Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (11 page)

I wasn't going
to take anything whatever for granted there. On the other worlds I
could be more cursory. It wouldn't matter if I missed any there –
for the time. The things would surely use any base to produce more
units to spread out. That's why it was so critical we miss none of
them.

The closest to
Old Home was called Tohm on my charts. It was the only planet in
the system at all suitable for use by the brain in any way. I hoped
I would find nothing, which would show the thing hadn't gone quite
everywhere.

"Or that it was
programmed to try another system if this one won't work," TR said
smugly (How DOES it do that?). "That would mean we'd have to plot
everything from here outward and from every other close system
where we can't find one of the things!"

That was an
unpleasant thought!

What about
systems with NO usable worlds? Did that mean we'd have to do
secondary and then tertiary searches? We could get bogged down
forever in this!

TR called Maita
again, but Thing said that was only the most peripherally likely
scenario (It talks like that), as that would mean giving the
secondary brains too much free will in making decisions. It would
have the things orbit the star and shut down or something. The plan
would be to gather those orbiting ships at some later date and send
them to a newly programmed destination.

It was there.
It had set up a mining operation on Tohm and was producing machines
of various types.

That put me in
another dilemma. If it was merely producing a mechanical society
who wouldn't bother anyone it was under the emerging civilization
rule and I shouldn't bother it.

"Crap!" TR
snarled (Again? HOW, damnit!). "I'll send passive floaters. If that
thing is building anything it'll be military. It'll be trying to
turn the whole planet into a large berserker machine!"

The brain there
wasn't expecting visitors and had satellites only close around
Tohm, so TR got two floaters down near the activity. They returned
after a time and we viewed what they found.

"It's
stockpiling weapons and making roboticized troops," TR reported.
"You'll notice they're all tightly controlled by beam transmission
directly from that central dome, so the brain will be there.

"I think we can
take the brain out without damaging the robots much. They'll shut
down and someone may find a good use for them someday. There's no
atmosphere there to corrode them or anything to damage them
otherwise."

"How do you get
the brain?" I asked. "It'll shield."

"YOU can go
right in to the dome and handle it. It's following everything on
the control beams. I didn't detect scanners of any sort with the
floaters – which is pretty obvious.

"They weren't
attacked. No scanners. It won't know you're there. Get it over with
so we can move on. We can't spend the next fifty years sitting here
while you agonize over something as stupid as this!"

I grinned and
decided it would be worth a try, so rode a tug floater to not far
from the area, then walked in. I almost made it to the dome when I
suddenly noticed I was being watched by a robot.

Direct visuals
didn't send a detectable scan. That's what a passive sensor was! I
should forget something like that?

It seemed
probable there was no visual from farther away from the dome, so
the floaters weren't detected.

I turned to my
floater and direct light-beamed a message to it, it would relay by
direct beam to TR. There was no sense in fooling myself, so I
continued to the entrance of the dome, where four armed robots
stood facing me. I could shield against them, but not against
heavier weapons, so was in great danger and knew it.

Now another
decision.

I opted for the
digital language the brain used on Old Home.

"Tb02-SP," I
sent. "I am designated XR01-DU. This discovery unit will update
your banks with new scientific advances. Much has been
learned."

I don't know
why. Maybe I intercepted a message to the robots there or maybe I
saw a beginning movement, but I dropped to the ground and rolled
behind the dome a bit to one side just as all four robots fired at
where I had been.

I jumped to my
feet and extended suction pads to climb the smooth curved walls,
reasoning there would be no attack that was directly aimed at the
dome itself, so on the dome was my safest bet. It would take a
certain amount of time to direct anything there, so I could call a
floater in to get me out.

Wrong! I
shielded as the robots again fired at me. The blast this time was a
bit less than last. They had very limited power for their weapons,
but reinforcements would be there in seconds.

I felt a
command to jump and did. My floater scooped me up and we shot
straight up as more robots came to fire. We flew a wild pattern
around as the dome itself brought the more powerful weapons into
play, then I was out of sight and danger in some hills.

I headed back
to TR, who then hit the dome with everything it had. Everything in
a small area around where the dome had been was slagged and the
robots not destroyed shut down.

"I got in with
an old-fashioned obsolete disruptor beam, would you believe?" TR
reported. "It defensed energy and projectile immediately, but the
disruptor vaporized its antennae before it could defense
vibratories!"

"One thing's
sure," I replied. "We got THAT brain!"

"You're lucky
it didn't get YOU! I'd say this one wasn't Tb oh two SP! You gave
it the wrong recognition code!"

We spent two
hours checking the planet over more thoroughly, but didn't expect
there would be a second brain here. We weren't disappointed.

Next was
Wifgert, which had two planets that were usable. It had a single
name because the planets revolved around a central gravity point.
That point was a neutron mass, and the system itself revolved
around a large star.

"I think we'll
find our brain won't be here at all," TR said.

"Yo! The
military mind. It was designed to work in the Tlesson system only
and wouldn't be programmed about such things as neutron masses. It
would have approached the system, scanned that there were two
planets seemingly orbiting around one another, and would have gone
to the central point between them to scan for evidences of
civilization.

"A silver ball
a kilometer or two in diameter would be most logically an
installation big enough to hide near, but out of close sensor
range.

"You can't get
close to that thing and survive."

Whether or not
that was what happened or whether there was simply no brain sent to
that system we don't know. That much mass causes the star to show a
fairly obvious perturbation to a point no farther away than
Tlesson, but we can't be sure. There was no brain in the system and
there was one in all the other close systems, so we can assume the
one here was a thin film on the neutron mass.

Next was
Leepup. There were three possible planets in the system, but Leepup
was the one where we found the brain. It was building much on the
order of the one on Tohm, so TR didn't waste any time. It hit the
dome with a disruptor first, then slagged it. All the robots shut
down except for some in a mine a few kilometers away. I went down
to the surface. The robots totally ignored me, so I was able to
locate the sender computer and to shut it down. It was
preprogrammed to direct the mining of the vanadium there and wasn't
programmed for anything else. I spent awhile reading its boards,
while figuring how the system worked. I had the robots all go into
the cave and wrap themselves in a preservative box from the inside,
then to shut themselves off. I used the system to call all the
other robots still working to join them, then shut down the entire
system. Those servos may someday be very useful to someone. If they
had been designed for military uses I wouldn't have saved them, but
there's no sense in destroying things like that if they can
possibly be used for a good purpose later. It would be a simple
matter of reprogramming the central command computer. It was a
simple type of computer we understood since the original meeting at
Old Home, so maybe we could reprogram them and have them ready to
work on planoforming projects or something.

The next
system's brain was housed on a planet called Ziim on my charts. It
was the only planet in the system that was in the "life producing"
zone that didn't have emerging life. That was encouraging, because
it could mean the brains were supposed to avoid life until they
built strength.

"Nuts!" TR
retorted. "On Flimt we learned better than that!"

"Then maybe
this one had ... no," I replied. "They're to use intelligent life,
and are to avoid basic lifeforms. There's nothing the stage of life
on these planets could offer except problems. Molds and bacteria
could attack the materials used in building things, so it's easier
to use a planet without those things, so long as there wasn't
something else that could be used to greater advantage.

"It's a matter
of weighing the advantages against the disadvantages. The military
mind. There simply isn't anything worth conquering on those
planets.

"I hope this
setup is identical to those on Tohm and Leepup!"

"Request
denied! I don't like this much at all! It means Thing figured it
wrong, and we have to go to all the systems where there are no
planets to try to trace where they might've gone from there."

"Why?"

"Because the
fact this thing has the same situation as those on Tohm and Leepup
but acted in a very different manner shows it has some ability to
make choices! We have to see what else is different here and try to
... we're lucky all of these closer systems had planets of one sort
or another. Farther out means less chances of them going far, so we
should be able to find them all. They're still slower than light,
so our original sphere is the same. We'll have to find the closer
ones, count them, and trace the second row outward. That
militaristic brain certainly wouldn't have programmed two of them
for one system under any circumstances whatever."

"Whatever you
say. I guess you know what you're talking about.

"Let's do
something about that thing down there on Ziim. I'm afraid it'll
take some time if there's one on Killit. The fleet shouldn't have
any trouble locating others farther out. Call Gohn and Ander and
have them do a search on grid from systems within range that have
no planets if they don't find anything still in the systems and
talk to Thing about it. Maybe it considered this already and has a
reason for what it projected. It usually has ten steps figured
beyond what we thought of."

"Thing won't be
able to respond for awhile. Maita and T Six are working on various
things while Thing and Z are handling their own problems. We got
them en route before. Maita doesn't have any idea of how long
they'll be busy.

"From what I
can tell, the brain seems to be holed up in a cave or something.
It's built a couple of robots or servos and is doing something
inside there."

"It isn't
mining or anything?"

"It's not doing
much of anything, judging by the energy use. It's barely detectable
... so!"

"Yes. It was
somehow damaged. The reactors were destroyed and its generation
power is poor, so it has to build something first to recharge
itself. It's using only the servos that were aboard from the first
– those it brought with it.

"This is one we
shouldn't have a lot of problems with. Maybe I can get to it to
read it."

"It's been here
for twenty or twenty five years. The damage must be pretty serious.
Its ability to produce the robots and servos is gone."

"And it doesn't
have energy to spare for weapons. Maybe we've found the one I can
read at last! It'll save us a lot of time if I can.

"We've
accounted for five, and we know there were a minimum of fourteen.
Of the other nine, the fleet got rid of one, leaving a minimum of
eight more.

"One is on
Killit almost certainly. Seven.

"I'm getting a
worse and worse feeling about Killit. With that population in the
stage they're in we could have a very hard brain to get rid of. I
don't like the way that thing always starts building nuclears. It's
too much like the Immins for my tastes!"

"Hold on," TR
said, and I waited a few minutes. "Okay. Ander reports his fleet
destroyed four and lost one ship through a very stupid mistake. We
told them this thing is known for trickery, yet the ship approached
what they thought was a dead brain ship and were destroyed. Twelve
crewmembers.

"Two other
ships were dispatched and slagged the brain there. There are three
more at minimum."

I went aground
and found the sealed entrance to the cave. A floater found another
entrance big enough to get through over a flowing stream coming
from inside of the mountain, so I went in to confront the brain. My
problem was to prevent it from self-destructing and taking me with
it, though its fusion generator wasn't working much at all. There
was some high radiation in the cave, but I'm a machine, so it would
have no effect on me.

The brain ship
was in a cavern. It had a large rupture on one side and had three
servos working around an old-style electrical generator that worked
on a flowing water principle in a stream flowing from the cavern
out along the mountain where I came in. It was an easy thing to
enter the ship through the hole, which was directly into the
machinery storage area, and then into the generator area. There
would be much too much leakage of current in some of these points
for the brain to advance very rapidly from the waterwheel, but it
would soon be able to direct servos to repair those lines. Once it
had that power it could slowly build its strength until it could
begin mining.