The thing was exerting all its siren flowers to lure the crusher to destruction. It flashed its most exquisite colors hypnotically in the faceless muzzle of the machine, it shrilled irresistible hypnosis to disrupt the synopses of the wire-linked nerves and paralyze the juggernaut tread.
And for a moment it seemed impossible that even a creature of steel and impervium could withstand the onslaught of that wonderful hypnosis.
If it had not withstood the siren, the men who were running forward now would have been lost. All Sam caught was a distant echo of the humming, but it made his brain work only in flashes, and in the flashes the color of the web wrought its paralysis of the mind. He knew that if he were running with those men behind the crusher he would probably run blindly too, to throw himself into the outstretched embrace of the siren.
“It’s happened before,” he told himself dazedly. “A long time ago in Greece, and Homer wrote the story.”
The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds. To the last the siren flamed and shrilled, spreading out its web in a wide-flung promise of rapture. Then the nose of the crusher lurched forward and touched the center of the web.
In a flash the membrane leaped forward and closed about it. The cables drew thin and fine, screaming with a last vibration of triumph. And there may have been some faint electrical impulse to shock and paralyze the prey, for even the crusher seemed to hesitate for an instant as the glowing wings of the thing infolded its muzzle. Even the crusher seemed to tremble in every plate and wiry filament at the ecstacy of the siren’s touch.
Then the juggernaut lurched on.
The cables drew thinner, thinner, tauter, paling from brilliance to translucent white at the increasing tension. They sang so shrilly the ear could no longer hear, but the nerves felt their last agonized vibration high up in the supersonic chords.
The cables snapped. The siren web clutched convulsively in one last spasm at its metal destroyer, colors flamed over it in impossible discords. Then it went flaccid and dropped limply forward, sliding down the mailed muzzle. The grinding treads caught it, carried it remorselessly to the ground, trampled it under into the debris.
And the thing that slid groundward was an enchanted web, a Nessus-shirt of burning color. But the thing the caterpillar treads crushed into the green melee beneath them was an ugly, rubbery gray mat that squirmed convulsively when the cleats caught it.
Sam let out his breath in a long sigh. He lowered the binoculars. For a moment he said nothing. Then he stepped forward, laid the glasses on Hale’s camp table, and proved anew that he was no fit subject for hypnosis of any kind.
“About the Harker interview,” he said, “when can you get away for the trip?”
Hale sighed, too.
“I can’t,” he said.
Sam frowned. “It’s important. It’s something nobody but you is really fitted for. I wish you could manage it, Hale.”
“There’s only one place where I’m really indispensable, Reed. Right here. Nobody else knows landside as I do. I’m no diplomat. You’re our contact man. I’m sorry.”
There was more to it than that. Sam felt perfectly sure of it. Hale was disassociating himself resolutely from every aspect of this game of deceit except one—the profit. The man power. That he would accept. The rest was up to Sam. And there was nothing whatever that Sam could do about it.
For the first time an unpleasant idea flashed across Sam’s mind. Until this moment he had seen himself as the motivating force behind colonization. He had pulled the strings that moved the puppet figure of Robin Hale. But in the final analysis, he wondered suddenly, who was the puppet-master and who. the dancing doll?
He shrugged.
“All right. I’ll do it if I have to. But don’t blame me if I make a mess of it.”
“I won’t.”
Sam set his jaw. The matter was not really ended. He knew now where his real competition lay, and he knew the conflict had just begun.
The light was cool and clear as crystal. It was a room for working and thinking and planning. It had been designed by Immortals and for Immortals. The planes and curves were functional, but not obtrusively so; they flowed smoothly into each other, and the crystalline flower sprays and the changing picture designs on the frieze were part of the entire quiet, casual pattern. There was nothing to catch and hold the eye for longer than a moment or two. But were the eye rested on shifting color or slow-budding, slow-flowering artificial crystal plant, the beholder found an anchor for his shifting thoughts, and could build new ones from that point.
In that cool, quiet place, brimming with a clarity of light that held steady from its invisible sources, Zachariah sat beside Kedre at a long desk. Her tapering fingers, with gilt nails, shuffled through the dossiers before her.
“You had better go to see Reed,” Zachariah said.
Kedre lifted her shoulders in a delicate shrug. “Landside?” she asked. “Oh, no!”
“Aren’t you the one best qualified to deal with him at this point?”
“Must we deal with him?” Zachariah nodded toward the desk top.
“You have a plan. But Reed’s no fool. Misdirection—he’s used that trick himself. We should have one real plan, and one overt one to distract Reed’s attention.”
“You don’t know what I have in mind.”
“I’ve got an idea. You must have based it on the theorem that Sam Reed is necessary now but will be dangerous at some later time.”
She nodded.
Zachariah took one of her hands and ran his finger tips lightly across the gilded nails. “But when? We don’t know that. And until then, Sam Reed will make his position stronger and stronger. He may be vulnerable now and invulnerable later. We can’t strike now, though. Not if Venus landside is to be colonized.”
“Hale was right, you know,” Kedre told him musingly. “We did wait too long.”
“Not quite—but we would have. However! One error doesn’t mean failure. The question is, who’s the pawn and who’s the player? Reed thinks he’s the player. He must remain SB, until—”
“Until?”
Zachariah looked at a crystal plant, not answering till it had gone through its glittering cycle of bud and flower. “Until he’s served his purpose and landside’s safe. We can’t set a definite time-period. So what we need is a bomb, planted now, which will explode when we set it off.”
“That’s my plan,” Kedre said. “A bomb. The only possible time-bomb an Immortal can use against an Immortal, when we can’t really read the future.”
“And that is?”
“What can we plant near Sam that will stay with him always, potentially explosive, that won’t deteriorate for, gay, twenty years? That should be time enough. Sam must want that bomb near him. It must be something he will want and need. Something that can be custom-made, to suit Sam’s requirements exactly, and especially something that Sam can’t possibly suspect. A bomb that must seem so harmless Sam can investigate it thoroughly without suspecting its deadliness, even if he traces it back to its—construction.” Zachariah chuckled.
“Construction?”
“Birth.”
“Of course. A human time-bomb. As you say, the only feasible one an Immortal can use against an Immortal, under the circumstances. What about the difficulties?”
“I need your help now, Zachariah. We’ve got to start before birth. We’ve got to plan our time-bomb from the very gene, train him every Step of the way, and cover our tracks very thoroughly. I think I know how we can do that. But first—I’ve been using deduction, and then induction. Here’s a brief of pertinent information from Sam Reed’s dossier.”
“Not the public—”
“I used our private files, too. Oil, we know more about Sam than he suspects. Psychologically we have him pretty well taped.”
“He’ll change in five years. Or fifty.”
“We can make prediction graphs. And some basics won’t change. He’ll always have a weakness for the color blue, I know. Our t
ime-bomb will have blue eyes.”
Zachariah began to laugh. Kedre didn’t She made an irritated gesture and picked up a photograph.
Zachariah sobered. He looked at her shrewdly.
“I wonder what your motives are, Kedre,” he said. “I wonder if you know?”
She said calmly, “I isolated many facts from Sam’s records, and built up a picture of what sort of man he’ll want near him in, say, eighteen years. I’m predicting my picture on the success of the colonization plan, naturally. We’ll have to work with Sam on that. Our time-bomb must be specially trained, so his talents and skills will be what Sam needs. Personality and appearance are important, too. Sam’s conditioned to like certain types of voices and faces. And to dislike others. Well—I got that picture clear . . . what sort of man we’d need.”
She found another photograph.
“Then I searched in vital statistics tor a man and a woman. I checked everything about them—heredity, everything! I can predict almost exactly what their child will be like, especially since it will be conceived and born under certain conditions we’ll arrange—not obviously.”
Zachariah took the photographs, one of a young man, the other of a young woman.
“Do they know each other?”
“Not yet. They will. The man is ill. I had to arrange that. I had him infected—he had volunteered for the Colony. We’ll keep him here, and we’ll arrange for him to meet this girl. But we must never show our hand.”
Zachariah, suddenly interested, bent forward, glancing at various charts.
“What’s his work? Oh, I see. Mm-m. Give him something more interesting. Making sure they stay in Delaware will be tricky. I think we can pull the right strings, though. Yes, I’m sure of it. We can arrange for them to meet and marry—but the child?”
“Simple. We already know her fertility period.”
“I mean, what if the boy turns out to be a girl?”
“Then she may have even a stronger appeal to Sam Reed,” Kedre said, and was silent for a little while. Suddenly she pushed the girl’s photograph away.
“Psychonamics is the rest of the answers,” she said briskly. “The child, boy or girl, will have psychonamic treatment from the very start. Secret, of course. Not even his parents will know. There will be mnemonic erasure after every treatment, so the boy himself-won’t know he’s undergoing continued hypnosis. And it’ll amount to posthypnotic suggestion, hi the boy’s unconscious, by the time he’s eighteen, will be a command he can’t disobey.”
“To kill?”
Kedre shrugged. “To destroy. We can’t yet tell what will be the most effective treatment. Of course nobody can be hypnotized into committing any act he wouldn’t do consciously. The boy must be trained so he’ll have no compunctions about Sam Reed. There’ll have to be some triggering response—we’ll implant that hypnotically, too. He mustn’t act until we set off his reaction, no matter what provocation he gets up to that time.”
Zachariah nodded thoughtfully. “It’s good. It’s elaborate, of course, too. A Robin Hood’s sort of plan.” He used the curious colloquialism without even thinking of its vastly faraway origin. “Are you sure we aren’t overestimating the man?”
“I know Sam Reed. Don’t forget his background. During his formative years he thought of himself as a short-termer. He’s got a tremendously strong instinct for self-preservation, because of the life he lived in the Keeps. Like a wild animal’s, watchful every second. I suppose we might kill him now—but we don’t want to. We need him. The whole culture needs him. It’s only later, when he’s dangerous, that we’ll want him destroyed. And by then . . . well, you’ll see.”
Zachariah, his. eyes on a slowly unfolding stone flower, said, “Yes, it’s a pattern, I suppose. Every autocrat knows how precarious his position is. We’d have been better rulers of the Keeps if we’d remembered that ourselves. And Sam will have to be an autocrat to survive.”
“Even now it probably would be very hard to attack him personally,” Kedre said. “And in ten years—twenty—fifty—he’ll be really invulnerable. He’ll be fighting every hour, every year of that time. Venus, his own men, us, everything around him. He won’t be living in the Plymouth Colony we see on the visors now. Here in the Keeps nothing changes—it’s hard for us to adjust our minds to the changes that are going to take place landside. Our own technologies will make his invulnerability possible—protective devices, psychological barriers, screenings . . . yes, I think we’ll need something like our time-bomb to make sure of reaching him by then.”
“It’s elaborate in one way,” Zachariah told her, “but I withdraw my Robin Hood’s barn simile. In its own way it’s extremely simple. Once you admit the need for the roundabout approach, you can see how simple it is. Sam will be expecting some tremendously complicated attack from us. He’ll never dream we could lack deviousness to the extent that our single weapon is a gun in the hands of a boy.”
“It may take fifty years,” Kedre said. “It may fail the first time. And the second. The plan may have to be changed. But we must start now.”
“And you’ll go landside to see him?”
She shook her gold-coifed head. “I don’t want to go landside, Zachariah. Why do you keep insisting on that?”
“He’ll be wondering what we’re up to. Well—give him an answer. Not the right one. He’s no fool. But if we can make him suspicious of minor things, it’ll occupy his mind and stop him from watching us too closely in our major project.”
“You go.”
Zachariah smiled. “I have a personal reason, too, my dear. I want you to see Sam Reed. He isn’t the underdog any more. He’ll have begun to change. I want your reaction to Sam Reed Immortal.”
She gave him a quick, masked glance, the light glinting from her golden hair and golden brows and dazzling from the flicker of golden beads that tipped her lashes.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go. You may be sorry you sent me.”
Hale studied the site of Island Six’s ganglion, the cleared area where the local administration buildings would presently rise. Work progressed. In distant jungles, toward the coast, the rumbling roars of crushers could still be heard, but here there was constructive, not destructive, activity. The tree boles had been hauled away over a four-acre, area, and the ground had been ploughed up. Surveyors were already busy.
An old man was stooping down not far away, and Hale strolled toward him as he recognized the Logician. Ben Crowell straightened, his shrewd, seamed face alight with speculation.
“Hullo, Governor,” he said. “Looks like good soil here.” He crumbled loam between his calloused fingers.
“You’re not expendable,” Hale said. “You shouldn’t be here. But I suppose there’s no use trying to give you orders.”
Crowell grinned. “Not a bit. Thing is, I always know what’ll happen and about how far I can go.” He examined the loam again. “Poisoned now, but it’ll come back. When the anaerobic bacteria get to working—”
“First we’ll flood the soil with bacteriophage,” Hale said. The surveying crew and the diggers were some distance away; they could talk without being overheard. “One toxic treatment helps, but one isn’t enough—there are too many dangerous bugs in the dirt.”
“It’s good dirt, though. Almost too rich. Over to the west there it’s sour; needs liming. But you can get some nice crops on this island.” A man wearing a shoulder-tank equipped with a hose and what seemed to be a gigantic hypodermic syringe came past, moved to a labeled stake, and began working the telescopic “needle” into the ground. “One of them, huh?” Crowell said.
“One of the worst. Above ground it’s just a creeper. But the root-reservoir’s twenty feet long and ten feet down. Only way to kill it is pump it full of poison.”
“Used to be something like that on Earth—Man Underground, we called it. Dunno the scientific name. Only we used kerosene to kill it. Stuff never grew quite as fast on Earth as it does here. Bad now, but it’ll be an advantage when
we get good crops in. Corn in twenty days, maybe.” He shook his head, clucking appreciatively.
“If we can keep the weeds out.”
“Only one real way. Pull ’em. You might try crab grass, though,” Crowell suggested. “I’d back crab-grass even against Venus creeper, and you know what a strangler that is. Look, instead of letting some of the acres stay poisoned—that don’t help the soil—why not put in some crab grass? Brother, it grows!”
“I’ll check on it,” Hale said. “Thanks. Any more ideas? Or is that against your rules?”
The Logician laughed. “Shucks, I can make suggestions. They don’t alter the future one way or the other—somebody was sure to try crab grass here sooner or later. It’s only the big things I don’t interfere with, if I can help it. They may not look like big things at the time, but I know.” He peered through a swathe of fallen trees toward the coast. Far beyond, across the bay, was the mainland, where the clifflike structure of the old Doonemen fort stood. There was activity on that weed-draped, lichen-stained hulk. Bright scarlet flashes blazed out and were gone. Boats kept up a continual traffic from the mainland to Island One and back again.
“What goes on?” Crowell asked. “Going to work on the fort already?”
“Sam’s idea,” Hale said. “I think he’s afraid I’m beginning to take the initiative. I started work on this island without discussing it with him first. So he’s pulling the same trick. That’s fine.”
Crowell considered. “So? What’s the setup?”
“He’s started to clear the old fort. Quite a job, and we weren’t ready to tackle the mainland yet—but I think it’ll be O.K. I’d say otherwise if the fort weren’t already there. The Doonemen built it the right way. I remember—” He, too, looked toward the shore, his face changing a little. “There was always a maintenance crew on duty. The jungle was always ready to eat us up, if it could. The plants—and the animals. But the Keeps gave us equipment then; UV batteries, heat rays, acid sprays. The Free Companions always had two fights going on.
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