The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

It struck Jasperodus how imperturbably the miners viewed the event. The leader’s complaining was no more than ritualistic grumbling. They were like ants: stolid, matter-of-fact manipulators of raw nature. In hours they would have dragged out the remains of the plane, repaired the belts and chain-ramp, and have everything functioning normally.

‘Where’s your lamp,’ the leader said suddenly, glaring at him.

Jasperodus made no answer except to grope at his forehead as though surprised to find nothing there.

‘Oh, krazzin’ heck. What team are you supposed to be with? What are you doing here, anyway? Hey, you—’ the man beckoned impatiently to the smaller of the two constructs—‘take this toy soldier to Number Two rip, they’re short there. Come on, the rest of you, we’d better see about getting this krazzin’ lot sorted out.’

He turned and trudged up the tunnel, followed by the others. The robot who was left with Jasperodus looked him over briefly.

‘Are you new here?’ he asked him mildly. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before.’

‘Very new,’ Jasperodus told him.

‘And not Borgor-made, either. Captured, like me, I presume? Well, don’t think of trying to get out of here. There’s nowhere to go. You shouldn’t have lost your lamp, by the way. You need it down here. Follow me.’

With only the other’s lamp to see by, Jasperodus found that the going was not easy and he had to step carefully. His companion, he noticed, spoke with a southern accent. Neither did he look like a manual-labour robot. His visage was refined, his limbs slender.

‘What shall I call you?’

‘There’s no need for names here. My master used to call me Yoshibo.’

‘You weren’t a free construct, then?’

‘A wild robot, you mean? I should think not!’ Yoshibo sounded offended. ‘I belonged to the household of a senator chief of Mungold, a protectorate on the border of the New Empire—the border as it was then, I should say. I was tutor to the senator’s children.’ A note of pride entered Yoshibo’s voice, to be replaced by sadness. ‘But that was more than twenty years ago, as near as I can judge by counting shifts. I was taken during one of the sweeps south, and have been here ever since.’

The slope of the passage was getting steeper. They went on for a considerable time, until Jasperodus judged they were about a quarter of a mile underground. Side tunnels began to appear, usually branching off at a narrow angle. Eventually Yoshibo took one of these.

At its entrance some bogie-mounted metal tubs and a couple of flatbeds lay on railway tracks which disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. ‘A belt has not been installed here yet,’ Yoshibo murmured, as if by way of explanation. ‘That will have to wait until after the main supplies have been got through.’

‘What is mined here?’ Jasperodus asked suddenly.

‘You don’t even know that?’ Yoshibo stopped to stare at him. ‘We mine coal.’

Coal. Jasperodus was intrigued, almost amused. He knew of the stuff, of course. It was a combustible soft black rock, though occasionally brown, which was the petrified remains of packed and decayed vegetation laid down millions of years ago. It was, in fact, the state of decay immediately preceding liquid oil. Burned in the manner of wood, it could be used as a fuel. ‘Cooked’ in a certain way, it could yield a variety of useful substances.

As with oil, the irreplaceable natural deposits had been consumed voraciously in the earlier age. There was no coal in the south. But he had heard that a little of it still remained in the north, and that the Borgors used it to fire one or two power stations. The reason for this anachronism was that the mineral riches of northern Worldmass had been extracted at a relatively late date. Technology had learned to do without natural hydrocarbons before every last particle was gone.

How grimed and caked Yoshibo was, Jasperodus noticed. And how strange it was to see men working in an environment as dangerous as mining undoubtedly was. If this mine had been in the New Empire it would have been very nearly all robot-operated.

But then, the Borgors had a real fear of construct intelligence. In the south, a demand for—say—shoes resulted in androform robots, capable of thought and feeling, being put to work at last, alongside a human owner. In Borgor it resulted in a mechanised factory which was like a low-grade robot taken to bits: idiot servomechanisms with only vestiges of self-direction, lacking any higher functions.