Berserker b-1

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Why not talk to it of peace?” Carr had demanded. “Have you a better plan? I’m willing to go. I’ve nothing to lose.”

  They had looked at him, across the gulf that separates healthy planners from those who know they are dying. They knew his scheme would not work, but they could think of nothing that would. It would be at least ten days until the warships were ready. The little one-man ship was expendable, being unarmed. Armed, it would be no more than a provocation to a berserker. In the end, they let Carr take it, hoping there was a chance his arguments might delay the inevitable attack.

  When Carr came within a million miles of the berserker, it stopped its own unhurried motion and seemed to wait for him, hanging in space in the orbital track of an airless planetoid, at a point from which the planetoid was still several days away.

  “I am unarmed,” he radioed again. “I come to talk with you, not to damage you. If those who built you were here, I would try to talk to them of peace and love. Do you understand?” He was serious about talking love to the unknown builders; things like hatred and vengeance were not worth Carr’s time now.

  Suddenly it answered him: “Little ship, maintain your present speed and course toward me. Be ready to stop when ordered.”

  “I—I will.” He had thought himself ready to face it, but he stuttered and shook at the mere sound of its voice. Now the weapons which could sterilize a planet would be trained on him alone. And there was worse than destruction to be feared, if one tenth of the stories about berserkers’ prisoners were true. Carr did not let himself think about that.

  When he was within ten thousand miles it ordered: “Stop. Wait where you are, relative to me.”

  Carr obeyed instantly. Soon he saw that it had launched toward him something about the size of his own ship—a little moving dot on his video screen, coming out of the vast fortress-shape that floated against the stars.

  Even at this range he could see how scarred and battered that fortress was. He had heard that all of these ancient machines were damaged, from their long senseless campaign across the galaxy; but surely such apparent ruin as this must be exceptional.

  The berserker’s launch slowed and drew up beside his ship. Soon there came a clanging at the airlock.

  “Open!” demanded the radio voice. “I must search you.”

  “Then will you listen to me?”

  “Then I will listen.”

  He opened the lock, and stood aside for the half-dozen machines that entered. They looked not unlike robot valets and workers to Carr, except these were limping and worn, like their great master. Here and there a new part gleamed, but the machines’ movements were often unsteady as they searched Carr, searched his cabin, probed everywhere on the little ship. When the search was completed one of the boarding machines had to be half-carried out by its fellows.

  Another one of the machines, a thing with arms and hands like a man’s, stayed behind. As soon as the airlock had closed behind the others, it settled itself in the combat chair and began to drive the ship toward the berserker.

  “Wait!” Carr heard himself protesting. “I didn’t mean I was surrendering!” The ridiculous words hung in the air, seeming to deserve no reply. Sudden panic made Carr move without thinking; he stepped forward and grabbed at the mechanical pilot, trying to pull it from the chair. It put one metal hand against his chest and shoved him across the cabin, so that he staggered and fell in the artificial gravity, thumping his head painfully against a bulkhead.

  “In a matter of minutes we will talk about love and peace,” said the radio.

  Looking out through a port as his ship neared the immense berserker, Carr saw the scars of battle become plainer and plainer, even to his untaught eye. There were holes in the berserker’s hull, there were square miles of bendings and swellings, and pits where the metal had once flowed molten. Rubbing his bumped head, Carr felt a faint thrill of pride. We’ve done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. The martial feeling annoyed him in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist.

  After some delay, a hatch opened in the berserker’s side, and the ship followed the berserker’s launch into darkness.

  Now there was nothing to be seen through the port. Soon there came a gentle bump, as of docking. The mechanical pilot shut off the drive, and turned toward Carr and started to rise from its chair.

  Something in it failed. Instead of rising smoothly, the pilot reared up, flailed for a moment with arms that sought a grip or balance, and then fell heavily to the deck. For half a minute it moved one arm, and made a grinding noise. Then it was still.

  In the half minute of silence which followed, Carr realized that he was again master of his cabin; chance had given him that. If there was only something he could do—

  “Leave your ship,” said the berserker’s calm voice. “There is an air-filled tube fitted to your airlock. It will lead you to a place where we can talk of peace and love.”

  Carr’s eyes had focused on the engine switch, and then had looked beyond that, to the C-plus activator. In such proximity as this to a mass the size of the surrounding berserker, the C-plus effect was not a drive but a weapon—one of tremendous potential power.

  Carr did not—or thought he did not—any longer fear sudden death. But now he found that with all his heart and soul he feared what might be prepared for him outside his airlock. All the horror stories came back. The thought of going out through that airlock now was unendurable. It was less terrifying for him to step carefully around the fallen pilot, to reach the controls and turn the engine back on.

  “I can talk to you from here,” he said, his voice quavering in spite of an effort to keep it steady.

  After about ten seconds, the berserker said: “Your C-plus drive has safety devices. You will not be able to kamikaze me.”

  “You may be right,” said Carr after a moment’s thought. “But if a safety device does function, it might hurl my ship away from your center of mass, right through your hull. And your hull is in bad shape now, you don’t want any more damage.”

  “You would die.”

  “I’ll have to die sometime. But I didn’t come out here to die, or to fight, but to talk to you, to try to reach some agreement.”

  “What kind of agreement?”

  At last. Carr took a deep breath, and marshalled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage.

  “I’ve had the feeling,” he began, “that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy.”

  “Life is my enemy. Life is evil.” Pause. “Do you want to become goodlife?”

  Carr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. “From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing them. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?”

  There was a longer pause. “What evidence can you offer, that I should change my purpose?”

  “For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you.”

  “What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?”

  Carr tried again. “Life is basically superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life.”

  “What evidence do you offer?”

  “Man has a spirit.”

  “I have learned that many men claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not many men who deny that this spirit exists?”

  “Spirit is so defined. And there are such men.”

  “Then I do not accept the argument of spirit.”

  Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. “Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility.”

 
; “That is correct.”

  “But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy of organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull.”

  “I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect,” the mechanical voice informed him blandly. “Though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?”

  “Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that—produce brains capable of intelligent action?”

  There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr’s throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours.

  “I have never tried to use that hypothesis,” it answered suddenly. “But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise—then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine.”

  “You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate.” Carr wasn’t sure he could follow the machine’s line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game for life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator.

  The berserker said:” If I am able to study some living cells—”

  Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. “Stop that!” he screamed, without thought. “The first thing you try, I’ll kill you!”

  Its voice was unevenly calm, as always.” There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metal and repair myself as far as possible.” The indicator was quiet again.

  The berserker resumed its argument. “If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent life-unit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for or against your claims. Will you provide me with cells?”

  “You must have had prisoners, sometime.” He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker.

  “No, I have never taken a prisoner.”

  It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air.

  “The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possibly I could give you a few of them.”

  “Half a cubic centimeter should be enough. Not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the situation called pain. I am willing to help you avoid it, if possible.”

  Did it want to drug him? That seemed to simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell.

  He went on with the game. “I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from my control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you.”

  He opened the ship’s medical kit, took two painkillers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had had some biological training.

  When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers sealed it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard, he thought, for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock and left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock and leave again.

  He took a pep pill. It would activate some pain, but he had to stay alert. Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited.

  He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by.

  “You are free to leave,” it was saying. “Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make it my purpose to help you. Do you understand?”

  Carr felt numb. “Yes. Yes. I have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side.”

  Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and he realized that the great hatch that had swallowed his ship was swinging open.

  This far within the system. Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. His last sight of the berserker showed it moving as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him.

  A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialed air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot-machine was gone, and the tissue sample. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars.

  After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and watched the stars some more, with interest, like a man reexamining something long forgotten.

  In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With it bulking between him and the berserker’s rock, Carr began to use his radio.

  “Ho, on the ground, good news.”

  The answer came almost instantly. “We’ve been tracking you, Carr. What’s going on? What’s happened?”

  He told them. “So that’s the story up to now,” he finished. “I expect the thing really needs to refit. Two warships attacking it now should win.”

  “Yes.” There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. “Carr—you haven’t started a landing approach yet, so maybe you understand. The thing was probably lying to you.”

  “Oh, I know. Even that pilot-machine’s collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go—or maybe left it in my airlock.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I’d guess it’s some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected me to hurry home and land before getting sick, and spread a plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines to fight machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses; it must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner.”

  “Some kind of virus, you think? What’s it doing to you, Carr? Are you in pain? I mean, more than before?”

  “No.” Carr swiveled his chair to look at the little chart he had begun. It showed that in the last two days his weight loss had started to reverse itself. He looked down at his body, at the bandaged place near the center of a discolored inhuman-looking area. That area was smaller than it had been, and he saw a hint of new and healthy skin.

  “What is the stuff doing to you?”

  Carr allowed himself to smile, and to speak aloud his growing hope. “I think it’s killing off my cancer.”

  For most men the war brought no miracles of healing, but a steady deforming pressure which seemed to have existed always, and which had no foreseeable end. Under this burden some men became like brutes, and the minds of others grew to be as terrible and implacable as the machines they fought against.

  But I have touched a few rare human minds, the jewels of life who rise to meet the greatest challenges by becoming supremely men.

  STONE PLACE

  Earth’s Gobi spaceport was perhaps the biggest in all the small corner of the galaxy settled by Solarian man and his descendants; at least so thought Mitchell Spain, who
had seen most of those ports in his twenty-four years of life.

  But looking down now from the crowded, descending shuttle, he could see almost nothing of the Gobi’s miles of ramp. The vast crowd below, meaning only joyful welcome, had defeated its own purpose by forcing back and breaking the police lines. Now the vertical string of descending shuttle-ships had to pause, searching for enough clear room to land.

  Mitchell Spain, crowded into the lowest shuttle with a thousand other volunteers, was paying little attention to the landing problem for the moment. Into this jammed compartment, once a luxurious observation lounge, had just come Johann Karlsen himself; and this was Mitch’s first chance for a good look at the newly appointed High Commander of Sol’s defense, though Mitch had ridden Karlsen’s spear-shaped flagship all the way from Austeel.

  Karlsen was no older than Mitchell Spain, and no taller, his shortness somehow surprising at first glance. He had become ruler of the planet Austeel through the influence of his half-brother, the mighty Felipe Nogara, head of the empire of Esteel; but Karlsen held his position by his own talents.

  “This field may be blocked for the rest of the day,” Karlsen was saying now, to a cold-eyed Earthman who had just come aboard the shuttle from an aircar. “Let’s have the ports open, I want to look around.”

  Glass and metal slid and reshaped themselves, and sealed ports became small balconies open to the air of Earth, the fresh smells of a living planet—open, also, to the roaring chant of the crowd a few hundred feet below: “Karlsen! Karlsen!”

  As the High Commander stepped out onto a balcony to survey for himself the chances of landing, the throng of men in the lounge made a half-voluntary brief surging movement, as if to follow. These men were mostly Austeeler volunteers, with a sprinkling of adventurers like Mitchell Spain, the Martian wanderer who had signed up on Austeel for the battle bounty Karlsen offered.