A moment later, without warning, the berserker was upon him, no matter that he might have thought for a moment that he’d been granted some miraculous respite.
Only minutes ago this man had seen another human killed by this same berserker. Another man killed when the machine caught him, and with a motion quick and deft as that of any factory assembly robot, crushed in the fellow’s helmet, and in the next instant twisted head and helmet completely off. And at the last instant, as his fellow human died, there had come to the ears of the survivor the shriek of a human voice on radio, and then the sound of breath and life and air departing.
But what had happened to others seemed irrelevant in the mind of the last man living on the Imatran surface. He himself had now been reduced to a state of mental and physical exhaustion in which it seemed to him that neither mind nor body could any longer move. He was no stranger to the earlier phases of this condition; but this time he knew in the foundation of his being something that he had never known before, that this time there was no way out. He could perceive distinctly, and with a curious detachment, just what final shape his termination had assumed. Skeletal and metallic, Death turned to him unhurriedly. Without hurry, but without delay—Death was wasting no time, though really there was all the time in the world for it to finish this job up properly.
… and there came a timeless, hideous moment, beyond anything that the survivor, who had thought he had already seen and known it all, would have been capable of imagining. When this moment arrived, the advancing machine was close enough for him to be able to look into at least some of its lenses as if they were eyes.
By this time the doomed man had struggled to his feet in what felt like a last effort and then fallen again, and struggled up once more, turning deliberately to confront Death, preferring that to feeling his doom grab him, strike him from behind.
And in that ultimate moment the man about to die was granted a good look into the lenses through which death gazed out at him …
… why should it move him so profoundly now, now when nothing in the world could matter, why should it make the least difference that those lenses were little mirrors?
… and what did it matter that he could see, if not his own face, at least his own helmet’s faceplate, looking out at him expectantly?
A touching, even an exchange, of souls. As if he, in seeing the end of life so closely, had come to be Death, and meanwhile Death had come in behind his own eyes, and supplanted him …
… and then, just at that moment of triumph—as if the machine were concluding some inexplicable computation, reaching a decision that its goal had been achieved—just at that moment, the four metal legs still functioning stopped in their tracks. A moment later, without a pause, without a break, it had ceased to threaten its still-living victim and was backing away. In another moment the great steel insect had turned its back upon the last Solarian survivor and was running in the opposite direction, determined on an incredible retreat that looked even faster than its pursuit had been.
Still the man, whose lungs yet kept on breathing, could not move a voluntary muscle. He could only stare after the berserker. Blown dust and swirling fog obscured the metal shape, first thinly and then heavily. And then in another moment it was gone.
No, not completely. For long seconds the air mikes of the armored suit still brought him the vibration of the berserker’s broken, dangling limbs, clashing against the members that still worked, a rhythmic sound that faded slowly, steadily, until it too had disappeared. The man who listened did not, could not, raise his eyes again or drag himself back to his feet.
With part of his mind he understood, vaguely but with a great inner conviction, that he had made some kind of pledge and that his offering must have been accepted. No words had been exchanged, but that made no real difference. The horror had departed from him because it was satisfied that now in some sense he belonged to it.
Only by the power of some satanic bargain was he still alive.
Somehow, in its terms and details, the bargain had still to be negotiated, given its final form. Sooner or later that must happen, and there was nothing to be done about it now. Right now the world of his survival was unreal. Still, when he let his eyelids close, he could see nothing but those reflective lenses, and those grippers raised and coming after him.
Some three standard hours later, the man who had survived was located, almost at the same spot, almost in the same position, by human searchers, who came looking for him armed and armored in their own swift-moving slave machines. Some of the joints of his armored suit had failed at last, so that he could no longer walk. His rescuers were led to where he huddled among the ruins by the slight vibration of his own still-trembling, still-living body.
FIFTEEN
In the hours immediately following his seemingly miraculous escape, the survivor was examined and then given medical care in a field hospital hastily erected on one of the least damaged portions of the Imatran surface. In this facility he soon discovered a fact he considered to be of great significance—he was the only patient.
A number of people questioned this incredibly lucky man about his experiences, and he gave truthful answers, as best he could, to most of them. He skirted the truth by a wide margin when he was asked how he had come into possession of the space armor that had saved his life; otherwise he was generally truthful, except that he revealed nothing about what had gone on inside his head during those last horrible moments of confrontation with the machine that had come so close to killing him. He said nothing about reflections in lenses, or about any feeling he had of having come to an understanding with the enemy.
Lying in his hospital cot under a room-sized plastic dome, sometimes shifting his weight from side to side in obedience to the medirobot’s brisk commands, he listened to the peculiar sounds attendant upon the efforts to restore the atmosphere outside, listened also for a certain recognizable tone of authority in the footsteps passing his room, and wondered if it would be of any practical value to steal and hide in some handy place, a scalpel someone had carelessly left upon a nearby table. He soon decided against that.
The survivor also reflected with awe upon the implications of the fact that out of several thousand humans populating the surface of Imatra when the attack began, he was the only one now still alive.
Stranger than that. Not just the only human survivor, which would have been bizarre enough. Not simply the only Earth-descended creature. Almost the only specimen of any biological species to outlast the onslaught. Scarcely a microbe, other than those in his body, clothing, and armor, had weathered the berserker aggression.
In the privacy of the man’s own thoughts, the uniqueness of his position, and the questions that it raised, glowed with white-hot urgency. They were all really variants of the same problem: What was the true nature of that last silent transaction that had taken place between himself and the machine?
Somethingreal must have happened between them, for it to have let him live.
What could a berserker have seen about him, known about him, detected in his voice, that had caused it to single him out for such special treatment?
And then there came a new thought, dancingly attractive, with—like all really attractive thoughts—a flavor of deep danger. Presently the man—who was startlingly handsome, and somewhat older than he looked—began to laugh. He kept the laughter almost entirely inside himself, in a way that he had long since mastered. No use encouraging his attendants to wonder just what he had found to laugh about. But the situation was really so amusing that he had to laugh. He wondered if the metal things that had so long and thoroughly terrorized humanity might have their own code of honor. For all he knew, it was conceivable that they did.
There was a certain long-established term in common use, a name with its translations and variants in every human society, for people who cooperated with berserkers. A name that had been originally bestowed upon such people by the machines themselves. The worst name that one could
have, in most branches—maybe in any branch—of Solarian society.
Goodlife. That was the dirty word. What those who committed the vilest of crimes were called. One of the few crimes, the survivor thought, of which he himself had never been accused.
Not yet, anyway.
Abruptly he had ceased to laugh, and was shaking his head in private wonderment. What could the machine ever have learned about his past life, and by what means, that had given it cause to take him for an ally?
More immediately to the point, what concrete action did it expect of him?
He had never in all his life, before his arrival on Imatra, been within communicating distance of a berserker machine. Nor had he ever wanted to be. How could killing machines coming out of deep space to attack this system, where he had never been before, where he had never wanted to be—how could such machines have known anything, anything at all, about what he was like? Or that he would be here?
At whatever odds, under whatever conditions, he was the only survivor of their attack. Of only that one fact could he be certain.
A day after being admitted to the hospital, when he was on the verge of being released—he had suffered only inconsequential physical injuries—the survivor, somewhat to his own amazement, went into delayed shock.
The doctors said something about a natural psychic reaction. The patient didn’t think it at all natural for him. Massive medical help was of course immediately available, and chemical therapy brought him out of the worst of the shock almost at once. But full healing in this case could not be achieved through chemistry, or at least the medics did not deem it wise to try. One of them wished aloud that he had the patient’s medical history; but though that was available in a number of places, all those places were many days or even months away, upon the planets of other stars.
On the morning of the next standard day, having finally been given the doctors’ permission to walk out of the hospital—even as machines were starting to disassemble the temporary building around him—the survivor trod the surface of a planetoid that was already enjoying a modest start on its way back to habitability; the complete journey was going to take a long time, judging by the way things looked. The diurnal cycle, disturbed when Imatra’s period of rotation was thrown off by the violence of the attack, was slowly being returned to a period of twenty-four standard hours. Some tough ornamental plantings were still alive, still green, despite having endured some hours of virtual airlessness. Havot paused to gaze at them in admiration. A spacesuit was no longer required to walk about—atmospheric pressure, if not oxygen content, was well on the way back to normal. Humans working out of doors, who were the only people around except for the just-discharged patient, moved about protected by nothing more than respirators.
Unexpectedly, as if by some deep compulsion, he found himself heading back toward the place, the building, in which he had acquired his lifesaving suit of armor. Of course compulsive feelings could be dangerous, but this time he indulged them. As he drew near the site, his feet slowed to a stop. Silently he offered thanks to fate, to luck, the great faceless monsters who from somewhere ran the world, for at last coming back round to his side. Only a blasted shell of the edifice remained, on the edge of a disorienting ruin, stretching for kilometers, that had been one of the larger Imatran spaceports.
It would have been wiser, he supposed, to move away at once; but at the moment he was enjoying a feeling of invulnerability. He was still standing there, thoughtfully gazing at the ruins, when footsteps with a certain recognizable tone approached behind him. Only one pair of them.
He turned and found himself confronting a young woman dressed in executive style, who was of course wearing an inhalator like his own.
“Excuse me. Christopher Havot, is it not?” Her voice was soft, somehow inviting. “They told me your name at the hospital.”
“That’s right.” The name he had given his rescuers was not one that he had ever used before, but he considered he had as much right to it as anyone else.
His questioner’s moderate height was about the equal of his own. She (again like him) was strong-limbed and fair, and very cool and businesslike. She began fairly enough by introducing herself as Rebecca Thanarat, special agent of the Office of Humanity.
Havot looked innocently puzzled. “This is not my home world—far from it. I’m afraid I’m not entirely clear on what the Office of Humanity is. I suppose an ‘office’ would be some government bureau, or—?”
She nodded tolerantly. “Yes, the Imatran system is only one of four families of planets that fall under the jurisdiction of our OH office.”
“I see.” Havot had been right about the footsteps; he thought he could always tell when the law approached him, even though he was having some difficulty figuring out exactly what law, whose law, his interrogator was determined to enforce. Except he was certain that the Humanity Office could have no notion of who he really was. Not when they sent one casual young woman out to talk to him.
Obviously she was just feeling her way. She asked: “Then we do have the correct information, you are not an Imatran native?”
“No, I was just passing through. This was part of the spaceport, wasn’t it?” He turned and gestured at the ruined plain before them. Actually he had no doubt of where he was. Only a few meters in front of where they were now standing had been the spaceport detention cell. As soon as the alert had sounded, one of his guards, who in other matters had not acted especially like an idiot, had begun to argue stoutly that the prisoner, whose life was totally dependent upon those who had him in their care, really ought to be unfettered, and be given the first chance at getting into an armored protective suit. It would be safe enough to give him armor, because certain of the suit’s controls could be disabled first …
After only a brief discussion they had given their prisoner the suit. Chris smiled remotely, fondly at the memory.
Meanwhile young Agent Thanarat was talking at him in her bright attractive voice, beginning a conversation. This is how we put the suspect at ease. More than likely she had been taught certain general rules, such as beginning most interrogations on a friendly note. But she seemed very young indeed, likely to have trouble keeping the friendliness from becoming genuine and spontaneous.
She was determined to accomplish her assigned job, no doubt about that. After a minute she led the talk rather awkwardly around to the question of why the berserkers had retreated so abruptly. What ideas did Havot have on that point?
Until this moment he had never really considered that larger aspect of the matter. He had assumed, without really thinking about it, that the enemy, having practically sterilized this little world, had moved on to bigger things, launching an attack on the more heavily populated sunward planets. Since he’d heard no weeping and wailing about horrendous casualty reports received from sunward, he assumed that the berserkers had been defeated there, or at least had been beaten off.
When he said as much, adopting a properly serious tone, his interlocutor gently informed him that nothing of the kind had happened.
“As soon as the berserkers broke off their attack on this planetoid, they very quickly withdrew from the entire system. The inner worlds were never menaced.” When she said this, Agent Thanarat appeared to be watching carefully for his reaction.
Havot blinked. “Maybe they found out that a relief fleet was on its way.”
“Possibly. But it still seems very strange. Or don’t you think so? No one’s ever frightened a berserker yet.” Now Rebecca Thanarat was sounding tougher than she had seemed at first impression.
Havot turned his back on the ruins of the spaceport and started strolling, almost at random, putting his booted feet down among gray shards and dust that came drifting up feebly in the new air. Agent Thanarat came with him, walking with her hands clasped behind her back.
After a few paces Havot said: “But surely they have been known to retreat. If they’d known a superior force was coming to destroy them, they’d have backed a
way, wouldn’t they? Withdraw to keep from being wiped out, so they could destroy more life another day?”
His companion nodded. “Sure, they retreat sometimes, for tactical reasons. But the human force approaching, the people who found you still alive, wasn’t that much stronger than theirs. And even if they’d mistakenly computed that for once humanity had them outnumbered, that wouldn’t throw machines into a panic—would it, now?”
“I hardly think it likely,” agreed Havot, wondering at the tone of the question. The speaker had uttered it in the manner of one delivering the crushing conclusion to some serious debate.
His interlocutor nodded with evident satisfaction, as if she took Havot’s answer as some kind of a concession. Then she went on: “The real question is, excuse me if I put it crudely, why couldn’t they hang around another fraction of a minute to finish youoff? If the version of your story that I’ve heard is the correct one, another few seconds would have done it.”
“I hope you’re not disappointed that I’m still here.” He flashed a winning smile for just a second. Not too long; he had decided that Christopher Havot should be a basically shy young man.
“Not at all.” The Humanity Office agent in turn favored him with a more personal look than any she had given him so far. Then—were her fair cheeks just a little flushed?—she lifted her blue eyes to stare into the sky. “We ought to have some verification shortly as to exactly what happened during the attack. A couple of ships are out there now looking for the relevant light.”
“The relevant light? I don’t understand.”
Rebecca Thanarat made little jerky motions with her hands, illustrating the movement of craft in space. “A couple of ships have gone jumping out, antisunward in several directions, to overtake the sunlight that was reflected from this planetoid during the hours of the attack. It’s a hazardous job, going c-plus this near a sun, and no one undertakes it except for the most serious reason. When the investigating ships have determined the exact distance, a couple of light-days out, they’ll be able to sit there and watch the attack in progress. If all goes well, and they can fine-tune their distance exactly right, they’ll be able to record the events just as they took place.” The speaker, proud of her technical knowledge, was once more observing Havot closely.
Berserker Wars (Omnibus) Page 80