Collected Short Fiction, page 564
“I’m sorry.” He moved shakenly to open the door again. “I just forgot they’re blind.”
They crept out silently, into the vast chamber of the brain. Beneath a soundless hush, Forester fancied that he could feel the rivers of incalculable rhodomagnetic power that flowed out from here to drive and control all the trillions of mechanicals serving all the worlds that men had owned.
Following a narrow, dim-lit catwalk that had no railing—because it was built for prefect machines, that never slipped or stumbled—he searched the gray glowing panel faces. And he found the numbers old Mansfield had painted on the sections, eighty years ago. Hasty brush marks, splashed on merely for identification in the shop, they were faded now, peeling away from the satiny palladium shieldings. But he could read them still.
The first three sections held the Prime Directive. Three long, silver-gray cases, a little smaller than three coffins. The freedom and the future of mankind had lain buried in them for eighty years, he thought, murdered by Mansfield’s error to preserve a sterile peace. He passed them and crept on toward those beyond, the silent child clinging hard to his arm. Trying to ignore the blind machines ahead, trying to forget the giddy pit beneath, he leaned to read the faded numbers.
Four! For an instant he couldn’t breathe. He felt as if that narrow walk had swayed beneath him, and he had to clutch desperately for a flange of the nearest massive girder. But he got his balance back, and he was fumbling desperately to open the little leather case of tools he had brought to change the connections, when he felt Jane tugging sharply at his hand.
Turning apprehensively, he saw her pointing at that nearest black mechanical. It was still busy removing invisible dust from the panel faces with something like a tiny, silent vacuum cleaner, but it was working steadily toward them. Forester saw that he had no time for terror. He found his pliers and lifted the cover of the fourth section and began rapidly unhooking the flexible wave-guide tubes that coupled it into the brain.
“Oh—”
Jane Carter’s cry was a low and stifled moan of pain. She let his fingers go, but at first he didn’t know what had happened. He thought she was falling from the walk until he saw her backing silently away from him.
Her pinched face was bloodless, and her staring eyes seemed enormous in the gloom, watching the door where they had come in.
XXII
CLUTCHING the flange of that great girder to balance himself, Forester turned fearfully back to the door. A man came out, striding toward him confidently along that giddy path.
“Stop it, Forester!”
His instant weak relief was shattered by a stark dismay. For he knew that clear, pleasant voice, echoing so alarmingly through those dim corridors of the grid, and it belonged to a man more dreadful than any humanoid. Frank Ironsmith came stalking out along the catwalk, urbanely indifferent to any risk of falling.
“You blundering fool, Forester!” Lower now, restrained, his voice reflected neither hate nor anger, but only an infinite shocked regret. “Look what you have done!”
For an instant Forester stood heartsick and shaken, swaying on that gangway meant for sure machines. Fighting a sudden giddiness, he tightened his sweaty grasp on the girder.
“I tried to warn you, Forester.”
Scarcely hearing that sad reproof, he blinked at Frank Ironsmith—who should have been still idling his useless life away at Starmont, reading his ancient books and playing his mysterious chess and riding his rusty bicycle. Youthful still, he looked leaner and firmer and browner, older and sobered.
“I thought Mark White would call on you, but—”
Forester interrupted that suave, regretful voice. He stood empty-handed, for even the pliers had fallen in his first alarm, but now, when he had reached the most vital part of Mansfield’s monstrous creation, he didn’t intend to be stopped. Sudden purpose clenched his stringy fist, and sudden fury drove his lashing blow.
Darting forward, Forester forgot all his dizty fear of the vast black spaces of the brain beneath, and all his dread of the busy blind machines behind him. He tried to knock the urbane traitor off that unrailed way, but Ironsmith evaded the blow.
“That won’t help you, Forester.” Smiling apologetically, Ironsmith caught his quivering wrist. Quick and strong as any humanoid, the mathematician twisted it up and back, to pin him against the gray panel faces. He gasped and pulled and tried to strike again, and somehow hurt his injured knee.
Throbbing pain checked his fury.
“You aren’t fit to fight.” Ironsmith’s low calm voice held no resentment. “You had better give up.”
Not yet! Forester shook his head to clear the mist of pain. He twisted in Ironsmith’s ruthless grasp, trying to ease his arm, and shifted his weight to relieve his trembling knee. Looking desperately behind him on that perilous catwalk, he found Jane Carter. She stood still and pale with fright, but he knew the dreadful power she had learned.
“Jane!” He fought that agony, and found his voice. “Stop him!”
Her blue lips seemed to quiver, but then she froze again, motionless as a humanoid not working.
Nothing happened to Ironsmith.
The detonation of even a tiny fraction of the unstable potassium atoms in his body would have killed him instantly, but not even his calmly compassionate expression changed. Dazed from the impact of that failure, Forester gave way to pain. Clinging to the girder again, he heard Jane Carter speak.
“Service, Clay Forester.” He shrank from her, stricken, for now her thin treble voice had a new quality of whining, emotionless melody. It was like the voices of the humanoids. “We heard your unwise request,” that new voice droned, “but we cannot injure Mr. Ironsmith. You are the one who requires restraint, sir, because Mr. Ironsmith has been faithful to the Compact, and he has loyally defended our relays from your own unhappy effort to alter the Prime Directive.”
And she stood appallingly still again. Forester turned in consternation, to croak accusingly at Ironsmith:
“What have you done to her?”
“Not I.” Sternly, Ironsmith shook his bare sandy head. “Though it is a dreadful thing.” His cool gray eyes rested on the stiffened child, and Forester could see the shocked pity in them. “Because the humanoids aren’t ready, yet, to cope with such opponents in any humane way. I’m afraid she’ll have to be destroyed. But you’re the one to blame.”
“I?” Forester trembled angrily. “How?”
“Come along—if you really want to talk about it.” Glancing sadly at the child again, he nodded toward the door. “We can’t stay here.”
He swung, as if in sublime contempt, and Forester limped helplessly after him along that narrow inspection walk, to clutch gratefully at the jamb of the door.
Little Jane Carter had glided after him with the sure grace of another humanoid.
“How?” he croaked huskily. “How am I to blame?”
The mathematician was strolling absently about that gray-lit, stale-smelling room. He glanced at the faded backs of the reference books, idly spun the loose headstock of a bench lathe, curiously tapped the time-stiffened keys of a tiny portable calculating machine—which must have been a remote cybernetic forebear of the humanoids themselves.
“The humanoids have to guard the grid.” His voice was mild and friendly. “Warren Mansfield built that into them. When such blundering fools as you and Mark White attack the Prime Directive with paraphysical weapons, they are compelled to develop paraphysical defenses.”
“They?” Forester kept his eyes off the frozen child. “Or you?”
Ironsmith stood silent, watching him with gray troubled eyes, until a sudden gust of wrath brought Forester out of the dusty chair. His knee gave again, and he had to catch the corner of the desk.
“It’s, true that a mutual pact exists.” Ironsmith nodded pleasantly. “A necessary arrangement. Because the humanoids were created without any psychophysical capacities, and because they aren’t themselves creative. They were unable to protect the Prime Directive from psychophysical attacks, without the human aid the Compact provides.”
“I thought so!”
“But you didn’t think enough.” Rubbing the lean angle of his sunburned jaw, Ironsmith strolled about the shop again, and nodded at last in grave decision. “You’ve made things very difficult, Forester—but still I’m going to give you one more chance to join us.”
Peering in a bleak perplexity at this amiable and honest-seeming man who had turned so incredibly against his kind, Forester muttered sardonically, “Thank you!”
“Not me.” Ironsmith shook his head. “Your thanks should go to someone else, who is still willing to forgive the most of your follies. To Ruth—who was your wife.”
“Ruth? But she’s at Starmont, under euphoride.”
“She was.” Ironsmith smiled innocently. “You left her there with the humanoids. But I had always liked her, Forester—more, I suppose, than you ever did—and I brought her away with me when I came to leave Starmont. She has her mind and her memory back, and now she’s with us in the Compact. She’s anxious for you to join us.” He paused hopefully. “What shall I tell her?”
“So she’s with you?” Forester’s bad knee shuddered and he felt cold inside. Leaning weakly against the desk, he nodded to a painful understanding. He had never entirely liked Ironsmith, not even before the humanoid invasion, and now he thought he saw the reason.
For the desert observatory had been an isolated, intimate little world, and this ingratiating traitor, the realization stunned him, had too often been with Ruth. At the office and the cafeteria, talking with his indolent brilliance of some quaint bit of forgotten history or useless philosophy he had translated from the dead languages of the first planet.
Forester’s skin felt hot, and he heard a roaring in his brain. His whole body tensed and shook with hatred, but his knee was useless and he knew he couldn’t fight.
“I’ll go with you.” He swung abruptly back to Ironsmith. “On one condition. Jane Carter comes with me—free.”
“Sorry, but that’s out of the question.” Ironsmith was smoothly regretful. “We can rescue you, but she has unfortunately used psychophysical powers of her own against the humanoids, and I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for her.”
“Then there’s nothing you can do for me.”
“If that’s the way you want it.” Ironsmith nodded soberly.
Two identical humanoids had come in through the balcony door. Beautiful with flowing gleams of bronze and blue, they glided silently to Forester’s elbows.
Following between his keepers, Forester looked back twice. The first time, Ironsmith still stood beside the desk, tall and young and stern, watching him with a look of dispassionate regret. When he looked again, the dusty shop was hushed and empty.
XXIII
A LITTLE rhodomagnetic cruiser was waiting outside, hovering silently above the low aluminum railing of the narrow balcony, the smooth oval hull of it reflecting the gray vastness of the tower and murk of the smoky sky and the dark flatness of that endless busy spaceport, all in shimmering distortion. Numbed and tingling at the scalp from the vanishing of Ironsmith, Forester shuffled blankly toward it between his guards. The idle-seeming clerk from Starmont, a cold certainly struck him, must have somehow learned to control exchange-force probability for himself.
Agile as any mechanical, Jane Carter sprang nimbly over the railing to the deck of the waiting craft. Forester’s two graceful guards helped him aboard, and the little ship rose silently. Watching through the one-way transparency of the hull, he saw the smoke-veiled vastness of that endless spaceport sink and spread. And he saw his destination.
“I just begin to get it!” The tiny craft banked, coming down to land, and he tried to guard his knee. “I begin to see what this monstrous thing is for.”
His bad knee gave as the deck leveled again, and the humanoids reached quickly to support him. He cuffed at them impatiently, but they held him up until the cruiser had settled gently beside a long windowless building, with the scarlet dome looming up beyond, fretted with the black scaffolding, huge as a strange moon rising. Forester shrank from it.
“Now I think I see the truth,” he rasped at his guardians. “I think those platinum relays are paraphysical. I think Ironsmith and his gang of renegades have taught you how to generate paraphysical energy and helped you build this new grid.” His voice turned hoarse. “And I think it’s intended to operate men.”
“That is partly true, sir.” His brooding eyes had moved to Jane Carter, and now her thin body broke suddenly out of that stark immobility, moving a little toward him with a quick mechanical grace. “The platinum rays are to be energized with para-mechanical force, and the grid has in fact been constructed to control the minds and bodies of men. But our purpose with it is not evil, sir, in any way.”
Sweetly melodious, her thin bright voice reflected nothing human.
Forester stood numbed and voiceless.
“Men have need of such guidance,” droned the mechanized child. “Because most men cannot truly control the working of their own bodies, or even understand the functions of their own minds. Our function is to guard men from the consequences of their own ignorance and folly and vice. You cannot call that evil, sir.”
Gulping painfully, Forester found no reply.
“Now come.” The door of the cruiser was sliding open. “Here is our new para-mechanical laboratory.”
The two humanoids helped him carefully down from the deck. Shivering in the red shadow of that enormous dome, he limped stiffly after the child.
The humanoids had no use for light, and the only illumination came through the bars of an endless row of cages built along the foot of one high wall—cages much like those he had seen containing animals intended for biological experiment. They seemed quite small at first, in that enormous space, so that he wondered for an instant what sort of animal they were built to hold.
The dim light, spreading from them a little way across the floor and diffusing upward toward the unseen ceiling, outlined here and there the dark bulk of some immense unknown mechanism, picked out some polished metal surface, or caught the hastening sleekness of another humanoid. In a moment he had grasped the vastness of everything, and he knew that the cages were large enough for him.
He tried to stop again, but the two careful machines carried him on without effort. The barred door of one empty cage lifted for him, and the machines set him gently down inside. One of them stayed with him.
“You must wait here,” it said, “until additional sections of the new grid are ready to be tested. Meantime, you may request any comforts you wish.”
Concealed relays behind him shut arid locked the door again. His black guardian stood abruptly motionless, the glow of the walk glistening faintly on its slim silicone nudity. Muttering sardonic thanks, Forester looked about the cage. He found a cot, a table and a chair, a tiny bath behind another door.
Shivering on the cot, Forester wondered what had become of little Jane Carter. He had lost her in the dark while he struggled with his keepers, and he couldn’t see into the other cages. He couldn’t find her now.
“As another scientist, sir, you will understand our methods,” the machine went on. “Our human subjects, under strict control, are caused to exert paramechanical forces. We proceed to measure those forces, to investigate the mechanics of their origin and determine the nature of their effects, and finally to duplicate them by mechanical means.”
Forester had slumped abjectly back against the cold partition. Watching the intent machine, he nursed his knee and clung to one thin thread of hope.
“The final result of this research will be the perfected paramechanical grid. Any human body under its direction will be operated far more efficiently than is ever possible by the slow, uncertain biochemical processes of the natural brain. It can regulate men to prevent all the accidents caused by their clumsy feebleness. It can stimulate the restoration of lost or damaged members, and correct the faulty functions which so often impair the well-being of fragile human bodies and minds. It can even mend the decay of time, to make men almost as durable as our own units.”
The humanoid ceased all movement, in absolute efficiency, as that golden melody ended. Forester sat uncomfortably before it on the cot, nursing his knee and his hope. Desperately, he clung to memory of that sealed and secret limestone cavern, where no humanoid could go.
His breath caught, and the feeble strand of his hopeless hope became a mighty thing. For he saw a huge, red-bearded figure striding out of the dark beyond the cages, still majestic in a tattered silver cloak.
“Mark!” He lurched to his feet, his knee strong again. “Mark White!” Darting past his frozen keeper, he tried to shake the massive, coldly glowing bars. “Mark—here I am!”
But that tall figure ignored his call. It stalked on by, and all his hope went with it. His knee shuddered under him, so that he clung weakly to the bars. For he had seen the face of the marching thing, strangely stiff and pale. He had seen the eyes, huge and dark and blank, their sullen blaze and hate dead at last. And he had seen the look behind the splendid beard, a smile that came from some far place of cold forgetfulness, lost beyond all feeling.
He stared after the stalking creature, stricken, until it vanished in the dark. Even its movements, the realization hit him, no longer had any characteristic of Mark White. Its striding gait had been too quick and sure and soundless. Like little Jane Carter, it had become a mechanical puppet of the grid.
And it was not alone, for the others came marching after it out of the whispering dark. Still tall and gaunt, old Graystone was no longer awkward now, his nose no longer ruddy. Overstreet, for all his puffy bulk moved lightly as a child. Not nervous any more, little Lucky Ford came gliding by with a swift mechanical grace.
Forester found no voice to call again, and none of them seemed aware of him—for all awareness was suspended, in those controlled by the paramechanical relays. All their eyes had blind, distended pupils, and all their faces smiled out of unfeeling oblivion.
