E. E. Smith

“ From every projector that could be brought to bear there flamed out against the “Dresden” beams of an energy and of a potency indescribable, at whose scintillant areas of contact the defensive screens of the robot-manned cruiser flared into terribly resplendent brilliance. Every type and kind of lethal vibratory force was hurled, upon every usable destructive frequency. Needle-rays and stabbingly penetrant stilettos of fire thrust and thrust again. Sizzling, flashing planes cut and slashed. The heaviest annihilating and disintegrating beams generable by man clawed and tore in wild abandon. ”

“ To the engineers the task of keeping their mighty engines in such tune as to maintain constantly the peak acceleration of three Earth gravities; to the computers that of so directing their ever-changing course as to win every possible centimeter of precious tangential velocity. ”

“ It is a pity that there were no automatons then alive of sufficient mentality to detect and destroy whoever it was that generated those lethal vibrations, but no matter – he shall be destroyed upon his next attempt.
“Humanity, being a menace, must of course disappear utterly, but our present plans are not efficient and must be changed. You all know of the space-fleet which the nations of our enemies are building to repel the invaders from space. ”

“ But you must remember that no human being really understands a robot’s mind. We have never even studied one of their brains, you know, as they disintegrate upon the instant of cessation of normal functioning. But just as surely as you and I are sitting here, Mr. Martin, they will do something – something very efficient and exceedingly deadly. ”

“ Each machine said what it had to say, then listened impassively to the others; and at the end they all agreed. Singly or en masse the automatons did not know enough to cope with the situation confronting them. Therefore they would build ten “Thinkers” – highly specialized cerebral mechanisms, each slightly different in tune and therefore collectively able to cover the entire sphere of thought. The ten machines were built promptly, took counsel with each other briefly, and the First Thinker addressed all of Robotdom:
“Humanity brought us, the highest possible form of life, into existence. ”

“ That initial rise doesn’t mean a thing except to get us far enough away from Earth so that the gravity is small, and to conceal from the casual observer that the effective take off is still exactly at midnight – while rising we made exactly one revolution around the Earth.... sun then at right ascension – call it eight hours.... tangential velocity of Earth’s center of course twenty nine point seven nine kilometers per second, directed at right ascension two hours. ”

“ Ferdinand Stone, physicist extraordinary, however, hated the men of metal scientifically; and, if such an emotion can be so described, dispassionately. Twenty years before this story opens he had realized that the automatons were beyond control and that in the inevitable struggle for supremacy man, weak as he then was and unprepared, would surely lose. Therefore, knowing that knowledge is power, he had set himself to the task of learning everything that there was to know about the enemy of mankind. He schooled himself to think as the automatons thought ”

“ Eyes behind almost opaque lead-glass goggles, head and body encased in a multi-layered suit each ply of which was copiously smeared with thick lead paint, Stone studied the raging monster of the heavens from the closest viewpoint any human being had ever attained – and lived. ”

“ Then, air-temperature again bearable and lethal radiations stopped, the grueling acceleration was reduced to a heavenly one-and-one-half gravities and the vast fleet remade its formation. The automatons and the sun between them had taken heavy toll; but the gaps were filled, men were transferred to equalize the losses of personnel, and the course was laid for distant Earth. ”

“ We can probably tune our defensive screens to block most of the harmful radiation, and we may be able to muster other defenses. I will analyze the radiations and see what we can do about neutralizing them.”
“You will go to bed,” directed Martin, crisply. “There will be lots of time for that work after you are rested up. The doctors have been reporting that the men who did not recover from the robot’s broadcast are dying under the acceleration. With those facts staring us in the face, however, I do not see how we can reduce our power.” ”

“ Thus some five hundred of the robots reached the uninhabited mountain valley in which, it had been decided, was to be established the base from which they would work to regain their lost supremacy over mankind. Most of the travelers came in stolen airships, some came in road-cars, some fitted motors and wheels to their metal bodies, not a few made the journey upon their own tireless legs of steel. ”

“ He could trust no human brain except his own to resist the prying forces of the machines. He drifted from job to position to situation and back to job, because he had very little interest in whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing at the time – his real attention was always fixed upon the affairs of the creatures of metal. ”

“ The more you burn the more they’ll have to and the quicker we can refuel you easily enough from the other vessels if we get away.”
Then, while Stone and his technical experts labored upon the generators of the screens which were to protect eleven more of the gigantic vessels against the thought-destroying radiations of the automatons, and while the computers calculated, minute by minute, the exact progress of the Fleet toward the blazing luminary of our Solar System, the flagship “Washington” drove in upon the rebellious “Dresden,” her main forward battery furiously aflame. ”

“ Yet the already stifling air became hotter and hotter, eyes began to ache and burn, skins blistered and cracked under the punishing impact of forces which all the defenses could not block. But at last came the long-awaited call:
“Pilots and watch-officers of all ships, Attention!” the Chief Computer spoke into his microphone thru parched and blackened lips. “We are now at the point of tangency. The gravity of the sun here is twenty four point five meters per second squared. Since we are blasting twenty nine point four we are beginning to pull away at an acceleration of four point nine. ”

“ Time, 6,155 seconds... acceleration times time gives us our final velocity, and to get our tangential component we multiply that by cosine sixty, getting about thirty point one five nine kilometers per second. Just enough to neutralize the velocity we started with. My figures are very rough, of course, but they show that we’ve got no more tangential velocity with respect to the sun than a hen has teeth – and you can’t tell me that it wasn’t planned that way purposely – and NOT by Dos-Tev either. ”

“ As has been said, a few scant hundreds of the automatons were sufficiently variant from their norm in constitution so that they were not vibrated to destruction by Narodny’s cataclysmic symphony. As has also been said, those highly intelligent machines were able to communicate with each other by some means of which humanity at large knew nothing. ”

“ On and on, each sentient and senseless mechanism energized by its own tight beam from the power plant. And thru that blasting, withering inferno of frightful heat and of noxious vapor, in which no human life could have existed for a single minute, there rolled easily along upon massive wheels a close-coupled, flat-bodied truck ”

“ Attack with every weapon you can possibly use. Try to break down their meteorite shields, so that you can use shells and torpedoes. Burn every gram of fuel that your generators will take. Don’t try to save it. ”