No Boundaries

by C. L. Moore

  “It has not gone,” Azazel said tonelessly.

  Carnevan’s body shook uncontrollably. “Mentally I can tell myself not to be frightened. Physically the thing is … is——”

  “It is horrible even to me,” Azazel said. “Remember, I have seen it directly. Eventually it will destroy me, if you keep me in this world of yours.”

  “Humans have exorcised demons,” Carnevan pointed out. “Isn’t there any way you can exorcise that thing?”

  “No.”

  “A blood sacrifice?” Carnevan suggested nervously. “Holy water? Bell, book and candle?” He sensed the foolishness of the proposals as he made them.

  But Azazel looked thoughtful. “None of those. But perhaps—life force.” The dark cloak quivered.

  Carnevan said, “Elementals have been exorcised, according to folklore. But first it’s necessary to make them visible and tangible. Giving them ectoplasm—blood—I don’t know.”

  The demon nodded slowly. “In other words, translating the equation to its lowest common denominator. Humans cannot fight a disembodied spirit. But if that spirit is drawn into a vessel of flesh, it is subject to earthly physical laws. I think that is the way, Carnevan.”

  “You mean”

  “The thing that pursues me is entirely alien, But if I can reduce it to its lowest common denominator, I can destroy it. As I could destroy you had I not promised to serve you. And of course, if your destruction would help me. Suppose I give that thing a sacrifice. It must, for a time, partake of the nature of the thing it assimilates. Human life force should do.”

  Carnevan listened eagerly. “Will it work?”

  “I think it will. I will give the thing a human sacrifice. It will become briefly and partially human, and a demon can easily destroy a human being.”

  “A sacrifice——”

  “Diana. It will be easiest, since I already have weakened the fortress of her consciousness. I must break down all the barriers of her brain—a psychical substitute for the sacrificial knife of pagan religions.”

  Carnevan gulped the last of his drink. “Then you can destroy the thing?”

  Azazel nodded. “That is my belief. But what will be left of Diana will be in no way human. You will be asked questions by the authorities. However, I shall try to protect you.”

  And with that he vanished before Carnevan could raise an objection. The apartment was deadly still. Carnevan looked around, half expecting to see the black spindle flashing away as he glanced towards it. But there was no trace of anything supernatural.

  He was still sitting in the chair, half an hour later, when the telephone rang. Carnevan answered it.

  “Yes. … Who? … What? Murdered? … No, I … I’ll be right over.”

  He replaced the receiver and straightened, eyes aglow. Diana was—was dead. Murdered, quite horribly, and there were certain factors that puzzled the police. Well, he was safe. Suspicion might point at him, but nothing could ever be proved. He had not gone near Diana all that day.

  “Congratulations, Azazel,” Carnevan said softly. He crushed out his cigarette and turned to get his topcoat from the closet.

  The black spindle had been waiting behind him. This time it did not flash away as he looked at it.

  It did not flash away. Carnevan saw it. He saw it distinctly. He saw every feature of what he had mistakenly imagined to be a spindle of black fog.

  The worst part of it was that Carnevan didn’t go mad.

  HOME THERE’S NO RETURNING

  THE GENERAL opened the door and came softly into the big, bright underground room. There by the wall under the winking control panels lay the insulated box, nine feet long, four feet wide, just as it aways lay, just as he always saw it—day or night, waking or sleeping, eyes open or closed. The box shaped like a tomb. But out of it, if they were lucky, something would be born.

  The General was tall and gaunt. He had stopped looking at himself in the mirror because his own face had begun to frighten him with its exhaustion, and he hated to meet the look of his own sunken eyes. He stood there feeling the beat of unseen machinery throb through the rock all around him. His nerves secretly changed each rhythmic pulse into some vast explosion, some new missile against which all defences would be useless.

  He called sharply in the empty laboratory, “Broome!”

  No answer. The General walked forward and stood above the box. Over it on the control panel lights winked softly on and off, and now and then a needle quivered. Suddenly the General folded up his fist and smashed the knuckles down hard on the reverberent metal of the box. A sound like hollow thunder boomed out of it.

  “Easy, easy,” somebody said. Abraham Broome was standing in the doorway, a very old man, small and wrinkled, with bright, doubtful eyes. He shuffled hastily to the box and laid a soothing hand on it, as if the box might be sentient for all he knew.

  “Where the hell were you?” the General asked.

  Broome said, “Resting. Letting some ideas incubate. Why?”

  “You were resting?” The General sounded like a man who had never heard the word before. Even to himself he sounded strange. He pressed his eyelids with finger and thumb, because the room seemed to be dwindling all around him, and the face of Broome receded thinly into grey distances. But even with shut eyes he could still see the box and the sleeping steel giant inside, waiting patiently to be born. Without opening his eyes, he said, “Wake it up, Broome.”

  Broome’s voice cracked a little. “But I haven’t fin——”

  “Wake it up.”

  “Something’s gone wrong, General?”

  General Conway pressed his eyelids until the darkness inside reddened—as all this darkness underground would redden when the last explosions came. Perhaps tomorrow. Not later than the day after. He was almost sure of that. He opened his eyes quickly. Broome was looking at him with a bright, dubious gaze, his lids sagging at the outer corners with the weight of unregarded years.

  “I can’t wait any longer,” Conway said carefully. “None of us can wait. This war is too much for human beings to handle any more.” He paused and let the rest of his breath go out in a sigh, not caring—perhaps not daring—to say the thing aloud that kept reverberating in his head like steadily approaching thunder. Tomorrow, or the day after—that was the deadline. The enemy was going to launch an all-out attack on the Pacific Front Sector within the next forty-eight hours.

  The computers said so. The computers had ingested every available factor from the state of the weather to the conditions of the opposing general’s childhood years, and this was what they said. They could be wrong. Now and then they were wrong, when the data they received was incomplete. But you couldn’t go on the assumption that they would be. You had to assume an attack would come before day after tomorrow.

  General Conway had not—he thought—slept since the last attack a week ago, and that was a minor thing compared to what the computers predicted now. He was amazed in a remote, unwondering way, that the general who preceded him had lasted so long. He felt a sort of grey malice towards the man who would come after him. But there wasn’t much satisfaction in that thought, either. His next in command was an incompetent fool. Conway had taken up responsibility a long time ago, and he could no more lay it down now than he could detach his painfully swimming head for a while and set it gently aside on some quiet shelf to rest. No, he would have to carry his head on his shoulders and his responsibilities on his back until——

  “Either the robot can take over the job or it can’t,” he said. “But we can’t wait any longer to find out.”

  He stooped suddenly and with a single powerful heave tore the box-lid open and sent it crashing back. Broome stepped up beside him and the two of them looked down on the thing that lay placidly inside, face up, passionless, its single eye unlit and blank as Adam’s before he tasted the fruit. The front panel of its chest was open upon a maze of transistors, infinitely miniature components, thin silver lines of printed circuits. A maze of fine wiring
nested around the robot, but most of it was disconnected by now. The robot was almost ready to be born.

  “What are we waiting for?” Conway demanded harshly. “I said wake it up!”

  “Not yet, General. It isn’t safe—yet. I can’t predict what might happen——”

  “Won’t it work?”

  Broome looked down at the steel mask winking with reflected lights from the panel boards above it. His face wrinkled up with hesitation. He bent to touch one finger to a wire that led into the massive opened chest at a circuit labelled “In-Put.”

  “It’s programmed,” he said very doubtfully. “And yet——”

  “Then it’s ready,” Conway’s voice was flat. “You heard me, Broome. I can’t wait any longer. Wake it up.”

  “I’m afraid to wake it up,” Broome said.

  The General’s ears played a familiar trick on him. I’m afraid—I’m afraid … He couldn’t make the voice stop echoing. But fear is what all flesh is heir to, he thought. Flesh knows its limitations. It was time for steel to take over.

  Pushbutton warfare used to look like the easy way to fight. Now man knows better. Man knows what the weakest link is—himself. Flesh and blood. Man has the hardest job of all, the job of making decisions on incomplete data. Until now, no machine could do that. The computers were the very heartbeat and brain-pulse of pushbutton war, but they were limited thinkers. And they could shrug off responsibility with an easy, “No answer—insufficient data”. After which it was up to man to give them what more they needed. The right information, the right questions, the right commands. No wonder the turnover in generals was so high.

  So the Electronic Guidance Operator was conceived. The General looked down at it, lying quietly waiting for birth. Ego was its name. And it would have free will, after a fashion. The real complexity of the fabulous computers lies not in the machines themselves, but in the programming fed into them. The memory banks are no good at all without instructions about how to use the data. And instructions are extremely complex to work out.

  That was going to be Ego’s job from now on. Ego had been designed to act like the human brain, on only partial knowledge, as no machine before had ever done. Flesh and blood had reached their limits, Conway thought. Now was the hour for steel to take over. So Ego lay ready to taste the first bite of the apple Adam bit. Tireless like steel, resourceful like flesh, munching the apple mankind was so tired of munching. …

  “What do you mean, afraid?” Conway asked.

  “It’s got free will,” Broome said. “Don’t you see? I can’t set up free will and controls. I can only give it one basic order—win the war. But I can’t tell it how. I don’t know how. I can’t even tell it what not to do. Ego will simply wake like—well, like a man educated and matured in his sleep, waking for the first time. It will feel needs, and act on its wants. I can’t control it. And that scares me, General.”

  Conway stood still, blinking, feeling exhaustion vibrate shrilly in his nerve ends. He sighed and touched the switch on his lapel microphone. “Conway here. Send Colonel Garden to Operation Christmas. And a couple of MPs.”

  Broome burst into very rapid speech. “No, General! Give me another week. Give me just a few days——”

  “You’ve got about two minutes,” Conway said. He thought, See how you like quick decisions. And this is only one. I’ve had five years of it. How long since I slept last? Well, never mind, never mind that. Make Broome decide. Push him. Resting!

  Broome said, “I won’t do it. No. I can’t take the responsibility. I need more time to test——”

  “You’ll go on testing till doomsday. You’ll never activate it,” Conway said.

  The door opened. The two MPs followed Colonel Garden into the room. Garden’s uniform looked sloppy, as usual. The man wasn’t built for a uniform. But the dark pouches under his eyes tempered Conway’s contempt. Garden hadn’t slept much lately, either. It was past time for all of them now—Ego must pick up the burden and justify its name.

  “Arrest Broome,” Conway said. He ignored their startled looks. “Colonel, can you wake up this robot?”

  “Wake it up, sir?”

  Conway gestured impatiently. “Activate it, start it going.”

  “Well, yes, sir, I do know how, but——”

  Conway didn’t bother to listen. He pointed to the robot, and whatever else Garden was saying became a meaningless yammer in his ears. Forty-eight hours, he thought—time enough to test it before the attack comes, if we’re lucky. And it had better work. He pressed thumb and finger to his eyes again to keep the room from swinging in slow, balancing circles around him.

  Broome from the far end of nowhere said, “Wait General! Give me just one day more! It isn’t——”

  Conway waved his hand, not opening his eyes. He heard one of the MPs say something, and there was a brief scuffle. Then the door closed. The General sighed and opened his eyes.

  Garden was looking at him with the same doubt Broome had shown. Conway scowled and the other man turned quickly to the box where the robot lay. He stooped as Broome had done and touched with one finger the wire cord still leading into the spot marked “In-Put.”

  “Once this is detached, sir, he’s on his own,” he said.

  “The thing has its orders,” the General said briefly. “Go on, do something.”

  There was a little pinging noise as Garden neatly detached the cord. He closed the steel plate that sealed Ego’s inwards. He ran his hands around the steel limbs to make sure all the nest of wires was clear. Then he got up and crossed to the instrument panel.

  “Sir,” he said.

  Conway didn’t answer for a moment. He was rocking just perceptibly to and fro, heel and toe, like a tower beginning to totter. He said, “Don’t tell me anything I don’t want to hear.”

  Garden said composedly, “I don’t know just what to expect, sir. Will you tell me as soon as the robot starts to respond? Even the slightest——”

  “I’ll tell you.” Conway looked down at the placid blind face. Wake up, he thought. Or else don’t. It doesn’t really matter. Because we can’t go on like this. Wake up. Then I can sleep. Or don’t wake up. Then I can die.

  The round, flat, cyclopean lens of the robot’s eye began to glow softly. In the same moment a rising hum of power from the instrument panel made the lights dim, and all the reflections shimmering from Ego’s steel surfaces paled and then burned strong again as auxiliary switches kicked in. One by one the lights on the panel went out. The quivering needles rocked to and fro at zero and quieted.

  The robot stared blankly up at the ceiling, not moving.

  Conway, looking down, thought, Now it’s your turn. I’ve gone as far as a man can go. Take over, robot Move!

  The robot’s whole body shivered very, very slightly. The eye brightened until it sent a cone of light straight up at the ceiling. Without the slightest warning it lifted both arms at once out of the box and smashed its metal hands together with a clang that made both men jump. Conway gasped with surprise and released tension. Uselessly he said, “Garden!”

  Garden opened a switch and the singing whine of power died. The robot was motionless again, but this time, like an effigy on a tomb, it lay with palms pressed together hard. The shivering began again and rhythmic clicking sounds like many clocks ticking out of phase could be heard faintly from deep inside the big steel cylinder of the body.

  “What’s happening?” Conway asked, whispering without knowing why. “What made it do that?”

  “Activation,” Garden said, also whispering. “It——”

  He paused, cleared his throat self-consciously, and spoke aloud. “I’m not too familiar with this, sir. I suppose the basic tensions are setting up. They’ll be relieved through energy transformation of some kind or other, depending on the homeostatic principle that Broome——”

  From the box and the supine robot a strange, hollow voice spoke in a kind of howl. “Want …” it said painfully, and then seemed to stop itself shor
t. “Want …” it said again, and ceased abruptly.

  “What is it?” Conway wasn’t sure whether he was addressing Ego or Garden. The sound of the voice frightened him. It was so mindless, like a ghost’s, flat and hollow.

  “There’s a speaker in its chest,” Garden said, his own voice a little shaken. “I’d forgotten. But it ought to communicate better than this. It—he—Ego——” Garden gestured helplessly. “Some kind of block, I should think.” He stepped forward and bent over the box, looking down. “You—want something?” he asked awkwardly, sounding foolish. Conway thought what an ineffectual man he was. But at least the robot was awake now. Surely in a little while it would be adjusted, ready to take over. …

  Well, maybe they could all relax a little, after that. Maybe Conway could even sleep. A sudden panic shook him briefly as he thought, What if I’ve forgotten how to sleep? And exhaustion rolled up over him like water washing over a man of sand, relaxing and crumbling away the very components of his limbs. In just a moment I’ll be free, Conway thought. When Ego takes over. I’ve made it. I haven’t gone mad or killed myself. And now I won’t have to think any more. I’ll just stand here, without moving. I won’t even lie down. If gravity wants to pull me down, that’s up to gravity. …

  Garden, bending over the box, said again, “What is it you want?”

  “Want …” Ego said. And suddenly the prayerful hands flashed apart, the four-foot arms flung wide like shining flails. There it lay motionless again, but Colonel Garden was no longer leaning over the box. Conway saw, with hazy detachment, that Garden was crumpling down against the wall. The flail had caught him across the side of the neck, and he lay with his head at an angle like a jointed doll, more motionless now than the robot.

  Moving slowly, Conway touched the switch of his lapel microphone. The silence hummed receptively. There was a long interval while he couldn’t quite remember his name. But presently he spoke.

  “General Conway here. Bring Broome back to Operation Christmas.”