The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy
Page 27
“Webb!” she whispered again. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I know what I’m doing.” Claypool limped grimly toward them. “I’m going to smash your dirty little plot with the humanoids—this monstrous Compact to smother and mechanize the human race. I’m going to give all men, everywhere, the same freedom you’ve sold us out to get.”
He swung violently upon the sober man beside her.
“Ironsmith, I’m going to kill you. I’m willing to bargain with the rest, but I think you’ve a little too much to answer for. Have you anything to say?”
Calmly, Ironsmith said: “You might specify-your charges.”
“You’ve turned against your kind, and joined the mechanicals,” Claypool rapped. “You spied on me, and sabotaged Project Thunderbolt, and betrayed White, and wrecked our last effort to change the Prime Directive. Now you’ve helped build this new grid, to run men like machines.”
Claypool gulped, and tried to lower his-voice.
“Those are the crimes I know,
I don’t know how long you schemed to take my wife away—” He swallowed hard, and Dawn saw the spasm of pain that crossed his face. “But I think those are proven charges enough. Now are you ready to die?”
Claypool paused, swaying on his bad leg, gasping heavily. He waited, but Ironsmith didn’t answer. He turned back to the woman, with agony twisting his face.
“Get away from him, Ruth!” His voice was flat and breathless. “I don’t want to hurt you—whatever you may have done. But I’m going to kill this traitor, and you’ll be hurt if you stand too near.”
The woman didn’t move. “Please, Webb—don’t be ugly!” Her low voice seemed distressed. “We can help you, if you’ll only let us. But please forget your silly threats—because you can’t hurt us, Webb.”
He flung out his skinny fist, and she insisted sadly:
“You can’t harm us, really.”
She “lanced at die calm man beside her. Dawn saw the glow of devotion that lit her dark eyes, and the deep pity that shadowed them when she looked back at Claypool.
“Please try to see it all our way, Webb,” she begged, “because there’s nothing unfair about Frank, and there’s no one you can really blame except yourself—and Project Thunderbolt!”
Dawn saw the glint of tears, in her dark eyes.
“I’m sorry for you, Webb, and I used to be sorry for myself. That planet-bursting toy of yours was a monstrous thing, and yet I think you really loved it. I know it left you no time to think of me.”
She tried to control her low, trembling voice.
“Please, Webb—don’t blame Frank, He only took me away from Starmont after you had abandoned me, drugged with euphoride, when you wandered away on your insane adventuring. He brought me here, and woke my memory, and we’ve learned this new way of life together.”
She looked at Ironsmith, and Dawn saw her deep joy.
“We’re in love, Webb.” Something made her flush. “It’s all legal. I didn’t know where you were hiding—we couldn’t find you for the formalities. But Frank and I are married, now. I . . . I hope you’ll try to wish us well.”
Dawn saw her white throat pulse.
“Won’t you, Webb?”
Clinging fearfully to Claypool’s thin sleeve, Dawn felt him stiffen.
She heard his tortured, sobbing cry, and saw the gray, sick fury on his face. She cowered back behind him, and flung up her arm to shield her eyes from the flame of annihilation.
She knew he meant to kill them now.
She waited, shuddering, but nothing happened to the man and the woman. The mass of their bodies wasn’t detonated into dreadful flame. They didn’t even fall. They merely stood there on the silver steps, Ruth shaking her lovely head in sad reproof.
“Huh!”
Claypool gasped with disbelief and pain, as if some unfair blow had wounded him. His wide, hurt eyes went back to the horizon, where that ominous mushroom of cloud was still dissolving in the summer sky. He seemed to search for another rock.
“Hold oil, Claypool!” that gaunt old man broke in hastily. “There’s no use wrecking all the landscape. Because you can’t hurt anybody—not with paraphysics.”
Claypool blinked at him, swaying and ill.
“Seems you must have overlooked a couple of basic fundamentals,” old Sledge murmured softly. “In the first place, as you should have learned, the paraphysical functions are normally unconscious—they belong largely to that great fraction of the brain tissue which lies outside the area of conscious thought. And the savage conflicts in such a sick mind as yours make a difficult barrier to any conscious paraphysical control.”
Claypool stood silent, shuddering.
“The astounding thing is that you accomplished all you did,” the gaunt man said. “But I’ve known other cases of paraphysical compensation for physical handicaps, in individuals under great stress. And you had an advantage, of course, in your sound grasp of the physical and mathematical side of the problem.”
Claypool stood numbed and stupid-seeming with his pain.
“Yet, for all you’ve done, you have no real understanding.” Sledge shook his cragged head. “You’ve just proved that, with this insane effort to murder Frank Ironsmith. You should have learned, long ago, that paraphysical energy cannot be used for such destructive purposes.”
The old man spoke with a careful patience.
“Because it’s creative—the basic creative element of the universe. It builds stable atoms, out of disruptive electrical particles. It controls the shaping of planets, out of exploding nebular gas. It kindles life. It is the driving force of evolution.
“And it is mind.”
Claypool felt groggy with fatigue and grief and shock. Slow throbs of pain stabbed through his swollen knee, and small fangs of hungry agony nibbled at his stomach. But he shook his head and tried to listen.
“Mind is the ultimate paraphysical phenomenon,” the old man said patiently. “It is an emergent function of the paraphysical components of the atoms in the brain tissue.
Each atom has mentality to the tiny extent of that component, and every molecule has more. The human mind is simply a new integration of that creative force, on a higher level.”
Claypool wanted to listen, but the warm air seemed suddenly oppressive. Sweat began to trickle down his forehead and his flanks, and something squeezed his chest, and his knee tried to buckle. He staggered, on the silver steps.
“. . . sick man, Claypool,” Sledge was saying. “You’re killing yourself.” Because life and mind are creative. When you try to turn them to ends of destruction, you set up inner conflicts which destroy your own identity. A mind, like an atom or a star, can be shattered by the failure of the paraphysical component.”
Claypool swayed again, and the tall man steadied him.
“Better sit down.”
Dazedly, aching all over, Claypool sat down on the broad silver stair. A cool breeze struck him, from the far blue estuary. Wet with nervous perspiration, he began to shiver in the thin pajamas. Some stray pollen grain gave him a fit of sneezing. He blew his nose, and tried to listen.
“Full conscious control of the paraphysical functions requires a whole mind,” Sledge told him softly. “A mature and integrated personality, free of inner strains. No man who has found that mental peace would attempt to kill another. No man who has not would be able to—not paraphysically—because that energy is creative, and it will but destroy itself.
“Now, do you see why you failed?”
Claypool nodded heavily. He felt drugged and drowsy with the poisons of fatigue, and pain, and sheer defeat. But he tried to understand.
“You imagined you were fighting for the good of mankind.” Sledge went on. “That creative purpose—however mistaken—must account for what you did accomplish. I imagine you were quite successful, so long as you limited your efforts to constructive projects.”
Claypool peered up from where he sat.
“That�
�s true,” he said faintly. “I think it explains the most astounding thing. When we escaped from Wing IV, you see, we somehow got to a dead planet, lost outside the Galaxy. Somehow I built a shelter for us there—or Dawn said I did.” Haunting wonderment Whispered in his voice. “I could never remember.”
The gaunt man nodded his white mane.
“A creative project. Therefore, no conflict existed. Imagined danger to the child was the stimulus. The unconscious function made use of your conscious knowledge. But your attack on Ironsmith was destructive, and the utmost folly.”
Claypool shivered in the breeze, and sneezed again. Dawn stood close to where he sat, whimpering silently. He knew she didn’t understand, and she was still afraid. He put out: his stringy arm, and drew her to him.
Ironsmith and Ruth stood below them on the silver stair, hands clasped. Claypool looked down at them with an apathetic envy. They stood so straight, so pink with health and joy, so serenely absorbed in one another. Aware of his sullen gaze, they came toward him up the steps.
“So you can’t hurt us, Claypool.” He winced from Ironsmith’s cheery calm. “Because paraphysical energy creates, as surely as masses gravitate. I might have taught you that, long ago—if you had been a little less absorbed in Project Thunderbolt.”
Claypool sat cold and silent, too ill to hate them now. His clammy arm drew Dawn a little closer, and he felt her tiny fingers touch his stubbled cheek, sympathetically. That little act of compassion made an ache in his throat, and blurred his eyes. He wiped his face angrily, with the gray pajama sleeve, and sat staring at the tall stranger who had been his wife.
The cold breeze brought him a hint of her perfume. The thin clean fragrance of it was laden with crowded memories, bitterly sweet, of their home at Starmont and the lost closeness of their love and their honeymoon by the sea—interrupted by the cold blue flare of the Crater Supernova.
“Please. Webb—try not to hate us so!” The pity in her voice cut him with a thin pain. “Because your mind is sick, and hate is part of the sickness, and you can’t get well unless you try to cure it.” Heavily, Claypool shook his head. He didn’t really hate her now, because the past was gone and dead. He was even glad to see her glowing joy in Ironsmith, because she had a right to happiness.
But he didn’t want to hear her voice again, or smell the musky scent of Sweet Delirium. Bleakly, he muttered:
“Sure, Ruth. I understand.”
“Thank you, Webb!” Her quick little smile hurt him with too many memories. Her throaty voice held a soothing comfort, as if she spoke to a suffering child. But Claypool looked away from her. He wanted nothing from her now.
“I think we can help you, Webb,” she was murmuring softly, “with Frank’s new grid.”
“Huh!”
Taut with protest, he came to his feet on the silver steps.
“What do you mean?”
Still absently holding the woman’s hand, Ironsmith looked at him with gray, candid eyes.
“Yes, Claypool, I think the new grid can cure your troubles,” he promised softly. “It is designed to handle just such cases as your own, where partial knowledge and inadequate power and mistaken resentments have become too dangerous.”
Claypool was shuddering, washed with a sudden black and chilling tide of recollection. He remembered four human machines he had seen marching too swiftly and too gracefully across that dark laboratory under the grid, deaf and blind and smiling.
He didn’t want any help from Ironsmith’s grid.
The serene gray eyes of the younger man were looking past Claypool, as if he saw something far beyond the silver pillars and the vast crystal windows of the war museum. His smooth pleasant face smiled a little, and his sandy head nodded, and then his eyes came back.
“The grid will be ready for you soon,” he said. “The last sections have been connected, and now the paraphysical potential is buildings—”
Convulsively, then, Claypool broke free of the terror which held him. Beside him, Dawn was whimpering softly in her bewildered fright. He picked her up in his knobby arms, and fled with her up the broad stair, toward the museum door, and the crystal case that held a sleek and dreadful missile.
XXX.
Beyond the silver columns, that huge hall lay hushed and dim. Near the scarred and blackened tank, he could see the unguarded case that held the stolen relics of Project Thunderbolt. The long missile itself would be impossible to launch by hand, without special tools to set the controls and start the drive: but he had seen the heavy little cylinder of a detonator, among the labeled parts of another war head, displayed beside it.
That detonator would be enough.
“Listen, Dawn!” he rasped hoarsely as he ran. “I want you to go away—back to our shelter. I think you’ll be safe—because I’m going to blow them up.”
She squirmed in his arms, protestingly.
“Please—don’t!” she sobbed. “ ’Cause they aren’t really bad.”
He almost paused, but sheer terror drove him on. He didn’t want to be a flesh machine, safely run by Ironsmith’s grid. His knee was shuddering under him, and Dawn seemed too heavy in his arms. But he came to the top of the stair, and staggered between the shining pillars. His anxious eyes found the white palladium cylinder of the detonator in the case—smaller than his stringy fist, but big enough.
He glanced back fearfully, but the three behind had not moved to interfere. Perhaps they hadn’t guessed his desperate plan. Or perhaps their paraphysical powers, like his own, were useless for violence. They merely stood watching, Ruth with a sick pity in her eyes. He was suddenly sorry she must die.
“Please!” Dawn was whispering. “Please don’t—”
Then his foot struck a raised threshold, between the silver columns, which he hadn’t seen before. He tried to catch himself, but his bad leg folded. He fell, trying to shield the child. His head struck a corner of the tall crystal case that held the tank.
For a moment he merely lay there, limp and dazed. Dawn knelt by him, crying. At first he thought she was hurt, and then he felt her trying to lift his bursting head. He tried to get up. and felt a sickening stab in his knee.
“Better wait, Claypool,” old Sledge boomed gently.
Laboriously, he pushed himself up on his elbows, and hitched himself backward, and propped his body against the shining case. The corner of it had cut his scalp, and he felt warm blood in his thin hair. Slow waves of pain surged through him, but he tried to grin at Dawn’s tearful face.
“Last try,” he breathed. “Nearly . . . made it.”
He tried to hitch himself a little higher, and great breakers of agony hammered him back down again.
“He still, you blundering fool,” Sledge told him softly. “You’ve made mistakes enough. You’ll have to let the grid take over, now, as soon as we get the potential up. Perhaps it can manage your body a little more efficiently.”
He saw the old man dimly, then, following through that wide portal with a vigorous stride—and now there was no longer any lifted threshold, where he had tripped. He looked bleakly for Ironsmith and Ruth, but they had vanished from the silver stair.
“They went back to Wing IV,” Sledge told him. “to get that potential up.”
He lay propped against the slick crystal, cold with despair. Blood made a sticky rivulet down his stubbled cheek, and dripped on the gray pajamas. He saw the terror on Dawn’s grimy face, and her stout effort to stop her tears.
“I felt the grid once,” she whispered bravely. “It isn’t really bad.”
“Not bad at all!” old Sledge told him heartily. “On the contrary, it is built to cure all the destructive conflicts and compulsions of such unfortunate individuals as you are, Claypool. It will be good for you, and you should be grateful for it.”
Claypool blinked at him, bitterly. The trial, he knew; was over. The verdict was guilty. The sentence was death—by a special kind of gallows, that made a puppet of the victim. Now he was waiting for the hangman.
Claypool tried to lift his head, and waves of pain forced it back against the case. A weary detachment had come to end his passion, and even a dull relief that his long battles were ended. But he had never solved the monstrous riddle of these renegades, and now a dull wonder struck him.
“Sledge! Are you—that Sledge?”
The old man nodded serenely.
“I built the humanoids, nearly ninety years ago. To stop the self-destruction of mankind. I built the Prime Directive into the relays at the Central, and protected it from change—and then tried mistakenly to change it.”
Old Sledge sighed.
“I made the same blunder you have made. I had no philosophy. Stoicism ruled me, instead of intelligence. I wanted freedom, before I had earned it. I was stupid and blind enough to fight the humanoids. Thirty years ago, I tried to blow, up Wing IV with a rhodomagnetic beam. Fortunately, I tailed.”
Beyond the gaunt old man, Claypool could see a long tapered missile in a crystal case, and a little silver-colored cylinder on a tray beside it. He tried to lift his body again, and pain staggered him.
“Don’t move.” old Sledge said softly, “just wait a few minutes longer, and Ironsmith’s grid will pick your body up. It can heal everything that’s wrong with you. I wasn’t quite so lucky, thirty years ago. Then there wasn’t any paraphysical grid.”
“Eh?” Claypool caught his breath, and tried to ease his knee. “White told me how the machines exiled you from Wing IV, and drove you from planet to planet. You must have hated them then?” The white head nodded gently. Bleakly scornful. Claypool whispered his challenge:
“Then tell me why you sold out!”
“I didn’t.” The old man stepped a little nearer, smiling calmly down from his straight height. “I just—changed. Let me tell you how it was. Perhaps I can help you to welcome the grid.”