Then they were all gone.
Hesitantly Gann entered the hall, laser guns ready, eyes darting about as he picked his way across the destroyed battleground.
There were distant bellowings still. Obviously there were still a few strays elsewhere in the underground palace of the Planner; but most of them were dead in this room. He hurried toward his unknown ally.
Machine General Abel Wheeler stepped stiffly out of the niche and moved toward him. There was a hard grin of victory on his face. He bolstered one gun and thrust out a hand with a motion like a piston to grasp Gann's extended clasp. "Well done, Major," he rasped.
'Thank you, sir. I had help. This is—"
The general's expression did not change. "I know Sister Delta Four," he boomed. "You may tell the Machine that I commend you, Sister. Please contact the Machine now and ascertain its condition. I fear this attack may have been intended to harm it!"
He grasped Gann's arm in a grip of steel and led him away. "Ugly creatures," he rasped, kicking at one enormous ripped cadaver. "Poetic justice, you might say. The Planner has always been fascinated by them. Interesting coincidence that they've appeared out of nowhere, here in his own home grounds." He glanced over his shoulder at Sister Delta Four, who was quickly chiming her tonal beads, setting up her linkbox. "See here, Gann. Look at this."
On the floor in front of the niche where General Wheeler had taken refuge there was a square of thick, creamy paper. "What is it, sir?"
"Pick it up, man! See for yourself!"
There were human voices, now, coming from the hall. The mighty forces of the Plan of Man were regathering themselves. Order was being restored.
Boysie Gann hesitated. Something was wrong. "The Planner?" he asked. "Is he ..." He looked around the great hall littered with the corpses of the invading pyro-pods and the human guards who had been trapped there.
"Not he, Major! Gone this half hour. Read that document!"
Gann, with a feeling that something was awry, leaned forward and retrieved the paper. He glanced at it.
Then the doubts and uncertainties dropped out of his mind. This paper was strangely familiar. He had seen one just like it—twenty billion miles away—in the hands of the dying Machine Colonel Zafar.
That had been the document they called the Writ of Liberation!
And this one was something almost as earthshaking in its importance, almost as dangerous to the Plan of Man.
Boysie Gann read swiftly, looked up at the silent carved face of General Wheeler wonderingly, then returned to the paper. It was headed To the Planner, and it said:
TO THE PLANNER, OR TO WHOEVER SUCCEEDS HIM IF HE IS NOW DEAD:
You and those who serve with you ignored my warning and discounted the dimming of the Sun.
I send you now a pack of beasts to show that my powers can do more than frighten. They will destroy much. They may yet destroy more.
If I send them again, it will not be to the headquarters of the Planner—if anything remains of that to be destroyed.
The next demonstration will occur in the vaults of the Planning Machine.
Gann looked up, his lips taut, his eyes narrowed. "The Planning Machine!" he said. "General, we must tell Sister Delta Four at once! This must be conveyed to the Machine immediately."
The general rasped, "That decision will be made by me, Major. What have you to say for yourself?"
Startled, Gann said, "Why—I don't know what you mean, General. I didn't have anything to do with ..." Then he saw that the general was no longer standing with his arms at his side. One hand held a laser gun again, and it was pointing at him.
"You're under arrest," clipped General Wheeler metallically. "Do not attempt to draw those weapons. Do not speak or move."
Gann opened his mouth, then closed it again. This was the overwhelming, culminating insanity of a fantastic experience. Himself under arrest!
But for what? He dared not even ask. The general's iron expression showed that he meant his orders to be obeyed.
Behind him, Boysie Gann heard the movements of the guards, coming near—and past them, a distant booming.
He recognized that sound. Another stray pyropod! He forgot his orders and cried: "General! There's another one."
General Wheeler rapped, "Be silent! I will not speak again! The men will take care of your beast!" His voice was queerly loud, Gann thought, even in his confusion— almost as if the general were speaking not to him, but to the roomful of witnesses.
But he could not help himself. He knew what one single pyropod could do, knew that even the Planner's guards might not be able to cope with it—and knew that in that room was the body and heart of the girl he loved, even though they might be inhabited by the cold, machinelike mind of Sister Delta Four. He whirled, drew his laser gun and was ready as the roar of the pyropod shrieked to the door of the room and the creature appeared.
Gann fired at the red eyes.
The guards were ready too, alerted by the sound and by Gann's quick action; they had turned and were firing. The creature was caught in a dozen bolts of destroying energy. It puffed into flame and exploded ...
And between Gann and the door, Sister Delta Four, whispering into her linkbox, fell silently forward. She dropped to the floor and did not move, though the linkbox hooted questioningly to her.
"She's hit!" cried Gann and, dropping his weapons, raced to her. He caught her up in his arms, and stared into her black eyes.
His hands were covered with blood. Along one side of her black robes a spreading patch of sticky moisture began to seep, clouding the bright electronic symbols, trickling to the floor.
There was no heartbeat.
He raised his eyes, stared vacantly at the approaching General Wheeler. "Is she dead?" he demanded, unable to take it in. "Was it my shot? Or ..." He paused, trying to remember. Had there been another pencil-thin lance of laser light coming from his side of the room? Had General Wheeler fired over his shoulder and shot Sister Delta Four?
But there was no time to think of that. The general was on him now, his face a metallic mask of sternness. "Disarm that man!" he rasped to the guards. "Take him before the Planner! I accuse him of bringing this document here! I accuse him of admitting the beasts we have destroyed. I accuse him of slaying Sister Delta Four to keep her from denouncing him. I accuse him of being the Starchild!"
Chapter 10
The battered veterans of the skirmish with the pyropods, limping out of the battlefield and taking the swift elevators to the surface, found the Planner standing like a jovial Santa Claus on a quartz-walled balcony, near the snowy summit of the mountain in which his headquarters was buried.
This was his eyrie, the great crow's-nest of his palace. He chuckled to General Wheeler, "They tried to get me and missed! They'll not have another chance! We'll wipe out every last lone rebel."
The general rasped, "Sir, here is your first traitor! This is the man who is responsible. I found him bearing this document."
Gann cried, "Planner, the general is lying! He knows I didn't—"
"Silence!" snapped the general.
The Planner did not even look at Gann. Smiling and nodding, he read the square of paper, then dropped it negligently to the floor. "You're sure he's the Starchild, General?" he asked.
"Consider the evidence, sir!" rapped the general. "One. He appeared originally in the vaults of the Machine, with no explanation of how he got there. Two. At the same time, the Writ of Liberation appeared, also unexplained. Three. He was bearing this document when I apprehended him. Four. He displayed a suspicious knowledge of the vulnerable spots on the pyropods when his own life was in danger. Five. He purposely slew Sister Delta Four, making it look like an accident, so that she could not speak against Mm. Six. He was about to do the same to me when I ordered the guards to disarm him. The conclusion, sir, is overwhelmingly indicated that Machine Major Boysie Gann is indeed the Starchild."
"But, sir," cried Gann.
The Planner gestured, and one of t
he guards wrenched his arm, forcing him to be quiet. 'That's better," chuckled the old Planner, beaming down on Boysie Gann. His dose of communion had clearly lasted him a long time; he was as bubbling with, good humor as if the Machine even now were shooting pleasure sensations into his brain. "Yet," said the Planner, smiling good-humoredly at General Wheeler, "one of the guards reported that it was you, not Gann, who killed the sister. Could you have been mistaken?"
"No, sir! Impossible, sir. I had no reason."
The Planner nodded cheerfully and scratched his plump old cheek. He got to his feet and went to the quartz wall of his eyrie, squinting out into the sunset sky. To windward of the summit, the descending sun picked out a towering crown of cumulus. Beyond the crystal parapet, its last rays shimmered on a small waterfall and tinted the falling slopes of evergreens.
"As a matter of fact," the Planner added over his shoulder, "Sister Delta Four is not dead." He stared smiling down the slopes toward a brown-smogged city below. "She is now in surgery. Her heart was destroyed, but circulation was restored before the brain was damaged. Even now a donor is being provided to replace her lost parts."
Boysie Gann cried joyfully, "Plan be thanked! Sir, she'll tell you that I knew nothing of the pyropods until she herself told me about them!"
"Silence!" rasped General Wheeler. "Guards! Your orders are to keep him quiet. I understand donors are needed for several of your wounded comrades. The first man who fails to keep the prisoner silent will be considered a volunteer!"
"Not so fast," said the Planner, chuckling. "Your zeal goes too far, General." His heavy-lidded eyes looked dark and as old as the lichen-crusted stone below the crystal wall as he gazed benignly toward the far city in the smog. "Let us Plan," he said, turning and smiling. "Let us decide What to do."
The Vice-Planner for Venus spoke up promptly: "Double the guards in the vaults of the Machine, sir. Institute maximum security measures, admitting no unauthorized person , , ." He broke off and scratched his enormous nose in puzzlement as he realized that neither Boysie Gann nor the pyropods had submitted to security check before entering the most heavily guarded places in the Plan of Man.
A male acolyte in the black robes of the Machine, listening to a subdued buzzing from his linkbox, raised his voice suddenly. "The Machine requires the services of the prisoner," he chanted. "The Machine instructs Machine General Wheeler that the prisoner is not to be harmed in any way that will affect his memory or his intellect."
Wheeler's expression was that of a steel-gray thundercloud. The Planner turned toward him, chuckling. "You have your orders, General," he said good-humoredly. "Be sure they are carried out. Do you know what those orders are, young man?" he added, turning with a bland expression of cheer to Boysie Gann.
"No, sir. But I stand ready to serve the Plan of Man!" "Oh, you do indeed," nodded the Planner. "In a very special way, as it happens. Major, you have been selected to replace Sister Delta Four. The Machine is about to permit you to receive training in its special service as an acolyte—and then communion!"
The heavy iron security collar was not enough for so precious an enemy of the Plan as Boysie Gann.
"You're not just a Risk," one of the guards explained solicitously. "See, we can't take a chance, Major. We don't want to blow your little head off. We don't want to kill you. We want to deliver you in one piece, right? So just stand still there while we put these cuffs on you ... and we'll take you to the training base ... and then, when the Machine's all finished with you, then we'll blow your head off!" And the guard snapped the fetters cruelly tight on Gann's wrists and started him moving with a shove.
They took him to a subtrain station first, and would not answer his questions. Was Julie Martinet all right? Why had General Wheeler lied? What was the Machine going to do with him? To each question there was only one response: "Shut up, you! Move on!"
But then there was nowhere to move. They were in the subtrain station, the great cold, vaulted shed where the enormous electron-flow-driven globes waited to carry their passengers through tunnels in the earth, across a continent or under a sea. But no globe was moving.
They brought Gann to a platform, ten security guards forming the detail that surrounded turn; then they waited. Boysie Gann could see that the station was a military base, because of the armored guard boxes beside the troughs, and because of the black Technicorps uniforms on everyone. That was understandable enough; this was the depot that served the Planner himself, the one nearest his tunneled-out mountain retreat. But what was not understandable was that there were neither arrivals nor departures.
Behind him, a track lock closed with a wheeze of leaking air. A Togetherness girl froze her automatic smile as she caught sight of his collar, and hurried past. The guards in their radar horns gazed vacantly after her.
"Look," said Boysie Gann, "what's the matter? What are we waiting for?"
"Shut up, you," growled a Machine Sergeant of the guards. But he had a worried look. One of his men said something to him; the sergeant replied in an undertone. All Gann could catch was: "... trouble in the tunnels somewhere. Now shut up. When they're ready for us, we'll know."
The great forty-foot bubbles waited silently in their passage cradles, and Boysie Gann stood regarding them. Wherever he was going, it was probably somewhere far away. Short-haul trips were seldom by way of the sub-trains. The great atomic drills of the Plan had tunneled straight-line passages from all major centers to all others, sometimes relayed, sometimes piercing nearly through the nickel-iron core of the Earth itself in a single non-stop thrust from Sidney, say, to Calcutta. The great freight and passenger globes reached speeds so great that Coriolis force was their principal adversary; the electrostatic hoops that banded the evacuated tunnels were double and triple strength on the side against which the earth's rotation tended to throw the spheres. Via the subtrains, no point on Earth was more than a few hours away from any other...
Boysie Gann became aware of a confused mutter of excitement, and focused his eyes on what was going on in the subtrain shed. A great dull freightsphere was sliding gently into the station, emerging from the mouth of a belt-ringed tunnel.
"About time they got ‘em going again," grumbled the Machine Sergeant. "All right, let's move out. They'll be letting us board now."
The sergeant was right. Within ten minutes they were hi a subtrain globe, settling down in a passenger compartment. But there was a wait of nearly a quarter of an hour more before Boysie Gann felt the gentle lurch that meant they had begun to move.
His guards were more relaxed, now that they were in the subtrain. Gann could not very well escape them now, not when there was nowhere to go but the interior of a forty-foot sphere, with nothing outside but great electrostatic hoops in an airless tunnel, whizzing by at speeds of thousands of miles an hour. A couple of the guards disappeared, came back with self-satisfied smiles, and relieved the others. Clearly there was a Togetherness canteen on the globe. Even the radar-horned sergeant looked somehow less inimical, more like a human being.
Above ah" things, Gann wished he knew what had happened to Sister Delta Four. There had been a moment there, while the pyropods were attacking, when she had seemed less like a cold-hearted servant of the Machine and more like the girl he had kissed at Playa Blanca. He dreamed of getting her back—of somehow winning favor with the Machine and receiving the great reward of Julie Martinet's release ...
It was only a dream. Considering his position now, it was an insane one.
Gann realized that he should be devoting every second's thought he could to planning—to trying to understand what had put him in this position, and what he could do. But it seemed quite hopeless. He had the giddy sensation that the universe had gone mad. From that first moment on Polaris Station, when he had followed Machine Colonel Zafar down to the methane snowball, events had carried him helplessly along; they made no sense to him, but there was nothing he could do to help interpret them. Their incomprehensibility was intrinsic. It was not that he was l
acking in comprehension, it was that the things which had happened were not to be understood in the sane, sensible terms of life under the Plan of Man... .
He felt a giddy sensation again, and this time it was not in his mind.
Boysie Gann leaped to his feet in alarm. He could not help thinking of the strange queasiness that had preceded his twenty-billion-mile drop into the Planning Machine's catacombs ... the same sensation, just before the pyropods struck...
But this was not the same thing at all. The lurching, twisting sensation he felt was simply explained. The sub-train car had come to a stop. It was hanging now, spinning slowly, between the charged hoops of its airless tunnel.
If Gann had been in any doubt, the cries from outside his room, the shouts of guards within, removed that doubt quickly. Everyone on the subtrain globe seemed to be shouting at once. "What's the matter?" "We've stopped!" "Great Plan, we're a couple of hundred miles down! The temperature—" "Help me! Let me out of here!" The voices were a confused babble, but they all had in common the warning knife edge of panic. There was terror on that subtrain car—terror that could not be calmed with words, for its base was all too real.
The Machine Sergeant comprehended the situation at once. With a jerk of his radar-horned head he bawled at his squad: "Come on, outside! Those sheep'll stampede if we don't keep ‘em in line!"
Boysie Gann was left alone. Outside he could hear the Technicorps guards shouting orders at the terrified travelers on the subtrain. No one seemed to know what had happened. They had stopped; that was all. Hundreds of miles below the surface of the earth, the rock outside hot enough to melt aluminum, the pressure great enough to crush diamonds into dust if the electrostatic hoops ever faltered—they were stopped. Whatever it was that had disrupted the service before they left the station was probably disrupting it again.
The Starchild Page 9
