Collected Short Fiction, page 625
Boysie Gann felt a shudder, as if the floor of the room were shaking. It had not moved.
He staggered and thrust out a hand to support himself, yet there was no motion. “To Earth!” cried the sick man, and threw the sheet of paper from him. “Swan, carry it! Starchild, guide it! To Earth . . .” He broke off.
The doctor tried again to calm him, but the dying man thrust him aside. “To Earth!” he cried. “And you—spy, traitor, slave of the Machine! Swan take you . . .”
Gann opened his mouth to say something, anything, but words would not come. The room lurched again, more violently. Sickeningly. The others did not seem to notice, yet the shock came again. He stumbled and almost fell, caught himself and reached out instinctively for the fluttering sheet of paper Zafar had thrown into the air.
It slipped away from him . . . and disappeared. One moment it was there. The next moment it was gone. Where it had been Gann saw a queer flow in the atmosphere, like flawed glass, spinning.
The whirlpool grew. It enlarged and came near him, and the room moved around him once more. Frantically he tried to leap back, to save himself, but he was falling, falling into the whirlpool . . . falling . . . and falling . . .
He fell for what seemed to be a thousand years while the room turned queerly dark and disappeared. Quarla’s worried face, the doctor’s look of shock, Mohammed Zafar’s dying glare of hate—all disappeared, and around him he saw the dim shapes of stars and planets, of galaxies and dust clouds, rippling and glowing . . .
He fell for a long time, through what seemed to be a distance of billions upon billions of empty, airless miles.
And was.
For when the falling stopped and shaken and frantic he staggered to his feet, he fell flat and cut his face, bloodied his nose against a gray, soft-lighted metal floor.
He was in full earth gravity.
He was on the Reefs no longer. He was on a planet. And around him stretched long empty corridors of metal walls and spinning tapes and glittering lights. Machine Major Boysie Gann was home at last. He was in the catacombs under Earth’s surface that housed the mighty electronic masses of the Planning Machine.
VI
And that was how it began for Boysie Gann, with a twenty-billion-mile drop that landed him in a place where no one could possibly be, in the heart of the Machine.
A warm wind blew between the narrow walls of the corridor. There was a faint distant hum, overlaid by the whir and hiss of rushing tape, the drone of enormous far-off machines. Gann stood up, gasping with the effort of moving his new weight—nearly a hundred kilos, when for months he had had to carry only a fraction of that, or none. He looked around, dazed.
He was in a long corridor. At the end of it, hundreds of yards off, was a brighter light that seemed to be a room.
He stumbled toward it, stanching the flow from his nose with the back of a hand, coughing and tasting the acrid blood at the back of his mouth.
The gray light turned out to come from a strange round chamber, its roof a high concrete dome. The great floor was broken with little island clusters of consoles and control panels, unattended. The wall, almost circular, was pierced with twenty-four dark tunnels like the one he had come from.
Gann leaned dizzily for a moment against the frame of the door through which he had entered. Then, summoning his strength, he shouted, “Help I Anyone! Is anybody here?”
The only answer was a booming echo from the great concrete dome, and the distant whirring of the tapes.
The control stations were empty, the corridor vacant. Yet as Gann stood there he began to feel that the place was somehow alive. As the echoes died away his ears began to register fainter, more distant sounds—a muffled mechanical murmur, a hum and whir. All the corridors were as empty as ;the one he had left. He peered into them one by one, saw nothing but the endless banks of computing equipment, the jungle of thick cables that roofed them.
Almost humbled by the immense hush around him, Gann went to the circular islands of consoles in the middle of the chamber. One unit, glowing with illuminated dials and buttons, faced each radiating tunnel. He stood entranced, watching the race of indicator lights across the face of each console.
He had never seen this place in his own person before, yet it was all familiar to him, had been repeated a hundred times, from a hundred angles, in the texts and visual-aid lectures at the Technicorps academy. He was in the very heart of the Planning Machine—the most secret, the most elaborately guarded spot on nine planets. The nerve center of the Plan of Man.
And the Planning Machine did not even know he was there!
That was the fact that most shook Boysie Gann, almost terrified him, not only for himself, although surely he was on dangerous ground—men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. His fear was for the Plan of Man itself. How was it possible?
With all its storage of facts on every act of every human being in the Plan—with its great taped mass of data covering every field of knowledge, every scientific discovery, every law—the Planning Machine seemed to have no way of telling that an unauthorized human being was at large in its very heart.
Gann found himself sobbing. Dizzied, he clutched at the edge of the nearest console and frantically tried to make sense of the unfamiliar glitter of dials and scopes and racing lights. There was a linkbox! For a moment he was hopeful—yet the linkboxes to the Machine were meant only for those who had received communion, who wore the flat plate in their skulls that gave the Machine access to their cranial nerve centers. Dared he use the linkbox?
But what else was there? Gann thought swiftly, crazily, of punching a button at random—throwing a switch—turning a dial. Any small change would alert the Machine. Serving robots or human techs would be there in moments.
Then his eyes caught sight of a small, flat red plate, bearing a single bright-lit button, and one word. It was at the top of the console nearest him. The single word was STOP.
He stood staring at it for a long moment, forgetting to breathe. If that plate meant what it so clearly, unequivocally said, he had it in his power to . . . to. . .
To stop the Machine.
Machine Major Boysie Gann, Technicorps academy graduate, veteran of the spy school, trained and toughened against the worst a solar system could produce, found himself babbling in terrified hysteria. Stop the Machine! The thought was unbearable.
He flung himself on the linkbox, found a switch, wept, babbled, and sobbed into it. He was not speaking in the Mechanese that the Machine had developed for the links—didn’t know it—would have forgotten it if he had known it He was literally terrified, as nothing in his life had ever terrified him before.
When the squad of Plan Guardsmen in Machine gray came boiling out of the access elevators, racing down the corridors, their weapons at the ready, they found him slumped on the floor, all but unconscious.
Boysie Gann nearly died right then, with twenty bullets in his body. But the Techtenant in command issued a sharp order. He peered wonderingly at Gann, restrained his men, thought for a second, then shook his head. “Don’t hurt him,” he growled. “Or not so he can’t talk! Let’s get him up to the security office—fast!”
For four days Boysie Gann was questioned around the clock by the brawniest bullies in the Technicorps, and they were not gentle with him.
He answered all their questions—told the absolute truth—-and paid for it with the impact of a club against his kidneys, a kick in his ribs. They knocked him unconscious a dozen times, and each time he revived again with a hard-faced medical orderly pulling a hypodermic out of his skin, brought back to face more interrogation.
Finally they let him sleep—not because they were satisfied with his answers, but because the medics feared he would die.
When he awoke he ached in every part of his body. He was strapped to an operating table. The Body Bank, he thought at first in a surge of panic. But it was not the Body Bank; it was a prison. Clearly the medics had been working on him. Although he ached, he could move. His toes curled, his fingers responded to his brain. His eyes opened and moved where he willed them.
Only one thing was different: there was a cold, hard pressure around his neck.
The security collar that Harry Hickson had removed so easily had been replaced.
Men were all around him, removing the straps, forcing him to his feet. “You! Risk,” growled one of them, a radar-horned NCO with a chin that was stubbled blue with beard. “On your feet! You’re going to talk to the general.”
They hurried him through gray-walled corridors to an elevator. It rose with a sickening thrust of acceleration, stopped as rapidly. Gann nearly fell, but was thrust to his feet again by one of the guards. “Out! Move on, Risk!” And he stumbled through more corridors into a bare gray office, and there he stood at attention for a long, long time, waiting.
Then—Boysie Gann heard no signal, but perhaps it had been relayed through the radar-horned helmet of the guards—the security guardsman barked, “In there!” and thrust him through a door.
Gann entered a larger, brighter office. It was beautifully furnished, with a bust of the Planner in glowing gold smiling down from a pedestal, and a golden linkbox to the Machine dominating the desk. On the desk was a nameplate.
Machine General Abel Wheeler
And the man who sat behind it was the general himself.
He sat regarding Boysie Gann for a long moment. Machine General Wheeler seemed more than half a machine himself. He was a big man, an angular, perplexing, abrupt-moving man. His whole body looked metallic: skin tan of bronze, eyes the color of steel, spikes of copper wire for hair. He stared at Gann and then, without a word, looked away, his eyes going to something invisible on his desk.
Boysie Gann felt choked by the hard, cold constriction of the security collar. Bruises aching, skin clammy with sweat, he stood painfully rigid. At the Technicorps academy he had learned the art of standing endlessly at attention—the imperceptibly slow shifting of weight and muscular tensions that kept a man from pitching forward on his face. He blanked out his mind, thought of nothing but of the importance of standing there.
The general’s frowning eyes clung to the tilted communications screens that faced him on his desk, invisible to Gann. After a moment he tapped soundless keys, communicating, Gann knew, with the Machine. Gann wondered that he did not use the linkbox. It did not occur to him that the general might fear that Boysie Gann, the man who had appeared inexplicably in the heart of the Planning Machine’s caverns, might equally inexplicably have learned to understand Mechanese.
The general waited, reading something, frowning stiffly. Abruptly his head jerked up and he stared at Gann.
The screens had ceased to flicker. His flat bronzed face Was expressionless. It was a mask of meat, as if some bungling surgeon at the replacement center had failed to connect the nerves and muscles that would have given it life.
General Wheeler said sharply, “Machine Major Boysie Gann!” Gann jumped; he could not help himself; the voice was like a metal rasp. “You may stand at ease!”
Gann let his lean shoulders sag slightly forward, drew a long breath, shifted his feet. But he was not really at ease. General Wheeler’s eyes were on him, steel-colored, as coldly merciless as if they were the probes of a surgeon planting electrodes in his brain. He snapped, “The Machine requires information from you.”
Gann said painfully, “I know, sir. I’ve already been interrogated—about a hundred times, I’d say.”
“It will be a thousand! You will be interrogated again and again and again. The Machine’s need for truth is urgent.” Wheeler’s broad head jutted forward like the sudden thrust of a piston. “The Starchild! Who is he?”
There was a dry lump in Gann’s throat. He swallowed and said stubbornly, “I don’t know, sir. I’ve told everything I know.”
“The Writ of Liberation! Who wrote it?” Gann shook his head. “How did it get into the Planner’s headquarters?” Gann kept on shaking his head, hopelessly but obstinately. “And yourself, how did you get into the Planning Machine’s tunnels? Who is Quarla Snow? Why did you kill Machine Colonel Zafar and make up this preposterous lie?”
“No, sir!” cried Gann. “I didn’t! Colonel Zafar was anti-Plan!”
The general’s wide mouth hardened. His bloodless lips shut like the jaws of a trap. His voice was like a muffled, ominous clang. “The evidence,” he said, “suggests that you are lying. Can you prove you are not?”
“No, sir. But—”
“Machine Mayor Boysie Gann! Are you the Starchild?”
“No, sir!” Gann was honestly surprised, indignant. “I—”
“Machine Major Boysie Gann! Do you know what became of the Together ship?”
Gann cried hopelessly: “The what? General, I never even heard of the—what is it? The Togethership. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Like the steady pulse of a laser scan, the general tolled: “The Togethership went into space forty years ago. It was never heard of again. Major Gann, what do you know of this?”
“Nothing, sir! Why, I wasn’t even born!”
For a moment the mask cracked, and the general’s face looked almost human. Worried. Even confused. He said after a moment, “Yes. That’s true. But . . .”
Then he tightened up again, bent forward stiffly from the hips. His steel eyes narrowed. “Are you loyal to the Plan of Man?” he asked softly.
“Yes, sir!”
The general nodded. “I hope so,” he said bleakly. “For the sake of the Plan—and for your own sake, too. For I am going to tell you something that cannot ever be told again. If you whisper a word of it, Machine Major Boysie Gann, your death will come at once. At once.
“You see, the Planning Machine is not unique. There is another one.”
Gann’s eyes widened. “Another . . .” he stopped, and had to begin again. It was like being told there were two Jehovahs, a second Christ. “Another Planning Machine, sir? But where is it?”
The general shook his head. “Lost,” he said somberly. “Another Machine—as great, as powerful, as complete as the one that guides the Plan of Man. And we do not know where it is.
“Or what it is doing.”
There was a man named Ryeland, the general told Boysie Gann. A great mathematician. A brilliant scientist. The husband of the daughter of the then-Planner, and close to the center of power surrounding the Planning Machine itself. And decades before he had gone into space, just as Gann himself had done, and seen the Reefs of Space, and come back with the tale of countless thousands of unplanned humans living their lives out on the fusorian worldlets, outside the scope of the Plan.
“What he said,” rasped General Wheeler sternly, “was false! But the Machine wisely determined to test it out! The Planning Machine does not leap to conclusions! It weighs the evidence—learns the facts—makes a plan!”
“Yes, sir,” said Boysie Gann. “I’ve heard of this Ryeland, I think. A leading scientist even today!”
The genera! nodded. “Today,” he said cryptically, “Rye-land has abandoned error. A loyal servant of the Plan. And so is the former Planner, Creery, who also has turned away from falsity. But then . . .” He sighed, like the wheezing of a high-vacuum pump.
Then, he told Gann, both men had been duped—and had caused the Machine to commit. . . not an error, of course—that was impossible to the Machine—but to conduct an experiment that failed.
The experiment was to bring the Plan of Man to the Reefs.
The Machine had directed the construction of a mighty spacecraft called the Togethership, The biggest space-going vessel ever built, a mobile spacefort. it was fabricated at the yards on Deimos, and powered with six detachable jetless drive units that were themselves great fighting ships. And more than half of its hull was filled with a slave unit of the Planning Machine—a linked bank of computers and storage banks, as advanced as the Machine itself, lacking only the network of communications and implementation facilities that the Machine had developed out of the race of Man.
The Togethership was built, launched, tested, and fitted out. A selected crew was assembled and came aboard. Supplies were loaded for a ten-year cruise. The slave Machine assumed control . . . the Togethership flashed out past Orbit Pluto—passed the Spacewall—and was gone.
Days later a message came back via laser relay chain. All was going well. The Togethership had sighted a major cluster of the Reefs of Space.
No other message was ever received.
Machine General Wheeler paused, his steel-gray eyes on Gann. “No other message,” he repeated. “It has never been heard from again. Scouting vessels, attempting to locate it, came back “without having found any trace. Or did not come back at all. Or returned early, damaged, having been attacked by pyropods or something worse.
“That is the story of the Togethership, Major Gann. Except for one thing: the cluster of Reefs it last reported sighting was in the same position as what you have called Freehaven, And you were there, Major. What did you learn?”
Wonderingly, Gann shook his head. “Nothing, sir. Believe me. Not even a rumor.”
The general looked at him for a long second. Then he nodded. “Gann,” he said bleakly, “I will tell you one more thing.” Abruptly he snapped three switches on his desk, glanced at a monitoring dial, nodded, “We are cut off,” he declared. “Not even the Planning Machine can look in on us now. What I have to tell you is for no ears but your own.
“You see, Gann, it is not only the welfare of the Plan of Man that is involved here. I have a special interest in solving these mysteries. Solving them myself.
“Major Gann, I intend to be the next Planner.”
Boysie Gann was adrift in dangerous waters, and he knew it. He had heard rumors of the power struggle of the human leaders who surrounded the great central power-fact of the Machine, jockeying for position, seeking personal advantage. The Technicorps Academy had been filled with sly jokes and blazing-eyed, after dark discussions of it. Some had viewed the political strife as treason (though they dared only whisper the thought). Some had taken it as a joke, or as a natural law of human affairs which they proposed to follow for their own advancement. Gann remembered the brother of the girl he had left at Playa Blanca, a white-hot idealist—remembered one of his instructors, a cynical humorist whose japes had seemed half in earnest and had set his classes wriggling with astonishment and something like fear. The instructor had disappeared one day. The young cadet who was Julie Martinet’s brother had become an honor student at the academy. He had even gone on to spy school on Pluto, just as Gann himself was leaving.
