by Jerry
Again it seemed to him he heard the bitter ring of brass.
But when she spoke again her manner was changed and the life was back in her voice, whether by deliberate effort or not he could not know.
“They let Patricia visit me this morning. The bullet only grazed her knee and it will be well in a week or two. You and I and Patricia will leave soon on the Vanguard. To go to Earth.”
“To Earth? What—”
“When they psycho-probed me they learned I had wanted to go back to Earth. Now, they said, they’re going to take me there because they want me to be happy.”
“That’s wonderful, Nona.” He tried hard to put life in his voice. “I’m glad they’re trying to make you happy.”
He looked at the utter bareness of the room and could not force himself to finish. There were no chairs or bed, no food tray or water pitcher, no table or books or flowers—nothing but the blank, gray walls and the blank, gray floor. A machine could not use the things a living person needed to be happy.
The silence lengthened and he tried to find something to say. “We’ve been away from Earth a long time.”
It was a pointless remark, having no bearing on the dark and lonely emotions which he could not express.
“Yes, a long time,” she said. “It has been over ten years.”
Again there was a silence in which he could find nothing to say to her. The past was gone, never to be recaptured, the present was an emptiness, the future a mockery.
The guard opened the door and said, “You will come with me now.”
He looked back when he reached the door. She was still standing by the window, the one single object in the gray, empty room.
He was taken outside, to a waiting Guard car. It did not go down the long, dark road to the prison but the other way, to the spaceport.
There the Vanguard was almost ready to lift, four days ahead of schedule. He saw that most of those hurrying up the boarding ramp were doctors and technicians from Cybernetics Center.
It could have but one meaning: Marmon’s serious condition had suddenly grown worse and the cybernetics staff which had performed the successful brain transfer in Venus City had been ordered to Earth to give the dying Marmon near-immortality. Nona would be studied all the way, to check every last possibility of failure, and he was being taken in case he was needed to give Nona the impression that all was well and normal. And somewhere on the ship they would have Patricia for the same reason.
He met Patricia in the ship’s elevator, standing as far from her guard as she could, her young face set in such lines of hurt and hatred that he thought at first she did not see him. But when the elevator started to lift and the sounds of voices and machinery behind the thin-walled compartments they passed afforded protection, she spoke in a quick, savage whisper:
“Nona—I saw her before the ambulance came. The doctors could have saved her. They killed her for their experiment, Johnny. Home and Felder—damn them, damn them!—they had the doctors kill her!”
The elevator stopped with a jerk and the guards shoved them outside, to take them down different corridors. He was locked in a bare, cell-like compartment, there to move restlessly about as he thought of what Patricia had told him.
It had been hard enough, at best. Now, to learn they had deliberately let her die for their own purposes.
They had needed a cooperative mind with which to test their new technique. Cooperative minds would have been very rare among the Workers who had been injured and maimed in the service of Technorder. But Nona, gentle and intelligent, incapable of deceit or desire for violence, would have had the mind ideal for their purpose; a mind that would try to adjust to its new body as Marmon’s mind would want to adjust to his new body.
So Nona, too tender of heart to kill even a rain moth, was being used to show them how to give a bloody tyrant a thousand more years of life.
The ship trembled and gravity pulled at him as it lifted. Time went by as it climbed the hundreds of miles up through the atmosphere, the singing of the hull diminishing as the atmosphere thinned. He felt it clear the atmosphere and heard the drives cut off as the time came to go into the interplanetary warp, through which Earth was only one day away.
Then, abruptly, the drives thundered into full force again and there came the falling sensation that always accompanied the shift into the warp.
He tensed for what was coming, thinking in wild amazement: What do they mean?
The drives exploded as the force field of the warp inclosed the ship, in the way an overloaded shotgun might explode when fired under water. The ship leaped, flinging him to the floor, then leaped again as the convertors exploded and the stern half of the ship was riddled and smashed.
Then there was silence, and what seemed to be absolute motionlessness. But he knew the wrecked ship was not motionless. Already it would be starting the fall back to Venus; slowly at first, to go faster and faster until it would go screaming down through the atmosphere as molten metal.
His guard came for him ten minutes later, his wooden face an ashy color. The elevators were without power and he was taken down through the manways. He heard the voices of frightened passengers as he went, the crying of a child, the dazed voice of an officer saying to someone, “I heard the captain’s order on my own extension. ‘Full drive’ he ordered, then he put us into the warp and shot himself.”
All the lifeboat berths had been riddled, the boats rendered useless except for a tiny five-passenger model that had been designed for ship-to-ship missions.
Home and Felder were already inside; Home cold and composed, Felder looking back in sweaty-faced relief at the pale and hushed guards and crewmen who would soon be transformed into incandescence along with the Vanguard.
Nona was pleading with Home:
“Let me stay. Let somebody else be saved in my place.”
“No,” Home said shortly, but there was an expression like satisfaction on his face. “We still have use for you. Get into the boat.”
She hesitated and Home suggestively touched a thing like a large black button that was strapped to his wrist. “Or do you want me to deactivate you and have you carried in?”
She said quickly, “No!” and went into the boat, to sit beside Felder at Home’s command. Johnny saw that Felder, too, had a deactivator button on his wrist. Patricia was ordered in next, to sit beside Home. Then Home lifted a pistol and gestured at Johnny with it.
“We have use for you, too, Freedomist,” Home said. “This boat’s limited range will land us somewhere in the unsettled country east of Venus City. Since you know that country and can use a blaster rifle, you will guide us to the nearest point of rescue. The girl is being taken along as hostage to guarantee your cooperation.”
“I see,” he said. “I’m supposed to kindly save your scared hides and then you’ll go ahead and have the kid executed anyway.”
Home’s thin mouth tightened even more but he said without emotion.
“She was a minor and unimportant member of the Freedomist underground, not a dangerous threat to us as you were. So her sentence will be reduced to labor in one of the prison camps if your cooperation is satisfactory.”
It would be life for Patricia, a hard life but life, better than dying so soon in the Vanguard.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
He did not ask about his own future. He knew that they would kill him as soon as his services were no longer needed.
Hours later they climbed the first rocky ridge, the fog closing in on them and giving the late afternoon the darkness of evening. Behind them, lost from view, the lifeboat was sinking in the quicksand at the swamp’s edge.
Somewhere to the northeast the Vanguard had already met its fate, roaring down through the clouds like a fiery meteor and into the Northern Sea.
Johnny walked in the lead, the heavy blaster rifle cradled in his arms. Home had given him flat and deadly warning about it: “If you ever face us while carrying it or let your fingers g
et near the firing controls, the girl will be shot instantly.” Patricia walked behind him, limping as she tried to favor the wounded knee. Home walked behind Patricia, his pistol at her back. Felder brought up the rear, the portable transmitter in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Nona walked beside him, silently, and he wondered again what her thoughts might be. She could not help but know how their last journey together would end.
They came suddenly to an outcropping of copper ore. The claws of Diggers had ripped through the hard quartz as though it were clay. Slabs of country rock had been thrown back, to get deeper into the vein, slabs that weighed thousands of pounds. It had all been done very recently.
They detoured around the tumbled slabs and Home’s tone was momentarily without its curtness as he asked, “Diggers did that?”
“About an hour ago,” Johnny answered, not looking back. “They’ll still be in this vicinity.”
Home said no more but Johnny could imagine him and Felder mentally reviewing the three-dimensional pictures they would have seen of the Venusian Diggers: things like three-ton armor-plated dragons, half inorganic, with silicon-carbide tipped claws and teeth and massive jaws that could crush granite boulders. They lived on minerals and were especially fond of the phosphorus in human bones. They would follow a human trail for days and nothing short of the beam of a blaster rifle, at a range no greater than one hundred and fifty feet, could penetrate their armor.
And neither Home nor Felder had ever fired a blaster rifle, the controls of which were so complex that only an experienced man could have the shadow of a chance against a Digger charge.
They stopped just short of the top of the ridge. Johnny laid the blaster rifle on the ground and Patricia sat down at Nona’s feet, to retie the awkward knee bandage. Felder set the transmitter down and Home said to Johnny:
“See if it’s safe to stop here long enough to send the messages.”
Nona went with him to the ridge top. Tall bushes grew thickly there, to hide them from anything that might be ahead or to either side.
He waited while Nona studied the country before them. The fog was a thick gray shroud to his eyes, through which he could see only a short distance, but Nona’s robot eyes, like the eyes of the Diggers, could penetrate the fog by seeing in wave lengths of light far beyond those of human vision.
He touched her shoulder, the shining metal that could not feel his touch, and asked, “Do you see anything, Nona?”
She looked up at him, reminding him again of the night long ago when there had been a Technorder-forbidden play and she had been Joan of Arc. It helped that way, to imagine that she was Joan of Arc in armor again and that at any moment she might throw back the metal visor and her own face would look poignantly beautiful into his.
“There are no Diggers in sight,” she answered. “In the distance ahead of us is a range of mountains, with what seems to be a V-shaped pass in the middle. Is that the pass we want?”
“Yes. I don’t even have a compass. You’ll have to lead us all the way and watch for Diggers, too.”
“I can lead us straight to it,” she said.
He left her standing on guard and went back to the others. “It’s safe for the time being,” he told Home.
Home spoke to Felder. “I’ll order a rescue truck sent from Venus City, then I’ll have them connect me with Technorder Capital.”
He turned his gray-frost eyes on Johnny. “I presume you know that if you are taking us through these mountains merely to delay your execution, you will deeply regret it?”
“Yes, I believe you’ve mentioned that several times before. It happens to be a fact that the nearest point a rescue truck can meet us is a place just beyond the pass called Silent Valley. The truck can’t come through the pass. Not even the Diggers can go through it.”
Home knelt by the transmitter without further comment and Johnny moved back to lean against a high boulder. Felder was sitting near the blaster, the muzzle of his pistol staring at Johnny like a little empty eye.
Nona was still standing on guard, a motionless steel statue, and Patricia was watching her with longing on her face as she tried again to accept the fact that the mind which spoke to her through the cold metal was all there would be of her sister.
For himself there had been the same longing even though he knew it was based on an illusion. It was a strange and haunting feeling. The voice that spoke to them was Nona’s and it was as though Nona were very close and real; there just behind the steel barrier, just beyond the touch of their hands and the sight of their eyes.
There was a soft crunch of gravel as Patricia came over to sit down beside him. She pressed her hand against her hurt knee and rested her head against his leg, a lonely, frightened child despite her seventeen years. Felder watched her with an expression of faint amusement. Home had completed his calls and was waiting for the response from Earth, tapping his fingers impatiently against the transmitter.
“They should answer any minute,” Home said to Felder. “They know that—”
Something screamed in one of the invisible canyons to their right; a hooting, reverberating shrieking with an undertone like the rumble of thunder—a Digger. An answering scream came out of the fog to their left, blasting at their eardrums with its startling closeness.
Patricia scrambled pale-faced to her feet, clutching at Johnny’s arm. Felder sat rigid, staring open-mouthed toward the source of the second scream. Home swung in alarmed question to Nona.
Her bright steel face was looking down at them. “Two bands of Diggers are in sight.” Then, with a touch to her voice that sounded like terror, “Please hurry. Both bands have started toward us!”
Of them all it was Nona who would know the most horror if the Diggers found them. There would be no quick and final death for her. The Diggers would tear off her arms and legs and destroy her robot eyes but her brain and artificial heart were encased in thick eternalloy, immune to any destructive force short of the beam of a blaster rifle. She would lie there, blind and incapable of movement, thinking the same endless circle of thoughts over and over as the decades and centuries went by.
“Home—Home?”
The transmitter spoke in the impatient voice of a sick and imperious old man—David Marmon. Home moved quickly to answer:
“Yes, here. I’ve been waiting to give you the last report. I understand that your transfer will take place immediately afterward.”
“What is your report?” There was hope and eagerness in Marmon’s tone. “Is the woman still reacting normally?”
“In all respects. She wanted to remain on the ship and let someone be saved in her place, a desire perfectly in keeping with her former personality. Her intelligence and drives were not altered in the slightest by the brain transfer. We have checked that constantly and thoroughly.”
“Good, very good.” There was relief and satisfaction in Marmon’s tone. “The computers were right, as usual, when they predicted that. Now,” Marmon’s tone changed, “the surgo-cybernetics staff here at Capital assure me that absence of the Venus City staff is not important. There was only the question of the effect of the transfer. I wanted to know for sure that I would still be the same.”
“We have verified that beyond doubt,” Home said.
“There are many things I can do in a thousand years. One will be to destroy the last trace of Freedomist resistance.”
“What about their plan to attack Capital?” Home asked.
“We now know their entire attack plan. I think I’ll send the robot A-bombers into them this time. The radiations will be a nuisance afterward in that area but it will give the Freedomist sympathizers there something to remember.
“Now,” Marmon coughed wheezingly, “they’re waiting to take me to the operating room. Call me as soon as you reach Venus City. I want to know that the Freedomists behind the sabotage of the Vanguard are found and publicly executed, together with their most remote sympathizers.”
Thunder crashed overhead as Ho
me acknowledged the termination and close behind it came the low, tense voice of Nona from her place on the ridge:
“The Diggers are almost on us. Hurry! Hurry!”
They obeyed her without delay. Johnny picked up the blaster and Nona led the way in a run down the other side of the ridge. Patricia followed Johnny and Home and Felder came behind her with their pistols in their hands, leaving the transmitter to growl with static to itself on the ridge.
They were in the valley when the rain and lightning storm struck the iron ridge behind them. The thunder was a steady rumble and the lightning a glittering glow through the fog but in the valley there was only an occasional drop of rain. Home called a halt, breathing heavily.
“What will the lightning do to the Diggers?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Johnny answered. “They’re immune to it.”
Home glanced up at the darkening sky. “What if they should attack us after dark?”
“The blaster would be almost useless against Diggers I couldn’t see. Our only hope of living through the night is not to let them see us, and they can see as well in the dark as in daytime.”
Home was thoughtfully silent. The random drops of rain began to fall faster, suddenly a downpour. It was then that the Diggers on the ridge broke into a wild clamor of hooting and shrieking, a clamor that carried an undertone of anticipation.
Johnny replied to the startled, questioning look on the faces of Home and Felder.
“They’ve found the transmitter and know now that humans are in the vicinity. Our trail is rain-washed but they’ll still be able to follow it in a walk for the rest of the night.”
“Then,” Home said, rising, “we’ll travel as far as we can before dark. In line!”
They stopped a few minutes before complete darkness for Felder to chain Johnny’s wrists together. In that position he could continue to carry the blaster but his hands could not go around the firing controls.
The darkness was so complete by the time Felder had chained Patricia’s wrists that he had to use his pencil light to check his work. Home was breathing more heavily than before and they rested a while at his order.
