Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  After a minute’s silence, Del’s voice asked: “What’ll we use for a board?”

  “We will radio our moves to one another,” said the berserker equably. It went on to describe a checkers-like game, played on a smaller board with less than the normal number of pieces. There was nothing very profound about it; but, of course, playing would seem to require a functional brain, human or electronic, able to plan and to predict.

  “If I agree to play,” said Del slowly, “how’ll we decide who gets to move first?”

  “He’s trying to stall,” said the Commander, gnawing a thumbnail. “We won’t be able to offer any advice, with that thing listening. Oh, stay sharp, Del boy!”

  “To simplify matters,” said the berserker, “I will move first in every game.”

  Del could look forward to another hour free of the mind weapon when he finished rigging the checkerboard. When the pegged pieces were moved, appropriate signals would be radioed to the berserker; lighted squares on the board would show him where its pieces were moved. If it spoke to him while the mind weapon was on, Del’s voice would answer from a tape, which he had stocked with vaguely aggressive phrases, such as, “Get on with your game,” or “Do you want to give up now?”

  He hadn’t told the enemy how far along he was with his preparations because he was still busy with something the enemy must not know—the system that was going to enable Newton to play a game of simplified checkers.

  Del gave a soundless little laugh as he worked, and glanced over to where Newton was lounging on his couch, clutching toys in his hands as if he drew some comfort from them. This scheme was going to push the aiyan near the limit of his ability, but Del saw no reason why it should fail.

  Del had completely analyzed the miniature checker game, and diagrammed every position that Newton could possibly face—playing only even-numbered moves, thank the random berserker for that specification!—on small cards. Del had discarded some lines of play that would arise from some poor early moves by Newton, further simplifying his job. Now, on a card showing each possible remaining position, Del indicated the best possible move with a drawn-in arrow. Now he could quickly teach Newton to play the game by looking at the appropriate card and making the move shown by the arrow.

  “Oh, oh,” said Del, as his hands stopped working and he stared into space. Newton whined at the tone of his voice.

  Once Del had sat at one board in a simultaneous chess exhibition, one of sixty players opposing the world champion, Blankenship. Del had held his own into the middle game. Then, when the great man paused again opposite his board, Del had shoved a pawn forward, thinking he had reached an unassailable position and could begin a counterattack. Blankenship had moved a rook to an innocent-looking square and strolled on to the next board—and then Del had seen the checkmate coming at him, four moves away but one move too late for him to do anything about it.

  The Commander suddenly said a foul phrase in a loud distinct voice. Such conduct on his part was extremely rare, and the Second Officer looked round in surprise. “What?”

  “I think we’ve had it.” The Commander paused. “I hoped that Murray could set up some kind of a system over there, so that Newton could play the game—or appear to be playing it. But it won’t work. Whatever system Newton plays by rote will always have him making the same move in the same position. It may be a perfect system—but a man doesn’t play any game that way, damn it. He makes mistakes, he changes strategy. Even in a game this simple there’ll be room for that. Most of all, a man learns a game as he plays it. He gets better as he goes along. That’s what’ll give Newton away, and that’s what our bandit wants. It’s probably heard about aiyans. Now as soon as it can be sure it’s facing a dumb animal over there, and not a man or computer . . .”

  After a little while the Second Officer said: “I’m getting signals of their moves. They’ve begun play. Maybe we should’ve rigged up a board so we could follow along with the game.”

  “We better just be ready to go at it when the time comes.” The Commander looked hopelessly at his salvo button, and then at the clock that showed two hours must pass before Gizmo could reasonably be hoped for.

  Soon the Second Officer said: “That seems to be the end of the first game; Del lost it, if I’m reading their scoreboard signal right.” He paused. “Sir, here’s that signal we picked up the last time it turned the mind beam on. Del must be starting to get it again.”

  There was nothing for the Commander to say. The two men waited silently for the enemy’s attack, hoping only that they could damage it in the seconds before it would overwhelm them and kill them.

  “He’s playing the second game,” said the Second Officer, puzzled. “And I just heard him say, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ ”

  “His voice could be recorded. He must have made some plan of play for Newton to follow; but it won’t fool the berserker for long. It can’t.”

  Time crept unmeasurably past them.

  The Second said: “He’s lost the first four games. But he’s, not making the same moves every time. I wish we’d made a board . . .”

  “Shut up about the board! We’d be watching it instead of the panel. Now stay alert, Mister.”

  After what seemed a long time, the Second said: “Well, I’ll be!”

  “What?”

  “Our side got a draw in that game.”

  “Then the beam can’t be on him. Are you sure . . .”

  “It is! Look, here, the same indication we got last time. It’s been on him the better part of an hour now, and getting stronger.”

  The Commander stared in disbelief; but he knew and trusted his Second’s ability. And the panel indications were convincing. He said: “Then someone—or something—with no functioning mind is learning how to play a game, over there. Ha, ha,” he added, as if trying to remember how to laugh.

  The berserker won another game. Another draw. Another win for the enemy. Then three drawn games in a row.

  Once the Second Officer heard Del’s voice ask coolly: “Do you want to give up now?” On the next move he lost another game. But the following game ended in another draw. Del was plainly taking more time than his opponent to move, but not enough to make the enemy impatient.

  “It’s trying different modulations on the mind beam,” said the Second. “And it’s got the power turned way up.”

  “Yeah,” said the Commander. Several times he had almost tried to radio Del, to say something that might seep the man’s spirits up—and also to relieve his own feverish inactivity, and to try to find out what could possibly be going on. But he could not take the chance. Any interference might upset the miracle.

  He could not believe the inexplicable success could last, even when the checker match turned gradually into an endless succession of drawn games between two perfect players. Hours ago the Commander had said good-bye to life and hope, and he still waited for the fatal moment.

  And he waited.

  “—not perish from the earth!” said Del Murray, and Newton’s eager hands flew to loose his right arm from its shackle.

  A game, unfinished on the little board before him, had been abandoned seconds earlier. The mind beam had been turned off at the same time, when Gizmo had burst into normal space right in position and only five minutes late; and the berserker had been forced to turn all its energies to meet the immediate all-out attack of Gizmo and Foxglove.

  Del saw his computers, recovering from the effect of the beam, lock his aiming screen onto the berserker’s scarred and bulging midsection, as he shot his right arm forward, scattering pieces from the game board.

  “Checkmate!” he roared out hoarsely, and brought his fist down on the big red button.

  “I’m glad it didn’t want to play chess,” Del said later, talking to the Commander in Foxglove’s cabin. “I could never have rigged that up.”

  The ports were cleared now, and the men could look out at the cloud of expanding gas, still faintly luminous, that had been a berserker; metal fire-
purged of the legacy of ancient evil.

  But the Commander was watching Del. “You got Newt to play by following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?”

  Del grinned. “He couldn’t, but his toys could. Now wait before you slug me.” He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal’s hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of one possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-colored arrow indicating each possible move of Del’s pieces.

  “It took a couple of hundred of these boxes,” said Del. “This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking—that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way,” said Del, demonstrating. “Ah, this one’s blue. That means, make the move indicated on the cover by a blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position, see?” Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. “No orange beads left; there were six of each color when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly.”

  “Well,” said the Commander. He thought for a moment, then reached down to scratch Newton behind the ears. “I never would have come up with that idea.”

  “I should have thought of it sooner. The basic idea’s a couple of centuries old. And computers are supposed to be my business.”

  “This could be a big thing,” said the Commander. “I mean your basic idea might be useful to any task force that has to face a berserker’s mind beam.”

  “Yeah.” Del grew reflective. “Also . . .”

  “What?”

  “I was thinking of a guy I met once. Named Blankenship. I wonder if I could rig something up . . .”

  END

  GOODLIFE

  The starship was old as time, relic of a race of warriors who left It one task—destroy Man and all his works!

  “It’s only a machine, Hemphill,” said the dying man in a small voice. Hemphill, drifting weightless in near-darkness, heard him with only faint contempt and pity. Let the wretch go out timidly, forgiving the universe everything, if he found the going-out easier that way!

  Hemphill kept on staring out through the port, at the dark crenelated shape that blotted out so many of the stars.

  There was probably just this one compartment of the passenger ship left livable, with three people on it, and the air whining out in steady leaks that would soon exhaust the emergency tanks. The ship was a wreck, torn and beaten, yet Hemphill’s view of the enemy was steady. It must be a force of the enemy’s that kept the wreck from spinning.

  Now the young woman, another passenger, came drifting across the compartment to touch Hemphill on the arm. He thought her name was Maria something.

  “Listen,” she began. “Do you think we might—”

  In her voice there was no despair, but the tone of planning; and so Hemphill had begun to listen to her. But she was interrupted.

  The very walls of the cabin reverberated, driven like speaker diaphragms through the power of the enemy forcefield that still gripped the butchered hull. The voice of the berserker machine came:

  “You who can still hear me, live on. I plan to spare you. I am sending a boat to save you from death.”

  The voice changed tones from word to word, being fragments of the voices of human prisoners the machine had taken and used. It was made of bits of human emotion sorted and fixed, like butterflies on pins. Hemphill was sick with frustrated rage. He had never heard a berserker’s voice in reality before, but still it was familiar as an old nightmare. He could feel the woman’s hand pull away from his arm, and then he saw that in his rage he had raised both his hands to be claws, then fists that almost smashed themselves against the port. The thing, the damned thing wanted to take him inside it! Of all people in space it wanted to make him prisoner!

  A plan rose instantly in his mind and flowed smoothly into action; he spun away from the port. There were warheads, for small defensive missiles, here in this compartment. He remembered seeing them.

  The other surviving man, a ship’s officer, dying slowly, bleeding through his uniform tatters, saw what Hemphill was doing in the wreckage, and drifted in front of him interferingly.

  “You can’t do that . . . you’ll only destroy the boat it sends . . . if it lets you do that much . . . there may be other people . . . still alive here . . .”

  The man’s face had been upside down before Hemphill as the two of them drifted. As their movement let them see each other in normal position, the wounded man stopped talking, gave up and rotated himself away, drifting inertly as if already dead.

  Hemphill could not hope to manage a whole warhead, but he could extract the chemical-explosive detonator, of a size to carry under one arm. All passengers had put on emergency spacesuits when the unequal battle had begun; now he found himself an extra air tank, and some officer’s laser pistol, which he stuck in a loop of his suit’s belt.

  The girl approached him again. He watched her warily.

  “Do it,” she said with quiet conviction, while the three of them spun slowly in the near darkness, and the air leaks whined. “Do it. The loss of a boat will weaken it, a little, for the next fight. And we here have no chance anyway.”

  “Yes,” He nodded approvingly. This girl understood what was important: To hurt a berserker, to smash, burn, destroy, to kill it finally. Nothing else mattered very much.

  He pointed to the wounded mate, and whispered: “Don’t let him give me away.” She nodded silently. It might hear them, talking. If it could speak through these walls, it could be listening.

  “A boat’s coming,” said the wounded man, in a calm and distant voice.

  “Goodlife!” called the machine voice cracking between syllables, as always.

  “Here!” He woke up with a start, and got quickly to his feet. He had been dozing almost under the dripping end of a drinking-water pipe.

  “Goodlife!” There were no speakers or scanners in this little compartment; the call came from some distance away.

  “Here!” He ran toward the call, his feet shuffling and thumping on metal. He had dozed off, being tired. Even though the battle had been a little one, there had been extra tasks for him, servicing and directing the commensal machines that roamed the endless ducts and corridors repairing damage. It was small help he could give, he knew.

  Now his head and neck bore sore spots from the helmet he had had to wear; and his body was chafed in places from the unaccustomed covering he had to put on it when a battle came. This time, happily, there had been no battle damage at all.

  He came to the flat glass eye of a scanner, and shuffled to a stop, waiting.

  “Goodlife, the perverted machine has been destroyed, and the few badlives left are helpless.”

  “Yes!” He jiggled his body up and down in happiness.

  “I remind you, life is evil,” said the voice of the machine.

  “Evil is life, I am Goodlife!” he said quickly, ceasing his jiggling. He did not think punishment impended, but he wanted to be sure.

  “Yes. Like your parents before you, you have been useful. Now I plan to bring other humans inside myself, to study them closely. Your next use will be with them, in my experiments. I remind you, they are badlife. We must be careful.”

  “Badlife.” He knew they were creatures shaped like himself, existing in the world beyond the machine. They caused the shudders and shocks and damage that made up a battle. “Badlife—here.” It was a chilling thought. He raised his own hands and looked at them, then turned his attention up and down the passage in which he stood, trying to visualize the badlife become real before him.

 
“Go now to the medical room,” said the machine. “You must be immunized against disease before you approach the badlife.”

  Hemphill made his way from one ruined compartment to another, until he found a gash in the outer hull that was plugged nearly shut. While he wrenched on the obstructing material, he heard the clanging arrival of the berserker’s boat, come for prisoners. He pulled harder, the obstruction gave, and he was blown out into space.

  Around the great wreck were hundreds of pieces of flotsam, held near by tenuous magnetism or perhaps by the berserker’s forcefields. Hemphill found that his suit worked well enough. With its tiny jet he moved around the shattered hull to where the boat had come to rest.

  The dark blot of the berserker machine came into view against the starfields of deep space, battlemented like a fortified city of old, and far larger than any such city had ever been.

  He could see that the berserker’s boat had somehow found the right compartment and clamped itself to the wrecked hull. It would be gathering in Maria and the wounded man. Fingers on the plunger that would set off his bomb, Hemphill drifted closer.

  On the brink of death, it annoyed him that he would never know with certainty that the boat was destroyed. And it was such a trifling blow to strike, such a small revenge.

  Still drifting closer, holding the plunger ready, he saw the puff of decompressed air-moisture as the boat disconnected itself from the hull. The invisible forcefields of the berserker surged, tugging at the boat, at Hemphill, at bits of wreckage within yards of the boat.

  He managed to clamp himself to the boat before it was pulled away from him. He thought he had an hour’s air in his suit tank, more than he would need.

  The berserker pulled him toward itself.

  II

  The berserkers were relics of some ancient galactic war, some internecine struggle between unheard of races. They were machines set to seek out and destroy life, and each of them bore weapons that could sterilize an Earth-sized planet in two or three days.