside the Service too."

"Particularly," said Yonge, one hand resting on the scarred forearm as though to hide the mark, "if one is nephew of the director of the Central Body."

Devoure rose. "Was that meant as sarcasm, Serviceman?"

"Not at all. It was meant literally. The relationship makes it possible for you to do Sirius more service than otherwise."

But there was a dry quality to his statement, and Lucky was not unaware of the flash of hostility between the two aging Servicemen and the young and undoubtedly influential relative of Sirius's overlord.

Zayon tried to deflect the direction things had taken by turning to Lucky and saying mildly, "Has our proposition been offered you?"

"You mean the suggestion that I lie at the interstellar conference?"

Zayon looked annoyed and a bit puzzled. He said, "I mean to join us, to become a Sirian."

"I don't think we had quite reached that point, Serviceman."

"Well, then consider this. Our Service knows you well and we respect your abilities and accomplishments. They are wasted on an Earth that must lose someday as a matter of biologic fact."

"Biologic fact?" Lucky frowned. "The Sirians, Serviceman Zayon, are descended from Earthmen."

"So they are, but not from all Earthmen; only from some, from the best, from those with the initiative and strength to reach the stars as colonists. We have kept our descent pure; we have not allowed the weaklings in, or those with poor genes. We have weeded out the unfit from among ourselves so that we are now a pure race of the strong, the fit, and the healthy, while Earth remains a conglomerate of the diseased and deformed."

Devoure broke in, "We had an example here a while ago, the Councilman's companion. It infuriated and nauseated me merely to be in the same room with him; a monkey, a five-foot travesty of a human being, a lump of deformity... "

Lucky said slowly, "He is a better man than you, Sirian."

Devoure rose, fist drawn back, trembling. Zayon moved toward him rapidly, laying a hand on his shoulder. "Devoure, sit down, please, and let me go on. This is not the time for extraneous quarrels." Devoure shook the other's hand off roughly but sat down all the same.

Serviceman Zayon went on earnestly, "To the outer worlds, Councilman Starr, Earth is a terrible menace, a bomb of sub-humanity, ready to explode and contaminate the clean Galaxy. We don't want that to happen; we can't allow it to happen. It's what we're fighting for: a clean human race, composed of the fit."

Lucky said, "Composed of those you consider fit. But fitness comes in all shapes and forms. The great men of Earth have come from the tall and the short, from all manner of head shapes, skin colors, and languages. Variety is our salvation and the salvation of all mankind."

"You are simply parroting something you have been taught. Councilman, can't you see you are really one of us? You are tall, strong, built like a Sirian; you have the courage and daring of a Sirian. Why combine with the scum of Earth against men like yourself, just because of the accident of your birth on Earth?"

Lucky said, "The upshot of all this, Serviceman, is that you wish me to come to the interstellar conference on Vesta and deliver statements designed to help Sirius."

"To help Sirius, yes, but true statements. You have spied on us. Your ship was certainly armed."

"But you waste your time. Mr. Devoure has already discussed the matter with me."

"And you have agreed to be the Sirian you really are?" Zayon's face lit up at the possibility.

Lucky cast a side glance at Devoure, who was inspecting the knuckles of his hands with an indifferent air.

Lucky said, "Why, Mr. Devoure advanced the proposition in another fashion. Perhaps he did not inform you of my arrival sooner than he did in order to have time to discuss the matter with me alone and to use his own methods. Briefly, he simply said that I was to attend the conference on Sirian terms or else my friend Bigman was to be sent out in a stripped space ship to die of starvation."

Slowly the two Sirian Servicemen turned to look at Devoure, who merely continued the contemplation of his knuckles.

Yonge said slowly, speaking directly to Devoure, "Sir, it is not in the Service tradition... "

Devoure exploded in sudden flaming anger. "I am not a Serviceman and I don't give a half-credit piece for your tradition. I'm in charge of this base, and its security is my responsibility. You two have been appointed to accompany me as delegates to the conference on Vesta so that the Service will be represented, but I am to be chief delegate, and the success of the conference is also my responsibility. If this Earthman does not like the type of death reserved for his monkey friend, he need only agree to our terms, and he will agree to them a lot faster with that as stimulus than your offer of making a Sirian out of him.

"And listen further." Devoure rose from his seat, paced angrily to the far end of the room, and then turned to glare at the frozen-faced Servicemen who listened with disciplined self-control. "I'm tired of your interference. The Service has had enough time to make headway against Earth and has a miserable record in that regard. Let this Earthman hear me say this. He should know it better than anyone. The Service has a miserable record, and it is I who have trapped this Starr and not the Service. What you gentlemen need is a little more guts, and that I intend to supply-... "

It was at this moment that a robot threw open the door and said, "Masters, I must be excused for enter ing without orders from you, but I have been instructed to tell you this concerning the small master who has been taken into custody... "

"Bigman!" cried Lucky, jumping to his feet. "What has happened to him?"

After Bigman had been carried out of the room by the two robots he had thought furiously. Not, really, of possible ways of escaping. He was not so unrealistic as to think he could make his way through a horde of robots and, singlehanded, get away from a base as well organized as this one, even if he had The Shooting Starr at his disposal, which he had not.

It was more than that.

Lucky was being tempted to dishonor and betrayal, and Bigman's life was the bait.

Either way, Lucky must not be subjected to this. He must not have to save Bigman's life at the cost of becoming a traitor. Nor must he have to save his honor by sacrificing Bigman and carry the guilt with him for the rest of his life.

There was only one way to prevent both alternatives. Bigman faced that coldly. If he were to die in some way with which Lucky had nothing to do, the big Earthman could bear no blame, even in his own mind. And there would no longer be a live Bigman with which to bargain.

Bigman was forced into a small diagravitic car and taken for another two-minute drive.

But those two minutes were enough to crystallize matters firmly in his mind. His years with Lucky had been happy, exciting ones. He had lived a full lifetime in them and had faced death without fear. He could face death now, also without fear.

And a quick death would not be so quick as to prevent him from evening a tiny bit of the score with Devoure. No man in his lifetime had insulted him so without retaliation. He could not die and leave the score unevened. The thought of the arrogant Sirian so filled Bigman with anger that for a moment he could not have told whether it was friendship for Lucky or hatred of Devoure that was driving him.

The robots lifted him out of the diagravitic car, and one passed its huge metal paws gently and expertly down the sides of the Martian's body in a routine search for weapons.

Bigman felt a moment of panic and strove uselessly to knock aside the robot's arm. "I was searched on the ship before they let me get off," he howled, but the robot completed the search without paying attention.

The two seized him again, made ready to take him into a building. The time, then, was now. Once he was in an actual cell, with force planes cutting him off, his task would be much harder.

Bigman kicked his feet desperately forward and turned a somersault between the robots. He was kept from turning completely around only by the robots' hold of his arms.

One said, "It distresses me, master, that you have placed yourself in what must be a painful position. If you will hold yourself motionless so that you will not interfere with our assigned task, we will hold you as lightly as we can."

But Bigman kicked again and then shrieked piercingly, "My arm!"

The robots knelt at once and deposited Bigman gently on his back. "Are you in pain, master?"

"You stupid cobbers, you've broken my arm. Don't touch it! Get some human being who knows how to take care of a broken arm, or get some robot who can," he ended in a moan, his face twisted in agony.

The robots moved slowly backward, eyes upon him. They had no feelings, could have none. But inside them were the positronic brain paths whose orientation was controlled by the potentials and counter-potentials set up by the Three Laws of Robotics. In the course of their fulfillment of one law, the Second-that they obey an order, in this case an order to lead a human being to a specific spot-they had broken a higher law, the First: that they never bring harm to. a human being. The result in their brains must have been a kind of positronic chaos.

Bigman cried out sharply, "Get help... Sands of Mars-get... "

It was an order, backed by the power of the First Law. A human being was hurt. The robots turned, started away-and Bigman's right arm flashed down to the top of his hip boot and snaked inside. He rose nimbly, with a needle gun wanning the palm of his hand.

At the sound of that, one of the robots turned back, voice blurred and thickened as a sign of the weakening hold of the confused positronic brain. "Ith the mathter not in pain, then?" The second robot turned back too.

"Take me back to your Sirian masters," Bigman said tightly.

It was another order, but the First Law was no longer reinforcing it. A human being had not, after all, been harmed. There was no shock or surprise at this revelation. The nearest robot simply said, in a voice that had sharpened once more, "As your arm is not, indeed, damaged, it becomes necessary for us to carry out our original order. Please come with us."

Bigman wasted no time. His needle gun flashed noiselessly, and the robot's head was a gout of melting metal. What was left of it collapsed.

The second robot said, "It will not help to destroy our functioning," and walked toward him.

Self-protection was the Third Law only. A robot could not refuse to carry out an order (Second Law) on the basis of the Third alone. So it was bound to walk into a pointing needle gun. And other robots were coming from all directions, summoned, no doubt, by some radioed call at the moment when Bigman had first pretended the broken arm.

They would all walk into a needle gun, but there would be enough to survive his pumping shots. Those who would survive would then overpower him and carry him into imprisonment. He would be deprived of the quick death he needed, and Lucky would still be faced with the unbearable alternative.

There was only one way out. Bigman put the needle gun to his temple.