by C. L. Moore
“I wouldn’t? Don’t be too sure.”
“If you could, you’d have done it before now. Maybe you haven’t tried? Never mind. Mayall’s no fool. He’s dug humself a hole in the ocean and pulled Akassi in after him, if you want to look at it that way. The Secesh boys aren’t paying him to set up an island the first stray radar beam could pick out blindfolded. Those barriers around Akassi—well, they erase Akassi, that’s all. You can’t see it. You can’t find it. It isn’t there—unless you work with Mayall and know his code. Even then you can’t pass the barriers unless Mayall invites you.” He puffed violet smoke and squinted through it at Harding’s face.
“You ready to risk your neck yet, my boy?” he asked. “It’ll take the two of us. But Mayall hates you. He’ll kill you on sight. That means a risk on your part. I’ll buy you higher than the bottle of gin it’d cost next January. I’d cut you in for half the take—if you get me ashore at Akassi and help me work out my scheme to take over from Mayall.”
“You’ll have to have something pretty good to kick Mayall out a second time,” Harding said thoughtfully.
“Well now, I expect I will,” the fat man agreed. He took the pipe from his mouth and narrowed his eyes at Harding. “Surprised?” he asked. “You don’t look it.”
“If you expect perfectly normal human reactions from me,” Harding said quite gently, laying his palms flat on the table with a soft, reminiscent gesture, “you’re the one who’s in for a surprise. A man doesn’t work ten years on an Integrator Team and stay entirely human. A gradual occupational mutation sets in. For example—” He looked up and grinned suddenly.
“For example, I know we’ve been under weigh for about three minutes now. There’s no perceptible vibration and no roll, so how could I have guessed?”
Turner grunted, but the blue eyes gleamed.
“You tell me.”
“I am the boat,” Harding said, and laughed. There was no amusement in the laughter. “I’ve got a score of my own to settle—with society. All right, Turner. I’m with you. Where’s the control room?”
• • •
That was the question.
From Pluto to Mercury its echoes ran. From the New Lands mankind was molding into fertile red soil out of the stuff of fire and ice, on worlds where no man could have lived before technology brought the elements of life, from all the new colonies on the new planets that question went echoing endlessly. Where is the control room?
The artificial Threshold Experiments that mold humanity into shapes which can live on alien worlds had done their part. Thresholders inhabited the planets and the empire of Earth spun in a tight network around its sun. Interstellar drive was on the way. Paragravity was already a little more than theoretical. The enormous complexities of science sprang in century-long leaps across time. An engineering process would drag with it a dozen allied fields frantically trying to catch up, a biological method that could enable men to survive interstellar trips shoved rivals impatiently out of its all-important path, hustled other sciences along with it.
The web from Earth had spun out, intricate and tangled, through the Solar System. Now it stretched tenuous threads toward the tremendous macrocosm of the stars, and the moment the first star was reached—Earth could fall.
It could fall as Rome fell, and for the same reason. The New Lands beyond the stratosphere grew, young and strong and integrated, but for century after century Earth had been the control room. The controls grew so complex that unification became an almost impossible task. Only by absolute unity, by a complete and bonded sense of solidarity, could the intricate socio-technological system of Earth stay below critical mass. And it couldn’t stay there long.
For Earth had grown to be too small a planet. And the other planets were not ready yet to take up their burden. They brawled among themselves and they complained against Earth. They threatened secession. The isolationism of the New Lands became a menace that threatened the unity of the Solar Empire as Thresholders tugged angrily at the cords which bound them to the Earth from which they had sprung. And desperately in the meanwhile man strove for one major goal—sanity, rational thought, system, organization—integration.
This wasn’t the best method, perhaps. But it was the best one they had.
The Integrators were amazing things, electronic thinking machines that could be operated efficiently only by teams of specially chosen, specially trained men who lived a specially planned life. When you lived a life like that, you were apt to mutate in unexpected ways. You didn’t turn into a machine, exactly, of course. But the barrier between living, reacting man and nonliving, reachine broke down—a little.
Which is why Edward Harding could be the submersible boat he was guiding.
It didn’t have isotopic mercury memory units, like a differential analyzer. It didn’t trigger electric circuits that punched out stored information and analytical reasoning for Harding to read. But in a way it nevertheless remembered—
And Harding’s instantaneous reaction-time sense made him perhaps the one pilot alive who could have guided the submersible through the strong defenses Mayall had flung out around his island.
“We through yet?” Turner asked, up on deck. Around him the blue Pacific lay glittering emptily under a flawless sky. There was a faintly unpleasant smell in the air which the trades couldn’t dispel. Turner puffed strongly at his pipe, studying the empty horizon that wasn’t really empty. His eyes strained to find some break, as though the sky could tear like a veil, rift from top to bottom and let the real world show through. Mayall’s world, Mayall’s miraculously camouflaged island, impossible to find in spite of its plain markings on the charts.
In the control room below deck, Harding sat perfectly relaxed in a cushioned chair, his arms slipped into elbow-length metal gauntlets that glistened like wet snakes. Before his eyes hung a transparent disk, shaded like a color wheel. Harding moved his head gently so that his gaze looked through this section and that of the special lens. Before him, vertical on the wall, was the cosmosphere, a great half-globe than ran and bled and fountained with shifting colors and patterns. Radar and sonar made up only part of the frequencies that were the living chart of the cosmosphere. It showed the heavens above, the waters around, the reefs below—and most of the time now, it lied.
Harding said, “We’re not through yet. One more barrier—I think.”
On deck, Turner puffed violet smoke at the bland blue sea.
“Afraid of Mayall?” he asked the microphone.
“Shut up a minute. Tricky here.”
The false screen bled and flared, showing a clear, narrow passage through empty water. Harding moved his head around the varying shades of the lens, trying to find a frequency that checked accurately with another. Only this would keep the ship from sinking, this and the magnetic control panel.
Over the ordinary manual controls, a metal plate had been attached, corrugated and colored and marked into a pattern as dizzying as that which spun across the cosmosphere. But Harding knew it. He had used such controls with the Integrator. His gauntleted hands moved above the plate without touching it, while his glittering fingers played upon an invisible keyboard.
The varying magnetisms leaped a synapse from the ship across lines of force into the metal gauntlets, and Harding’s own body-synapses snapped the messages instantly to his brain. His fingers responded as instantly on the keyle meeyboard. And as his fingers moved, the ship moved, delicately, warily, perceptively, through wall after wall of frequency mirage where no ordinary compass or radar would operate sanely.
He was the ship.
“Afraid of Mayall?” he echoed Turner’s question after a moment. “Maybe. I can’t tell yet. I’ve got to find out something first. So it all depends.”
“Find out something?” Turner sounded suspicious.
Harding cocked a sardonic eye at the round ear of the diaphragm. He said nothing. Presently Turner’s voice came again. There was provocation in it.
“I’ve often w
ondered,” he said, “why Mayall was kicked off the Team.”
“Have you?” Harding asked in a noncommittal voice. He paused. After a while he said, “The important thing right now is that he blames me for it. So naturally, he hates me. He’s afraid it could happen again. And it could. Oh yes, Mayall has the strongest reason in the world for hating me.”
His tone grew thoughtful. “I’m a rival. I’m the heir apparent. And all he’s got is Akassi. He’ll be afraid of me. He’ll try to kill me.” Harding meditated upon this thought. “See anything up there?” he asked, after a moment.
“Nothing yet,” Turner’s voice came down thinly. “Sure he’ll try to kill you. Wouldn’t you, in his place?”
“I probably will anyhow. Try, I mean.” Harding made the modification of his verb in a meticulous voice. “Akassi is—well, pretty tremendous. I hadn’t actually realized it until now. These barriers are slightly phenomenal.” He considered, then laughed shortly. “The defenses must be so complex that only something like this could have a chance. A direct, unexpected, outrageously simple attack. We’ll have to—”
“Harding!” the diaphragm broke in with a sudden rasp. “Look! I can see the island!”
“Can you?” Harding asked dryly. There was a pause.
“It’s gone,” Turner said.
“Sure. And if we’d turned that way we’d be gone, too. Rocks. Wait.”
The glittering gauntlets performed arpeggios in the air. “I think,” Harding said, watching the cosmosphere, “I think we’re through.”
“We are,” the voice from above said, more quietly now. “I can see the island again. Different now. I can see buildings beyond the hills there. And a spaceship, ready to take off. Take her in shore, Harding. Ground her on the beach. We’ve got a jet-stern, you know.”
Harding had no idea what the beach looked like in a visual way, but the cosmosphere showed him all he needed to know of the strand he was approaching, the composition of the sand, what rocks lay under it, how far back the vegetation began. Under him the floor jolted upward as the ship’s stern rose at a stiff slant, hesitated, grated motionless. A little shudder began in Harding’s gauntleted hands and spread briefly through his body.
He took off the gauntlets.
He was no longer the ship.
He felt himself divide into two separate halves again, one flesh and blood, himself, the other mobile metal going inert as the life withdrew from it. For a rather horrible moment he wondered what it might be like some day if the machine he operated would not let him go. If the metal developed a taste for life, and the tool became the master.
“Harding?” Turner’s voice called softly. “Come up. Better bring your gun.”
Standing together at the rail, they scanned the peaceful, tree-fringed shore. Gentle green hills rolled upward inland a little way, and you could see rooftops over them, a high spider-web tower glittering against the sky, and farther back the unmistakable blunt, skyward pointing snout of a spaceship standing on its fins.
“It’s quiet enough,” Turner said, regarding a spider crab that scuttled across the sand, its eyestalks twiddling convulsively. “Have we sprung any traps yet?”
“No. I neutralized frequencies that would have tipped Mayall off. But I doubt if we can get to the settlement without announcing ourselves.”
“We may. Two men might have a chance where a small army wouldn’t. Where’s the best place to … to ring his bell?”
“Under the circumstances,” Harding told him, “it’s straight ahead, inland, toward those hills. Plenty of brush for cover here. The cosmosphere can’t show everything, and Mayall’s no fool—but spectral analysis showed that brush has had nonlethal frequencies used on it. There are microphone pickups, too, so—”
“So our trick ought to work, eh?” Turner said solemnly, tapping out his pipe over the rail. “You call out your code phrase and Mayall will hear it. Don’t see how we can miss. Only, don’t go getting any funny notions, my friend. You and I haven’t got a chance unless we stick together. I can’t help remembering you and Mayall worked together for a good many years. I keep wondering how a man feels, once he’s kicked off an Integration-Team.”
Harding laid his hands on the hot rail and slid the palms back and forth slowly. Then he tightened his grip so that every vibration of the boat carried up through his nerves to his responsive brain.
“A man misses it,” he said dryly. “Come on. We’re wastingtime.”
The frequency caught them in the middle of the brush field. They had been only partially prepared for this. From now on everything would have to be played out free-hand, on the spur of the moment. Turner, who had been walking ahead, flung up a warning arm. Harding felt the beginning tremor a moment before Turner did, and with desperate speed he sucked air deep into his lungs and let it out again in a shout that must have made the hidden microphones planted along the shore rattle in their clamps.
“Mayall!” he roared. “Mayall!” And then he added a phrase that had no meaning to Turner, a quick, glib phrase which only an Integrator of Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda would know.
While he shouted, Harding let his muscles relax with a sort of frantic limpness, a lightning speed and control. Barely in time. The last syllables of his yell still hung in midair as he dropped into a crouch. The brush closed over his head and the vibration froze him motionless against the warm earth.
After that there was nothing but silence. The sky burned blue. The air hummed. His shouted words hung echoing in the stillness.
It seemed to Harding that he heard a sort of caught breath sough out of somewhere, hidden microphones catching the sound of it with a note of surprise. But Harding was almost instantly distracted by the urgent and immediate problem of Edward Harding, and the difficulty of staying alive.
First his eyes began to sting, because he couldn’t blink. Almost immediately thereafter a frightening sensation of darkness and dizziness swept up from the brown earth and down from the clear blue sky, a shadow enfolding him from without which seemed to come hollowly and emptily from within at the same time.
He had stopped breathing.
That wasn’t the worst, of course. The autonomic nervous system controls the heart, too. He hadn’t anticipated this. The cosmoscope had revealed only nonlethal frequencies in this barrier field. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that “non-lethal” is a comparative term. He felt his heart lurch heavily in his chest, aware of its nonmotion as he had never been fully aware of its beating. Doggedly for a long instant, while that caught breath of surprise from some hidden throat echoed in the microphones, and the shadow of darkness hovered, he crouched helpless under this paralyzing power.
Then out of a dozen separate little mouths, vibrating tinnily low down in the brush, a harsh, familiar voice called out.
“Harding?” it cried incredulously. “Harding, is it you? Here? Welcome to Akassi, Harding!” Sardonic menace sounded in the voice. It paused briefly and then rattled off a series of signal numbers that meant nothing to Harding. “I’m cutting the paralysis,” Mayall’s harsh voice said exultantly. “I don’t want you to die—that fast.”
Blood roared in Harding’s ears. A sense of wide-opening distances lifted dizzily around him as the frequency-lock let go. Theshadows from without and from within drew back, rose beyond the sky, sank deep into the earth, closed up like a black flower’s petals and became a seed inside Harding again. Briefly and strangely he knew what death would be like, some day, Gigantic around him and tiny within him lay latent the enormous dark. Black seed within, black cloak without. When one swooped down to meet the other’s swift unfolding, then the last hour would strike.
But not yet.
Someone was coming toward them through the brush. Crouched in hiding, Harding saw Turner’s barrel-shaped bulk rise painfully to its full height directly between him and the approaching man. That was the plan, or part of it. He drew a deep breath, grateful anew for the air he breathed. The gun balanced delicately in his hand. He tightened hi
s finger until it pressed cool metal hard. Then he was part of the gun. He couldn’t miss.
He could still see nothing except Turner’s back outlined against a clear sky, but he knew the familiar, harsh voice that spoke.
“Who are you? How did you—” There was a pause. Then, “Turner! It’s Turner! I didn’t send for you!”
Turner spoke quickly. “Hold on,” he wheezed. “I know you didn’t. Just let me get my breath back, will you? Near killed me!” He took a step sidewise and lurched heavily, rubbing his leg and swearing in a thick voice. Mayall turned automatically to face him, and now at last Harding saw his face.
It shocked him, somehow, to see that Mayall had grown a beard. He couldn’t help wondering instantly, first of all, how the beard would show up in the Composite Image. If Mayall had a Team here—and he must have—would all those blended faces seem to wear it? Or would it be obliterated by the six other superimposed images?
Otherwise Mayall had not changed much. The hollow black eyes burned, under strong, meeting black brows. The gaunt body stooped forward. But Harding did not remember the eyes as quite so fiercely bright, or the mouth as quite so bitter and so violent. And the short, neatly clipped graying beard was a note of unfamiliarity that made Mayall somehow a complete stranger.
Turner muttered: “My leg’s asleep,” and bent to rub it, stumbling farther around so that he brought Mayall’s back squarely toward the hidden Harding.
“Stand still,” Mayall snapped. “You shouldn’t have come. I’ll have to kill you now, and I need you outside. Why did you do it, you infernal idiot?”
“Take it easy,” Turner said, painfully straightening. Harding could see through the leaves the outline of the gun in his jacket pocket. From here it looked as if Mayall were quite unarmed. One hand held a microphone, the other hung empty. Mayall could order the paralysis turned on again whenever he chose, of course, but surely it would trap him in the same field if he did. Frowning, Harding waited.
“Now let me say my say before you fly off the handle,” Turner was plating the bearded man. “Won’t cost you anything to listen, will it? I—”
