Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Adrienne shuddered, and squeezed his arm. “You knew it was a berserker,” she said, regarding him. “And yet you came for me.”

  “Walking between two Space Marines. Even so my knees were shaking.”

  “It might have fired through the door at you, not grabbed.”

  “We figured that it wanted to be quiet, until the Chief came down and it could get a shot at him. It was a special assassin-machine, of course. They must have thought it a good bet that sooner or later the Chief would show up on Maximus to do his wreath-laying as he has so many other places. So before their raiders left they planted one extra-special booby trap; it must have been monitoring our local radio chatter and it knew when he was coming.”

  “You knew it was a berserker and yet you came for me. But—how’d you know?”

  “Well. There were some strange things going on, with the work machines. Too much of a coincidence, just when the Chief was due. It hit me that an assassin-machine could have taken the place of my foreman, and then come back here to Central in a groundcar I sent out. And where else would it go, to get a good shot at the Chief, but up in one of the towers overlooking the monument? So I hooked up my own computer to play a few moves of the Game for me, and . . .”

  “But how did you know that it was in my tower?”

  “How do you think?” Smiling at her.

  Adrienne was smiling too, and at the same time trying not to cry. “My little psychological block. You knew I could never in all my life have brought myself to beat you in The Game.”

  As life may transmit evil, so machines of great power may hand on good.

  1980

  ADVENTURE OF THE METAL MURDERER

  On a death mission, he found a friend.

  It had the shape of a man, the brain of an electronic devil.

  It and the machines like it were the best imitations of men and women that the berserkers, murderous machines themselves, were capable of building. Still, these man-shapes and woman-shapes were obviously fraudulent when under close inspection by members of any known human society.

  “Only twenty-nine accounted for?” the supervisor of defense demanded sharply. Strapped into his combat chair, he sat looking through the information screen before him into space. The nearby bulk of Earth was armored in the dun brown of defensive forcefields, and the flagship was hugging it as closely as had the first astronauts’ capsules a thousand years before.

  “Only twenty-nine.” The flat admission of the answer arrived on the flagship’s bridge amid a sharp spattering of electrical noise. The skirmish just concluded had left enough radiation in nearby space to fry the signals of even the best communicators. The tortured voice continued: “And it’s quite certain now that there were thirty to begin with.”

  “Then where’s the other?”

  There was no immediate reply.

  All of Earth’s defensive forces were still at something close to full alert, though the attack had been tiny, no more than an attempt at infiltration, and it seemed to have been thoroughly defeated. Berserkers, remnants of some ancient interstellar war, were mortal enemies of everything that lived, and the greatest danger to humanity that the universe had yet revealed.

  The moon was rising now, its apparent motion greatly accelerated by the flagship’s own fast orbit. And now, much closer than the moon, a small blur leaped over Earth’s dully shielded limb, hurtling along a course that would bring it within a few hundred kilometers of the supervisor’s craft. This was Power Station One, a tamed black hole. In times of peace the power-hungry billions of the planet drew from it half their necessary energy. Station One was visible to the eye only as a flowing, slight distortion of the stars beyond. The flagship’s mass detectors had already recognized it, though; two decks below the bridge, engines murmured with the autopilot’s nudging, moving the ship to give that subtle blur more elbow room.

  Another report was coming in. “We are searching space for the missing berserker android, Supervisor.”

  “You had damned well better be.”

  “The infiltrating enemy craft had padded containers for thirty androids, as shown by computer analysis of its debris. We must assume that all containers were filled.”

  Life and death were in the supervisor’s tones: “Is there any possibility at all that the missing unit got past you to the surface?”

  “Negative, Supervisor.” There was a slight pause. “At least we know it did not reach the surface in our time.”

  “Our time? What does that mean, babbler? How could—ah.”

  The black hole flashed by. Not really tamed, though men sometimes described it with that word, to help put their own doubts to rest. Just harnessed, more or less. Moving that enigmatic monster into a handy orbit had not been easy.

  Suppose—and given the location of the skirmish, the supposition was not unlikely—that berserker android number thirty had been propelled, by some accident of combat, right at Station One. It could easily have entered the black hole. According to the latest theories, it might conceivably have survived that process, to re-emerge into the universe intact, projected out of the hole as its own tangible image, in a burst of virtual-particle radiation.

  Theory dictated that, in such a case, the re-emergence must take place before the falling-in.

  The supervisor issued orders crisply. At once, his computers on the world below, the Earth Defense Conglomerate of awesome reputation, took up the problem, giving it highest priority. What could one berserker android do to Earth? Probably not much. But to the supervisor, and those who worked for him, defense was a sacred task. The temple of Earth’s safety had been horribly profaned.

  To produce the first answers took those machines eleven minutes.

  “Number thirty did go into the black hole, sir. Neither we nor the enemy could very well have foreseen such a result, but—”

  “What is the probability that the android emerged intact?”

  “Because of the peculiar angle at which it entered, approximately sixty-nine percent.”

  “That high!”

  “And there is a forty-nine percent chance that it will reach the surface of the Earth intact, in functional condition, at some point in our past. However, the computers do add one reassuring note. As the enemy device must have been programmed for some subtle attack upon our present society, it is not likely to be able to do much damage at the time and place where it—”

  “Your skull contains a vacuum of a truly intergalactic order. I will tell you and the computers when it has become possible for us to feel even the slightest degree of reassurance! Meanwhile, get me more figures.”

  The next word from the ground came twenty minutes later. “There is a ninety-two percent chance that landing of the android on the surface, if it occurred was within one hundred kilometers of fifty-one degrees, eleven minutes, north latitude; zero degrees, seven minutes, west longitude.”

  “And the time?”

  “Ninety-eight percent probability of January 1, 1880 CE, plus or minus ten standard years.”

  A land mass, a great clouded island, was presented to the supervisor on his screen, marked with a green ring and crosshairs.

  “Recommended course of action?”

  It took the Ed Conglomerate an hour and a half to answer that.

  The first two volunteers perished in attempted launchings before the method could be perfected. When the third was ready he was called in, just before launching, for a last private meeting with the supervisor.

  The supervisor looked him up and down, taking in his outlandish dress, strange hair-styling, and all the rest. He did not ask if the volunteer was ready, but began bluntly: “It has now been confirmed that whether you win or lose back there, you will never be able to return to your own time.”

  “Yes, sir.” Training had ingrained the ancient speech patterns so thoroughly in the volunteer that now the words of his native language emerged half strangled from his throat. “I had assumed that would be the case.”

  “Very we
ll.” The supervisor cleared his own throat, and consulted data spread before him. “We are still uncertain as to just how the enemy is armed. Something subtle, no doubt, suitable for a spy or saboteur on our contemporary Earth—in addition, of course, to the superhuman physical strength and speed you must expect to face. There are the scrambling or the switching mindbeams to be considered; either could damage any human society. There are the pattern bombs, designed to disable our defense computers by seeding them at close range with pure, random information. There are always possibilities of biological warfare—you have your disguised medical kit? Yes, I see. And, of course, there is always the chance of something new.”

  “Yes, sir.” The volunteer agent looked as ready as anyone could look. The supervisor went to him, opening his arms for a ritual farewell embrace.

  He blinked away some London rain, pulled out his heavy, ticking timepiece, as if only checking the hour, and stood on the pavement before the theater like a man waiting for a friend. The instrument he held throbbed with a silent, extra vibration in addition to its ticking. This special signal had now taken on a character that meant the enemy machine was very near indeed, probably within a radius of fifty meters from where the agent stood.

  A poster nearby said:

  THE IMPROVED AUTOMATION CHESSPLAYER

  MARVEL OF THE AGE

  UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  “The real problem, sir,” proclaimed one top-hatted man nearby, in conversation with another, “is not whether a machine can be made to win at chess, but whether it may possibly be made to play at all.”

  No, that is not at all the real problem, sir, the agent from the future thought. But count yourself fortunate that you can still believe it is.

  He bought a ticket and went in. On exhibit inside there were a number of clockwork devices, some of an ingenuity that the man from the future would have found really intriguing, under other circumstances. When a sizable audience had gathered there was a short lecture, by a man in evening dress, who had something at once predatory and frightened about him, despite the glibness and the rehearsed humor of his talk.

  At length the chessplayer itself appeared, a desklike box with a figure seated behind it, the whole assembly wheeled out on stage by assistants. The figure was that of a man in Turkish garb, quite obviously a mannequin or dummy of some kind, and it bobbed slightly with the motion of the rolling desk, to which its chair was somehow fixed. Now the agent could feel the excited vibration of his watch without even putting a hand into his pocket.

  The predatory man cracked another joke, dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief, and from several chessplayers in the audience who raised their hands—the agent was not among them—selected one to challenge the automation. The volunteer went up on stage, where black and white pieces were being set out on a board fastened to the rolling desk or table, and the doors in the front of the desk were being opened to show that there was nothing but mechanism inside.

  The agent noted that there were no candles on this desk, as there had been on Maelzel’s, a few decades earlier. Maelzel’s mechanical chessplayer had been a fraud, of course, and candles had been needed on its box to mask the odor of burning wax from the candle needed by the man so cleverly hidden inside amid the dummy gears. It was still too early in the century, the agent knew, for electric lights, at least the kind that would be handy for such a hidden man to use. Add the feet that this chessplayer’s opponent was allowed to sit much closer than Maelzel’s had ever been, and it became a pretty safe deduction that the box and figure on this stage contained no hidden man.

  Therefore . . .

  He might, if he stood up in the audience, get a clear shot at it right now. But he could not be sure how it was armed. Who would stop it, if he tried and failed? Already it had learned enough to survive in nineteenth-century London; already it had found itself a niche. Doubtless it had already killed, to further its designs.

  “Under new management,” indeed. With the agent out of the way it could safely bide its time until it had discovered how to do the greatest damage to Victorian humanity with whatever armament it had.

  No, now that he had located the enemy, he must plan as thoroughly as it was planning, and work as patiently. Deep in thought, he left the theater amid the crowd at the conclusion of the performance, and started on foot back to the rooms which he had just begun to share in Baker Street. A minor difficulty at launching into the black hole had cost him some of his equipment, including most of his forged money. There had not been time as yet for his adopted profession to bring him much income, so he was, for the time, in straitened financial circumstances.

  He must plan. Suppose, now, that he approached the man who ran the chessplayer show, who by now ought to have begun to understand what kind of a tiger he was riding. The agent might approach him in the guise of—

  A sudden tap-tapping came in the agent’s watchpocket, a signal quite distinct from any his fake watch had previously generated. This one meant that the enemy had managed to detect his detector, was indeed locked onto it and tracking.

  There was sudden sweat on his face now, mingling with the drizzle, as he began to run. It must have discovered him in the theater, though probably it could not single him out amid the crowd. Avoiding horse-drawn cabs, four-wheelers, and an omnibus, he turned out of Oxford Street to Baker Street, and slowed to a fast walk for the short distance remaining. He could not throw away the telltale watch, for he would be unable to track the enemy without it. But neither dared he retain it on his person . . .

  As the agent burst into his sitting room, his new roommate looked up, with his usual, somewhat shallow smile, from a leisurely job of taking books out of a crate and putting them on shelves.

  “I say,” the agent began, in mingled relief and urgency, meanwhile leaning against the doorjamb for a moment’s rest, “something rather important has come up, and I find there are two errands I really must undertake at once. Might I impose one of them on you?”

  The agent’s own brisk errand took him no farther than just across the street. There, in the doorway of Camden House, he shrank back, trying to breathe silently. He had not moved three minutes later when from the direction of Oxford Street there approached a tall figure that the agent suspected was not human. The lower portion of its face was muffled in a white scarf or bandage, and its hat was pulled down. It paused briefly in front of 221B, seemed to consult a watch of its own, then rang the bell. Had the agent been sure it was his quarry, he would have shot it in the back. But without his watch, he would have to get a better look to be sure.

  After a moment’s questioning from the landlady, the figure was admitted. The agent waited about two minutes. Then he drew a deep breath, gathered up his considerable courage, and went after it.

  The thing standing alone at a window turned to face him as he entered the sitting room. Now he was sure of what it was, from the mere expression of the eyes above the bandaged lower face. Not the Turk’s eyes, but not human, either.

  The white swathing muffled its gruff voice. “You are the doctor?”

  “Ah, it is my fellow-lodger that you want.” The agent threw a careless glance toward the desk where he had locked up the watch, the desk on which some papers bearing his roommate’s name were scattered. “He is out at the moment, as you see, but we can expect him presently. I take it you are a patient.”

  The thing said, in its wrong voice: “I have been referred to him. It seems that the doctor and I share a certain common background. Therefore, the good landlady has let me wait in here. If my presence is no inconvenience?”

  “Not in the least. Pray take a seat, Mr—?”

  What name the berserker might have given, the agent never learned. The bell sounded below, suspending conversation. He heard the servant-girl answering the door, and a moment later his roommates brisk feet upon the stairs. The death machine took a small object from a pocket, and sidestepped a little to get a clear view past the agent toward the door.

  Half turning his
back upon the enemy, as if with the casual purpose of greeting the man about to enter, the agent casually drew from his own pocket a quite functional briar pipe, which was designed to serve another function, too. Then he turned his head and fired the pipe at the berserker from under his own left armpit.

  For a human being he was uncannily fast, and for a berserker, the android was meanly slow and clumsy, being designed for imitation and not primarily for dueling. Their weapons triggered at the same instant.

  Explosions racked and destroyed the enemy, blasts shatteringly powerful but compactly limited in space, self-damping so as to be almost silent.

  The agent was hit, too. He staggered, knowing with his last clear thought just what kind of weapon the enemy had carried—the switching mindbeam. Then for a moment he could no longer think at all. He was dimly aware of being down on one knee, and of his fellow-lodger, who had just entered, standing stunned a step inside the door.

  At last the agent could move again, and shakily pocketed his pipe. The ruined body of the enemy was almost vaporized already. It had been built to self-destruct when damaged badly, that humanity might never learn its secrets. Already it was no more than a puddle of heavy mist, warping in slow tendrils out through the slightly open window to mingle with the fog.

  The man still standing near the door had put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. “The jeweler . . . did not have your watch,” he muttered dazedly.

  I have won, thought the agent dully. It was a joyless thought because with it came slow realization of the price of his success. Three-quarters of his intellect, at least, was gone irrecoverably, the superior pattern of his brain-cell connections scattered . . . No. Not scattered. The switching mindbeam would have reimposed the pattern of his neurons somewhere farther down its pathway . . . there, behind those gray eyes with their newly penetrating gaze.

  “Obviously, sending me out for your watch was a ruse.” His roommate’s voice was suddenly crisper, more assured than it had been. “Also, I perceive that your desk has just been broken into, by someone who thought it mine. And that you, sir, are not exactly what you represent yourself to be.” The tone softened somewhat. “Come, man, I bear you no ill will. Your secret, if honorable, is safe with me.”