Read Captain Future 25 - Moon of the Unforgotten (January 1951) for Free Online Page A

of Grag
    From the Spring 1943 issue of Captain Future
     
    The Astonishing Facts in the Experiments of Roger Newton and Simon Wright Which Brought a Thinking Robot into Being!
     
    THE tall red-haired man who stood in the center of the moon-laboratory stood back for a moment and surveyed the robot’s body. In the laboratory itself, the humming of atomic motors could be heard, supplying light and heat, purifying the air, making the rockbound retreat livable.
    But looking out through the plastex windows, he could see the barren airless landscape of Earth’s satellite, covered with dark and gloomy shadows that offered almost perfect hiding places for the dangerous metal-eating moon-wolves. There, all was cold, silent, almost as empty of life and as dangerous as space itself.
    Soon there would be five of them on the Moon, but at the moment there were only four — Roger Newton, the red-haired man himself; his wife, his infant son, Curtis; and Simon Wright, a grizzled old scientist who had been Roger’s friend for years.
    Simon was ailing, and already could see death approaching, but he had as yet no suspicion of the strange fate that would eventually be his — to live as a Brain without a body, to exist, and yet to be free of almost all human cares.
    Now he was still human, with the thoughts and emotions of a man.
    He was the most brilliant scientist that Earth had produced in generations, and at the moment the most excited one. For today was to see the climax of years of careful work.
     
    A METAL BODY IS BUILT
    Roger Newton moved toward a speaking tube. “Well, Simon,” he said, “it’s time for our robot to be born.”
    A moment later Simon entered the laboratory. The huge room was full of strange instruments and novel forms of apparatus, most of them constructed by Roger and Simon themselves, implements unknown anywhere else on the solar planets or their satellites.
    But none was more wonderful than the metal body of the robot, and the matchless mechanism of hydrophilic colloid metal that was to be his brain.
    The body lay upon a sturdy table, a suggestion of latent power in the motionless limbs that had been constructed so carefully of specially treated steel. No other robot possessed a body like it, but nonetheless it had taken the scientists little enough time to fabricate.
    It was the making of the brain that had delayed the birth of Grag. The plans for it had first been drawn up ten years before by Simon. It had taken a long time for them to come to fruition, but now the task was done, with hundreds of thousands of brain paths carefully traced in the finely divided metal, each path so tiny and delicate as to be invisible, and yet possessed of sufficient strength to control the motions of the mighty monster that would soon come to life.
    The brain had been placed in a temporary case of strong steel. Now Simon, with more caution than if he had been handling a new born babe, lifted it out and inserted it into the cavity prepared for it within the robot’s head.
    Here it would be protected by the strongest metal yet known — magnasteel, beside which ordinary steel had the strength of wet paper. There was one more task to do, the connecting of numerous brain endings with the metal spinal cord.
     
    CONNECTING THE BRAIN
    Simon’s skilled hands worked quickly, while Roger Newton handled the bank of electrical instruments that sent a pulsing current through the newly made joints.
    It was necessary to fuse each joint thoroughly and at the same time avoid overheating. In a half hour Simon was finished, and stepped back to examine his handiwork.
    The robot was ready. Simon and Roger exchanged glances, and Roger pushed a switch toward his elderly colleague.
    “You bring him to life, Simon,” he said. “He’s really your baby.”
    He could see the veins throbbing in Simon’s temple as the elderly scientist’s hand moved toward the switch. Emotion was a thing that had for years seemed utterly alien to Simon’s nature,