by Brian N Ball
“It’s a mockery!” said Wardle in a pause. “The whole fort’s on a destruct circuit!”
“Irrelevant!” said the huge self-appointed judge. “That is not evidence, and I order it to be struck from the record of this court!”
“How?” said the Security robot. It hefted the huge sword inquiringly.
Khalia wondered if it would all end then and there.
“Erase the words,” said the judge. “The record!”
“Yes,” said the Security robot. It brought the sword down squarely on a bank of controls immediately behind the Duty Commander’s armchair. “Erased,” it said.
And yet, to Khalia, the robots appeared to sustain the mad fabric they were building up. The harem robot had woven together two sets of events: one, the ancient tale it had shown to her and Danecki; and secondly, the incursion by their own party.
“The case for the prosecution rests on three chief lines of evidence,” it lisped happily. “First, the records of the entry of the Duty Commander and his concubine, together with the illegal incursion of the saboteur. I produce these now.”
“They are adjudged admissible,” said the red-robed figure. “Show the recordings to the accused.”
Dross gasped in wonder at the age-old tale.
Khalia saw again the anticipatory lust in the Duty Commander’s eyes. He smiled with the knowledge of a man who hurries to a woman waiting with an impatience and need to match his own; he had a habit of tapping the blaster at his belt, a nervous scratching at the small, functional weapon.
“Astonishing!” gasped Dross. “And how logical! One woman diverts the attention of the Duty Commander—she slips in an identification blip and her partner can follow! So simple! And what a woman! Her poise, my dear! This is what finally defeated the Confederation! Who would have expected the girl to gain access through what in effect is the front door of the fort! Doesn’t it prove, Brigadier, that the machines can always be circumvented?”
“It’s a pitiful tale,” said Wardle. “You still think they can be circumvented?”
“No, not so far as we’re concerned—but observe the fantastic complexity of the installation! The endless security systems—the checks and double-checks! And they were to be of no value whatsoever!”
“They died,” whispered Mr. Moonman. “They all died.”
They saw the girl rush from the green and gold room to find her lover. They watched the Duty Commander’s appalled realization that he had betrayed his command, and, in that betrayal, allowed the enemy to come to grips with the Confederation’s final weapon. And they saw the brief flaring confrontation: the girl’s head forced back by the blast of energy—the knife thudding home cleanly—the bright surge of power that completed the final act in the tragedy.
“It’s ancient history,” Dross said loudly to the red-robed automaton. “It all happened so long ago that the human race has begun all over again! There isn’t a Confederation now!”
“Wrong!” said the Security automaton. “I am the Security System for this fort. This fort is a Confederation installation. Therefore there is a Confederation!”
“Quite right!” lisped the harem attendant. It shook its curls. “My next piece of evidence!” It pointed the blaster at the astonished group. “Taken from the Duty Commander,” it lisped. “Incontrovertible evidence!”
“It means that the blaster was taken from Danecki!” Wardle said angrily. “It’s mad! Mad! That blaster’s been lying with the bones of the Duty Commander for a thousand years!”
“You are addressing the court?” asked the red-robed figure. “If so, you will speak to me as ‘My Lord.’ ”
“Good God!” Wardle burst out. “That I’d live to see the day when a robot said a thing like that!”
“They are guilty,” lisped the harem robot. “It’s in their faces! This is where I nail my case firmly!”
“Now?” growled the black-clad Security robot.
“Now!” giggled the harem attendant.
A black hawser reached for Khalia. She saw it coming but she was unable to avoid its clinging, cold embrace. It moved down from the ceiling like a swath of funereal cloth, coiled and soft. She felt herself edged towards the staring figure of the red-robed Central Command automaton.
A hawser began to search a recess in the one-piece garment she had hastily donned so long before.
“Here,” said the Security robot.
“As I said!” lisped the disgusting harem attendant. “An identification tab—she isn’t a thousand years old! She’s a young woman of twenty-two. This is a Confederation work-tab for a woman engaged on missile-direct duties!”
“Let me see,” said the thing hewn from iron ore.
Dross was dumbfounded. Khalia heard him say: “It makes a mad kind of logic! It does! The machines always looked for facts—and this is a fact!”
“She—she took the dress, or whatever it is, from the concubine’s room!” Wardle said.
“If she wears the garments of the Confederation, she is not a thousand years old,” said the Central Command robot.
“Therefore she is a Confederation human,” said Security. “She will be assuming command?”
“You cannot make decisions,” the harem robot reminded the black-clad figure. “Though she wears Confederation garments, and though she has an identification tag which shows she is a missile-direct worker, it does not follow that she is a Confederation missile-direct worker.”
The Security robot began to growl something, but the red-robed figure stopped it. “I agree. It is confusing but I must make a decision. I am a judge. Therefore I shall judge.”
A new voice put in: “I am the destruct circuit. I am programmed to become active shortly. I have been listening with admiration to the proceedings. Shall I hold off final destruct until the proceedings are complete?”
“Yes,” agreed the red-robed figure at once. “Wait.”
Khalia was nudged back towards Dross. “So we have to wait until this criminal farce is over?” she said. “Until we’re condemned?”
“It looks like it,” said Dross.
“Yes,” said Wardle. “Yes!” He began to whistle quietly to himself; Khalia put his nervousness down to the beginnings of a mental breakdown. When he began to pace about the center of the Central Command Area, she wondered if she was right.
For nearly ten minutes, the three figures stared at the humans. The minutes slid along quickly. Khalia was aware of a subtle tension among the robots. It was as though at a formal dinner party someone had called loudly for attention, and then forgotten what it was he had to say.
Dross talked quietly about the Confederation. In his own erudite way, he was a happy man. His only regret was that the incredible fort, with all its relics of the old and failed Confederation, should slowly subside into molten hell beneath Earth’s crust. The mystery would remain, a total, baffling eternal blank!
At last, the red-robed figure spoke. “Spies,” it said. “How do you plead?”
Dross shrugged. Mr. Moonman looked at the ancient robotic head in his hands. Khalia felt herself increasingly detached from the weird scene. She recognized that her body needed food and sleep, that her mind was unable to concentrate on the mad scene. Her grief was the only reality that meant anything to her—and that would end soon. Dross was right, she thought. Why make the waiting unbearable when there was nothing any of them could do to stop the machines from crushing them?
Wardle stopped pacing. “We all plead guilty!” he snapped. “Yes, guilty, my Lord! Be quiet, Doctor—I know what I’m doing! And you too, Miss! Let me handle this—I know you don’t care now what happens to you, what with your loss—ah—your grievous loss, but we have to think of ourselves! Can’t give in—can’t surrender! Never would, though I lost my command for saying it! Yes,” he said again to the three monolithic figures. “Guilty!”
“That makes it easier!” the harem attendant exclaimed. “I was going to ask you human spies to act as jury, but since you’ve pleaded guilty, th
ere’s no need for that kind of elaborate procedure. All you have to do, my dear high-grade superior, is to condemn them!”
The red-robed figure slowly rose to its feet. The black-clad Security robot passed the glittering sword. The sword came downwards to point at the group of humans.
Khalia felt the protest welling up inside her. What were they guilty of! A thousand-year-old crime? Danecki’s double death? She watched, hypnotized, as the flashing blade swept upwards again. The ritual of the eerie scene possessed her.
“Death,” it said.
* * *
CHAPTER 19
Air was expelled simultaneously from the lungs of all five survivors. It came with a heavy gasp from Dross; angrily, with a stifled curse from Wardle; in a moaning sigh from Mr. Moonman. Khalia heard her own instinctive cry. Jacobi screamed.
The whole incredible nightmare scene left them paralyzed with horror.
Jacobi fingered his neck as the black-clad robot played with the hempen noose. “You—you fool!” he screamed to Wardle.
The Brigadier moved quickly. He placed a big hand over the boy’s mouth and whispered urgently and fiercely in his ear. Jacobi’s eyes flared.
Khalia watched the byplay as if it were happening in another place—as if that too were a part of the ancient happenings of a thousand years before.
She heard Wardle’s crisp authoritative voice: “My Lord!”
The red-robed figure inclined its head.
“We are all soldiers in the anti-Confederation armies!” Wardle said. “We must not be dealt with under civilian law! It is our right to die as soldiers!”
The black-clad monolith halted in the act of reaching for Jacobi.
“I am confused again,” said the Central Command robot. “What do your records show?” it asked the harem attendant.
“I am in confusion too,” it admitted.
“I have a rope,” offered the Security automaton.
“We are soldiers,” said Wardle. “We must die as soldiers. That is the custom. It must be at dawn, by gunfire.”
Khalia suddenly realized what the Brigadier was doing. The instinct for survival had asserted itself in another of the party. The old soldier was buying time.
She began to hope he would succeed. The desperate grief she had felt was to some extent relieved by Wardle’s efforts. He was a man who would not surrender. So much he had said. Unlike Dross, who could accept the dictates of an impersonal fate, and Mr. Moonman, who did not seem to care much about anything, Wardle had the most basic of all human desires: that existence, under whatever conditions offered themselves, should continue.
The red-robed, self-appointed judge waited.
At last, the harem attendant spoke. “I have no information.”
“That is because you don’t know,” put in Dross.
Wardle tried to stop him, but the big-bellied archaeologist pushed his restraining arm aside.
“That is because we don’t know,” the central figure said.
“I know,” said Dross. “I know because I am a thousand years old.”
In unison, the three robots said: “No man lives to be a thousand years old.”
“The last human to contact you did so a thousand years ago,” said Dross calmly. “I am a human. Therefore I am a thousand years old.”
“Superficial logic?” suggested the harem attendant.
“I am confused,” said the Security robot. “Shall I hang the murderer? Now?”
“He and the others claim a death by gunfire,” said the red-robed judge.
“We do,” said Dross. “And because I am a human and you are a machine, I know more than you about the customs of humans.”
“That may be,” agreed the judge.
“Therefore you will do what we ask.”
“I cannot obey spies and saboteurs.”
“And murderers,” put in the lisping voice.
Dross shook his head in disappointment.
Khalia sensed the welling excitement in Wardle and Jacobi. Now Dross had joined in the fight for survival once more.
“A death by firing squad!” Wardle’s voice rang out loudly in the cavern.
“Agreed!” answered the great, monstrous, red figure.
“I have effective execution systems,” announced the Security robot. “I shall prepare them.”
“At dawn,” said Dross.
“Agreed!”
The voice of the destruct systems put in hesitantly: “Shall I abort the destruct system?”
“No!”
For one moment, Dross’s face had changed. Khalia could see the surge of anticipation dying away. He had thought for a moment that the strange installation would hold the destruct system permanently.
“Delay destruct until after the execution,” the red-robed figure ordered. “We will dispense with these humanoid structures forthwith!”
The three robots trooped away through a suddenly-opened gap in the wall of the Central Command Area.
The trial, the survivors realized, was over.
“Dawn!” Jacobi gnawed on his fist again. “How long before dawn—are we going to wait here like rats waiting for death? It’s dawn in a few hours! It’s dawn soon— what can we do?”
“Wait,” suggested Khalia.
Wardle gestured to the familiar prison. “Wait,” he agreed.
“Wait and hope,” said Dross. “We have a little more time.”
“You’re hoping that the Black Army was lost—aren’t you?” said Khalia.
“You saw the saboteur reach the control desk,” pointed out Dross. “I’ve been wondering if, after all, his mission was accomplished!”
“If it was, how would that help us?” said Wardle. “The only people who could reach us are the Outlanders—and our own fellow travelers aboard the excursion ships, if they haven’t been blown up by the fort’s rockets! But the Outlanders wouldn’t know how to reach us, and the rest of our companions won’t dare to look for us!”
Khalia saw that his burst of enthusiasm had petered out. “Wouldn’t the robots possibly change their minds?” she asked. She thought of the three great, monstrous figures which had been contrived expressly to enact the ritual of the court.
“No,” said Dross. “I’m afraid, my dear, that they’re under control again. We’re not faced any more with a series of disconnected personalities, but with a single, directed entity. The Central Command System seems to have things pretty much under control. Mad, it may be. Vindictive, I doubt. But it’s purposeful.”
“If only we could think of something!” Wardle paced about restlessly once more, but with the fury of frustration, not the determination of a man with a new idea.
“If only Danecki—” began Dross. He stopped, seeing Khalia’s sudden overwhelming grief. Mr. Moonman saw it too. Dross and Wardle watched him. Jacobi roused himself from his trance of fear.
The Revived Man drew himself up to his full gaunt height. He raised the ancient robotic head high above the other survivors.
Khalia saw what he was doing. She screamed.
Dross blanched. Jacobi tried to writhe into the space behind the Duty Commander’s armchair, squealing pitifully. Brigadier Wardle stared stone-faced at the most terrifying enigma of modern times.
The Revived Man was withering before their eyes.
It was the reason for the ferocious distrust that all normal men and women had of the unfortunate victims of that bizarre warp in time. It was the cause of the revulsion Revived Men created in all who saw them—and in themselves.
The Revived hung in a precarious temporal balance. They neither aged nor decayed. Each one of the few survivors of the two-hundred-year hiatus could decide the time and manner of his extinction. The Revived held their own life-spans in their hands.
Mr. Moonman had come to a decision on the time of his death.
“Don’t!” yelled Khalia, somehow overcoming the wild nausea that brought her heaving to her feet. “It isn’t over! You shouldn’t—”
“I heard of it o
nce before,” breathed Dross. He raised his voice. “Don’t, my friend! We’ll all wait together—don’t anticipate the fates, Mr. Moonman! There’s been enough of death in this place!”
Mr. Moonman was an insubstantial wraith. The ancient robotic skull smiled into his gaunt face.
“Transference!” Dross mumbled.
“What!” Wardle said in a gasped whisper. “What, Doctor?”
“Don’t let him!” Khalia whispered with the others.
“They know the trick of transference!” Dross exclaimed in awe. “That this should happen to us—that another of the greatest mysteries of the entire cosmos should be unveiled to me! I, Dross!”
Khalia recognized the astonishing arrogance of the archaeologist. Alone of the shocked onlookers, he thought of himself, not of the weird, dissolving figure.
She remembered the Revived Man’s lonely figure during the voyage across the Galaxy. He had traveled far, only to die here. Head, shoulders, trunk, skeletal legs— all were becoming liquid phosphorescence. The humanoid head still hung above the decaying figure.
There was a stench of the grave in the gleaming, functional Command area. Decay, age-old decay.
But there was a voice in the thin detritus. “Minutes,” groaned the voice. “Minutes, Doctor! Ask! Ask it to tell what it remembers! Ask its name, and call on the Confederation Commander! Only minutes, Dr. Dross!”
“Great God Almighty!” breathed Wardle. “What is it! What is it, Doctor?”
“Transference!” said Dross again. “The end of a human being who gave up the ghost two centuries ago—the Revived is returning to his grave! No, Wardle, don’t ask any more questions—look at the robot head! Do you see?”
Khalia held back a scream. She was so full of a horror beyond any that she had thought could exist, that she forced the scream deeply back so that it would not disturb the steady decay of the insubstantial thing before her. What was Dross saying? Transference? A transference of what! And to what!
She saw the robotic head alive with intelligence. Its humanoid features crinkled with amusement. It waited for the questions.