by Brian N Ball
“You have my hand-weapon!” called Danecki.
He wanted to cry out to the unseen voice that he needed the girl—to unleash some of the wild impatience that ate into him.
Mrs. Zulkifar whimpered into her hands. She was past caring now. The desperate anger of the three men had cowed her. She stared at Danecki from black-ringed magnificent eyes, with no trace at all of her earlier disdain.
Dross wrote: “Order it to key your brain-imprints into the Central Command System.”
It was what they had agreed. But Danecki hesitated. Where was the girl! There had been an oblique reference to a woman, but to which woman? If there were only time to reason out a clear plan among the fort’s paranoiac ravings! But time was the one thing they lacked. His task at the moment was to keep the machines’ interest.
“I am the Duty Commander,” he said firmly. “My weapon must be restored. I must find the infiltrators. The command systems must be keyed to my brain-imprints. Do this at once!”
“Is it wise, Mr. Danecki?” wailed Mrs. Zulkifar.
A harsh voice grated out: “I shall act independently! The woman is to be released!”
“Watch out!” yelled Wardle.
The net of black hawsers swung from the roof and caught Mrs. Zulkifar in their flabby embrace. It happened in the space of perhaps three seconds.
One moment the woman was whimpering and facing three men with a timid defiance, and the next she had been caught and hauled up out of the prison like the flitting of a bat across the night sky.
The gaudy bedclothes floated down beside Mr. Moonman. He didn’t look away from the ancient carapace.
“It believed her!” bellowed Wardle. “It believed her! Doctor, we’ve failed! The fort’s accepted her story! What the devil’s to happen to us? And to her?”
“You heard,” said Danecki. “She’s to be released.”
“But she’ll be out—perhaps she’ll have the sense to call for help! We’ve—what?—nearly five hours! No! Four hours—just over four hours left! She could contact the excursion ships—they could find a way through to us! Eh, Doctor?”
Dross shook his head. “No, Brigadier.”
“What?”
“I might have expected this,” Dross said heavily. “Poor woman! No, Brigadier, I don’t think Mrs. Zulkifar will get to the surface.”
“It said she was to be released,” pointed out Danecki.
“Security said that,” Dross agreed. “One system. You’re thinking in terms of a single highly motivated personality again. Don’t. What you heard was the voice of one of a number of highly confused electronic systems. One system talked to you while another quite different system may have come to a different decision. I agree that Security took the lady’s confession at face value.”
Wardle said loudly: “So what will happen to Mrs. Zulkifar, Doctor?”
Danecki thought he understood. Dross was trying to play on the fort’s disharmony. It seemed that Mrs. Zulkifar had become a pawn in the contending systems’ emerging struggle for power.
“Listen,” said Dross.
Nothing happened. No voices battered sense and sensation into one mass of pain. The fort was silent.
“Less than four and a half hours to destruct,” said Wardle. He seemed to take a grim satisfaction in the words.
“Listen!”
“For what, Doctor? You know what’s going to happen, do you? Well I do! You think that in four-and-a-half-hours’ time it’s going to be one instant explosion, just like the end of the tourist ship? You know the period, Doctor! None better! Do you recall how the Confederation disposed of its unwanted hardware?”
Dross shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Wardle turned to Danecki. “We’ll slide,” he said. “Slide. Down! Down into the nearest fault—down into the cracks in the Earth’s mantle! And then we’ll know! It won’t be quick, Danecki!”
“What are we listening for, Doctor?” said Danecki.
“For Mrs. Zulkifar’s exit.”
“Bitch!” Wardle grunted.
“We all act as we have to, Brigadier. Don’t we, Mr. Danecki? You—me—Mr. Moonman, who belongs to a race which by now should be philosophical about the concept of death, since they’ve all experienced it several times. Don’t you wonder what drives creatures like those to take refuge in total withdrawal? Or what drives Mrs. Zulkifar to the act of betrayal—though why call it betrayal? She owes us no loyalty.”
“It was the act of a stupid bitch,” Wardle said. “Thought she had some backbone when we were on the trip. Damn it, Dross, if she hadn’t tied us in with the tourist ship, the fort would have accepted us by now!”
“Listen,” said Dross.
Danecki wondered about Jacobi. He felt that it was a good sign, that he should again be worrying about his future. His and the girl’s. Why hadn’t they talked about being together?
Dross seemed to be counting the seconds as they filtered through the eerie room.
Wardle exploded with impatience. “Dross, what are we waiting for! We can’t just sit around waiting—let’s look at the walls again! Come on, Danecki! You too, Doctor. And you!” he bawled, catching the Revived Man by the arm. “Look for a sign of an opening—there must be doors of some sort! They can’t just lower prisoners in through the roof—there must be a way in for a man on his two legs!”
Reluctantly they all began to inch their way along the walls. This was the third time, for Danecki had insisted on another minute survey of the room during one of the intervals of waiting.
Mr. Moonman took an active part. Slow, ponderous, moving crab-like, one long dead-white hand brushing against the strangely-patterned walls.
“Well?” Danecki said to Dross. “What are you expecting?”
Dross shrugged. “Boom.”
When it came, the explosion was almost an anticlimax. The whole cell heaved itself upwards.
Danecki watched the figure of Mr. Moonman climb into the air. The Revived Man accepted the bone-jarring impact of his fall as another outrageous infliction, in silence and without acknowledgment. Wardle bawled madly. Dr. Dross was hurled from his couch with no change of expression on the way up, though Danecki saw him mouth “Boom!” on the way down. Danecki himself felt every muscle and tendon in his body shake away from bone in the moment of the explosion. He tried to relax for the inevitable fall. The shock of hitting the ground cleared his mind.
The woman—desperate, constrained, finally her own executioner—was the cause of the explosion.
“That was a molecular bomb!” bawled Wardle. “Unmistakable—the sequence of shock waves, the force of the explosion!”
Dross was trying to sit upright. He had been deposited in an undignified heap on the couch. Fat legs threshed unathletically. The paunch slowly aligned itself along the body. “Only in a sense, Brigadier,” he got out. “Mr. Knaggs had it right. Poor lady! The second casualty of this illfated expedition!”
He faced the Brigadier, on whose face was an expression of dawning comprehension. “Boom?” said Wardle.
“Exactly! The spin-shaft! Not destroyed, but booby-trapped! The security system tried to reward the poor lady, but she met her end in an act of total dissolution! Mortality!”
“She—what was it your engineer said?—tried to fill two spaces at once? Moving precisely at—? Displacing matter?”
“Poor Emma! A handsome woman, but stupid! Shallow, vain, and stupid! Poor woman!”
“She’s gone,” agreed Dross. “As you say, a totally self-interested woman, but nevertheless a human being. Another death at the hands of the machines, Brigadier!”
Danecki tried to picture Mrs. Zulkifar’s face. He recalled only a certain regularity of feature; it was the woman’s voice that stuck in the memory. Autocratic, but somehow conditioned to servility. And yet, as Dross had said, she was a human being done to death by the macabre robots.
Dross’s voice was brisk when he spoke again: “We have to consider our new situation, gentlemen! For it is a new situatio
n. Though we have suffered another casualty, we must think of ourselves. Yes, and your young lady— even of the murderous youth, Mr. Danecki! Now. What effect will such a large explosion have had on this installation? Well, Mr. Danecki?”
Danecki thought of the machines which he had come to know so well. “It can absorb the destruction,” he said.
“Agreed,” put in Wardle. “It will take punishment.”
“But there’s already confusion,” Danecki went on. “There will be a further strain on maintenance and repair units. Added to which, if you’re right, Doctor, there will be further deterioration among the individual robotic systems. I’d say that we have a further advantage, if anything.”
“My feelings exactly,” said Dross.
“Well, Doctor?” asked Wardle.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Brigadier, the passing of Mrs. Zulkifar may be turned to use.” He turned to Danecki. “Central Command will be in a state of almost complete disorganization. It has to cope with a mutiny among the security systems, and it has to repair the damaged units. The time is ripe for further confusing it. Reinforce what you said before, young man!”
Danecki took little time to consider his words. The pattern had been established. As Dross said, the time was opportune.
“The fort has been infiltrated by saboteurs!” he shouted. “I am the Duty Commander! I have been accidentally locked in the Security Wing as the result of the explosion! I must have access to the other prisoners!”
They all flinched—with the exception of Mr. Moonman—expecting the smashing voices to set up their appalling clamor. A slight electronic whistling brought hands to ears, and heads down to chests.
The familiar voice of the Central Command System said quietly: “The Duty Commander should assume control.”
“I assume control. I am Danecki, Duty Commander.”
“You are a thousand years old?”
Logic could play no part in this argument.
“I am a thousand years old. My blaster has been taken.”
“Security reports possession of the weapon,” admitted the robotic voice.
“Security has released a prisoner,” Danecki said, at Dross’s mouthed urging.
“Yes,” the metallic voice agreed. “I am confused. Is the Duty Commander dead?”
“Yes,” said Danecki.
“Humans cannot be rectified.”
“Security has failed,” Danecki insisted, hoping to keep the machine interested. “I am in the Security Wing. A Duty Commander should not be locked with prisoners.”
“I am confused, sir. I am a thousand years old,” it said.
“Then carry out my orders. Imprint my brain’s electrical impulses on the Central Command System.”
“I am the Central Command System.”
“I am Danecki.”
The machine changed the subject: “You report infiltrators, sir?”
“Yes.”
Another voice, slurred but robotic, interrupted: “The external spin-shaft has been destroyed! Maintenance units cannot repair it! The Duty Commander should be notified!”
“I am extremely confused,” complained Central Command. “Are you dead, sir? I have no record of your brain-imprint. Should I obey you, sir?”
“Yes!” snarled Danecki. “All systems must obey me! Show me the way out of here!” He stared with furious impatience about the room. Talking to the disembodied voice of the age-old robot left him with a deep and potentially violent sense of frustration.
There was no answer from the machine.
Wardle caught his attention. The Brigadier was staring wide-eyed at one wall. “Good God!” was all he could get out. “It worked!”
Danecki looked. A doorway had appeared in the shifting whorled patterns. It was a perfectly ordinary opening leading down a corridor with subdued greenish lighting. It had the functional appearance of any jail’s corridors.
“It worked indeed!” exclaimed Dross. “One of the systems has responded! Not what we’d planned, but it’s a start! Now, try again, Mr. Danecki! Keep trying!”
“No,” said Danecki. He made for the doorway. “I know about this kind of thing, Doctor. Central Command can only grow stronger—it won’t take long to regain complete control. We have to move while we can. Come on!”
Dross hesitated.
“He’s right!” snapped Wardle. “The military mind thinks slowly, but it gets there in the end—the fort’s off-balance at the moment, Doctor—we have to take our chances‘.”
Danecki didn’t wait for Dross’s answer.
* * *
CHAPTER 14
He had no idea where he might be. Obviously the fort was honeycombed with the black shafts through which he had been passed by the flabby ropes. But where had the security system taken the captives?
Danecki ran along the level corridor. He came to a smallish room that had been some kind of guard room. Racks of weapons lined one wall. Almost filling another wall was a panel of control-sensors, and there was a curious well, about the size of a man, in the floor. It rippled with an oily gleam. It had the stench of death about it. Unbidden, the word came to Danecki: execution!
The place was a deathroom.
Across the centuries, he felt the grim presence of the guards and the efficient men who had built the fort. They had planned for all eventualities, including the execution of prisoners. Their bodies would feed the nuclear piles deep within the great military installation.
Danecki turned to the control panel. Dare he touch its eager sensors? Had the fort accepted him as the Duty Commander?
A noise brought him whirling round. It was Wardle. “Well, man?” gasped the stout Brigadier, his tired old arteries pumping blood sluggishly about his body. Danecki recognized the effort that had gone into Wardle’s presence in the deathroom. Dross would be far, far behind.
“Just this,” said Danecki. “Mind how you go—that looks like a pit for bodies. Over here, there’s a control panel.”
“Don’t touch it!” warned Wardle. “These military complexes are riddled with fail-safe security systems. It’s a part of military thinking to be suspicious.”
“I was going to try giving it direct orders.”
“Then do so! Do so—” Wardle gasped with the effort. “Do so while it’s still in the obeying mood!”
“I want the young woman captive!” snapped Danecki to the flashing control panel.
Excitedly, the almost-living jelly of the sensor-pads sprang out to his hands. He backed away hurriedly.
“Sir!” rang out a clear voice at the level of his face.
Danecki could see no screen, nothing to indicate the presence of a robot. The thing was the whole panel, maybe the whole Security Wing.
“Get her!”
“Young woman, sir? Weight one-five-one?”
Danecki felt his heart thumping with a deafening madness. It could only be Khalia! Mrs. Zulkifar was no young woman, and she would weigh a clear twenty pounds more than Khalia. He remembered the explosion. There would be little, if anything, left of the older woman.
“Get her! Bring her to me!”
“Out of my system’s competence, sir! She is not on this level!”
“Then where the devil is she!” demanded Wardle. “Yes, if that will make you happy, man—find the girl!”
Danecki grinned at the Brigadier. “Where is the girl!”
“Why, in your quarters, sir—as you ordered!” rang out the metallic reply. “Quite comfortable, sir! Ready, if you take my meaning, sir!”
“Bring her!”
“Against your standing orders, sir!”
“I’m changing them!”
The machine pondered the instruction. Danecki felt himself restraining a fierce impulse to kick the bland panel. It was like dealing with a horde of mad ghosts.
Dross puffed his way into the deathroom. “Well?” he managed to get out.
“It’s taking orders as far as it can,” reported Wardle. “Danecki’s instructed it to bring
the girl. But there’s a delay—I don’t like this, Danecki! We’re giving Central Control time to get organized! We can’t rely on these local systems being cut off from the center for long!”
“Spread confusion, young man!” panted Dross. “Order Security to take over the functions of Central Command! They’re in a state of civil war already—start a power struggle in earnest!”
Danecki opened his mouth to give the order. Dross was right, of course. At all costs, they had to prevent the calm disembodied Central Command System from resuming direct control of the entire fort.
Before he could get out the order, however, the by now familiar harsh voice of Security rang out: “Prisoners have been released! The Duty Commander is dead!”
Central Command responded: “This is another security lapse!” it complained. “I have powers of command, but the Duty Commander is a thousand years old! Maintenance systems do not respond to instructions! I am confused!”
“I am the guard room system,” rang out the clear voice from the level of Danecki’s head. “The Duty Commander requests his concubine. Standing orders do not allow me to have her sent to this area!”
“Identify yourself, sir!” pleaded Central Command.
“Your concubine is safe and comfortable,” put in Security. “Are you dead again, sir, as Central Command reports?”
“Dead men do not need concubines,” pondered the calm voice of Central Command.
“I have no information,” agreed Security.
A reedy voice put in: “I am a defunct maintenance unit, and I too have no knowledge of concubines.”
“Kindly abort yourself then,” ordered Security.
A sullen rumbling immediately shook the guard room.
“Mad!” said Wardle. “Mad!”
“Schizoid,” agreed Dross.
The fort argued.
“Security systems do not give orders,” said Central Command.
“Are you dead, sir?” repeated the harsh voice of Security, ignoring the voice from the Central Command Area.
“You have my blaster,” said Danecki. “Your systems took it from me less than an hour ago. Therefore I am not dead.”