Short Fiction Complete Page 14

  A thick forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework, expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into space “below” the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise anchor number one . . .

  He found himself descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came.

  Outside, he said: “I’m out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other end and I’ll come home.” He scarcely heard what she said in reply, but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better.

  The bike shot him thirty miles down the dream-like length of X toward Sol in a few minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he thought . . . and Sol was dim ahead.

  Almost recklessly he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving toward Sol once more.

  He looked in almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed.

  “WHAT is it?” asked Laura, impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face.

  “People,” he said, sitting down. “Alive over there. Earth people. Humans.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “Sure. It’s just—God!” He told her about it briefly. “They must be descended from the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically there’s no reason why they couldn’t live when you come to think of it—even reproduce up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen—I bet their air’s as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and gravity . . . they have about everything they need. Everything but a space-drive.” He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was hard for him to stop talking to her.

  She was silent for a little, trying to assimilate it all. “But if they have hydrogen power couldn’t they have rigged something?” she finally asked. “Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they’d keep moving.”

  Marty thought it over. “Moving a little faster won’t help them.” He sat up and opened his eyes again. “And they’d have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them.

  “Somehow they had the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way, to evolve a system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going wild and killing each other. And their children, and their grandchildren, and after that . . .” Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused on the telescope screen.

  “All those years,” Laura whispered. “All that time.”

  “Do you realize what they’re doing?” he asked softly. “They’re not just surviving, turned inward on weaving and designing and music.

  “In a few hours they’re going to get up and start another day’s work. They’re going to pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it. That’s their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about thirty miles closer to home.

  “Honey, these people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a religion with them by now, or something very near it . . .” He put an arm around Laura.

  “MARTY . . . how long would it take them?”

  “Space is big,” he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize.

  After a few moments he continued. “I said just moving a little faster won’t help them. Let’s say they’ve traveled thirty miles a day for two thousand years. That’s—somewhere near twenty-two million miles. Almost enough to get from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they’ve got a long way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars’ orbit. We’re well out beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they’re just about where they started from.” He smiled wanly. “Really they’re not far from home, for an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of their own solar system, and they’ve been walking toward the threshold ever since.”

  Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the Navy within a few hours. She paused. “How long would it take them now,” she asked, “to get somewhere near Earth?”

  “Hell would freeze over. But they can’t know that any more, or maybe they still know it and it just doesn’t bother them. They must just go on, tugging at that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday now and then . . . I don’t know how they do it. They work and sing and feel they’re accomplishing something . . . and really, they are, you know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they say of Earth, how they think about it.”

  Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator.

  Marty watched her. “Are you sure?” he pleaded suddenly. “What are we doing to them?” But she had already sent the call.

  For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.

  1963

  FORTRESS SHIP

  Huge as an island, mighty as a squadron of dreadnauahts, old as time, the ship of the aliens was out to destroy them!

  The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.

  One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular machine had already done just that.

  It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy’s territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

  Men called it a berserker.

  Del Murray, sometime computer specialist, had called it other names than that; but right now he was too busy to waste breath, as he moved in staggering lunges around the little cabin of his one-man fighter, plugging in replacement units for equipment damaged by the last near-miss of a berserker missile. An animal resembling a large dog with an ape’s forelegs moved around the cabin too, carrying in its nearly human hands a supply of emergency sealing patches. The cabin air was full of haze. Wherever movement of the haze showed a leak to an unpressurized part of the hull, the dog-ape moved to apply a patch.

  “Hello, Foxglove!” the man shouted, hoping that his radio was again in working order.

  “Hello, Murray, this is Foxglove,” said a sudden loud voice in the cabin. “How far did you get?�
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  Del was too weary to show much relief that his communications were open again. “I’ll let you know in a minute. At least it’s stopped shooting at me for a while. Move, Newton.” The alien animal, pet and ally, called an aiyan, moved away from the man’s feet and kept single-mindedly looking for leaks.

  After another minute’s work Del could strap his body into the deep-cushioned command chair again, with some-thing like an operational panel before him. That last near-miss had sprayed the whole cabin with fine penetrating splinters. It was remarkable that man and aiyan had come through unwounded.

  His radar working again, Del could say: “I’m about ninety miles out from it, Foxglove. On the opposite side from you.” His present position was the one he had been trying to achieve since the battle had begun.

  The two Earth ships and the berserkers were half a light year from the nearest sun. The berserker could not leap out of normal space, toward the defenseless colonies on the planets of that sun, while the two ships stayed close to it. There were only two men aboard Foxglove. They had more machinery working for them than did Del, but both manned ships were mites compared to their opponent.

  Del’s radar showed him an ancient ruin of metal, not much smaller in cross section than New Jersey. Men had blown holes in it the size of Manhattan Island, and melted puddles of slag as big as lakes upon its surface.

  But the berserker’s power was still enormous. So far no man had fought it and survived. Now, it could squash Del’s little ship like a mosquito; it was wasting its unpredictable subtlety on him. Yet there was a special taste of terror in the very indifference of it. Men could never frighten this enemy, as it frightened them.

  Earthmen’s tactics, worked out from bitter experience against other berserkers, called for a simultaneous attack by three ships. Foxglove and Murray made two. A third was supposedly on the way, but still about eight hours distant, moving at C-plus velocity, outside of normal space. Until it arrived, Foxglove and Murray must hold the berserker at bay, while it brooded unguessable schemes.

  It might attack either ship at any moment, or it might seek to disengage. It might wait hours for them to make the first move—though it would certainly fight if the men attacked it. It had learned the language of Earth’s spacemen—it might try to talk with them. But always, ultimately it would seek to destroy them and every other living thing it met. That was the basic command given it by the ancient warlords.

  A thousand years ago, it would easily have swept ships of the type that now opposed it from its path, whether they carried fusion missiles or not. Now, it was in some electrical way conscious of its own weakening by accumulated damage. And perhaps in long centuries of fighting its way across the galaxy it had learned to be wary.

  Now, quite suddenly, Del’s detectors showed force fields forming in behind his ship. Like the encircling arms of a huge bear they blocked his path away from the enemy. He waited for some deadly blow, with his hand trembling over the red button that would salvo his atomic missiles at the berserker—but if he attacked alone, or even with Foxglove, the infernal machine would parry their missiles, crush their ships, and go on to destroy another helpless planet. Three ships were needed to attack. The red firing button was now only a last desperate resort.

  Del was reporting the force field to Foxglove when he felt the first hint in his mind of another attack.

  “Newton!” he called sharply, leaving the radio connection with Foxglove open. They would hear and understand what was going to happen.

  The aiyan bounded instantly from its combat couch to stand before Del as if hypnotized, all attention riveted on the man. Del had sometimes bragged: “Show Newton a drawing of different-colored lights, convince him it represents a particular control panel, and he’ll push buttons or whatever you tell him, until the real panel matches the drawing.”

  But no aiyan had the human ability to learn and to create on an abstract level; which was why Del was now going to put Newton in command of his ship.

  He switched off the ship’s computers—they were going to be as useless as his own brain under the attack he felt gathering—and said to Newton: “Situation Zombie.”

  The animal responded instantly as it had been trained, seizing Del’s hands with firm insistence and dragging them one at a time down beside the command chair to where the fetters had been installed.

  Hard experience had taught men something about the berserkers’ mind weapon, although its principles of operation were still unknown. It was slow in its onslaught, and its effects could not be steadily maintained for more than about two hours, after which a berserker was evidently forced to turn it off for an equal time. But while in effect, it robbed any human or electronic brain of the ability to plan or to predict—and left it unconscious of its own incapacity.

  It seemed to Del that all this had happened before, maybe more than once. Newton, that funny fellow, had gone too far with his pranks; he had abandoned the little boxes of colored beads that were his favorite toys, and was moving the controls around at the lighted panel. Unwilling to share the fun with Del, he had tied the man to his chair somehow. Such behavior was really intolerable, especially when there was supposed to be a battle in progress. Del tried to pull his hands free, and called to Newton.

  Newton whined earnestly, and stayed at the panel.

  “Newt, you dog, come lemme loose. I know what I have to say: Four score and seven . . . hey, Newt, where’re your toys? Lemme see your pretty beads.” There were hundreds of tiny boxes of varicolored beads, leftover trade goods that Newton loved to sort out and handle. Del peered around the cabin, chuckling a little at his own cleverness. He would get Newton distracted by the beads, and then . . . the vague idea faded into other crackbrained grotesqueries.

  Newton whined now and then but stayed at the panel moving controls in the long sequence he had been taught, taking the ship through the feinting, evasive maneuvers that might fool a berserker into thinking it was still competently manned. Newton never put a hand near the big red button. Only if he felt deadly pain himself, or found a dead man in Del’s chair, would he reach for that.

  “Ah, roger, Murray,” said the radio from time to time, as if acknowledging a message. Sometimes Foxglove added a few words or numbers that might have meant something. Del wondered what the talking was about.

  At last he understood that Foxglove was trying to help maintain the illusion that there was still a competent brain in charge of Del’s ship. The fear reaction came when he began to realize that he had once again lived through the effect of the mind weapon. The brooding berserker, half genius, half idiot, had forborne to press the attack when success would have been certain—perhaps deceived, perhaps following the strategy that avoided predictability a almost any cost.

  “Newton.” The animal turned, hearing a change in his voice. Now Del could say the words that would tell Newton it was safe to set his master free, a sequence too long for anyone under the mind weapon to recite.

  “—shall not perish from the earth,” he finished. With yelp of joy Newton pulled the fetters from Del’s hands Del turned instantly to the radio.

  “Effect has evidently been turned off, Foxglove,” said Del’s voice through the speaker in the cabin of the large ship.

  The Commander let out a sigh. “He’s back in control!”

  The Second Officer—there was no third—said: “Thai means we’ve got some kind of fighting chance, for the next two hours. I say let’s attack now!”

  The Commander shook his head, slowly but without hesitation. “With two ships, we don’t have any real chance. Less than four hours until Gizmo gets here. We have to stall until then, if we want to win.”

  “It’ll attack the next time it gets Del’s mind scrambled! I don’t think we fooled it for a minute . . . we’re out of range of the mind beam here, but Del can’t withdraw now. And we can’t expect that aiyan to fight his ship for him. We’ll really have no chance, with Del gone.”

  The Commander’s eyes moved ceasele
ssly over his panel. “We’ll wait. We can’t be sure it’ll attack the next time it puts the beam on him . . .”

  The berserker spoke suddenly, its radioed voice plain in the cabins of both ships: “I have a proposition for you, little ship.” Its voice had a cracking, adolescent quality, because it strung together words and syllables recorded from the voices of human prisoners of both sexes and different ages. Bits of human emotion, sorted and fixed like butterflies on pins, thought the Commander. There was no reason to think it had kept the prisoners alive after learning the language from them.

  “Well?” Del’s voice sounded tough and capable by comparison.

  “I have invented a game which we will play,” it said. “If you play well enough, I will not kill you right away.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything,” murmured the Second Officer.

  After three thoughtful seconds the Commander slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “It means to test his learning ability, to run a continuous check on his brain while it turns up the power of the mind beam and tries different modulations. If it can make sure the mind beam is working, it’ll attack instantly. I’ll bet my life on it. That’s the game it’s playing this time.”

  “I will think over your proposition,” said Del’s voice cooly.

  The Commander said: “It’s in no hurry to start. It won’t be able to turn on the mind beam again for almost two hours.”

  “But we need another two hours beyond that.”

  Del’s voice said: “Describe the game you want to play.”

  “It is a simplified version of the human game called checkers.”

  The Commander and the Second looked at each other, neither able to imagine Newton able to play checkers. Nor could they doubt that Newton’s failure would kill them within a few hours, and leave another planet open to destruction.