COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 383
Court's face was stern. Bradley stood braced against the shattered window, his knees strengthless, his head still spinning with the pull of the street below. Blank-eyed, he stared at the android across the room.
"You fool!" Arthur Court said. "Are you trying to ruin us all?"
"But I—"
"You still don't understand? You still don't know Wallinger told you the truth?"
"Wallinger—told the truth?"
"Yes—in part. Think, Bradley, think!"
He could not think. His mind had suffered too many stunning shocks for reasoning now. But he did not need to think. He had had the clue many hours ago, and until this moment he had not known. The memory came back and he heard Sue Wallinger's small voice speaking again in the quiet library. He saw her at the door as he went down the path. He remembered her gesture and her smile.
"I can tell you how many of the real kind of men in this room—one, one!"
And she had smiled at him and touched her brother's shoulder.
She had not meant anyone in that room except the human male child. He had asked about men—she touched her brother's shoulder. All the children knew—all the androids knew. Only the humans were blind—and James Bradley.
"Look down," Court's voice said, almost gently.
Bradley looked. There was blood on the floor. He felt a stinging in his hand, and dully lifted his arm to see why. He had put his fist through the window. It had not mattered, then, whether he slashed his own flesh or not. It didn't matter now ...
He saw, without surprise, without shock, only with a numbness of the mind, how the edges of his skin had parted cleanly. The slow blood welled into his cupped palm. He looked down with utter silence at the uncovered tendons of his hand, gleaming mirror-bright from every steel surface. He saw the fine, tiny, tight-curled springs draw up in perfect response when he clenched his fingers.
-
"We made you too well," Arthur Court was saying. "We made you so well you're imperfect. You must be changed, Bradley. No android must be able to attack his own kind. Our survival depends on that law. Do you see now what Wallinger was trying to tell you? The danger of a perfect humanoid is too great. And you're perfect. Answer me, Bradley—do you understand what I'm saying?"
He could not answer. He knew the truth now, but he felt exactly as he had felt before. He was a man still. His whole loyalty lay with the human kind of which he was so merciless a duplicate. Until they made that change that would alter his imperfection, he must continue this fight he had taken up for man against machine. Until they changed him from imperfect android to the perfection of the race of the machine ...
When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. St. Paul had put it all with such terrifying clarity. Though I speak with the tongues of men ... I am become as sounding brass ...
"We don't want to waste you, Bradley," Court said. "You're a fine machine. We need you badly. There's so much work to be done, and we need your help."
"No," Bradley said. "No."
And this time they could not stop him.
He didn't pause to brush the curtain aside, and the glass was already shattered. He saw again the inward-leaning wall that dropped straight for twenty stories toward the street. His knee was on the sill.
Down there would be men to see. Down there in the street they must see and they might perhaps understand the meaning of this paradox that was the android body, the steel ribs and the intricate wiring by which this flesh-clad body once had moved ...
Somewhere deep in his chest the little sparkling thing that at this moment thought as a man thinks knew an instant's wonder. "Is this the way a man feels who gives up his life for his own kind?" Bradley asked himself the futile question. "Or am I moving only as a machine moves, in blind obedience to the orders that were given me when I was made? They must have set me the problem of behaving like a human. And this is a thing men do ... not machines. Never machines."
He leaned out. The mighty drag of the earth's swing pulled him across the sill. It was not much he could do for the race in whose image he had been made, but it was all he could give them. Perhaps it might help. Perhaps it would not. That was something he would never know.
The robots crowded to the sill to watch him fall.
The End
WE SHALL COME BACK
Science Fiction Quarterly – November 1951
with Henry Kuttner
(as by C. H. Liddell)
Dim were the memories of Man's greatness in this latter day, when humanity had returned to the sea for refuge. But Ran knew there was hope, if he could fulfill his mission—if he could keep his tribe men...
-
Man: An individual at the highest level of animal development, mainly characterized by his exceptional mentality. The human creature or being as representing the species.
—American College Dictionary
Man is the highest type of animal existing or known to have existed.
—Webster's New International Dictionary
-
THE FIRST soundless death scream, from far away, when "the killing fires struck, exploded in red echoes in every listening mind. The little clan of humans in headlong flight down the undersea current broke for an instant into a scattering hysteria, until Ran's monitoring thought shot out to halt them.
The flurry quieted. The clan drew together, sleek, pale silver, shuddering above their shadows on the green sand of the sea-bottom. Huddling close, they heard and saw with keener senses than sight or hearing the massacre of that other, kindred tribe. The same death might be their own before evening, and they knew it.
They waited, trembling as the water rocked them, while far-off fountains of fire rained down upon the distant clan, killing wherever it touched. Without vision they could see colored stars arrowing to their targets, and the screams of the dying burst scarlet in every hearer's inward ear. Echoing dully, like a knell beneath those cries, sounded the iron heart-beat of the Destroyer. The tribe wavered when they heard it—even Ran wavered—on the edge of a threshold Ran alone had recognized long ago.
Blind, brainless animal panic urged them to scatter and run until they dropped. Instinct urged them. Reason said wait.
Then something moved tremendously through the waters—a vast, calm pulse that beat once, twice, a third time—and ceased. It was one of the "Thoughts of the Deep", impersonal as the Gulf Stream, and as mighty. The little clan was tossed for a moment upon it as if upon a wind that blew under the ocean.
Something deep in Ran's mind took courage from its calm, and drew back from the dark threshold upon which the whole tribe poised, the mindless threshold between instinct and reason, when instinct shouts so loudly and reason's voice is so cold and quiet that only a man could hear it. Not a beast—a man.
The old knowledge of duty roused itself wearily in Ran's mind again and he turned in the water, gathering in the minds of the clan. His duty was not only to his people, but to something beyond them all, beyond himself, in that unguessable future of which he knew only the legend and the promise.
He must keep them men.
They stood on the very threshold of the sea-beast, at the bottom of the long slope down which their whole race had been driven for so many milleniums, back into the waters from which they first sprang, back to the mindless unreason of the beast. And the drivers, the hunters, the killers, pressed them inexorably toward that last, low door.
Ran rose upright in the water and called the clan together, mind touching mind without words. "It's all right," he told them patiently. "They haven't found us yet. We must run; if we can reach the city we'll be safe. Don't scatter! Follow me, and keep together, and we'll all be safe."
It was, perhaps, a lie, and all but the most foolish knew it, but there are times when lies may be both more comforting than truth and more useful.
Sanctuary was where the sunken city lay, where a man might flash in and out of windows a hundred stories above the pavement, and with luck hide safely even from the bright Destroyers from the Air.
There was another kind of safety there, too, though not even Ran could name it. Somehow, in the sunken cities which their own kind had built so long ago—in another element, the tribe seemed less close to that fatal threshold. Somehow the recurrent, almost irresistible waves of impulse toward mindless action were less strong there than in the open sea.
Ran's people, in this long, dim twilight of the planet, were very near to the point where they would lay humanity aside forever. Ran himself knew, as well as any, the strong urgencies of sheer instinct in the face of danger. But he knew his responsibility, too, and he felt it strongest in the undersea cities. He had even dreamed, rocking in the darkness of the ocean nights, about such fantastic feats as turning in flight before a Destroyer and facing it resolutely as it sank through the waters toward him. Dreams in which he was not entirely Ran, but perhaps the whole tribe too, perhaps, somehow, a part of the sunken cities and Champion of the race of man.
Nothing on earth had ever faced a Destroyer—nothing that hoped to live. Yet Ran dreamed, since there was no harm in dreaming, even if sleep were a thing man could control.
Heavily he cast out the net of his thought and gathered in the tribe, interposing his own mental images between theirs and the far-off massacre reddening the waters and the listening minds. He goaded his people into motion and hurled them in an arrowing swarm down the long slope of the undersea forest, away from that distant focus of danger. His mind touched the minds of the whole group simultaneously with firm, swift, reassuring images that had no shape, being only the clan symbols for ordered flight.
THE THOUGHTS of his tribe flickered against Ran's like the touch of cold, unsteady fingers. Terror; exhaustion; the trembling thought of a silver-furred woman who had never run so long or felt such fear before; the quaver of a furry child; the wild, scattered thoughts of the foolish. And behind all these the steady, uncomplaining firmness of the older clansmen, supporting Ran's thoughts without question because they had chosen him for their leader and knew they had chosen well.
"Hurry," he told his tribe. "Don't lag. Hurry! We can reach the city by noon if we hurry. Run, run, run! I know we're tired. When we reach the White Cleft where the mussels grow we can rest for a moment. You can make it that far; we'll rest, at the White Cleft. Run!"
The words meant nothing. He was using them as a shield to blank out the cries of the distant tribe from which no sane thoughts came, now. There were only mindless flashes, screaming with panic—the silvery arcs of sea-folk darting wildly and the fiery arcs of the stars pursuing, against which no defence could stand—and the bursts of color, and the dying. Ran got no flash from their leader, if he lived; surely, he thought, all need not have died if the leader had been wise. Surely a few might have been directed into hiding, or the strongest and the children sent on ahead while the rest drew the Destroyer's fire. But these were beyond all reasoning, beyond all reach of the mind; it was sea-beasts, not men, whose deaths exploded in the thoughts of the listeners.
So Ran's tribe fled, for the best and oldest of reasons, through a clear undersea dawn that was beginning to glow green with the filtering of early sunlight from far above, where the Aliens lived and ruled the world. They knew, nothing of the Air and the Aliens, except that from them the implacable iron Destroyers came down. They knew nothing of what lay in the Great Deeps out of which the slow, calm "Thoughts" arose. They knew only their own water-world, how to hide in it, how to run for their lives when the Destroyers drove them. How, if they were lucky, to save a few when the Destroyers found them. That other tribe had not been lucky.
No thoughts came through at all, now.
Then in a flurry of churning waters, sending his message screaming ahead of him in mindless panic, a blue-silver body swept down toward them through the swaying jungle, tearing the brown leaves as he passed, blind with fear and shrieking, "Run! Run! Run!"
The clan broke its formation and spun wildly apart, searching in all directions for the danger. Ran sent his perceptions fastest and farthest and keenest, probing backward along the wake of the fugitive for an iron, torpedo-shaped thing slipping silently toward them.
There was nothing; the Destroyers were here, but not close, and none of them seemed yet to suspect the presence of the fleeing clan. This tumult might very easily summon them. Ran ruffled out his fur to test the water, smoothed it sleek again and turned strongly in his course, rising to meet the newcomer.
It was a man, big, with a blue sheen to his fur, and half-insane thoughts running like a rip-tide from him through the receptive listening minds of the tribe, too frightened and exhausted to be under much control. Ran felt them shaking the calm reins he had laid upon them, and fought back his own anger, because that too would only inflame them more. "Silence!" he ordered them all sternly,, but the newcomer most. "Silence! Follow us, but don't speak."
The man whirled in the water and saw him. He flashed downward with quick, jerky strokes, carrying with him upon his fur the indefinable taint of blood that no one could mistake. The two hung a few feet apart, measuring each other.
And so Ran met Dagon, leader of the lost tribe, now leader of no tribe.
-
RAN DID NOT like what he saw in that dark mind that had held unquestioned power for so long. There was strength latent there, and courage of a sort, but there was no discipline at all, and so the courage had crumbled before the Destroyers. And when courage left mankind, Ran thought wearily, what remained? Only blind-ferocity, like the shark's. For an instant he saw the gleaming bodies of his people as he saw a shoal of fish, mindless, taking the last fatal step down the descending path into the darkness of the race.
Out of Dagan's mind thoughts of panic and flight and death spun in % whirlwind that caught even Ran himself, a little, in its dangerous spiral. It would be so easy to give way to terror, so easy to abandon the tribe and fly in senseless, unreasoning panic until the Destroyers found them all.
It was easy to do what Dagon had done. But, of course, when a man sees his whole tribe destroyed in one bursting barrage of stars—
"Join us," he said as calmly as he could. "We'll find a shelter; we know a sunken city not very for away—"
But Dagon was used to rule, not to accept commands. His thoughts burst out in a strong shriek, wild with terror, urging disorganized flight—each for himself. A few of the younger and less stable of Ran's tribe flashed sidewise in the water, beating their arms in panic, churning froth and brown weed-leaves, ready to fly the instant they saw a shelter to hide in.
Ran lowered his head, gathered his exhausted muscles strongly, and with all his power drove a measured blow of his bulky shoulder into Dagon's neck between shoulder and head. He had fought often enough before; he knew where to strike.
Dagon's frantic thoughts broke off into blankness for a moment—a brief but all important moment. Into that blankness Ran sent his own mind, radiating the familiar clan-patterns of unity and control.
The scattered tribe rallied a little, wavered, hesitated and then drew together, waiting. Dagon's thoughts took form again after that instant's stunned silence. But he was hesitant, unsure. Reason was not in him, and Ran had won—for the moment.
"Come," Ran said, and doubled his legs in a strong beat that carried him to the head of the hovering clan. "Quiet!. Follow me and keep your ranks. You know the way to the cleft."
Suddenly Dagon swung around and swam after the obedient tribe. His thoughts were tinged with red, but he came.
Something moved through the waters. Not the iron pulse that told of the Destroyers. A vast, calm pulse that beat through all ocean curved out in a slow and powerful tide—and ceased. They had heard again the "Thought of the Deep."
* * * * * *
In its dawn, and in its twilight, a race may be able to sense such pulses. Something like this may once have moved through misty fern-forests, when the beat of creation itself had not yet faded into silence. Furred primates, not yet men, may have listened and sniffed the wind when those unhearable pulses moved through the milky air, above the booming of the mastodon's feet and the cry of the carnivores. Man cannot very clearly sense the heartbeat of the world; but those who came before man may have known—and those who came after man know, too. Man wearing fur once more and drawing nearer and nearer to the close of his long circle of planetary life, here in the seas that bore him, heard the beat.
It was part of the sea, as Ran was. It had always been there; man did not question the unfathomable. Memory of it was mixed with Ran's earliest memories, the dark, cool, quiet remembrance of his first years alive and the "Thought of the Deep", mighty, unknowable, moving through all ocean on such a subtle plane that not a frond of seaweed stirred, though there was power in that mighty pulse to turn a tribe aside if it swam cross-current of the slowly furling "Thought." Ran did not question, any more than he questioned the tides themselves.
