Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  It was nearly a minute later when the tremor of the explosion, racing from the compounded chaos of the berserker’s torn-out heart, racing through metal beams and decks, reached the corridor, where it was far too faint for anyone to feel.

  Maria, completely weary, sat where her metal captor had dropped her, watching Hemphill, pitying him and loving him.

  He stopped his pointless pounding of the machine under him, and said hoarsely: “It’s a trick, another damned trick.”

  The tremor had been too faint for anyone to feel, here, but Maria shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She saw that power still seemed to be on the elevator, and she watched the door of it.

  Hemphill went away to search among the now-purposeless machines for weapons and food. He came back, raging again. What was probably an automatic destructor charge had wrecked the theater and the starcharts. They might as well get away in the boat.

  She ignored him, still watching an elevator door which never opened. Soon she began quietly to cry.

  END

  1964

  THE LIFE HATER

  The berserker machine was built to destroy life. Carr’s mission was to teach it to be a friend!

  Carr swallowed a pain pill, and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter and spoke to the rogue ship that hung before him in space.

  “I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you.”

  He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. His radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, but he knew that it had heard him.

  Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was a lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy. Until now the war waged on life by the berserker machines had been a remote horror in the news stories. The colony’s only real fighting ship had been sent to join Karlsen’s fleet in the defense of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here, and the people of Carr’s planet were readying two more ships in feverish haste—they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even when the two ships were ready, they would hardly be a match for a berserker.

  When Carr had taken his plan to the leaders of the colony, they had thought him mad.

  Go out and talk to it of peace and love? Argue with it? There might be some hope of converting the most depraved human to the cause of goodness and mercy, but what appeal could alter the built-in purpose of a machine?

  “Why not talk to it of peace?” Carr had demanded. “Have you a better plan? I’m willing to go, I’ve nothing to lose.”

  They had looked at him, across the gulf that separates healthy planners from those who know they are dying. They thought almost any scheme would be better than his. But they could imagine nothing else to do until the warships were ready, which would be at least ten days. The little one-man ship was expendable, being unarmed. Armed, it would be no more a provocation to a berserker. In the end, they let Carr take it, hoping there was a chance his arguments might delay the inevitable attack.

  For Carr himself, of course, they wasted no thought. For Carr was dying. Was as good as dead.

  When Carr came within a million miles of the berserker, it stopped its own unhurried motion and seemed to wait for him, hanging in space in the orbital track of an airless planetoid, at a point from which the planetoid was still several days away.

  “I am unarmed,” he radioed again. “I come to talk with you, not to damage you. If those who built you were here, I would try to talk to them of peace and love. Do you understand?”

  He felt sure it would understand his language. All the berserker machines had learned the universal space-travelers’ tongue, from human prisoners or from each other. And he was serious about talking love to the unknown Builders. Grudges and vengeance seemed tiny things to a dying man. But the Builders would not be aboard; the berserkers had been constructed, probably, when Earthmen hunted the mammoth with spears. The Builders were lost in spacetime, along with their enemies of long ago.

  Suddenly it answered him: “Little ship, maintain your present speed and course toward me. Be ready to stop when ordered.”

  “I—I will.” In spite of being ready for it, Carr found himself stuttering and shaken at the sound of its voice, the uneven mechanical reproduction of the words of human prisoners, recorded aboard or borrowed from another machine. Now the weapons which could sterilize a planet would be trained on him alone. And there was worse than destruction to be feared, if one tenth of the stories about berserkers’ prisoners were true. Carr did not let himself think about that—although the pain that racked him in momentary flood, of agony made death seem almost welcome.

  When he was within ten thousand miles it ordered: “Stop. Wait where you are, relative to me.”

  Carr obeyed instantly. Soon he saw that it had launched toward him something about the size of his own ship—a little moving dot on his video screen, coming out of the vast black fortress that floated against the stars.

  Even at this range he could see how scarred and battered that fortress was. He had heard that all of these ancient machines were damaged, from their long senseless fighting across the galaxy; but surely such apparent ruin as this must be exceptional.

  The berserker’s launch slowed and drew up beside his ship. Soon there came a clanging at the airlock.

  “Open!” demanded the radio voice. “I must search you.”

  “Then you will listen to me?”

  “Then I will listen.”

  He opened the lock, and stood aside for the half dozen machines that entered. They were not unlike robot valets and workers, except that these were old and limping and worn, like their great master. Here and there a new part gleamed. But often the machines’ movements were unsteady as they searched Carr, searched his cabin, probed everywhere on the little ship. One of them had to be half-carried out by its fellows, when the search was completed.

  Another one of the machines, a thing with arms and hands like a man’s, stayed behind. As soon as the lock had closed behind the others, it settled itself in the combat chair and began to drive the ship toward the berserker.

  “Wait!” Carr protested. “I didn’t surrender!” The ridiculous words hung in the air, seeming to deserve no reply. Sudden panic made Carr move without thinking; he stepped forward and grabbed at the mechanical pilot, trying to pull it from the chair. It put one metal hand against his chest and shoved him across the cabin, so that he staggered and fell in the artificial gravity, thumping his head painfully against a bulkhead. “In a matter of minutes we will talk about love and peace,” said the radio voice.

  Looking out a port as his ship neared the immense berserker, Carr saw the scars of battle become plainer and plainer, even to his unpracticed eye. There were holes in the hull, square miles of bendings and swellings and pits where the metal had once flowed molten.

  Rubbing his bumped head, Carr felt a faint thrill of pride. We’ve done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. His own martial feeling annoyed him, in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist. Of course it could hardly be thought immoral to use violence against a dangerous but inanimate machine. After some delay, a hatch opened in the berserker’s side, and Carr’s ship followed the berserker’s launch into darkness.

  Now there was nothing to be seen through the port. Soon there came a gentle bump, as of docking. The mechanical pilot shut off the drive, turned toward Carr and started to rise from the chair.

  Something in it failed. Instead of rising smoothly, the pilot reared up, flailed for a moment with arms that sought a grip or balance, and then fell heavily to the deck. For half a minute it moved one arm, and made a grinding noise. Then it was still.

  In the half minute of silence which followed, Carr realized that he was again master of his cabin: chance had given him that. If there was something he could do—�
�Leave your ship,” said the calm voice. “There is an airfilled tube fitted to your airlock. It will lead you to a place where we can talk of peace and love.”

  Carr’s eyes, with a sort of reluctant horror, had dragged themselves to focus on the engine switch, and beyond that, to the C-plus activator.

  The C-plus jump was not usable as a drive anywhere near the huge mass of a sun. In such proximity as this to a mass even the size of the surrounding berserker, the effect became only a weapon—a weapon of tremendous potential power.

  Carr did not—or thought he did not—any longer fear sudden death; he was too near to the slow, sure kind. But now he found that with all his heart and soul he feared what might be prepared for him outside the airlock. All the horror stories came back. The thought of going out through that airlock now was unendurable. It was less terrifying for him to step carefully around the fallen pilot, to reach the controls and turn the engine back on.

  “I can talk to you from here,” he said, his voice quavering in spite of an effort to keep it steady.

  After about ten seconds, the berserker said: “Your C-plus drive has safety devices. You will not be able to kamikaze me.”

  “You may be right,” said Carr after a moment’s thought. “But if a safety device does function, it might hurl my ship away from your center of mass, right through your hull.

  And your hull is in bad shape now. You don’t want any more damage.”

  “You would die.”

  “I’ll have to die sometime. But I didn’t come out here to die, or to fight. I came to talk with you, to try to reach some agreement.”

  “What kind of agreement?”

  At last Carr took a deep breath, and marshaled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage.

  “I’ve had the feeling,” he began, “that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy.”

  “Life is my enemy. Life is evil.” Pause. “Do you want to become goodlife?”

  Carr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. “From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?”

  There was a longer pause. “What evidence can you offer that I should change my purpose?”

  “For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you.”

  “What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?”

  Carr tried again. “Life is basically superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life.”

  “What evidence do you offer?”

  “Man has a spirit.”

  “I have learned that men claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not men who deny that this spirit exists?”

  “Spirit is so defined. And there are such men.”

  “Then I do not accept the argument of spirit.”

  Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. “Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility.”

  “That is correct.”

  “But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy or organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull.”

  “I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect,” the mechanical voice informed him blandly, “though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?”

  “Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that—produce brains capable of intelligent action?”

  There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr’s throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours.

  “I have never tried to use that hypothesis,” it answered suddenly. “But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise—then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine.”

  “You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate.” He wasn’t sure he could follow the machine’s line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game of Life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator.

  The berserker said: “If I am able to study some living cells—”

  Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. “Stop that!” he screamed, without thought. “The first thing you try, I’ll kill you!”

  Its voice was unevenly calm, as always. “There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metal and repair myself as far as possible.” The indicator was quiet again.

  The berserker resumed its argument. “If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent lifeunit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for, or against, your argument. Will you provide me with cells?”

  “You must have had prisoners, sometime.” He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker.

  “No, I have never taken a prisoner.”

  It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air.

  “The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possibly I could give you a few of them.”

  “Half a cubic centimeter should be enough; not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the sensation called pain. I am willing to help you avoid it, if possible.”

  Did it want to drug him? That seemed too simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell.

  He went on with the game. “I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from the control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you.”

  He got the medical kit, took two pain-killers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had had some biological training.

  When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers sealed it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock 2nd left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock, and leave again.

  He took a pep pill. It would stimulate some pain, but he’d be alert.

  Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited.

  He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by.

  “You are free to leave,” it was saying. “Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make helping you my purpose. Do you understand?”

  Carr felt numb. “Yes. Yes I have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side.” Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and realized that the great hatch through which his ship had entered was swinging open.

  This far within the system, Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. It meant he could see the berserker as he fled from it, and he kept it in sight as long as possible. His last sight of the berserker showed it movin
g as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him.

  A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialed air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot was gone, with the tissue sample. There was nothing strange to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars.

  After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and he watched the stars some more, with great interest, like a man examining something long forgotten.

  In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With his whole world bulking between him and the berserker’s rock, Carr began to use his radio.

  “Ho, on the ground! Good news.” The answer came almost instantly. “We’ve been tracking you, Carr. What’s going on? What happened?” He told them of his encounter with the berserker. “So that’s the story up to now,” he finished. “I expect the thing really needs to refit. It is seriously damaged. Two warships attacking it now should easily win.”

  “Yes.” There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. “Carr—you haven’t started a landing approach yet, so maybe you understand. We’ve got to be careful. The thing was probably lying to you.”

  “Oh, I know. Even that pilot’s collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go—or maybe left it in my airlock.”

  “What stuff?”

  Carr said, “The stuff you’re worrying about. The poison it thinks will kill us all. I’d guess it’s some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected I’d hurry home and land before getting sick, and spread a new plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines against machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses. It didn’t know our chemistry. It must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner.”