"No such luck," he said. "Not that it'd be luck. Anybody who's come here and taken charge like this would probably scupper us. It's yet another brand of guard robot." He tried to joke. "That means a further detour. I'm getting more exercise than I really want, aren't you?"
"You could destroy it."
"Maybe. Maybe not. If our friend the knight was typical, as I suspect, the lot of them are fairly well armored against energy beams. Besides, I don't care to waste charge. Used too bloody much in that last encounter. Another fracas, and we could be weaponless." Flandry started off on a slant across the square. "We'll avoid him and go catercorner past the domain of that comparatively mild-looking chap there."
Djana's gaze followed his finger. Remotely gleamed other immobile forms, including a duplicate of the hippoid and three of the anthropoid. Doubtless more were hidden by irregularities of terrain or its steep fall to the horizon. The machine which Flandry had in mind was closer, just left of his intended path. It was another cylinder, more tall and slim than the robot with the hammers. The smooth bright surface was unbroken by limbs. The conical head was partly split down the middle, above an array of instruments.
"He may simply be a watcher," Flandry theorized.
They had passed by, the gaunt abstract statue was falling behind, when Djana yelled.
Flandry spun about. The thing had left its square and was entering the one they were now in.
Dust and sparkling ice crystals whirled in the meter of space between its base and the ground. Air cushion drive, beat through Flandry. He looked frantically around for shelter. Nothing. This square held only basalt and frozen water.
"Run!" he cried. He retreated backward himself, blaster out. The heart slugged in him, the breath rasped, still hot from his prior battle.
A pencil of white fire struck at him from the cleft head. It missed at its range, but barely. He felt heat gust where the energy splashed and steam exploded. A sharp small thunderclap followed.
This kind does pack a gun!
Reflexively, he returned a shot. Less powerful, his beam bounced off the alloy hide. The robot moved on in. He could hear the roar of its motor. A direct hit at closer quarters would pierce his suit and body. He fired again and prepared to flee.
If I can divert that tin bastard—It did not occur to Flandry that his action might get him accused of gallantry. He started off in a different direction from the girl's. Longer-legged, he had a feebly better chance than she of keeping ahead of death, reaching a natural barricade and making a stand . . . .
Tensed with the expectation of lightning, the hope that his air unit would give protection and not be ruined, he had almost reached the next line when he realized there had been no fire. He braked and turned to stare behind.
The robot must have halted right after the exchange. Its top swung back and forth, as if in search. Surely it must sense him.
It started off after Djana.
Flandry spat an oath and pounded back to help. She had a good head start, but the machine was faster, and if it had crossed one line, wouldn't it cross another? Flandry's boots slammed upon stone. Oxygen-starved, his brain cast forth giddiness and patches of black. His intercepting course brought him nearer. He shot. The bolt went wild. He bounded yet more swiftly. Again he shot. This time he hit.
The robot slowed, veered as if to meet this antagonist who could be dangerous, faced away once more and resumed its pursuit of Djana. Flandry held down his trigger and hosed it with flame. The girl crossed the boundary. The robot stopped dead.
But—but—gibbered in Flandry's skull.
The robot stirred, lifted, and swung toward him. It moved hesitantly, wobbling a trifle, not as if damaged—it couldn't have been—but as if . . . puzzled?
I shouldn't be toting a blaster, Flandry thought in the turmoil. With my shape, I'm supposed to carry sword and shield.
The truth crashed into him.
He took no time to examine it. He knew simply that he must get into the same square as Djana. An anthropoid with blade and scute in place of hands could not crawl very well. Flandry went on all fours. He scuttled backward. The lean tall figure rocked after him, but no faster. Its limited computer—an artificial brain moronic and monomaniacal—could reach no decision as to what he was and what to do about him.
He crossed the line. The robot settled to the ground.
Flandry rose and tottered toward Djana. She had collapsed several meters away. He joined her. Murk spun down upon him.
It lifted in minutes, after his air unit purified the atmosphere in his suit and his stimulated cells drank the oxygen. He sat up. The machine that had chased them was retreating to the middle of the adjacent square, another gleam against the dark plain, under the dark sky. He looked at his blaster's charge indicator. It stood near zero. He could reload it from the powerpack he carried, but his life-support units needed the energy worse. Maybe.
Djana was rousing too. She half raised herself, fell across his lap, and wept. "It's no use, Nicky. We can't make it. We'll be murdered. And if we do get by, what'll we find? A thing that builds killing engines. Let's go back. We can go back the way we came. Can't we? And have a little, little while alive together—"
He consoled her until the chill and hardness of the rock on which he sat got through to him. Then, stiffly, he rose and assisted her to her feet. His voice sounded remote and strange in his ears. "Ordinarily I'd agree with you, dear. But I think I see what the arrangement is. The way the bishop behaved. Didn't you notice?"
"B-b-bishop?"
"Consider. Like the knight, I'm sure, the bishop attacks when the square he's on is invaded. I daresay the result of a move on this board depends on the outcome of the battle that follows it. Now a bishop can only proceed offensively along a diagonal. And the pieces are only programed to fight one other piece at a time: of certain kinds, at that." Flandry stared toward his hidden destination. "I imagine the anthropoids are the pawns. I wonder why. Maybe because they're the most numerous pieces, and the computer was lonely for mankind?"
"Computer?" She huddled against him.
"Has to be. Nothing else could have made this. It used the engineering facilities it had, possibly built some additional manufacturing plant. It didn't bother coloring the squares or the pieces, knowing quite well which was which. That's why I didn't see at once we're actually on a giant chessboard." Flandry grimaced. "If I hadn't . . . we'd've quit, returned, and died. Come on." He urged her forward.
"We can't go further," she pleaded. "We'll be set on."
"Not if we study the positions of the pieces," he said, "and travel on the squares that nobody can currently enter."
After some trudging: "My guess is, the computer split its attention into a number of parts. One or more to keep track of the wild robots. Two, with no intercommunication, to be rival chessmasters. That could be why it hasn't noticed something strange is going on today. I wonder if it can notice anything new any longer, without being nudged."
He zigzagged off the board with Djana, onto the blessed safe unmarked part of the land, and walked around the boundary. En route he saw a robot that had to be a king. It loomed four meters tall in the form of a man who wore the indoor dress of centuries ago, goldplated and crowned with clustered diamonds. It bore no weapons. He learned later that it captured by divine right.
They reached the ancient buildings. The worker machines that scuttled about had kept them in good repair. Flandry stopped before the main structure. He tuned his radio to standard frequency. "At this range," he said to that which was within, "you've got to have some receiver that'll pick up my transmission."
Code clicked and gibbered in his earplugs; and then, slowly, rustily, but gathering sureness as the words advanced, like the voice of one who has been heavily asleep: "Is . . . it . . . you? A man . . . returned at last? . . . No, two men, I detect—"
"More or less," Flandry said.
Across the plain, beasts and chessmen came to a halt.
"Enter. The airlock . .
. Remove your spacesuits inside. It is Earth-conditioned, with . . . furnished chambers. Inspection reveals a supply of undeteriorated food and drink . . . . I hope you will find things in proper order. Some derangements are possible. The time was long and empty."
Chapter Eleven
The Merseians treated him correctly if coolly. He was unbound, conducted aboard their destroyer, checked by a physician experienced in dealing with foreign species, given a chance to clean and bestir himself. His effects were returned, with the natural exception of weapons. A cubbyhole was found and curtained off for him and the girl. Food was brought them, and the toilet facilities down the passage were explained for her benefit. A guard was posted, but committed no molestation. Prisoners could scarcely have been vouchsafed more on this class of warcraft; and the time in space would not be long.
Djana kept keening, "I thought they were human, I thought they were human, only an-an-another damn gang—" She clung to him. "What'll they do with us?"
"I can't say," he replied with no measurable sympathy, "except that I don't imagine they care to have us take home our story."
A story of an intelligence ring on Irumclaw, headed by that Rax—whose planet of origin is doubtless in the Roidhunate, not the Empire—and probably staffed by members of the local syndicates. Not to mention the fact that apparently there is a Merseian base in the wilderness, this close to our borders. A crawling went along his spine. Then too, when word gets back to their headquarters, somebody may well want a personal interview with me.
The destroyer grappled the spaceboat alongside and started off. Flandry tried to engage his guard in conversation, but the latter had orders to refrain. The one who brought dinner did agree to convey a request for him. Flandry was surprised when it was granted: that he might observe approach and landing. Though why not? To repeat, they won't return me to blab what I've seen.
Obviously the destination coordinates that Rax had given Djana meant the boat would be on a course bringing her within detection range of a picket ship; and any such wouldn't go far from the base. Flandry got his summons in two or three hours. He left Djana knotted around her wretchedness—serves her right, the stupid slut!—and preceded his armed guide forward.
The layout resembled that of a human vessel. Details varied, to allow for variations in size, shape, language, and culture. Yet it was the same enclosing metal narrowness, the same drone and vibration, the same warm oily-smelling gusts from ventilator grilles, the same duties to perform.
But the crew were big, green-skinned, hairless, spined and tailed. Their outfits were black, of foreign cut and drape, belts holding war knives. They practiced rituals and deferences—a gesture, a word, a stepping-aside—with the smoothness of centuried tradition. The glimpses of something personal, a picture or souvenir, showed a taste more austere and abstract than was likely in a human spacehand. The body odors that filled this crowded air were sharper and, somehow, drier than man's. The dark eyes that followed him had no whites.
Broch—approximately, Second Mate—Tryntaf the Tall greeted him in the chartroom. "You are entitled to the courtesies, Lieutenant. True, you are under arrest for violation of ensovereigned space; but our realms are not at war."
"I thank the broch," Flandry said in his best Eriau, complete with salute of gratitude. He refrained from adding that, among other provisions, the Covenant of Alfzar enjoined both powers from claiming territory in the buffer zone. Surely here, as on Starkad and elsewhere, a "mutual assistance pact" had been negotiated with an amenable, or cowed, community of autochthons.
He was more interested in what he saw. Belike he looked on his deathplace.
The viewport displayed the usual stars, so many as to be chaos to the untrained perception. Flandry had learned the tricks—strain out the less bright through your lashes; find your everywhere-visible markers, like the Magellanic Clouds; estimate by its magnitude the distance of the nearest giant, Betelgeuse. He soon found that he didn't need them for a guess at where he was. Early in the game he'd gotten Djana to recite those coordinates for him and stored them in his memory; and the sun disc he saw was of a type uncommon enough, compared to the red dwarf majority, that only one or two would exist in any given neighborhood.
The star was, in fact, akin to Mimir—somewhat less massive and radiant, but of the same furious whiteness, with the same boiling spots and leaping prominences. It must be a great deal older, though, for it had no surrounding nebulosity. At its distance, it showed about a third again the angular diameter of Sol seen from Terra.
"F5," Tryntaf said, "mass 1.34, luminosity 3.06, radius 1.25." The standard to which he referred was, in reality, his home sun, Korych; but Flandry recalculated the values in Solar terms with drilled-in ease. "We call it Siekh. The planet we are bound for we call Talwin."
"Ah." The man nodded. "And what more heroes of your Civil Wars have you honored?"
Tryntaf threw him a sharp glance. Damn, I forgot again, he thought. Always make the opposition underestimate you. "I am surprised at your knowledge of our history before the Roidhunate, Lieutenant," the Merseian said. "But then, considering that our pickets were ordered to watch for a Terran scout, the pilot must be of special interest."
"Oh, well," Flandry said modestly.
"To answer your question, few bodies here are worth naming. Swarms of asteroids, yes, but just four true planets, the smallest believed to be a mere escaped satellite. Orbits are wildly skewed and eccentric. Our astronomers theorize that early in the life of this system, another star passed through, disrupting the normal configuration."
Flandry studied the world growing before him. The ship had switched from hyperdrive to sublight under gravs—so few KPS as to support the idea of many large meteoroids. (They posed no hazard to a vessel which could detect them in plenty of time to dodge, or could simply let them bounce off a forcefield; but they would jeopardize the career of a skipper who thus inelegantly wasted power.) Talwin's crescent, blinding white, blurred along the edges, indicated that, like Venus, it was entirely clouded over. But it was not altogether featureless; spots and bands of red could be seen.
"Looks none too promising," he remarked. "Aren't we almighty close to the sun?"
"The planet is," Tryntaf said. "It is late summer—everywhere; there is hardly any axial tilt—and temperatures remain fierce. Dress lightly before you disembark, Lieutenant! At periastron, Talwin comes within 0.87 astronomical units of Siekh; but apastron is at a full 2.62 a.u."
Flandry whistled. "That's as eccentric as I can remember ever hearing of in a planet, if not more. Uh . . . about one-half, right?" He saw a chance to appear less than a genius. "How can you survive? I mean, a good big axial tilt would protect one hemisphere, at least, from the worst effects of orbital extremes. But this ball, well, any life it may have has got to be unlike yours or mine."
"Wrong," was Tryntaf's foreseeable reply. "Atmosphere and hydrosphere moderate the climate to a degree; likewise location. Those markings you see are of biological origin, spores carried into the uppermost air. Photosynthesis maintains a breathable oxynitrogen mixture."
"Uh-h-h . . . diseases?" No, wait, now you're acting too stupid. True, what's safe for a Merseian isn't necessarily so for a man. We may have extraordinarily similar biochemistries, but still, we've fewer bugs in common that are dangerous to us than we have with our respective domestic animals. By the same token, though, a world as different as Talwin isn't going to breed anything that'll affect us . . . at least, nothing that'll produce any syndrome modern medicine can't easily slap down. Tryntaf knows I know that much. The thought had flashed through Flandry in part of a second. "I mean allergens and other poisons."
"Some. They cause no serious trouble. The bioform is basically akin to ours, L-amino proteins in water solution. Deviations are frequent, of course. But you or I could survive awhile on native foods, if we chose them with care. Over an extended period we would need dietary supplements. They have been compounded for emergency use."
Flandry decided
that Tryntaf lacked any sense of humor. Most Merseians had one, sometimes gusty, sometimes cruel, often incomprehensible to men. He had in his turn baffled various of them when he visited their planet; even after he put a joke into their equivalents, they did not see why it should be funny that one diner said, "Bon appetit" and the other said, "Ginsberg."
Sure. They differ, same as us. My life could depend on the personality of the commandant down there. Will I be able to recognize any chance he might give me?
He sought to probe his companion, but was soon left alone on grounds of work to do, except for the close-mouthed rating who tail-sat by the door.
Watching the view took his mind partly off his troubles. He could pick up visual clues that a layman would be blind to, identify what they represented, and conclude what the larger pattern must be.
Talwin had no moon—maybe once, but not after the invader star had virtually wrecked this system. Flandry did see two relay satellites glint, in positions indicating they belonged to a synchronous triad. If the Merseians had installed no more than that, they had a barebones base here. It was what you'd expect at the end of this long a communications line: a watchpost, a depot, a first-stage receiving station for reports from border-planet agents like Rax.
Aside from their boss, those latter wouldn't have been told Siekh's coordinates, or of its very existence. They'd have courier torpedoes stashed away in the hinterland, target preset and clues to the target removed. Given elementary precautions, no Imperial loyalist was likely to observe the departure of one. Replenishment would be more of a problem, dependent on smuggling, but not overly difficult when the Terran service was undermanned and lax. Conveyance of fresh orders to the agents was no problem at all; who noticed what mail or what visitors drifted into Rax's dope shop?
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