The Questor Tapes

Q U E S T O R

WHO WAS HE?

Questor was an artificial man, built in the labs and designed to be virtually indistinguishable from a human being. But something had gone wrong with his programming, and he was brought to life without the ability to feel or understand emotion.

WHERE DID HE COME FROM?

He knew the engineers had designed and built him from the notes left by a Dr. Vaslovik. But the good doctor had disappeared, and nobody knew where he was.

AND WHAT WAS HE SUPPOSED TO DO?

Questor knew he would have to meet his maker, if he were ever to find out what his mission was to be. And he would have to find Vaslovik fast . . . before the head of Project Questor found his AWOL android and destroyed him!

PROJECT QUESTOR
The Making of a Man

The android sat before the mirror in the cosmetology section, studying its own smooth hairless face and body. The table bore an array of dyes, creams, special heat-molding tools. An image flashed briefly in its brain—a picture of what it should look like. Then the image was gone. Gaps . . . too many gaps in information. Program lacking.

The cosmetology computer keyboard was at the left. The android turned to it and activated it. A schematic came on as the screen glowed to life. The android studied it, keyed in a new instruction.

The computer completed the run and stopped. The android was motionless for the space of a minute, analyzing and correlating the information it had absorbed.

Then its eyes flicked down, and it picked up a heat-molding tool . . .

Also by D. C. Fontana
Published by Ballantine Books:

THE WINDS OF SPACE

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1974 by Universal City Studios, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Canada.

ISBN 0-345-24236-X

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First Edition: October 1974

For Gene L. Coon

June 7, 1924—July 8, 1973

“Gene celebrated life. With honesty, candor, love, generosity, humor—yet he delighted in insisting he was a hard-nosed s.o.b. . . . He was an authentic war hero . . . Yet he was very much against war and killing. So he built an armor around his gentle heart, of toughness and humor . . . Any way you looked at Gene, you saw a loving man. He loved his family . . . He loved people. He loved reading. He loved writing with a joy I’ve never seen in another writer . . . Gene had a literary streak, and so I’ve adapted an old Latin verse by the poet Catullus, just for him, for now:

By ways unknown and many mem’ries sped,

Brother, to this moment am I come

That I may celebrate the dead

And speak of peace with your ashes dumb.

Accept my thoughts. Such heirlooms of past years

Are joyous things to grace you where you dwell.

Take them, all drenched with a brother’s tears.

And, Gene, my brother, now,
hail . . .
and farewell.”

(Excerpted from eulogy by
John J. Furia, Jr., President
Writers Guild of America)

T H E
Q U E S T O R
T A P E S

1

J
erry Robinson felt no more for the object lying on the instrument assembly pallet than he felt for any other computer assembly he had constructed in the past seven years. The fact that this computer had the shape of a male human being in every particular had little bearing on the work he did. He glanced up from a monitoring device to look at the object for which an entire top-security lab had been built.

It had an average build—about five feet eleven inches and not overly muscular. Still, heavy metal straps held the arms and legs in a spread-eagle position on the assembly pallet. Jerry could not think of it as anything other than
it
—the android Emil Vaslovik had left for a five-nation science combine to build. But the thick metal restraints had been insisted upon by Michaels, the British scientist.

“It resembles an ordinary human body,” he had said. “But there is a tempered steel framework under that plastiskin and an energy source to give it power beyond all human capacity. If anything goes wrong in the lab, I want to be assured it won’t break loose.”

So Michaels had been assured, and the android had been strapped down. Jerry saw no menace in the android. Perhaps he had worked on its component parts too long. To him it appeared to be only a man-shaped thing with sleek, hairless skin and no details at all to make it seem human. The bald head had basic nose and ear shapes in the proper places, but the mouth was only a slit—lipless. The eyes had been inserted, and the thin plastiskin eyelids were closed; but there were no brows or lashes. The body had no nipples or navel. Nowhere were there any of the blemishes, scars, wrinkles, or other tiny flaws that human bodies carry.

Jerry thought ruefully of the long scar on his left shin, the result of a childhood bicycle accident. It could be covered, if he had enough vanity about it to go to a plastic surgeon and go through the skin grafts.
One up for the android,
he thought. Any scars it acquired could be neatly repaired in a matter of minutes with a heat molder.

Michaels’ voice broke in on his thoughts. “Ready to disconnect?”

Jerry stepped closer to the android’s side and scanned the contact points of the control and readout wires that led from the exposed circuitry to a telemetry unit over-head. The flap of plastiskin had been pulled back at the right side of the abdomen, laying open the intricate and astonishingly small servo-units, electronic relays, and microscopic transistors that would, supposedly, bring the android to life. There was doubt, in some quarters that the project would succeed. Most of the android’s components had been designed by Emil Vaslovik before he inexplicably vanished three years ago, and not one of the scientists or technicians in the room could explain what half of them were or how they worked. Or were supposed to work. The acid test would come in a few moments.

Satisfied that the contacts had been doing their job, Jerry nodded to Dr. Michaels. “Ready to disconnect, sir.”

“Disconnect it from the lab controls.”

Jerry began to remove the leads, his deft fingers moving with the skill of one whose craft is both instinctive and well learned. A bluish pulsating glow came from a power unit deep inside the android. The color intensified as Jerry removed the fine wires one by one.

The scientists and technicians hovered over control and monitoring devices as the young microelectronics engineer worked. Their ID tags identified several as Nobel Prize winners in their fields. The white “clean suits” gave them all a uniform, bulky look, except for Phyllis Bradley, whose spectacularly contoured figure could not have been defeated by an old-fashioned diver’s suit. She was also one of the Nobel Prize winners.

Jerry completed the disconnections and stepped back a pace. Suddenly the android’s chest heaved; Jerry caught his breath, startled. The rise and fall of the machine’s chest steadied into a regular pattern, and Jerry became aware of the voices routinely reporting.

“Heartbeat simulation steady at eighty.” This from Michaels.

Phyllis Bradley flicked her gaze across a console and nodded in satisfaction. “Respiration simulation holding at twenty-one. Epidermal reading, 98.6. Internal lubricant flow, normal; full circulation. Pulse registering normal.”

Jerry moved to the android’s side again. It lay unmoving except for the rhythmic rise and fall of the chest in a normal breathing pattern. The eyes remained shut. The flawless skin and lipless mouth made it seem suddenly alien and disquieting. Jerry tentatively reached out to touch the android. The plastiskin was warm, but far too smooth. He had almost expected a human reaction—perhaps a ticklish drawing away. There was none, of course; he pulled back his hand, vaguely uncomfortable.

“It’s doing nicely on its own.” Michaels looked up in time to see Jerry withdraw his hand, and he frowned. “Have you met a problem there, Robinson?”

“No, sir. When its chest started moving, it startled me, that’s all.”

Gorlov, the Russian, shook his head. “Strange you should be alarmed. This great toy of ours—you were most prominent in constructing it. You knew what it should do.”

“Maybe I didn’t really believe it would work.”

Gorlov appeared surprised but had no chance to comment. Geoffrey B. Darro entered the security lab. He was dressed like the others, in a white clean suit, wearing the obligatory identification tag and radiation-level badge. Jerry always knew when Darro was around, even if he hadn’t seen him come in. Everyone instinctively fell silent and waited to be spoken to.

Darro was a man few people questioned. If they did, they seldom received answers. There probably was a dossier on him—somewhere—but most of what was known about him was only what Darro himself cared to reveal. Physically, he was a rugged, broad-shouldered man, still showing the easy, fluid motions of a well-conditioned athlete. He might have been fifty—there was a little gray in his crisp, dark hair. Intellectually, he was an accomplished man with a broad grasp of history, politics, economics, international strategies, and interplay on all levels. He was fluent in five languages and unyielding in all of them. Personally, he seemed to have no friends, no associates, no soft spots or weaknesses. At times Jerry was sure that Darro was made of harder steel than the android.

Darro was the official head of the five-nation Project Questor primarily because he was the one individual on whom they could all agree. He had been hired by many nations in the past—sometimes to overthrow a government, other times to save one. He never broke his word or his contract, and any country which employed him never regretted it. Geoffrey B. Darro’s integrity was as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun.