“Thank you,” Mekkis said in a strangled voice. He tongued off the intercom and sat for a long time in silence. All around him lay the articles, monographs, books and pamphlets of Dr. Balkani, and Mekkis thought, As long as I am alive Balkani is alive, too. What he began I will finish. The work of the man exists entire in my mind.
Harshly, he called for his creeches. They came, scuttling and scampering and flapping, from the next room, pitifully happy to be once more noticed, once more of use to him.
“Electronics engineer,” Mekkis said.
“Yes,” squeaked the little being with the slender, delicate fingers.
“Rig up the thought amplifier that we use to contact the Great Common for short-range purposes,” he commanded. We live always in each other’s minds, he thought. Stuck together in a sticky mass through the Great Common, hardly existing as individuals at all.
But I, he thought, have become an individual; I have separated from the Great Womb and been born—as what? A true Ganymedian? A human? No; something else: a stranger in the universe belonging nowhere. A Balkani. The Great Common turned against me, cast me out to rot away in the most unwanted corner of the system. Now, he thought, I can thank them for it; if I hadn’t hated them I never would have seen the meaning of Dr. Balkani’s theories.
Theories? No, facts. The truth, the ultimate truth of existence.
“What,” the Oracle said apprehensively, “are you going to do with the thought amplifier when it is rigged?”
“I’m going to contact Percy X,” Mekkis informed him.
“Then,” the Oracle said with resignation, “it is too late to turn back. The great darkness is upon us and nothing can stop it now.”
XIV
WHEN THE TOMS perceived the angel of light descending from the heavens they fled in terror, leaving the warehouse unguarded.
“That got those superstitious rats moving,” Percy X shouted in triumph. “Now set up a wall of fire around the warehouse to keep them out while we load up with supplies.”
“Right,” Lincoln said, moving the dials of his mechanism and concentrating.
Almost at once the flames became so hot that it was hard for the two Neeg-parts to breathe. But the fire burned without consuming. Working quickly and efficiently the two men soon had their ionocraft so heavily loaded that they knew it would be reluctant to leave the ground.
As they worked, Percy sang—one of the wordless micro-tonal chants that had grown out of many cold nights in the mountains. It’s good to feel my muscles pull, he said to himself. Much better than to think when thought only leads to despair. A moment later the ionocraft, with its cargo and the two men inside it, glided away from the flame-surrounded warehouse and headed, unobserved, for the mountains.
As they flew, Percy became more and more aware of the sensation of being a bird and less and less aware of being a man flying an ionocraft. He had ceased to see the craft around him or its control panel; now he even ceased to feel the steering wheel and the pedals. He forgot, for an interval, that he had ever been a man. Nothing remained but air currents, which he could see by means of tiny distortions in the background of hills and trees. He was swimming in the air, feeling its currents as stresses on some sort of transparent plastic, feeling the different levels moving against each other like the different parts in a great choral hymn.
A voice called him from somewhere far away. He recognized it as the voice of Joan Hiashi and it said, “He knew you were listening. He’s a terrible ham.” For an instant he made out her face; then that face changed, the features moving, shifting about like moist plastic under the fingers of a sculptor, and it became Joan no longer; it became Lincoln Shaw, shouting at him, “Snap out of it! Snap out of it, Percy! We almost crashed!”
Gradually Percy returned to the ionocraft in which he sat. He looked out the window and saw the hills sweeping by on both sides of the craft. “I thought I was a bird,” he said unsteadily.
“Yeah, I know,” Lincoln said, shakily adjusting his battered horn-rimmed glasses. “I turned off the projector just in time.”
“I was singing to Joan. And Paul Rivers, he was there, too; I flew right up next to his face.”
“That’s what you think, man. That wasn’t Paul Rivers’ face you almost bumped into. That was the face of a solid rock cliff.”
“You’d better handle the controls until we get back to base camp,” Percy said, perspiring; his hands had begun to shake and the motion was communicated through the sensitive controls to the ionocraft itself.
“Now you’re talking,” Lincoln said, taking over.
For a time they skimmed along in silence and then Percy said, “The food will last better, now.”
“That’s one of the advantages,” Lincoln said caustically, “of having fewer mouths to feed.”
“How many will there be when we get back?”
Lincoln said, “Don’t ask me, man.”
“All I know anymore,” Percy said, “is that—” He broke off. Within his mind a voice had spoken. “I hear a voice,” he said.
“The projector,” Lincoln said. “Don’t pay any attention to it.”
“Is that you, Percy X?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” Percy answered. There was something naggingly familiar about the voice and about the vague emotional shapes that floated behind it. For a moment he thought it was Dr. Balkani and then he realized it was Mekkis, a terribly changed Mekkis—a far cry from the cool, self-assured administrator of power that Percy had faced the day of his capture. Mekkis now had strange, painful, sharp vibrations infused throughout him.
“I have a proposition for you,” Mekkis said jerkily.
“I’ve already heard your proposition,” Percy said, “and I’m not buying it.”
“This,” Mekkis said, “is different. Previously I asked you to join me; now I’d like to join you—against our mutual enemy, the Great Common of Ganymede.”
The prison of Ulvöya lay almost deserted under a gray, low, slow-moving overcast. The cell doors, even the entrances to the buildings, stood open, so that some of the bolder sea gulls found themselves able to enter and roam through the long dim hallways in search of food. The smell of their droppings had already begun to taint the chill air, and their cries echoed up and down the passageways like distant, despairing screams for help.
Hearing these cries the creeches of Marshal Koli clustered close around their master, shivering, telling themselves that no matter what happened their master would know what to do. Koli, as he lay on the analyst’s couch in what formerly had been Dr. Balkani’s office, paid no attention to his surroundings at all, but gave himself over wholeheartedly to the not unpleasant task of cross-examining Major Ringdahl, who sat behind Balkani’s desk, cold and miserable. The electric power had been turned off so they had been forced to make do with candles; the drafts that swept in under the door made the candleflames flicker and dance and constantly threaten to go out, at the same time casting demonic writhing shadows on the stone walls.
“Can you explain,” Marshal Koli demanded, nodding in the direction of the deactivated robot Percy X and what remained of the robot Joan Hiashi that lay side by side in the corner of the room, “how those two quaint contraptions got here?”
“No,” Major Ringdahl answered. “Unless Dr. Balkani—”
“And what about the doctor’s book, Major? What happened to it?”
“There’s a mail robot that goes around in the morning and picks up all outgoing mail. If Balkani put the manuscript of his book in his outgoing mail basket the robot would have received it and automatically sent it off.”
“Where was the manuscript sent?”
Ringdahl said huskily, “We have no way of determining that, sir.”
“You know where I think he sent it?” Koli arched himself into an s-curve of fury. “I think he sent it to his co-members of a vast and previously unsuspected underground movement. I don’t believe, Major Ringdahl, that you appreciate the gravity of this matter. It isn’t ju
st a question of closing down the Ulvöya operation. We can no longer rely on any of the wiks conditioned here—and that includes the better part of the human portion of the governmental structure. Without this human buffer between the rulers and the ruled our plans for this planet will be effectively stalled. If we have to do all the ruling and policing of this planet ourselves, with no human assistance, it will simply be more trouble and expense than it’s worth.”
“What can you do about it?” Major Ringdahl asked.
“We can withdraw from this planet,” Koli said crisply. He signaled his carriers, and, with a sardonic nod to the major, left; his creeches trailed behind him in a straggling, scuttling procession.
Night was falling as they emerged from the building. As they made their way with difficulty to an awaiting ionocraft the Techman creech scampered up close to his master and asked, fearfully, “Are we actually pulling out? Giving up?”
“Of course not,” Koli said. “We will only be evacuating the planet to permit Operation Sterilization to begin. After all our Ganymedian forces are safely out in space, I will personally supervise the systematic extinction of all life on the Earth. It will be a careful, thorough job, I assure you, and after this planet has been wiped clean, we will return to repopulate the globe with reasonable Ganymedian life forms.”
“Your wisdom is profound,” the Techman creech said, pleased.
“Predict something,” Mekkis ordered.
“There is no future.” The Oracle gave a long weary sigh.
“If you do not function,” Mekkis said, “I can have you replaced.”
“Killed, you mean. But it doesn’t matter, a few hours more or less. We are already dead, did we but know it.”
“Guard!” Mekkis called into the intercom. A moment later a human military individual entered the room. Pointing at the Oracle with quivering tongue Mekkis said, “Shoot him.”
“Your own death—” the Oracle began, but did not finish its prophecy.
“Drag the carcass out and dump it somewhere,” Mekkis instructed the guard. He felt gloomy. As soon as the guard had left he called for his electronics technician. “Turn on the amplifier,” he instructed. “I wish to contact Percy X.”
The electronics technician set the thought amplifier for Percy’s general location and encephalic wave form, while Mekkis, aided by his dressers, slipped on the transmitting helmet.
“Percy,” he thought, concentrating deeply, his cold eyes shut.
Presently an answering thought. “I am Percy. I am here.”
“According to all my studies,” Mekkis projected, “the hell-weapon is our only hope of victory. I believe you ought to use it.” Carefully, he masked and scrambled any doubts he might have, projecting only his feeling of urgency.
“I’d be glad to,” Percy answered, “if I live long enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m under attack by your friend Gus. He’s surrounded me and he’s closing in with first-line Gany hardware, fully autonomic. I think this time he’s finally got me.”
Mekkis concentrated and in a moment found himself looking out through Percy X’s eyes. Everywhere he looked he saw robot tanks, troops and ionocrafts of all sizes and shapes. Moving in for the kill.
An army of robots and autonomic engines of war faced, on the field of battle, an army of nightmares. As the two armies tangled, Percy and Lincoln crouched in the mouth of a cave, operating an illusion projector. Scattered over the area and concealed in the cave behind him bobbed and ducked all that remained of Percy’s Neeg-parts. So many had defected…and now, peering down into the valley below, Percy saw that others had their hands up, had begun to go over to the enemy.
“You, too?” Percy demanded grabbing Lincoln by the arm. “You turning against me, too?”
“Keerist, I’m sitting here working this damn nightmare box and you ask me if I’ve turned against you!”
“If you do,” Percy said in a low, threatening voice, “I’ll kill you.”
“You’ll never kill me, man,” Lincoln said. “I’m the only one around who has the guts to tell you the truth about yourself.”
“I don’t know what got into me.” Percy shook his head, trying to clear his mind. My head doesn’t seem quite right, he realized. They must be using some new kind of nerve gas on us. He saw, then, that Lincoln was looking at him with real concern. “I can see it in your mind,” Percy said. “You think I’m getting paranoid.”
Lincoln glanced away, saying nothing.
“Look out there,” Percy grated, gesturing at the valley where now the muffled thunder of high-velocity explosives could be heard. “Is it a delusion that everyone’s against me? Am I just imagining all those tanks and ionocrafts? Am I just imagining all those Neeg-parts going over to the other side? It’s me against the universe! One man! And it’s no delusion.”
“Okay, Percy,” Lincoln said, with a mixture in his voice of admiration and revulsion. “You win. I guess that as you say—”
“Wait!” Percy cut in; his battle-trained eye had turned once again to the valley below. “Look—those idiots down there aren’t using the illusion projectors; they don’t have a chance without them!”
Even as the two men watched, the leading column of autonomic tanks burst through Percy’s lines and came rumbling toward them. “Look out,” Lincoln shouted. “They’re drawing a bead on us!”
Not one second too soon the two Neeg-parts leaped back into the cave, while, behind them, the cave entrance exploded in an inferno of heat and dust and flying fragments.
“We’ve had it!” shouted someone in the swirling clouds of dust.
Another voice followed it. “Surrender!”
Other voices joined in. “Surrender! Surrender! We haven’t got a chance!”
Then Percy X’s voice cut through the confusion. “Fight, you yellow-bellies! Fight to the last man!” But from the sound of scrambling feet it was clear that few—if any—intended to follow his commands. “Come on,” he said to Lincoln. “We’ll go farther back into the cave and wait for them there; they can’t bring their damn tanks and ionocrafts in here—it’s narrow and it’s complicated and I know every inch of it.”
“You’re the boss,” Lincoln said grimly. They set off into the depths of the mountain, making repeated spot-checks with their portable arc light. Finally Percy said, “Okay, let’s dig in here.”
They crouched together behind a smooth stalagmite and held laser rifles in readiness. Percy muttered under his breath, “I sure wish I had that hell-weapon here.”
“I’m glad you don’t,” Lincoln said. “It’s encouraging to know that even if we’re going to die somebody will be left.”
“Even if it’s just worms and wiks and traitors?” Percy asked.
Lincoln said, “Even if it’s just worms and wiks and traitors.” His voice sounded tired.
They had no opportunity to continue their conversation, because at that moment, in the darkness of the cave, they heard the unmistakable hum of electric motors and the tramp of heavy metal feet. “Here they come,” Percy said; he and Lincoln raised their laser rifles to their shoulders.
Percy fired first, aiming where he knew the entrance to their chamber lay. The robot exploded beautifully; by the flames that leaped up from it they could make out the other robots sneaking forward behind it. There seemed to be no end of them. Again and again the two men fired, but still the metal giants advanced, unceremoniously crushing underfoot the wreckage of their disabled comrades. The air filled with bitter, acrid smoke and the smell of burning and shorted wiring; Percy and Lincoln could hardly breathe: they coughed and coughed helplessly while tears poured from their eyes and traced lines in the dust which coated their cheeks. The heat of the burning machines was rapidly making it unbearably hot in this narrow, enclosing space; however, the two of them, drenched with sweat, continued firing.
It was Percy who first ran out of charge; he pulled the trigger and swore at the top of his voice when nothing happened. Roughl
y he grabbed Lincoln’s rifle, only to find that it, too, had only two more good blasts left. “Have you got anything else?” Percy demanded.
“Nothing that’ll stop those things,” Lincoln answered.
Helpless now, they watched the metal juggernauts lurch triumphantly toward them.
XV
LATE IN THE afternoon the ionocraft bearing Paul Rivers and Joan Hiashi swept down out of the cloudless sky and settled onto the street in front of Gus Swenesgard’s seedy, run-down hotel. Paul pushed open the door and climbed out, then turned to Joan and said, “Stay out of sight. I don’t want Gus to see you.”
“Okay,” she said dreamily, lying down like a child on the seat. “I don’t care for that musty old place anyhow. I think I’ll stay out here in the sunshine.”
“Fine,” Paul said as he started for the sagging front porch of the hotel with its familiar flight of broken steps. Judging from the smoke up in the mountains, he reflected, the Neeg-parts are fairly hard-pressed. If Percy is captured alive again they’ll just skin him and be done with it. Nervously he fingered the laser pistol in his pocket. If Percy is brought this far alive, he realized, there’ll be no choice for me. I’ll have, to burn him out of existence.
Sighing, he climbed the rickety steps and crossed the porch. I think, he said to himself, I’ll stick close to Gus; if Percy is captured, sooner or later he’ll turn up here now that Gus, it seems, is the actual functioning top man in this bale.
As he entered the lobby Gus called out to him, “Hey, welcome back, sir. It’s not every day someone comes back to this hotel for a second time.” He chuckled, evidently in an unusually good mood.
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