by Brian N Ball
“I wondered how they had entered the fort,” Danecki said. “The two skeletons were side by side where they died. I heard the argument begin again, and then the black ropes came for us.”
“You picked up the blaster,” said Dross quietly. “You dived for it—you saw it. You checked the firing mechanism—did you look at it?”
“Look at it?”
“Did you see it—what did it look like?”
Wardle butted in: “Conventional impulse-emitter? Heat-ray? Black-shadow fusor? Handgun? Weight? Think of it in your hand. Imagine it there in your hand.”
Danecki looked down at his hand. “Handgun,” he said. “Not heavy. It fitted exactly and the firing mechanism readied itself once I pointed. I didn’t think about it. Point, press, fire. It was a reinforced ion-beam ejector, powerful enough to burn up the hawsers.” He thought hard, closing his eyes. “The hawsers burned gray and dropped spots of plastic. The beam caught the metal sides of the corridor. The metal buckled but held. That’s all.”
“It could have been from any period,” Dross said. “The Confederation forces used that kind of weapon, but so did the rest of the contending forces. What you’ve told me so far helps to outline the general picture, but you haven’t given me the one single, indisputable fact that I can present to the fort! One fact, Mr. Danecki! One!”
Wardle joined in. “Think, Danecki! What did the girl say? Did she notice anything?”
Danecki found the memory of Khalia’s sympathy with the dead couple almost unbearable. He contained the angry retort which sprang to his lips. If, by intruding on the private new world which had been created in the grim cavern, the two men could help, then let them. “She said they were lovers.”
Dross nodded. “Likely enough. But were they attackers on a suicide mission, or two Confederation people finding the last refuge? I have to think.”
“Four hours and fifty minutes,” said Wardle.
The room pressed in on them all. Even Dross was perturbed by the subtle tensions set up by the whorled patterns; he closed his eyes and his lips moved, but he maintained another of those dragging silences while Danecki fought back fatigue and frustration.
Wardle continued his pacing. Then he called Danecki across to see the unconscious Mr. Moonman. The Revived Man lay with his eyes open. Danecki saw the long, yellow nose hooked out of a large gaunt area of face.
“He’s nursed that since he came,” said Wardle. He pointed to the strange robotic head which Danecki had last seen beside the inert figure of Batibasaga in the Central Command Area. Mr. Moonman cradled the mud-streaked carapace as though it were some terrible yet comforting companion.
The sight of the long, scarcely-breathing figure oppressed Danecki. “He traveled halfway across the Galaxy to find that,” he said.
The dreadful head had played a strange part in the events of the long day. It had been found only that morning; then, abandoned, it had become a weapon. Now it comforted Mr. Moonman.
It was at that moment that Danecki suddenly recalled with a peculiar vividness the image of the blaster as it was neatly flicked from his hand by the black tendril.
“Three sunbursts,” he said aloud. “Doctor! The blaster!”
Mrs. Zulkifar whimpered in her sleep.
Dross opened his eyes. “Tell me, Mr. Danecki,” he purred. “Tell me!”
“You’ve got it!” Wardle said when Danecki was finished. “Three sunbursts was the crest of the Confederation—the three suns rising on the three planets they controlled!”
Dross rose to his feet. He was an impressive figure. His vast expanse of tunic swelled over the big belly. Danecki felt impatience begin to flood over his mind, but he controlled himself with a will trained in the iron year.
“I asked for one fact,” began Dross sonorously. He paused. “And you gave it to me! I, Dross, will save you all!”
“The time, Doctor!” reminded Wardle. “Time!”
Dross ignored the interruption. “It is an indisputable fact! Why the insistence on the presence of the Duty Commander? Why the almost guilty maunderings of the confounded gadgets? Why the incarceration of ourselves with no attempt at interrogation? Why! Because the fort is unsure of itself! Because it thinks it might have committed some monumental act of folly! And that is why Dross is able to save you all—and the fort itself, the greatest single archaeological discovery of the millennium!” He pointed to Danecki. “Your courage and perseverance have helped! Undoubtedly! By bringing your story back, you have enabled the brain within this skull to put together the fragments of legend and fact that otherwise meant nothing. The Duty Commander—that’s what you have brought back! The Duty Commander whose weapon you used until it would fire no more! The Duty Commander whose skeleton it is that lies below us at the entrance to Level Nine!”
“Yes,” said Danecki. “It could be.”
“Doctor—how does that help?” said Wardle.
“If we know about the Duty Commander, we know about the fort’s dreadful sense of insecurity, Brigadier. But the weapon is the key—three sunbursts on the blaster! The personal weapon of the Confederation’s officers. Only they would carry the insignia of the Confederation! And who but an officer of the Confederation would find his way into the fort?”
“But the others, Doctor?” Danecki asked. “What of them?”
“Not our immediate concern, Mr. Danecki! It is the long-dead Duty Commander who concerns us. If we control him, we control the fort!”
Dross peered about the room. He was looking, the two men saw, for a suitable focus for his speech. A speech, Danecki saw, it would be.
At last Dross was ready to act. The plan was uncertain. It was based on so many unproven and unprovable assumptions and shreds of fact that it sounded crazy even when outlined in Dross’s shrewd presentation. Danecki acknowledged its weaknesses but trusted the big-bellied archaeologist’s intuition.
Dross was as much a master of this strange situation as he, Danecki, had been of the uncertain shoals of hyperspace.
Dross chose to speak to the ceiling. “We are ready to reveal our identity!” he called sharply.
He spoke again. “We are ready to reveal our identity!”
The men listened, but there was no answering metallic voice. None could be expected, if Dross was right. Not until the indisputable facts were put forward.
“I address myself to the Security Section! You must relay this message to Central Command.” The words bounced off the weird ceiling.
Dross spoke louder in his sonorous professorial voice. “We are Confederation civilians! We have survived outside the fort area. I have news of an infiltration of the lower levels.”
Still nothing broke the silence. A few echoes rang about the alloyed ceiling. Mrs. Zulkifar rustled against the bedclothes. But that was all.
“The Black Army is in danger!” Surely that would bring the fort into action! Danecki strained to hear the first gratings of the robot voice that would break the long silence.
Nothing!
“The Duty Commander has been killed! His personal weapon has been taken from him! Security has possession of the Duty Commander’s blaster!” Dross paused.
Was there a subtle change in the ambience of the room? Was there a hint of electronic attention?
“We are survivors of the Confederation! A thousand years have passed since all other Confederation personnel of this installation died! The Duty Commander is dead! Two intruders were killed by the Duty Commander! You are a robotic installation! You are a thousand years old!”
Dross paused, for Mrs. Zulkifar was sitting up, gasping. Her face showed the wild emotions that disturbed her.
“You can’t tell it that! Don’t let it think it’s a thousand years old! What might it do? Why can’t you leave it alone! It wouldn’t have harmed us!” Her fine eyes flashed, and for a moment Danecki half-believed her. “All we had to do was wait—all this nonsense would have been sorted out! There are correct procedures—ways of doing things! If we start interfering with
things that don’t concern us, who knows what will happen? Doctor, you’re a scholar and a gentleman! You wouldn’t want me to be hurt!”
Wardle tried to quieten her. “Emma! Leave the Doctor alone! He’s trying to get us all to safety!”
But Mrs. Zulkifar made a grab for Dross. “Leave it to the proper authorities!”
It was left to Danecki to grab a covering from her couch and muffle her cries.
Dross smoothed his clothes and went on: “This installation has no human direction! The Duty Commander is dead! We are Confederation forces!”
The room seemed to shake slightly. Danecki noticed it. So did Wardle.
Dross nodded. He too had observed the slight pulsation of the eerie room. He paused, as he had said he would, before delivering the final part of his speech.
The fort was listening.
Circuits had fallen together. There was an odd, poised sensation in the strange room, one which had not been evident before. It made the weirdly patterned prison a quiet and deadly place. Cold electronic ghosts lingered in the silence.
“We are Confederation forces! Your last official brain-imprint was received a thousand years ago. The Duty Commander died defending the Black Army. Before he died, he gave his personal weapon to Danecki, here present!”
He pointed to Danecki.
This was the plan. Danecki looked about for some focal point for his short message. There was none, so, like Dross, he looked upwards: “I appoint myself Duty Commander!”
Mrs. Zulkifar screamed. She burst from Wardle’s old muscles and dragged the bright bedclothes over the heads of all three men. Wardle bellowed into the muffling cover;
Dross choked against a swath of fabric; Danecki clawed savagely, realizing what the sick, mad woman intended.
“Stop!” implored Wardle. He too realized the danger she represented.
“We’re not!” the terrified woman screamed. “He lied! Dross lied! He’s no gentleman! We’re from the tourist ship —we’re from the hyperspace ship you blew up! I’m not lying! I’m a law-abiding citizen! I’ve a great regard for the proper way of doing things! Dross is lying—Danecki’s lying! I’m just a woman! I can’t die—!”
She was still babbling when Danecki reached her. He couldn’t hit her to stop the noise. She was a sick animal who stared at him in blank, stupid terror, waiting for the blow.
Mrs. Zulkifar put a hand to her mouth and wept.
The fort took up the noise. It howled.
They all waited as the weird cell took on a life of its own. Walls, ceiling, floor—all became part of an appalling huge scream of electronic dismay. Light, whorls, patterns, sound—all clung together.
The cell reeled in on them.
This is the end of it, thought Danecki as the grating efflorescence of noise smashed into his head.
The metallic voices that made up the screaming raged and battered with astonishing physical violence around his skull, outside and inside, hitting through the bones of his hands, too, as he sought to keep the sheer volume of sound from his ears in an instinctive defensive movement.
Schizoid!
His mind registered a babble of mad commands. He opened his eyes briefly and the ceiling fell into him, its crazed shapes absorbing what was left of sight after he had been completely deafened by the roaring of robotic incoherence.
Confusion!
A thin wedge of memory made him call for the girl, but the cry made no impression on the awful fury of the fort’s trauma.
Memory, thought, consciousness. All went.
* * *
CHAPTER 13
Danecki would gladly have died.
There were moments of silence, and then the hideous clamor would begin again. The pain was reinforced by the silences.
Danecki saw his fellow-prisoners soundlessly yelling into the electronic howlings of the fort. Mr. Moonman was on his feet rocking to and fro and holding the grim robotic head to his straining chest. Mrs. Zulkifar ran about the room in little circles, still with the bright bedclothes draped about her, so that she looked like some eldritch creature, more witch than woman. Dross had his hands over his big head, and Wardle was trying to burrow into a deep-piled couch.
A score of metallic voices competed for attention.
And then Danecki could bear the fury. This was what Dross had wanted, he realized. This violent outpouring of robotic terror. The fort was running riot. It believed that it might have made a mistake. And machines couldn’t absorb the notion of error. There was no apparatus in the big computers for shrugging off a mistake.
“We’ll make it believe it arrested the Duty Commander.” That was what Dross had intended. “Confuse it utterly!” That was what Dross had said a few minutes before.
The minutes stretched back like the centuries the fort had slept through; nothing could be worse than the sheer appalling misery of the installation’s demented systems.
Danecki found himself about to trample over the woman. She mouthed obscenities against the eerie, wind-wrenching noise; when she saw Danecki she skipped aside nimbly. She clawed out at him in a moment of comprehension, and then she was performing her involved little circuit of crazed movement.
There was no escape from the monstrous noise.
Danecki slipped in and out of consciousness three or four times, desperately willing himself into the soft blankness of coma when he emerged. And still the noise went on.
Fragments of electronic reportage impacted on his brain. “Red Alert! Red Alert!” bawled one impassioned voice.
“The Duty Commander is dead!” screamed another. “His death was an error!”
“Errors can be rectified,” pointed out another. “A replacement unit must be found.”
“Humans cannot be repaired!” screamed the first. “The Duty Commander’s hand-weapon has been identified!”
“He is not a thousand years old,” said a new voice.
All yelled at once in pain.
Dross crawled over to Danecki, who by this time was lying on the floor. It was only with difficulty that the archaeologist was able to unwind Danecki’s arms from his head.
Neither attempted to speak. Dross fought against the clamor for a while, mouthing words so that Danecki could read his lips. But an upsurge of electronic misery made them seek the shelter of their arms and hands.
Minutes passed.
Had the woman spoiled Dross’s plan?
Muted fragments of robotic messages began to filter through the high-pitched yells.
Danecki heard the harsh voice of Security demanding either instructions or the delegation of responsibility. “—this system must interrogate the thousand-year-old saboteurs—”
Another voice put in: “I have a superior robot in my workshop—complete repairs or feed to the fuel store?”
“—not identifiable!” stuttered Central Control.
“Batibasaga?”
Dross had heard it too. He mouthed, “Batibasaga?”
Danecki nodded.
“—superior robot refuses to acknowledge maintenance robots—inert!”
“Burial party, attention!” a thin voice said.
“—concubine of Duty Comm—”
Danecki felt a chill as the faintest hint of a reference to a woman filtered through the robotic chatter.
Concubine!
“Khalia!” he shouted, but the noise died in the uproar.
“This installation is not in error! No man lives for a thousand years!”
“One of my prisoners has given information,” said Security heavily. “She should be released under Article Number—”
“I am responsible for decisions!” snapped Central Command.
“Infiltration!” spat out another voice.
“I am confused,” admitted Central Command. “Abort procedures may be called on.”
Anything could be tolerated, Danecki realized. Even this demented uproar. Dross wrote on the strange floor: “When it stops, repeat claim to be Duty Commander.”
Daneck
i nodded.
The two men were joined by Wardle. They lay on the floor picking out the development of a pattern in the fort’s deterioration. Undeniably, there was a recurring theme in the flow of messages which the demented systems roared out to one another. All three men gathered in as much as they could, aware that when the noise ceased, each thread of information would be invaluable.
Danecki refused to allow himself to wonder about the enigmatic reference to a concubine; he would not dwell either on the fate of Mrs. Zulkifar. It was enough to listen to the two chief systems and memorize as much as possible.
He concentrated on one metallic outburst at a time, trying to pick out phrases here and there from the random surges of information that filled the room.
“—I have four hours, thirty-three minutes to abort—” bleated a quiet little voice.
“—remains of three humans discovered?” asked Central Command. “Confirm figure ‘three’!”
“Confirmed,” said Security.
“Am I a thousand years old?” asked a maintenance system.
There was no answer.
“I shall take independent action,” warned Security. “I must have decisions.”
“Humans do not live for a thousand years,” said Central Command.
“I have arrested four humans,” pointed out Security. “I must have decisions.”
Central Command was uninterested. “I do not make mistakes!”
The howling, which had died down appreciably, began to surge again. Then it stopped. There was complete silence. It hung in the air like a clammy thing, leaving behind the smell of fear.
“I am the Duty Commander!” roared Danecki.
Central Command answered: “No man lives for a thousand years.”
Dross hauled himself up to his hands and knees. He shook his big head. Like Danecki and Wardle, he was amazed to find that he could still hear. “It’s acknowledged us,” he said. “I was right. A military machine will always accept information.”