by Moulton, CD
Mr. Hoosh turned and waved me toward the cavern. I had to be ready for some trick, so I kept all my sensors on full.
It was lucky I did, because I was suddenly injected with an anesthetic from behind. I feigned falling under the influence of the stuff, having to modify all my sensor outputs to match. I was then taken aboard the brain's ship, given a hypnotic, told I had seen some rather decrepit and poor mining equipment, asked a lot of questions about various aspects of island life and customs, implanted with a desire to go home and to be away from the cavern I was suddenly sure was going to fall in at any moment, and was taken back to the mouth of the cavern and sat on a rock. I was then injected with a counteractant to the other drugs.
I shook my head and looked around at Noobish.
"Are you all right now?" she asked, concern dripping from her voice. "Really! The cave is safe! You need have no fear for us!
"I thought you were going to have a heart attack! You actually fainted!"
"Old ticker never done nothin' like that afore!" I mumbled, looking confused. "I got wine on my boat. It'll steady me down.
"I ain't never been scared in no cave afore. It must'a been the ticker made me think they was somethin' wrong. Must'a been that. I just need a little wine. I'll be all right.
"Don't hover, girl! I ain't helpless!"
They helped me down to the boat, where I took a long draw of the wine, then sat in the boat a moment.
"I'm all right now," I said after a few minutes. "Ain't even shaky! That's a strange one! Usual I'm shaky for a hour'r more if I take a turn. Never had nothin' like that 'un afore! Funny taste in my mouth.
"Mustn't'a been the ticker at all. Bad fish fer tha dawnmeal. Could'a been that. Fish can do funny things. That's what it was. I'm sure! Bad fish! I'll dump what's left. Got to be more careful at my age!"
I said my goodbyes and headed out. There was a spot under an overhang where the watcher servos couldn't see me, so I stopped and told TR about the whole thing and told it what my sensors showed while I was aboard the ship.
I also told it what I planned to do now.
The servos above would automatically go to the far side of the crag to await my coming out there, though one would stay on this side, just in case.
I arranged for the floater to take the boat on down the shore to lead the servos away while I slipped into the water to proceed along the bottom back toward the beach. The boat would begin its return trip now, appearing to be drifting.
I waited until I saw Noobish and Mr. Hoosh head for the beach, then slipped into the cavern along with the returning empty cart. The last of the plutonium except for a small amount in a nuclear warhead aboard the ship was gone. TR had instructions about that.
I went to the closest point to the ship and strolled out in plain view to stare at it. I walked toward it and was beside the hatch when all hell broke loose. Servos were encircling me as Noobish ran into the cavern and toward me.
"I got real worried about this cave falling on your heads!" I cried. "What is all this?! What is this thing?! Where is all the stuff you showed me afore?!"
Somebody Done Tricked Somebody
"How did you get back here? How did you get inside?" Noobish yelled.
"What's going on here?" I countered. "This ain't what I saw afore! You done tricked me!
"Why? What's going on?"
"We saw you get in your boat and leave," Noobish said. "How did you get back?"
"I got under the cliff and got scared. It were unnatural. I jumped out'n my boat. I swam back and came in with the cart.
"Those are go-gotems! Those are the things they said for us to watch for! They're all wire and metal, but they don't look like no Killit to me.
"I don't know what's goin' on!"
"I will try to explain," Noobish said soothingly. "You are getting far too excited for one with your heart condition.
"This is only a large metal shed to keep the mining stuff in. The golems were given to father by a starker over on Rocky Peak Island, which is near Stormlee. That was the starker who helped to throw the bad one out.
"The golems have no mind and only do what we tell them to do. There is no danger."
I was near the hatch to the brain's ship, so managed to make the heartbeat erratic, then to faint. I wanted to be taken inside of the ship again. The brain would have to think the hypnotic conditioning against the cave must have suddenly recurred under the overhang of the cliff and I had panicked. Now it was in a very touchy position.
It had offloaded the plutonium and would have to get it back aboard and would need time to get out. It would now become known it was still here on Killit, and it could be certain the Tlesson army would come back – and they wouldn't give up so easily next time. The trick wouldn't work twice.
I wished there was a way I could communicate with the brain, but that would have to wait until TR finished its own projects.
I was carried into the ship and placed in a small room by the hatch on a hastily made bunk. I was glad Noobish was a robot. I'm a bit heavy myself, but she wouldn't expect to be asked how she got me inside.
I waited a moment, then "came to" again.
"Please don't excite yourself again," Noobish pleaded. "This can all be explained. You will see you are becoming upset over nothing at all."
"If it ain't nothin' at all, then you wouldn't'a tried to trick me! We don't have no truck with none 'a your starkers or no magic men out here. There ain't no place for your go ... golems.
"There's somethin' wrong here! You can't keep me here! I don't flash-flash tonight and you'll have a war party on your hands come mornin'! You turn your golems against 'em and ain't no way you get away with it! There ain't no way you can ever stop 'em messaging to the mainland!"
"Please!" she cried. "Listen to me! No one is holding you. You can walk out of here anytime you want. No one is going to try to stop you. We are only trying to mine some of the gold here and we have the help of a starker who helped the people at Stormlee!"
"You had to be here already when that happened in Stormlee! You ain't had no time to get here! That's another one 'a your tricks! You ain't foolin' me!"
"I didn't say we came here AFTER the trouble in Stormlee! All this was many days ago. Almost a quarteryear. I said it was the same starker who gave us the golems that helped the people of Stormlee. No one is trying to trick you."
Mr. Hoosh came in and acted very concerned about my condition. He took up the conversation exactly where Noobish had left off and became disconcerted when I asked how he knew what Noobish had been saying. He couldn't say he overheard, because he had come up a ramp and inside in full view of both myself and Noobish.
I was enjoying it very much.
Suddenly both Noobish and Mr. Hoosh stiffened for a moment and Noobish headed out at a run.
"What happent!?" I cried. "You both looked so funny! What done happent to her?"
"Didn't you, uh, that is, there was an, uh, we heard an alarm outside. Didn't you hear it?"
"I sort of heard a buzz. That it?"
"Uh, yes! It means a golem has found some gold out there. Noobish ran out to see how much and whether it's any good for mining."
"Humff! City women! She told me she didn't care nothin' 'bout no gold! Can't eat gold! Ain't no good for nothin' 'cept rings! Ain't told the truth 'bout nothin' yet! Not once! Can't believe a word she says!"
He put on a confidential air. "I'm really afraid she's what you'd call a spoiled child. Her mother died when she was very small and I gave her far too much. She hasn't a very good sense of values and has always exaggerated.
"She doesn't really lie, but she does, let's say, not tell the whole truth.
"I'll try to tell you what has happened here. She should have told you from the first, but she was afraid you'd interfere if you knew about the golems.
"The starker isn't a bad person, but he's not so good as she'd have you believe, either. It's him who wants gold as much as her. He gave us the golems, but he gets half the gold w
e find. I will tell you that he didn't ...."
"I've got all the plutonium," TR sent on an open radio signal. It was sent in our private coded digital, so all the brain would know was there was a sudden burst of radio. It would have no meaning to it.
Mr. Hoosh paused. I had nothing to lose now, tactically. I was inside of the ship and didn't think it would self-destruct too precipitously.
I looked as innocent as I could and said, "Are you a golem, too? Is that how you and her knowed what was bein' said when you wasn't in the room?"
He looked at me and didn't speak.
"They done said that some of the golems was the same lookin' as Killits. You and her both golems?" I asked.
I tried to appear merely interested and not afraid.
"And are you a Tlessarian?" he asked in Tlesson Major.
I looked confused.
"Are you from the Maitan Empire?" it asked in Maitan, and I looked even more confused, as it stared at me very hard.
"We are not golems, we just control them for the starker. I'm sorry we ever got involved in all of this. It would have been all right if there hadn't been that stupid trouble in Stormlee.
"Please. We mean no harm to anyone. We will go away and do our exploring and mining somewhere else if you will promise not to tell others about us. We won't bother anyone, but if you tell any others they'll never leave us alone."
"Golems don't bleed!" I cried triumphantly. "Do you bleed?"
"Of course I bleed! Just go! Get out of here and leave us alone!"
I got up and swayed a bit, then crawled out, mumbling that a person would think they'd make a door big enough to get in and out of.
I was a bit puzzled at this point because the brain was being a bit too easy to fool. It could think I was really a Killit, but why these extremes of concern about my reporting them? They could kill me and be gone before any war party ever showed up. Was the brain that weakened?
I was a short distance from the ship when the floater came to me from atop the ship. I took the laser off of it and shot Mr. Hoosh as he came down the ramp. He shorted out and fell heavily to the bottom of the ramp. I took the trmpthm detonator TR had placed there for the purpose and tossed it into the ship. It went off with the tremendous force the stuff generally does go off with.
I had no belief whatever it would harm the brain itself, but I wanted to do all I could to distract it.
There was a sudden buzzing sound and a small plutonium-loaded missile dropped down under the ship on a platform. I dove for the cave entrance as the floater dove for the missile to put up a solid shield around the thing. I was in the cave and running for TR with all the speed I could muster.
I remember seeing the Noobish robot coming into the cavern on the run as I entered the cave. I felt a rumbling and fell flat, but there wasn't nearly the blast I expected.
"The floater held the shield and decayed it from the top as the blast went off. It was directed as almost a huge heat laser through the brain ship. There's nothing left," TR reported. "The radioactivity won't be too bad, as the mountain absorbed much of it.
"We came out pretty well ahead of this one, I think. I really expected more of a problem, but we backed the thing into a corner it couldn't find a way out of.
"It intended to take you with it. We always felt it would do that. It had to be suspicious at the very least.
"Come on aboard and we'll dump this plutonium somewhere. I sent in floaters and took it all. I fused the servos who resisted and got it over with. That's when Noobish ran out of there."
TR used the big laser to open the outer entrance to our cavern so it could get out. We went out to dump the plutonium into the sun, where it couldn't ever contaminate anything, then headed outsystem.
I may have been a bit uneasy, but we would check back here again as soon as we saw the results of the fleet's actions.
I sat in the pilot's chair and told TR to call up the view of the cavern before the blast so I could watch it on the holovid screen and fill in the gaps in my personal file.
There was the ship with its deteriorated ion grids and the spots on the difusion tube that had become granular. Those tubes would never have lifted the ship a centimeter. The granulation would've gone through the linings at first blast. The acid attack worked very well indeed.
I watched myself come out of the hatch and turn to see the gravity floater come to give me the trmpthm detonator and laser, then Mr. Hoosh was coming down the ramp. I shot him and spun as the trmthm detonator was thrown into the open hatch.
I sat back and started laughing. I couldn't stop. This was like a very bad dream. A very bad dream, indeed!
"What's the matter with you?" TR demanded.
"Oh, I was just thinking. Wasn't it so very easy to get rid of that brain? Didn't it cooperate so very nicely in its own destruction? A military strategist like that! Why, it never fixed the ion drive-grids and I doubt it ever checked the difusion tubes at all.
"How very convenient! How clever!"
"Okay. I see. But when and how did it get out of the ship? I wondered about that. There was no way that strict a military mind would allow those grids and tubes to sit there and rot.
"How could it get out of there, and how did it handle Noobish and company? There was no radio and no direct connection. I know that!"
"It fully expected to be followed. Here it goes with the same tricks it always pulls, and there we went falling into its trap again.
"It always overdoes it just a little. If it fought us to the bitter end there, had the servos attack, fired that missile as soon as it cleared the ship it would've worked. It had to make it a little too easy. The military mind at work. Don't fix something that'll be sacrificed anyway, so the tubes stay eaten away and the grids weren't replaced.
"A one hour replacement job on the grids. The tubes, it still could've fooled us, but not those grids. If that thing was still in the ship there would've been clean gleaming replacements in those frames.
"It left that ship while we were waiting for it to check for us out in our own little cave and set the rest of this up. We did pretty much exactly what it figured we'd do. It fully expected us, so programmed a secondary computer aboard that ship with what to do in any case that came up.
"It slipped my mind it was here on Killit for some time, and certainly wouldn't have all of the servos it produced at work around Stormlee. It had plenty of time to make all it could need.
"I didn't check while in the ship, but I'd be willing to bet there was a hell of a lot of empty space in there. It had the servos unload it and carry it to some special spot as soon as it landed. It'll have a full complement of robots to do everything it needs, but they'll all be shut down completely. It can wait until it's sure we're gone for good before it starts actually doing what we thought it was doing there.
"Now it DOES think it's won. It can take centuries to build its forces at its own pace."
"There's no detectable energy use anywhere around that mountain," TR said. "What has it done with the power supply for all of those servos? What about its own power?"
"It'll have generators it can start and small power units in battery form to start the generators," I answered. "It has to wait a minimum of twenty years to be sure we won't be watching anymore. It took more than a century to get here and doesn't mind waiting another to start. Time is nothing to it."
"We may have one more ingredient in all of this in our favor," TR agreed. "Unfortunately, it's also pretty much against us in another way.
"If it's started a decay timer or something and is on standby it won't resist us when we find it: On the other hand, we'll have a hell of a time locating something that isn't using detectable power.
"I'm going to land directly in the cavern where its secondary blew up its ship."
We went into the cavern, where TR sent servos with sensors to check over every square centimeter of the place. We did a lot of calculating with the debris from the ship and servos and robots minus the stuff mined, minus the plut
onium, and came up with a data crossover from the trace of power being expended to move the ship from Stormlee to the island.
"Between thirty and thirty three and a half tons unaccounted for," TR figured. "That's enough for mining equipment, servos, a machine shop, component extras, and more.
"Some of those servos show scrapings and such to show they've handled copper, antimony, cesium, iridium alloys. Do you see what that means?"
"It has shield grids and may be doing pretty much what we did in our own little cave. It can use all the power it wants inside the shield and we can't detect it. We can assume it has passive sensors through the shield to watch approaches.
"If we can locate the sensors we'll know where it is. They have to be very close to the shield."
"I can find passive sensors. I'll make them form eddy currents and locate the eddy. It'll tell the brain we have it located, but that won't mean much. It had one and only one hope here, and that is that it is NOT located. This is one trap it built and fell into itself!"
"Well, it didn't have any real choice. It was either that or actually destroy itself. Find it and we'll see if we can get past its shield. It'll have a plutonium reactor in there and a breeder, so it won't ever run out of power for the shield. As tricky as that thing is, we could never.... Ahha!"
"You got it, Boss!" TR replied. "I think we're going to find our shield pretty easily!"
"It activated the shield from outside, so maybe you can find the switch to turn it off through the same place. If it used a simple ... it'll have programmed a servo to turn it on. It can afford that.
"It would never take the chance we'd find a way to drop the shield to find it isn't in there."
TR was right. We found the shield without much trouble at all. The brain decided to make a transparent plot with the ship so we would search for its hiding place. There wasn't any reason for the servo to have those traces of alloy. The shield grids would definitely have been coated for storage, so we were to "find" a shield which we couldn't open. We would then place sensors around every centimeter of that shield and wait for the brain to come out – even if we had to wait centuries – and we would wait for centuries, because that shield was self-perpetuating and had a power supply that wouldn't fail for millennia.
