Siebling’s ship continued to speed toward safety, and the matter should now have been one solely for the Armed Forces to handle. But Siebling imagined them pitted against the Sack’s perfectly calculating brain, and his heart sank. Then something happened that he had never expected. And for the first time he realized fully that if the Sack had let itself be used merely as a machine, a slave to answer questions, it was not because its powers were limited to that single ability. The visor screen in his ship lit up.
The communications operator came running to him, and said, “Something’s wrong, Mr. Siebling! The screen isn’t even turned on!”
It wasn’t. Nevertheless, they could see on it the chamber in which the Sack had rested for what must have been a brief moment of its existence. Two men had entered the chamber, one of them the unknown who had asked his questions in Prdl, the other Senator Horrigan.
To the apparent amazement of the two men, it was the Sack which spoke first. It said, ” `Good-by’ is neither a question nor the answer to one. It is relatively uninformative.”
Senator Horrigan was obviously in awe of the Sack, but he was never a man to be stopped by something he did not understand. He orated respectfully. “No, sir, it is not. The word is nothing but an expression—”
The other man said, in perfectly comprehensible Earth English, “Shut up, you fool, we have no time to waste. Let’s get it to our ship and head for safety. We’ll talk to it there.”
Siebling had time to think a few bitter thoughts about Senator Horrigan and the people the politician had punished by betrayal for their crime in not electing him. Then the scene on the visor shifted to the interior of the spaceship making its getaway. There was no indication of pursuit. Evidently, the plans of the human beings, plus the Sack’s last-minute advice, had been an effective combination.
The only human beings with the Sack at first were Senator Horrigan and the speaker of Prdl, but this situation was soon changed. Half a dozen other men came rushing up, their faces grim with suspicion. One of them announced, “You don’t talk to that thing unless we’re all of us around. We’re in this together.”
“Don’t get nervous, Merrill. What do you think I’m going to do, double-cross you?”
Merrill said, “Yes, I do. What do you say, Sack? Do I have reason to distrust him?”
The Sack replied simply, “Yes.”
The speaker of Prdl turned white. Merrill laughed coldly. “You’d better be careful what questions you ask around this thing.”
Senator Horrigan cleared his throat. “I have no intentions of, as you put it, double-crossing anyone. It is not in my nature to do so. Therefore, I shall address it.” He faced the Sack. “Sir, are we in danger?”
“Yes.”
“From which direction?”
“From no direction. From within the ship.”
“Is the danger immediate?” asked a voice.
“Yes.”
It was Merrill who turned out to have the quickest reflexes and acted first on the implications of the answer. He had blasted the man who had spoken in Prdl before the latter could even reach for his weapon, and as Senator Horrigan made a frightened dash for the door, he cut that politician down in cold blood.
“That’s that,” he said. “Is there further danger inside the ship?”
“There is.”
“Who is it this time?” he demanded ominously.
“There will continue to be danger so long as there is more than one man on board and I am with you. I am too valuable a treasure for such as you.”
Siebling and his crew were staring at the visor screen in fascinated horror, as if expecting the slaughter to begin again. But Merrill controlled himself. He said, “Hold it, boys. I’ll admit that we’d each of us like to have this thing for ourselves, but it can’t be done. We’re in this together, and we’re going to have some navy ships to fight off before long, or I miss my guess. You, Prader! What are you doing away from the scout visor?”
“Listening,” said the man he addressed. “If anybody’s talking to that thing, I’m going to be around to hear the answers. If there are new ways of stabbing a guy in the back, I want to learn them too.”
Merrill swore. The next moment the ship swerved, and he yelled, “We’re off our course. Back to your stations, you fools!”
They were running wildly back to their stations, but Siebling noted that Merrill wasn’t too much concerned about their common danger to keep from putting a blast through Prader’s back before the unfortunate man could run out.
Siebling said to his own men, “There can be only one end. They’ll kill each other off, and then the last one or two will die, because one or two men cannot handle a ship that size for long and get away with it. The Sack must have foreseen that too. I wonder why it didn’t tell me.”
The Sack spoke, although there was no one in the ship’s cabin with it. It said, “No one asked.”
Siebling exclaimed excitedly, “You can hear me! But what about you? Will you be destroyed too?”
“Not yet. I have willed to live longer.” It paused, and then, in a voice just a shade lower than before, said, “I do not like relatively non-informative conversations of this sort, but I must say it. Good-by.”
There was a sound of renewed yelling and shooting, and then the visor went suddenly dark and blank.
The miraculous form of life that was the Sack, the creature that had once seemed so alien to human emotions, had passed beyond the range of his knowledge. And with it had gone, as the Sack itself had pointed out, a tremendous potential for harming the entire human race. It was strange, thought Siebling, that he felt so unhappy about so happy an ending.
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Document creation date: 03.04.2011
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The Sack Page 3
