“No doubt.” White grinned through his beard, and frowned again with thought. “But I used to think that physical time and physical space might be just illusions—”
“Quantum mechanics can be interpreted nearly that way, come to think of it,” Claypool said. “I remember a theory that time and space are not independent entities, but rather only the incidental side properties of the energy units that appear variously as waves and particles—call them wavicles!”
He blinked at the huge man, hopeful and elated.
“There I think we have it—the mechanics of teleportation! Not a transfer of actual substance, but rather an exchange of identity patterns, made by controlled probability. That avoids the problems of inertia and instantaneous acceleration, that used to trouble me.”
“Might be.” White nodded, still frowning. “I guess you’re right. But what is the actual mind-force? How does it act to control atomic probability, or exchange probability? What is probability? What are the equations of psychophysics? The laws? The limits?”
And Claypool shook his gnomish brown head, baffled again. That uncertain hypothesis, he saw, was only a flicker in the dark. The full truth lay somewhere ahead of him, still veiled in ultimate mystery. White always asked more questions than he could answer. Yet that feeble illumination had comforted him, and it cheered him on.
He toiled to decipher old Sledge’s notes and drawings. When he came to study the layout of the grid, White had him take the tattered plans into Overstreet’s little curtained grotto. The clairvoyant sprawled inert in a creaking wooden chair. Pale puffy hands were folded on his fat knees, and his vague eyes stared through the lacy fretwork of calcite on the walls.
“Yes, I can see the Central . . . the brain,” he whispered. “They haven’t blocked it off, like that thing ill the dome. Not yet.” He took the drawings clumsily, peering as if he could scarcely see them. “Here’s Sledge’s shop, where he built the first humanoid—it isn’t changed, because he built them somehow to stay out of it.”
His puffy finger pointed.
“And here, beyond the tower door, are the first sections of the brain—the ones Sledge built. The humanoids have built on millions more—and changed the whole planet so that he wouldn’t know it—but those first sections are still the same.”
Overstreet blinked dimly, behind thick lenses.
“I can still read the numbers that old Sledge painted to identify the sections. The first three—here and here and here—contain the Prime Directive. The next two—numbered four and five—govern the interpretation. They’re the ones that must be changed.”
Toiling at the bench, Claypool lost track of time. For that closed cave was sealed against the flow of day and night, and White had conquered sleep. Claypool failed to grasp the method of it, but he followed White’s stern regimen and came to share a little of the huge man’s driving vitality.
And he had no time to sleep.
His hands were blistered from handling hot metal, and numb with weariness. His eyes ached from straining through the lens, and his back was sore from bending. His weak knee throbbed and swelled. But still he worked on—and his fatigue began to fall away. His old dyspepsia ceased to trouble him, and he ate his hurried meals with relish. White assured him blandly that he was learning psychophysics.
The white blocks of rare palladium were fused and cast and machined, rolled and stamped and drawn. White took his place at the bench, and little Ford, and even the child. The new relays went together, and Claypool soldered them into new grid sections.
Time was suspended in that deep cave, but Wing IV kept moving. Sitting heavy and pale in his creaking chair, Overstreet peered away through the white-rimed walls, and saw the shape of trouble. At last he came shuffling to the cluttered bench, and touched Claypool’s arm.
“I can’t see it clear.” His hoarse whisper was muted with worry, and somehow apologetic. “I can’t see it clear, and I don’t know why. But things are happening, on Wing IV. I believe that new thing in the dome beside the brain is nearly done. I believe it’s time for us to try.”
Behind the heavy glasses, his puzzled eyes seemed vague and strange and dark.
“I think it’s now, or not at all.”
Claypool tested a last relay, and put down his tools and his jeweler’s lens, and said that he was ready.
XXI.
The time was now, and Claypool had thought that he was ready. He had watched Dawn come and go, and elaborated his own exchange-force theory of teleportation. But Wing IV was two hundred light-years away.
Standing with the child and White, beside the palladium-shielded sections waiting on the bench, Claypool dwelt upon that staggering magnitude. That was twelve hundred trillion miles. That was farther than a naked human eye could see the atomic blaze of an ordinary star.
The vastness of that distance brought his old doubts back, and the calcite walls shut him in again. He felt the stuffy deadness of the air, and the merciless pressure of living stone, and listened to the mockery of dark water running where men couldn’t go.
His stomach twisted, and his flesh turned clammy. All the orthodoxies of his old training came trooping back to haunt him, out of dusty laboratories and gloomy observatories. It couldn’t be done, his old habits screamed. No man could simply step across twelve hundred trillion miles, as if it were a line drawn on the floor.
He turned uneasily away from the shining urgency of the new grid sections, those two long palladium boxes heavy with all the hopes of man. He mopped his cold forehead, and blinked unhappily at the tall impatient man.
“I can’t do it,” he confessed. “It’s just too far.” He gulped, and peered hopefully at the solemneyed child. “Perhaps . . . perhaps we could try shorter hops . . . just across the cave . . . till I get the feel of it.”
“Nonsense!” White boomed abruptly. “Remember your own theory. Physical space is not an entity. That balcony on Wing IV, outside the door to old Sledge’s shop, is just as near, paraphysically, as this bench. And we’ve no time to waste.”
He nodded impatiently at the long grid sections, and the blue hate in his eyes was an unquenched flame.
“Your theory ought to help you, Claypool. I believe, myself, that physical space is merely a convenient sensory illusion. But all you really need to do is relax. Dawn can carry you to Wing IV—if you’ll just let go your unconscious opposition.”
And the child turned to him, holding up a small grubby hand. She looked very tiny, but she had found a new and brighter scarlet ribbon for her hair. Her eyes were huge and dark and shining eagerly. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.” And suddenly he knew the way. He caught the spark of her courage, and gave her his trust. She led him, and they didn’t even have to step across a line. They didn’t seem to move at all, but they were on the balcony.
“See!” she told him softly. “It wasn’t hard at all.”
She stood beside him, still clutching his hand. He squeezed her warm tiny fingers, with a voiceless gratitude for her presence, and then looked about him dazedly.
The narrow metal floor of the balcony jutted from a gray wall, which gleamed with the dull color of oxidized aluminum. That wall reached, windowless, far to right and left. It soared above them, topless. It dropped beneath, a blank metal precipice, so far that his breath went out when he tried to look down.
His searching eyes found a narrow door behind them, and his anxious mind could see a tattered drawing, printed fast in his memory now. That door would let them through Sledge’s old shop. Just beyond the shop were the three grid sections that held the Prime Directive, and then the two that must be changed.
He let his gaze drift up again, and again the vastness of the building stunned him. But the relay grid must have been growing like a living brain, he knew, ever since old Sledge first energized it. The humanoids must have built additional sections for it, every time their teeming trillions reached another planet.
The old ground level must have been near this balcony, and Sledg
e’s shop must once have been some rough temporary building—for he had been alone here at first, working desperately amid the deadly rubble of rhodomagnetic war, building his machines to banish war forever.
But eighty years had changed Wing IV.
Claypool looked beyond the low gray railing, and felt a shiver of awe. The shadow of this tremendous solitary tower fell dim and vast before him, an endless blot that lay out across a strangely leveled plain. For the whole planet, out to the gray rim of a murky sky, seemed to be one single spaceport.
Interstellar craft were arriving and departing. All those mighty vessels must have been as enormous as the black ships which brought the teeming machines to his own world, yet those in the far distance seemed tiny as midges flying. They were numberless, multitudinous as dark insects swarming.
A few landed on the surface, near enough for him to glimpse dark rivers of ore roaring out of them— metal, he thought, for new machines. One ship was loading. He saw ordered armies of tiny black mechanicals marching up its gangways—ready, he supposed, to quiet all the quarrels of some troubled world with the crushing benevolence of the Prime Directive.
Most of those great craft, however, dropped through black pits toward the planet’s bowels. For all Wing IV, he saw, must have become a single labyrinth of entrance shafts and landing cradles; ore bins and smelters, foundries and factories—the dark metal matrix of this unimaginable machine, where the humanoids were born.
He withdrew from the railing, humbled and shuddering.
Dawn crouched against him, and they crept back against the cold face of the metal wall. She had been proudly brave, showing him the way, but now her small hand clung hard to his. He drew her toward the narrow door.
“No, that wasn’t very hard.” He gave her a pale smile. “Now vet’s find those two grid sections, and put the new ones in.”
But she hung back.
“Wait!” she whispered urgently. “ ’Cause Mr. White says you ought to look at that.” She pointed, out across that gray, busy vastness. “He says maybe you can tell him what it is.”
He looked the way she pointed, and saw the thing the humanoids were building. It was dome-shaped, taller than its breadth, colored darkly red. Dim in the smoky distance, a web of black scaffolding still surrounded it.
It towered up, far-off and alone. At first he had no clue to its size, and then he saw a descending interstellar vessel, creeping down across the dark scarlet face of it, a thin black fleck. He knew then that it was enormous.
“Mr. White wants to know what you think it is?” Dawn was whispering urgently. “He says maybe you can guess, ’cause you’re a rhodomagnetic engineer. He says you ought to try, ’cause he’s afraid of it. Even Mr. Overstreet can’t see inside it any more, but he thinks it’s nearly done.”
Claypool peered at the far curve of it. Were the humanoids attempting to improve themselves, with that vast new grid of platinum relays? That seemed scarcely possible—they were already much too perfect.
A thin wind brushed Claypool’s face. It stung his eyes with a bitterness of furnace smoke and industrial fumes. It was the stifling breath of the machine. He coughed, and shuddered, and turned quickly to the child.
“Tell Mr. White I don’t know what that dome could be,” he whispered. “Platinum relays couldn’t be rhodomagnetic, and I don’t know any use for them.” He was afraid to guess, and he moved impatiently toward that narrow door. “Now I think we ought to get started.”
“Yes, Mr. White says we ought to hurry,” she agreed. “ ‘Cause Mr. Overstreet can see trouble waiting for us. Only he can’t see just what it is, ’cause that gets in the way.”
She nodded fearfully toward that far scarlet dome, and then they turned hastily to the narrow door. Oddly, in this world without men, it had a knob to fit a human hand. It opened stiffly. A short hallway, the walls of it glowing faintly with a gray radiant paint, let them into a room older than the humanoids.
Into old Sledge’s shop.
“Wait!” Dawn breathed again. “ ’Cause Mr. Overstreet is watching the sections we must change, and he says one of the black things is too near it now. We must wait in here till it goes away.”
Waiting uneasily, Claypool looked wonderingly around this room where old Sledge had made his dark machines too well. The dull cold radiance of the paint fell on a scarred wooden desk and a worn swivel chair, on a dusty drafting table with a tall stool pushed against it, on long shelves of technical books in faded bindings, on cluttered benches and rusting tools. The place had a dry stale odor, of years and slow decay.
In one corner, a few moldering blankets were still folded neatly on a cot, and a little table was stacked with dishes and rusted cans and beakers and an alcohol burner—as if old Sledge had interrupted his strange creation only reluctantly, to snatch the simplest essentials of life.
Beyond the shop was an inner door. They waited before it, and the child’s cold hand was tight in his own. Gay with the ribbon, her head was bent as if to listen. His mind rehearsed the things they had to do, and he whispered:
“We must find those two sections—number four and number five. I’ll undo the connections. You take them to the cave, and “bring back the new ones. I’ll hook them in—and you must stop any humanoid that finds us.”
Dawn nodded, listening.
That was all they had to do. It would take them live minutes more, with any luck at all—to amend the Prime Directive with a bill of human rights, and free many thousand worlds from a suffocating kindness. His heart thumped loud, and the leg the humanoids had set began to tremble weakly.
Dawn suddenly tightened her icy fingers on his hand, and pointed at the door. It also had a common knob, to fit a human hand, instead of a concealed relay. He opened it—and closed it quickly.
Beyond, he had seen Humanoid Central.
The relays of the mechanical brain were arranged in panels, and each panel was packed with intricate sections like the two he had built. He could see no cables—all its rivers of energy must be carried on rhodomagnetic beams. The vastness of it rocked him.
The humanoids required no light, and most of that enormous space within the tower was ,quite dark. But on this original level, which Sledge himself had built, the panel faces and the narrow inspection walks before them were finished with a gray-glowing paint. That dim light shone far into the gloom, above and beyond and below.
The panels of the grid made endless shadowy avenues. Level on level, they reached above as far as he could see, and they fell away, level under level, down into the chasm of the dark. Busy on the web of narrow walks, he had glimpsed scores of humanoids.
All those black machines were hurrying along with a quick efficient grace, some of them carrying tools—busy, he supposed, enlarging and maintaining the grid. But that glimpse of them had shaken him. He leaned weakly against the closed door. The child clung hard to his hand, peering up at him with a mute alarm.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I just forgot they’re blind.”
And he opened the door again.
They crept out silently, into the Central. Beneath a soundless hush, Claypool fancied that he could sense the pulsation of unimaginable energies—the power beams that controlled and drove trillions of black machines, on many thousand worlds.
They pushed out breathlessly, along a dimly glowing walk. That narrow footway had no railing— it was built for perfect machines, that never slipped or erred. He leaned shuddering back from the gulf of bottomless dark.
Trying not to look at the busy little machines, hurrying about that endless web of metal ways, he searched the panel faces. And he found the numbers that old Sledge had painted on the sections, eighty years ago. Hasty brush marks, splashed on for identification in the shop, they were faded now, and peeling away from the satiny palladium shielding.
They were faint with age, but he could read them still. The first three sections held the Prime Directive. Three long, silvergray cases, a little smaller than three coffins. The freedom
and the future of mankind had lain buried in them for eighty years, he thought, murdered by error to preserve a sterile peace.
He crept out along that giddy way. White and silent, the child clung hard to his arm. He tried to ignore the blind machines ahead, and blinked to read the peeling numbers.
Four!
For an instant he couldn’t breathe. He felt as if that narrow walk had swayed beneath him, and he clutched desperately for the panel edge. But Dawn tugged sharply at his hand, pointing fearfully at a dark intent machine that was moving too near. He fumbled in his pocket for the pliers he had brought, and lifted the cover of the fourth section.
“Oh—”
Dawn’s cry was a low moan of pain. She let go his fingers. At first he didn’t know what had happened. He thought that a mechanical had found them, and then he was afraid she had fallen from the walk. The pliers made an alarming clatter on the thin shielding. He nearly lost his own balance, and skinned his knuckles in his frantic snatch for safety.
Then he found her.
She had backed away from him, along that dizzy walk. She stood frozen, like a mechanical at rest. Her pinched face was bloodless. Pier staring eyes seemed enormous in the gloom. Voiceless, she was pointing stiffly at the door behind them.
Claypool looked at that door. It was still closed. He could bear nothing, in that hush of silent power, he glanced fearfully at the nearest black machine again. It still ignored them, brushing invisible dust from a dimly glowing panel.
The door opened, behind him.
He heard the creak of it, and panic spun him. He saw a man, striding confidently out along that giddy path. For an instant he felt a weak relief, because it wasn’t a machine. Then stark dismay clutched him back again, for he recognized Frank Ironsmith.
“Stop it, Claypool!”
Iron smith’s pleasant voice rang clear and imperative, alarming in those dim corridors of the grid. He stalked that narrow way, indifferent to any risk of falling. His boyish, sunburned face looked lean and stern, and his gray eyes held a stricken sadness.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 21