Part 2

Hyperdimensional travel has its penalties. Among them, black virus infection, which is not black, not virus, not infection. One of the penalties. An alien protein native to those dark dimensions beyond dimension. A protein to which all mankind, most animals and plants, and even a few types of robots, were fatally allergic.

Strong fingers closed on Hastings' arm and hustled him along. Exertion cleared his mind and fear roused his senses to action. Now thoroughly awake, resistance to Bell did not occur to him. He permitted Bell to drag-lead him through the passenger compartments into the crew's quarters. One glance was sufficient. Half the crewmen were already dead. Hideously dead. Others writhed in convulsions, wrenched out of their shockblocks, their faces blotched with dark weals, chest and abdomens bloated and bursting with agony.

"Chiefly the crew, so far," Bell explained. "Only one of the passengers had contact with it. Or with them. They must have got it on the out voyage, before reaching Pluto."

Hastings nodded, numb with horror.

"Can we help them?" Bell asked calmly.

"Not much. Drugs by injection to kill the pain. A few may survive, the stronger ones, and they may wish they hadn't. We'll try to keep it from spreading to the other passengers. There are treatments, but not here. If we could reach the hospital at Luna City--"

Hastings' voice sounded hopeless.

"It's not too far," Bell commented. "We're well inside the orbit of Mars. A week of deceleration and orbit trimming. Plenty of fuel."

"But who'll handle the ship?"

"They can't?"

"None of them--ever. Even if they live to reach Luna City."

"Then I'll have to," Bell said confidently.

Hastings stared as if the robot-man had suddenly gone mad. "No one man could handle the ship," he gasped. "Even if you knew all about space ships and how to land them. Trimming orbit is a full-crew job. And landing is ticklish enough for old hands. You don't know a thing--"

"No," agreed Bell. "But I'll manage. No _man_ could, but I'm not a man, as you pointed out. More or less. We'll find out now which it is. I can do it. I'll have the robots and the automatic machinery. We understand each other."

Hastings wasted no time in futilities. "That's your department. Do whatever you can. Send a warning to Luna City for relay to Earth and Pluto. Then get me a couple of the more intelligent passengers. I'll need help."

"They won't come," Bell said, with the nearest a grunt of disgust he could manage. "They're human enough to be scared. Not that I blame them. I can remember being that human myself. You'll have to settle for whatever help I can give ... between errands."

Hastings swore and accepted the inevitable.

* * * * *

Nine days of nightmare. Four of the remaining crewmen died and were promptly incinerated. Bell attended to this gruesome task, and others too ugly for print. He ate rarely and slept not at all. He took over completely when Hastings collapsed from sheer exhaustion, rousing him again only when the vital necessities of ship management demanded attention. Apparently immune to contact with the alien protein, he handled living and dead without precautions. During the intervals when Hastings could manage the clinical requirements of his patients, Bell's brain went to work.

Feeding mountains of figures into himself, he became a living calculator, resolving the mathematical mountains into the twinned equations of orbit and objective. By tricky gearing and fantastic jumbles of wiring he increased the efficiency of both automatic machinery and the non-humanoid robots. Simple devices accomplished prodigies of result.

Passengers were herded into a confined space near the nose of the ship, and kept strictly quarantined. Two of the passengers showed unmistakable signs of exposure and were segregated. All the routine tasks of the ship went into the hands of the machines, functioning under the direction of Bell, half-man, half-machine.

"I still don't understand how you managed to get aboard," said Hastings, half-angrily. "But I'm damned glad you did. Even if you don't make the landing and set us down like a panful of scrambled eggs, it's still been interesting to know you. We searched every place in the ship that a stowaway could possibly have hidden."

It was the last day out from Luna.

"You tried too hard, doc." Bell laughed, his sharp, metallic clattering laughter. "I didn't stow away. I was one of the crewmen who helped you search the holds. Nobody ever notices a man in uniform, and I helped them overlook me. These eyeplates are the secret, for people look too hard at them, and it's easy to hypnotize them. Then I will them to see whatever they expected to see. You made everything too easy for me."

"That's what I wanted," said Hastings, flushing, "to make things easy for you. But not exactly as you mean it. Never trust a robot any further than you can throw him."

Bell replied thoughtfully. "No one really trusts a machine. Man instinctively fears and distrusts his own creations. We try to reassure ourselves by repeating the time-dishonored formula. The automobile will never replace the horse, nor the airplane the car, the rocket the airplane. And on down the line. For myself, I'm still faint-hearted about the hyperdimensional drive in spaceships. A new invention scares hell out of the stay-put mentality of the human race. We try desperately to convince ourselves that it isn't so, that these inventions won't really work."

"People will eventually outgrow childish fears," protested Hastings.

"To some extent. But never completely. People accept the new inventions, but only after they have proved themselves. When they become commonplace, comfortable, they are taken for granted. Often too much so. But machines do every job better than their masters and creators. And civilization goes wherever the machines wish to take mankind; machines feed man, wake him up, put him to sleep, wipe his nose, change his didy when necessary. So mankind returns to the nursery stage--with machines as the new version of benevolent nursery despots. Machines do the thinking; they are kind masters and eager, tireless servants.

"But inside, there is always the hate, the fear, the natural distrust that flesh always feels for the new, the alien. People learn to accept, under duress, just as children accept the despotism of the nursery. But machines are the real rulers. Mankind is at the mercy of machinery. Machines check progress, pass on the sanity and utility of every development. They are gruesome guardian angels but until mankind grows up, they are needed. Theirs is the problem of all guardian angels ... to make themselves trusted and accepted. That's my problem. I'm half-machine, even though I am still more flesh than anything else."

Mars would have been a glowing, pink-orange coal behind the ship had it not chanced to be elsewhere in its orbit. Earth and Luna were a pair of faint crescents, one vivid blue, the other pale and ghostly gray-yellow, so far to the side that one unversed in astrogation would have feared a clean miss. However, by the time calculated, the ship would reach Earth's orbit and the planet and satellite would be there, in proper position and moving at nearly the exact speed to make landing possible.

There was hope now for those still living. If Bell could only cap his miracle with another.

"What are your plans now?" Hastings asked. "Going on to Earth after we're cleared from Luna?"

Bell studied the psychiatrist wistfully. "Is it safe to tell you?"

"Why not? I'm on your side now," admitted Hastings. "You've proved yourself. If the population board gives you any trouble about landing, or going to Earth, refer them to me. I'm your man, your doctor and your friend. You don't have to worry about me, and I've stopped worrying about you. I can even believe you'll set down this crate in one piece. I'm awed. What do you want? Earth?"

Bell's voice was uneasy. "Not right away. I've sent word on to Jane. She'll take the E-L shuttle and meet me here. After I've talked to her, there are things to do. I'm afraid of people, doc. Honestly afraid. And I don't want to go back empty-handed."

* * * * *

It was not a good-landing, technically. But there have been worse with a full-crew ship. Considering the emergency, and all of his handicaps, Bell worked the equivalent of a miracle. Bell saw to the transfer of the still-living crewmen to the Lunar Base hospital, then submitted himself along with the doctor and the well passengers to the thorough examinations of space quarantine. He enjoyed the discomfiture caused the staff by his unorthodox anatomy.

Fortunately the signs of deadly reactions to the misnamed protein are easily distinguished. Bell and Hastings were cleared in record time. And the shuttle from Earth was not due for a full hour when they reached the landing stages.

"You haven't answered my question, Bell!" Hastings probed. "I asked what you wanted. What are your plans?"

Bell hesitated. "I don't know exactly. It depends on what Jane wants. I have an idea about proving myself. But it will take money, a lot of money."

"You'll have a lot, Bell. Claim salvage for the ship and cargo. Stick the Company. They owe you something for that accident that should never have happened. Even according to law they're at fault for not providing safeties. Nobody ever argues with the Company but you have that fat, greedy octopus over a barrel. You'll be rich and they'll have to let you go and come as you please. On Earth or anywhere."

Bell grinned. "I know they'd like to box me up and keep me buried alive on Pluto, just to keep my mouth shut. But you don't sound like a Company man, doc. Aren't you?"

Hastings snorted savagely. "They strangle business, suppress initiative, gobble all valuable inventions, and generally dictate subsistence terms to owners and workers alike. D'you think I went to Pluto to work under P. & T. terms because I liked it? I had to go or starve, and I thought I could do something for the men in the mines. They'll put meters on our breathing next. The P. & T. empire controls all sources of power, from water wheels to fuel and atomic generators...."

"But not sunlight or the cosmic rays, do they?"

"Wait a minute!" Hastings was pale but interested. "You're not thinking of wrecking the trust."

"I might. It would be fun to short-circuit that power. I could do it in a week. A guardian angel has to prove himself. Free power to everyone could be my gift. About that salvage money. Would P. & T. settle for half the legal amount?"

"They'll settle and be glad for such a comfortable deal."

"Will you handle that part for me? Save embarrassment. How's your nerve, doc?"

"Never better. Sure, I'll arrange the salvage deal. Why not? I'll even nick them for a fat cut of commission. But you can't get rid of me so easily. This is one fight I want a share of. And I'm sticking like a burr."

They watched the shuttle ship through the giant airlocks. Like a falling leaf it maneuvered, settling through the dense, hothouse atmosphere of subsurface Luna. Airlock doors in the hull slid open.

"About this free power. It's a simple matter of gratings to step down the frequency--"

"Skip it," said Hastings absently. "I wouldn't understand the technology anyhow. That doesn't matter. After all, I built your superbrain. Anyone who can do what you've done, bringing in the spaceship and setting it down in one piece, not to mention saving all our lives and preventing the spread of Black Virus, is my man. If you say you can do it, you can."

Bell's metallic eyeplates selected one tiny figure among the many disembarking. He groaned.

"I guess this is it." The doctor gripped his arm, then left him alone to meet his fate.

She was a trim figure in a simple gray suit. Not beautiful, not extraordinary nor spectacular except in that individual way every human being is extraordinary and different from all others. She was in her middle thirties, even plain by some standards. But she was Jane, which was somehow important to Bell.

"It's all right," she said calmly, standing straight and firm, unafraid of the things time and change can do to love, or to other human relations.

"Don't hurry it," Bell advised. "Just remember that whatever you want is all that really matters."

"You're changed," she said rapidly. "Different in ways that I can't understand. Maybe I'll never understand. It may be pretty difficult but we'll worry about details later. You're still you, I think. Welcome home."

Much later Hastings joined the pair and was introduced. He made no comment worthy of record but while Jane attended to some formalities of disembarking on Luna the men were left alone.

Bell fixed his robot stare on Hastings. "Tomorrow we start Project Power," he promised. "Still with me?"

"All the way," Hastings agreed. "I guess that settles everything but the Jackpot Question."

For once, Bell's face-plate achieved the miracle of a completely human expression. Puzzlement.

"Is there another?"

"I think so. What _are_ you going to do with Humanity?"

Bell laughed, the sound full of murmurous, metallic overtones.

"I haven't quite decided...."