“We must declare a cease-fire, then send an emissary to reach an accommodation with it, before it is too late.”
There was silence while Gregor and Radigast looked at each other. Gregor stopped the recording again. Then he unplugged the unit from the holostage console that rose from his cabin’s floor, and sat weighing it in his hand. “I don’t think he-it can hear us now.”
“This is like a bad joke,” the admiral commented. “First he won’t talk, then he resigns, and then he finally decides to give some orders. Completely crazy ones.”
“Agreed. But I still think we had better hear the rest of this.”
“Agreed.”
Gregor switched the unit on again. Meeting the eyes of the small Belgola-image, he asked it clearly:
“Whom did you have in mind as your replacement, Mr. President?”
The half familiar face seemed to briefly beam approval of the question. “As I said before, our situation being new, we must think anew. I intend to resign the presidency in favor of Logos.”
Gregor touched a switch, and the image died again.
“As bad as that,” the admiral muttered. “Now he’s rewriting the Constitution. Or his word processor is. Motherless Logos has already taken over. Gregor, are you seriously going to try to talk, negotiate, with this bloody thing? Are you going to accept its orders, when it gives them?”
It took Gregor a while to find his answer. “No. I’ll take no orders from a computer. As you’ve already noted, there’s no way it can be a legal president. Still, I want to hear the remainder of this message. Maybe I can get a better idea of what the man is thinking. You’re welcome to sit in with me if you like.”
But after only a little more, a rambling speech about the metaphysics of machinery, Gregor could not keep silent. He broke in: “Mr. President, whoever or whatever exactly it is I’m talking to, our fleet has taken a terrible beating.”
‘Terrible,” said the image calmly. Gregor thought that should not have been a hard response to program in. “Tragic. Of course. But what I’m talking about is something vastly more important than our fleet. Even more important than the lives of several billion people who live on our two planets. There are hundreds of billions of Earth-descended lives scattered across an arm of the Galactic spiral, and we don’t know where we’re going.”
Gregor cleared his throat. “Am I now addressing the president, or the computer known as Logos?”
His interlocutor needed no pause to think that over. The answer was a calm and confident “Yes.”
Gregor and Radigast looked at each other. Gregor turned off the recording again, though he was still not certain that doing so kept whatever was inside from hearing what he said.
“I’m afraid to ask it anything else,” he admitted to the admiral.
“You’re afraid? You know, I thought it was kind of cute at first. Cute and motherless stupid. Now I’m scared shitless it’ll start giving me direct orders, and I won’t know what to do.” Radigast swung himself to his feet and started for the door, where he paused to look back over his shoulder. “Maybe I should have saluted before I left. I’ve got a fleet to try to put back together, then maybe you can tell me what to try to do with it. Make my excuses to the commander in chief?”
When the door had closed again, Gregor sat for a time alone in his cabin, thinking. Feeling very much alone, for what seemed to him a long time.
Then he restarted the recording. Once more, from the beginning. He was going to have to hear and see it all.
The replay was essentially the same, again with minor changes in wording here and there. There was not a whole lot more.
“Gregor, as you have perhaps noted already, what I am wearing is no ordinary helmet. Logos and I can no longer be separated, without doing great damage to us both. Putting on an ordinary helmet, as most people do to interact with their close machines, is no real commitment. No genuine connection at all. It keeps you at a real distance; and we are past the point where half measures will do us any good.”
“Mister President,” Gregor murmured, “I think I must agree with you there.”
With such mobile opposition as the Twin Worlds system could muster having been subdued, destroyed, or scattered, the unknown enemy suffered no distraction as it moved to concentrate its full attention, at relatively close range, on thickly populated Prairie.
As the strange intruder drew within a million kilometers of the planet, about three times the distance between the antique homeland, Earth, and its disproportionately huge Moon, most of the ground weapons that could be brought to bear were already firing at it, so far with astonishingly little effect. New batteries opened up as the planet’s majestic rotation brought their target into range, while others fell silent as the attacker fell below the horizon.
All of the planet’s defensive shields were up, and the first reports from the surface to reach the fleet were bravely optimistic. But in the first few minutes, the news reports turned bad. And as the minutes wore on, they gave no indication of recovery.
The intruder’s attack fell on its target with unbelievable fury.
The world of Prairie was enveloped in a storm of offensive and defensive weapon power, making a shell of energy that effectively isolated its people from the rest of the universe. Contact with the fleet was only intermittent, and that with their sister planet had been totally cut off.
Just like those on Timber, the planet Prairie’s ground defenses had been freshly tested and mobilized. When the stranger drew within the calculated distance, they came into action, just as they were designed to do.
Those strong beams, much more powerful than any weapon any ship could wield, penetrated the enemy’s thick forcefield shielding and inflicted damage, radioactive fire was visible at places on the dark mass, and some secondary explosions.
But it was soon evident that they were not getting the job done.
Still, they had an evident deterrent effect. The giant attacker withdrew a few tens of thousands of kilometers, and seemed to be making some new adjustment on its defensive shields, for observers on the flagship could see the shape and the tint of their almost invisible covering changing slightly.
Then it returned to the attack. Hanging over the world it was determined to kill, while the planet’s normal rotation slowly brought every part of its surface into the reach of relatively short-range weapons.
More power was now made available to pour into a new assortment of killing devices, and these were methodically unleashed. A few missiles were still sent down into the steaming atmosphere, but the attacker used that type of weapon very selectively, as if it might be husbanding a limited supply. The chief tools that it now employed were thermal beams and grappling forcefields. These leveled the hills that were the best Prairie could show in the way of mountains, and boiled the oceans.
Somehow a robot message courier, or a tight-beam transmission, got up through the blinding, deadly clouds that had once been an atmosphere, and crossed the intervening gulf of space to reach Radigast’s flagship. This messenger carried a desperate plea for help, telling how the last of the deep, womb-like shelters that had once seemed to promise absolute safety, were presently filling up with molten rock, or drowning in sea water, as the portion of the oceans that was still liquid ran in at scalding temperature through great cracks freshly opened.
Because of their relative distances from the action, people on Timber necessarily saw and heard every aspect of the battle at least several minutes later than did those aboard Admiral Radigast’s flagship. Given the essential time lag of signals moving at merely light speed, he found it hard to hold any intelligent ship-to-ground discussion with the people on that planet. Distances were in the awkward range, too short to speed things up much by using couriers, too great to hold any serious talk without long cumbersome pauses.
The only failures in accomplishment seemed to be on the human side; the attacker was an evasive moving target from the moment when it came within range of the ground defenses
, and it convincingly created multiple images of itself, as part of its campaign to confuse them. So much of the enormous firepower that was originally available to the defense was wasted, blanketing the sky in an effort to hit an opponent that could not be precisely located.
The admiral was on intercom, respectfully asking the plenipotentiary if he would come back to the bridge. Yet another message had just arrived from the president, this one addressed to the admiral. Like the previous communication, it was marked personal and private.
“If you would, sir.”
“Of course.”
“I know what’s happened,” Radigast was muttering. “The son of a bitch has packed up and gone home, leaving his robot counselor plugged in and turned on. And the Oracle is going to give me some kind of crazy order, I know it is. Gregor, I want you as a witness. My cabin, this time.”
This message module was technically similar to the previous one. Again the watchers were confronted by the unsettling, almost comic figure of the president.
Now Belgola was intent on declaring a cease-fire, apparently assuming the anonymous attacker was certain to go along with it. He was preparing his most trusted counselor, composed, he said, of certain computer modules that formed an up-to-the-minute replica of part of Logosto carry the message to the alien, and open a discussion on terms. He wanted the admiral to provide a special ship for this special envoy, and guarantee it safe passage.
The president could still put on the tones and facial expressions of a statesman. “We must end this conflict as soon as possible. There are matters of great import to be discussed between us and our attacker. More important than the survival of a handful of planets.
“Meanwhile, it is vital that we keep these pending negotiations secret. Have you any questions?”
Evidently Belgola had forgotten his earlier announcement of resignation, or the computer was now just faking his image to pass along its own orders. Gregor couldn’t decide which would be worse. “No sir, no questions.”
“He’s a motherless madman,” was the admiral’s comment, through clenched teeth, as soon as the unit had been shut off again. To Gregor he said: “Only you and I have seen this yet. Only you and I are going to see it.”
“Are you going to forward this package of hardware to our visitor, as requested?”
“As ordered, you mean. But it’s a funny thing, how the recorder malfunctioned this time, and I couldn’t see or hear any orders that might have been on it. How about you, sir?”
Gregor heaved a sigh. “No. I tried my best, but I couldn’t see or hear anything either.”
As matters turned out, the president’s competence or lack thereof would probably have made no difference in the immediate situation. The nameless enemy’s attitude seemed to be that it had come here to wage war, or, more exactly, to accomplish extermination, and it was proceeding along those lines, with the single-mindedness of a pure machine. Whether those it had attacked fought back or not made no essential difference.
Again and again, the invader’s weapons struck with irresistible fury. Its missile warheads somehow foiled the quenching fields that should have damped out even nuclear explosions as they struggled to be born. Its beams, heterodyning strangely, found a mode of operation that ate through most of the defensive fields of ground defense as if they were not there.
It was not that resistance suddenly collapsed completely; the planet had too many reserves of strength to call upon. But systematically, as one hour after another of intense combat passed, the attacking monster somehow discovered their weak points, probed at them and wore them down.
Admiral Radigast’s flagship, already battered and only marginally functional, was no more than a couple of light minutes from Prairie, and still trying to move in that direction, helpless to do anything to deflect the full fury of the attack upon the planet. The Morholt’s drive was paralyzed, with humans and machines struggling furiously to get it working.
In time of peace, the admiral would probably have given the order to abandon such a severely damaged ship hours ago. But war was a different matter; he could not yield the weapons he still had while there remained the faintest chance of using them.
Up from the planet came frantic appeals for help, cries of desperation sent to the remnants of the fleet in space, signals somehow crackling their way through the fury of weaponry, telling of unbelievable catastrophe, of slaughter on an unimaginable scale, the murder of humans, animals, plants, of everything that lived. Fragments of a screaming plea for help came through, all the more terrifying because the bulk of the messages were lost in bursts of static.
The engineers were able to get the flagship’s normal-space drive functioning again, though not at full power. At least the Morholt was not condemned to helpless drifting.
It was of course not enough to get one ship moving again. “When we attack again, we have to have the whole motherless fleet moving, or all the parts that can still move.”
Something had surely energized the president. He now sent yet another hasty message to Radigast, in another interactive module.
“First he won’t utter a word, then he resigns, now he won’t shut up.” The admiral briefly considered just throwing it away, unopened and unread.
The new communication announced that as part of the peace negotiation, he, Belgola, was forming a Twin Worlds government in exile. The implication was that the Oracle, or some twin of that computer, would actually head the new government, as a benevolent dictator. Belgola would remain as the titular head, until such an office could be formally done away with.
No general announcement of this plan was to be made as yet. The Oracle had revealed it to President Belgola only under binding secrecy. But all surviving components of the fleet, at least all who could do so, should join the president, in fleeing for their lives, to some neutral system that was much more distant than Huvea.
The admiral gave the plenipotentiary a look. For just a moment, Radigast seemed close to helplessness.
Gregor cleared his throat. Carefully he said: “Admiral, it seemed to me that the president, in sending this courier message, was making a great effort just now to communicate something of importance. It’s unfortunate that, due to combat interference, the contents were scrambled to near illegibility.”
By now the admiral had himself in hand. He let out a long sigh. “Yes, very bloody unfortunate. You’re absolutely right, counselor. I’ll turn it over to my machine for processing.” He did something at his console, and the frozen image on the holostage promptly vanished, swallowed up in arcane optelectronics where no human eye was likely to find it again until Radigast gave the word.
A lot of systems on the flagship were malfunctioning just now. It could hardly be considered all that strange if peculiar defects in communications were among them.
When Gregor had his next chance for a private talk with his granddaughter, he noted that Luon seemed to have gradually shrunken into herself, becoming a study in fear.
“Gramp, one of the officers told me you’ve recently had a personal message from the president.”
“In a way I did. Yes.”
“What did he say about the hostages?”
Gregor shook his head slowly. The fact that a whole world had just been slaughtered, billions, seemed too big to think about. “What did the president say about hostages? Not a thing.”
“Not a thing? Nothing?” That seemed really too much to ask anyone to believe. If people did not have the hostages at the top of their list of grave concerns, what could they be thinking of? “What did he tell you?”
“Luon, probably the absolute best that could happen to them right now is to be forgotten.”
Gregor tried to offer her such silent encouragement as he could. He murmured a few soothing words, though he hardly knew what to say.
The girl spelled out the story she had started to tell before. She had met her lover, Reggie Panchatantra, now a Huvean hostage, at the same diplomatic function where Reggie had met Gregor. How eac
h of them had been afraid, at the meeting in the Citadel, to show any sign that they even knew each other. Near tears, she concluded: “I don’t suppose you can understand this, Gramp, but now he’s everything to me. And I’m afraid he’s going to die!”
Now did not seem the best time to point out that everyone was going to die, whether or not strange treaties decreed death, or strange invaders tried to cause it. Gregor only shook his head. “Why do you think I can’t understand? Think I was born yesterday?” He paused. “Right now I can’t do much for you, Luon, or for him either. But why don’t you tell me something about him?”
It turned out that the young man was quite marvelous in many ways, and listening to the story seemed to help the narrator a little.
CHAPTER TEN
“Prairie’s gone. I can’t believe it, but it’s gone.” Luon’s voice was breathless as she came through the doorway separating her room from Gregor’s. “Gramp, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask. Is there any way I can get back to Timber?”
Sitting on the edge of the narrow bunk, he rubbed his face in weariness. “No. Certainly not right now. I’ll keep it in mind that you want to go, and if there appears to be any possibility I’ll let you know.” Somehow it was a relief, a distraction from colossal tragedy, looking for ways to a problem that might actually be solvable.
A world was gone, with several billion people. Their fellow citizens who were left alive went on, going through the motions of whatever they had to do.
His eyes probed the girl’s. “Anyway, I’m not at all certain that you’d be any safer there.”
“Gramp, please. You know what I”
“All right. But I think we must assume this thing will turn on Timber next, unless we can find some way to stop it. But I have to say that our chances of doing that look very small.”
That provoked outrage. “I’m not worried about my own safety!”
“Well, I’m worried about you.” Gregor smiled wanly. “And supposing you did get down to the planet, then what? I seem to recall you saying that you had no place to go on Timber.”
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