The life watch

by Lester Del Rey

He managed to sidetrack his thoughts before blacking out, and to keep his arms down. He lay there, cursing himself and the things which had created him, fighting his battle silently, until he knew he had won.

His legs were unsteady when he finally stood up. The effort of will had shocked even his motor control impulses, but the damage was not permanent, and by the time he passed Miles' darkened doorway, he was moving smoothly enough again. He saw surprised looks exchanged by his guards as they followed him back to the laboratory.

"You might as well come in," he told them. "I'll be here all night, and there's nothing secret about my work now. I think there's a deck of cards in the desk over there."

One of them looked and came back, holding the deck and grinning. "Thanks, Doc," he said. "You're all right."

For a second, Norden experienced a warming glow as he turned into his office. He could find some acceptance among men now. Then he grimaced bitterly, as he realized what they'd think of him if they knew the truth about him. It was one thing to ape humanity, quite another to belong.

The article on speculative spectra by the Japanese scientist was still on his desk, and he began poring over it. Almost at once, his mind swerved away on a flight of curiosity about the card game the men had been playing. He pulled it back, and his imagination started in on hatred of the Aliens.

He fought against that too, tempting as it was. He'd licked the compulsion to communicate with them in two hours. There was hope that he could lick the taboo against investigating into a forbidden field. The fact that it was forbidden made it doubly worth studying.

Bit by bit he traced down the mathematics, but in the end the taboo threw him. It required all the effort he could bring to the problem to follow the tricky formulae, and it couldn't be done while fighting the treachery of his own mind. He gave up in disgust, and turned to the computer.

He'd seen Pat use it often enough, and apparently his robot mind was good at memorizing. He searched through the available tapes of information until he came to one that covered the more vital aspects of Einstein's unified field theory.

He fed it in, and began adding the spectra relation data from the books, carefully storing them in the memory circuits of the machine. The mathematics of the article went in next. He made sure the material they had used to locate the screen was still active, and brought it up to date.