THE ETERNAL MACHINES

By William Spencer

It was a graveyard planet—the junk-pile of the Universe—but its sole keeper had a use for many of the machines discarded by humanity: to build a memorial for mankind.

Rosco checked the scope again.

The big shuttle ship was arcing in smoothly on a reentry curve. The speck of light on the screen, indicating her position, was crossing the hairlines of range and altitude at pre-programmed intervals. It was going to be a routine landing.

In a moment now, the glowing hull of the vast ship would break through cloud-base on flaring jets, closing in for a touch-down on the scarred slag of the landing apron, which lay a few hundred yards from Rosco’s control centre.

The growing thunder of the jets affronted Rosco’s ears, setting a panel vibrating in the transparent dome over his head.

The process of landing was completely automated. There was really nothing for Rosco to do. He deliberately turned away from the big curving window that overlooked the landing zone, and went through a pretence of checking over some racks of telecommunications equipment on the far side of the control room.

He’d seen too many of these unmanned shuttle ships come simmering in for a landing on the dusty grey surface of the planet. Watched them settling on a cone of flame, blistering down through unsteady waves of boiling atmosphere. Observed the trellis of spidery legs extending on pneumatic joints, the pads at their extremities feeling for a firm purchase on the treacherously hot slag. Then the long ramp telescoping out, and the automatic lift trucks beginning to shuttle up and down with their loads.

So many ships had come and gone that the event no longer excited any particular emotion in him.

Or did it? Perhaps, if he was completely honest with himself, it did affect him in a subliminal way. The suppressed irritation he felt at the sight of a ship coming in from the inner inhabited planets—planets where men like himself lived—was it a symptom of something deeper?

Were those faint waves of resentment, vague stirrings of uneasiness—were they simply a mask for genuine homesickness and longing for companionship ?

Rosco mentally brushed the question aside. For fourteen years the nearest he had been to home was a pale flickering image coming faintly over the interplanetary communications channel. A garbled sound of voices, distorted and chopped around by the dust and ionisation bands of many million miles of space.

Rosco flipped switches on the control panel with unnecessary vigour. Dammit, he didn’t regret his decision to take over as warden of Chaos (the name chosen for the outermost planet at the time of its discovery had taken on an unconscious irony in the light of its subsequent use).

All right, so he had got just about the loneliest job in the whole system. He liked it that way.

He, Rosco, was the sole human inhabitant of Chaos: a trillion tons of planet with several million tons of assorted junk littering a large part of its sterile surface.

Chaos was the municipal rubbish dump of the whole system. Only they didn’t call it a rubbish dump any more. It went by some polite new name. Spoil tip …? Infill zone … ? That was it.

Robot ships shuttled in regularly from the more favoured planets of the system, bringing with them a capacity load of obsolete and unwanted junk of all kinds. Battered and bent relics of metal and polymer, crystal and fibre, outmoded before they could be outworn. The cast-offs from a machine-dominated culture, in which only the latest devices, the newest techniques, the most get-ahead styling, were acceptable in civilised circles. The dented detritus of the march of progress—a march that was breaking into a run.

The ships came in, unloaded their quota of junk, and scooped up a load of high-grade niobium ore. Then they were off again.

Weight of ore removed exactly balanced the incoming mass of junk. And so Chaos remained nicely in her orbit, not nudging inwards towards her more lovely sisters, or swinging outwards on a flighty new orbit in the depths of space.

Rosco looked out now at the ship safely sitting on the landing apron, enshrouded in shimmering waves of heat, and saw that the automatic trucks were already engaged in their work of shuttling to and fro up and down the ramp.

He checked off the entry in the arrivals log, and began to close down the control room for the night.

There was nothing more he need do. The job of unloading would carry on without intermission through the hours of darkness, as the trucks streamed back and forth, following the sonic sensors in their sensitive noses.

He could safely turn in. In the morning, according to schedule, the big freighter would have left. Another ship come and gone in the dozens of identical grey ships that were his sole companions and visitors on this lonely planet, with its sterile surface unquickened by life of any kind, wrapped in an inert atmosphere of nitrogen, krypton, and argon.

Rosco padded through into the living quarters attached to the control dome.

They had the functional, unlovely air that any accommodation tends to have when a man runs it purely for his own convenience, without regard for appearances.

On a table by the window was a tumble of old books, piled up in apparent disorder, mostly old-fashioned histories of technology and out-of-date manuals and catalogues. The collection revealed Rosco’s sole self-indulgence, his one concession to human weakness.

Usually the ships brought in a few new reference books on each visit, a sealed package being specially ferried over in one of the trucks and left just outside the airlock of the control dome.

Rosco’s superiors at System Headquarters indulged his odd obsession, despite its unmodish air. Everybody needed to have his small hobby, this much was granted. And Rosco was a good warden, the best they’d had for the greater part of a century. He never complained about the loneliness, or requested home leave. One day, they were going to have quite a difficult job replacing him.

Rosco selected a book from the pile, to read while chewing his way through the pre-cooked supper. Later, he took a shower, and then settled down in his bunk to enjoy the copy of “The Development of the Centrifugal Motor” (Accra, 2035).

He adjusted the angle of the reading light and the height of the pillows to his satisfaction and prepared to read himself asleep.

It was three hours after dawn when Rosco rose again, the light streaming into the sleeping quarters through the round window, and a babble of electronic music coming from the time-sequencer.

The big freighter had gone, and it would be three days before another came smouldering in down the landing beam.

Each day on Chaos was thirty-five hours long. The sun gleamed, a pale disk, through the high layer of grey dust that hid the stars at night.

He had three days of solitude. Over a hundred hours of complete isolation. Or, if you preferred to look at it that way, three days when he was undisputed king of the planet. There was no one to challenge his authority, not even an intelligent robot.

Rosco finished a leisurely breakfast, then rode one of the utility trucks out through the dumps which surrounded the landing zone and occupied vast tracts of the planet’s surface.

As the truck rolled along the dusty metalled road, Rosco watched the walls of junk slipping past on either side. The debris of civilisation lay piled up in fantastic profusion. A tangle of broken domestic gadgets, dead robots, crashed jetplanes, bruised rotor-craft, fragments of electronic sub-units, communications gear, and mangled computers.

The detritus of a society of dedicated consumers. To Rosco, it represented the reckless plundering of the system for minerals and raw materials.

Men had torn the elements out of underground tunnels, sucked them out of the air, or sieved them out of the seas. Fashioned them into devices of extraordinary complexity. Then, in a matter of a year, or a few months, some new advance had turned the plunder into obsolete junk, fit only for the scrap-heap.

His daily rides through the junk tips had become for Rosco a solemn and deeply satisfying ritual.

He sensed a kind of magnificence in these mountains of tangled artifacts. In death, they revealed a brilliance of conception which, when they had been in use, had often been masked by opaque casings, smooth and glossy shells.

Now the sections of computers, torn out by the roots, showed in the many-coloured intricacy of their connections a sort of technological artistry. The parts of the automated machinery, refined by several centuries of development, had the same sleekness of functional form that appears in a mammal’s jawbone or shoulder-blade.

Rosco drove slowly down between the long ridges of the dumps, which humped their serrated backs thirty feet upwards, shutting him in from the skyline. In all directions the flat-topped ridges reached almost the same height, showing the precision with which the dump-trucks had done their work.

His route took him a couple of miles in a ziz-zag course through the grid of intersecting roadways that criss-crossed the dumps, until, near one of the lesser intersections, he stopped the truck and switched off the motor.

Clambering down from the cabin, he walked through an inconspicuous gap in the nearest ridge of debris.

Through the gap, hidden from the roadway, there was a clearing about two hundred yards square. Rosco had arranged, some time past, for the ground in this area to be left clear of junk. He had done so by the somewhat devious expedient of temporarily re-siting the sonic beacons which gave the dump trucks from the freighters their co-ordinates on the surface of the planet.

The cleared space had become Rosco’s own private retreat. An oasis of order in the midst of piled-up disorder. Here he could pursue his obsession undisturbed.

With the loving care of a dedicated collector, he had reassembled some of the original machines from the dumps, salvaging a part here and joining a part there. In the inert atmosphere of the planet, these specimens of human technological equipment might last well over a million years.

Rosco walked slowly through his lines of specimens.

They gave him a sense of achievement, a deep inward satisfaction. But for his intervention, these machines would have disappeared irrecoverably into limbo.

Some of the machines had the hunched look of sleeping giants. Others towered over his head in tall slender forms, with a questioning or admonitory air. He felt the sense of homecoming that a man feels when he comes among friends.

Rosco strolled over towards an infra-red communicator of obsolete design. He rubbed his hand over its flank. This was one of his favourites. He pressed a recessed key that brought it to life.

The machine, after emitting a few brief crackles and coughs through an audio panel in its side, began to recite a poem:

Broken fragments

After brief glory

Discarded,

Now with longing

We remember

Our first subterranean sleep.

Where was the merit

In waking us at all?

The word “subterranean” came out in slightly garbled form, and Rosco made a mental note to clarify the recording some time.

The communicator had scanned the words from a memory bank into which Rosco had written them some years earlier. As the machine read them, it sumultaneously transmitted them down a modulated infra-red beam across the clearing.

At the far side of the clearing was another similar machine. The beam hit its receptors and the message was fed down into the second machine’s memory. One minute later, the second machine beamed the message back again.

This mechanised conversation continued to shuttle back and forth until Rosco switched the communicators off.

Rosco, who felt no need for human discourse, derived a kind of wry pleasure from this sterile gossiping of machines. But after three cycles had been completed, he grew tired of the repetitions and stopped the communicators.

Near the centre of the clearing was a computer complex, a sprawling assembly of units of differing design and vintage, which Rosco had coupled together after a certain amount of modification. He remembered the problem which he had fed into it during his last visit, and went over in its direction.

The computer, scanning the air restlessly with its hypersonic probes, emitted a shrill whistling noise indicating that it had sensed his approach.

“Good morning, Rosco,” the computer said. “You would like the answer to your problem now?”

Rosco stood in front of the machine.

“Yes, go ahead,” he said.

The computer paused briefly, as though scanning its memory, and then announced: “The probability of a meteor obliterating this area, on the basis of the data you gave. The answer is: one hit should occur every 10years.”

“Thank you,” said Rosco, smiling.

“Have you any problem for today?”

“No. You may return to a resting state.”

Rosco turned away, fully satisfied with the answer. There was nothing to worry about.

Ten-to-the-nineteenth years. At that rate it would have to be a very unlucky meteor indeed that smashed his collection, before that time in the unthinkably remote future when even the inert atmosphere of Chaos had corroded the machines to unrecognisable masses of crumbling rust.

Rosco’s personal image of himself took on a new posture of assurance, in the light of this information.

He was the custodian of the most durable museum in the system—perhaps even in the entire cosmos. When the men who had first made them were forgotten dust, these machines would still be standing in immaculate completeness.

The men had consigned the machines to the scrap-heap. Now it was the machines, in effect, who were relegating the men to oblivion. There was a kind of justice in it, really.

He looked round him at the ranks of the machines he’d salvaged. But for him, they would have remained tangled, useless, all-but-unidentifiable wrecks. Now they were launched on a career of unthinkable duration and majesty.

Rosco knew that he could not share the longevity of the machines. His metabolism was still burning itself up at the same rate, feeding on oxygen recycled in the hydroponics installation, topped up by extra supplies brought in by the freighters. Several big pressure cylinders, each containing a ton of the gas, were always cached in the main store, ready to be bled off as needed.

But although his life-span, measured against the cosmic scale, was only a moment, he was preparing to perpetuate his own image for as long as the museum lasted.

His genius—the far-sightedness of the man who had created a memorial to outlast the whole human race— should surely not be entirely lost to posterity. So at any rate Rosco modestly thought.

He went over to the video rostrum where the master recorder was sited. He usually made a point of not leaving the museum without putting a few memorable thoughts for the day on to tape. Revealing a few new facets of himself to the wondering gaze of future generations.

Rosco ran his fingers over the selector buttons, flipping through some of his early masterpieces of communication. Which did he want to view today? That was it: tape E-73 291. Summing up the whole situation admirably. Just about the best thing he had done.

He had to wait for a few moments while the capsule was being sorted out and loaded on to the tape deck. Then the coloured image of himself—a few years younger, but still recognisably Rosco—began to speak from the video display screen.

“So I came to the conclusion that man was consuming the vital raw materials of the cosmos at an outrageous rate. Greedily feeding on minerals and fossil deposits which he could not possibly replace. Accelerating the process of entropy with reckless haste.

“Man is behaving, in fact, like a spoilt child confronted with a mountainously huge cream cake. He just goes on eating and eating, becoming utterly insensitive, in the long run, to the taste of what he is eating. Losing sight of any enjoyment. Consumed simply by the urge to consume.”

Rosco, watching the screen with absorbed interest, nodded his head unconsciously, in agreement with himself.

“Becoming, in fact, no more admirable than a fat worm eating its way through an immense baulk of timber.”

Good, good, thought Rosco.

“The point of the exercise, if there is one, has become completely lost in the overwhelming reflex compulsiveness of the whole business.

“Man has even lost sight of the time process. And since his existence has become meaningless, he has no urge to distil the significance of his experience and preserve it for future generations of men—or for the beings who will come later, when man has finally disappeared from the cosmos.

“So I, Rosco, conceived the need for a perpetual memorial to the folly and extravagance of man.”

The face, Rosco’s face, but full of youthful enthusiasm and idealism, faded from the screen. Rosco nodded thoughtfully as the tape was shuffled back to its proper position in the store.

Then, after positioning the numerous microphones and cameras to his satisfaction, he mounted the rostrum and began to dictate yet another installment of his interminable memoirs.

So Rosco worked away, cutting, recasting, and editing his tape, working painstakingly towards the final perfection of expression that always in the end escaped him.

While he did so, events were taking place above his head that would have surprised him.

High above the dust-veiled atmosphere of Chaos, in the outer reaches of the planet’s gravitational field, a space craft was in difficulties.

Manned space craft were forbidden to land on Chaos. Their approach might easily have interfered with the work of the automatic craft, shuttling in and out with their rich loads of niobium. Also, in view of the very high price that niobium commanded on the international market, it was considered undesirable to have unauthorised craft landing and blasting off from its valuable surface.

The Homecomer, a six-hundred ton interplanetary shorthaul craft with a three-man crew, was having trouble with a couple of vernier motors. The captain of the ship, Dr. Graves, had taken the opportunity of putting her into orbit round the convenient mass of Chaos, while he and his plasma specialist did some investigating.

Working in pressure suits outside the hull, they uncoupled the motors from their mounts and brought them through the main airlock, manoeuvring the half-ton masses of metal with comparative ease in their weightless, though not intertialess, condition.

The process of stripping down the high temperature section could not be hurried and took them all of three hours. When they had the parts laid out on an almost surgically clean bench, it was clear that all the main refractories were badly cracked.

“What do you say. Dale?” Graves asked his plasma expert.

The young technologist rubbed his chin.

“Looks like a long job. And a tricky one, too. To do it properly, we need more equipment than we’re carrying aboard this ship.”

“So we either call up a repair ship, or …”

“Is there an alternative ?”

“I was thinking of the possibility of landing on the planet. They must have repair facilities down there.”

Harley, the navigator, intervened at this point, telling them that only official ships were permitted to land on Chaos.

“Why the ban?”

“Practically the entire planet’s made of niobium. They mine it down there for the whole system.”

Graves whistled.

“Niobium. Well, that’s no problem. We’ll just bleep out an ultimate distress signal and they’ll have to give us a landing beam. They’re compelled to do so, by international law, don’t forget. It’s as simple as that. I’m certainly not waiting around for three or four days for a repair ship.”

The younger men glanced at each other uneasily. Was Graves getting too old for the job? He’d displayed several irrational quirks just lately, and his temper seemed if anything to be getting shorter.

“Ultimate distress?” said Harley slowly. “Isn’t that pushing it a little, when we’re only missing a couple of verniers?”

The trouble with the verniers could have been avoided if Graves had taken account of the obvious symptoms earlier on, Harley thought privately.

Dr. Graves made a gesture of impatience. “I’ll worry about the law problem when I come to it. Just you send out the signal, that’s all.”

He turned his back, effectively closing the conversation.

Rosco ran through the new tape again, with mingled feelings of pleasure and regret.

Pleasure, because there were undoubtedly some good things in it, well said. Regret, because he was aware still of the many imperfections that he had failed to eliminate. Perhaps the next time he came to the museum site he might do a little more polishing.

As he switched the video set off and turned to go, his overriding feelings, he decided, were of satisfaction.

He was conscious that, however the rest of the human race might be squandering their energies, he, Rosco, was creating a timeless memorial to outlast them all.

The eternal machines stood round him, as though silently approving his judgment, immobile in the uncorrupting atmosphere.

Rosco looked round once more at the ranks of metallic forms. Then, as he walked back towards the gap in the enclosing wall of debris, his ears caught a distant rumble. Thunderstorms were rare on Chaos. To his trained ear this sounded more like the remote roar of rocket motors.

But surely the next ship was not due for another couple of days?

Flipping a control in his pocket communicator, Rosco interrogated the control centre, which he had left in charge of the automatic programme. The coded response told him that an unidentified ship was coming in on emergency procedure.

Rosco snapped off the communicator. For some reason, the information that visitors were on the way had caused a feeling of foreboding to chill his mind momentarily. Perhaps he had been cut off too long, away from his fellow human beings, to welcome an interruption of his total isolation. After being alone for so long it was a disturbing prospect to have to face his fellow men again. To put on the assumed smile, and exchange the pleasantries of normal conversation. It was going to be difficult.

The roar of the landing ship grew louder. Rosco reached the roadway where he had left his transport. He’d better get back to the landing zone as soon as possible. Maybe if these people were coming in on an emergency routine, they would need help as soon as they landed. He was fully equipped, back at control headquarters, with all essential medical and surgical gear, as well as a portable diagnostic computer.

Rosco was about to climb aboard the truck and start the motor when the descending ship broke through cloud-base, a few thousand feet up. The hot hull glowed a dull orange as it pierced the grey dust clouds like an enormous sun, touching the undersides of the nearest reefs of cloud with an ominous reddish tinge.

The roar of the motors was a massive wall of sound, reaching down from the ceiling of cloud to the ground under Rosco’s feet and setting it quivering.

Rosco paused, half-in and half-out of the truck, watching the big ship as it lumbered downwards, staggering through the concentric waves of sound and heat that shuddered from the labouring motors.

All Rosco’s senses were stretched taut and his mind spun wildly without generating any coherent thought. But he seemed to hear a ragged irregular note in the roar of the ship, as though the pilot were juggling the throttles as he fought to establish control.

It was descending the last few hundred feet now, and he became vividly aware of the ship’s vast bulk as it leaned across the sky crazily, crabbing sideways in a way that caused Rosco to dive into the cabin of the truck and crash-start the motor, head craning over his shoulder as he did so, to keep the looming ship in view.

He had a wild notion that he would be able to run for it in the truck, escaping from under the searing hot hull of the vast ship, which now seemed to him to blot out most of the sky.

Then he saw where the ship was going to crash, where the impact of the massive hull must come.

Rosco leapt out of the truck, shouting at the top of his lungs. He started to run back into the clearing, through the gap, gesticulating and roaring at the ship. The noise of his shouts were lost in the monumental roar of the motors as the enormous hull careened in above his head.

The men inside the ship, braced in their contoured couches against the inevitable impact, saw on their screens Rosco running forward madly. But now they were unable to influence the outcome one way or another.

The ship struck a few yards from the centre of Rosco’s museum. Great waves of flame engulfed it, and there were a series of sharp explosions as those of the exhibits which had not been destroyed by impact were gutted by the flames.

Then, for a few moments, there was something approaching silence.

When the shaken men from the interior of the ship clambered out in their space suits and walked unsteadily across the scorched ground, there were only a few sparse tongues of flame licking at the twisted skeletons of those machines which had contained combustible material.

They found Rosco lying face downwards near the gap. When they turned him over they could see where a splinter of metal from an exploding machine had pierced his visor and gashed his forehead.

Quickly, Dr. Graves sealed the punctured helmet with a plastic compound and turned up full oxygen inside the pressure suit, pressing Rosco’s sternum rhythmically with the ball of his hand.

It was no use. Rosco must have been dead already by the time they reached him.

After a few minutes of persistent effort, when it was clear that resuscitation would not succeed, Dr. Graves turned to his companions and spread the open palms of his hands outwards in a gesture of hopelessness.

The three of them stood for a moment in a leaden trance, looking round them at the remains of Rosco’s smashed museum. The machines still retained in their twisted destruction a sense of ordered arrangement, rank upon rank, contrasting with the confused piles of debris surrounding them.

Harley approached one of the nearest relics, which towered above him in an attitude that might have suggested, to an imaginative eye, a grotesque kind of supplication, a pleading for justice from whatever powers were in control of the cosmos.

But it suggested nothing of the kind to Harley. He was merely trying to decipher what the original purpose of the machine had been.

He was looking at the funerary relic of the infra-red communicator. But the design was so outmoded that Harley, who had no taste for antiquarian studies, could make nothing of it.

He was about to turn away, having lost interest in the problem. Then some obscure electro-mechanical process in the remains of the machine—it could have been warping induced by the progressive cooling of the scorched shell— caused the communicator to snap into action.

Once again the discs in the memory bank began to rotate, but their records had been irreparably damaged by the heat, and by shock waves from the explosions nearby.

The most the communicator could manage was a kind of strangled cough, and then:

“Broken frags….”

A pause, another cough, and again:

“Broken frags…

“Broken frags…

“Broken frags…

“Broken frags…”

Harley turned to his companions with a puzzled grin on his face.

Then he turned back to the communicator.

“Broken frags…

“Broken frags…

“Broken frags…”

Harley stepped closer to the machine.

“Damn stupid thing,” he said, without any particular emotion in his voice.

He gave the flank of the communicator a sharp kick with his space boot, and it lapsed finally into silence.

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