Destination: Saturn

XV

The robots surrounded the Destiny and stood glowering at it. Most of them were multi-armed, with pincher, drilling or laser components, and Ajax knew they could make mighty short work out of the trim little yacht if they wanted to.

“For the luvva Space, Ajax, aren’t you going to do something? Are you just going to let those monsters just stand there like that? Aren’t you going to assert yourself?” Emily demanded shrilly.

He cleared his throat. “Of course, dear. Now let me see…”

“What about Fido here?” she suggested, gesturing at the immobilized repairs robot. “What about him?”

“Well, I don’t know… couldn’t you send him outside to talk to those animated tin cans? I mean… he’s one of their kind and… you know!”

Ajax mulled it over. In the absence of any other idea, he couldn’t see that it could do any harm.

“Why not?” he asked rhetorically, and seating himself in the reclining chair, he donned the cowl-like visor. Fingers twinkling over the console, he guided the repairs robot out the airlock and into the ring of metal giants. There, Fido elevated one arm portentiously, then squatted and began drawing a series of concentric rings in the loose soil.

Emily regarded this through the port with growing curiosity.

“What’s Fido doing out there?” she asked. His voice muffled by the cowl, Ajax mumbled something about “sign-language, the universal tongue.” Suddenly he jumped as if tweaked on a sensitive spot. “What is it?”

“Radio signals,” he mumbled. “The big boy in the middle is hitting Fido with a radio beam!”

“Can you make out what he’s saying?” Emily inquired. “Nope. Mathematics. Arithmetical symbols. Sort of like what they call ‘computer-noise’… but… I wonder …”

“What?”

Ajax wriggled with excitement. “If it is anything like computer-noise, maybe a computer can figure it out! When I had the ship built, I wanted it completely automated so I wouldn’t need a crew. I had a whopping big computer built in to run just about everything—it takes up nearly half the ship. Maybe it can figure out what King Kong is saying to Fido. Emily—hook in the ship’s radio to the computer bank over there with that extension… let’s see if we can get a fast translation. Hurry!”

Sure enough, the ship’s computer proved to have enough think-power to work out the kind of mathematical symbology the Alcmenian robots talked in. In no time flat, Ajax and Emily were poring over the translation. It read:

“ATTENTION, MOBILE UNIT! MINING REGULATIONS 14-A THROUGH SUBPARAGRAPH M-32, FORBID UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL AT THIS DEPTH. YOUR BORE-VESSEL MUST LEAVE IMMEDIATELY, OR MASTER CONTROL WILL SUMMON AID FROM SURFACE-MONITORS! (click-buzz) ATTENTION, MOBILE UNIT! MINING REGULATIONS 14-A THROUGH SUBPARAGRAPH M-32 …”

Ajax’s jaw went slack and his eyes glistened with incredulous awe.

“Mining regulations!” he gasped.

“Ajax, stop it,” demanded Emily, who found his imbecilic expression highly offensive.

“At this depth!” he mumbled, glazed eyes shining. Emily tightened her jaw.

“A-jax…” she said between clenched teeth.

“Bore-vessel! Surface monitors! Holy Incandescent Asteroids, Emily, do you understand what that means!?”

“No, I don’t. It’s gibberish to me. But will you wipe that expression of adolescent idiocy off your face?”

He goggled at her. “I was right! This asteroid was core-material… what’s more, the ancient Asteroidals were mining the core when the planet blew up ages ago…”

“So what does that m—oh. Oh!” Emily’s jaw dropped in slack surprise and her lovely eyes glazed into the identical, idiotic expression she had objected to in her betrothed.

He chortled gleefully. “Now you get it! The Asteroidals were mining the planet’s core with robots—the same robots that are out there right now! When the lost planet blew up, they went along with this chunk of core-material as if they were part of it! Migawd, Emily, they’ve been mining and mining away for the last five or six million years!”

“Oh, my” she marveled. “Why it hardly seems possible, Ajax… why weren’t they smashed to splinters when the Asteroid-planet exploded?”

“Perhaps some of them were—who knows? But they must have had a portable machine-shop along for on-the-spot repairs. Then again, to withstand the terrific pressures of the core, the robot miners would have to be built mighty strong—heavily armored against shocks and that sort of thing—why, Emily, the mind boggles at the thought!”

“It certainly does…”

Filled with sudden determination, Ajax became a figure of dynamic action. In terse phrases he instructed her to fit a two-way circuit through the computer’s mathematical translator, so that he could talk into one end and a radio beam of mathematical lingo would emit from the other. This was accomplished in a remarkably short time. Once in communication with the Asteroidal robots, Ajax fed them a line of guff that was, actually, only partly untrue:

“ATTENTION, MINING UNITS! THIS UNIT’S BORE-VESSEL TEMPORARILY INCAPACITATED DUE TO PARTIAL DESTRUCTION OF DRIVE-MOTORS BY LASER BEAM! REQUEST EMERGENCY AID AND REPAIR FACILITIES.”

The twenty-foot robot who seemed to lead the others, mulled this over for a bit, then shot back a radio beam in reply:

“MESSAGE RECEIVED, MOBILE UNIT. EMERGENCY REPAIRS TAKE PRIORITY OVER MINING REGULATIONS 14-A THROUGH SUBPARAGRAPH M-32, SUBJECT: UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL IN MINE. (click-whirr) REPAIR UNIT STANDING BY FOR DIRECTIONS, AS ORDERED BY SECTION 12-F, CODE 44, SUBJECT: EMERGENCY REPAIRS.”

While Fido guided the repair robots through the engine room, Emily whipped up a spot of something nourishing and hot. Once the ship was buzzing and echoing with the sound of power drills and welding torches, Ajax slipped out of Fido’s control unit and enjoyed a snack. So efficient were the robot repairmen, that it seemed like no time before the damages done by the pursuit-squadron’s laser gun were fixed up and the ship was ready for flight.

The problem of fuel, of course, was even simpler.

“THIS UNIT THANKS MINING CONTROL-UNIT FOR AID IN EMERGENCY REPAIRS, (clank—whine) WONDER IF YOU CHAPS COULD SPARE A COUPLE OF INGOTS OF PLUTONIUM-239. THIS UNIT IS A BIT LOW ON THE OLD GO-GO JUICE!”

On a 14-mile-thick asteroid of almost solid uranium, it was sort of like asking a Brazilian plantation-owner if he could spare a cup of java. Ingots a-plenty were forthcoming, and the Destiny was soon fueled up and ready for space again. With Fido back aboard and safely stashed away in the decontamination chamber, the yacht rose from the surface of little Alcmene and headed out for the Jovian border of EMSA space.

“Thanks a lot, King Kong, and a hearty ‘click-buzz’ to all the other Kongs!” Ajax chuckled. He was in rare good humor… after all, for the first time since this particular adventure had begun, something good had happened to him!