Collected Short Fiction, page 654
The rogue deposited her as gently as it could on the floor of its cab, and methodically analyzed its findings. It was a long process, requiring more than one microsecond; there was much that it had to deduce or interpolate. Even its own actions were not entirely clear to the rogue; it had no well formed referent for the term “love,” though it had felt quite strongly that it was the proper operator to describe its relationship to Molly Zaldivar. Casually and quickly it detached a section of itself and entered into the brain and nervous system of Molly Zaldivar, studying as it went, attempting to sort out the damage that had been done. It seemed quite small, the rogue considered; only a few hundred thousand cells were damaged, and a relatively small proportion of them destroyed. It made a few adjustments which had the effect of stopping the efflux of circulatory fluid, rejoining some separated vessels and ligaments and, contented with its work, exited the girl’s body and reassembled itself.
The girl, aware that something was happening but unable to know what, was very close to hysteria. She fumbled about the floor of the car, pulled herself to the seat, hammered feebly against the windows; orange terror flashed through the radiance that surrounded her, and the sleeth tried to speak to her again:
“Why do you struggle, Molly Zaldivar? Why do you not love me?” Molly threw herself back on the seat, with a ragged laugh. “Love? You can’t love!”
“I do love, Molly Zaldivar. Why am I a nightmare?”
She shuddered, forcing herself to speak. “Why? Because you don’t have a right to exist, monster! You are a synthetic intellect. The transflection patterns of your mind were created in a cloud of plasma by Cliff Hawk and the Reefer—”
When she spoke of Cliff Hawk a golden glow lighted her mind’s radiance. The rogue said:
“I am Cliff Hawk.”
“You?” The girl caught her breath; she was shaking all over now, half terror, half utter uncomprehending bewilderment. “Cliff is dead! I saw him die.”
“Yes. Dead. But I am that of Cliff Hawk which survives at all. Cliff Hawk is a member of me. And you must love me.”
The girl abandoned herself to a storm of weeping. After some thought, the rogue reentered her mind, sought for and found certain centers it had learned to recognize and caused her to go to sleep. It then paused and considered what it knew about the maintenance of organic masses of organized matter. This was, in truth, very little; but certain peremptory needs were clear. The girl would need protection against the elements and a place to rest. She would need air for combustion, the rogue thought, and observed that this was in adequate supply from the ambient atmosphere; she would need liquid H20, easily procured nearby. And she would also need metabolizable chemicals of the class it described by the vaguely comprehended label “food”.
All these matters it determined to deal with. First it opened the door of its cab. Then it sought out and reentered the sleeth, hovering halfstunned and bewildered over the hilltop, and brought it arrowing swiftly back into the tunnel. The sleeth’s great body felt supple and powerful after the clanking paralytic environment of the handling machine; the rogue caused it to soar into the mouth of the tunnel, hurtle down a straightway, round a curve and join the group. It felt joy in the strength of the great muscles, delight in the silent power of its transflection fields, pleasure even in the dreadful radiation that it could evoke from the huge blind eyes. It lifted the girl’s sleeping body in the deadly, gentle claws and traced a tightening curve along the tunnel’s way, into the mountain and down, until it found a pit that it had not previously observed.
The rogue paused, probing the dark space at the bottom of the pit. It found nothing hostile, nothing of organized organic matter. It was, in fact, a long-forgotten base of the scientific establishment of the Plan of Man; the rogue had no notion of what that meant, and less interest.
Careful with Molly, holding her cuddled against the great sleek belly of the sleeth, it dropped into the dark, drifting slowly downward past the vertical walls, until it dropped out of darkness into a cold, ghostly light: They were in a huge sphere hollowed in the rock at the base of the hill. Once multiplying neutrons had flashed through and saturated a few kilograms of fissionable metal; the nuclear explosion had blossomed and shrugged tens of thousands of tons of rock away, melting the inner shell and holding it suspended, like a balloon, for long enough for the dome shape to form. As the pressure leaked away the plastic rock hardened, and what was left was this great ball-shaped cave.
The pale light came from all about it, especially from a pale cold sun of milky mist that hung at the center of the hollow. A spiral staircase, made of skeletal metal treads and a handrail, wound upward inside a spidery steel tower, from the bottom of the globular cavity’s floor to a railed platform half inside that high, pale cloud of opal light.
What was the hollow?
What was the light?
The rogue gave those questions no consideration. Tenderly it set Molly Zaldivar down on the bottom of the hollow and allowed her to waken.
To the extent that the non-human intelligence of the rogue was capable of satisfaction, it was now pleased with what it had done. It had removed the person of the oddly attractive organized bit of matter called Molly Zaldivar to a place where it would not be harmed by outside activities, and where its own attempts to establish communication could go on without interference. It was a place whose chemistry, pressure and temperature appeared to be compatible with life, as far as the rogue was able to judge.
Of course, the rogue was still comparatively young in time, lacking experience, and even with the absorbed patterns that were all that was left of Cliff Hawk embodied in its own systems it had no very deep understanding of biological chemistry.
An attractive feature of the cave, for the rogue, was the presence of residual ionizing radiation, coming from the surrounding rock, the very atmosphere inside the bubble, above all from that queerly glowing misty cloud of light To the rogue this was a welcome source of energy to be tapped at need. It did not know that to Molly Zaldivar it was a death warrant.
When the girl woke up she cried out, peered wildly around the pit, saw the hovering form of the sleeth and tried to leap up and run away. There was nowhere to run. She slipped on the curving stone, black-stained and slick with seeping water, and lay there for a moment sobbing.
The rogue attempted to form patterns of sound to communicate with her. It was difficult. Even using the transflection fields of the sleeth, modulating them as rapidly and precise as it could, there was no handy substance for it to vibrate; all it could produce from the shaking of the metallic substance of the nearby tower and steps was a harsh metallic scream, incomprehensible to Molly.
The rogue was, for some picoseconds, baffled. Its persona, the sleeth, had no vocal chords, no mechanism at all for making signals in air. But the rogue was more than the sleeth.
It extended a quick plasma finger and probed the tower itself. There, rustless and fresh as the day it was installed, was a bank of instruments; the rogue hunted among them until it found one that possessed a flexible membrane. It spoke through it: “Molly Zaldivar. You need hot be afraid because I love you.”
The girl’s involuntary scream echoed strangely from the high rounded walls. The rogue floated patiently above her, waiting.
Trembling and unsteady on the slick slope, she climbed to her feet and stared up at it. With a great effort she whispered: “What are you?”
“Cliff Hawk is a part of me. Call me Cliff Hawk.”
“I can’t! What sort of monster are you?”
“Monster?” The rogue examined the term carefully, without comprehension. It activated the distant tinny speaker to say: “I am your lover, Molly Zaldivar.”
The girl’s face wrinkled strangely, but Molly had herself under control now. She smiled, a cold, white and terrible smile, ghastly in that shadowless light. “My lover!” she crooned. She paused in thought. “I am lucky,” she said bravely. “What girl ever had so mighty a lover?”
The rogue could not recognize near-hysteria. It was puzzlingly aware that the radiance from the organized matter called Molly Zaldivar was not the gentle, warming glow of rose or pearl that it had wanted to evoke; but it knew far too little of human beings to comprehend what Molly was trying to do. In its sleeth body it dropped gently toward her, meeting her as she rose, and allowed her quivering fingers to stroke the fine, dense fur.
“If I love you,” she whispered tremulously, “will you help me?” Powerful floods of energy thundered through the rogue, mighty and irresistible; it was a species of joy, a sort of elation. The rogue allowed its sleeth body to drop to Molly’s feet.
“I’ll give you everything,” it swore through the distant tinny speaker.
The girl was trembling violently, but allowed the vast black talons to draw her quivering body against the fur. The rogue sensed her terror and tried to reassure her. “We are safe here, Molly Zaldivar. No enemy can reach us.”
Her fear did not abate. “I fell in the water,” she whispered. “I’m damp. And cold. . .”
The rogue made the sleeth’s fur warm for her; but still she was afraid.
“I’m a human being,” she whimpered. “I’ll be hungry. Thirsty. I must have food or I’ll die!”
From above then the tinny rattle of the overtaxed speaker shouted: “III bring all things you need. But we must stay here, where we are safe—”
The rogue arranged the pit for her comfort, dried the rock with a searing beam from the sleeth’s transflection fields, dragged down a cushion from the tower to make her a resting place. It put her shivering body on it and reached into her mind to erase her haunting terror.
Presently she slept.
The rogue went foraying in the body of the sleeth. It rose to the top of the pit, squeezed its way through the long passages, climbed into the night. It needed only moments to arrow the score of miles to the nearest human dwelling. It dropped out of the dark onto the little house, crushed a four-legged creature that barked and howled at it, ripped through a wall and seized a refrigerated box filled with human food.
The little box in its talons, it dropped again into the side of the mountain and paused to consider.
Molly Zaldivar had been in an agony of terror; that much it realized. Why? The rogue, which shared with all intellects the homomorphic trait of considering itself the proper matrix on which all other creatures should be modeled, could not believe that it was its own self which frightened her; no doubt it was its proxy, the sleeth. From the dim stirrings of Cliff Hawk’s mind it realized that those great blind eyes, those vengeful talons were likely to be frightening to smaller creatures. It determined to leave the sleeth and visit her in another form.
Under the lip of the cave, where the rogue had abandoned it, the hulk of the robot lay tossed aside. The rogue entered into it, flexed its transcience fields, lifted it into space and in it, bearing the refrigerated box of food, retraced the long winding route, sank down through the frozen light of that misty opal sun. . .
Molly was awake.
The rogue, wearing the egg-shaped body of the robot, brought itself up sharply and hung there just out of sight, the food box dangling from its effectors. Molly was no longer stretched out asleep on the cushions it had brought for her. She was in the spidery metal tower, crouched before the bright, ancient control panel, fumbling frantically with the radio. The rogue listened through the ears of the robot:
“Calling Monitor Quamodian!” the girl whimpered. “Oh, please! Andy! Anyone!”
The rogue knew that the radio was dead; it hung there, letting her speak.
“Molly Zaldivar calling Monitor Quamodian! Andy, please listen. I’m trapped in a cave. That thing—the rogue star, whatever it is—has me trapped here, because it says. . . it says it loves me! And it won’t let me go.”
Her head fell forward, her hand still on the useless switch of the radio. She sobbed. “Oh, please help me. It’s a hateful, horrible thing—a monster . . . I—I tried to deceive it, to make it let me go by pretending to—to like it. But it won’t . . .” The rogue in the persona of the broken transcience robot, sank slowly toward her, burdened with the box of food that it had brought for her. It was struggling in its complex mind with concepts for which it had no names, and little understanding. Betrayal.
Anger. Revenge.
XIII
The Reefer’s deepset eyes glowed like a robot’s plasma patch. “Make this thing move, Quamodian!” he roared. “I want that critter for my trophy room!”
Andy Quam hissed in annoyance, “Be still, Reefer! I’m not interested in your game collection. It’s Molly Zaldivar’s life that concerns me.” He bent to the panel of his flyer. He was indeed making it move, as fast as he could, cutting out the autonomic pilot circuits and racing the craft along on manual override. It was a flimsy enough bolt to hurl at a creature that ranked with stars for majesty and might—a simple atmosphere flyer, with a few puny transflection beams that could be used as weapons. But it was all he had.
They arrowed through the chill morning air, along the road toward the misty blue ridge. Over the Reefer’s hill a smudge of smoke still lifted and wandered away with the wind. Quamodian’s eyes were on it when his transceiver clicked into life. For a moment the speakers hummed and crackled, but there was no voice. Andy Quam scowled with annoyance and leaned to listen.
“What is it?” growled the Reefer, brows knotted under their blond tangle of hair.
“I don’t know,” said Andy Quam. “Nothing. Listen.”
But there was no voice, only the questing carrier sounds. For a moment Andy Quam thought it might have been Molly, and the thought lit his mind with a living image of her red-glinting hair, her haunting oval face, her laughing eyes. But it was not her voice that came from the speaker.
Something was trying to talk to him. An uncanny voice—slow, toneless, laborious. It chilled him with alarm.
“What’s that?” demanded the Reefer again. “Quamodian, what are you doing?”
“Be still!” Andy Quam touched the dial, trying to bring the sound in more clearly. It was not a robot’s clipped and penetrating whine. It lacked the mechanical precision of an automatic translator. The scattered sounds he made out were not from the universal signal-system of the intergalactic society. They were Earth-English. Yet they were somehow alien, monstrous, inhuman. It was not a message; it was more like some great, tortured soliloquy, a voice that rambled on and on, brokenly and angrily. The distorted and intermittent signal had no clear message, but it filled Andy Quam with fear.
Climbing slightly, he pushed the flyer to transsonic speed. The narrow black ribbon of road unreeled. Higher hills flashed beneath him. A building flickered. The leaning smudge of smoke was a momentary blur.
Something crept along the road below him.
The Reefer caught Andy Quam’s shoulder. “It’s that machine!” he bellowed. “An old Plan of Man earth-mover—the rogue’s using it. Blast it, man! Drive him out into the open!”
Quamodian shrugged the great paw off his arm and bent to stare down at the road. It was huge and clumsy, lumbering ponderously toward the crest of the ridge on grotesque old caterpillar tracks. It waved claw-ended handling forks around its angular, orange-painted cab.
“Flyer,” ordered Andy Quam, “pot that thing for me.”
There was a faint deep hiss of departing missiles as, obediently, the flyer flung out a burst of landing flares at the machine. They were not meant as weapons, but they would do a weapon’s work. They missed, stitching a row of pits across the pavement in front of the machine.
“Sorry, Monitor Quamodian,” the flyer apologized mournfully. “I’m not really designed for this sort of work.”
“Get its tracks!” Quamodian ordered. “Use all the flares if you have to—stop it!”
The machine plowed recklessly through the shower of flame. Quamodian spun the flyer around, returned it, passing low over the machine; a new spray of flame darted out toward it, struck it, and clung.
The machine slid sidewise, seeming to float on that pool of fire, and Andy Quam saw a broken track flap wildly.
The machine stopped. At a word, the flyer took over automatic control and hovered; the two men looked down.
The machine lay, silent and broken, on the pitted road, while choking fumes rose from the remnants of the flares. Andy Quam turned to the Reefer and demanded: “I’ve shot it up for you. It doesn’t seem to have accomplished a thing. Now what?”
“Now go on!” roared the Reefer. “You’ve just killed one of the rogue’s tools, we haven’t touched the beast itself yet. Go on and dig it out!”
Quamodian shrugged, was about to order the flyer on . . .
Then disaster struck.
The klaxon hooted. Red signals blossomed in holographic solidity on the panel. The bubble marker circled a flying object, coming low and fast from the woods behind. It shone with a pale but queerly painful greenish radiation.
“It is the space creature called the sleeth, Monitor Quamodian,” reported the flyer. “Indications are that it is under the control of the intellects being you seek.”
The Reefer was briefer and more furious: “That’s my critter!” he howled. “Careful! It can eat up a dozen like us any day!”
“Careful!” growled Andreas Quamodian. “Let your animal be careful! Flyer, got any flares left?”
“Two racks, Monitor Quamodian,” the machine reported.
