Collected short fiction, p.561
Collected Short Fiction, page 561
“I call the place Dragonrock,” Ironsmith was murmuring. “After the old lighthouse that used to stand here.”
Forester nodded stiffly, afraid to ask what had become of those curious fugitives hiding in the old tower, Mark White and his tattered disciples.
“Pretty wonderful, isn’t it?”
Ironsmith was beaming innocently, and Forester turned uncomfortably to look at the new building crowning that bleak headland. Golden columns and balconies and clustered towers made a luminous filagree too elaborate for his taste, and high roofs burned crimson. When the craft had landed on a wide stage, Ironsmith took him proudly to tour the monumental halls and the exotic gardens sheltered from the cold sea winds by crystal parapets.
“Pretty gorgeous, don’t you think?” Ironsmith inquired happily.
Forester eyed him narrowly, wondering what else he had to do, and then blinked angrily at his own silent keepers, blurting impulsively, “Can’t you send them away—so we can talk alone?”
To his stunned surprise, Ironsmith nodded calmly.
“If you like.” He turned quickly to the machines. “Please leave us alone for half an hour. I’ll be responsible for Dr. Forester’s safety.”
“Service, sir.”
Incredibly, the two guards departed. Forester looked hard at Ironsmith. All he could see was a lean and harmless-seeming man with untidy clothing and gray, friendly eyes, but something touched him with an icy awe. Forester caught his breath, to plunge vehemently:
“Frank, I want to know what you’ve done with Mark White and that remarkable child and the others.”
“Nothing.” Ironsmith turned sober. “I don’t even know where they are. When I came here looking for them the old tower was empty. I selected this for a building site, hoping they might come back. But they didn’t. I never found a clue.”
The cold purpose in his voice astonished Forester, for this was not the callow and indolent clerk who had loafed through his work with such surprising ease in the old computing section.
“Why try so hard?”
“Because Mark White is an ignorant, dangerous fanatic.” That calm voice held a crushing certainty. “Because he’s a mental child—as you must have seen from the melodramatic way he first got us here—a child unfortunately armed with something very dangerous. His blundering could wreck Wing IV.”
“If he’s against the humanoids, that’s enough for me.”
“That’s why I brought you here—to warn you.” Ironsmith’s eyes were level and grave and a little sad. “Because I want to stop you from making Mark White’s blunder. And Warren Mansfield’s. Your whole attitude is mistaken, Forester, and highly dangerous.”
Forester shivered. “You mean—I may get euphoride?”
“That doesn’t matter at all.” The lift of Ironsmith’s shoulders was almost scornful. “Really, Forester, I think you ought to ask for the drug. Because you can only hurt yourself—and others—if you try to fight the humanoids. Better let them help you, in any way they can.”
Forester said nothing, but his narrow jaw set hard. He stared out at the copper glints fading on the sea, wondering how to ask what he had to know.
“The greatest danger is from Mark White,” Ironsmith went on quietly. “But I’m sure he still wants help, and I imagine he’ll try to get back in touch with you. If he does, please tell him to come and talk to me—before his mad plots have done too much harm to be repaired. I just want a chance to show him that he has chosen the wrong side. Won’t you pass along that message?” Forester shook his head.
“That’s nonsense.” His voice had a breathless harshness. “But there are things I want to know.” He caught his breath, trying to shake off his uneasy dread of this inexplicable individual—human or not—who once had been just a clerk at Starmont. “How do you get on so well with these machines? Why are you so disturbed about White’s fight against them? And who”—his husky voice caught—“who’s your chess opponent—when you’re all alone?”
“Your imagination is working too hard.” Ironsmith gave him a brief, sunburned grin.
Forester felt his thin fists clenching. “See here, Frank. I don’t want any sort of runaround. I think there’s something else—and pretty ugly—behind your immunity from these damned restrictions and your queer attitude toward these perfect machines.” Sarcasm lifted his breathless voice. “Let them serve and obey—I want the truth!”
Ironsmith seemed to hesitate. Ruddy in the reddening western light, his smoothly youthful face showed no resentment, and he nodded solemnly at last, admitting, “There are things I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“If it were left to me, I’d tell you everything.” He studied the remote, straight horizon. “I’d be willing to trust you with all the facts. But the humanoids are also involved, and they were designed to take no chances.”
“Frank—don’t you see?” Forester’s broken voice was hoarsely pleading. “I’ve got to know!”
“Nothing more.” Ironsmith turned to face him, smooth jaw firm. “Not until you actually accept the humanoids—and I had better warn you that they are expert in assaying human reactions. They don’t trick.”
“That’s why I’m so—so horribly afraid!”
“I’m sorry for you, Forester.” Ironsmith turned reluctantly, as if to rejoin the humanoids. “I had really hoped to help you—because your abilities are too brilliant to be killed by euphoride, and because I’m your friend.”
“Are you?”
Ironsmith twisted away from his frantic hands with the effortless deftness of another humanoid, his calm and honest eyes looking back across the court again, past the bitter-odored fungi in the tall yellow jars.
“Here they come,” he murmured casually. “And I hope you remember my message.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Tell Mark White to come and talk to me, before he starts any childish attack on Wing IV.”
Forester nodded bleakly, watching die two tiny black machines come running silently back across the soundless pavement to resume their suffocating supervision.
XV
“DR. FORESTER! Please—can you hear me?”
A clear childish treble voice was calling to him, urgent and afraid. Only a part of the dream, he thought at first; yet it had brought him off his pillow, taut and shivering, wide awake.
But that luxurious room seemed more dreadful to him than any nightmare could have been, because a solicitous humanoid stood watching beside the great bed.
Shuddering convulsively, he desperate!? strove to smile and hide his fear—until he saw that the humanoid had stopped. It was falling, the blind tranquility unchanged on its narrow face, and it made no move to recover its balance. Rigid as some statue of ideal grace in black-lacquered metal, it toppled deliberately to strike the soft floor with a muffled crash. And still it lay there, dark face up, incredibly dead. Forester coughed to a sudden stinging reek of hot metal and burned plastic.
“Dr. Forester!” Startled, he realized that the child’s voice was not a dream. “Won’t you please come with me now?”
He saw her then. Jane Carter! She came creeping timidly around the foot of his bed, peering uneasily at the quiet mechanical on the floor. That immense bright room seemed warm to him, and she was huddled in a worn leather coat too large for her, yet he saw that she was shivering. Under a thin yellow dress, her bare knees and feet were blue with cold.
“Huh—why, hello, Jane!” He answered her shy smile with a feeble grin, and nodded stiffly at the fallen machine. “What happened to that?”
“I stopped it.”
He searched her frightened face silently, and then turned back to that fallen unit of the ultimate machine. A dazed incredulity shook his voice. “How?”
“Like Mr. White taught me.” She retreated uneasily from the thing on the floor. “You just look, in a certain way he taught me, at a little white bead in its head. That bead is—potassium.” She was careful with the word. “You just look—that certain way—and the potassium burns.”
Forester couldn’t see any potassium bead, or anything else, inside the bald plastic-covered head of the stopped machine, but he shrugged with a numbed acceptance. He remembered the unstable isotope of potassium, and Mark White’s boast that this hungry urchin had learned to control atomic probability, to detonate K-40 atoms by a simple act of her mind.
“Please, won’t you come and help us now?
“I’m coming,” he whispered. “But where?”
He was scrambling out of bed, a slight anxious figure in a loose blue night robe, when the motionless machine caught his glance. Its handsome narrow face was still the same, faintly astonished and eternally benign, but now the steel-colored eyes were tarnished with heat, and thin gray smoke was seeping from the black nostrils.
“How can we get out?”
“Come,” Jane Carter said. “Just come with me.”
She put up a grubby little paw for him to clasp, thin and shivering. He stared at her, nodding bleakly at the locked doors. “There’s no way out.”
“For us there is,” she said. “We go by teleportation.”
Forester dropped her hand. His dry laugh was almost hysterical, and the smoke changed it to a coughing paroxysm. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his robe, gasping huskily, “But I can’t do teleportation.”
“I know,” she told him solemnly. “But Mr. White thinks I can carry you. If you will help, the best you can.”
“Help?” he muttered harshly. “How?”
“Just think of where we are going,” she told him. “And try to be there.”
Shuddering, he attempted to believe. “Where are we going?”
“To a far, dark place, underground. It’s always cold there, and you can hear water running. I don’t like it—but there’s no opening in the rocks, and no way in but by teleportation, so the black things can’t get us there. Mr. White says he will help you find the way.”
Forester took her hand again, trying to picture some dark cave where Mark White and his tattered followers must be hiding from the humanoids. He tried hard enough, he thought, because his mind could already see the efficient mechanicals swarming to investigate the one Jane Carter had stopped. He longed, with a savage intensity, to escape this glittering prison and the threat of euphoride. Surely, he tried desperately enough.
But he was still a physicist. He couldn’t quite imagine the mechanics of instantaneous translation.
“Please—try!” Her voice was strained and breathless. “Harder!”
“I did.” Forester let go her hand, his voice a gasp of baffled failure. “I did—but I don’t know how. Sorry, Jane, but it’s no use.”
“But you must!” Her cold, tiny fingers clutched his hand again. “Mr. White says we can carry you—if you will only let us. By myself, I can move a rock as big as you. If you’ll just turn loose—”
He tightened his grasp on her small hand, looking down at her black anxious eyes and thinking of Mark White and Overstreet and old Graystone and little Lucky Ford, waiting for them in some deep cavern. He thought he tried. But he knew that nothing would happen—and nothing did.
Forester caught a flicker of motion, then, outside the huge window, as something dark and very swift ran past. He knew the machines were closing in. Turning shakenly back to the child, he was choked with a sudden tenderness. For one moment of hopeless yearning, he wished that he and Ruth had found time for children—instead of Project Thunderbolt.
“It’s all right, Jane—”
He reached awkwardly for the little girl, wanting to comfort her, but some cruel school must have taught her independence. She refused the caress. Her bare skinny knees shook with fear and cold, but she stood proudly straight.
“No, it isn’t all right.” Her voice was high and bitterly clear. “Mr. White says this is very bad, for all of us. He says the black machines are sure to take your memory now, if you don’t get away. And he says they will know a lot about us, from studying the one I stopped.”
She stood a little away from him, tiny and indomitable. Her blue lips moved, murmuring silently. Her apprehensive eyes looked at something far away. Her famine-hollowed head tilted, as if she listened. And then she turned gravely back to him, sadly offering her small grimy hand.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Forester. We’re all sorry, ’cause we need you and we like you. Now it’s time for me to go. Mr. White says the black machines are coming—”
He could see another humanoid beyond her, watching with hard, bright eyes of blind-seeming steel through the great window. Nodding at it vehemently, he whispered at her to kill it. Before she could turn, however, the crystal panel turned abruptly opaque, shutting out that alert mechanical and the light of the dawn. The glow of the murals on the high walls was also extinguished. Smothering darkness fell upon them, and he heard a terrified gasp from the child.
XVI
STAGGERED by that fall of blackness, Forester nodded in bleak understanding of the move. The humanoids, with their rhodomagnetic sensory fields, had no need of light. That efficient brain on far Wing IV intended to bewilder him with darkness, while its invincible units swarmed in to seize him. He wondered how forgetfulness would feel.
“We can’t help you.” The child’s hurt voice seemed too loud, beneath that crushing dark. “And Mr. White says I must go.”
Her tiny questing fingers caught his hand for a moment, and then let him go. For an eternal second he stood all alone in the dark, until sheer desperation armed him. “Jane!” he gasped. “Wait!”
“Please!” Her tiny, frightened voice brought back hope. “Mr. White says—”
“I can’t go with you,” he sobbed. “But tell him there’s another way.”
Careless of the strangling smoke from the machine on the floor, he filled his lungs again.
“Tell Mr. White I have weapons,” he whispered swiftly. “Self-guided missiles already ranged and armed to detonate Wing IV—still hidden in that underground station where you came. Just one of them could stop all the humanoids, in about half a minute.” Apprehension rocked him. “Anyhow, I hope the missiles are still there,” he added hoarsely. “Though I saw an excavating machine, working toward the building above the station.”
“Wait,” the child breathed. “Mr. Overstreet can look.”
For an endless second the room was silent again, while he shivered to the dread of soundless black machines creeping upon them in the dark.
“Mr. Overstreet can see the building,” she whispered at last. “The digging machine has broken through the corner of it, but the roof hasn’t fallen in. He says the black things haven’t found the elevator.”
“Then we can try!” A savage elation lifted him. “We must wait until the humanoids open the doors, to get at us. You must be ready to stop them, Jane—as many as you can. And I’ll make a run for the project.”
Silence seemed to clot the dark again. Waiting for the mechanicals to break in, he was startled by the child’s quiet voice. “Mr. White says we’ll try your plan. I’m to stay and help you all I can. And he says—”
Jane Carter gasped faintly. Forester felt her small hand tighten on his sleeve. Breathless and afraid, she went on faintly, “He says there’s another danger we must face—worse than all the humanoids. He’s afraid we’ll meet Mr. Ironsmith.”
“Ironsmith?” Forester shivered, as if something unseen had breathed upon him from the dark. “I’ve been wondering,” he whispered huskily, “why he likes the mechanicals so well—and why they leave him so free.”
“Mr. White says he doesn’t know.” Trouble slowed her voice. “Except he’s helping the machines against us.”
She broke off suddenly, to listen in the dark.
“Mr. White says we mustn’t wait any longer.” Her voice turned breathless. “Mr. Overstreet can see them on the roof, fixing the ventilator to blow something in—something to make us sleep.”
“So that’s the way!” Forester swayed to the impact of disaster, remembering that the efficient machines took no chances. “They don’t mean to open the door until we’re helpless and we can’t get out.”
“But we can.” She tugged urgently at his sleeve. “With Mr. Lucky helping.” Forester had turned to run with her from the expanding gas cloud, before the warm feel of the floor reminded him that his feet were bare. He hesitated, glancing desperately back in search of his shoes, but the tidy humanoids must have locked them up in some closet with a rhodomagnetic latch. The child was tugging at his hand, and he fled with her on tender naked feet down that spacious hall, past the glowing screens in the niches. The outer door checked them until Lucky Ford could reach from that distant cavern to open it, but at last they came out into the brightening dawn.
Breathless, Forester ran on with the trembling child until he could see the old search building.
The ruin of it stood on the very lip of a deep new excavation. The west wall had already been ripped away, and the flat concrete dome had begun to settle, so that it was leaning drunkenly. The excavating machine was somewhere out of view, however, and he thought the way might still be open to that masked elevator.
His labored breath made stabbing pains in his chest, and sharp stones cut his feet.
But they were halfway to the building before Jane Carter began to hang back, whimpering breathlessly. Pale with terror, she was pointing up at a long new ridge of raw soil and broken rock ahead.
“The machine that digs,” she whispered. “Coming!”
They sprinted for the building, too late. That enormous machine which had been slowly slicing the end of the mountain into geometric neatness came lurching over the new embankment, no longer deliberate. The first sunlight flashed yellow on its huge bright blades and red on its black-and-crimson armor, as it roared down to meet them.
