“Where—” he gasped blankly.
Ironsmith turned to the narrow doorway, watching with a calm bright interest, and the child came running in again. She handed Ironsmith some small metal object, and sat down again by the fire.
“Please, Mr. Graystone!” She watched the simmering stew, with enormous eager eyes. “I’m awful hungry.”
“You’ve met Dawn Hall,” the big man was drawling softly. “Her great accomplishment is teleportation.”
“Tele—What?”
Claypool wrestled with an overwhelming surmise.
“I think you must agree she’s pretty good.” White smiled through the red beard, and the child looked back at him, her great eyes luminous with a mute admiration. “In fact, she has the richest psychophysical abilities that I’ve found on several planets.”
“Dawn was another misfit,” White told him. “In this age of machine-worshipers, her young genius had been ignored and denied. Her only recognition came from some petty criminal, who tried to make her a shoplifter. We took her out of a reform school.”
Her thin blue face smiled up at Claypool.
“And Mr. White never has to beat me,” she informed him proudly. “Now there aren’t any iron windows, and I always have enough U eat. And Mr. White is teaching me psychophysics.” She spoke the word with solemn care. “I went to find you in that cellar in the mountain, all by myself. Mr. White says I did very well.”
“I. . . I think you did,” Claypool stammered faintly.
The child turned happily back to Ironsmith, and went on chattering about her studies. Claypool peered about that smoke-blackened room, where a few driftwood timbers and little piles of straw made the only furniture. White saw his taut unease.
“A curious fortress, I know.” That blue fire of ruthless purpose lit the huge man’s eyes again. “But all our weapons are in our minds, and the pursuit of the enemy has left us no resources to waste on needless luxuries.”
Dazedly, Claypool watched the absent little gambler roll another nervous seven. That must be a well-practiced trick, he thought, and the child’s unaccountable appearance at Starmont must have been another. No respectable scientist would take serious stock in this paraphysical stuff.
He swung back to White, stiff with a skeptical hostility. But he tried to hide his bleak mistrust, and his doubt of Ironsmith, and his cold scorn for the dubious band about the fire. He must stall, study these people, discover the motives and the methods of their strange trickery.
“What enemy?” he rapped.
The red-maned giant smiled alarmingly.
“I see you aren’t taking my warning very seriously.” His rumbling drawl had taken on an ominous intensity. “But I think you will when you hear this bit of bad news.” And White took his arm, to draw him away from that motley group at the fire. He felt the big man’s lazy, light-footed strength again. He saw the iron purpose in that angular red face, and heard the driving, fanatic power beneath the muffled boom of that deceptive voice, as White murmured gently:
“Mason Horn is going to land tonight.”
Claypool swallowed hard, and tried to cover his shock. For these suspicious characters, whether desperate Triplanet agents or merely clever private rogues, had no right to know the name of Mason Horn.
V.
For the mission of Mason Horn was another high secret, as closely guarded as Project Thunderbolt. Three years ago, in the search dome at Starmont, a meter needle had trembled. A recording pen made a sharp little peak on a turning drum. And young Mason Horn quietly vanished from his job and his home and the knowledge of his friends.
“Automatic trackers of Project Lookout indicate a very singular neutrino burst at 14:17:03 today, Universal Time,” Claypool stated in the urgent, secret report he encoded and dispatched to warn the Defense Authority. “Co-ordinates fall in Sector Vermillion—where Intelligence reports indicate current unexplained activity of Triplanet spacecraft.
“Anomalous characteristics of recorded curve convince me that observed burst is secondary effect of extremely penetrative gamma radiation. disrupting atoms in massive shielding. However, check with warning net shows that counters on satellite stations recorded no recent peak in gamma rays of indicated penetration.
“That discrepancy is ominous. Gamma rays can be successfully shielded, and neutrinos cannot. This observation, therefore, indicates carefully shielded test, in Sector Vermillion, of new Triplanet military device. I am afraid that this device makes obsolete all our defenses against fission weapons.
“Because gamma rays produced by atomic fission are inadequate to produce observed effect. Rays of indicated penetration are possible only from complete conversion of entire nuclear mass to energy. Triplanet possession of any such device is gravest threat imaginable to our national security. No defense is believed possible.
“Instrumental error at Project Lookout is unlikely. Careful recheck of instruments, records, and computations shows no alternative explanation. My considered judgment is that our planet faces extinction in event of hostilities. Investigation of Triplanet activities in Sector Vermillion urgently advised.”
Young Mason Horn had been drafted from the Starmont staff, to make that investigation. In three years—since he boarded a Triplanet liner, booked as a salesman of medico-radiological supplies—no word of him had come back.
Now, in that smoky den, Claypool felt ill with shock.
“Mason Horn!” he gasped. “Did he find—” Caution choked him, but White’s great shaggy head had already nodded at Ash Overstreet. Turning slowly from the fire, the clairvoyant peered up vaguely through his heavy glasses. Bleached from confinement, his lax face had a look of heavy stupidity.
“Mason Horn made an able secret agent,” he whispered hoarsely. “In fact, though he doesn’t know it. Horn has well developed extrasensory perceptions. He penetrated the arsenal of a Triplanet space fort stationed out in Sector Vermillion, and got away with a sample gadget I .don’t quite understand the device, but I get his fear of it. His label for it is ‘mass converter’.
Claypool’s legs turned weak. He looked around him blankly and sat down on a driftwood block. For all those three ghastly years, perfecting those missiles of Project Thunderbolt and waiting beside them in the vault through eternal days and sleepless nights, this was the thing he had most greatly feared. He swallowed to wet his throat.
“So that’s your bad news?”
But White gravely shook his flowing, fiery mane.
“No, our true enemy is something vaster and more vicious than the Triplanet Power, and the weapon against us is something more deadly than any mass converter. It is pure benevolence.”
Cold and numb, Claypool sat hunched on the driftwood block. His stomach tried to heave, from the damp smell of the old tower and the garlic reek of the stew. His voice came taint and dry, protesting:
“I’m afraid you don’t understand mass-conversion weapons. They use all the energy in the detonated matter—and the theoretical maximum for a plutonium bomb is not a tenth of one per cent. They make a different sort of war. A single mass detonation can split the crust of a planet, boil the seas and burn the land, and poison everything with radio isotopes for a thousand years.”
He shuddered a little, staring at White.
“What could be worse than that?”
“Our benevolent enemy is.”
Claypool waited, perched uncomfortably on the block, taut and silent.
White came to sit on a straw bed before him, moving with a supple, feline vigor. A hard purpose and a shocking hate rang deep and ruthless under the gentle rumble of that slow drawl.
“Our enemy has spread out from Wing IV. The story is simple and dreadful. Ninety years ago, that planet faced the same crisis that this one does today—the old hard choice of slavery or destruction. But a man named Sledge created a third, alternative.”
The hushed power of White’s voice held Claypool.
“Physical science had got out of hand there, as here. Sled
ge had already discovered rhodomagnetism on Wing IV—nearly a century ahead of you, Claypool, by absolute time, but two light-centuries away. He had seen it misused for a weapon. And he tried to bottle up the technological devil he had freed.
“Military mechanicals had already been evolved too far, on.-Wing IV. Sledge used his new science to build android mechanicals of a new type—humanoids, he called them—designed to restrain men from war. He was too successful. His rhodomagnetic mechanicals are a little too perfect.”
The big man paused, taut with an angry energy.
“I knew Sledge.” Beneath his lazy voice, Claypool could hear a savage ring of hate. “On a different planet. He was an old man, then, desperately fighting the benevolent monster he had made. A refugee from his own humanoids. For the mechanicals were following him from planet to planet, spreading out across the colonized section of the Galaxy to stamp out war—exactly as he had designed them to do.
“He couldn’t stop them.
“He found me a homeless child, wandering in a land that war had ruined. He rescued me from famine and terror, and I grew up to join him in that hopeless crusade against his own creation. I worked with him for a good many years, while he was trying one weapon and another to stop the humanoids. He always failed.
“Sledge grew old, defeated. He tried to make a physical scientist of me, to carry on after him, and failed again—for I lacked his scientific gift. He had been a physicist, and I grew into something else. Living like a wild animal in the rubble of ruined cities, hunting and hunted, I had learned powers of the human mind which Sledge could never recognize.
“Our philosophies came to differ. Sledge had put his faith in machines—and made the humanoids. When he came to see his blunder, he tried to destroy them with more machines. He was bound to fail—because those mechanicals are as nearly perfect as any machine will ever be.
“But I was groping for a better weapon. I put my trust in human beings—in the native human powers I had begun to learn. To save themselves, I saw that men must now discover and develop their own inborn capacities—crippled and neglected as they are from long neglect.”
Staring out through the narrow archway beyond the fire, into gray drifting fog, the big man sighed. The broad shoulders under that worn, silver-colored cloak made a heavy little shrug, but that brooding purpose burned invincible in his eyes.
“So at last we separated. I’m sorry that our parting words were too bitter—I called him a machine-minded fool, and he said that my efforts would only end in mechanizing human beings, instead of setting them free. Sledge went on to try his last weapon—he hoped to ignite a chain reaction in the oceans and the rocks of Wing IV, with some kind of rhodomagnetic beam. I never saw him again, but I know he failed.
“Because the humanoid didn’t stop.”
White’s blue, smoldering eyes drifted to his four followers. The gaunt awkward telepath, stirring the black pot. The pale clairvoyant, motionless and lax on his rock. The nervous little gambler, absently practicing telekinesis. And the eager-eyed child, clutching a cracked white bowl and chattering to Ironsmith while she waited for her stew.
“So I’m fighting Wing IV, and all those benevolent hordes of Sledge’s humanoids,” the huge man rumbled. “And these are my soldiers.” A mighty indignation throbbed beneath his drawl. “Look at them—the most talented citizens of the planet! I found them in the gutter, the jail, the madhouse. But they are the last hope of man.”
Claypool flinched from the angry booming of his great voice, and demanded uneasily: “I don’t quite see . . . what are these weapons of the mind?”
“One is atomic probability.”
“Eh?”
“Take an atom of Potassium-40.” White’s voice turned softly patient again. “As a physicist, you already know that such an unstable atom is a natural wheel of chance, set to pay off only once during several billion years of spinning. Like most machines of chance, it can be manipulated. In fact, being smaller, it is a good deal more responsive to telekinesis than, say, a pair of dice.
Claypool glanced uneasily at little Lucky Ford, crouching thin and withered over his dice, which now showed a five and a two in the firelight. He blinked unbelievingly.
“How do you manipulate an atom?”
White’s blue eyes turned dark with trouble.
“I don’t quite know,” he rumbled heavily. “Although Dawn does it easily, and the rest of us have sometimes been successful—it seems that children learn the mental arts more easily, perhaps because they don’t have to unlearn the false truths and break the bad habits of mechanistic science.”
White’s brooding face warmed for a moment, as he glanced at the child, who was eagerly watching old Gray stone ladle out her bowl of stew.
“But I don’t know.” He shook his red mane, and sighed. “The facts I have discovered are often apparently contradictory, and always incomplete. Perhaps the physical principle of uncertainty involved in atomic instability doesn’t apply to psychophysical phenomena. Perhaps it is merely illusion, arising from the fact that our physical senses are too coarse to perceive nuclear particles. I have suspected that physical time and physical space are also illusions, coming from our other physical limitations. There’s too much that I don’t know. But I do know that mental energy can detonate K-40 atoms.”
The big shoulders shrugged wearily, in the silver cloak.
“I’ve had dreams, Claypool.” White’s slow voice seemed suddenly sad. “Dreams of a splendid coming era, when my new science of the mind could free every man from all the old shackles of the brute and the machine. I used to believe that I could conquer matter, master space, and rule time.”
Heavily, he shook his bearded head.
“But I’ve failed, in all such large efforts—I don’t know why. I run into blind alleys, and I stumble over obstacles that I don’t expect. Perhaps there’s some barrier I fail to see, some limiting natural law that I have never grasped.”
The huge man sat for a moment, bleakly silent.
“I don’t know,” he rumbled bitterly. “and there’s no time left for trial and error now, because those invading mechanicals are already upon us.”
Claypool’s thin jaw dropped, with a shocked unbelief.
“Yes, old Sledge’s humanoids are already infiltrating your defenses,” White assured him solemnly. “Those efficient machines, you see, make very superior secret agents. They are clever enough to avoid detection by any ordinary means. They don’t sleep, and they don’t blunder.”
“Huh!” Claypool gulped, astonished. “You don’t mean—mechanical spies!”
“You’ve met them,” White drawled gently. “You would find it extremely difficult to distinguish them. But one thing I have learned—for all my failures at psychophysics—is how to tell machines from men.”
Claypool gaped, unbelieving and yet appalled.
“They’re already here,” White insisted. “And Overstreet believes that Mason Horn’s report will be the signal for them to strike. So you see we’ve no more time for bungling. To stop them at all, we must grasp every device we can. That’s why we need rhodomagnetic engineers.”
Claypool peered, bewildered.
“I don’t quite see—”
“These humanoid mechanicals are rhodomagnetic,” White’s driving voice cut in. “They are all operated by remote control, on rhodomagnetic beams, from a central relay grid on Wing IV. We must attack them through that grid—for the loss of one individual unit, or a billion, wouldn’t hurt them. Now I’ve no head for math, and old Sledge failed to teach me rhodomagnetics. But we’ve got to have an engineer.
The bearded giant leaned forward, taut and urgent.
“So now will you join us, Claypool?”
Uncomfortably perched on his driftwood block, Claypool hesitated for half a second. He was fascinated by this glimpse of White’s dubious disciples, and challenged by the possibility of an actual science of the mind behind their enigmatic gifts.
But he shook his he
ad uneasily. If all this were true—if Mason Horn were really coming back, with proof that Triplanet scientists had perfected a working mass-conversion weapon—then he should be back at Starmont, standing by for the signal to launch those shining, terrible missiles of Project Thunderbolt.
“Sorry,” he said stiffly. “But I can’t.”
Oddly, White didn’t argue. Instead, as if he understood the reasons for Claypool’s refusal, the big man nodded and turned immediately to Ironsmith, who sat talking with the old magician while the little girl sucked up her bowl of stew.
“Ironsmith,” White rumbled softly, “will you stay?”
Watching, Claypool’s eyes narrowed. If the young man did, that would go to prove that he was already involved with this queer group. He might even have helped old Graystone the Great stage an expert illusion of the little girl’s visit—if such a thin could have been illusion.
But Ironsmith was shaking his calm sandy head.
“I can’t see what’s so terrible about those mechanicals,” he protested amiably. “Not from anything you’ve said. If they can actually abolish war, I’d be glad to see them come.”
White’s intense blue eyes turned almost black.
“They’re already here.” Savagely harsh, his great voice forgot to drawl. “Overstreet says they know all about Mason Horn, and such a crisis of runaway technology is always the signal for them to strike. You’ll both change your minds when you meet them.”
Ironsmith met that lowering glare, with a pink and affable grin.
“Might be,” he murmured, “but I don’t think so.”
The big man stiffened, as if stung by Ironsmith’s genial calm. Taut with impatience, he turned back to Claypool.
“Still there’s one thing you can do, Claypool. You can warn the nation of those humanoid spies infiltrating your defenses, and those invading ships from Wing IV on the way. As adviser to the Defense Authority, you can perhaps delay the invasion long enough—”
White broke off suddenly, looking at Ash Overstreet. The short pale man had stirred a little on the rock where he sat. His dim eyes stared vacantly at nothing, but the tilt of his white head had a curious alertness. He didn’t speak, but old Gray stone turned quickly from his low-voiced talk with Ironsmith.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 10
