by C. L. Moore
There was no time to waste now. Harding slipped between mesh hangings that swayed like the curtains of reality, blue sky and green grass shivering, warping space, settling again into the illusion of a solid world. The ground glided past fluidly under him. Bending forward as if against a steep slope, Harding began to mark time again as the top of the hill slid level with his feet.
He began to descend the hill. Now he could see the domed building again, and the lake below. He thought of Turner, a white shape dimly visible at a window under the dome, letting out a loud wheeze of relief as his image came into view. The disorienting sense of doubled projections everywhere made Harding’s head swim when he tried to think.
“Harding?” The blue lake seemed to speak in Mayall’s voice as Harding’s path carried him smoothly down toward the shore. “Everything all right?”
“So far,” Harding said, moving his feet dutifully as the path skirted the water’s edge. “How are you doing?”
“I think we’re getting it,” Mayall said, apparently out of the rushes around which soundless water lapped.
“You’d better,” Harding said, thinking grimly that if they didn’t, this ghost of himself might go on gliding for years to come over the desolate island, always supposing the projective equipment survived, by some miracle. Or no—no, the man himself had to stand here before the ghost could walk.
“Harding,” the rushes said, half hesitantly, “we’ve got a few minutes. I want to talk to you. Suppose we succeed. I’ve got a paralysis beam set upon Turner now. The moment we cancel his hot sonic, the paralysis goes on. Turner’s a dead man already, as far as his chances go. But afterward … Ed, what about this Ganymede deal? Haou got proof?”
Harding chuckled.
“Do you take me for a fool? Once Turner dies, do you think I don’t know the next question you’ll put to your Team? ‘How can I force myself to kill Harding?’ Maybe it’s set up already, just waiting until they’re free. They’ll give you an answer, too—if we survive. If they’re good enough to cancel Turner’s beam, they’ll be good enough to tell you how to get rid of me. If I die, George, you’ll never know the truth about Ganymede.”
The rushes were silent. The whole ghostly world was silent, for the distance of a dozen paces. Harding trudged on around the edge of the phantom lake under a phantom of sunlit sky. At the top of the next rise stood the phantom of a domed building where a phantom Turner waited to recognize a phantom.
“Ed, tell me the truth,” a phantom of Mayall’s voice said out of air. “Are you from the Ganymedans?”
“Why not ask your Team?” Harding mocked him. “Maybe I was lying. Maybe I’m just a washed-out Team member trying to muscle in on your racket.”
“Or maybe you weren’t washed-out,” Mayall said. “Maybe the Team sent you to stop me, because they couldn’t stop me any other way.”
“That would be a joke, wouldn’t it?” Harding said, chuckling. “Building up Integrators and Teams to such a pitch of complexity they cancel each other, and we have to go right back to the old prehistoric days of man against man, unarmed—without even weapons against each other, George! Because we can’t hurt each other with any weapons. Yes, that would be very funny—if it were true.”
“Is it true?”
“Ask your Team,” Harding said again cheerfully. “There’s another possibility you may not have thought about. What if Venus sent me, George?”
“Venus?” Mayall echoed in a startled voice.
“They might have. They may have been waiting and watching for just such a man as me, George. They snapped you up when you were bounced off the Team. O.K. Maybe they snapped me up, too. I’ve never said I wasn’t approached, have I?”
“But why?” Mayall’s voice was bewildered.
“Lots of reasons. Maybe they were curious to know if you’d sell them out when a better offer came along.” Harding chuckled again. “Well, they’d know the answer to that, wouldn’t they, once I got in touch with my backers again?”
“You won’t leave this island,” the green hillslope said grimly. “Ever.”
“One of us won’t. That’s sure. But maybe you’ll be the boy who stays. Do you really wonder why Venus might want you kicked off this Team too, George? Maybe for the same reason Twelve-Wye-Lambda had to. What disqualified you for one Team might disqualify you for another. Might? It would!”
“There’s no reason—” Mayall sounded a little choked.
“There’s every reason. Why is it Venus hasn’t made any offensive moves against Earth for … how long has it been now? … six months? Eight? All Venus does is counter Earth’s aggressions—successfully, but defensively. Only defensively. Things are settling down to a status quo—another Hundred Years’ War. I wonder why?”
“Why?” Mayall asked harshly.
“Because the top brass always hates for a war to end. And you’re top brass as long as Venus depends on your Integrator. Why, you’ve put up such defenses yourself nobody could get in to stop you, until I came along. Maybe for a long time now your backers have wanted to change things on Akassi. But how could they? They’ve set up a Frankenstein’s monster.
“Did you pick out an incompetent Team on purpose, George? One you could boss around the way you bossed Twelve-Wye-Lambda until I came along? Or have you got ’em drugged or hypnotized? It looks like a draw between Earth and Venus, infinitely prolonged, because Earth’s too vitiated to expand and reconquer, and Venus just isn’t asking any questions.
“That’s what wins any fight, George—asking questions. That’s what progress and growth is. Not answering questions so much as asking ’em. And it’s the one thing a thinking-machine can’t do.”
“I suppose you know all the answers, Ed,” Mayall said coldly. “I suppose—”
“Nobody knows all the answers. Nobody can. The only way a machine could know them all would be to draw a circle and destroy everything outside it, everything it couldn’t handle. And that’s what you’re doing, George. You’re not using your Team or your Integrator or yourself. The one thing nobody wants is status quo right now. Only a machine’s at optimum at status quo—and you’re a status quo man from away back, George. It’s why they threw you off our Team. It’s why Venus might have sent me to Akassi.”
The landscape unrolled silently when Harding’s voice ceased. Mayall said nothing. The lake wheeled away behind and the pathway, straightening itself ahead, swung the whole island around with it until the domed station where Turner sat waiting lay directly before Harding, at the top of the nearing hill.
He grew tense as the time drew out and still Mayall did not speak. What was happening behind that illusory veil upon which the world reflected itself? Whatever was happening, it couldn’t go on much longer. Already Harding could see the thick white shape of Tuner leaning at the window eagerly, watching him—watching his illusion—toil up the steep hillside toward the dome.
Something was going on. In the square, small room on the other side of the wall, where Mayall sat at a table before a tri-di screen, something was certainly moving to a climax. It had to. Because in another two or three minutes Harding was going to reach the door of the relay station—no, not Harding, but Harding’s phantom. Just how convincing it looked Harding had no way to guess, but sooner or later the limits of illusion would have to be reached, and then—
Then Turner would pull the lever and the whole game would be canceled on Akassi.
Now Turner was leaning over the windowsill, waving to the oncoming ghost. Harding could see his quivering, fat face with the blood streaks on it. He saw the mouth open and knew Turner must be shouting to him. But since this illusion of Akassi was silent, he didn’t know what Turner was saying. It might be a command to halt. It might be an invitation to come in. It might be a question upon whose answer all the lives on Akassi depended. But he could not answer if he could not hear.
He said, “George!” in an urgent undertone, pitching his voice low because of the irrational feeling that Turner must hear him i
f he spoke aloud. He was so near now—he was looking up at the fat man in the window from so close he could see the sweat beading the heavy face. The closed door of the relay station rose up within a hundred feet of him, and he was nearing it with every step.
When he got there, what would happen? His hand was solid and the door looked solid, but the width of the island lay between them, and once the unreeling illusion swept him irresistibly into contact with the door, Turner would see the truth.
“George!” Harding said again, his eyes meeting Turner’s eyes.
From the other side of the illusion, he heard the hillside laugh—
It was Mayall’s voice, and it did not speak a word, but the laughter was a freezing sound.
Between one step and the next, Harding knew the truth.
He stopped dead still, stunned for an instant by the knowledge of what was happening in the black steel room—what had already happened, while he plodded blind and lost through the mirage.
He should have known when Mayall first spoke a few moments ago, after the long silence of concentration upon the Composite Image and its problem. Mayall would not have broken silence before the problem was solved.
That meant the Team already knew its answer to the question of Turner. And that meant the Team was free to give Mayall the second answer upon which his life depended. He must already have asked that final question, and the Integrator must be answering it in this very moment. “How can I kill Ed Harding?”
No wonder the hillside laughed at him.
Smoothly the pathway swept backward beneath his unmoving feet. Smoothly the ghost of the domed building glided toward him. At its window Turner leaned, staring down anxiously. Harding made his feet move, striving for illusion to the last. For the fat man’s hand quivered on the lever. He sensed something wrong, though he did not yet see what.
“George!” Harding said desperately, putting up a hand to hide his mouth so that Turner would not realize the ghost’s lips moved soundlessly. “Look, George! I’m almost there. Are you watching?”
The hillside laughed again, the same chilling sound.
Of course Mayall would make no move—yet. There were still several seconds left, and as long as Turner stayed alive, Harding was trapped in his little treadmill of mirage. He dared not break the illusion while Turner could still be held by the last slow-running moments of it. But while Harding plodded in his trap the Integrator gave Mayall the answer that was all he needed to extinguish Harding forever.
“George!” Harding shouted suddenly and desperately. “George, look” And with frantic resolution he snatched the revolver out of its holster at his side.
The hillside gave its freezing laugh again. “You can’t shoot me,” Akassi said to Harding. “All I need is half a minute more, and—”
“I’m not trying to shoot you,” Harding said, taking careful aim. “George, if you aren’t watching we’re all dead! George—I’m going to fire at Turner!”
The ghost of Turner shouted soundlessly in its window just over Harding’s head. To that ghost, the man and the gun below looked desperately real. Turner lurched backward clumsily, mouthing shouts that made no sound.
The fat hand tightened on the lever.
The lever moved.
“George!”
“All right!” Mayall snarled from the other side of the hill. The air began to fill with a strange, thin singing sound too far above the threshold of hearing to impinge except as a stinging and tickling in the ears.
But Harding knew what it was. The Team and the Integrator, working as one tight-welded unit, were bending every iota of their blending efforts to cancel Turner’s UHF as it slid down the spectrum toward explosion. It would take full concentration from Mayall and his Team and his Integrator—for a few seconds.
In those few seconds, Harding had to act.
He thought, If I can ever kill him, the time is now!
He saw through th window just above him the deadly lever dropping under Turner’s hand. While the united Team rode the beam downward invisibly Harding was safe—and only that long. Then their full concentrated attention would go back to the problem of Harding’s death.
The mirage was vividly real before him—but he knew it for a mirage. He knew that where open hills and a lime-green sea seemed to stretch before him in the sun there was really only a mesh curtain, and beyond that a steel wall which bullets could pierce, and beyond that—George Mayall.
He swung his gun around toward the spot on the wall where he knew Mayall would be sitting. Even if Mayall were watching him now, he couldn’t move from that spot. He had to focus his full attention upon the screen and the Integrator. If Harding could fire, then the game was his.
If he could fire.
Until this moment he had not consciously tried to kill Mayall. He knew the strength of the compulsion that forbade him to shoot, and he had not wanted to build up defeat-patterns until he made his final effort. But it was now or never.
He thought. I can fire a gun at nothing. And there’s nothing in front of me. Nothing but empty air. The bullet will clear the corner of the relay station and go out over that hill and drop into the ocean when it’s spent. There is no mesh in front of me. There is no wall. There is no George Mayall. I’m shooting into midair—
The revolver was a part of himself, an extension of his outstretched arm. The new synapse waited to be bridged between the crook of his finger and the smooth, cool trigger it pressed. He was the gun.
The gun responded as his arm responded to conditioned reflex. The gun felt pain.
Sensory hallucination is an old story. The gun had symbiotic life that was one with the gunner’s, and how real is psychogenic pain? Harding knew this sharp, increasing burn was purely imaginary. But it hurt. Moving backward from the muzzle, the pain burned through the steel and the hand, up his arm, contracting the muscles until the pistol wavered. He was suddenly frightened. The symbiosis was terrifyingly complete. Could he let go when the time came?
He made one desperate, determined effort to squeeze the trigger. And all his muscles locked. For an instant absolute rigidity held him. And for that instant he fought hard against the frightening illusion that the awareness he had projected into the gun had been seized by the gun. The tool seized the man, merged with him, might never let him go.
Then every muscle from the shoulder down went limp. The arm dropped helpless to his side. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoot Mayall. He was conscious at the moment only of relief.
Above him in the window he saw Turner at the lever go suddenly rigid. Paralysis had struck him motionless in the middle of a gesture as the Team moved in. He saw the back of the man’s thick neck go red with congestion as the breath stopped in his frozen lungs. That meant the UHF was now ng and the Team with it, in full, fast action. Within the next few seconds they would succeed—or fail. If they failed, probably Harding would never know it. If they succeeded, then Mayall would get his answer to that other question in a matter of minutes.
There might still be one chance for Harding. If he could hear the answer—
His rebellious arm was perfectly obedient when he sent the impulse downward to holster the gun. Rubbing the numbness from his muscles, he whirled in the illusion of the sunshine and tore the universe apart like a painted veil.
Blue air and lime-colored sea separated to let him through.
On the wall of the control room the TV screen showed Turner still rigid, back to the screen, his neck purple now. He was probably quite dead already.
Walking fast, Harding crossed the room, laid his hand on the lock plate of the inner door. He watched the door slide open.
Then he stepped into the little, dark-walled metal room, and the conflict ended as it had begun, with an image on a screen.
Mayall sat with his back to the door, leaning forward over the table, his hands flat on the plate. He was staring hard at the tri-di screen, and out of it the Composite Image of himself and his tools looked back.
It was
beautiful and terrible—and the answer.
It was something Harding could not believe, and yet it came as no surprise, for given George Mayall as Harding knew him, what other answer could there have been but this?
The Integration Team was complete—seven thinking brains and the Integrator. But George Mayall was the only human being on the Team. The Composite Image glittering before him on the screen blended his outlines and theirs, merged his mind with their minds. But the six minds that met with Mayall at the Round Table on Akassi were machines. And Harding knew vividly the danger of machines.
Six mechanical brains, stored with knowledge out of human brains. But not humans themselves. Not beings who could ask questions or demand accountings from the one living human on the Team.
No one man had ever before controlled an Integrator single-handed, single-minded. No one man had ever dared try. And no sane man could do it. George Mayall had tried, and in his way succeeded. But his success was a failure more terrifying than any defeat could be.
Perhaps the most terrible thing of all was his attempt to create a Round Table with his seven mechanical storehouses of human knowledge. It would have been bad enough had he simply stored the knowledge away on tapes and drums. Even then it would be fearfully dangerous to draw upon it blind-folded, as he had to, because one man’s mind can hold only so much, and it takes seven minds at least to balance an Integrator. Not seven storage drums of recorded fact, but seven human minds, alive, active, perpetually posing questions and arriving at flexible decisions as no mehanical brain has ever yet learned to do.
The mechanical brain must be balanced by human minds, or spin out of control. Or else it must draw a circle at the limits of arbitrary control, and destroy all growth outside the circle.
Out of the tri-di screen an Image looked back at Harding which made his mind go numb. It was the most I beautiful thing he had ever seen. He hated it more than I anything he had ever seen.
The Image had no face, and it had no eyes. But Mayall’s burning black gaze looked out of it—somehow, impossibly—blended with the glittering masks of the machines in a synthesis so perfect no watcher could decode that total linkage. Seven component parts made up the Image. It glittered, it was smooth and shining, its fine, functional lines and perfect proportions made it a thing j of unthinkable beauty. But you could not separate what of that Image was human and what was machine. The steel was one part flesh, the flesh six parts steel.
