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The Humanoids
Jack Williamson
1948
Chapter ONE
THE GRANITE-FACED sergeant of the gate detail found her standing outside the tall steel fence,
looking up at him with timid, imploring eyes. She was a grimy little waif, in a cheap yellow dress. Her
bare brown feet were shuffling uncomfortably on the hot asphalt, and he first thought she had come to
beg for something to eat.
"Please, mister, is this the Starmont Observatory?" She seemed breathless and afraid. "May I please see
the director? Dr. Clay Forester?" Her wet eyes shone. "Please, mister! It's awful important."
The sergeant scowled at her doubtfully, wondering how she had got here. She was about nine, he
thought, her head too large and deeply hollowed, as if from the pinch of long famine. Her straight black
hair was clipped short and primly combed. He shook his head disapprovingly, because she was far too
young to be here alone. He could feel her trembling urgency, but stray urchins didn't see Dr. Forester.
"Not without a pass." She flinched from the hash rasp of his voice, and the sergeant tried to smile.
"Starmont's a military reservation, see?" Seeing the trouble in her dark uplifted eyes, he tried to warm his
tone. "But what's your name, sister?"
"Jane." She lifted her thin voice, stoutly. "And I've just got to see him."
"Jane? Haven't you any other name?"
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"People used to call me other things, because I didn't know my really name." Her eyes fell briefly. "They
called me Squeak and Insect and Little Pip, and others not so nice. But Mr. White says my really name is
Jane Carter - and he sent me to see Dr. Forester."
"How'd you get here?"
The sergeant squinted past her at the narrow road beyond the fence that twisted down the flank of the
solitary mountain and lay straight and black on the tawny desert below.SaltCitywas thirty miles away,
much too far for her to have walked. But he could see no vehicle.
"Mr. White sent me," she repeated firmly. "To see -"
"Who," the sergeant broke in, "is Mr. White?"
An utter devotion illuminated her brimming eyes.
"He's a philosopher." She stumbled on the word. "He has a red, bushy beard, and he came from other
places. He took me out of a bad place where people beat me, and he's awful good to me. He's teaching
me tele-" She gulped. "He sent me with a paper for Dr. Forester."
"What sort of paper?"
"This." Her skinny hand came halfway out of the pocket of her dress, and the sergeant glimpsed a gray
card clutched in her thin grubby fingers. "It's a message - and awful important, mister!"
"You might send it in."
"Thank you." Her thin blue face smiled politely. "But Mr. White said I mustn't let anybody see it, except
Dr. Forester."
"I told you, sister -" The sergeant saw her flinch, and tried to soften his refusal. "Dr. Forester is a big
man, see? He's too busy to see anybody - unless you happen to be an inspecting general, with papers
from the Defense Authority. And you don't, see? Sorry, but I can't let you in."
She nodded forlornly. "Then let me - think."
For a moment she stood still, forgetting even to move her feet on the hot pavement. Her bony head tilted
and her eyes half closed, as if she listened to something beyond him. She nodded, and whispered
something, and turned hopefully back to the sergeant.
"Please - may I see Mr. Ironsmith?"
"Sure, sister!" He gave her a leathery smile, relieved. "Why didn't you say you knew him? Forester's
hard to see, but anybody can talk to Frank Ironsmith. He ain't important, and he's a friend of mine. Come
around here in the shade, and we'll call him."
Timidly silent, she came gratefully up under the narrow awning in front of the guard box. The sergeant
picked up his telephone to call the observatory switchboard.
"Sure, Frank Ironsmith has a phone," came the operator's nasal whine. "He works in the computing
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section. Starmont 88. Sure, Rocky, he's in. He just bought me a cup of coffee, on the way to work. Just
hold the line."
Ironsmith listened to the sergeant, and promised to drop right down. Waiting for him, the little girl kept a
tight grip on the card in her pocket. She stooped restlessly to pick gaudy yellow blooms from a desert
weed outside the fence, and then her huge eyes came uneasily back to the sergeant.
"Don't you worry, sister." He tried to smooth his drillfield voice. "Because Frank Ironsmith is a good
guy, see? He don't amount to much, and probably never will - all he does is run the calculating machines
in the computing section. But I know he'll try to help you."
"I do need help." She gripped the card tighter. "To get this to Dr. Forester."
"Frank will think of something." The sergeant grinned, trying to break her big-eyed solemnity. "He's
plenty smart, even if he is just a clerk."
She had cocked her head again, staring past him at the lawns and the dark evergreens that made
Starmont a cool oasis, and the sergeant was disturbed by a brief impression that she was listening for
something besides his voice.
"Frank's all right, sister." He went on talking, because the child's odd intentness made him nervous. "And
he knows plenty. Even when he stops at the canteen to drink a beer with us, he's apt to have a book
along. Why, he can even read some old language he says people used to use back on the first planet."
She was looking back at him, now really listening.
"That's off somewhere in the stars, you know." He gestured vaguely at the brazen sky. "The first world,
where Frank says all men came from, back in the beginning. One night he showed me the mother sun." A
remembered awe echoed in his voice. "Just another star, in the big telescope."
For Starmont was not on Earth, nor Jane Carter's language English; even her name is here translated
from less familiar syllables. A hundred centuries had gone since the time of Einstein andHiroshima, and
the tamed atom had powered ships to scatter the seed of man across many thousand habitable planets
within a hundred light-years of Earth. Countless human cultures, isolated from one another by the long
lifetimes and generations required by the best atomic ships to cross from star to star, had grown and
killed themselves and sprung hardily up to invite new destruction. Caught in that ruthless repetition of
history, this world - not unlike the cradle planet in chemistry and climate - had fallen with the breakdown
of its mother civilization back almost to barbarism. A dozen centuries of independent progress had
brought its people back about to the level of Earth at the dawn of the atomic age. Technology, however -
displaying the variation more significant than the recurrence of history - was a little farther advanced, with
all its social consequences. A world republic had ended the long eras of nationalistic war, but that
universal state already faced new conflicts in a wider universe. For the local rediscovery of nuclear fission
had set explorers and traders and envoys to voyaging in space again, their crude atomic craft carrying the
virus of science to the peoples of near-by planets still too backward to have any immunity to the
discontents and revolutionary ideologies generated by industrial revolution. Now, as the slow wave of
progress passed its crest on this world of Jane Carter and the sergeant, the old historical cycle of rise and
ruin was preparing to repeat itself again - and again with variations. Threatened with the inevitable fruit of
its own exported know-how, the democratic republic was already sacrificing democracy, as it armed
desperately to face a hostile new alliance of the totalitarian Triplanet Powers.
"See, sister?" The sergeant grinned encouragingly. "Frank Ironsmith's the one to help you - and here he
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comes, right now."
The anxious urchin looked up quickly, to see a slight young man coming down to the gate, along a
shaded gravel path from a little red-shingled building among the evergreens, riding a rusty bicycle. He
waved a genial greeting to the sergeant, and looked at her with gray, friendly eyes. She smiled at him
uncertainly.
A boyish, twenty-six, Ironsmith had a lean, sunburned face and untidy sandy hair. Looking easily relaxed
in a faded shirt, open at the collar, and shapeless, ancient slacks, he answered her shy smile with a
sympathetic grin, and turned to the sergeant inquiringly.
"Miss Jane Carter," the sergeant said. "To see Dr. Forester."
Ironsmith tapped the bowl of his underslung brier against the bicycle frame, and stood absently testing its
temperature with his fingertips. Seeing her breathless urgency, he shook his head with a quick regret.
"You'd have to be at least a general." His voice was soft and kindly. "Wouldn't anybody else do at all?"
"Nobody," she said firmly. "And it's awful important."
"I'm sure," Ironsmith agreed. "And what might it be about?"
Her great, limpid eyes stared beyond him. Her thin blue lips moved silently, and then she seemed to
listen.
"I'm not to say," she told Ironsmith. "Except it's something Mr. White says is going to happen right away.
Something awful bad! That's why he wants to warn Dr. Forester."
Ironsmith peered beyond her, at the long empty road winding down to the desert and stretching into the
shimmering distance toward Salt City. His puzzled eyes saw the uncomfortable shifting of her bare,
chapped feet, and concern sobered him.
"Tell me, Jane - where did you leave your folks?"
"I don't have no folks," she said gravely. "I never had any folks, and the cops shut me up in a big dark
house with had smells and iron on the windows. But I'm all right now." She brightened. "Mr. White took
me out through the walls, and he says I don't have to go back."
Ironsmith rubbed his smooth chin, thoughtfully.
"Dr. Forester is pretty hard to see," he told her. "But maybe we can manage something. Suppose we go
over to the cafeteria, and eat a dish of ice cream while we talk about it?" He looked at the sergeant. "I'll
see her back to the gate."
She shook her head, reluctantly.
"Aren't you hungry?" Ironsmith urged. "They've got four flavors."
"Thank you." He could see the eager longing in her wet black eyes, but she stepped back firmly. "Yes,
I'm getting awful hungry. But Mr. White says I haven't time to eat."
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Turning, she started away from the gate. Beyond her the black empty road was a narrow shelf blasted
into the dark basalt pillars of the mountain, and the nearest haven was that dark smudge already rippling
under the morning sun on the far horizon.
"Wait, Jane!" he called anxiously. "Where're you going?"
"Back to Mr. White." She paused, gulping. "So he can tell me how to find Dr. Forester. But I'm awful
sorry about that ice cream."
Pushing the card deeper in her pocket, she ran on down the narrow pavement. Watching the way she
tried to step in the cooler shade beneath the cliff, Ironsmith felt an increasing solicitude. She seemed a
daughter of want. Hunger had made her body too small for her head, and the stoop of her shoulders gave
her almost the look of a little old woman. Yet he felt more puzzlement than pity. He didn't understand her
odd way of listening at nothing, or her solemn determination to see Forester. He began to wish he had
tried to break red tape enough to get her a pass.
In a moment, her fluttering yellow dress was gone beyond the first dark jutting angle of the mountain. He
got astride his bicycle to go back to work, and then something stopped him. He waited, watching a lower
curve of the road that lay in view beyond, but she didn't come in sight again.
"Let me out," he told the sergeant suddenly. "A homeless kid, with that crazy notion about a message for
Dr. Forester - we can't just let her run away in the desert. I'm going to bring her in and try to get Forester
to see her. I'll be responsible."
He rode down around the curve, and on for a mile beyond. He didn't find Jane Carter. Presently he
came back to the gate, walking to push the cycle up the grade.
"Find her?" the sergeant greeted him.
He shook his head, mopping dusty sweat off his pink, worried face.
"Then where'd she go?"
"I don't know." Ironsmith peered uneasily back down the empty road behind him. "But she's gone."
"I kept watching." The sergeant put down a pair of binoculars. "I didn't see her anywhere. Or anybody
else, between here and Salt City." He scratched his head, and then automatically set his cap back to the
proper angle and checked the military neatness of his buttons and his tie. "A funny thing," he concluded
vehemently. "Damn funny!"
Nodding mildly, Ironsmith asked to use his telephone.
"Belle," he told the operator, "please get me Dr. Forester's office. If he isn't there yet, I want to talk to
anyone who is."
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