"Why didn't you—I mean, why didn't Julie Martinet wait for me? I sent you a letter from Pluto—"
"Your message was delivered," she sang. "But Julie Martinet had already been admitted to training as acolyte for the Machine. She destroyed your message. She does not wish to recall it."
"But I loved you!" Gann burst out. "How could you turn your back on me?"
The serene pale face stared at him without curiosity. "Julie Martinet loved you," she corrected him melodiously. "I am Delta Four. Please sit down, Major Gann. I must interrogate you for the Machine,"
Reluctantly Gann sank into a chair, watched as she moved another chair near his. She seated herself with deliberate grace.
From under the cape she brought forth a small link-box, covered in a black plastic, like leather. "Major Gann," she said, "I must ask you if you are the Starchild." Her voice was pure melody, cold and perfect and remote as her white, oval face.
Gann snapped, "Plan take it, no! I'm fed up with that question! I've said it a hundred—"
But she was shaking her head. "Wait," she broke in. "One moment, please."
He watched her glumly, the ache of his bruises combining with the deeper ache in his heart as, hooded head intently bent, she once again touched the long string of beads. As each electronic chime rang out her throat echoedthe tone, practicing the difficult scale of tone phonemes that made up the artificial language called Mechanese.
Mechanese was the difficult bridge between the Machine and the human mind. Earlier computers had crossed that bridge by building their own structure of translation, transforming English into Fortran or another artificial tongue, Fortran into binary numbers, the binary statement into instructions and data for processing. The Machine's language was itself a sort of pattern of binary digits that represented its own electronic processes—circuits open or closed, storage points charged or discharged, ferrite cores in one magnetic state or another.
Human beings could not be trained to speak that binary language, nor could the Machine of the Plan of Man be troubled with the dull task of translation. Instead, it had created a language that men could learn—with difficulty, with a consecration of purpose that required them to give up the coarser human aspects of their lives, but all the same with accuracy and assurance.
Mechanese was a bridge, but a difficult one. The Machine, counting time in nanoseconds, could not wait for laggard human speech. Accurate in every either-or response, it had no need of redundancy. It had computed the theoretical capacity of the human ear and the human voice at some 50,000 binary units of information per second, and it had devised a tongue to approach that theoretical maximum.
Normal human speech conveyed only about fifty such bits of information in a second; Mechanese was a thousand times more efficient.
And, Gann knew, it was about a thousand times as difficult to learn.
Bitterly he realized that it was the very thing in Julie Martinet that first drew his attention to her—her soft, true voice—that had lost her for him forever. The Machine sought endlessly for humans who could be trained to Mechanese—sought them and, when it found them, did not let them go. Only such special individuals could be trained to speak Mechanese well, though it was possible for almost anyone who invested the time and effort to learn a sort of pidgin, or to understand it. A true acolyte needed not only a wide vocal range but a true sense of absolute pitch. The tonal beads would help. An acolyte could, as Delta Four was doing now, use them as a sort of pitch pipe before talking to the Machine. But not even they would convert an ordinary human into one fluent in Mechanese.
Watching her tolling the tonal beads, Gann pictured the long, arduous weeks of training. He knew it required total concentration, absolute devotion. And its ultimate reward was the bright metal plate in her forehead.
Her quick voice trilled a chain of silver bird notes. The linkbox sang an electronic answer. Her alert, emotionless eyes looked up at him at last.
"We're ready now," she said. "Major Gann. Are you the Starchild?"
A hundred interrogations, and this was the hundred and first.
Boysie Gann no longer needed his mind to answer the girl's questions. Repetition had taught his tongue and lips to answer by themselves. I am not the Starchild. I have never seen the Starchild. I know nothing of the Writ of Liberation. I have never engaged in unplanned activities.
And all the time his heart was shouting: Julie! Come back ...
Each time he answered a question, Sister Delta Four sang into the linkbox. The strange, quavering notes sounded nothing like what he had said, but he knew that each difficult phoneme was also a meaningful morpheme, each sung syllable a clause. And each time she asked a question she paused, regarding him with detached interest, her perfect face as inhuman as her voice.
"My tour of hazardous duty took me out to the Space-wall ..." he said, and went on with the long familiar tale.
He felt the bright gold walls pressing in on him, suddenly suffocating. He wondered how many thousand feet of rock lay above him. Up at the surface of the earth, was the endangered sun shining now on woods and fields tinted faintly green with early spring? Or was there arctic ice above this isolated, sound-deadened cell in the Planner's vast suites? Or miles, perhaps, of dark and icy ocean?
He had no way of knowing.
And abruptly he felt a wave of desperate longing for the Reefs, for Freehaven, for Quarla Snow. Those strange spaceborne rocks were somehow kinder than the Plan of Man. He was homesick for infinite space ... for that fantastic concept freedom ...
The stern snarl of the linkbox brought him back to his interrogation. "Proceed," cooed Sister Delta Four, "You were attacked by pyropods?" Her voice was as tuneful as a crystal bell, cold and empty as the black space between the Reefs. There was no flicker of feeling on the serene and secret oval of her face.
He nodded wearily—then, remembering: "Yes, but before that, I forgot to mention one thing. Hickson removed my collar."
Her brilliant dark eyes did not widen. She merely sang into the linkbox, still watching him, her eyes intent but somehow blind, as if she were already absorbed in her private ecstasy of communion.
The black box snarled.
"The Machine requires elucidation," Sister Delta Four trilled sweetly. "We must find this unregimented Harry Hickson. His knowledge must be recovered for the Plan. Then each organ of his body must be obliterated."
Gann grinned bleakly at her, looking at the lips he had kissed so long ago. "Sorry. I can't help you. He's dead."
"The Machine rejects this data," she sang. "Did you not ask this unplanned man how he removed the collar?"
"I don't know how," he admitted. He paused, hoping to see some living spark in her eyes. But there was none. The black box whirred ominously. "I think he was a convert to the Church of the Star," said Gann hurriedly. "I think—that is, as I understand it, his power was thought to come from Deneb."
An angry peal from the linkbox. "That is self-evidently false," sang the cool voice of Sister Delta Four. "No star possesses any such power to share. No mind in the universe is more powerful than the Machine."
She paused while the black box snarled again. "If the falsehood is Harry Hickson's, the truth will be extracted when he is captured," she translated sweetly. "If the falsehood is yours, Major Gann, you are in grave danger of the Body Bank."
He cried, "I'm telling the truth! I'm loyal to the Plan of Man!"
The box sang; the girl intoned, "The Machine rejects such merely verbal assurances. One moment. The Machine is receiving additional data through another input."
Queerly, the girl's voice was fading. Gann blinked at her. She seemed to be moving—dwindling—as if she were falling away from him, down through the long, dark emptiness of space. It was as if Gann were looking at her through a zoom lens, pulling away. She receded a thousand yards ...
Then she was back. Gann felt a moment's vertigo, as if the Planner's suite down in the bowels of the earth were somehow dancing a slow waltz. The feelin
g passed.
The linkbox whirred menacingly, and Sister Delta Four sang, "The Machine terminates this interview." A sharp hum from the linkbox. "It reminds you that unplanned ideas, like unplanned words and unplanned actions, must be severely corrected. But it reserves judgment on your ultimate disposition."
Her white, perfect face was .smiling slightly, perhaps in contemplation of her instant rapture that was soon to come, when the buried electrodes would excite her brain to the incomparable bliss of electronic communion. But the linkbox was not yet through with her. It buzzed again, harshly.
"The Machine finds your narrative incomplete," she recited melodiously, contemplating Gann with her dark serene eyes. "You have not identified the Starchild. You have revealed no facts about the Togethership. You have not accounted for the so-called Writ of Liberation. You have not explained bow you got into the vault of the Machine."
Gann shook his head. "I don't know what to tell you," he said. The box whirred implacably.
"Your statements are inadequate," Sister Delta Four sang again. "But the interview is concluded ..."
There was that surge of unreal motion again. Gann gripped his chair. This time even the girl felt it; her perfect lips opened, her eyes shook a flicker of surprise.
The linkbox twittered urgently. At the same moment loud bells and sirens began to sound elsewhere in the Planner's warrens.
"Earth temblors," the girl began haltingly, "have been detected at several points ... "
Then the linkbox crashed out a loud, despairing sound. Sister Delta Four gasped. Instinctively she reached out and caught Boysie Gann's arm. "Pyropods!" she cried. "The . , . the ... Oh, you've got to help! The Planner's hall has been invaded by pyropods! Dozens of them! They're there now!"
The private room in which Sister Delta Four had been interrogating Boysie Gann was one tiny office in the immense network of corridors and chambers that was the administrative and living headquarters of the Planner. It had been locked, but the door opened instantly to the pattern of the girl's fingertips on the knob. It flung wide, and Gann and the girl ran through the open doorway, into a wide, gold-walled hall. Broad as a highway, tall as a two-story building, it ran straight through the heart of a mountain, the Planner's rooms opening off it at intervals all the way. It was a great ceremonial thoroughfare, lined with glittering gold and crystal statuary, hung in gold brocades, paneled with murals and viewscreens.
And it was filled with the reeking, choking, dusty smoke of jet exhausts.
A scream of some huge rocketing body ripping through the air smote their ears. A human shout of anguish—the cries of men taken by surprise—the thin, ear-splitting volley of laser guns. In all the noise and confusion Gann saw one thing clearly—saw it, grabbed the girl by her arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the doorway.
A pyropod was rocketing toward them down the hall.
It roared at them at a speed nearing Mach One; in the cramped quarters of the hall the shriek of its passage was physically painful, deafening. And the look of the thing was that of an avenging angel come to Earth, set on destruction.
It was a nightmare come to life. Wilder than the most fantastic of the Planner's toys, it was shaped a little like a scorpion, larger than a charging buffalo. Its eyes were great mirrors with stalked receptors at the center—natural radio telescopes, glowing red. Its jaws were mighty enough to crunch steel bars. Its talons could rip through armor plate. Its body was armored with darkly shining scales; a long, wicked, saber-like tail was arched over its back. And the whole thing was screaming through the air of the tunnel toward them.
The girl cried out in fear; Gann pulled her head against his chest, quieting her—though in truth the sound of her terror was lost in the ear-splitting din of the pyropod's passage. This was no baby, like the one Gann had played with on Harry Hickson's reef. It was an armored juggernaut, full-grown, capable of battling a Plan space cruiser on equal terms.
It passed them and rocketed into a group of armed guardsmen, knotted a hundred yards down the hall. They were firing wildly with laser and projectile weapons; it struck them, passed ... and they were gone. Only a jackstraw heap of corpses and stirring near-dead marked where they had been.
"Great Machine!" gasped Sister Delta Four, her impeccable serenity gone, her black hood thrown back, the bright metal plaque blinking out of a terrified face. "What was that?"
"You told me," snapped Gann. "Pyropod! If it comes back, we're dead!"
She whimpered and tugged at his arm. "Back in here... we can hide."
"No! There are others. If one finds us this way we don't have a chance. But if I can get a gun ... "
He stared down the broad, long hall. The bright jet of the pyropod's tail was out of sight. Perhaps the monster had gone into another room, or down another hallway. Meanwhile, the guardsmen were still in a heap of death.
He came to a fast decision. "Julie—I mean ... oh, never mind that. Listen! These things can be killed if you know where to aim. I'm going after a gun. You stay in the room!" And he was off, running as hard as he could, straight down the broad hall toward the dying men. He fought the temptation to skulk along the sides. There was no concealment here. If the creature came back, he would be dead; it was that simple. His only chance was speed. He did that hundred yards in Olympic time.
And it was nearly too slow, at that. Gasping, wheezing, his chest and muscles on fire, he heard a sudden growing volume of sound and looked up. A howl of sound was coming toward him, and behind it, almost as fast as the sound itself, a pyropod was rocketing at him.
He flung himself to the floor.
The thing missed him by inches; he caught a quick glimpse of metal jaws and crystal tusks, of enormous talons reaching out for him; then it was past, and he was up and running.
He heard the thing crashing, smashing, battering into the statuary and the walls of the hall, stopping itself at heedless cost, but he did not turn. He leaped to the fallen guardsmen, caught up a laser gun, checked its charge and whirled.
The pyropod had completed its turn.
It caught Gann hi its pulsing red headlamps. It was screaming at him, a living battle rocket. He fired one maximum-blast shot into its eye, and tumbled to the ground again.
It screamed in agony as it passed over him. It blundered blindly into a wall, sideswiped a cluster of statuary, gouged out a bright streak in the hard metal of the corridor. Its jet flamed brightly and faded. Gann fired one more shot, then covered his head with his hands.
There was a great distant explosion. He felt the shock waves pass over him. Some of the corpses near him were stirred by the thrust of it, their bleeding limbs flopping wildly, their unseeing faces nodding.
The pyropod was gone.
But Sister Delta Four had said "dozens" of them ...
Quickly Gann stooped to the abattoir the pyropod had left and rummaged for weapons. He discovered a half-empty laser weapon, pocketed a light projectile gun, loaded up with the three heaviest-charge laser guns he could find. Then he turned to go after Sister Delta Four.
She was standing just behind him. She had seen what he was doing, and she had done the same. She held two weapons, and in a pouch in her robes Gann could see the glitter of at least one more.
He hesitated, then grinned.
"Come on," he cried. "Let's see what we can do! Right in the eyes, remember!" He clapped her on the shoulder, and turned and ran in the direction of the Great Hall of the Planner.
A hellish howling and roaring led him to it. He needed no other signs.
Before he got there, he destroyed two more pyropods, neither quite as big as the one that had nearly got them in the hall, and Sister Delta Four had frightened another off-with a long-range shot that might or might not havehit.
The Great Hall of the Planner was the mother hive. It was filled with the great creatures, ripping through the smoky, sulfurous air, ripping out boulder-sized bits from the walls, from the huge golden chair of the Planner, from anything that would give them r
eaction mass. They seemed to have conquered the human defenders of the Hall with no trouble, and were fighting among themselves over the spoils.
Then Gann caught the slim ruby flash of a laser weapon.
One of the pyropods bellowed with pain, like an air raid siren gone mad. It was not a mortal wound, but it must have been an agonizing one; the injured creature hurtled through the air and collided with another feasting beast; the two began to slash each other...
Someone was still alive in the room!
Warning the girl to remain behind, Gann peered cautiously around the door. The laser flash had seemed to come from one of the decorative niches holding statuary, under a painted lunette. Gann took a deep breath and shouted, then ducked back around the door. But it was useless. In the monstrous racket of the snarling, fighting pyropods his voice was unheard.
He caught Sister Delta Four by the shoulder, pulled her close to him so that her ear was next to his lips. "I'm going to try to pick them off one by one!" he cried. "They're not paying any attention right now. I think I can get most of them. But if any start this way, you shoot right for the eyes!"
She nodded, her face calm and untouched again, the great service lasers incongruous in her hands. He gave her a last thoughtful glance, unable to forget the bright communion plate that was now once again hidden under the black cowl, then turned toward the Great Hall.
It took him twenty minutes.
He counted, and there were fifteen of the great beasts rocketing and fighting about the hall. He got seven of them, one by one, before there was any trouble. Then at Sister Delta Four's warning touch, he had to turn and destroy a lone wanderer racing toward them down the hall.
He got three more, and then he noticed that at the far side of the hall one screamed, burst and died that he had not fired on. Whoever was hiding in the niche across the hall had seen what he was doing, and had copied him.
There were two guns-firing then—no, three; for Sister Delta Four stepped out beside him and helped gun down the last survivors, confused and blundering, as the walls shook with the creatures' screams and the air grew acrid and sickening with their fumes.
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