"These robots are impressionless, blank, so to speak. Their only motivation is to administer the sleep-freeze antidote to the scientists aboard. After that, the scientists can direct them to required tasks, and each problem as it is solved by the robot, remains in its mechanical nero-pattern for repetition if necessary. They're wholly metallic, almost indestructible. Whoever uses them first, is their master!"
It was then that Mark unable to restrain himself, bent down and kissed her. "It occurs to me," he said very gently, "that I've never known your social name."
"Lucero," the girl whispered. "It's an ancient, almost forgotten name of the romance languages now lost."
"The evening star!" Mark breathed. "No wonder you're golden...." Forgetting Palanth he was about to take her in his arms, when the latter coughed with the dry, hacking sound of the Martians.
"Are we going into the Spacer, or have we changed our minds?" he inquired of the universe in general. "Terra's being wrecked, we're shanghaied aboard a sleep-freeze coffin polluted with half a thousand scientists and fifty inimical robots; we are headed for an unexplored moon of Jupiter, in the mesh of a gigantic plot, and three hundred million victims are dependent on our wits ... yet two highly specialized humans on whom the fate of a universe depends, are oblivious of it all like two Phobos-struck kaladonis! Arrgh ... what a race, O Mind of ultimate understanding!" He bowed at the mention of the Martian all highest—the nameless God.
Both Lucero and Mark came to, faces crimson, smiling sheepishly. Together they left the helio-plane and went down an emergency ladder into the interior of the vast interplanetary Spacer.
Within the Stellar Virgin the silence was intense—the silence of a dead city. In the luxurious quarters provided for the scientists, the latter lay soundless and inert in the almost ultimate oblivion of sleep-freeze. They were ten in number to each mammoth, cavernous stateroom, and in the very center, upon a throne-like dais, motionless and life-like, a gigantic robot sat immobile, awaiting the end of the trip, when for the first time since they were fashioned, they would perform the only task impressed upon their virgin brains.
Mark Lynn went silently from cabin to cabin, to all outward appearances inspecting the ship, but inwardly, his mental processes geared to the apex of their wide-awakedness, grappled endlessly with the problem of the robots. If the scientists awakened from the sleep-freeze thanks to the antidotes, they'd instantly command the robots for their initial tasks and thereafter they'd be masters of that incalculable source of power. With the robots under their command, the scientists would be masters indeed, able to dispose of the machinery within the Spacer at their will, to manufacture more machinery, build weapons and in short, control Europa.
He thought of the thousands of Internationals in the Spacer's hold, and his head ached with the sustained effort. It was a little thing that gave him the clue, the intense pain at the base of his brain was like a constant hammering, and Mark considered an infinitesimal dose of Vanadol. It would banish the pain as if by magic.