by Brian N Ball
“We can’t look for help from them,” Wardle said. “Curious, though, that the fort should be interested!”
“I think soon it will begin to ask itself questions,” said Dross.
Wardle stalked the blue-steel cavern impatiently. “We’re taking too much time!” He stopped to look at the robot. “Having trouble, eh, Danecki? What is it you’re trying to do?”
Danecki found the Brigadier’s brisk impatience trying. He spoke with a chilled politeness: “When the fort does get around to realizing we’re here, we’ll need whatever help we can get. The robot is our only resource. I’m programming it to act independently.”
“Independently? How?”
“Search, communicate, act. As many contingency plans as I can fit into its banks.” Danecki wondered whether to tell the others precisely what he had fed into the internal workings of Batibasaga. He decided they should know. “If your robot can’t get to us, Doctor,” he said, turning to the big-bellied archaeologist, “it will have to act independently. We have to rely on its code of ethics.”
“Ethics!” exclaimed Mrs. Zulkifar. “What have they got to do with it! How can they help us?”
Khalia began to question the Jacobi youth’s case at that moment. Killers didn’t discuss ethics.
“I’m interested, Mr. Danecki,” said Dross.
“I’m instructing your robot to act in what I think is an honest way.” Danecki cleared his mind and took the glittering coils of membranes in his hands. The work had to be done manually. A score of tiny circuits must be hooked together to attain some degree of reliability. No one spoke as his fingers moved.
“Yellow Phase Alert,” the robotic voice reminded the trapped party. “This is a Yellow Phase Alert.”
Mrs. Zulkifar rapped out: “You’ve taken twenty minutes already! More! We might have found a way out by now!”
“The longer we take, the more chance there is of the systems knowing we’re illegal visitors,” Wardle added uneasily. I’m for exploring now. What can the robot do? It’s immobilized! Doctor—we’re wasting valuable time!”
Dross loomed over Wardle and Mrs. Zulkifar. His imposing bulk posed a physical threat, while his stone-faced gaze at Mrs. Zulkifar brought the distraught woman to whimperings of fear. In her distress she began to cram a block of chocolate into her mouth.
She noticed the hungry look on Wardle’s face. “I’m hungry!” she got out, her mouth half full. “I always eat at this time. My stomach won’t stand it if I don’t have something. How far would one block go amongst all of you? I needed it! I’ll be ill—sick—I’ll die here!”
Khalia heard her in an agony of embarrassment.
Danecki cursed quietly and began a rethreading of the minute patterns of membranes.
“Yellow Alert,” the metallic voice said. It was an irregular croak of doom.
Knaggs’s corpse slowly stiffened.
“Won’t those people on the surface do something?” asked Mrs. Zulkifar, breaking a long silence.
“The Outlanders?” Dross said quietly.
“Yes! Why couldn’t they have picked up our message? How do you know they haven’t got communicators?”
Wardle nodded his agreement.
“I don’t think you understand,” Dross said in an attempt to calm the frightened woman.
The others listened, moving a little closer to the archaeologist. Only Danecki closed his mind to the frightened questioning that had been going on for the past half hour.
“The only people who live on this planet have come here by chance,” Dross continued. “People who have drifted around until their ships gave out. They don’t want involvement with any part of the Galactic Union. They hide when my ship comes—they talked to Knaggs only because he’s their kind. Don’t raise your hopes falsely, please!”
Khalia thought of the excursion ships. She hesitated to risk ruining Danecki’s concentration, but when she saw that he could work with a total intentness during Wardle’s and Mrs. Zulkifar’s interjections, she decided to speak. “Wouldn’t there be a hope of someone on the other excursions coming to our help?”
“I wish I could say there was,” said Dross. “I really do, my dear. But no. You agree, Brigadier?”
“No hope at all,” said Wardle. “The scanners on the excursion ships would have picked up the ship’s explosion. And they’d have backtracked to check on heat-transmissions before the loss. They’d know there was a weapons system in use, and they’d lie low in the asteroids, or at one of the moonbases, until an investigating ship arrived. They’d take no chances. That’s how I read the situation.”
Mr. Moonman stared at Danecki. “What sort of a chance are we taking here?”
For the third time Danecki ripped aside the circuits he had set up. He was familiar with the combination of tissues and impulse-generators that made up the robot’s deductive and planning systems. What was lacking was any help at all from the automaton itself. Normally a machine of this kind would be able to take him through a stage-by-stage account of the procedures necessary to get it working again. Batibasaga seemed mentally paralyzed.
Danecki wondered if the shock of the strange spatial convolutions in the ancient shaft had unbalanced it. Was it the effects of orbital spin that had disturbed the metabolism of the robot? Or was the fort’s control system putting out a subtle form of inhibitor?
He disregarded the tense group watching him. Jacobi was safely near the bulky figure of Dross. And Dross was keeping the others more or less in check. So far there had been no panicky run for the inviting control-pads, no impulsive attempts to leave the big control room itself.
Once he looked up and caught Khalia’s eye. He wondered if it was the reinforced dangers of the fort that brought the immediate shock of sexual awareness: the girl —she was no more than that—had a moist, wide-eyed look.
Almost unbidden the circuits found their proper path.
* * *
CHAPTER 9
Yellow Alert. Duty Commander. Yellow Alert!”
It was almost a looked-for interruption in the silence. The command area itself was part of a familiar scene. How long, thought Khalia, did it take for an ordinary woman to accept the presence of death and the prospect of personal extinction as normal?
“An hour!” squealed Mrs. Zulkifar. “One hour!”
“Yellow Phase Alert! We are in Yellow Alert. Duty Commander. Yellow Alert!”
“That’s all I can do,” said Danecki. “I’ve programmed your robot to use its knowledge of the Confederation. It’s ready to argue for our lives or to try to find a way out.”
“But it doesn’t work in here!” wailed Mrs. Zulkifar.
“No,” Danecki said. “We’ll drag it along with us. That gives us two chances. If we fail, the robot might be able to act independently.”
“We can’t move that!” exclaimed Dross.
The inert robot, despite the loss of almost one side of its trunk and attendant limbs, bulked hugely in the brightly-lit cavern. The watchers began to note the metallic mass of the headpiece, the squat width of the trunk, the heavy remaining leg with its splashes of molten metal.
Jacobi laughed aloud as Danecki replaced the plates in its back. “It won’t do you any good, Danecki!”
Dross glared at him, but the youth went on laughing through his agony. “One touch on this,” he said, gesturing with his good arm to the Control Systems, “and it’s over for you.”
“And you too,” pointed out Dross. “You care nothing for your own life?”
“Not much. Not now.”
In answer, Dross grabbed the youth’s collar and hauled him carefully to his feet.
“You come with us,” he said. “Mr. Danecki, I’ll see that he’s kept under restraint. What do you advise now?”
The choice had been limited. It was very evident that three wide corridors which ran in curves outward and downward from the control room were alive with auxiliary systems. During the time it had taken for Danecki to program the robot, they had beg
un to hum with life. What had been an almost dead and lost world was germinating. Of the remaining exits from the Wide cavern, with its dominating blue screen, two were closed off by dense black shields.
Dross had put forward the theory that these were the customary means of entrance and exit to the underground fort. Wardle was fairly sure that, as the fort believed itself to be at total war, the two openings were some form of blast bulkhead between the main offensive batteries and the control sections of the fort. In either case, as Dross pointed out, they could be of no concern to them. The only practical and seemingly-safe path was by means of a minor tunnel sloping sharply downwards in a gentle curve that concealed its eventual destination.
It was towards this tunnel that they hauled the heavy, still mass of the robot. All helped. Mrs. Zulkifar panted with the exertion, finding a channel for her energetic terror in pushing against the automaton’s shoulder. Mr. Moonman grunted savagely, but it was Dross and Danecki who provided the main strength. Wardle had soon relaxed his efforts, purple-faced and groaning. The Jacobi youth lay jammed against the big black armchair.
As Khalia pushed next to the intent Mrs. Zulkifar, heaving with all the strength of her young muscles, she found herself curiously unafraid. The waiting had been the worst. Now she could examine the thought of death, whereas before she had only thought of that colossal sunburst that had flowered from the screen when the tourist ship disappeared. She had seen herself dissolving into spinning, still-screaming dust, boiling and whirling into a billion splintering fragments that still possessed something of her personality, that still felt shock and pain and the eerie certainty of death.
That had passed. It was the waste that appalled her now. Twenty-two years, she thought. At twenty-two, the step into nothingness.
Danecki heaved. One huge thrust took the robot clumsily down the incline. He caught Khalia as she stumbled. No one wanted to be the first to move from the safety of the command area. They waited as the robot came to rest a short way down the smooth slope.
Would the robot stir into life?
Still they waited.
“It isn’t moving!” Mrs. Zulkifar complained. She shook Wardle by the arm. “All that time wasted—we might have found a way out! Why did we trust this man? Why, Brigadier? Why!”
“Well?” said Wardle to Danecki.
Danecki shrugged. “It was a chance we had to take. If we’d rushed blindly out, more than likely—”
He stopped. They all saw the reason.
A great, glittering grab had swung noiselessly from the roof of the corridor. It reached delicately for the green-bronze robot. It came down quickly, selected its quarry— a shining hook of metal, as solid and remorseless as some single-minded primeval claw. Then the hulk of Batibasaga was lifted and drawn into the opening through which the hook had appeared.
It took two seconds.
Metallic voices reported flatly. “Duty Commander! Unidentified automaton removed for inspection! Appears defunct. Orders? Orders?”
“Gone!” squealed Mrs. Zulkifar. “Gone! The robot isn’t going to help us! It’s gone, do you hear? Gone!”
She set up a high-pitched yelling that bounced down into the corridor which still rang with the grating metallic voices of the fort’s security systems. Then Mrs. Zulkifar began to abuse Danecki with a sustained virulent obscenity.
Danecki was aware of a growing sense of personal responsibility for the little group of refugees. It seemed to him, now that they were back in the dazed fear of the first moments when the spin-shaft had deposited them in the fort, that they were all inextricably intermingled with his own consciousness. They were almost an extension of his own way of life. The shriek of a woman—the eerie figure of the Revived Man—pathetic Jacobi nursing his outraged hatred and pain—Wardle who had once been a man of action—Dross, a man between ecstasy and terror—and, of course, the girl. Somehow they were now all a part of the past year’s frightful pattern of despair and hope. It was as though he had grown outwards to include them. Their shrill screams, the growled accusations, the pleas which they shouted and whispered, all were peculiarly from him as well as directed at him.
He listened to the bitter denunciations and held back the immediate contemptuous retort. They were all people who could not face the grim oppressiveness of the situation in the fort. He could. It was now a familiar and almost easy thing to work out a path in the patterns of danger.
Then he saw that the girl was not shouting. She had remained tense but had not panicked; she was afraid but she could wait and watch. She waited for him to move, but she would weigh what he said before committing herself. It struck him that Khalia might be enjoying the danger.
“We have to move out now, don’t we?” she said in a moment of quiet. “Don’t we, Danecki?”
Mr. Moonman heard her, but Wardle and Dross were still arguing about the fort’s security systems. Mrs. Zulkifar was on the floor, pounding it with the rings on her long, elegant hands and making little scraping noises from the back of her throat. Jacobi was enough of a boy to be shocked by her behavior, but his eyes never once left Danecki.
“Oh, yes,” said Danecki. “Now, we have no choice.”
Wardle blustered on angrily: “What choice had we before you wasted all that time? We could have reconnoitered the entire installation by now—sent out patrols in three directions—reported back and organized some plan! Danecki, you’ve wasted a whole hour!”
The metallic voices cut in, setting up a refrain in the corridor down which Batibasaga had disappeared: “Orders, Duty Commander! Failing orders, humanoid automaton has been secured for interrogation! Duty Commander, Central Security System awaits orders!”
The noise calmed the little group. It had the effect of a sudden furious burst of thunder in a quiet night, stunning the hearers and cutting off all conversation and complaints.
Danecki spoke rapidly. “This isn’t what I hoped for, but it had to be expected. Batibasaga in custody—the security systems will hold him. Turn him over to the workshops, possibly.”
Mrs. Zulkifar stopped cursing and scrabbling at the floor.
“I see,” said Dross. He spoke to the little group. “It isn’t entirely hopeless,” he went on. “Mr. Danecki has made what use he could of our only resource. Batibasaga. We can’t blame him—we left the decision in his hands. So far, we’ve lost an hour.”
“And the fort’s alive!” Wardle exclaimed. “Did you hear that, Doctor? Central Security System! That’s a major control unit, sir! Always the worst! Installations like this will be full of snoopers! We won’t be able to go an inch without being reported! We’re stuck here now!”
Mrs. Zulkifar, Khalia noticed, was listening with a frenzied intentness. “Calm down, Brigadier!” Dross ordered. “I’ve said it isn’t hopeless! Consider the advantages! Mr. Danecki knows them. Listen!”
“It’s the robot,” said Danecki. “I think it’s inhibited by the effects of the molecular interference of the spin-shaft. If it can throw them off, it might be able to divert some of the auxiliary systems. Not the major systems, perhaps, but possibly those that control the exits. Maybe the spin-shaft.”
Dross added: “Batibasaga could do it! Remember that even though he’s not the most modern of automatons, he’s entirely different from the robots of the Confederation period! He’s not the same thing at all! Even half-ruined as he is, Batty possesses hugely superior powers of intuition and judgment. This fortification is full of robots—aggressive, powerful machines, no doubt—but they’re old! Ancient! They’re just logical machines. They reason simply, like murderous children!”
“Murderous?” whispered Mrs. Zulkifar.
Khalia tensed. Was the woman going to attack someone again?
“But he’s in enemy hands, Doctor!” Wardle exclaimed. “How can we know what it’s up to?”
“Enemy?” Mrs. Zulkifar said, rising to her feet. “Murder? Me?”
She howled. Then she ran. As she ran, she screamed: “I’m getting out!”
/> Her intention registered on Danecki’s mind, but what she proposed to do was such a blind, senseless thing that he could do no more than shout: “Stop!”
He saw the distraught woman, with her fine head and splendid body, rush toward the middle of the three wide corridors. “Stop her!” Danecki yelled, but he was a dozen strides away.
Wardle could have made a grab, but he too was utterly bewildered by her mad action. Dross managed to heave himself forward a pace, but that was all.
By the time Danecki was in motion, the woman was out of range. He impelled himself toward her despairingly. Jacobi put out a foot, and Danecki pitched headlong against Wardle.
Khalia had to move around the bulk of Dross, but Mrs. Zulkifar was already racing as if pursued by devils.
Before she put a foot outside the safe confines of the low central command area, a shriek of electronic chatter burst out: “Emergency! Emergency! Intruder reported! Unauthorized human reported by Security!”
It was followed by the voice of Central Command. They were the words they had all been dreading. “Red Alert! Red Alert! This is a six-hour Red Phase Alert!”
Wardle had dropped to the floor in an attempt to avoid the effects of the fort’s destruction. Jacobi freed himself and scrambled after Danecki, paces behind Khalia. Mr. Moonman was on the floor, staring fixedly at the mud-stained robotic head which Knaggs had discovered that morning, and which had molded itself into Danecki’s hand when the other Jacobi youth stood over him.
Mrs. Zulkifar rebounded from an invisible barrier. “I’m going out! I am! I am! I’m not staying down here amongst criminals and riffraff!”
Danecki ignored her.
Khalia found herself being hauled along with a brutal strength. She pulled back, but Danecki insisted. “Come on! It doesn’t matter now—the fort knows we’re here!”