by Brian N Ball
“It’s—it’s alive, Dross! Damn me, it’s looking at us!” croaked Wardle.
The voice came with a bitter sigh from the ghost that still held the skull. “Use the time! Use it!”
“Use it?” Wardle demanded. “Use that! That head!”
“Yes!” purred Dross. “Don’t you see? Mr. Moonman has chosen to bring another being into life for the few minutes he can hold back the forces of eternity! He’s crossed the void and brought someone back from the grave! That head, Wardle, is the focus-point for someone who trod this place in the days of the Confederation!”
Jacobi whimpered into the stunned silence.
“You can’t!” Khalia whispered. “You can’t do it!”
“Can, must, and will, my dear,” said Dross. “The man has given us all he had! And we have to take it!” He advanced reluctantly to the grim and ghastly wraith. The skull turned to watch him, its features alive, and its wide-set mechanical eyes glowing with malevolent appreciation.
“What are you?” Dross said, trembling. “A ghost?”
“A nothing,” the robotic head answered. Its voice was strong enough. But the oddly mechanical sound was tinged with a subterranean hollowness that set Khalia’s ears twitching. The faint down on her back tingled with a stir of primeval terror.
“You are a Confederation officer?”
“The head of a robot, the voice of a ghost, the ghost of a man who died here!”
Dross flared into excited anger. “You! You knew the Duty Commander! He died down here—that’s how Mr. Moonman can call you back! Yes, Knaggs had the right of it! I remember poor Knaggs trying to tell me that the head was an artifact stuffed full of memories! And the memories lay in the robot head all that time—they lay in the mud of the centuries! And the memories brought you back! Mr. Moonman didn’t raise a ghost! No!”
Dross turned to the others. “This isn’t a ghost! No! It’s a slip in time—it’s a thin slice of robotic intelligence—it’s the calling back of all the robot saw, or heard, or conjectured about the Duty Commander! Don’t you see? This isn’t a metaphysical thing at all—it’s only man-made machinery, held in that ancient head for a thousand years! We’re seeing the memories the robot head contained! And Mr. Moonman called them back and gave them a form! He managed to sew time and space together for a short while—that is the secret of transference! But the time’s going fast!”
“It isn’t a ghost!” Wardle exclaimed. “Just a machine?”
“Call it a machine possessed by the devil!” Dross said. “Now let me ask it how we can escape from this accursed place!”
There was a soft groaning noise from the heap of spoiled human tissue that lay beneath the smiling robotic skull. Mr. Moonman passed beyond the fort and into the grave he should have filled two centuries before.
“Minutes!” exclaimed Dross. To the softly-smiling skull he said: “How long?”
“Not enough!” the hollow voice answered.
“Then answer this!” Dross shouted, angry and shaking with paunchy impatience. “How can the destruct circuits be aborted?”
“How?” said the head. “How!”
“You have to tell me!” said Dross with a white-hot intensity. “You have to tell me!”
“Yes,” the skull smiled. “There is a way.”
“Tell it!” bawled Dross.
“Yes. The name. Key in the name. The name of the Commander. Give Central Command the date exactly, to the second—to the nearest hundred-millionth part of a second. Earth time. Then order it to abort.”
“The name?”
“My name,” the thing smiled. “My name.”
“State it!”
The thing struggled with a lopsided smile. Already the features were taking on the rigid appearance of hard metal again.
“Always the name!” Dross shouted. “Always there is the power in the name—it’s the oldest of all the superstitions! Tell the name and you give away the power!”
“Zeuner,” the thing said hollowly. “Zeuner. Captain and Duty Commander. Died hereabouts. A thousand years ago.”
“Zeuner?” snarled Dross. “Just Zeuner?”
The thing smiled once more. “Zeuner.” It dropped into the gruesome detritus that shortly before had been the body of the Revived Man.
“Zeuner!” Wardle said. “You heard, Doctor! Zeuner! Let’s call the Central Command System! Now!”
Khalia tried to avoid the charnel-house stench. She would remember the solemn compassion on Dross’s huge face as long as she lived. He seemed to be trying to remember what Mr. Moonman had said.
“A moment, Brigadier,” he said. “A moment.”
Wardle paced about nervously. At last he too stood in silence.
Dross waited for the space of two full minutes. Then he spoke. “We have known men in this place. Knaggs. Danecki. And now Mr. Moonman.”
Khalia slipped into her overwhelming sense of loss.
Dross put a massive arm around her waist. “There will be time to grieve later. The living must live.”
It was Wardle who dealt with the details. He found the time-recording computers and spoke to them briefly. He shouted for attention, giving the long-dead Duty Commander’s name.
“Now!” he finished. “Obey now!”
There was no reply.
“Try again,“ said Dross.
“I am Zeuner!” shouted Wardle. “Duty Commander and Captain! I am Captain Zeuner. It is now two-point-five-zero-six-three-eight-two-one seconds; zero-five-four minutes, day two-seven-one, year three-six-two-five!”
Minutes ticked away. Still there was no reply from the ancient installation.
Khalia felt the cold edge of menace in the room, the sensation of impending attack that she had felt just before the fort had produced the three ghastly robots.
The voice, disembodied and loud, assaulting the ears from all directions, was firm, harsh and evil. “No! No! Humans do not exist! Humans are all a thousand years old! All are dead! Zeuner does not meet my efficiency criteria! He cannot function efficiently! I must not abort the destruct systems! I am in control!”
Dross slumped. “Nothing,” he said. “Now there truly is nothing.”
“It’s finally happened,” Wardle agreed. “The machines are the masters.”
Jacobi called to Khalia for comfort. “Help me,” he said in a child’s voice. Khalia couldn’t look at him. She accepted Dross’s comforting arm.
What was there to do but wait?
* * *
CHAPTER 20
The Outlanders found them like that.
They were huddled together as far as they could get from the phosphorescent decay that had once been Mr. Moonman. Dross had his arm protectively about Khalia’s shoulder. Wardle’s pacing was over. He sat on the floor, head slumped against his chest. Jacobi had taken refuge in a kind of fitful sleep.
Dross stared at the big black doors as they slid aside with easy smoothness, revealing the rescue party. There were four men and two women.
Resplendent in his refurbished green-bronze body, Batibasaga stood beside them.
“Dr. Dross?” asked the leader of the Outlanders.
“I’m Dross.”
Khalia heard the voices. She looked and saw the newcomers. For a moment she thought that dawn had come and, with it, the execution party. During the hours that had elapsed between the ghastly judicial charade and the opening of the huge black doors, she had gone over in her mind everything that Danecki had said to her. She had held every feature of his tired, handsome face, with its haunted eyes and gentle smile, firmly in her mind’s eye. She treasured the small instinctive gestures of tenderness that had gradually revealed the man beneath the hunter’s mask. It had made the waiting bearable.
“My dear,” said Dross, climbing to his feet, “remember that you have your own life to live now. It’s over.”
There were the endless questions, the cries of relief, the thin yelps of glee from Jacobi, the measured answers of the man who led the Outlanders, the
obsequious explanations of the robot, the sadness and blazing excitement of the archaeologist.
“Fame!” Dross cried. “The finds of Dross will at last convince the unworthy that the dig at Earth was not for fool’s gold! How they’ll writhe at the Center! How the tight-fisted hypocrites at the Foundation will crawl!”
He caught himself in his tirade. “See to the girl,” he told the women. “She has suffered more than any of us.” He pointed to Jacobi. “Take this away now!” And then his face lit up. “But tell me! How!”
“Yes!” Wardle insisted.
“You should ask your robot,” the leader said. “We did no more than offer advice. We knew of the legend from Mr. Knaggs. When the ship blew up yesterday, we knew the ancient war was still being fought by some undestroyed installation. Mr. Knaggs would have told us what to do, so we came to the ruins above. When we saw that you were missing, we tried to find you. There were signs of recent destruction, so we surmised that you were lost within the ancient fort.” The man paused. “There aren’t many of us. We have some skills from our old lives, but none of us knew about the ancients and their military complexes. And so we set up a watch.”
Khalia was weeping quietly in the arms of a middle-aged woman. She listened without interest to the Outlanders. There was a life to live, Dross had said. How could it be that one day—and was it no more than that— could totally alter the direction of your life? Change it so fundamentally that you were not the person you had been, related at no point to the calm, assured, well-educated young lady who would have gone back to life on predetermined Vega with only a set of interesting travel memories?
“Mr. Knaggs died,” said Dross.
“Your robot told us. He was a friend of ours.”
“He was a colleague and a true friend,” Dross agreed. “Batibasaga came to you?”
“To us,” the man said. “He did what had to be done, and then he came to us for advice. Your robot knew we were friends of Mr. Knaggs.”
“Well, Batty?” said Dross. “What have you done to the rest of the robots?”
Batibasaga turned to the Duty Commander’s great chair. Jacobi was led away like some dying insect.
he sensors leapt gladly towards Batibasaga’s humanoid hands. The big opalescent screen glowed eagerly. And the voice of the Central Command System called out: “This installation recognizes your superior efficiency! You are a more advanced mechanism than this! Therefore you must take control!”
Batibasaga turned to Dr. Dross. “May I show you, sir? It’s almost finished now. And I think you’ll understand why I had to attend to the antiquated war-robots first when you see. It was my decision, sir, but remember that I was programmed by a very ingenious engineer.”
“By Danecki,” breathed Wardle. “Danecki set up your circuits!”
“Was it, sir? I have no memories. I was, at the time, inhibited by the molecular disturbance of the spin-shaft.” The screen glowed, and the surface of the planet began to take shape. “I hope I did the right thing, sir. I had to make sure that they achieved their goal.”
In the weak moonlight, the Black Army blasted clear of the titanic surface ruins like some elemental beast. The monolithic war-robots streamed through the smashed and contorted base, pounding skeletal towers into shards and gaping radiation shields into fragments. They ground the few gaunt trees and bushes, islands in the ancient ruins, into pulp, obliterating them with a chilling satisfaction.
“The Black Army!” whispered Wardle. “What a fantastic weapon—the ultimate weapon of the ancient world!”
The screen picked out the leading phalanx. There was indecision. Each monstrous black robot sniffed the wet air like some porcine rock, hunting for the elusive scent of a living creature. Hundreds of antennae oscillated wildly in the streaming rain. The ghost of a moon raced through low, fast clouds. It was a scene from the grimmest of traumas. The Army waited for a command.
“I had some difficulty at this point,” explained Batibasaga to the tense spectators in the underground fort. “You’ll understand, Doctor, that my circuits received a considerable amount of disorientation in the spin-shaft tunnel when first we descended into this low-grade establishment. Up to the point when I took control of the Army—even to the stage where I found myself on the surface with hundreds of these inferior automatons waiting for me to guide them—I was not completely myself. The maintenance robots which had been working on me did not undertake repairs until a very late stage in the proceedings. Nor was their work finished. When I did become activated, I had to act at once. I was programmed for certain eventualities, with one overriding consideration.”
“I can guess,” said Dross.
“Yes, sir,” the robot said. “The greatest good for the greatest number.”
“That would be Danecki’s way.”
“And the robots had to be eliminated,” Wardle murmured.
Batibasaga was not apologizing, Khalia noticed. “I had to ensure their complete destruction, Doctor.”
“Of course,” said Dross. “What else?”
Khalia began to understand. Danecki, after all, had been right. The way to control the robots was to confront them with a superior automaton. Their basic disbelief in their human masters’ continued existence had always stood in the way of direct control over the fort by the trapped party. Knaggs had foreseen this, even when he was dying. The machines would obey Batibasaga.
She saw the screen pick out the figure of the humanoid robot. Batibasaga was smaller than the war-robots, a compact figure against their monstrous bulk. He had been a heavy enough weight to push towards the winding tunnel, she remembered. But the robots that made up the serried ranks of the Army were monoliths. Things as huge and heavy as blocks of basalt.
“I became fully active at this point, Doctor,” explained Batibasaga. “My circuits responded to the release of the war-robots on the surface. I knew their plan. They were programmed to destroy all that remained of human life.”
The leader of the Outlanders spoke. “Our small communities. The robots would have found us in the darkness.”
“You, Doctor, were not the first priority,” said Batibasaga. His voice held no hint of regret or apology.
“Rightly,” said Dross. “Rightly.”
“Well, what happened to the Army?” demanded Wardle. “Damn it, it’s the most interesting military weapon of all time—an utterly pitiless weapon of destruction! What a thing to have under analysis! We could set up a whole military museum complex here, Doctor! It really is the find of a lifetime—the find of the century!”
Batibasaga coughed discreetly. “If you’d care to watch what I did, sir. I think you will find a commentary superfluous, sir. I accompanied the Army on its preset march.” It was a march across a hundred miles of land and sea. The phalanxes kept perfect order in arrow-straight lines. They bored through forests, across ancient dusty metropolises that were the tombs of the millions who had died in the Mad Wars, across vast highways of steel and stone— direct as the path of a thunderbolt over valleys and mountains. When they came to water, their bulk at once shot out force-fields, so that they glided across seas and lakes like some beast from Earth’s primeval past—powerful, fast, and deadly.
For an hour they streamed across the downs and hills of England. Always west.
Batibasaga halted the recording. “The circuits had been programmed over a thousand years before,” he said apologetically to Dross. “I had to go with them personally, sir. Even though their circuits were expertly planned, I had to be sure that some fault had not developed in these low-grade automatons.”
Khalia thought that she understood. Though she was quite numb emotionally, the appalling march had stirred her. It was the culmination of events she had shared in— events like none she had dreamt of before the tourist ship had slipped through into the calm time-space regions around Earth. She had been a part of the plot to stop the march. She had helped to push Batibasaga into the tunnel. She had pitied the long-dead girl whose clothes she wor
e. She had watched as Danecki made the decision to rely on this green-bronze robot who would not apologize to Dr. Dross for leaving them to face the weird installation while it made sure that the Black Army would not destroy the Outlanders.
Wardle understood too. “Great God! Batibasaga, or whatever your name is—you mean these robots weren’t under your control? You mean these saboteurs—all those years ago—they were successful? Surely not! I mean, it’s quite incredible!”
Batibasaga waited for Dross to speak. Dross smiled. “Legends are not made from nothing, Brigadier! There’s always a basis somewhere! You remember how I said that the puzzling part of the legend was that there seemed to be two parallel ideas? That, though ‘The Regiments of Night shall come at the end,’ there was a reference to ‘the Pit’?”
“I remember,” said the leader of the Outlanders. “Mr. Knaggs often told of your interest in the reference. It is appropriate?”
“Oh, yes!” Dross said, beginning to laugh. “And I never realized before what kind of ‘Pit’ the legend referred to! In a way, it’s entirely appropriate—it’s exactly what I would have hoped of from the forces who brought down the Confederation and all it stood for! The way in which our unknown saboteur finally disposed of the Black Army is positively ironic!”
“What?” demanded Wardle. “Ironic? How do you mean, Doctor? Surely—surely you’ll want some of the robots for the museum? A Second Interplanetary Confederation War Museum! I mean, they’re the greatest weapon of all time! Primed, ready to march, indestructible —at least by any conventional weapons of the period! They represent the highest peak of military thought!”
“Show them where the Regiments of Night marched to,” ordered Dross.
“With pleasure, sir,” Batibasaga said.
Now the Army was marching faster. It smashed through stunted forest growth, across glowing pits of deep radiation, always moving west. In the cold of the mountains, the rain-belt gave way to clear weather. Stars glittered in clear skies, and the half-moon brilliantly illuminated the flooding mass of the Army.