There was a television link that was still useful, as a quick check showed. And there were ships to carry as much equipment as he needed, including two rabbits, and a male and female sand lizard in little airtight cages where oxygen could be supplied from tanks. He had no idea of what he might need, and had to take everything he could imagine as being useful.
VI
Three hours later, he stood alone in the building that had served as a barracks for a mine crew. He watched the rockets leave, and began opening the airlocks to space. Any bacteria left by the former men would quickly perish, he felt sure. But he had to be thorough.
He had no hope of success yet. He might be keeping a death watch over the human race as the Aliens moved in—or a life watch, since he was seeking life while they were intent on ending it. But he, at least, was no living thing, and the life detectors of the Aliens should miss him. Somehow, he'd learn enough to seek vengeance among them.
They'd made a mistake in creating him with all the ability of the original William Norden, and the thinking speed of a robot. They'd made a bigger mistake in assuming that a robot was only a robot, and that orders in the form of compulsions would be followed without question.
For their mistakes, they'd pay. He had twenty-four hours out of each day for work, and, until they caught him, to learn their further weaknesses.
He flooded the front entrance, where the television link to Moon base stood, with air to make speech possible, and rigged up a flexible seal to the rest of the building.
Janiekowski had dissected countless sand lizards, and the pictures were included in the reel of tape from Earth. He studied them, digging into what the calculator had supplied about radiation, and its behavior in the third spectrum. He found, as he had expected, that a tiny bit of radio-active material lay at the base of the microscopic receptor in the female, and that a similar mechanism was to be found in the organ which the male used to generate the force.
There was a tiny helix of super-fine, wirelike construction around the radio-active material, but he had no idea of what the conductor was composed, or how the animals generated the faint currents of electricity they'd need. He was only sure the helix was a tiny electromagnet.