by Brian Lumley
“Like Mars?” Turnbull said.
Now it was Gill’s turn to say, “That isn’t what I meant.”
“But you do think the Castle’s alien, right?” Turnbull pressed.
“I didn’t say so.” Gill was evasive.
“Not in your lecture, no,” said Turnbull. “But then you were talking to a whole lot of heavies: Russians, French, Germans, Americans, even a couple of Chinese! You’ve been told not to be as open with outsiders as you’ve been with the home team. But my Old Man talks to me now and then when he’s not busy, you know? He practices his speeches on me, or just says things to get my reaction. And just occasionally he lets things slip. It may not have been on BBC One—may not be for common consumption—but the word is that you’ve opted for an alien origin.”
Gill snorted, almost laughed out loud. “The whole world has opted for an alien origin, for God’s sake! What else would they opt for? It’s either that or the biggest damned hoax in the history of the planet.”
They had reached Gill’s rooms. As he unlocked the door and let them in, Turnbull said, “But it isn’t a hoax, right?”
Gill put on the lights. Shrugging out of his overcoat, he looked Turnbull straight in the eye. “No,” he said, “it’s no hoax.”
Turnbull clutched his arm and Gill could feel the big man’s excitement. “So where’s it from? And why is it here? I mean, you’re the Machine Man—the man who talks to machines—so if anyone knows it has to be you.”
Gill shook his head (sadly, Turnbull thought) and turned up the heating. Collapsing into a chair he said, “I don’t talk to the damn things. I have … a feel for them, that’s all. I understand them like Einstein understood numbers, or like a paleontologist understands old bones. Just like Einstein could find a missing equation, or a fossil hunter put together a dinosaur, I can rebuild a machine. No, even that’s not strictly true, for I haven’t the skill. But I can tell someone who has the skill how to do it. I sense things about machines. Show me a car engine and I’ll tell you what year it was made. I can listen to a Jumbo and tell you if one of the turbo blades is cracked. But as for talking to them …”
Turnbull looked disappointed. “So you don’t know where it’s from.”
“I know where it’s not from: it’s not from Mars. Nor from any other planet we have a name for.”
“It’s not from our Solar System?”
Gill was patient. “Ours is the only Solar System. The sun is Sol—hence Solar System. No, it isn’t from one of our nine planets or their moons. And that’s not me saying so but every cosmologist in the business. We are the only intelligent life-forms in this neck of the woods. The Castle is from … somewhere else.”
Turnbull was excited again. “You know, I’ve been daft on science fiction ever since I was a kid. But this isn’t SF, it’s real! You said you can tell the age of an engine on sight, so—”
“Not always on sight,” Gill cut him short. “But let me touch it, let me sit with it for a while, and … I’m not usually far wrong.”
“Well fine. So you’ve been up here sitting on this machine of yours for a year! So here comes the obvious question—”
“How old is it?”
“Obviously.”
Gill’s pale face was suddenly even more gaunt. His eyes were grey now and empty as space. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve nothing to measure it against. I mean, I wasn’t here when it was made—when what’s inside it was made. We weren’t here. How old? How old is the earth?”
Turnbull sighed. And after a long time, he said, “So what’s it doing here? All right, I know you don’t know. So guess.”
“I do know,” said Gill, “I think. It’s watching, and it’s listening, and it’s waiting. But I don’t know what for … .”
CHAPTER FOUR
“You asked me how it started,” said Gill. “I honestly don’t know. It’s as much a mystery to me as to anyone else. It’s something that grew in me, that’s all. But I’m not unique. It’s as if, in some people, nature makes up for a deficiency by introducing a supplementary talent. People who are blind from birth or soon after can often ‘see’ as well as you and I. Musicians as deaf as posts compose masterpieces—without ever being able to hear them! Do you know what I mean?”
Turnbull frowned. “I think so. And you think nature knew she’d played a dirty trick on you, so gave you this thing of yours to balance the scales. But what good is it to you? It strikes me the scales remain pretty much out of kilter. I mean what the hell good is this talent of yours—this rapport with mechanical things—if it doesn’t solve your problems?”
“It’s been a lot of use to other people.” Gill defended his “talent.” “I check out faulty jet engines. I have a knack of programming computers to crack security codes—Eastern Bloc codes, that is. I can look at a piece of Russian equipment and say how it was made and, if it’s any good, the easiest way to duplicate it. I’ve just helped Elecorps reduce their microchip to micromicro, and working with Solinc we developed a solar energy panel thirty-five percent more efficient than the next best. No, it hasn’t helped me much, not personally—not if you discount the money. I’m not short of money, believe me! But even without the financial side, I’m still a sight better off than that kid in Cyprus.”
“Cyprus? Your father was in the army, wasn’t he? He served there?”
Gill nodded. “I was just a kid,” he said. “I schooled in Dhekelia, a British sovereign base. I was lousy at sums. One day out shopping in Larnaca, my father showed me a local kid standing on a street corner. ‘Son,’ my father said, ‘stop worrying about your sums. Some people have it and some don’t. You see that Greek Cypriot kid? He has it. But he’s also a cripple, with one leg four inches shorter than the other, and he stammers like a machine gun.’
“I asked what it was that the kid had and my father showed me. He wrote down a three-figure number and multiplied it by itself twice. Like two times two times two equals eight, but using three figures instead of just one. We went to the Greek kid and my father told him the first number and asked him to cube it—but in his head. Mental arithmetic! The kid said the number twice to himself, scratched his head, then took my father’s pencil and wrote down the answer. The one-hundred-percent-correct answer. Now tell me: what good was his talent to him, eh? On a street corner in a fishing village?”
Turnbull had to agree. “Not much.”
“Then there were the so-called ‘Rubik Twins’ just nine or ten years ago. A Manchester father bought his twin sons a cube. No matter how complicated he’d mix up the squares, his sons would solve it in seconds flat. Let him totally sod up the combinations, still they’d unscramble the thing. Each son was as good as the other. So the father complained to the makers that he’d been ripped off; their cube was too easy. They came to see these prodigies for themselves, concluded that the twins were naturals at it—as simple as that. Word got out and other kids turned up who were almost as good. But the beauty of the twins was this: they invariably solved the thing in the least possible number of moves!
“The media explanation: ‘their minds work in three dimensions!’ My personal response to that: crap! That’s as bad as saying I talk to machines. All of our minds work in three dimensions! We live in three dimensions! But the fact is that multidimensional or otherwise, their minds did work differently. And so does mine.”
“What about computers?” Turnbull was insatiable. “That’s where you really shine, isn’t it? You can hear them thinking.”
The look he got then told him he was wrong. “No.” Gill sighed again and shook his head. “I can’t because they don’t. They solve problems but they don’t think. They can only give out what’s first put in. Oh, they can extrapolate, if they’re asked to—and they do it all a lot faster than any human mind—but they can’t think. Not yet anyway. Look: if you want to make a three-minute egg timer, put some fine sand in your funny bottle and let it run out. And time it. When you have exactly three minutes worth of sand in there, seal the
bottle. After that, every time you want a three minute egg, the timer will give you exactly that. Does that make it intelligent? A better example: if you want to know the time you check your watch, right? Day or night it gives you the right answer at a glance. But has your watch got a mind? It’s programming, that’s all.”
“My watch is programmed?”
“Certainly, to tick away one second every second.”
“See,” said Turnbull, grinning, “that’s why I was so good at interrogation.”
“Eh?”
“Methinks you protest too much. Have you tried listening to the Castle think?”
Gill found himself smiling a real smile for the first time in too long. “You know, Jack,” he said. “I liked you the first time I saw you. Something about you—a bloke I could get on with. But I didn’t tag you as brilliant. You are, though, in your way. Or if not brilliant, very clever.” “You have heard it thinking?” Turnbull sat up straighter.
“I’ve heard it doing … something.” The smile slid from Gill’s face.
“Listening, watching, waiting?”
Gill nodded. “Yes.”
“But you didn’t tell that to the VIPs.” It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact.
“Most of them already know,” said Gill. “Those who are worth their salt.”
“Come again?” Turnbull’s heavy eyelids came awake and propped themselves wide open. “I don’t recall hearing anything about that.”
“Scare mongering,” said Gill. “That’s what I’d be accused of if it was public knowledge. That’s what the government would be accused of. What? This pile of alien masonry up here on a Scottish mountainside, sitting watching us, waiting for something? Perhaps making its mind up about something? They’d yell, ‘What’s the government thinking of? Why aren’t they protecting us?’ And then they’d have to be told that the government is protecting them—or that they’re prepared to, anyway. And when they knew just how prepared …”
“So-called ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons,” said Turnbull, low-voiced. “CND would have a field day!”
“Hey! You’re not supposed to know about that!” Gill was alarmed.
“Damn right I am,” said Turnbull, matter-of-factly. “How am I supposed to play the game if I don’t know the stakes? We both have talents, Spencer, and mine’s minding. I look after the Man Responsible, remember?”
“Anyway, enough’s enough,” said Gill. “I’m tired and I’m turning in. I may read for a little while. Will the light bother you?”
“Not me.” Turnbull shook his head. “I won’t sleep for a while anyway. Too much to think about.”
Gill had the bed and Turnbull a long, wide settee. He’d slept in worse places. When Gill switched the light off, Turnbull said, “Just one more thing.”
“Shoot.” Gill’s voice was weary in the darkness of the room.
“You said the Castle was perhaps making its mind up about something. Now what did you mean by that? Machines don’t have minds, you said, and they don’t think. A bit contradictory, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Gill, after a little while. And: “It was a figure of speech, that’s all.”
Unconvinced, Turnbull nodded thoughtfully to himself. “Computers can’t think, you said—not yet. But you were talking about our computers, made here, on Earth. This thing, this alien thing, has to be way ahead of anything we’ve got. It would have to be just to have come from—wherever.” He waited for a response, and when none was forthcoming: “Gill?”
“Yes,” said Gill, very quietly. “It would have to be … .”
Turnbull left it at that. And now he had even more to think about before sleeping.
The time scheduled for selection was close now. The time of the choosing, when the House of Doors would take and commence its analysis of a handful of specimens. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with that; there was no margin for error; and so the Thone Controller must now seek out and deal with the watcher: the one who was aware. To some Thone Controllers that awareness in itself would have signalled an end to any further intrusion, but Sith of the Thone was not one of them. This world was a good one, eminently suitable, and Sith very much desired to please the Grand Thone. He must, for he himself was one of the contenders for that all-powerful office.
Which was why, tonight, in the cold and the dark, he was out in the shining, frosted streets of Killin. The hour was late and few people were about, but it wouldn’t much concern Sith if they were. In his human construct guise, and armed, he was close to invincible. Human flesh and blood just couldn’t stand up to him. Outside of his manufactured shell, of course, the bitter cold of this planet would kill him off in a matter of seconds. And even a human child would find little difficulty in pulling him to pieces.
What he contemplated—the murder of an innocent—was entirely against every Thone law, but this was no-man’s-land and as far as he was concerned the law didn’t apply. The man called Spencer Gill was or might prove to be a serious threat, and every threat must be taken into consideration. Since Gill was the only threat, the simple solution was to eradicate him. He couldn’t be allowed to stand in the way at the time of the taking.
Sith had graphed Gill on the last occasion his interference had registered inside the Castle, and now he let his locator guide him unerringly to Gill’s lodgings. Sith had calculated that since Gill was a mind alone—possibly one of a sort—it was likely that he’d also be a man alone. But even if there were a woman or a friend, it would make no difference. Surprise was on his side; that and his near indestructibility—the fact that face-to-face with an unarmed man he would be quite simply invincible—gave him supreme confidence, so that he failed to even consider the possibility of resistance or retaliation.
Gill was asleep when his doorbell sounded, ringing insistently and with short, regular breaks. Someone was either very impatient or extremely methodical. He woke up thinking just that, and putting on the light saw Turnbull shrugging into a dressing gown. “It’s okay,” said the big man. “It’s bound to be for me. I’ll give you odds something’s come up and we’re wanted in London on the double. Me and the boss, I mean.”
“What?” said Gill, only half-awake.
Turnbull went through a bead curtain and headed down a short, dark corridor to the door. The curtain jangled behind him, falling back into place. “Eh?” Gill mumbled, swinging his legs out of bed. The doorbell was still ringing. Gill heard it stop abruptly as Turnbull unlocked the door. Then—
Out in the night street a tall, blocky figure stood with something in his hand that shone and whirred. Turnbull didn’t even have time to focus his eyes. An arm and hand shot out, caught him under the left armpit and yanked him out into the street. His bare feet skidded on ice, shot out from under him. As he went down, so the hand holding the whirring thing sliced the air where his face had been. Turnbull scrambled frantically away, his hands and feet shooting off in all directions as they tried to find purchase.
Sith scarcely gave him another glance. His locator said that Gill was still inside. This man wasn’t Sith’s target. He stepped inside, into the corridor. At the other end, Gill’s shambling figure was coming through the bead curtains. “Who is it?” he said, blinking owlishly.
Sith stepped towards him.
“Hold it!” Turnbull yelled.
Sith paused and looked back, and Turnbull saw the fires behind his eyes. Turnbull’s dressing gown hung open and he was wearing a shoulder holster over a crumpled shirt. He was holding a gun in both hands, levelling it on Sith. But Gill was already halfway down the corridor.
“Spencer, go back!” Turnbull yelled. Sith put up his free hand before his face, lumbered back out into the street with his shining weapon swinging this way and that.
Turnbull backed off, triggered off a round. In the crisp night air of the dreaming village, the sound was a deafening roar. Turnbull saw the hand holding the whirring thing fly apart into so many red sausages, and the shining weapon went spinning into a pile o
f snow at the side of the road. It was lost in chunks of glittering ice crystal.
Sith charged Turnbull, who got off another round before the blocky figure was on him. Then he went down like a truck had hit him, hammered to the icy cobbles, and the intruder fled on across his prone form and away into darkness.
Turnbull lay where he had fallen, senses spinning, and tried to work out what was happening. Then Gill was there beside him, helping him to sit up. “Are you all right?”
Turnbull gingerly fingered his ribs. “Something in here’s a bit—uh!—banged about. But … yes, I think I’m all right. Bruised ribs, that’s all. I was lucky. Jesus, he was strong as a horse!”
“Who … who was he?” Gill’s face was white, shocked, a pale blur of astonishment.
Turnbull got up. Lights were coming on behind curtained windows up and down the street. “Inside,” said Turnbull. “Quick! We don’t want to become a focus of attention.” But before joining Gill in the corridor, he limped over to the snow pile and fished about for a moment. Then he followed on; Gill closed the door and locked it; they went to the flat’s tiny kitchen. Almost automatically, Gill made coffee.
Pouring hot water onto brown, swirling granules, he said again, “Well, who was—”
Turnbull cut him short. “I was rather hoping you could tell me,” he said. He glanced at Gill curiously, then began examining huge bruises across his chest and down his left side. Already they were starting to darken.
“Eh?” said Gill. “How would I know? I met you for the first time this morning, and now this. You’re’ the Dangerman around here. It’s pretty plain to me that he was after you.” He was plausible but didn’t sound too certain. Indeed, Turnbull thought his voice sounded just a fraction more shaky than it should be, even in these circumstances.
“He could have killed me when I opened the door to him,” Turnbull said. “He almost did! But then he left me and started after you. It was you he was after and I just happened to get in his way.”