by Jerry
Two huge holes for eyes, a gaping rent of a mouth. He threw it with disgust into the depository. It would go back to the Neurological Division to be cleaned and repaired.
He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his.
The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn’t come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off.
He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin.
He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he climbed into the overall casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin.
Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked across the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body.
He said “hello” experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn’t. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to.
HE went through the curtains into the tube-like corridor and joined the other silver warriors on their way to the mess hall. He knew no one of them, yet knew them all. In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. Until then the only faces he would see would be his own and those of the subnormal servers in the mess hall. He had no loyalties except to the fortress. The fortress was his past, present and future.
He nodded a greeting to his server. “How are you today, Teddy?” The voice distorter made him a gentle baritone.
The moron stared at him blankly, not understanding what was spoken, not caring. It was mentally impossible for him to care about anyone and psychologically impossible for anyone to care about him. That was why he was allowed to serve in the mess. He set Jord’s rations before him in their plastic containers. A scientific measure of calories, proteins, vitamins, minerals and hay-like roughage.
Jord wished the idiot was able to talk, but decided against holding a one-sided conversation with him. He used to do it quite often, taking pleasure in the shifting planes of his face, until he’d become sick with longing for a complete human being. He knew no one and only his psychiatrist knew him. The fortress was to him one complete body.
The parts of that body could never be allowed to become more important than the total of those parts. It was the first thing a potential master of a Galbth II learned: The basic lesson in loneliness.
He choked down the measured kilograms of roughage, saving the concentrates until the last when he could suck out the synthetic flavoring and delude himself for a moment that he was eating food. His fare consisted of the precise amount necessary to keep him operating at maximum efficiency and maintain optimum size. A two-pound variation in his weight would require a refitting.
He smoked his last cigarette for the day and then made his way to the third section briefing room.
There were twelve warriors in his section. Except for microscopic differences in their builds, there was little, if anything, to distinguish one from the other. They had no contact with anything as personalized as officers. Each warrior was a separate unit. The centralization of authority was complete. There was only the loudspeaker to command. For a time the warriors had been allowed to designate the voice as “The General,” but it was soon discovered that they felt a particular loyalty to the name. The word was dropped. To designate authority, a warrior used the word: “Authority.” This word also served as his official concept of politics. With all the strength of the fortress in the warriors, this was to be desired.
Simultaneously, the speaker and the large television screen below it came to life.
THE scene showed one of the fortress’s carefully tilled roughage farms being looted by a large body of the natives—the enemy that was determined to erase the last remnant of an empire that once held the entire solar system in its grasp. That meant nothing to Jord. It was the faces—the faces that were, relatively, not even faces at all. Yet there were points of similarity within the gulf of difference—and the faces. Faces without masks!
The voice called “Authority” was expressionless and precise.
“As you can see a large and heavily armed contingent of the enemy has breached the dome of number seven surface-farm.”
The scout obligingly swiveled his television optic to show the fused gap in the huge plastic dome through which the natives were hauling incendiary materials to destroy the crop. The motionless bulk of a warrior lay close beside the opening. He had been downed by artillery, while above the force-field the ever present aircraft of the natives circled watchfully. Somewhere, the ancient generators had shorted long enough for the raiders to slip through.
“A detachment has already been sent out,” the voice continued. “The natives are to be forced back beyond the northern defense perimeter. Intelligence estimates eight hundred of the enemy and thirty field-pieces. The fortress depends on you. You will not fail the fortress.”
On that note, the loudspeaker was silent.
“It seems to me,” the warrior on Jord’s right murmured as they moved towards the opening bulkhead at the far side of the room, “that we almost always fail.” He wasn’t contradicting, only remarking.
Jord nodded. One warrior lost today, two last week, one the week before, and more before that. He saw the leviathans, 140 tons of machinery with great gaping holes in their bodies, saw the wires and conduits, armor and all the intricacies that went into a Galbth II. He saw them steaming, stumbling, falling—respirators clogged—smothering. Their motions weakened, their limbs failed, the warriors died.
Two hundred years ago the planet had been a peaceful colony. Then with the collapse of the empire had come two hundred years of reversals, and they who had once been the overseers of harmless workers now found themselves struggling for the barest survival. Only the workers, the natives, had adapted.
He went through the bulkhead into the immenseness of the cavern where the machines stood waiting in the shadowless light.
Down the iron catwalks the silver warriors ran. Down to the mechanics, down to the surgeons with their surgeon fingers dead white beneath the operating lamps. All waiting. Waiting to fit the mechanism for a thousand eyes to the optic nerves, the amplifiers to the audio.
JORD felt the familiar horror.
When you were fitted with the conduits for optics and audios, you lost all contact with reality. You became a consciousness in nothing. His great fear at this time was of falling. He seemed to fall for eons until the mechanics with steel hands slid him into his machine and, bit by bit, his body returned.
Fingers, hands, wrists, arms, feet, legs, shoulders, back, neck, jaw, cheeks, nose, eyes—
His cranial optics slid from their sockets within the blue steel skin of his head, and he looked down to the floor of the cavern, seventy feet below.
“Check motion!”
He moved in the ritual ballet. Seventy feet and 140 tons of steel and glass, copper and nickel, silver and plastic, and a man buried deep inside.
The ultimate machine. The ultimate extension of a man.
A ton of fist opened and
closed, moved with effortless grace and fell to his side with enough power to crush a block of granite. His atomic muscles turned silently when he walked. His legs of flesh commanding legs of steel. He could walk two hundred miles an hour or run five times that fast. He could thread a needle with his fingers, or rip through a mountain.
“Check respirators.”
“Check.”
The technicians scurried from the cavern floor. The all-clear sounded and the roof slid open and a ramp grew up from the floor.
His voice echoed through the cavern, mingling with the voices of the other warriors.
Joyous, thankful voices—the horror had passed and they were alive again.
On the surface it was winter. The methane-frosted ground beneath the machines was like iron. Iron against steel feet rang in the heavy air. Wispy tendrils of steam rose from the great bodies. The respirators sucked and transformed ammonia and methane. The great feet left imprints in earth and stone.
Jord exulted in the freedom of the surface, the long vistas of unwalled space, in the curve of a far away horizon. He exulted in his machine body, so human in its parts, so more than human in its size and capabilities. The column of the neck, the steel sinews; every muscle, every ligament, every nerve of the human body had its counterpart in the machine. What man could do, the machine did. What affected man, in proportion, affected the machine.
Even to pain, the machine was complete.
He withdrew his optics and sent his telescope rising ten feet above his head, searching the gray land for the other detachment. A dozen miles away he could see the dome of the ravished farm. The little specks were scurrying to complete their destruction before the dreaded warriors should appear. They had blocked the entrance of the shallow valley in which the farm lay with their artillery. Behind it the gunners would try to hold off the warriors and give the rest time to escape. Not that it mattered. The enemy cared little for his losses.
His telescope swiveled, found the scarp of an ancient bomb, ringed with what was probably fission produced obsidian, and rested on the bodies of the machines who had beaten his detachment to the scene and now came streaming out to join them.
The two detachments merged, hesitated as each warrior assumed his position and began the attack.
They would charge straight at the guns, so much a warrior cared for the marksmanship of former slaves—so much a warrior cared for the power of native shells.
AT eight miles the snouts of the cannons began to belch. The gunnery was high. The barrage passed harmlessly overhead.
The first strike was for him. The armor-piercing shell clanged and flattened out against his chest, staggering him back. He rallied, caught his balance, sped on. He almost pitied the limited inventiveness of the natives, whose genius ended when they drove man into the fortresses.
Another shell. A warrior whirled and stumbled. Jord crashed into him, steadied him. The explosions blended into an endless sound.
He felt a shell bounce from his shoulder, taking six optics with it and leaving the smell of scorched steel. They were too thick now to dodge, too close to bear. Earth and stone sprayed up from a sudden crater before him. He wheeled. Now they were in a range where the shells could disable an arm or leg.
An arm! A stiff-hung, motionless limb of steel.
The rush had brought them to the artillery. Their feet trampled the ancient guns. They smashed at belching muzzles with hammer fists. They had breached the defenses. The natives had fled. In minutes they would be trampling the fleeing enemy.
Then the earth erupted . . .
Jord had only one leg still functioning when he regained consciousness. One leg and perhaps eight of his optics. His audio was dead and there was something wrong with his respirator. He had to fight to keep down the panic.
A warrior who had been trapped inside his machine once told him what it was like inside a Galbth II when you couldn’t move, or help yourself. If you but closed your eyes you imagined yourself inside a shell, and that shell inside a larger shell, and that inside a still larger shell until, after a hundred shells, you could imagine your machine, still true to your form, lying helpless and twisted on the ground.
There was no way you could get out of your machine without the help of the mechanics. Even if there were it was impossible to exist on the surface. You had to lie where you fell. Or, if possible, make your way back as best you could to your lock.
He tried moving. His good leg sawed the air like a giant flail. There was some motion in his chest, but that was all. He erected all the optics he could control and found himself lying on his stomach, dismembered. About twenty yards to the right he saw the other leg of his machine lying across a warrior who seemed to have no motion at all. As far as he could see, no one had escaped. Warriors and parts of warriors were strewn all about him. He swiveled his optics in anxiety. If he were to be rescued, it must be soon. Already the air was foul and he was having trouble focusing his optics.
He wanted to get out of the machine. He never wanted anything as much as he wanted this. The smell of metal and the taste of metal strangled him. He wanted to get out. Worse than he wanted faces, worse than he wanted identity, worse than he wanted to be able to live on the surface. He could feel all the weight of the machine on his body. The vocalizer was still on and he moaned into the dirt.
He tried to raise his optics again, but the power had somehow failed. Many-faced, congealing darkness drew near. He rushed into it.
THE Genocide Squad was the first to go into the crater.
The last warrior had ceased moving. Later the salvagers would come to collect the precious metals. They drilled Jord’s machine open but, luckily, by this time he was dead.
“Which one next?” he asked, clambering awkwardly from the hole in the machine’s back. He was a native and, except for certain functional differences in his construction, was little distinguished from other natives. But normalcy is relative. The normalcy of a native may be radically different from that of a fortress dweller.
“We are fortunate the bomb didn’t destroy more of these bodies,” he said, rejoining his partner at the side of the warrior.
“What is it like, inside?” his partner asked curiously.
The Genocide Monitor stopped for a moment and appraised the vast bulk. He had long ago ceased to be either fascinated or repelled by the soft, unfunctional bodies of fortress dwellers.
“Just another human,” the android said. END
NOVICE
James H. Schmitz
A novice is one who is inexperienced—but that doesn’t mean incompetent. Nor does it mean stupid!
n There was, Telzey Amberdon thought, someone besides TT and herself in the garden. Not, of course, Aunt Halet, who was in the house waiting for an early visitor to arrive, and not one of the servants. Someone or something else must be concealed among the thickets of magnificently flowering native Jontarou shrubs about Telzey.
She could think of no other way to account for Tick-Tock’s spooked behavior—nor, to be honest about it, for the manner her own nerves were acting up without visible cause this morning.
Telzey plucked a blade of grass, slipped the end between her lips and chewed it gently, her face puzzled and concerned. She wasn’t ordinarily afflicted with nervousness. Fifteen years old, genius level, brown as a berry and not at all bad looking in her sunbriefs, she was the youngest member of one of Orado’s most prominent families and a second-year law student at one of the most exclusive schools in the Federation of the Hub. Her physical, mental, and emotional health, she’d always been informed, was excellent. Aunt Halet’s frequent cracks about the inherent instability of the genius level could be ignored; Halet’s own stability seemed questionable at best.
But none of that made the present odd situation any less disagreeable . . .
The trouble might have begun, Telzey decided, during the night, within an hour after they arrived from the spaceport at the guest house Halet had rented in Port Nichay for their vacation on Jontarou
. Telzey had retired at once to her second-story bedroom with Tick-Tock; but she barely got to sleep before something awakened her again. Turning over, she discovered TT reared up before the window, her forepaws on the sill, big cat-head outlined against the star-hazed night sky, staring fixedly down into the garden.
Telzey, only curious at that point, climbed out of bed and joined TT at the window. There was nothing in particular to be seen, and if the scents and minor night-sounds which came from the garden weren’t exactly what they were used to, Jontarou was after all an unfamiliar planet. What else would one expect here?
But Tick-Tock’s muscular back felt tense and rigid when Telzey laid her arm across it, and except for an absent-minded dig with her forehead against Telzey’s shoulder, TT refused to let her attention be distracted from whatever had absorbed it. Now and then, a low, ominous rumble came from her furry throat, a half-angry, half-questioning sound. Telzey began to feel a little uncomfortable. She managed finally to coax Tick-Tock away from the window, but neither of them slept well the rest of the night. At breakfast, Aunt Halet made one of her typical nasty-sweet remarks.
“You look so fatigued, dear—as if you were under some severe mental strain . . . which, of course, you might be,” Halet added musingly. With her gold-blond hair piled high on her head and her peaches and cream complexion, Halet looked fresh as a daisy herself . . . a malicious daisy. “Now wasn’t I right in insisting to Jessamine that you needed a vacation away from that terribly intellectual school?” She smiled gently.
“Absolutely,” Telzey agreed, restraining the impulse to fling a spoonful of egg yolk at her father’s younger sister. Aunt Halet often inspired such impulses, but Telzey had promised her mother to avoid actual battles on the Jontarou trip, if possible. After breakfast, she went out into the back garden with Tick-Tock, who immediately walked into a thicket, camouflaged herself and vanished from sight. It seemed to add up to something. But what?