Wright’s metallic voice slowly. “Corvo is not likely to think of looking for us on the moon. We will be able to work in peace, and I feel sure we’ll succeed there in creating a living being. Then we can return and give humanity a new race of artificial servants.”
Elaine smiled bravely.
“Very well, Roger,” she told her husband. “We’ll go there, and maybe we’ll be as happy on the moon as we have been here on Earth.”
“We?” echoed the young biologist astoundedly. “But you can’t go, Elaine. When I said ‘we’ I meant Simon and myself. You could not possibly live on that wild, lonely world.”
“Do you think I would let you go there without me?” she cried. “No, if you go, I’m going with you.”
“But our child —” he objected, a frown on his face.
“Our child can be born on the moon as well as on the Earth,” she declared. And as he hesitated, she added, “If you left me here, Victor Corvo would find me and force me to tell where you had gone.”
“That is true, Roger,” interjected the Brain’s cold, incisive voice. “We must take Elaine with us.”
“If we must, we must,” Newton said resignedly, his face deeply troubled. “But it’s a terrible place to take anyone you love — a terrible place for our baby to be born —”
Ten weeks later, Newton, Elaine and Simon Wright — man, woman and Brain — sailed secretly for the moon in a big rocket crammed with scientific equipment and supplies.
Upon the moon, beneath the surface of Tycho crater, they built their underground home. There a son was soon born to the man and woman — a red-haired baby boy they named Curtis.
And there in the laboratory of the lonely moon home, a little later, Newton and Simon Wright created their first artificial living creature — a great metal robot.
GRAG, as they named the robot, stood seven feet high, a massive, man-shaped metal figure with limbs of incredible strength. He had supersensitive photoelectric eyes and hearing, and a brain of metal neurons which gave him sufficient intelligence to speak and work, to think and to feel primitive emotions.
But though Grag the robot proved an utterly loyal, faithful servant, he was not of high enough mentality to satisfy Newton. The biologist saw that to create more manlike life he must create it of flesh, not of metal. After more weeks of work, they produced a second artificial creature, an android of synthetic flesh.
This synthetic man they named Otho. He was a rubbery, manlike creature whose dead-white synthetic flesh had been molded into human resemblance, but whose hairless white head and face, long, slitted green eyes, and wonderful quickness of physical and mental reactions, were quite unhuman. They soon found that Otho, the synthetic man, learned more quickly than had Grag, the robot.
“Otho’s training is complete,” Newton declared finally. His eyes shone with triumph as he continued, “Now we’ll go back to Earth and show what we’ve done. Otho will be the first of a whole race of androids that soon will be serving mankind.”
Elaine’s face lit with pure happiness.
“Back to Earth! But dare we go back, when Victor Corvo is there?”
“Corvo won’t dare bother us, when we return as supreme benefactors of humanity,” her husband said confidently.
He turned to the two unhuman beings.
“Grag,” he ordered, “you and Otho go out and remove the rock camouflage from the rocket, so that we can begin to make it ready for the return trip.”
When the huge metal robot and the rubbery android had gone out through the airlock chamber to the lunar surface, Elaine Newton brought her infant son into the big laboratory.
She pointed up through the glassite ceiling which framed a great circle of starry space. There amid the stars bulked the huge, cloudy blue sphere of Earth, half in shadow.
“See, Curtis,” she told the baby happily. “That is where’ we’re going — back to the Earth you’ve never seen.”
Little
Christopher Knight, Alan Butler