"We can see and hear it when it happens—all of it, just as if we were taking it out into space ourselves. Every tele-communicator on the sky ship is turned on and tuned to big screen wave length. If there was a crewman on board he could talk to us and we could talk to him."
"Thank God there isn't a living man on board," I breathed.
"Yes," he said, nodding. "Yes, we can be thankful for that. And for our lives as well. There are four big screens here, but we may as well watch the one in the port clearance building. It's the largest of the four—if size makes any difference when about all we'll see when the cylinder explodes is a blinding flare. We won't see the bulkheads collapsing, or a robot cyb crumbling, that's for sure. It will happen too fast."
"What good will it do us to watch at all?" Joan asked. "I'd rather stay right here. We'll see the flash, won't we?"
"You'll see it, all right," Littlefield said, grimly. "It will look like an exploding star for about ten seconds. My sky ship—an exploding star. I never thought it would ever come to that."
He started to turn away, thinking, no doubt, that I'd fallen in with Joan's idea of passing up a view of it on the screen. But I hadn't at all and when he started walking toward the port clearance building I was right at his side. So was Joan, because she was that kind of a wife. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask him—questions of the utmost urgency, such as how much progress he'd made in finding out who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral and just what news he'd received from the hospital, when Nurse Cherubin had informed him I was trying to get back to the spaceport, that went beyond that bare statement—I was sure she'd briefed him in detail—and ... well, a lot of questions. But this hardly seemed the right time to ask him, because his inner torment was too great.
I could sympathize and understand, because I knew what a hell he was passing through. Nothing could prevent the destruction of his sky ship, but he had to see it with his own eyes, no matter how much agony it caused him.
He didn't have to do any explaining to the Port Clearance men, because they'd either assumed he'd pick out their screen well in advance of our arrival or their own curiosity had proved overmastering.
The screen was lighted and the sound tracks whirring when we walked into the projection room. It was just like walking into the sky ship's chart room and staring across it at the four robot giants who had followed both emergency instructions in space and the routine kind and were doing their best to perform a man's job now. A mechanical best, which meant, of course, that they had no way of knowing how close they were to annihilation. They would be blown apart without pain and had nothing to lose that a man would have valued. But they were not men, and who can be sure that mechanical brains and the thought processes which take place in them are not faintly tinged with emotional coloration?
Probably not ... for it would have been something that laboratory tests have never succeeded in establishing. A cybernetic brain can become fatigued, yes—but it is not really a human fatigue. It is on the metal-fatigue level. But knowing all that, a chill would have gone through me if the robots had been able to talk to us.