Ballard cursed. “We can’t shoot concrete at the devil. If he’s sensitized to differences in air pressure-hell! I don’t know. There must be some way. Johnson! Get me Plastic Products, quick!”
A short while later Ballard was closeted with a representative of Plastic Products.
“I don’t quite understand. A quick-drying cement-”
“To be squirted out of hoses, and to harden as soon as it hits the robot. That’s what I said.”
“If it dries that quickly, it’ll dry as soon as air hits it. I think we’ve got almost what you want. A very strong liquid cementoid; it’ll harden half a minute after being exposed to air.”
“That should work. Yeah. How soon-”
“Tomorrow morning.”
The next morning, Argus was herded into one of the huge halls downstairs. A ring of thirty men surrounded the robot, each armed with a tank, filled with the quick-drying cementoid. Ballard and Johnson watched from the side lines.
“The robot’s pretty strong, sir,” Johnson hazarded.
“So’s the cementoid. Quantity will do it. The men will keep spraying the stuff on till Argus is in a cocoon. Without leverage he can’t break out. Like a mammoth in a tar pit.”
Johnson made a clicking noise with his lips. “That’s an idea. If this shouldn’t work, perhaps I-”
“Save it,” Ballard said. He looked around at the doors. Before each one was stationed a group of men, also armed with cementoid tanks.
In the center of the room stood Argus, blankly impassive, waiting. Ballard said, “O.K.,” and from thirty positions around the robot streams of cementoid converged on his golden body.
The warning siren screamed deafeningly. Argus began to turn around.
That was all. He kept turning around. But-fast!
He was a machine, and could develop tremendous power. He spun on his longitudinal axis, a blazing, shining, glittering blur of light, far too fast for the eye to follow. He was like a tiny world spinning through space-but a world has gravitation. Argus’ gravitational pull was negligible. There was, however, centrifugal force.
It was like throwing an egg into an electric fan. The streams of cementoid hit Argus, and bounced, repelled by the centrifuge. Ballard got a gob of the stuff in his middle. It had hardened enough to be painful.
Argus kept on spinning. He didn’t try to run, this time. His alarm kept screeching deafeningly. The men, plastered with cementoid, continued to squirt the stuff at Argus for a while.
But the cementoid stuck to them when it was flung back. It hardened on them. Within seconds the scene resembled a Mack Sennett pie-throwing comedy.
Ballard roared commands. His voice went unheard in the uproar. But the men did not continue their hopeless task for long. They, not Argus, were becoming immobilized.
Presently the warning siren stopped. Argus slowed down in his mad spinning. He was no longer the target of cementoid streams.
He went quietly out of the room, and nobody tried to stop him.
One man almost strangled before the hardened cementoid could be dislodged from his mouth and nostrils. Aside from that, there were no casualties, save to Ballard’s temper.
It was Johnson who suggested the next experiment. Quicksand would immobilize anything. It was difficult to introduce quicksand into the castle, but a substitute was provided-a gooey, tarry mess poured into an improvised tank twenty-five feet wide. All that remained was to lure Argus into the quicksand.
“Traps won’t work,” Ballard said glumly. “Maybe stringing a wire to trip him-”
“I think he’d react instantly to that, too, sir,” Johnson vetoed. “If I may make a suggestion, it should not be difficult to drive Argus into the pit, once he’s maneuvered into a passage leading to it.”
“How? Flame throwers again? He automatically reacts away from the most serious danger. When he came to the pit, he’d turn around and go the other way. Break right through the men.”
“His strength is limited, isn’t it?” Johnson asked. “He couldn’t pass a tank.”
Ballard didn’t see the point immediately. “A midget tractor? Not too small, though-some of the castle’s passages are plenty wide. If we got a tank just broad enough to fill the hall-a pistol that would drive Argus into the quicksand-”
Measurements were made, and a powerful tractor brought into the castle. It fitted the passage, leaving no room to spare-at least, not enough to accommodate the robot. Once Argus was driven into that particular passage, he could go only one way.
The tractor, at Johnson’s suggestion, was camouflaged, so the robot’s flight-conditioned brain would not recognize and consider it as a serious factor. But the machine was ready to roll into the passage instantly.
The trick would probably have succeeded, had it not been for one difficulty. The consistency of the artificial quicksand had been calculated carefully. It had to be soft enough to drag the robot down, and stiff enough so that Argus would be helpless. The robot could walk safely under water; that had been proved days ago, in an abortive early experiment.
So the mix had surface tension, though not enough to bear Argus’ great weight.
The robot was maneuvered into the passage without trouble, and the tractor swung after it, blocking Argus’ escape. It rumbled slowly on, driving the robot before it. Argus seemed untroubled. When he reached the edge of the artificial quicksand, he bent and tested the consistency, with one golden hand.
After that, he lay flat on his face, legs bent like a frog’s, feet braced against one wall of the passage, head pointed out over the quicksand. He thrust strongly.
Had Argus walked into the goo feet first, he would have sunk. But his weight was spread over a far larger surface area now. Not enough to sustain him indefinitely, but long enough for his purposes. He simply didn’t have time to sink. Argus skimmed over the quicksand like a skiff or a sandboat. His powerful initial thrust gave him sufficient impetus. No human could have done it, and, while Argus weighed more than a human, he had also had more strength.
So he shot out, angling across the tank, buoyed by surface tension and carried on by his impetus. The quicksand got hold at last and bogged him down, but by that time Argus’ powerful hands reached their destination, the edge of the tank. Another door was in the wall at that point, and Ballard and Johnson were standing on the threshold, watching.
They dodged before Argus trampled them in his automatic fight-reaction away from the quicksand tank.
The robot dripped goo over a dozen valuable rugs before he dried. But after that he was no longer so dazzling a spectacle. However, his abilities were unimpaired.
Ballard tried the quicksand trick again, with a larger tank and smooth walls, on which the robot could get no grip. Yet Argus seemed to learn through experience. Before entering a passage now, he would make certain that there were no tractors within reach. Ballard concealed a tractor in an adjoining room where Argus could not see it, and the robot was induced to go into the fatal passage; but he ran out again the moment the tractor clanked into movement. Argus had an excellent sense of hearing.
“Well-” Johnson said doubtfully.
Ballard moved his lips silently. “Eh? Get that stuff from the quicksand washed off Argus. He’s supposed to be a showpiece!”
Johnson looked after Ballard’s retreating figure. His eyebrows lifted quizzically.
Ballard had a tough session with the televisor. His enemies were closing in from all sides. If only the end of the month would come, when he could get the new diamonds! His holdings were falling in ruin around him. And that damned robot held the key to-everything!
He gave such orders as he could and wandered upstairs, to Argus’ room. The robot, newly cleaned, stood by the window in a blaze of sunlight, a figure of fantastic beauty. Ballard noticed his own reflection in a nearby mirror. Instinctively he drew himself up.
It was a singularly futile gesture. The silent presence of Argus was like a rebuke. Ballard looked at the robot.
“Oh, damn you!” he said. “Damn you!”
Through the visor the impassive face of Argus ignored him. A whim had made Ballard shape the robot to resemble a knight. Somehow the idea seemed less satisfactory now.
Ballard’s long-suppressed inferiority complex was suffering badly.