The pad sounded three blasts before Jonathan could trace the sewage lines northward to the foundations of another building. He let the pad drop to his side, turned, and began briskly striding down the beach. Hollis was already in the pounding surf, tugging at strips of leathery matter tied in a large bundle. The sky to the south was a wall of roiling hot air closing in fast; and now the breeze came again, stronger, bringing the smell of salt, sulfur, and burnt wood. And there was an unpleasant surprise hidden just beneath the surface—an odor just like sweet Chinese pork.

He broke and ran, gagging, into the water, only anxious now to get back into the filtered air of the submersible, away from the smell of what could only have been people—hundreds of millions of carbonized people.

13

When I Have Fears

Something like a lighthouse beacon was sweeping the solar system. On Ceres, the first cluster of gamma ray telescopes picked it up and passed the signal to the station’s computer net with a red tag for instant analysis. Within a microsecond, one of the most highly advanced brains ever built by the hand of man had undergone a subtle change in programming and, against all previous instructions, sent an ominously less subtle program change on a hairline beam of laser light to one of the gamma ray telescope robots.

And still within that part of a second, the robot began to respond. Its multiple brains had been designed to predict the consequences of any action— from lifting a rock to constructing a new furnace— and then to decide the appropriate action at lightning speed by committee voting. Even without a human presence, the machine was capable of manufacturing a gamma ray telescope, or anything else it was instructed to supply.

Antlike in appearance, it was more like a colony of machines than an entity of its own—just as its creator had intended. It had been built from and by a hive of smaller, simpler machines, which still circulated inside it like motile cells through a dense matrix of connective pathways. There were workers of many shapes and sizes, and what could even be called “drones” and “egg-laying queens.” Each was so intensely social, and so intimately connected to the robot’s circuits, that if it were isolated from the rest of the hive, it could no more function on its own than an ant cast out of its hill or a human marooned on an island, and it quickly “died.” Like an anthill, or the Ceran colony itself, every robot hive met all the essential criteria of an organism.

One half second after the laser flashed into its eyes, the hive sensed a loss of some essential material it had been programmed to produce—a loss that, left unaccounted for, would have violated its first directive and allowed the human colony inside Ceres to come to harm.

The material in question had never existed before on Ceres, or anywhere else in the solar system; but the hive did not know that it was being deceived, that it was not acting on orders given it by human beings. Egoless, incapable of friendships or emotional ties, free of conscious sympathies and antipathies, without overt motives or concealed ones, the hive’s brains and workers responded so fast that it was already fashioning the right tools and had already located the right chemicals before Ed Bishop could even begin to notice that a problem was developing.