Collected Short Fiction, page 628
“The Machine rejects this data,” she sang. “Did you not ask this unplanned man how he removed the collar?”
“I don’t know how,” he admitted. He paused, hoping to see some living spark in her eyes. But there was none. The black box whirred ominously. “I think he was a convert to the Church of the Star,” said Gann hurriedly. “I think—that is, as I understand it, his power was thought to come from Deneb.”
An angry peal from the linkbox. “That is self-evidently false,” sang the cool voice of Sister Delta Four. “No star possesses any such power to share. No mind in the universe is more powerful than the Machine.”
She paused while the black box snarled again. “If the falsehood is Harry Hickson’s, the truth will be extracted when he is captured,” she translated sweetly. “If the falsehood is yours, Major Gann, you are in grave danger of the Body Bank.”
He cried, “I’m telling the truth! I’m loyal to the Plan of Man!”
The box sang; the girl intoned, “The Machine rejects such merely verbal assurances. One moment. The Machine is receiving additional data through another input.”
Queerly, the girl’s voice was fading.
Gann blinked at her. She seemed to be moving—dwindling—as if she were falling away from him, down through the long, dark emptiness of space. It was as if Gann were looking at her through a zoom lens, pulling away. She receded a thousand yards . . .
Then she was back. Gann felt a moment’s vertigo, as if the Planner’s suite down in the bowels of the earth were somehow dancing a slow waltz. The feeling passed.
The linkbox whirred menacingly, and Sister Delta Four sang, “The Machine terminates this interview.” A sharp hum from the linkbox. “It reminds you that unplanned ideas, like unplanned words and unplanned actions, must be severely corrected. But it reserves judgment on your ultimate disposition.”
Her white, perfect face was smiling slightly, perhaps in contemplation of her instant rapture that was soon to come, when the buried electrodes would excite her brain to the incomparable bliss of electronic communion. But the linkbox was not yet through with her. It buzzed again, harshly.
“The Machine finds your narrative incomplete,” she recited melodiously, contemplating Gann with her dark serene eyes. “You have not identified the Starchild. You have revealed no facts about the Togethership. You have not accounted for the so-called Writ of Liberation. You have not explained bow you got into the vault of the Machine.”
Gann shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. The box whirred implacably.
“Your statements are inadequate,” Sister Delta Four sang again. “But the interview is concluded . . .”
There was that surge of unreal motion again. Gann gripped his chair. This time even the girl felt it; her perfect lips opened, her eyes shook a flicker of surprise.
The linkbox twittered urgently. At the same moment loud bells and sirens began to sound elsewhere in the Planner’s warrens.
“Earth temblors,” the girl began haltingly, “have been detected at several points . . .”
Then the linkbox crashed out a loud, despairing sound. Sister Delta Four gasped. Instinctively she reached out and caught Boysie Gann’s arm. “Pyropods!” she cried. “The . . . the . . . Oh, you’ve got to help! The Planner’s hall has been invaded by pyropods! Dozens of them! They’re there now!”
The private room in which Sister Delta Four had been interrogating Boysie Gann was one tiny office in the immense network of corridors and chambers that was the administrative and living headquarters of the Planner. It had been locked, but the door opened instantly to the pattern of the girl’s fingertips on the knob. It flung wide, and Gann and the girl ran through the open doorway, into a wide, gold-walled hall. Broad as a highway, tall as a two-story building, it ran straight through the heart of a mountain, the Planner’s rooms opening off it at intervals all the way. It was a great ceremonial thoroughfare, lined with glittering gold and crystal statuary, hung in gold brocades, paneled with murals and viewscreens.
And it was filled with the reeking, choking, dusty smoke of jet exhausts.
A scream of some huge rocketing body ripping through the air smote their ears. A human shout of anguish—the cries of men taken by surprise—the thin, ear-splitting volley of laser guns. In all the noise and confusion Gann saw one thing clearly—saw it, grabbed the girl by her arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the doorway.
A pyropod was rocketing toward them down the hall.
It roared at them at a speed nearing Mach One; in the cramped quarters of the hall the shriek of its passage was physically painful, deafening. And the look of the thing was that of an avenging angel come to Earth, set on destruction.
It was a nightmare come to life. Wilder than the most fantastic of the Planner’s toys, it was shaped a little like a scorpion, larger than a charging buffalo. Its eyes were great mirrors with stalked receptors at the center—natural radio telescopes, glowing red. Its jaws were mighty enough to crunch steel bars. Its talons could rip through armor plate. Its body was armored with darkly shining scales; a long, wicked, saber-like tail was arched over its back. And the whole thing was screaming through the air of the tunnel toward them.
The girl cried out in fear; Gann pulled her head against his chest, quieting her—though in truth the sound of her terror was lost in the ear-splitting din of the pyropod’s passage. This was no baby, like the one Gann had played with on Harry Hickson’s reef. It was an armored juggernaut, full-grown, capable of battling a Plan space cruiser on equal terms.
It passed them and rocketed into a group of armed guardsmen, knotted a hundred yards down the hall. They were firing wildly with laser and projectile weapons; it struck them, passed . . . and they were gone. Only a jackstraw heap of corpses and stirring near-dead marked where they had been.
“Great Machine!” gasped Sister Delta Four, her impeccable serenity gone, her black hood thrown back, the bright metal plaque blinking out of a terrified face. “What was that?”
“You told me,” snapped Gann. “Pyropod! If it comes back, we’re dead!”
She whimpered and tugged at his arm. “Back in here . . . we can hide.”
“No! There are others. If one finds us this way we don’t have a chance. But if I can get a gun . . .”
He stared down the broad, long hall. The bright jet of the pyropod’s tail was out of sight. Perhaps the monster had gone into another room, or down another hallway. Meanwhile, the guardsmen were still in a heap of death.
He came to a fast decision. “Julie—I mean . . . oh, never mind that. Listen! These things can be killed if you know where to aim. I’m going after a gun. You stay in the room!” And he was off, running as hard as he could, straight down the broad hall toward the dying men. He fought the temptation to skulk along the sides. There was no concealment here. If the creature came back, he would be dead; it was that simple. His only chance was speed. He did that hundred yards in Olympic time—
And it was nearly too slow, at that. Gasping, wheezing, his chest and muscles on fire, he heard a sudden growing volume of sound and looked up. A howl of sound was coming toward him, and behind it, almost as fast as the sound itself, a pyropod was rocketing at him.
He flung himself to the floor.
The thing missed him by inches; he caught a quick glimpse of metal jaws and crystal tusks, of enormous talons reaching out for him; then it was past, and he was up and running.
He heard the thing crashing, smashing, battering into the statuary and the walls of the hall, stopping itself at heedless cost, but he did not turn. He leaped to the fallen guardsmen, caught up a laser gun, checked its charge and whirled.
The pyropod had completed its turn.
It caught Gann hi its pulsing red headlamps. It was screaming at him, a living battle rocket. He fired one maximum-blast shot into its eye, and tumbled to the ground again.
It screamed in agony as it passed over him. It blundered blindly into a wall, sideswiped a cluster of statuary, gouged out a bright streak in the hard metal of the corridor. Its jet flamed brightly and faded. Gann fired one more shot, then covered his head with his hands.
There was a great distant explosion. He felt the shock waves pass over him. Some of the corpses near him were stirred by the thrust of it, their bleeding limbs flopping wildly, their unseeing faces nodding.
The pyropod was gone.
But Sister Delta Four had said “dozens” of them . . .
Quickly Gann stooped to the abattoir the pyropod had left and rummaged for weapons. He discovered a half-empty laser weapon, pocketed a light projectile gun, loaded up with the three heaviest-charge laser guns he could find. Then he turned to go after Sister Delta Four.
She was standing just behind him. She had seen what he was doing, and she had done the same. She held two weapons, and in a pouch in her robes Gann could see the glitter of at least one more.
He hesitated, then grinned.
“Come on,” he cried. “Let’s see what we can do! Right in the eyes, remember!” He clapped her on the shoulder, and turned and ran in the direction of the Great Hall of the Planner.
A hellish howling and roaring led him to it. He needed no other signs.
Before he got there, he destroyed two more pyropods, neither quite as big as the one that had nearly got them in the hall, and Sister Delta Four had frightened another off with a long-range shot that might or might not have hit.
The Great Hall of the Planner was the mother hive. It was filled with the great creatures, ripping through the smoky, sulfurous air, ripping out boulder-sized bits from the walls, from the huge golden chair of the Planner, from anything that would give them reaction mass. They seemed to have conquered the human defenders of the Hall with no trouble, and were fighting among themselves over the spoils.
Then Gann caught the slim ruby flash of a laser weapon.
One of the pyropods bellowed with pain, like an air raid siren gone mad. It was not a mortal wound, but it must have been an agonizing one; the injured creature hurtled through the air and collided with another feasting beast; the two began to slash each other . . .
Someone was still alive in the room!
Warning the girl to remain behind, Gann peered cautiously around the door. The laser flash had seemed to come from one of the decorative niches holding statuary, under a painted lunette. Gann took a deep breath and shouted, then ducked back around the door. But it was useless. In the monstrous racket of the snarling, fighting pyropods his voice was unheard.
He caught Sister Delta Four by the shoulder, pulled her close to him so that her ear was next to his lips. “I’m going to try to pick them off one by one!” he cried. “They’re not paying any attention right now. I think I can get most of them. But if any start this way, you shoot right for the eyes!”
She nodded, her face calm and untouched again, the great service lasers incongruous in her hands. He gave her a last thoughtful glance, unable to forget the bright communion plate that was now once again hidden under the black cowl, then turned toward the Great Hall.
It took him twenty minutes.
He counted, and there were fifteen of the great beasts rocketing and fighting about the hall. He got seven of them, one by one, before there was any trouble. Then at Sister Delta Four’s warning touch, he had to turn and destroy a lone wanderer racing toward them down the hall.
He got three more, and then he noticed that at the far side of the hall one screamed, burst and died that he had not fired on. Whoever was hiding in the niche across the hall had seen what he was doing, and had copied him.
There were two guns-firing then—no, three; for Sister Delta Four stepped out beside him and helped gun down the last survivors, confused and blundering, as the walls shook with the creatures’ screams and the air grew acrid and sickening with their fumes.
Then they were all gone.
Hesitantly Gann entered the hall, laser guns ready, eyes darting about as he picked his way across the destroyed battleground.
There were distant bellowings still. Obviously there were still a few strays elsewhere in the underground palace of the Planner; but most of them were dead in this room. He hurried toward his unknown ally.
Machine General Abel Wheeler stepped stiffly out of the niche and moved toward him. There was a hard grin of victory on his face. He bolstered one gun and thrust out a hand with a motion like a piston to grasp Gann’s extended clasp. “Well done, Major,” he rasped.
“Thank you, sir. I had help. This is—”
The general’s expression did not change. “I know Sister Delta Four,” he boomed. “You may tell the Machine that I commend you, Sister. Please contact the Machine now and ascertain its condition. I fear this attack may have been intended to harm it!”
He grasped Gann’s arm in a grip of steel and led him away. “Ugly creatures,” he rasped, kicking at one enormous ripped cadaver. “Poetic justice, you might say. The Planner has always been fascinated by them. Interesting coincidence that they’ve appeared out of nowhere, here in his own home grounds.” He glanced over his shoulder at Sister Delta Four, who was quickly chiming her tonal beads, setting up her linkbox. “See here, Gann. Look at this.”
On the floor in front of the niche where General Wheeler had taken refuge there was a square of thick, creamy paper. “What is it, sir?”
“Pick it up, man! See for yourself!”
There were human voices, now, coming from the hall. The mighty forces of the Plan of Man were regathering themselves. Order was being restored.
Boysie Gann hesitated. Something was wrong. “The Planner?” he asked. “Is he . . .” He looked around the great hall littered with the corpses of the invading pyropods and the human guards who had been trapped there.
“Not he, Major! Gone this half hour. Read that document!”
Gann, with a feeling that something was awry, leaned forward and retrieved the paper. He glanced at it.
Then the doubts and uncertainties dropped out of his mind. This paper was strangely familiar. He had seen one just like it—twenty billion miles away—in the hands of the dying Machine Colonel Zafar.
That had been the document they called the Writ of Liberation!
And this one was something almost as earthshaking in its importance, almost as dangerous to the Plan of Man.
Boysie Gann read swiftly, looked up at the silent carved face of General Wheeler wonderingly, then returned to the paper. It was headed To the Planner, and it said:
To the Planner, or to whoever succeeds him if he is now dead.
You and those who serve with you ignored my warning and discounted the dimming of the Sun.
I send you now a pack of beasts to show that my powers can do more than frighten. They will destroy much. They may yet destroy more.
If I send them again, it will not be to the headquarters of the Planner—if anything remains of that to be destroyed.
The next demonstration will occur in the vaults of the Planning Machine.
Gann looked up, his lips taut, his eyes narrowed. “The Planning Machine!” he said. “General, we must tell Sister Delta Four at once! This must be conveyed to the Machine immediately.”
The general rasped, “That decision will be made by me, Major. What have you to say for yourself?”
Startled, Gann said, “Why—I don’t know what you mean, General. I didn’t have anything to do with . . .” Then he saw that the general was no longer standing with his arms at his side. One hand held a laser gun again, and it was pointing at him.
“You’re under arrest,” clipped General Wheeler metallically. “Do not attempt to draw those weapons. Do not speak or move.”
Gann opened his mouth, then closed it again. This was the overwhelming, culminating insanity of a fantastic experience. Himself under arrest!
But for what? He dared not even ask. The general’s iron expression showed that he meant his orders to be obeyed.
Behind him, Boysie Gann heard the movements of the guards, coming near—and past them, a distant booming.
He recognized that sound. Another stray pyropod! He forgot his orders and cried: “General! There’s another one.”
General Wheeler rapped, “Be silent! I will not speak again! The men will take care of your beast!” His voice was queerly loud, Gann thought, even in his confusion—almost as if the general were speaking not to him, but to the roomful of witnesses.
But he could not help himself. He knew what one single pyropod could do, knew that even the Planner’s guards might not be able to cope with it—and knew that in that room was the body and heart of the girl he loved, even though they might be inhabited by the cold, machinelike mind of Sister Delta Four. He whirled, drew his laser gun and was ready as the roar of the pyropod shrieked to the door of the room and the creature appeared.
Gann fired at the red eyes.
The guards were ready too, alerted by the sound and by Gann’s quick action; they had turned and were firing. The creature was caught in a dozen bolts of destroying energy. It puffed into flame and exploded . . .
And between Gann and the door, Sister Delta Four, whispering into her linkbox, fell silently forward. She dropped to the floor and did not move, though the linkbox hooted questioningly to her.
“She’s hit!” cried Gann and, dropping his weapons, raced to her. He caught her up in his arms, and stared into her black eyes.
His hands were covered with blood. Along one side of her black robes a spreading patch of sticky moisture began to seep, clouding the bright electronic symbols, trickling to the floor.
There was no heartbeat.
He raised his eyes, stared vacantly at the approaching General Wheeler. “Is she dead?” he demanded, unable to take it in. “Was it my shot? Or. . .” He paused, trying to remember. Had there been another pencil-thin lance of laser light coming from his side of the room? Had General Wheeler fired over his shoulder and shot Sister Delta Four?
But there was no time to think of that. The general was on him now, his face a metallic mask of sternness. “Disarm that man!” he rasped to the guards. “Take him before the Planner! I accuse him of bringing this document here! I accuse him of admitting the beasts we have destroyed. I accuse him of slaying Sister Delta Four to keep her from denouncing him. I accuse him of being the Starchild!”
