by C. L. Moore
A man cannot blend and merge with machines and remain sane. Nor should the machine look back at its watcher out of human eyes, with rage and terror showing in lines of passionless steel. If it were possible for a machine to be mad from too close a contact with humanity, then these machines were as mad as the man who had forced them into the impossible unity of the Composite Image.
But the machines had their revenge. They had seized the man.
It was this Image which guided the lives and fortunes of sixty-one thousand humans upon Venus, and threatened the Solar Empire.
Out of the Composite Image George Mayall looked despairingly at Harding, trapped and desperate in his inchoate prison of steel. The man in the flesh sat three feet away from Harding, but the man in the Image was the real George Mayall. And Mayall was the machine.
Drowned, lost, hopeless in the steely beauty of the Image, Mayall’s face looked back at Harding out of the bright, burning, multiple mask of the machines. There was helpless terror in the look, and a desperate appeal.
For Mayall had set up upon Akassi too strong a Team. He had laid out his defenses too well. And no one could break through to rescue him from the monster he had made and merged with. Mayall was the ultimate secessionist. He had seceded from the race of man.
Not now nor ever could Harding allow himself to injure a man who had once shared a Composite Image with him. But he lifted his revolver with a steady hand. It was no injury he was about to do Mayall now. Not any more. The time was long gone when death would be injury to George Mayall.
“I meant to tell you, George,” Harding said to the Image in the screen, “why I’m here and who sent me. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?” He centered the pistol upon the back of Mayall’s head in the chair before him. That wasn’t Mayall any more. Harding spoke only to the composite thing in the screen. “It makes no difference at all who sent me. It only matters that I’m here, and that I should wi220;d that you should die, George. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
He was the gun. The trigger pressed backward of its own accord.
On the screen, steel suddenly shattered outward and blood gushed over the hard, bright face of the metal Image and spread down the metal breast.
The screen began to dim. The fading face upon it was all steel now.
When the last trace of humanity melted from the metal, and the last trace of the Image from the screen, Harding put his gun back in the holster. He had been in time, then. Mayall was merely the first.
He closed his mind to that terrifying thought, that inevitable possibility. It might not happen. It might never happen, as long as men were willing to accept defeat rather than win conquests at a cost which all mankind must pay.
Man is a rational animal that can ask questions, and fail, and go on again from failure. But Mayall had come close to creating a machine which could not fail. It could maintain optimum—an eternal, functional, inhuman optimum, guarding its charmed circle with perfectly adaptive defense against all attacks from men—as long as men lasted.
No, surely it was impossible. That blinding, beautiful foreshadowing upon the screen had been a promise and a threat, but fulfillment must never happen. Now or ever. Harding would have a job of destruction to do—dismantling of the robots, so the Integrator might function normally, harnessed and guided by a human Team which he could get from … no, that didn’t matter. All that mattered was this.
Harding lifted his hand and touched his forehead gently. There the real Integrator lay. Once, a very long time ago, premen in the days of their unreason carried under their skulls brain-mechanisms of potentially great capacity. But at first they did not use them. Not until—something unknown—happened, and the flame of reason kindled in the waiting Integrator of the human brain. Homo sapiens—
Machina—?
Harding shook his head angrily. He turned toward the door, but on the threshold he paused to look back once, doubtfully, at the empty screen that was like a closed door on the wall.
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Also by C. L. Moore
Novels
Earth's Last Citadel (1943) (with Henry Kuttner)
The Mask of Circe (1948) (with Henry Kuttner)
Doomsday Morning (1957)
Collections
Beyond Earth's Gates (1949)
Judgment Night (1952)
Shambleau and Others (1953)
Northwest of Earth (1954)
No Boundaries (with Henry Kuttner (1955))
C.L. Moore (1911 – 1987)
Catherine Lucille Moore was born in Indianapolis in 1911. Prolonged illness when young meant she spent much of her time as a child reading the fantastic tales of the day, a background that no doubt spurred her on to become a writer of science fiction and fantasy herself. Moore made her first professional sale to Weird Tales while still in her early 20's: the planetary romance 'Shambleau', which introduced one of her best-known heroes Northwest Smith. She went on to produce a highly respected body of work, initially solo for Weird Tales and then, in collaboration with her husband, fellow SF writer Henry Kuttner, whom she married in 1940, for John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. Moore was one of the first women to rise to prominence in the male-dominated world of early SF, and paved the way for others to follow in her footsteps. Moore ceased to write fiction after Kuttner's death in 1958, concentrating instead on writing for television. She died in April 1987 after a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © C.L. Moore 1952
All rights reserved.
The right of C.L. Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11934 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
On the Pleasure Planet
Judgment Night
Paradise Street
Promised Land
The Code
Heir Apparent
Website
Also by C. L. Moore
Author Bio
Copyright
