by Simon Ings
It ignored the vibratory pattern and rechecked its battle gear. It introspected its energy storage, and tested its weapon activators. It summoned an emissary eye and waited a dozen minutes while the eye crawled crablike from the holy place to take up a watch-post near the entrance of the cave. If the enemy remnant tried to emerge, the emissary eye would see, and report, and it could destroy the enemy remnant with a remote grenade catapult.
The purring in the ground was louder. Having prepared itself for the fray, it came down from the crag and grumbled southward at cruising speed. It passed the gutted hulk of the Moonwagon, with its team of overturned tractors. The detonation of the magnapult canister had broken the freightcar sized vehicle in half. The remains of several two-legged enemy appurtenances were scattered about the area, tiny broken things in the pale Earthlight. Grumbler ignored them and charged relentlessly southward.
A sudden wink of light on the southern horizon! Then a tiny dot of flame arced upward, traversing the heavens. Grumbler skidded to a halt and tracked its path. A rocket missile. It would fall somewhere in the east half of zone Red-Red. There was no time to prepare to shoot it down. Grumbler waited—and saw that the missile would explode harmlessly in a nonvital area.
Seconds later, the missile paused in flight, reversing direction and sitting on its jets. It dropped out of sight behind an outcropping. There was no explosion. Nor was there any activity in the area where the missile had fallen. Grumbler called an emissary ear, sent it migrating toward the impact point to listen, then continued South toward the pain perimeter.
*
“Salvage Sixteen, this is Aubrey’s runabout,” came the long-wave vibrations. “We just shot the radio-seismitter relay into Red-Red. If you’re within five miles of it, you should be able to hear.”
Almost immediately, a response from the cave, heard by the emissary ear that listened to the land near the tower: “Thank God! He he he he—Oh, thank God!”
And simultaneously, the same vibratory pattern came in long-wave patterns from the direction of the missile-impact point. Grumbler stopped again, momentarily confused, angrily tempted to lob a magnapult canister across the broken terrain toward the impact point. But the emissary ear reported no physical movement from the area. The enemy to the south was the origin of the disturbances. If it removed the major enemy first, it could remove the minor disturbances later. It moved on to the pain perimeter, occasionally listening to the meaningless vibrations caused by the enemy.
“Salvage Sixteen from Aubrey. I hear you faintly. Who is this, Carhill?”
“Aubrey! A voice —A real voice—Or am I going nuts?”
“Sixteen from Aubrey, Sixteen from Aubrey. Stop babbling and tell me who’s talking. What’s happening in there? Have you got Grumbler immobilized?”
Spasmodic choking was the only response.
“Sixteen from Aubrey. Snap out of it! Listen, Sawyer, I know it’s you. Now get hold of yourself, man! What’s happened?”
“Dead… they’re all dead but me.”
“STOP THAT IDIOTIC LAUGHING!”
A long silence, then, scarcely audible: “O.K., I’ll hold onto myself. Is it really you, Aubrey?”
“You’re not having hallucinations, Sawyer. We’re crossing zone Red in a runabout. Now tell me the situation. We’ve been trying to call you for days.”
“Grumbler let us get ten miles into zone Red-Red, and then he clobbered us with a magnapult canister.”
“Wasn’t your I.F.F. working?”
“Yes, but Grumbler’s isn’t. After he blasted the wagon, he picked off the other four that got out alive—He he he he… Did you ever see a Sherman tank chase a mouse, colonel?”
“Cut it out, Sawyer! Another giggle out of you, and I’ll flay you alive.”
“Get me out! My leg! Get me out!”
“If we can. Tell me your present situation.”
“My suit… I got a small puncture—Had to pump the leg full of water and freeze it. Now my leg’s dead. I can’t last much longer.”
“The situation, Sawyer, the situation! Not your aches and pains.”
The vibrations continued, but Grumbler screened them out for a time. There was rumbling fury on an Earthlit hill.
It sat with its engines idling, listening to the distant movements of the enemy to the south. At the foot of the hill lay the pain perimeter; even upon the hilltop, it felt the faint twinges of warning that issued from the tower, thirty kilometers to the rear at the center of the world. It was in communion with the tower. If it ventured beyond the perimeter, the communion would slip out-of-phase, and there would be blinding pain and detonation.
The enemy was moving more slowly now, creeping north across the demi- world. It would be easy to destroy the enemy at once, if only the supply of rocket missiles were not depleted. The range of the magnapult hurler was only twenty-five kilometers. The small spitters would reach, but their accuracy was close to zero at such range. It would have to wait for the enemy to come closer. It nursed a brooding fury on the hill.
“Listen, Sawyer, if Grumbler’s I.F.F. isn’t working, why hasn’t he already fired on this runabout?”
“That’s what sucked us in too, Colonel. We came into zone Red and nothing happened. Either he’s out of long-range ammo, or he’s getting cagey, or both. Probably both.”
“Mmmp! Then we’d better park here and figure something out.”
“Listen… there’s only one thing you can do. Call for a telecontrolled missile from the Base.”
“To destroy Grumbler? You’re out of your head, Sawyer. If Grumbler’s knocked out, the whole area around the excavations gets blown sky high… to keep them out of enemy hands. You know that.”
“You expect me to care?”
“Stop screaming, Sawyer. Those excavations are the most valuable property on the Moon. We can’t afford to lose them. That’s why Grumbler was staked out. If they got blown to rubble, I’d be court-martialed before the debris quit falling.”
The response was snarling and sobbing. “Eight hours oxygen. Eight hours, you hear? You stupid, merciless—”
*
The enemy to the south stopped moving at a distance of twenty-eight kilometers from Grumbler’s hill—only three thousand meters beyond magnapult range.
A moment of berserk hatred. It lumbered to-and-fro in a frustrated pattern that was like a monstrous dance, crushing small rocks beneath its treads, showering dust into the valley. Once it charged down toward the pain perimeter, and turned back only after the agony became unbearable. It stopped again on the hill, feeling the weariness of lowered energy supplies in the storage units.
It paused to analyze. It derived a plan.
Gunning its engines, it wheeled slowly around on the hilltop, and glided down the northern slope at a stately pace. It sped northward for half a mile across the flatland, then slowed to a crawl and maneuvered its massive bulk into a fissure, where it had cached an emergency store of energy. The battery-trailer had been freshly charged before the previous sundown. It backed into feeding position and attached the supply cables without hitching itself to the trailer.
It listened occasionally to the enemy while it drank hungrily from the energy-store, but the enemy remained motionless. It would need every erg of available energy in order to accomplish its plan. It drained the cache. Tomorrow, when the enemy was gone, it would drag the trailer back to the main feeders for recharging, when the sun rose to drive the generators once again. It kept several caches of energy at strategic positions throughout its domain, that it might never be driven into starved inability to act during the long lunar night. It kept its own house in order, dragging the trailers back to be recharged at regular intervals.
“I don’t know what I can do for you, Sawyer,” came the noise of the enemy. “We don’t dare destroy Grumbler, and there’s not another autocyber crew on the Moon. I’ll have to call Terra for replacements. I can’t send men into zone Red-Red if Grumbler’s running berserk. It’d be murder.”
&
nbsp; “For the love of God, Colonel—”
“Listen, Sawyer, you’re the autocyber man. You helped train Grumbler. Can’t you think of some way to stop him without detonating the mined area?”
A protracted silence. Grumbler finished feeding and came out of the fissure. It moved westward a few yards, so that a clear stretch of flat land lay between itself and the hill at the edge of the pain perimeter, half a mile away. There it paused, and awoke several emissary ears, so that it might derive the most accurate possible fix of the enemy’s position. One by one, the emissary ears reported.
“Well, Sawyer?”
“My leg’s killing me.”
“Can’t you think of anything?”
“Yeah—but it won’t do me any good. I won’t live that long.”
“Well, let’s hear it.”
“Knock out his remote energy storage units, and then run him ragged at night.”
“How long would it take?”
“Hours—after you found all his remote supply units and blasted them.”
It analyzed the reports of the emissary ears, and calculated a precise position. The enemy runabout was 2.7 kilometers beyond the maximum range of the magnapult—as creation had envisioned the maximum. But creation was imperfect, even inside.
It loaded a canister onto the magnapult’s spindle. Contrary to the intentions of creation, it left the canister locked to the loader. This would cause pain. But it would prevent the canister from moving during the first few microseconds after the switch was closed, while the magnetic field was still building toward full strength. It would not release the canister until the field clutched it fiercely and with full effect, thus imparting slightly greater energy to the canister. This procedure it had invented for itself, thus transcending creation.
“Well, Sawyer, if you can’t think of anything else—”
“I DID THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE!” the answering vibrations screamed. “Call for a telecontrolled missile! Can’t you understand, Aubrey? Grumbler murdered eight men from your command.”
“You taught him how, Sawyer.”
There was a long and ominous silence. On the flat land to the north of the hill, Grumbler adjusted the elevation of the magnapult slightly, keyed the firing switch to a gyroscope, and prepared to charge. Creation had calculated the maximum range when the weapon was at a standstill.
“He he he he he—” came the patterns from the thing in the cave.
It gunned its engines and clutched the drive-shafts. It rolled toward the hill, gathering speed, and its mouth was full of death. Motors strained and howled. Like a thundering bull, it rumbled toward the south. It hit maximum velocity at the foot of the slope. It lurched sharply upward. As the magnapult swept up to correct elevation, the gyroscope closed the circuit.
A surge of energy. The clenching fist of the field gripped the canister, tore it free of the loader, hurled it high over the broken terrain toward the enemy. Grumbler skidded to a halt on the hilltop.
“Listen, Sawyer, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing—”
The enemy’s voice ended with a dull snap. A flare of light came briefly from the southern horizon, and died. “He he he he he—” said the thing in the cave.
Grumbler paused.
THRRRUMMMP! came the shocking wave through the rocks.
Five emissary ears relayed their recordings of the detonation from various locations. It studied them, it analyzed. The detonation had occurred less than fifty meters from the enemy runabout. Satiated, it wheeled around lazily on the hilltop and rolled northward toward the center of the world. All was well.
“Aubrey, you got cut off,” grunted the thing in the cave. “Call me, you coward… call me. I want to make certain you hear.”
Grumbler, as a random action, recorded the meaningless noise of the thing in the cave, studied the noise, rebroadcast it on the long-wave frequency: “Aubrey, you got cut off. Call me, you coward… call me. I want to make certain you hear.”
The seismitter caught the long-wave noise and reintroduced it as vibration in the rocks.
The thing screamed in the cave. Grumbler recorded the screaming noise, and rebroadcast it several times.
“Aubrey… Aubrey, where are you… AUBREY! Don’t desert me don’t leave me here—”
*
The thing in the cave became silent.
It was a peaceful night. The stars glared unceasingly from the blackness and the pale terrain was haunted by Earthlight from the dim crescent in the sky. Nothing moved. It was good that nothing moved. The holy place was at peace in the airless world. There was blessed stasis.
Only once did the thing stir again in the cave. So slowly that Grumbler scarcely heard the sound, it crawled to the entrance and lay peering up at the steel behemoth on the crag.
It whispered faintly in the rocks. “I made you, don’t you understand? I’m human. I made you—”
Then with one leg dragging behind, it pulled itself out into the Earthglow and turned as if to look up at the dim crescent in the sky. Gathering fury, Grumbler stirred on the crag, and lowered the black maw of a grenade launcher.
“I made you,” came the meaningless noise.
It hated noise and motion. It was in its nature to hate them. Angrily, the grenade launcher spoke. And then there was blessed stasis for the rest of the night.
(1954)
THE BELL-TOWER
Herman Melville
The author of the novels Typee and Moby Dick and other works now almost completely razed from memory lived a bitterly back-to-front career, propelled from early acclaim to utter obscurity. He was born in 1819 into New York City’s merchant class. His first novel Typee (1846) was a romantic account of his experiences of Polynesian life. In 1849 he went to London to negotiate book contracts and while there he picked up a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The climax to that book—an epic transoceanic chase sequence—suggested to him his next big project, “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”. But Moby Dick (1851) was the last thing of his anyone cared to read. His next, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) won him a headline in the New York Day Book that ran “HERMANN MELVILLE CRAZY” and by 1876 all his books were out of print. “If the truth were known, even his own generation has long thought him dead,” ran one obituary in 1891.
In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mold cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.
As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound —last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration—so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain.
From that treetop, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine, a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna.
Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth, following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried up and once more the green appeared. No wonder that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar aspiration.
In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond Bannadonna. Enriched through commerce with the Levant, the state in which he lived voted to have the noblest Bell-Tower in Italy. His repute assigned him to be architect.
Stone by stone, month by month, the tower rose. Higher, higher, snail-like in pace, but torch or rocket in its pride.
After the masons would depart, the builder, standing alone upon its ever-ascending summit at close of every day, saw that he overtopped still higher walls and trees. He would tarry till a late hour there, wrapped in schemes of other and still loftier piles. Those who of
saints’ days thronged the spot—hanging to the rude poles of scaffolding like sailors on yards or bees on boughs, unmindful of lime and dust, and falling chips of stone—their homage not the less inspirited him to self-esteem.
At length the holiday of the Tower came. To the sound of viols, the climax-stone slowly rose in air, and, amid the firing of ordnance, was laid by Bannadonna’s hands upon the final course. Then mounting it, he stood erect, alone, with folded arms, gazing upon the white summits of blue inland Alps, and whiter crests of bluer Alps offshore—sights invisible from the plain. Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he turned below, when, like the cannon booms, came up to him the people’s combustions of applause.
That which stirred them so was seeing with what serenity the builder stood three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed perch. This none but he durst do. But his periodic standing upon the pile, in each stage of its growth—such discipline had its last result.
Little remained now but the bells. These, in all respects, must correspond with their receptacle.
The minor ones were prosperously cast. A highly enriched one followed, of a singular make, intended for suspension in a manner before unknown. The purpose of this bell, its rotary motion and connection with the clockwork, also executed at the time, will, in the sequel, receive mention.
In the one erection, bell-tower and clock-tower were united, though, before that period, such structures had commonly been built distinct; as the Campanile and Torre del Orologio of St. Mark to this day attest.
But it was upon the great state bell that the founder lavished his more daring skill. In vain did some of the less elated magistrates here caution him, saying that though truly the tower was titanic, yet limit should be set to the dependent weight of its swaying masses. But, undeterred, he prepared his mammoth mold, dented with mythological devices; kindled his fires of balsamic firs; melted his tin and copper, and, throwing in much plate contributed by the public spirit of the nobles, let loose the tide.