The Ultimate Enemy Read online

  O, B, A, F, G, K, …

  “Second Officer!”

  “Sir!”

  “Cancel my previous order! Let the lifeboat land. Hit the Etruria/ Unload on that bloody damned berserker with everything we’ve got, right now!”

  “Yessir!”

  Long before Liao got back to the launch the c-plus cannon volleyed. Their firing was invisible, and inaudible here in airlessness, but still he and the others felt the energies released pass twistily through all their bones. Now the huge leaden slugs would begin skipping in and out of normal space, homing on their tiny target, far out-racing light in their trajectories toward Meitner’s Planet. The slugs would be traveling now like de Broglie wavicles, one aspect matter with its mass magnified awesomely by Einsteinian velocity, one aspect waves of not much more than mathematics. The molecules of lead churned internally with phase velocities greater than that of light.

  Liao was back on the dreadnought’s bridge before laggard light brought the faint flash of destruction back.

  “Direct hit, Captain.” There was no need to amplify on that.

  “Good shots, Arms.”

  And then, only a little later, a message got through the planet’s ionospheric noise to tell them that the two people with the space inverter were safely down.

  Within a few hours the berserker fleet appeared in system, found an armed and ready colony, with Hamilcar Barca hanging by for heavy hit-and-run support, skirmished briefly and then decided to decline battle and departed. A few hours after that, the human fleet arrived and decided to pause for some refitting. And then Captain Liao had a chance to get down into the domed colony and talk to two people who wanted very much to meet him.

  “So,” he was explaining, soon after the first round of mutual congratulations had been completed, “when I at last recognized the mnemonic on the wall for what it was, I knew that not only had Henri and Winny been there but that he had in face been teaching her something about astronomical spectroscopy at that very place beside the instruments—therefore after the ship was damaged.”

  Henri was shaking his youthful head, with the air of one still marveling at it all. “Yes, now I can remember putting the mnemonic thing down, showing her how to remember the order of spectral types. I guess we use mnemonics all the time without thinking about it much. Every good boy does fine, for the musical notes. Bad boys race our young girls—that one’s in electronics.”

  The captain nodded. “Thirty days hath September. And Barbara Celarent that the logicians still use now and then. Berserkers, with their perfect memories, probably don’t even know what mnemonics are, much less need them. Anyway, if the berserker had been on the Wilhelmina, it would’ve had no reason to leave false clues. No way it could have guessed that I was coming to look things over.”

  Winifred, slender and too fragile-looking for what she had been through, took him by the hand. “Captain, you’ve given us our lives, you know. What can we ever do for you?”

  “Well. For a start …”He slipped into some English he had recently practiced: “You might be a fine girl, sweetie, and …”

  And the search for truth may be the lifework of a human mind. Praise be to those who have such a purpose—truly—in their hearts!

  Some Events At The Templar Radiant

  All his years of past work, and more than that, his entire future too, hung balanced on this moment.

  A chair forgotten somewhere behind him, Sabel stood tall in the blue habit that often served him as laboratory coat. His hands gripped opposite corners of the high, pulpit-like control console. His head was thrown back, eyes closed, sweat-dampened dark hair hanging in something more than its usual disarray over his high, pale forehead.

  He was alone, as far as any other human presence was concerned. The large, stone-walled chamber in which he stood was for the moment quiet.

  All his years of work …and although during the past few days he had mentally rehearsed this moment to the point of exhaustion, he was still uncertain of how to start. Should he begin with a series of cautious, testing questions, or ought he leap toward his real goal at once?

  Hesitancy could not be long endured, not now. But caution, as it usually had during his mental rehearsals, prevailed.

  Eyes open, Sabel faced the workbenches filled with equipment that were arranged before him. Quietly he said: “You are what human beings call a berserker. Confirm or deny.”

  “Confirm.” The voice was familiar, because his hookup gave it the same human-sounding tones in which his own laboratory computer ordinarily spoke to him. It was a familiarity that he must not allow to become in the least degree reassuring.

  So far, at least, success. “You understand,” Sabel pronounced, “that I have restored you from a state of nearly complete destruction. I—“

  “Destruction,” echoed the cheerful workbench voice.

  “Yes. You understand that you no longer have the power to destroy, to take life. That you are now constrained to answer all my—“

  “To take life.”

  “Yes. Stop interrupting me.” He raised a hand to wipe a trickle of fresh sweat from an eye. He saw how his hand was quivering with the strain of its unconscious grip upon the console. “Now,” he said, and had to pause, trying to remember where he was in his plan of questioning.

  Into the pause, the voice from his laboratory speakers said: “In you there is life.”

  “There is.” Sabel managed to reassert himself, to pull himself together. “Human life.” Dark eyes glaring steadily across the lab, he peered at the long, cabled benches whereon his captive enemy lay stretched, bound down, vitals exposed like those of some hapless human on a torture rack. Not that he could torture what had no nerves and did not liva Nor was there anything like a human shape in sight. All that he had here of the berserker was fragmented. One box here, another there, between them a chemical construct in a tank, that whole complex wired to an adjoining bench that bore rows of semi-material crystals.

  Again his familiar laboratory speaker uttered alien words: “Life is to be destroyed.”

  This did not surprise Sabel; it was only a restatement of the basic programmed command that all berserkers bore. They were machines fabricated by unknown builders on an unknown world, at a time perhaps before any creature living on Earth had been able to see stars as anything more than points of light. That the statement was made so boldly now roused in Sabel nothing but hope; it seemed that at least the thing was not going to begin by trying to lie to him.

  It seemed also that he had established a firm physical control. Scanning the indicators just before him on the console, he saw no sign of danger … he knew that, given the slightest chance, his prisoner was going to try to implement its basic programming. He had of course separated it from anything obviously useful as a weapon. But he was not absolutely certain of the functions of all the berserker components that he had brought into his laboratory and hooked up. And the lab of course was full of potential weapons. There were fields, electric and otherwise, quite powerful enough to extinguish human life. There were objects that could be turned into deadly projectiles by only a very moderate application of force. To ward off any such improvisations Sabel had set defensive rings of force to dancing round the benches upon which his foe lay bound. And, just for insurance, another curtain of fields hung round him and the console. The fields were almost invisible, but the ancient stonework of the lab’s far wall kept acquiring and losing new flavorings of light at the spots where the spinning field-components brushed it and eased free again.

  Not that it seemed likely that the berserker-brain in its present disabled and almost disembodied state could establish control over weaponry enough to kill a mouse. Nor did Sabel ordinarily go overboard on the side of caution. But, as he told himself, he understood very well just what he was dealing with.

  He had paused again, seeking reassurance from the indicators ranked before him. All appeared to be going well, and he went on: “I seek information from you. It is not militar
y information, so whatever inhibitions have been programmed into you against answering human questions do not apply.” Not that he felt at all confident that a berserker would meekly take direction from him. But there was nothing to be lost by the attempt.

  The reply from the machine was delayed longer than he had expected, so that he began to hope his attempt had been successful. But then the answer came.

  “I may trade certain classes of information to you, in return for lives to be destroyed.”

  The possibility of some such proposition had crossed Sabel’s mind some time ago. In the next room a cage of small laboratory animals was waiting.

  “I am a cosmophysicist,” he said. “In particular I strive to understand the Radiant. In the records of past observations of the Radiant there is a long gap that I would like to fill. This gap corresponds to the period of several hundred standard years during which berserkers occupied this fortress. That period ended with the battle in which you were severely damaged. Therefore I believe that your memory probably contains some observations that will be very useful to me. It is not necessary that they be formal observations of the Radiant. Any scene recorded in light from the Radiant may be helpful. Do you understand?”

  “In return for my giving you such records, what lives am I offered to destroy?”

  “I can provide several.” Eagerly Sabel once more swept his gaze along his row of indicators. His recording instruments were probing hungrily, gathering at an enormous rate the data needed for at least a partial understanding of the workings of his foe’s unliving brain. At a score of points their probes were fastened in its vitals.

  “Let me destroy one now,” its human-sounding voice requested.

  “Presently. I order you to answer one question for me first.”

  “I am not constrained to answer any of your questions. Let me destroy a life.”

  Sabel turned a narrow doorway for himself through his defensive fields, and walked through it into the next room. In a few seconds he was back. “Can you see what I am carrying?”

  “Then it is not a human life you offer me.”

  “That would be utterly impossible.”

  “Then it is utterly impossible for me to give you information.”

  Without haste he turned and went to put the animal back into the cage. He had expected there might well be arguments, bargaining. But this argument was only the first level of Sabel’s attack. His data-gathering instruments were what he really counted on. The enemy doubtless knew that it was being probed and analyzed. But there was evidently nothing it could do about it. As long as Sabel supplied it power, its brain must remain functional. And while it functioned, it must try to devise ways to kill. Back at his console, Sabel took more readings.

  DATA PROBABLY SUFFICIENT FOR ANALYSIS, his computer screen at last informed him. He let out breath with a sigh of satisfaction, and at once threw certain switches, letting power die. Later if necessary he could turn the damned thing on again and argue with it some more. Now his defensive fields vanished, leaving him free to walk between the workbenches, where he stretched his aching back and shoulders in silent exultation.

  Just as an additional precaution, he paused to disconnect a cable. The demonic enemy was only hardware now. Precisely arranged atoms, measured molecules, patterned larger bits of this and that. Where now was the berserker that humanity so justly feared? That had given the Templars their whole reason for existence? It no longer existed except in potential. Take the hardware apart, on even the finest level, and you would not discover any of its memories. But, reconnect this and that, reapply power here and there, and back it would bloom into reality, as malignant and clever and full of information as before. A non-material artifact of matter. A pattern.

  No way existed, even in theory, to torture a machine into compliance, to extort information from it. Sabel’s own computers were using the Van Holt algorithms, the latest pertinent mathematical advance. Even so they could not entirely decode the concealing patterns, the trapdoor functions, by which the berserker’s memory was coded and concealed. The largest computer in the human universe would probably not have time for that before the universe itself came to an end. The unknown Builders had built well.

  But there were other ways besides pure mathematics with which to circumvent a cipher. Perhaps, he thought, he would have tried to find a way to offer it a life, had that been the only method he could think of.

  Certainly he was going to try another first. There had to be, he thought, some way of disabling the lethal purpose of a berserker while leaving its calculating abilities and memory intact. There would have been times when the living Builders wanted to approach their creations, at least in the lab, to test them and work on them. Not an easy or simple way, perhaps, but something. And that way Sabel now instructed his own computers to discover, using the mass of data just accumulated by measuring the berserker in operation.

  Having done that, Sabel stood back and surveyed his laboratory carefully. There was no reason to think that anyone else was going to enter it in the near future, but it would be stupid to take chances. To the Guardians, an experiment with viable berserker parts would stand as prima facie evidence of goodlife activity; and in the Templar code, as in many another system of human law, any such willing service of the berserker cause was punishable by death.

  Only a few of the materials in sight might be incriminating in themselves. Coldly thoughtful, Sabel made more disconnections, and rearrangements. Some things he locked out of sight in cabinets, and from the cabinets he took out other things to be incorporated in a new disposition on the benches. Yes, this was certainly good enough. He suspected that most of the Guardians probably no longer knew what the insides of a real berserker looked like.

  Sabel made sure that the doors leading out of the lab, to the mall-level corridor, and to his adjoining living quarters, were both locked. Then, whistling faintly, he went up the old stone stair between the skylights, that brought him out upon the glassed-in roof.

  Here he stood bathed in the direct light of the Radiant itself. It was a brilliant point some four kilometers directly above his head—the pressure of the Radiant’s inverse gravity put it directly overhead for everyone in the englobing structure of the Fortress. It was a point brighter than a star but dimmer than a sun, not painful to look at. Around Sabel a small forest of sensors, connected to instruments in his laboratory below, raised panels and lenses in a blind communal stare, to that eternal noon. Among these he began to move about as habit led him, mechanically checking the sensors’ operation, though for once he was not really thinking about the Radiant at all. He thought of his success below. Then once more he raised his own two human eyes to look.

  It made its own sky, out of the space enclosed by the whitish inner surface of the Fortress’s bulk.

  Sabel could give from memory vastly detailed expositions of the spectrum of the Radiant’s light. But as to exactly what color it was, in terms of perception by the eye and brain—well, there were different judgments on that, and for his part he was still uncertain.

  Scattered out at intervals across the great curve of interior sky made by the Fortress’s whitish stonework, Sabel could see other glass portals like his own. Under some of them, other people would be looking up and out, perhaps at him. Across a blank space on the immense concavity, an echelon of maintenance machines were crawling, too far away for him to see what they were working at. And, relatively nearby, under the glass roof of a great ceremonial plaza, something definitely unusual was going on. A crowd of thousands of people, exceptional at any time in the Fortress with its relatively tiny population, were gathered in a circular mass, like live cells attracted to some gentle biological magnet at their formation’s center.

  Sabel had stared at this peculiarity for several seconds, and was reaching for a small telescope to probe it with, when he recalled that today was the Feast of Ex. Helen, which went a long way toward providing an explanation. He had in fact deliberately chosen this holiday for his
crucial experiment, knowing that the Fortress’s main computer would today be freed of much routine business, its full power available for him to tap if necessary.

  And in the back of his mind he had realized also that he should probably put in an appearance at at least one of the day’s religious ceremonies. But this gathering in the plaza—he could not recall that any ceremony, in the years since he had come to the Fortress, had ever drawn a comparable crowd.

  Looking with his telescope up through his own glass roof and down through the circular one that sealed the plaza in from airless space, he saw that the crowd was centered on the bronze statue of Ex. Helen there. And on a man standing in a little cleared space before the statue, a man with arms raised as if to address the gathering. The angle was wrong for Sabel to get a good look at his face, but the blue and purple robes made the distant figure unmistakable. It was the Potentate, come at last to the Fortress in his seemingly endless tour of his many subject worlds.

  Sabel could not recall, even though he now made an effort to do so, that any such visitation had been impending—but then of late Sabel had been even more than usually isolated in his own work. The visit had practical implications for him, though, and he was going to have to find out more about it quickly. Because the agenda of any person of importance visiting the Fortress was very likely to include at some point a full-dress inspection of Sabel’s own laboratory.

  He went out through the corridor leading from laboratory to pedestrian mall, locking up carefully behind him, and thinking to himself that there was no need to panic. The Guardians would surely call to notify him that a visit by the Potentate impended, long before it came. It was part of their job to see that such things went smoothly, as well as to protect the Potentate while he was here. Sabel would have some kind of official warning. But this was certainly an awkward time …

  Along the pedestrian mall that offered Sabel his most convenient route to the ceremonial plaza, some of the shops were closed—a greater number than usual for a holiday, he thought. Others appeared to be tended only by machines. In the green parkways that intersected the zig-zag mall at irregular intervals, there appeared to be fewer strollers than on an ordinary day. And the primary school operated by the Templars had evidently been closed; a minor explosion of youngsters in blue-striped coveralls darted across the mall from parkway to playground just ahead of Sabel, their yells making him wince.