by Set Wagner
I impulsively reached out to hug her, but she walked over to the sofa and sat in the corner, her blanket pulled up to her chin. Her tousled hair fell across her face—a face unnaturally strained in an unsuccessful effort to hide her tension. A look of dread ignited the dilated black pupils in her pale eyes, making them appear almost phosphorescent
“You’re not cold,” I said hoarsely.
“No—I’m terrified!”
“Of what?”
She looked at me as if expecting me to read the answer on her face. Unfortunately, I only understood that it was very important to find out what was troubling her. Now! I sat next to her—slowly, cautiously, and somehow aware that any wrong or abrupt move would drive her away. At the same time, I had an oppressive feeling of guilt: this woman who so moved me had come to me for comfort, but instead of giving her that comfort, I found myself scrutinizing her reactions. All my seeming delicacy had only one purpose—to provoke her to confide something that was obviously very painful for her.
“Come on, Elia,” I slightly touched the tips of her fingers, white from squeezing the blanket. “You have to tell me!”
“Do I really have to?” She cowered even further into the corner of the sofa. “That’s exactly what I’m not sure of. I don’t know. Who are you really?”
“Just before you came I asked myself the same question but about a Yusian. We, at least, are both humans.”
“What difference does that make?” Her head sunk heavily. “Humans, Yusians. The mystery is still the same. Or almost the same: What is this person in front of me?”
“After all, there comes a moment when we have no choice, when we have to believe, even if we are blindfolded in some way.”
“Have to? As if you can order yourself to believe!”
“Listen, Elia.” I quit being delicate. “I don’t know exactly what has been frightening you lately—you and Vernie, and Reder too, it seems. What is obvious to me is that the thing you fear hasn’t happened yet. So it’s up to you whether it happens or not. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here in this state of painful hesitation. I’m telling you now: give it up! All of you give up—”
“How can you give such advice with no idea what you are talking about!” she exclaimed.
“Because I already know the way you think, which is enough for me to imagine the general nature of what you might be planning to do. I have no doubts that it will be wrong, irreparable, and if Reder is involved, repulsive as well!”
“Reder.” Elia closed her eyes. “He made me show you the deserted base, and then obviously he discharged the transformer to keep us near there longer. He was sure we wouldn’t go near the whale once that digging program began. Yes, yes! He explained it to me in detail. He didn’t intend to kill us! He just wanted to divert your attention—”
“To divert my attention from what?”
“From…our…job, which is strictly secret.”
After offering this empty answer, Elia suddenly lost control of herself, sobbing desperately in self-accusation. I watched her for some time, suspecting that once again she was the one trying to divert my attention. But she was so obviously suffering, her tears flowing so spontaneously and uncontrollably down her face, that only a maniac would doubt them.
My heart melted at her pain. Suddenly I was holding her closely in my arms, kissing the tears away from her wet, frightened face. The blanket slid from her shoulders, and I felt her soft hands caressing me timidly, hopefully, asking for tenderness. I gently lifted her, as if she were something extremely precious and delicate, and carried her to the bedroom.
“I hate the Yusians, Terry!” she whispered, still trembling. “You have to understand that—I hate them.”
Part Four
Chapter 34
The day set for the tests of the defractor turned out to be painful for me from the very beginning. I was almost sure the forthcoming event causing such apparent fear in Elia and Vernie was going to be included in some way in these tests; should I interfere and stop them, without even knowing what it was? Did I have any right to interfere? After all, people here were only doing their jobs. Well, yes or no?
After a long hesitation, the decision I finally made was actually predetermined from the very beginning: I started doing my job—by retrieving from the safe my notebook with the plan of my report to Franklin, despite my doubts from last night. On the one hand, the balance between the written, implied, and withheld information depended on whether I was going to send the report through Chuks or not send it at all, but, on the other hand, the answer to this question fully depended on achieving that balance.
I finished the report at noon, still without a clearer answer about my intentions than I had this morning. I put the notebook in the pocket of my jacket and then stood on the balcony, trying to catch a sound from the defractor, which was between three and four kilometers away from the lodge. I should have been able to hear at least the roar of the plasma generators, but either they weren’t functioning yet, which was unlikely, or they had mufflers, which was even more unlikely.
I went to the kitchen and made lunch for Jerry and me, but he hardly touched his, upset that I had shown him so little attention today. I petted him, thinking that he would probably have felt better with Elia. Then I put my jacket on and left the apartment, but I heard such desperate whining from inside that I went back in and took the frightened puppy with me.
Both of us were in low spirits as we descended the stairs to the front door, where we almost bumped into one of the robots, who had started silently walking behind us. I didn’t like his presence at all. I stopped. He stopped as well. I took a few steps, and he did the same.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I want to keep an eye on you,” he answered.
“Why?”
“So I have been ordered.”
“By whom and when?”
“By the base commander, yesterday, at eleven p.m.”
In other words, Larsen had his reasons to suppose I would try meeting with Chuks and decided to prevent that. He must have attached the robot to me as soon as I returned to the lodge. Unfortunately, this was the direct effect of “showing my cards” to him, to a human. What was it going to be with a Yusian?
I started walking Jerry to the base complex, the robot rumbling along behind us. My nerves couldn’t stand him walking behind my back. I turned around.
“Walk on the side—two meters from me!” I said, and he obeyed.
Instead of heading straight to the administrative building, I stopped at the parking lot. I approached one of the shuttles to see how the robot would react; he hurried to stand in front of me. “I won’t let you leave the base until I’m released from this duty,” he explained in a monotone.
“And what exactly can you do to prevent me from leaving the base?”
“I have the right to do anything.”
“Including force?”
“Yes.”
“Would you kill me if you had to?”
The robot seemed to think about that. “I would kill you, but only by accident,” he finally said.
“Very well!” I murmured dejectedly, and Jerry, echoing my mood, snarled at the imperturbable robot.
We kept going without exchanging a word, entered the administrative building and crossed its inappropriately furnished vestibule, walked next to each other along the corridor decorated like an art gallery, and stopped at the server room. I opened the door and tried to close it once Jerry and I entered, but the robot blocked the doorway. I had no choice but to let him in. Then I pointed at the most distant corner: “You can keep an eye on me from there.”
He walked backward to the corner, never taking his eyes off me. He might be of Yusian origin, but he still obeyed Larsen’s order to the letter. I asked myself how to get rid of him when I needed to and couldn’t come up with an answer.
I sat at one of the monitors, using all my patience to go through the series of complicated procedures demanded in order to copy on
a disk the file with Stein’s research results that was already in my restricted data bank. When I finally succeeded, I scanned my report from the electronic notebook and recorded it onto the same disk, making sure I left no copy of it on the server.
Now came the hardest thing: deciding what I would do with the disk. For a start, no doubt, I needed to guess, if at all possible, how Chuks would respond to its content. I turned the monitor so that the robot couldn’t see it and gave a command to bring up Stein’s file.
“hans stein, biophysics, exobiology, a member of the team at Eyrena base, first expedition.” In brief, the professional title and responsibilities of a dead man. Then his words and phrases—his thoughts—began rolling mechanically across the screen, each given equal weight, something that the human brain subconsciously rejects. To me, instead, some words seem to scroll by faster and easier, while others stayed longer before my eyes, as if demanding that I think them over and pay special attention:
Long, long ago their history turned into an ongoing series of small successes in serving the system—each basically repetitive and insignificant—events devoid of individuality, merely a mass of anonymous statistical data.
For thousands of years, they have been living without conflicts, in feigned satisfaction and growing apathy. They explored the galaxy like automatons, developing more and more new planets without discovering anything fundamentally new about any of them. Until they suddenly bump into us.
The encounter is now ten years old. But the contact they seek—is it possible at all with so many significant differences between us?
We are becoming victims of our fanatic anthropocentrism. Maybe the Yusians will be as well, but that is hardly a comforting thought.
We can’t even imagine how lonely they are.
I stopped reading the material late in the afternoon. Jerry had long ago fallen asleep on my lap, and I had long ago lost confidence in my plan. Now I agreed that entrusting this disk to any Yusian would be a betrayal. While Stein could have erred in certain aspects of his scientific research, his descriptions of our social and ethical relations with the Yusians were absolutely right. He was telling the simple truth, without hiding anything, and it wasn’t always flattering for either the Yusians or us.
My report also started to seem inadmissibly right and straightforward, challenging and breaking the rules of diplomacy. For better or worse, seeking “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is essential, but it’s also infuriating to discover truths that shatter cherished illusions and dangerous to convey such truths. Why did I think we and the Yusians needed that? Maybe Zung, by drawing a curtain of flattering deceptions and half truths between us, was much more farsighted than I. At least his approach reduced the risk of direct, open conflict. As my boss says, “Sometimes the distorted image can only be clearly seen in a distorted mirror.”
I put my electronic notebook and the disk in the inside pocket of my jacket and gave a command to delete my order for copying Stein’s file. “not possible” was the reply displayed on the screen. I checked the range of the prohibition and when it had been given. It applied to absolutely all kinds of deletions and everybody on the base, and it was given on the first day the server was put into service—seven months ago. This added yet another detail that corroborated what I already knew: Reder had saved Stein’s file in his computer only because it contained an order to copy his research results. Because that order for the microdisk provided a direct, crucial proof against the only person here who could override the prohibition and erase it from the server—against the killer, whose name I had known since yesterday.
I woke Jerry, and we left the room, still followed by the robot. If Larsen knew the robot was Yusian, could he still have given him the same order? I thought for a while before concluding that yes, he could have, and that realization made me shudder!
I was almost sure Larsen wasn’t in his office but went there anyway. To my surprise, it was unlocked. I peeked in. On the day of the most significant tests that had been made on Eyrena by humans, at the moment when all their hardest efforts would culminate in either success or failure, the base commander was slumped over his desk, his chin in his palms, his hair messy. Maybe he was drowsing.
“Why are you here?” I blurted out in my surprise.
“You too can come in.” Larsen slightly smiled at the puppy.
“Well, yes, the three of us!” I angrily pointed to the robot.
“SN Forty-Five, you wait outside,” Larsen told him, and the robot remained in the corridor.
I approached the desk. “You owe me some explanations, Larsen,” I began threateningly but fell silent once I looked carefully at his face.
No, he wasn’t drowsing—in fact, he obviously hadn’t even slept last night. His eyes looked old and bleak, devastated. His forehead was creased in a grimace that looked etched in as if held so long it had frozen into a mask. His lips were cracked as after a high fever.
“What’s wrong with you?” I lowered my voice unintentionally. “Did something happen?”
He just stretched out his hands. They were trembling.
“How are the tests going?” I worried, suspecting the worst. “Were there complications?”
“The tests?” Larsen looked surprised. “They haven’t started yet.”
“Why? Did you postpone them?”
“No. They will start.” He glanced at the window. “Soon.”
I looked out too. Low in the western sky the bright-yellow ball of Ridon was setting. “But what are you waiting for?” I exclaimed and the next minute answered myself. They were waiting for the rise of Shidexa!
Chapter 35
“Open the safe!” I abruptly turned to Larsen. “Now!”
He didn’t even move. It was obvious that his thoughts were elsewhere. Maybe on the choice he had made long ago—before they began building that satanic defractor—and on the related choice he couldn’t find the strength to make now.
“I can’t take your side,” he admitted, avoiding my eyes. “Nor can I take their side. I don’t know—who is right.”
“But when you shot Fowler and Stein you knew, is that what you’re saying?”
“And you? When you shot Odesta?”
“None of that! Open your safe, Larsen! I’m taking charge of the base, starting now!”
He obviously felt relief when I said this, relieved that someone else was taking over the huge responsibility and was going to decide for him. I was shocked: How could a dignified and no doubt brave man to be brought to such degradation, such moral disgrace, in only a few months?
It wasn’t necessary to threaten him with my flexor. He was paralyzed by his overwhelming dilemma and now could only obey orders. He went to the wardrobe, so grotesquely ornate, and opened the doors. As I expected, he had filled it with a huge safe. When he unlocked it, I saw enough weapons and explosives to destroy a whole base—human or Yusian.
Among more harmless items on the top shelf there were a few pairs of handcuffs. I took one pair and had Larsen leave his flexor there. Then he returned to his computer and officially transferred his authority to me. Despite his submissive behavior, I had no intention of trusting him. I locked one handcuff around his wrist and attached the other to the metal grid of the fireplace, where even today, like some lurid joke, heatless artificial flames continued to flicker.
I entered an official note into the base log: “Berg Larsen, I, Terence Simon, hereby arrest you for the murders of Andrew Fowler and Hans Stein.”
I took an Adler explosive with a neutrino detonator from the safe, which I locked afterward using my own code, and then crossed to the door. After I ordered Jerry to sit behind the desk, I turned to Larsen again. He was slumped on the ceramic ledge of the fireplace, listlessly gazing into the “fire,” his cheek leaning on his palm. I opened the door.
The robot was no longer in the corridor but outside, again literally obeying the given order. I stood in front of him.
“SN Forty-Five, report the last recei
ved order!”
He responded promptly: “A general order to Eyrena base given at nineteen hundred thirteen hours on all information channels: all authority, privileges, and responsibilities of the base commander are transferred immediately to special inspector Terence simon.”
“Fine. Here is your next order, highest priority! Initiate self-destruct sequence in thirty seconds!”
The robot made a strange hissing noise, stepped to the wall, and knelt down. His body began shaking, as though it had sustained a fatal electric shock, and collapsed without any visible changes. I approached it and removed the energy battery from its chest. For good measure, I then discharged my flexor into its head.
On my way to the so-called infirmary, I didn’t meet anybody, human or robot. I used the flexor again to open the door, went downstairs, and entered the morgue. I passed the bodies of Odesta, Fowler, and Stein and then took a few steps toward the transporter that I knew was on my side of the room, since two days earlier, I had availed myself of it. Like the one on the hill, it was carefully disguised. When I uncovered it, the plate—covered with frost—rose up, and the platform surfaced. I stepped on it, and after the program paused, it automatically descended.
Soon I was in the gallery far beneath the planet’s surface. I managed to find the light switch, turned it on, and started walking. I noticed that there were more restraining nets than yesterday; I saw new areas with fresh cement, and the ventilation system had been cleaned and worked much better. Obviously a lot of finishing work had been done here during the last two days, mainly by the imperfect, but definitely non-Yusian, REM robots.
When I approached the surgery room, I hung the remote detonator of the Adler explosive under my shirt. I attached the mechanism to one of the supporting pillars and took out the flexor again. I put it in my left hand and placed my right hand on the monitor by the gate. In three seconds, the electronic system recognized my new identity, and the metal wings of the gate silently opened before me. I went in.
