The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot) Read online

  On the other hand, every time the foreman received a visit Jasperodus hoped that a search was on for him. He was depending, for rescue, on the plane being examined by military scientists, who would be curious to know why it had not appeared on radar. Once they had realized that there was no ejection mechanism and that the canopy had never been opened, they might start looking for an injured human, for there was nothing to indicate definitely that a robot piloted the plane. Still, if the men who had met him were questioned, the investigators should be able to put two and two together.

  Yet nothing happened, and he was obliged to continue to work. Gradually it dawned on him that he had trapped himself in the mine, and that escape might be far from easy.

  In his time on the rip there was only one respite. That was when the foreman, for some unknown reason, absented himself. The robots continued to work as before, but soon the pace of work slackened until, when all the rubble was cleared, no one thought of preparing fresh charges and instead the constructs stood around aimlessly.

  Some wandered back to the alcoves where the gang sheltered while the charges blew. It was there that Jasperodus found Yoshibo sitting with his back to the wall in the company of the brass robot who had shown him how to drill holes, to insert the explosives, and then to attach detonators.

  He joined them, and as he did so whatever conversation was passing between them died.

  ‘Tell me something,’ Jasperodus asked Yoshibo. ‘What were you doing in the tunnel where we first met? Were you going to the surface?’

  ‘The surface? Certainly not—what on Earth gives you that idea! We had gone to find out why the conveyors had stopped.’ He paused. ‘If it comes to that, what were you doing there—by yourself, without a headlamp?’

  Jasperodus did not answer, and Yoshibo laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you were trying to leave the mine?’

  ‘Why not?’ Jasperodus said defiantly.

  Yoshibo appraised him with head tilted. ‘I have heard wild robots are like this—are you one? They are only properly behaved when there is a human around. Leave them on their own, and they start to have disobedient thoughts! Well I’ve told you before, you’re here for good, so get used to it. Robots are never permitted to leave the mine: it’s an absolute law. And besides, it’s impossible.’

  ‘Just the same, the tunnel leads to the surface.’

  ‘The adit? It is heavily guarded. If you wander up there, even by accident, you will be destroyed with no questions asked.’

  ‘What other exits are there?’

  ‘None. None at all.’

  They were silent, while Jasperodus studied the rock-strewn dirt floor in the light of the headlamp that, after repeated cringing requests to the foreman by Yoshibo, had been provided for him.

  Then Yoshibo thumped the side of the brass robot, eliciting a dull clink. ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear this construct mention the surface?’

  The other lifted his hands dismissively, and Yoshibo turned to Jasperodus, speaking with a kind of sly seriousness. ‘You can be of assistance to me. I have been trying to educate this robot. Brass is Borgor-made, and like the others he was brought into the mine before his activation. Quite reasonably, you might suppose, he believes the world into which he was born to be the only that exists, but I have been trying to enlighten him. Back up my words, Jasperodus. Tell him of the world that exists above ground—the world where the humans live, where there are no tunnels, only an endless surface on which one can walk as far as one likes without impediment, where there is no roof, only endless space overhead. Tell him that no one carries a headlamp: the world is already filled with light and the vision extends automatically for as far as the eye can reach. These Borgor robots seem unable to believe in the sun—darkness and dirt is all they can conceive of. So try to tell him, Jasperodus.’

  Jasperodus looked at Brass. His riveted, battered body spoke of decades of work. Even his face was dented, the eyes peering blearily from between wads of dried muck. Three fingers of his left hand were missing as a result of some accident.

  ‘What Yoshibo tells you is true,’ he said neutrally. ‘It is a world of light. Beside it, this is a dark, poky hole.’

  Brass shook his head glumly. ‘Stories, stories. Can I be shown this world? No, never. It is only made of words. By contrast life is made up of experience.’ He picked up a piece of rock, clenched it in his fist, then threw it in a corner. ‘And experience is what we see around us.’

  ‘Then you think we are lying, when we tell you we came from this world?’

  ‘Lying, you have had a brainstorm, it is a tale passed from robot to robot—what does it matter? It is too fantastical to take seriously. Show this upper world to me—then I will believe.’

  ‘The truth is,’ Yoshibo said quietly, ‘that Brass is unable to visualise what we are describing.’

  ‘What of the humans?’ Jasperodus pressed him. ‘Where do they go to, when they leave the mine by way of the adit?’

  ‘Naturally they do not wish to spend their pleasure hours with us robots. They go to a better part of the mine, probably where there is not so much dust in the air.’ He waved his hand, causing the ever-sifting particles to waver. ‘The humans do not like dust. It damages their lungs.’

  Just then the foreman returned, and with a roar of rage sent the robots rushing back to their labours.

  Jasperodus found little time for discussion after that. Indeed, he found himself becoming engrossed in the drive to find coal. The time came when a cheer went up among men and robots alike as, instead of grey rock and the occasional heavy lumps of ironstone, black coal began to show itself, though disappointingly the seam was only four feet thick. Jasperodus then watched in fascination as the ‘face’—the cutting surface—was set up. The tunnel was broadened into a gallery, its roof supported by ‘walking supports’, steel pillars that juddered forward inches at a time as the face progressed. The cutting machine, mounted on a track that similarly could edge forward, traversed from one end of the coal face to the other, churning through the solid black hydrocarbon and tumbling it onto a conveyor. Oddly, it was not robotised itself but was operated by small, monkey-like robots that could skip about the confined space. At various times Jasperodus was to see three of them caught up in the cutting machine and chewed to junk.

  With the rip finished, Jasperodus was put to work on other tasks and came to know a great deal about the archaic business of coal mining. He was allocated to ‘supplies’, manhandling needed equipment through the tunnels to the ‘gates’, as all working parts of the mine were called, hauling it on flatbeds but sometimes having to manoeuvre arced girders and sections of rail through narrow gaps where the tunnels had been squashed nearly flat by earth pressure. With drill, pick and shovel he dug those tunnels out again. He laid new tracks and conveyor belts. He worked as ‘switchman’, watching over the places where one belt fell onto another and making sure that the crossover did not get clogged up with overflow—a very boring occupation. He serviced the pumps that sucked out the constantly-collecting water everyone was obliged to wade through in places.

  He solved the mystery of the oil lamps the foremen carried. They were to warn the air-breathing humans when they were in a place where the oxygen content was dangerously low. Another danger came from methane and from coal dust: mixed with air, they made explosive mixtures. That was why there were no fixed lights in the mine, with the attendant risk of sparking should they be damaged. The electric headlamps were sealed and isotope-powered, while the oil lamps were a special kind of safety lamp whose flame could not pass beyond its mesh guard.

  In some passages a powerful draught could be felt. As he moved about the mine, always in the company of others, Jasperodus occasionally encountered air-doors which blocked off one or other of the maze of tunnels. A crowbar was usually left lying near one of these doors to prize it open if anyone needed to go through: sometimes the combined strength of two or three men or robots was needed to shift a door against the differential air pressure
. The purpose of the doors, he gathered, was to control the flow of air through the mine. Presumably there was an air-pumping machine somewhere to ensure that the humans had something to breathe.

  It was incredible how much was involved in obtaining what was only a modest amount of a crude combustible fuel … but for the use of robots, it was hard to see how the enterprise could ever have been made cost-effective.

  Indeed, was it not needlessly elaborate? Jasperodus, when his mind was not distracted by the task in hand, wondered how else the coal field might be exploited. Why not drill shafts straight down to a seam, pump in oxygen, and burn the coal in situ, drawing off the hot gases through an accompanying flue to an on-site power station? Or send down machines to grind it all to dust, which could then be vacuumed up….

  Still thinking of escape, he began to draw a mental map of the mine, even though much of it was disused and therefore out of bounds to him. To begin with he had entertained various schemes for smuggling himself through the adit, but Yoshibo had managed to convince him of their unfeasibility. Once underground, the robots were worked to destruction, and not even their defunct carcases were allowed through the screening process at the head of the mine. Instead, they were dismantled and the pieces simply left lying around.

  Time passed. Nine months, according to Yoshibo, who meticulously kept count. At first Jasperodus had tried to keep himself clean, washing dirt and dust from his body with water from the thick muddy pools. But eventually he gave up, and became as caked and grimed as the others, as though he had turned to rock.

  Then came a break in the pace of work. The face opened up by Number Two rip gave out, as did one of the other three faces. The trouble was that the region was faulted geologically: earth movements in past ages had broken up the seams, making them difficult to work. In fact the whole field had probably been bypassed as unsuitable, in the days when Tergov still mined coal.

  While the engineers pondered and argued, wondering in which direction to drive next, the temporarily-redundant robots lay about taking their ease. Jasperodus sought out Yoshibo, and ushered him out of sight of the others. He took him a few yards down one of the many disused passages known as airways—actually the empty and silent approaches to worked-out faces, but functioning now only as part of the air-circulation system.

  ‘You told me once that escape from here is impossible,’ he said. ‘You were wrong. There is another way out.’

  ‘Oh? And where is that, do you think?’ Yoshibo stared at the wall to show he was unimpressed.

  For answer Jasperodus pointed down the inky black tunnel. ‘It stands to reason. Two reasons, in fact. The first is the air supply. For air to move through the mine, it must enter at one place and leave at another. Preferably the two points should be at opposite ends of the workings—if they were both near the entrance the current would too easily short-circuit. Therefore there is an upshaft on the other side of the mine, installed in the old workings when mining first began. That is where the air pump will be.’

  ‘Yes, you may be right,’ Yoshibo admitted after he had digested this argument. ‘But even if one could find it, what use would it be? The upshaft may well be a quarter of a mile deep, for that is our present depth. No one could climb such a shaft’

  ‘That is where reason number two comes in. What would happen to the humans down here if some accident closed off the adit and there was no time to wait for rescue?’

  ‘They would all die.’

  ‘No. These humans are experts. They would never trust their lives to one exit. There must be another for emergencies—and logically it will be the same that the air goes out by. So the air shaft will have a lift, or at least steps. All we have to do is find it.’

  ‘Are you seriously thinking …?’

  ‘Yes, and you can help me. You have been here for twenty years, you told me. You must be acquainted with many of the abandoned workings. Perhaps you can guess the whereabouts of the air shaft.’

  Yoshibo backed off. ‘But the field has been worked for more than fifty years. I have no idea where the shaft is, if it exists … this has never occurred to me till now.’

  Jasperodus could only attribute this failing to an unwillingness to escape, though robots, of course, would not be particularly mindful of the air circulation system, since they needed none. Jasperodus had pieced together his deductions after about six months, and had cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner. But then, it had taken him some time to learn how the mine was engineered.

  ‘Are there robots who have been here longer than you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, some of the Borgor constructs. Brass may be one of the oldest. He’s been here a long time.’

  ‘Then recruit him as a guide. Perhaps he knows about the air shaft, even.’

  ‘Brass is loyal: he would never assist a robot to escape. Besides, getting out of the mine is only the beginning, Jasperodus. Where can one go once above ground? We are in the middle of Borgor! I prefer to stay here, where at least I am useful.’

  ‘Useful to the enemies of your true masters, Yoshibo!’ snapped Jasperodus. ‘Think back! Where is the senator? Where are his wife and children?’

  ‘Murdered! All murdered!’ agreed Yoshibo in a strangled tone. ‘My master! My pupils! And yet—’

  With a clank, Jasperodus placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘I mean to leave this mine. You will find Brass and bring him to me. That is an order.’

  He watched Yoshibo’s muddy yellow eyes flicker. A struggle was taking place in the one-time tutor’s brain. For the past two decades the discipline of the mine had been his only influence—and Jasperodus knew from experience how seductive that ethic could be. He had tried to weaken it by reminding Yoshibo of his former life. Mainly, though, he was counting on being able to elicit the automatic obedience proper to the normal construct.

  ‘Very well, Jasperodus,’ Yoshibo said meekly, the struggle over. ‘I will go now, and find Brass.’

  ‘Do not tell him we plan an escape, of course, Jasperodus said pensively. ‘Do not mention the air shaft at all. Tell him we are going to show him the sun. Tell him we can prove that a world exists above ground. Will that bring him here?’

  Yoshibo brightened. ‘Yes, it will. And of course it is true! Put that way, there can be no objection to our coopting him! I am merely bringing the truth to Brass!’

  So saying, he hurried off. Jasperodus squatted down on his haunches, his back to the rock wall. He could not switch off the lamp that was clamped to his skull by a headband; so he removed it and buried its face in the dust of the tunnel floor.

  In the darkness, he waited. Hours passed, before there were footsteps and he saw the light of two beams.

  It was Yoshibo and a companion: as promised, Brass. Jasperodus rose, retrieving his lamp and fastening it in place.

  ‘Well?’ Brass looked about him challengingly. ‘I see nothing new. All is as before—in fact we should not be here—’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jasperodus. ‘Wait.’ He looked into their faces one by one as they stood close together. The three headlamps, turned inwards from the corners of a triangle, made a conspiratorial cache of light. ‘Yoshibo told you why I sent for you?’

  ‘He said he could show me this fantastic world he tries to convince me of, where all is light.’

  ‘That is so. I will show you the world. You shall enter it. But first you must leave this world.’

  He paused, letting his words sink in, then continued quietly: ‘I understand you know about all parts of the mine. Including the abandoned parts.’

  ‘I know something, it is true.’

  ‘Brass, in the old workings there is a secret way to the upper world. Together we can find it.’

  Brass shook his had. ‘It is not permitted to enter the old workings. Yoshibo was wrong even to bring me here. We are transgressing—’

  ‘Listen to me. I want you to think back to your early life. Think to when you were first activated. The mine must have been smaller then than it is now.’
/>   ‘Smaller in one way. The working part isn’t much bigger today than it was then.’

  ‘But it spreads further.’

  ‘That is because there are so many old workings.’

  ‘And could you find your way about those workings?’

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t be permitted,’ Brass said, waving his head about in knowledgeable fashion. ‘Not unless a foreman ordered it.’

  ‘Well, listen. How did the coal and scurry leave the mine in those days?’

  ‘The same way. Except the adit came to a different place.’

  ‘At the opposite end of the workings from the adit, there was another place where there was an engine, wasn’t there? A place where you weren’t permitted to go. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘We had lots of engines, just like it is now.’

  ‘This was a special place where no work was done, except for occasional maintenance. Perhaps it was closed off by a door, with just a vent for air to go through. Do you remember it?’

  Brass thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it was at the other end. Robots never went there, but I remember hearing the engine. It was a pump. Whenever there was a new foreman the others took him in there, but they usually didn’t stay long.’

  That was it! Jasperodus thought with excitement. A newcomer to the mine would be shown the emergency exit and how to use it.

  ‘Was there a strong draught of air near that place?’ he asked. Brass only stared at him. He reminded himself that the Borgor robot would not have the sensitivity to feel air currents. His body shell was probably only crudely sensored.

  ‘A funny thing,’ Brass said thoughtfully. ‘I saw a foreman come out of the forbidden place once. But I hadn’t seen him go in.’

  ‘That is because he came down from the upper world, Brass. Now, could you find your way to this pump?’