“Certainly,” the colonel went on, “the berserkers would like to catch the First Men and eliminate them. But this, as we know, must prove impossible.”
On this one point at least, science and Orthodox religion were still in firm agreement. The first men entering the ecology on any planet constituted the beginning of an evolutionary peduncle, said science, and as such were considered practically impossible of discovery, time travel or not Colonel Borss smoothed his mustache and went on: “As in the first attack, we are faced by six enemy machines breaking into real-time. But in this case the machines are not flyers, or at least they seem not to be operating in an airborne mode. Probably they are slightly smaller than the flyers were. We think they are anti-personnel devices that move on legs and rollers and are of course invulnerable to any means of selfdefense possessed by the Neolithic population.
“Evidently the berserker’s game here is not to simply kill as many people as possible. We could trace the disturbance of a mass slaughter back to their new keyhole and blast them again. This time we think they’ll concentrate on destroying some historically important individual, or small group. Just who in the invaded area is so important we don’t know yet, but if the berserkers can read their importance in them we certainly can, and we soon will.
Now here is Commander Nolos, to brief you on your part in our planned counter-measures.”
Nolos, an earnest young man with a rasping voice, came right to the point. “You twenty-four men all have high scores in training on the master-slave androids. No one has any real combat experience with them yet, but you soon will. You’re all relieved of other duties as of now.”
Expressing various reactions, the two dozen men were hurried to a near-by ready room, and there left to wait for some minutes. At length they were taken down by elevator to Operations Stage Three, on one of the lowest and most heavily defended levels yet dug.
Stage Three was a great echoing cave, the size of an aircraft hangar. A catwalk spanned the cave close up under its reinforced ceiling, and from this walk were suspended the two dozen master units. They looked like spacesuits on puppet-strings.
Like a squad of armored infantry the slaveunits stood on the floor below, each slave directly beneath its master. The slaves were the bigger, standing taller and broader than men, dwarfing the technicians who were now busy giving them final precombat checks.
Derron and his fellow operators were given individual briefings, with maps of the terrain where they were to be dropped, and such information as was available on the Neolithic nomads they were to try to protect. Generally speaking this information did not amount to much. After this the operators were run through a brief medical check, dressed in leotards and marched up onto the high catwalk.
At this point the word was passed to delay things momentarily. A huge screen on one wall of the stage lit up with an image of the bald, massive head of the Planetary Commander himself.
“Men . . .” boomed the familiar amplified voice. Then the image paused, frowning off-camera. “You’ve got them waiting for me? Get on with it, man, get on with the operation! I can make speeches any time!”
The Planetary Commander’s voice was still rising as it was turned off. Derron got the impression that it had a good deal more to say, and he was glad that it was not being said to him. A pair of technicians came and helped him into his master, as into a heavy diving suit. But once inside he could wave the master’s arms and legs and twist its thick body with perfect freedom and servopowered ease.
“Power coming on,” said a voice in Derron’s helmet. And it seemed to him that he was no longer suspended in the free-moving puppet. All his senses were transferred in an instant into the body of his slaveunit on the floor below. He felt the slave starting to tilt as its servos moved it into conformity with the master’s posture, and he moved the slave’s foot as naturally as his own to maintain balance. Tilting back his head, he could look up through the slaveunit’s eyes to see the master-unit, himself inside it, holding the same attitude on its complex suspension.
“Form ranks for launching!” came the command in his helmet. Around Derron the cavernous chamber came alive with the echoes of the Technicians trotted and jumped to get out of the way. The squad of metal man-shapes formed a single serpentine file, and at the head of the file the floor of the stage suddenly blossomed into a bright mercurial disk.
“. . . three, two, one, launch.”
All of Derron’s senses told him that he inhabited one of a line of tall bodies, all running with immense and easy power in their winding file toward the circle on the dark floor. The figure ahead of Derron reached the circle and disappeared. Then he himself leaped out over the silvery disk.
His metal feet came down on grass. He staggered briefly on uneven ground, through shadowy daylight in the midst of a leafy forest.
He moved at once to the nearest clearing from which he could get a good look at the sun. It was low in the western sky—he checked a compass in the slave’s wrist—which indicated that he had missed his planned moment of arrival by some hours, if not by days or months or years.
He reported this at once, subvocalizing inside his helmet to keep the slave’s speaker silent. If the slave had after sail landed in the right place and time, the enemy was somewhere near it.
“All right then, Odegard, start coursing, and we’ll try to get a fix.”
“Understand.”
He began to walk a spiral path through the woods. He of course kept alert for sign of the enemy, but the primary purpose of this manuever was to splash up some waves in reality—to create minor disturbances in the local life-history, which a skilled sentry some twenty thousand years in the future should be able to see and pinpoint.
After he had spiraled for some ten minutes, alarming perhaps a hundred small animals and perhaps crushing a thousand insects underfoot without knowing it, the impersonal voice spoke again.
“All right, Odegard, we’ve got you spotted. You’re in the right place but between four and five hours late. The sun should be getting low.”
“It is.”
“All right. Bear about two-hundred-forty degrees from magnetic north. It’s hard to tell at this range just where your people are, but if you hold that course for about half an hour you should come somewhere near them.”
“Understand.”
Derron got his bearings and set off in a straight line. The wooded land ahead sloped gradually downward into a swampy area, beyond which there rose low rocky hills, a mile or two distant.
“Odegard, we’re getting indication of another minor disturbance right there in your area. Probably caused by a berserker. We can’t pin it down any more closely than that, sorry.”
“Understand.” He was not really there in the past, about to risk his own skin in combat; but the weight of forty million lives was on his neck again.
Some minutes passed. Derron was moving slowly ahead, trying to keep a lookout in all directions while planning a good path for the heavy slaveunit through the marshy ground, when he heard trouble in plain and simple form: a child screaming.
“Operations? I’m onto something.” The scream was repeated; the slaveunit’s ears were keen and directionally accurate; Derron changed course and began to move the unit at a run, leaping it across the softest-looking spots of ground, striving for both speed and silence.
In a few more seconds, he slid as silently as possible to a halt. In a treetop a stone’s throw ahead was the source of the screams—a boy of about twelve, who was clinging tightly to the tree’s thin upper trunk with bare arms and legs, clinging tightly to keep from being shaken down. Whenever his yelling ceased for lack of breath, another sharp tremor would ran up through the tree and start him off again. The tree’s lower trunk was thick, but the bush around its base concealed something that could shake it like a sapling. An animal would have to have the strength of an elephant, and there were no such living creatures here. It would be the berserker, using the boy in the tree as bait, hoping that his cries would bring t
he adults of his group to try a rescue.
Derron’s mission was to protect a particular group of people, and at least one of them was in immediate danger. He moved forward without delay. But the berserker spotted the slaveunit before, he saw the berserker.
Only an accidental slip of the slave’s foot on the soft soil saved it from taking the first hit right then. As Derron slipped, a pinkish laser beam crackled like straightened lightning past his left ear.
In the next instant the brash round the tree heaved. Derron caught just one glimpse of something charging him, something fourlegged and low and wide as a groundcar. He snapped open his jaw, which pressed down inside his helmet on the trigger of his own laserweapon. From the center of the slave’s forehead a pale lance cracked out, aimed automatically at the spot where the slave’s eyes were focused. The beam smote the charging berserker amid the knobs of metal that served it for a face and glanced off to explode a small tree into a cloud of flame and steam.
The shot might have done damage, for the enemy broke off its rush in midstride and dove for cover behind a hillock, a grass-tufted hump of ground not five feet high.
Derron was somewhat surprised by his own aggressiveness. He found himself moving quickly to the attack, running the slaveunit in a crouch around the tiny hill. Two voices from Operations were trying at the same time to give him advice, hut even if they had gone about it sensibly it was too late now for him to do anything but go his own way.
He charged right round onto the berserker, yelling inside his helmet as he fired his laser. The thing before him looked like a metal lion, but squat and very broad; given a second to hesitate, Derron might have flinched away, for in spite of all his training the illusion was very strong that he was actually hurling his own precious flesh upon this monster.
As it was, circumstances gave him no time to flinch. The slave ran at full speed into the berserker, and the trees in the swamp shook as the machines collided.
It was soon plain that wrestling was not likely to succeed against this enemy, which was not limited in its reactions by the slowness of protoplasmic nerves. For all the slaveunit’s fusion-powered strength, Derron could only hang on desperately, gripping the berserker in a sort of half nelson white it bucked and twisted like a wild loadbeast to throw him off.
Since the fight had started everybody wanted to watch. The voices of at least two senior Operations officers screamed orders and abuse into Derron’s ears, while the green forest spun round him faster than his eyes and brain could sort it out. In a detached fraction of a second of thought he noticed how his feet were flying uselessly on the end of his steel legs, breaking down small trees as the monster spun him. He tried to turn his head to bring the cyclops’ eye of his laser to bear, but somehow could not manage to do so. He tried desperately to get a more solid grip for his steel arms on the berserker’s thick neck, but then his grip was broken and he flew.
Before the slaveunit could even bounce the berserker was on top of it, moving faster than any maddened bull. Derron fired wildly with his laser. That the berserker should trample and batter the slaveunit and he should feel no pain gave him a giddy urge to laugh. In a moment now the fight would be lost and he would be able to give up.
But then the berserker was running away from Derron’s wildly slashing laser. It leaped among the trees as lightly as a deer and vanished.
Dizzily—for the master-unit had of course spun on its mountings even as the slave was spun—Derron tried to sit up, on the peculiar little hillside where he had been flung. Now he discovered why the berserker had retired so willingly. Some important part had been broken in the slave, so its legs trailed as limp and useless as those of a man with a broken spine.
But the slaveunit’s laser still worked. The berserker computerbrain had decided it could gain nothing by staying around to trade zaps with a crippled but still dangerous antagonist, not when it could be busy at its programmed task of killing people.
The voices had their final say: “Odegard, why in the—?”
“Oh, do what you can!” Then with a click they were gone from his helmet, leaving their disgust behind.
Derron’s own disgust with his failure was even sharper. Gone were the thoughts of getting things settled quickly one way or the other. Now all he wanted was another crack at ’em.
With the slave’s arms alone, he got it into a sitting position, halfway down the conical side of a soggy sandpit.
He looked about him. The nearby trees were nearly all in bad shape; those not broken during the wrestling-match were black and smoking furiously from his wildly aimed laser.
What about the boy?
Working hard with his arms, Derron churned his way up to a spot near the rim of the funnel-shaped pit, where the sides were steepest. He could recognize, a little distance away, the tall tree in which the youngster had been clinging for his life. He was not in sight now, living or dead.
In a sudden little avalanche the crippled slave slid down once more toward the bottom of the sandy funnel.
A funnel?
Derron at last recognized the place where the slaveunit had been thrown.
It was the trap of a poisondigger, a species of carnivore that had been—or would be—exterminated in early historical times. Even now, there reared up a frightful grayish head from the watery mess that filled the bottom of the pit.
V
Matt stood just behind the boy Dart, while both of them peered very cautiously through the bushes toward the poison-digger’s trap. The rest of The People were waiting, resting from their march while they ate some grubs and roots, a few hundred paces away.
Matt caught just a glimpse of a head above the lip of the funnel. Not a poison-digger’s head, certainly. This one was curved almost as smoothly as a drop of water, but was still hard-looking.
“I think it is a stone-lion,” Matt whispered very softly.
“Ah no,” whispered Dart. “It’s a man, a big man, the stone-man I told you about. Ah, what a fight he made against the stone-lion! But I didn’t wait to see the end, I jumped from the tree and ran.”
Matt beckoned Dart with a motion of his head. The two of them bent down and crept forward, then peered from behind another bush. Now they could see down into the pit.
Matt gasped, and almost called aloud in wonder. Poison-Digger down in the pit had reared up from his slime and lunged. And Stone Man simply slapped Digger’s nose with casual force, like someone swatting a child; and with a howl like that of a punished child, the Bad One splashed down under his water again.
In a strange tongue, Stone-Man muttered disconsolate words, like a man invoking spirits, at the same time slapping at his legs which seemed to be dead. Then with his arms he started trying to dig his way up and out of the pit. Stone-Man made the sand fly, and Matt thought maybe he would eventually make it, though it looked like a very hard struggle.
“Now do you believe me?” Dart was whispering fiercely. “He did fight the stone-lion, I saw him.”
Matt hushed the young one and led him away. As they retreated it occurred to Matt that the stone-lion might have been mortally hurt in the fight, and he circled through the trees looking hopefully for a huge shiny corpse. He wanted very much before his own death to see a stonelion somehow defeated and slain. But all he saw were burnt and broken trees.
When they got back to where the others were waiting, Matt talked things over with the more intelligent adults.
“You think we should approach this Stone-Man?” one asked.
“I would like to help him,” said Matt. He was eager to join forces if he could with any power that was able to oppose a stone-lion.
The oldest woman of The People opened her lizard-skin pouch, in which she also kept the seed of fire, and took out the finger-bones of her predecessor. Three times she shook the bones and threw them on the ground, and studied the pattern in which they fell.
At last she pointed to Matt. “You will die,” she announced, “fighting a strange beast, the likes of which none
of us has ever seen.”
Like most prophecies Matt had heard, this one was more interesting than helpful. “If you are right,” he answered, “this stone-man can’t kill me, since we have now seen him.” The others muttered doubtfully. The more he thought about it, the more determined Matt became. “If he does turn out to be hostile, he can’t chase us on his dead legs. I want to help him.”
This time the slave’s keen ears detected the approach of The People, though they were obviously trying to be quiet. Derron’s helmet had been free of Modern voices for some minutes now; the too-many chiefs of Time Operations were evidently busy harassing some other operator.
Derron hated to draw their attention back to himself, but the approach of The People was something that he had to report.
“I’m getting some company,” he subvocalized. No immediate reply was granted. Now the heads of the bolder ones among The People came into sight, peering nervously around treetrunks at the slaveunit. Derron made a gentle gesture to them with one open metal hand; he had to use the other to maintain the slave in a sitting position. If he could only get his visitors to remain until more help arrived, he could give them some degree of protection. The berserker had evidently gone away after some false scent, but it might be back at any time.
The People were reassured by the slave’s quiescence, its crippled condition and its peaceful gestures. Soon all two dozen of them were out in the open, whispering among themselves as they looked down into the pit.
“Anybody listening?” Derron subvocalized, calling for help. “I’ve got a crowd of people here. Get me a linguist!”
Lately the Moderns had made a desperate effort to learn all the languages of Sirgol’s past, through the dropping of disguised microphones into the divers parts of realtime where there were people to be studied. This had been a crash program, only undertaken in recent months when it had become apparent to both sides that the war could be moved from present-time into the past. There were one or two Moderns who had managed to learn something about the speech of The People and the other bands of the area—and those Moderns were very busy people today.
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