Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition Read online

  "Okay, but now how do we find the brain?" TR asked. "When and how did it move again, and where? That's the big question!

  "It probably does have a lot of servos and equipment hidden for its eventual use somewhere, but there wasn't enough on that ship for two reactors, even if they do mine their lead and other materials here. It'll be on the decay timer and will be hard as all hell to find.

  "We have no choice. We must find it, and we must determine its not really pulling a double trick planning that we won't trust it. It may really BE inside of that shield, you know."

  "It isn't, but it doesn't really matter. The mass attraction factor of that shield and contents can't be more than twenty tons. This is an uninhabited island. We can treat the shield and field as though it were a solid object. Set some servos to dig us a way to put a steel net around the shield and bring it out where we can look at it."

  I could almost feel TR giggle as it sent floaters to dig out the tunnel leading to the force bubble. The thing was just over twelve meters in diameter, so TR had the cave lasered out around it, it was rolled like a ball down an incline, then cables were formed into a net around the whole thing. They were drawn to hold it and TR acted as a tug to pull it out into the sunshine. It sat floating about an eighth of its diameter under the water.

  "Weight seven and a quarter tons here. What do you suggest?"

  "Take it out and let it join that plutonium. Inside the atmosphere of that sun the shield will collapse in a few minutes. Nothing will survive. If the brain's in there it's gone. If not we're rid of the shield and won't have to watch it for centuries.

  "Let's get that done, then let's come back here. I have an idea of where the brain is and how it handled the whole thing right under our best sensors. It didn't have to hide nearly so much as I thought at first. That may mean it has some kind of ... but we'll have to wait."

  It took time to haul the force sphere to the area of the sun, as your speed is definitely limited when you have a thing like that hanging on. We shot it into the sun and stayed until we saw it pop and the plutonium in its reactors emit all the radiations as it became a part of the star. There was no trickery there, and there was nothing that escaped the thing. We went back to the cavern, where I took a few things onto a floater.

  "I'm going to assume you know what you're doing," TR snarled sarcastically (!). "What should I do?"

  "Be ready to blast the brain to vapors when I find it," I said as I went down the ramp.

  Don’t Miss Anything

  I moved along the cavern floor looking for the tracks I wanted to trace, thought a moment, and went back aboard TR.

  "Can you show me a little bit of the routine going's on of the brain's servos?" I requested. "Run them at only about ten times normal speed. I don't want to miss anything I'm looking for."

  TR broadcast to me for two hours. I spotted what I thought I would need right from the first, but wanted to be sure.

  "Do you see something suspicious about this?" I asked.

  "It's your show. Obviously, you've figured it out and want to play games with me, so I'll wait."

  I laughed and ran my recorded memory back to three things over the twenty plus hours of TR's recordings. I replayed them on the return circuit.

  "Notice how the servos take the mining carts out along this cavern wall here," I explained (I would refuse to be drawn into an argument now. It would be fun, but this was more important). "They bring the ore back between the wall and the ship. It's a sort of oval pattern to avoid getting in each other's way. The empty carts go out along the wall and the full ones come in near the ship.

  "Now, we count the ones coming in here. There are never more than two in the cavern at one time, but one comes from the ship here, moves along past the refinery, and goes on out.

  "Now, next trip in, it goes back into the ship here and its companion cart goes on around the circuit. It has the little motor down on the bottom by the drive motor that those others don't have, so it's easy to recognize.

  "Now, here it comes out again, four trips later. It goes past the refinery and continues on outside.

  "Didn't that strike you as odd at the time?"

  TR ran back through its data. "I noted it, but decided there was a need of another cart for either larger production or to replace one that was out of service for one reason or another. I won't make any excuses for missing something so obvious."

  "It was so damned obvious there was never any question it'd be missed. We did the same sort of thing with that little opening in the caves, remember? Too obvious, so it was natural. Very cleverly done!

  "Over a period of time the entire brain was removed from the ship component by component and re-assembled somewhere.

  "Were there any sensors between the cavern and the mines?"

  "No. I'll locate where the carts went by the records from the sensors inside of the mines. Hmmm I see. Very clever.

  "It left the regular cart outside somewhere, substituted for the one carrying the brain, and took the brain elsewhere. The timing shows the cart with the little motor didn't enter any of the mines. Ever.

  "You know what that means?"

  "Yes. It knew where our sensors were, and it used them to its advantage. We don't know how many loads were taken out before our sensors were working, but you can figure it by seeing how many were taken out while they were in operation."

  "There were between ... seventeen and twenty three loads. Eighteen would account for the space in the ship.

  "The amount of time the cart was out of the cavern shows where it was taken wasn't farther than the mines themselves and we can eliminate under water because the components weren't protected in transit. It'll be in another cave, so it'll be in a large area to search."

  "Oh, I'll go directly to it," I promised. "I just wonder what all the extra loads contained. I'm afraid I already have a good idea."

  I went to the fastcom and plugged in to talk with Maita. "Has the fleet reported on the physical size of all the brain's ships they intercepted?" I asked. "Cancel that, Maita. They'd all be carrying the same stuff this one originally was.

  "What size was the escape pod the brain used to escape the gas giant when you first shot it down?"

  *I don't like the sound of this at all. It was perhaps six meters long by one and a half meters thick and was a round-ended cylinder with a small difusion engine. It could move anywhere inside of the system.*

  "I calculate that ... it would be about right with TiChroPlat alloy in prefabricated sections," TR interjected. "The difusion engine would do a lot of damage if it were to be used on the planet, but that thing couldn't care less.

  "It wouldn't have room for servos or weapons, but I guess it could slowly build one or two from wherever it lands and start over again. It doesn't have mining equipment or anything."

  "Yo! If it has to move it doesn't," I agreed. "We didn't do anything to the equipment already in those mines yet. We planned to come back in a few years to take them off the planet or drop them into the volcano, but weren't in any hurry. That would wait until we made a second search of all the planets between here and Old Home.

  "The brain could've made a stockpile of raw materials in a cave somewhere, then waited for us to go."

  *I see you're finally learning how this clever mind works. The fleet will make a secondary sweep and we will make another every five years for the next two hundred to be sure. If you run into too large a problem, call me. Z and Thing say to tell you hello and to tell you we're back on EC. T Six has the drive and I am going to build it its own counterpart. We have Tab and TR, now we'll have Kit and T Six, too. Finish that up and come on home.*

  I disconnected and went outside. I would really be anxious to meet the new robot, Kit, when Maita finished it but for now I had more pressing problems.

  I would find the brain by simply following the tracks of the extra cart. If it carried TiChroPlat alloy it was damned heavy and would have made little scars here and there on the rocks. Those scars would show up
very clearly in ultra-violet light because of the scraping off of natural oxides. They may not show in visible light, but I wasn't confined to visible light.

  The trail wasn't hard to follow into a small cave that ended rather abruptly. There were little passages that would be almost impossible for me to enter.

  "It brought the cart in here with its load, then had small servos take individual components through one of those holes and assemble them in some cavern or cave back there," I sent to TR. "Can you send a servo to check it out?

  "I would think that slit over there would be the only one the plating could be moved through, so check it first."

  I wasn't worried the brain would overhear the radio. It was shut down to strictly standby power until it could be sure we'd left for awhile. This was one chance it would be forced to take because to use energy would make it detectable.

  A small floater came in and went into the slot, stayed a few minutes, and returned.

  "It's in there," TR reported. "I'm sending in three little searchers to find another way to reach it. It would take too long to burn through twenty meters of that granite and the energy use would surely trip some kind of wake-up relay. If we can come from some other area we'll possibly not disturb the brain."

  I waited awhile. There was nothing to do until we could find a way to reach the brain.

  "Okay," TR finally said. "Go back around the mountain to a small cave about here (I saw the spot on my interior 'screen') where I'll have a large floater with a laser-cutter waiting. You'll have to do some cutting, but you'll come to a cave. I'll tell you when you've found the right one. You can then go right along to a small hole here. It's only six and a quarter meters from the brain's cave. We can find a way in from there easily enough.

  "I don't want to wake it up, but may have to when we get in there. If it starts the difusion engines there they'll do a lot of damage, but ... well, we can try to prevent that."

  I trudged around the mountain, found the floater, and entered the cave. Much of the area was basalt and would cut very easily, so I had TR send carrier floaters to haul out the rubble.

  I wanted to take the big laser with me. It occurred to me the brain may have a shield around itself and still be active in the cavern, but TR hadn't reported that, so it would just be waiting. Probably it didn't have shield generators here because they were so bulky.

  Right! Their casing was too large to get into that slit, and would have to be one piece.

  It took four and a half hours to get to the small vent hole that led to the brain's cavern. I wanted to be absolutely certain about precisely where I would have to burn, so ran a fiberoptic line in through the hole to check. I saw a small light-sensitive cell with a reflector dish aimed right at that hole.

  "TR, that thing knows about this hole – probably planned to use this route out of there eventually, so it'll detect the use of the laser here. Send in a small sensor probe to find out if it can detect vibrations, too," I radioed.

  I had to wait for half an hour, then TR reported it found only the light/heat sensor.

  "That means it has prepared for high technology methods, but not primitive ones," I said. "All of its equipment uses lasers, and all it's seen of ours use the same types of lasers, so it minimized and rejected good old-fashioned metal drill tip mining techniques as probabilities."

  "It would take fifty days to grind through there! It's solid granite. That's not basalt anymore."

  "I figure two hours for what I need. Make a drill with diamond teeth. The shaft will have to be about seven meters long, and the drill head about a third of a meter across."

  "What do you plan?" TR asked.

  "I want to drill a straight hole through this rock that points directly at the centerpoint of the distance from the front of the drive engine to the end of that cylinder. It has no defense there and I don't want to chance that it tries to move before I slag it. Even if the brain itself isn't in that part of the thing, the controls to the difusion engine are."

  TR sent a sort of radio "nod" and I suddenly knew how it had always been able to make "dry" or "sarcastic" statements! It sensed I caught the subliminal waves and sent a laugh along the system.

  "I screwed up," TR said through the laugh. "I should never've sent an unaccompanied signal.

  "You'll have the drill rig pretty soon."

  I waited and checked several times to be sure the hole I was going to drill would be where I wanted it. It must point exactly to the spot I wanted to hit, as I would have to fire the large drilling laser through it. It would be the barrel of my "cannon".

  The drill arrived and I began a slow bore. I wanted to keep even vibration at a minimum.

  It took more than five hours, but the hole was as close to perfect as I could have hoped. I fitted the focus of the laser to the hole, simulated taking a deep breath, and hit the instructor switch to maximum tight beam at infinite focus. The beam itself would be no more than eighteen centimeters across, so shouldn't heat the hole at all before it was too late for the brain. I held the fast recharge/fire switch wide open for a whole minute, then backed the laser-drill-cannon off and waited.

  It wouldn't be possible to look in there for about six minutes as the heat the hole had absorbed wouldn't allow it. I received a picture from the floater TR kept inside of the cavern. The whole place was glowing a pale orange from the reflection, but there was almost a full quarter of the ship missing from the end of the difusion engines forward almost to the middle of the ship.

  I backed the laser cannon off and began cutting a tunnel big enough for me to walk through. It took about twenty minutes, then I waited for TR to send forced air in to cool the place. It would take a couple of hours, and I could go in even now, but there was no hurry, and I didn't want the excess heat to interfere with my sensors in case the brain tried to laser me or something worse.

  There were no weapons type of radiation and we had isolated the fusion cell, such as it was. It was above the engine section between the nozzles and wouldn't be available to the brain – if the brain even existed anymore.

  I went in finally to find we had isolated the energy even for standby to the brain. It had taken its power from the storage cell directly.

  I didn't fully trust that, but couldn't detect anything more from the ship.

  I talked with TR a bit about reading that brain, but a couple that had been launched after this one had been read by the fleet. I wanted to be rid of these things, and really didn't want to energize any of its circuits.

  TR agreed, so I took the thing apart, isolated the boards, and melted the entire thing and all the pieces there to a puddle, and headed back to TR, who had rounded up the servos and equipment with floaters and was going to take it all aboard. It would prove useful for some of the nearby worlds. New Home could put it to use.

  We spent three more days making a most thorough search of the planet, then left Killit for New Home. I was feeling uneasy, and didn't quite know why when I reported to Maita.

  *Don't take that chance! Dump it all into the sun there!*

  "Why, Maita?" TR asked. "It's all stuff the Tlessarians can use."

  Thing came on the fastcom with its own peculiar code.

  [ I suggest you measure every smallest piece of the larger equipment. You can't know what instructions are built into every circuit there. That brain is very clever and very tricky. It may have counted on us taking the equipment somewhere. ]

  "I don't really get it," I argued. "I know for a fact we got the brain in that cave!"

  [ And how did the brain GET into the cave? ]

  "Oh, hell!" TR said. "It went in a piece at the time. It may have a second set of components stashed aboard something. It was ASSEMBLED in there!"

  *Just dump it all. You can check if you like, but I don't want any chances, no matter how slight, taken.*

  The second brain was in prepared plug-in boards in the base of the cart with the extra little motor. There was a circuit in the cart's directive center I couldn't read. I couldn
't even find the code to activate it.

  We dumped the whole mess into the sun and headed home to meet Kit.

  T6 and TR

  T6 was a lot of fun. It and TR shared a good time with Maita. Kit was made in the form of a Kheth and had been given a strange sense of humor. T6 had developed its own brand of humor when it first found its independent intelligence.

  Thing and Z were entertaining Kit and me at Z's place when Maita called to say Fleet found one more of the brain's ships, accounting for all of them. They read it completely and simply took it apart. Maita raised hell, so they destroyed all the memory circuits.

  The brain was finally completely dead. I didn't have any least feeling we missed anything this time, but then, I hadn't had such feelings before, either.

  Z said he was afraid we hadn't heard the last of it.

  It was a peaceful time for friends to be together. I knew that soon I was going to take Kit and T6 on a case when the right kind of thing came along.

  I reflected about us machines. Maita, TR, and I always worked well with our organic friends. T6 and Rimalt had shared what can only be described as a great love for one another. I can understand that, knowing my own feelings for Thing and Z. It's not a programmed thing. It just grew. Kit would develop the same sort of thing, probably.

  Maita was originally designed by an exceptionally good race who programmed it to be a partner, not a slave. The intelligence was very deliberately built in, and it was always meant that it would be independent. In fact, it was planned for Maita's class of ship be the rulers. That was why Maita was now emperor of this vast empire.

  TR and I were built to aid Maita, but also to share all things with organics. Not take orders from, not give orders to. Share.

  T6 was accidentally given its independent intelligence, and it was great good fortune Rimalt had been aboard to meet the stupid thing it did with humor. The friendship had grown.

  Theron was built by a race who were as good as the Maitans and was truly sharing its existence with the much-loved Zulians. It was built to share with its makers the great joy and adventure of exploring.