by C. L. Moore
He grew tense as the time drew out and still Mayall did not speak. What was happening behind that illusory veil upon which the world reflected itself? Whatever was happening, it couldn't go on much longer. Already Harding could see the thick white shape of Tuner leaning at the window eagerly, watching him—watching his illusion—toil up the steep hillside toward the dome.
Something was going on. In the square, small room on the other side of the wall, where Mayall sat at a table before a tri-di screen, something was certainly moving to a climax. It had to. Because in another two or three minutes Harding was going to reach the door of the relay station—no, not Harding, but Harding's phantom. Just how convincing it looked Harding had no way to guess, but sooner or later the limits of illusion would have to be reached, and then—
Then Turner would pull the lever and the whole game would be canceled on Akassi.
Now Turner was leaning over the windowsill, waving to the oncoming ghost. Harding could see his quivering, fat face with the blood streaks on it. He saw the mouth open and knew Turner must be shouting to him. But since this illusion of Akassi was silent, he didn't know what Turner was saying. It might be a command to halt. It might be an invitation to come in. It might be a question upon whose answer all the lives on Akassi depended. But he could not answer if he could not hear.
He said, "George!" in an urgent undertone, pitching his voice low because of the irrational feeling that Turner must hear him if he spoke aloud. He was so near now—he was looking up at the fat man in the window from so close he could see the sweat beading the heavy face. The closed door of the relay station rose up within a hundred feet of him, and he was nearing it with every step.
When he got there, what would happen? His hand was solid and the door looked solid, but the width of the island lay between them, and once the unreeling illusion swept him irresistibly into contact with the door, Turner would see the truth.
"George!" Harding said again, his eyes meeting Turner's eyes.
From the other side of the illusion, he heard the hillside laugh—
It was Mayall's voice, and it did not speak a word, but the laughter was a freezing sound.
Between one step and the next, Harding knew the truth.
He stopped dead still, stunned for an instant by the knowledge of what was happening in the black steel room—what had already happened, while he plodded blind and lost through the mirage.
He should have known when Mayall first spoke a few moments ago, after the long silence of concentration upon the Composite Image and its problem. Mayall would not have broken silence before the problem was solved.
That meant the Team already knew its answer to the question of Turner. And that meant the Team was free to give Mayall the second answer upon which his life depended. He must already have asked that final question, and the Integrator must be answering it in this very moment. "How can I kill Ed Harding?"
No wonder the hillside laughed at him.
Smoothly the pathway swept backward beneath his unmoving feet. Smoothly the ghost of the domed building glided toward him. At its window Turner leaned, staring down anxiously. Harding made his feet move, striving for illusion to the last. For the fat man's hand quivered on the lever. He sensed something wrong, though he did not yet see what.
"George!" Harding said desperately, putting up a hand to hide his mouth so that Turner would not realize the ghost's lips moved soundlessly. "Look, George! I'm almost there. Are you watching?"
The hillside laughed again, the same chilling sound.
Of course Mayall would make no move—yet. There were still several seconds left, and as long as Turner stayed alive, Harding was trapped in his little treadmill of mirage. He dared not break the illusion while Turner could still be held by the last slow-running moments of it. But while Harding plodded in his trap the Integrator gave Mayall the answer that was all he needed to extinguish Harding forever.
"George!" Harding shouted suddenly and desperately. "George, look" And with frantic resolution he snatched the revolver out of its holster at his side.
The hillside gave its freezing laugh again. "You can't shoot me," Akassi said to Harding. "All I need is half a minute more, and—"
"I'm not trying to shoot you," Harding said, taking careful aim. "George, if you aren't watching we're all dead! George—I'm going to fire at Turner!"
The ghost of Turner shouted soundlessly in its window just over Harding's head. To that ghost, the man and the gun below looked desperately real. Turner lurched backward clumsily, mouthing shouts that made no sound.
The fat hand tightened on the lever.
The lever moved.
"George!"
"All right!" Mayall snarled from the other side of the hill. The air began to fill with a strange, thin singing sound too far above the threshold of hearing to impinge except as a stinging and tickling in the ears.
But Harding knew what it was. The Team and the Integrator, working as one tight-welded unit, were bending every iota of their blending efforts to cancel Turner's UHF as it slid down the spectrum toward explosion. It would take full concentration from Mayall and his Team and his Integrator—for a few seconds.
In those few seconds, Harding had to act.
He thought, If I can ever kill him, the time is now!
He saw through the window just above him the deadly lever dropping under Turner's hand. While the united Team rode the beam downward invisibly Harding was safe—and only that long. Then their full concentrated attention would go back to the problem of Harding's death.
The mirage was vividly real before him—but he knew it for a mirage. He knew that where open hills and a lime-green sea seemed to stretch before him in the sun there was really only a mesh curtain, and beyond that a steel wall which bullets could pierce, and beyond that—George Mayall.
He swung his gun around toward the spot on the wall where he knew Mayall would be sitting. Even if Mayall were watching him now, he couldn't move from that spot. He had to focus his full attention upon the screen and the Integrator. If Harding could fire, then the game was his.
If he could fire.
Until this moment he had not consciously tried to kill Mayall. He knew the strength of the compulsion that forbade him to shoot, and he had not wanted to build up defeat-patterns until he made his final effort. But it was now or never.
He thought. I can fire a gun at nothing. And there's nothing in front of me. Nothing but empty air. The bullet will clear the corner of the relay station and go out over that hill and drop into the ocean when it's spent. There is no mesh in front of me. There is no wall. There is no George Mayall. I'm shooting into midair—
The revolver was a part of himself, an extension of his outstretched arm. The new synapse waited to be bridged between the crook of his finger and the smooth, cool trigger it pressed. He was the gun.
The gun responded as his arm responded to conditioned reflex. The gun felt pain.
Sensory hallucination is an old story. The gun had symbiotic life that was one with the gunner's, and how real is psychogenic pain? Harding knew this sharp, increasing burn was purely imaginary. But it hurt. Moving backward from the muzzle, the pain burned through the steel and the hand, up his arm, contracting the muscles until the pistol wavered. He was suddenly frightened. The symbiosis was terrifyingly complete. Could he let go when the time came?
He made one desperate, determined effort to squeeze the trigger. And all his muscles locked. For an instant absolute rigidity held him. And for that instant he fought hard against the frightening illusion that the awareness he had projected into the gun had been seized by the gun. The tool seized the man, merged with him, might never let him go.
Then every muscle from the shoulder down went limp. The arm dropped helpless to his side. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoot Mayall. He was conscious at the moment only of relief.
Above him in the window he saw Turner at the lever go suddenly rigid. Paralysis had struck him motionless in the middle of a gesture as
the Team moved in. He saw the back of the man's thick neck go red with congestion as the breath stopped in his frozen lungs. That meant the UHF was now going and the Team with it, in full, fast action. Within the next few seconds they would succeed—or fail. If they failed, probably Harding would never know it. If they succeeded, then Mayall would get his answer to that other question in a matter of minutes.
There might still be one chance for Harding. If he could hear the answer—
His rebellious arm was perfectly obedient when he sent the impulse downward to holster the gun. Rubbing the numbness from his muscles, he whirled in the illusion of the sunshine and tore the universe apart like a painted veil.
Blue air and lime-colored sea separated to let him through.
On the wall of the control room the TV screen showed Turner still rigid, back to the screen, his neck purple now. He was probably quite dead already.
Walking fast, Harding crossed the room, laid his hand on the lock plate of the inner door. He watched the door slide open.
Then he stepped into the little, dark-walled metal room, and the conflict ended as it had begun, with an image on a screen.
Mayall sat with his back to the door, leaning forward over the table, his hands flat on the plate. He was staring hard at the tri-di screen, and out of it the Composite Image of himself and his tools looked back.
It was beautiful and terrible—and the answer.
It was something Harding could not believe, and yet it came as no surprise, for given George Mayall as Harding knew him, what other answer could there have been but this?
The Integration Team was complete—seven thinking brains and the Integrator. But George Mayall was the only human being on the Team. The Composite Image glittering before him on the screen blended his outlines and theirs, merged his mind with their minds. But the six minds that met with Mayall at the Round Table on Akassi were machines. And Harding knew vividly the danger of machines.
Six mechanical brains, stored with knowledge out of human brains. But not humans themselves. Not beings who could ask questions or demand accountings from the one living human on the Team.
No one man had ever before controlled an Integrator single-handed, single-minded. No one man had ever dared try. And no sane man could do it. George Mayall had tried, and in his way succeeded. But his success was a failure more terrifying than any defeat could be.
Perhaps the most terrible thing of all was his attempt to create a Round Table with his seven mechanical storehouses of human knowledge. It would have been bad enough had he simply stored the knowledge away on tapes and drums. Even then it would be fearfully dangerous to draw upon it blindfolded, as he had to, because one man's mind can hold only so much, and it takes seven minds at least to balance an Integrator. Not seven storage drums of recorded fact, but seven human minds, alive, active, perpetually posing questions and arriving at flexible decisions as no mechanical brain has ever yet learned to do.
The mechanical brain must be balanced by human minds, or spin out of control. Or else it must draw a circle at the limits of arbitrary control, and destroy all growth outside the circle.
Out of the tri-di screen an Image looked back at Harding which made his mind go numb. It was the most I beautiful thing he had ever seen. He hated it more than I anything he had ever seen.
The Image had no face, and it had no eyes. But Mayall's burning black gaze looked out of it—somehow, impossibly—blended with the glittering masks of the machines in a synthesis so perfect no watcher could decode that total linkage. Seven component parts made up the Image. It glittered, it was smooth and shining, its fine, functional lines and perfect proportions made it a thing of unthinkable beauty. But you could not separate what of that Image was human and what was machine. The steel was one part flesh, the flesh six parts steel.
A man cannot blend and merge with machines and remain sane. Nor should the machine look back at its watcher out of human eyes, with rage and terror showing in lines of passionless steel. If it were possible for a machine to be mad from too close a contact with humanity, then these machines were as mad as the man who had forced them into the impossible unity of the Composite Image.
But the machines had their revenge. They had seized the man.
It was this Image which guided the lives and fortunes of sixty-one thousand humans upon Venus, and threatened the Solar Empire.
Out of the Composite Image George Mayall looked despairingly at Harding, trapped and desperate in his inchoate prison of steel. The man in the flesh sat three feet away from Harding, but the man in the Image was the real George Mayall. And Mayall was the machine.
Drowned, lost, hopeless in the steely beauty of the Image, Mayall's face looked back at Harding out of the bright, burning, multiple mask of the machines. There was helpless terror in the look, and a desperate appeal.
For Mayall had set up upon Akassi too strong a Team. He had laid out his defenses too well. And no one could break through to rescue him from the monster he had made and merged with. Mayall was the ultimate secessionist. He had seceded from the race of man.
Not now nor ever could Harding allow himself to injure a man who had once shared a Composite Image with him. But he lifted his revolver with a steady hand. It was no injury he was about to do Mayall now. Not any more. The time was long gone when death would be injury to George Mayall.
"I meant to tell you, George," Harding said to the Image in the screen, "why I'm here and who sent me. But it doesn't matter now, does it?" He centered the pistol upon the back of Mayall's head in the chair before him. That wasn't Mayall any more. Harding spoke only to the composite thing in the screen. "It makes no difference at all who sent me. It only matters that I'm here, and that I should wish that you should die, George. This was what you wanted, wasn't it?"
He was the gun. The trigger pressed backward of its own accord.
On the screen, steel suddenly shattered outward and blood gushed over the hard, bright face of the metal Image and spread down the metal breast.
The screen began to dim. The fading face upon it was all steel now.
When the last trace of humanity melted from the metal, and the last trace of the Image from the screen, Harding put his gun back in the holster. He had been in time, then. Mayall was merely the first.
He closed his mind to that terrifying thought, that inevitable possibility. It might not happen. It might never happen, as long as men were willing to accept defeat rather than win conquests at a cost which all mankind must pay.
Man is a rational animal that can ask questions, and fail, and go on again from failure. But Mayall had come close to creating a machine which could not fail. It could maintain optimum—an eternal, functional, inhuman optimum, guarding its charmed circle with perfectly adaptive defense against all attacks from men—as long as men lasted.
No, surely it was impossible. That blinding, beautiful foreshadowing upon the screen had been a promise and a threat, but fulfillment must never happen. Now or ever. Harding would have a job of destruction to do—dismantling of the robots, so the Integrator might function normally, harnessed and guided by a human Team which he could get from … no, that didn't matter. All that mattered was this.
Harding lifted his hand and touched his forehead gently. There the real Integrator lay. Once, a very long time ago, premen in the days of their unreason carried under their skulls brain-mechanisms of potentially great capacity. But at first they did not use them. Not until—something unknown—happened, and the flame of reason kindled in the waiting Integrator of the human brain. Homo sapiens—
Machina—?
Harding shook his head angrily. He turned toward the door, but on the threshold he paused to look back once, doubtfully, at the empty screen that was like a closed door on the wall.
The End
INDIVIDUAL
STORIES
GREATER GLORIES
Astounding Stories – September 1935
I.
SUNLIGHT beating upon his closed eyelids rou
sed him out of that cloud land which borders on the edge of nothingness. He opened his eyes wearily to a hot expanse of blue, and after a while dragged himself clear of the water and up a little along the sand. He slept.
When he woke the sun had moved on, leaving him in shadow, and he felt refreshed and rested, though very weak. He sat up and took stock of his surroundings. Blue—blue sky and blue sea, and the dazzle of sun on empty water. Out beyond the reef he could see the hulk of the splintered ship impaled on the rock that had been her undoing.
Except for himself the beach was bare. No break along its smooth surface spoke of a fellow survivor from last night's disaster. Well, no help for it. Only a miracle had saved him. Too much to hope for a double miracle. He got to his feet and faced inland. Jungle, tangled and flowery, stepped down to the sand in unbroken ranks.
They must have blown very far off their course, he thought. By all charts the seas were empty here. They could scarcely in one long night, however stormy, have blown far enough to reach land, even such an islet as this looked to be. By all accounts, this place did not exist. That ragged reef thrusting out of the breakers had been a stunning shock last night—land where no land should be.
He set off along the curving whiteness of the sand toward the right, walking slowly and scanning the sea's edge for signs of another castaway, hoping forlornly against hope that he was not alone. But no tracks broke the smoothness of the beach. He went a long way, sat down to rest and fell asleep for a while, a dizzy sleep that was half a swoon. On awakening he went on again with falling hopes. After a long time he thought he saw footprints ahead and broke into a shambling run, shouting. Bat when he stood over them he knew, they were his own tracks. He had completely circled the place, and he knew now that he alone had lived through the night.
He stood there in his own scattered footprints and stared out to sea, trying to orient himself. Where was he? What chances for a rescue? No use. Every attempt to locate the islet in his mind was frustrated by the very fact of its existence here, in a place which by rights should not exist. An islet—and there had been no land of any sort within days of their last position before the storm struck.
