The Ultimate Enemy

by Fred Saberhagen

  There were eight other people in the chamber, standing together and talking among themselves. They fell silent as the machines opened the door and thrust Gil among them.

  “How do,” said one man to Gil, as the door closed behind the machines again. The speaker was a thin guy who wore some kind of spaceman’s uniform that now bagged loosely on his frame. As he spoke he took a cautious step forward and nodded. Everyone was watching Gil alertly—in case he should turn out to be violently crazy, Gil supposed. Well, it wasn’t the first time in his life he’d been thrown in with a group of prisoners who looked at him like that.

  “My name is Rom,” the thin guy was saying. “Ensign Rom, United Planets Space Force.” “Gilberto Klee.”

  Everyone relaxed just slightly, seeing that he at least sounded normal.

  “This is Mr. Hudak,” said Ensign Rom, indicating another young, once-authoritative man. Then he went on to name the others, but Gil couldn’t remember all then- names at once. Three of them were women, one of them young enough to make Gil look at her with some interest. Then he saw how she kept half-crouching behind the other people, staring smiling at nothing, fingers playing unceasingly with her long and unkempt hair.

  Mr. Hudak had started to ask Gil questions, his voice gradually taking on the tone used by people-in-charge conducting an examination. In school, Youth Bureau, police station, Resettlement, always there was a certain tone of voice used by the processors when speaking to the processed—though Gil had never put the thought in just those words.

  Hudak was asking him: “Were you on another ship, or what?” On a ship. You were not a spaceman, of course, said the tone of authority now. You were just a boy being processed somewhere, we see that by looking at you. Not that the tone of authority was intentionally nasty. It usually wasn’t.

  “I was on a planet,” said Gil. “Bella Coola.”

  “My God, they hit that too?”

  “They sure hit the part where I was, anyway.” Gil hadn’t seen anything to make him hopeful about the rest of the planet. At the Resettlement Station where he was they had had just a few minutes’ warning from the military, and then the radios had gone silent. When the .berserker launch came down, Gil had been out in the fields just watching. There wasn’t much the people at the Station could do with the little warning they had been given; already they could see the berserker heat-rays and dust-machines playing over the woods, which was the only concealment they might have run to.

  Still, some of the kids had been trying to run when the silvery, poisonous-looking dart that was the berserker’s launch had appeared descending .overhead. The Old Man had come tearing out of the compound into the fields on his scooter —maybe to tell his young people to run, maybe to tell them to stand still. It didn’t seem to make much difference. The ones who ran were rayed down by the enemy and the ones who didn’t were rounded up. What Gil recalled most clearly about the other kids dying was the look of agony on the Old Man’s face—that one face of authority that had never seemed to be looking at Gil from the other side of a glass wall.

  When all the survivors of the Station had been herded together, standing in a little crowd under the bright sky in the middle of a vine-grown field, the machines singled out the Old Man.

  Some of the machines that had landed were in the shape of metal men, some looked more like giant steel ants. “Thus to all life, save that which serves the cause of Death,” said a twanging metal voice. And a steel hand picked a squash from a vine, and held the fruit up and squeezed through it so it fell away in broken pulpy halves. And then the same hand, with squash-pulp still clinging to the bright fingers, reached to take the Old Man by the wrist.

  The twanging voice said: “You are in control of these other life-units. You will now order them to cooperate willingly with us.”

  The Old Man only shook his head, no. Muttered something.

  The bright hand squeezed, slowly.

  The Old Man screamed, but did not fall. Neither did he give any order for cooperation. Gil was standing rigid, and silent, but screaming in his own mind for the Old Man to give in, to fall down and pass out, anything to make it stop …

  But the Old Man would not fall, or pass out, or give the order that was wanted. Not even when the berserker’s big hand came up to clamp around his skull, and the pressure was once more applied, slowly as before.

  “What was on Bella Coola?” Ensign Rom was asking him. “I mean, military—?”

  “Not much, I guess,” said Gil. “I don’t know much about military stuff. I was just sort of studying to be a farmer.”

  “Oh.” Rom and Hudak, the two sharp capable-looking ones among the prisoners, exchanged glances. Maybe they knew the farms on Bella Coola had been just a sort of reform-school setup for tough kids from Earth and other crowded places. Gil told himself he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.

  And then he realized that he had always been telling himself that, and that maybe now, for the first time in his life, it was the truth.

  In a little while the prisoners were fed. A machine brought in a big cake of mottled pink and green stuff, the same tasteless substance Gil had lived on since his capture eight or ten days ago. While he ate he sat off to one side by himself, looking at nothing and listening to the two sharp guys talking to each other in low voices.

  Rom was saying: “Look—we’re in what was the crew quarters, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Right. Now they brought me in through the forward compartment, the control room, and I had a chance to take a quick look around there. And I’ve paced off the length of this chamber we’re in. I tell you I served aboard one of these ships for a year; I know ‘em inside out.”

  “So?”

  “Just this—“ There came a faint scrape and shudder through the hull. When Rom spoke again his low voice was charged with excitement. “Feel that? We’re going spaceborne again, the big machine’s sending this ship somewhere, for some reason. That means we would have a chance, if only … Listen, the circuitry that makes up the brain that’s controlling this ship and keeping us prisoner, has to be spread out along that plastic bulkhead at the forward end of this compartment we’re in. On the control room side there’s another plastic slab been installed, and the circuitry must be sandwiched in between the two.”

  “How can you know?” Hudak sounded skeptical.

  Rom’s voice dropped even lower, giving arguments most of which Gil could not hear. “… as well protected there against outside attack as anywhere in the ship … paced off the distance … overhead here, look at the modifications in the power conduits going forward …”

  Hudak: “You’re right, I guess. Or at least it seems probable. That plastic barrier is all that keeps us from getting at it, then. I wonder how thick…”

  Gil could see from the corner of his eye that the two sharp guys were trying not to look at what they were talking about; but he was free to stare. The forward end of the big chamber they were in was a blank greenish plastic wall, pierced along the top for some pipes, and at one side by the door through which Gil had been brought in.

  “Thick enough, of course. We don’t have so much as a screwdriver, and we’d probably need a cutting torch or a hydraulic jack—“

  Hudak nudged Rom and they fell silent. The door forward had opened, and one of the man-sized machines came in.

  “Gilberto Klee,” it twanged. “Come.”

  Rom had been right, they were spaceborne again, away from the big berserker. In the forward compartment Gil had a moment to look out before the man-sized machine turned him away from a view of stars and faced him toward a squat console, a thing of eye-like lights and a radio-like speaker, which seemed to crouch before the front of the plastic wall.

  “Gilberto Klee,” said the console’s speaker. “It is my purpose to keep a number of human life-units alive and in good health.”

  For a while, Gil thought.

  The speaker said: “The standard nutrient on which prisoners are fed i
s evidently lacking in one or more necessary trace ingredients. In several places where prisoners are being held symptoms of nutritional deficiency have developed, including general debility, loss of sight, loss of teeth.” Pause. “Are you aware of my meaning?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t talk much.”

  “You, Gilberto Klee, are experienced at growing life-forms to be consumed by human life-units as food. You will begin here in this ship to grow food for yourself and other human life-units.”

  There was a pause that stretched on. Gil could see the Old Man very plainly, and hear him scream.

  “Squash would be good,” Gil said at last. “I know how to raise it, and there’s lots of vitamins and stuff in the kind of squash we had at the Station. But I’d need seeds, and soil …”

  “A quantity of soil has been provided,” said the console. And the man-sized machine picked up and held open a plastic case that was divided into many compartments. “And seeds,” the console added. “Which are the ones for squash?”

  When Gil was returned to the prison chamber other machines were already busy there with the modifications he had said would be needed. They were adding more overhead lights, and covering most of the deck space with wide, deep trays. These trays were set on the transverse girders of the inner hull, revealed by the removal of decking. Under the trays drainage pipes were being connected, while sprinklers went high overhead. Into the trays the machines were dumping soil they carted from somewhere in the rear of the ship.

  Gil gave his fellow prisoners an explanation of what was going on.

  “So that’s why it took you and some of the other farmers alive,” said Hudak. “There must be a lot of different places where human prisoners are being held and maybe bred for experiments. Lots’ of healthy animals needed.”

  “So,” said Rom, looking sideways at Gil. “You’re going to do what it wants?”

  “A guy has to keep himself alive,” Gil said, “before he can do anything else.”

  Rom began in a heated whisper: “Is it better that a berserker’s prisoners should be kept—“ But he broke off when one of the man-sized machines paused nearby, as if it was watching and listening.

  They came to call that machine the Overseer, because from then on it never left the humans, though the other machines departed when the construction job was done. Through the Overseer the berserker-brain controlling the ship informed Gil that the other prisoners were there mainly as a labor pool should he need human help in food-growing. Gil thought it over briefly. “I don’t need no help—yet. Just leave the people stay here for now, but I’ll do the planting.”

  Spacing the hills and dropping the seeds was easy enough, though the machines had left no aisles between the trays of soil except a small passage leading to the door. The trays furthest forward almost touched the plastic bulkhead, and others were laid edge to edge back to within a few paces of the rear. The machines gave Gil a platform the size of a short surfboard, on which he could sit or lie while hovering at a steady two feet above the soil. Hudak said the thing must work by a kind of hole in the artificial gravity field. On the platform was a simple control lever by means of which Gil could cause it to move left or right, forward or back. Almost as soon as the planting was done, he had to start tending his fast-growing vines. The vines had to be twisted to make them ~ grow along the soil in the proper direction, and then there were extra blossoms to be pinched off. A couple of the other prisoners offered to help, despite Rom’s scowling at them, but Gil refused the offer. You had to have a knack, he said, and some training, and he did it all himself.

  The two sharp guys had little to say to Gil about anything anymore, but they were plainly interested in his surfboard; one day while the Overseer’s back was turned Rom took Gil hurriedly aside. Rom whispered quickly and feverishly, like a man taking what he knows is a crazy chance, fed up enough to take it anyway. “The Overseer doesn’t pay much attention to you anymore when you’re working, Gil. You could take that platform of yours—“ Rom’s right hand, extended horizontally, rammed the tips of its fingers into the palm of his vertical left hand. “—into the wall. If you could only make a little crack in the plastic, a hole big enough to stick a hand through—we’d have some kind of chance—I’d do it but the Overseer won’t let anyone but you near the platform.”

  Gil’s lip curled. “I ain’t gonna try nothin’ like that”

  The thin sickly man was not used to snotty kids talking back to him, and he flared feebly into anger. “You think the berserker’s going to take good care of you?”

  “The machine built the platform, didn’t it?” Gil demanded. “Wouldn’t give us nothing we could bust through there with. Not if there’s anything so important as you think back there.”

  For a moment Gil thought Rom was going to swing at him, but other people held Rom back. And suddenly the Overseer was no longer standing on the other side of the chamber with its back turned, but right in front of Rom, staring at him with its lenses. A few long, long seconds passed before it was plain that the machine was not going to do anything this time. But maybe its hearing was better than the sharp guys had thought.

  “They ain’t ripe yet, but we can eat some of ‘em anyway,” said Gil a couple of weeks later as he slid off his platform to join the other people in the few square yards of living space left along the chamber’s rear bulkhead. Cradled in Gil’s arm were half a dozen dull yellowish ovoids. He turned casually to the Overseer and asked: “Got a knife?”

  There was a pause. Then the Overseer extended a hand, from which a wicked blade extended itself like an extra finger. “I will divide the fruit,” it said, and proceeded to do so with great precision.

  The little group of prisoners had come crowding around, some interest stirring in their dull eyes. They ate greedily the little morsels that the Overseer doled out; anything tasted good after weeks or months of nothing but the changeless pink-and-green cake. Rom, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation, joined the others in eating some raw squash. He showed no enjoyment as the others did. It was just that a man had to be healthy, he seemed to be thinking, before he could persuade others to get themselves killed, or let themselves sicken and die.

  Under the optimum conditions provided by the berserker at Gil’s direction, only weeks rather than months were needed for the trays to become filled with broad roundish leaves, spreading above a profusion of thickening, ground-hugging vines. Half of the fast-growing fruit were hidden under leaves, while others burgeoned in the full light, and a few hung over the edges of the trays, resting their new weight on the girders under the trays or sagging all the way to the deck.

  Gil maintained that the time for a proper harvest was still an indefinite number of days away. But each day he now came back to the living area with a single squash to be divided by the Overseer’s knife; and each day the fruit he brought was larger.

  He was out in the middle of his “fields,” lying prone on his platform and staring moodily at a swelling squash, when the sound of a sudden commotion back in the living area made him raise himself and turn his head.

  The center of the commotion was the Overseer. The machine was hopping into the air again and again, as if the brain that controlled it had gone berserker indeed. The prisoners cried out, scrambling to get away from the Overseer. Then the machine stopped its mad jumping, and stood turning in a slow circle, shivering, the knife-finger on its hand flicking in and out repeatedly.

  “Attention, we are entering battle,” the Overseer proclaimed suddenly, dead monotone turned up to deafening volume. “Under attack. All prisoners are to be—they will all—“

  It said more, but at a speed no human ear could follow, gibbering up the frequency scale to end in something like a human scream. The mad girl who never spoke let out a blending yell of terror.

  The Overseer tottered and swayed, brandishing its knife. It babbled and twitched—like an old man with steel fingers vising his head. Then it leaned forward, leaned further, and fell on its face, disappearing
from Gil’s sight below the level of frays and vines, striking the deck with a loud clang.

  That clang was echoed, forward, by a cannon-crack of sound. Gil had been keeping himself from looking in that direction, but now he turned. The plastic wall had been split across the center third of its extent by a horizontal fissure a few feet above the frays.

  Gil lay still on his platform, watching cautiously. Ensign Rom came charging across the frays and past him, trampling the crop unheedingly, to hurl himself at the wall. Even cracked, it resisted his onslaught easily, but he kept pounding at it with his fists, frying to force his fingers into the tiny crevice. Gil looked back the other way. The Overseer was still down. Hudak was trying the forward door and finding it locked. Then he, followed by the others, scrambled over frays to help Rom.

  Gil tested his platform’s control and found that it no longer worked, though the platform was still aloft. He got up from it, setting foot in soil for the first time in a couple of months; it was a good feeling. Then he lifted the thin metal platform sideways out of its null and carried it over to where everyone else was already struggling with the wall. “Here,” Gil said, “fry sticking the corner of this in the crack and pryin’.”

  It took them several hours of steady effort to make a hole in the wall big enough for Rom to squeeze through. In a minute he was back, crying and shouting, announcing freedom and victory. They were in control of the ship!

  When he came back the second time, he was in control of himself as well, and puzzled. “What cracked the wall, though? There’s no fighting, no other ships around—“

  He fell silent as he joined Hudak in staring down into the narrow space between the furthest forward tray and the slightly bulged-in section of wall where the strain had come to force the first crack above. Gil had already looked down there into the niches between wall and transverse girder. Those niches were opened up now, displaying their contents—the dull yellowish fruit Gil had guided into place with a pinch and a twist of vine. The fruit had been very small then, but now they were huge, and cracked gently open with the sudden release of their own internal pressure.