What could he do?
– Spear! Gregory shouted.
The transformed machine towered over Gregory, as the pincer squeezed inward. The sound of clicking gears, shunting pistons, and hissing steam grew louder and louder, intent on filling all other space around it.
– Spear! Gregory yelled. – If you created this, you can still stop it! This is only a product of your mind! You are John Murray Spear, a man of God, a defender of the weak! You saved dozens of lives by operating the Underground Railroad! They were slaves, man, you helped slaves to escape! Now are you going to be the architect of another kind of slavery? Do you want the whole of Mankind to be slaves to a machine?
Spear's face was a mask of concentration. His eyes were closed, his lips were trembling, and sweat was running down his brow. Even above the clash and bang of metal, Gregory could hear his words, as if they were spoken inside his own head.
– This was supposed to…be a new age…thou shalt guide me with thy counsel…why did you not guide me? I did not want this…and afterward receive me to glory…
Gregory immediately recognized the words from the Book of Psalms. – Whom have I in heaven but thee? he shouted, inside his head and out of it.
– And there is none upon Earth that I desire but thee…
Spear was visibly struggling inside the metal cage. His expression was now one of rage, as he pulled at the wires holding his arms and legs. The Living Motor swayed, as if off balance, as if something had gone wrong inside its mechanism.
Gregory watched and listened in horrified fascination as Spear's voice grew louder.
– Stop it! You've spoiled everything! My flesh and my heart faileth…
Spear ripped his arms free, and grabbed the inner workings of the machine. With an inhuman strength, he crushed the heart of the Living Motor, compressing it into a crumpled ball of scrap metal.
– but God is the strength of my heart! The true God! I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU!
The Gardens exploded with a silent flash of light.
*
Up on the bridge, at his leader's signal, the Sardinian commando lobbed both grenades at the narrow-boat below. Another two men took his place, and threw four more grenades in quick succession. Three struck the cabin's roof, and burst into flame, sending sheets of fire in all directions that hungrily licked at the wood. Two landed on the floor of the bridge and also exploded. One, badly tossed, went into the water.
Hatches slid open along the roof of the Jolly Boatman and a number of canisters swung into view, raised on hydraulic platforms. The Sardinians had no way of knowing that when the Jolly Boatman's Arithmometer Defense Engine detected the heat and smoke, seals inside the canisters were punctured, causing the two chemicals inside – sodium bicarbonate and aluminum sulfate – to react violently. The resultant chemical foam was squirted out at high pressure along the burning wood, and the flames flickered, then lessened, then died completely.
The Sardinians looked down in shock as the engines of the slightly charred Jolly Boatman started up again, and the narrow-boat edged towards the tunnel. Their commander signaled impatiently and the commandos began to fix ropes from their belts to the stone of the bridge wall, easing themselves over the brick, rappelling down towards the boat.
As the prow of the boat nosed into the tunnel, the commandos dropped onto the roof and prow and released themselves from the ropes. With rifles, pistols and knives in their hands, they prepared to break into the cabin, to complete their mission.
That was the moment when the automatic recoil-operated machine guns sprang out from concealed hatches along the hull and began firing.
Six
Gregory floated in empty space. The pincers holding him were now coated with rust, and as he watched they crumbled, leaving flakes and shavings that floated away.
Around him, twisted girders and jagged glass sailed by in slow motion, spinning outward into oblivion. Sheets of tin, coils of copper tubing, meshing wheels and swinging pendulums devolved into their constituent atoms. Glass lenses and jars broke apart and trickled away as sand. The essence of the Living Motor dissolved, computing the mathematical truth of its own destruction.
A long way off, in the patterns that formed, blew apart and then reformed, he saw the face of Murray Spear. He smiled. The fear had gone, and Spear looked calm, at peace, and proud of what he had done.
Gregory drifted in Limbo. The spheres of Heaven and Hell revolved around him, like music without beginning or end. He looked around him at the Cloud of Unknowing, the Choir Invisible, and saw faces pass before his eyes.
His wife.
His daughter.
It would be so easy to join them. It would be so easy to stop fighting, and just let go. Wasn't it fair? Hadn't he done enough?
But then another face came into view – Mr. Lentz, and his scars, and the clues that Gregory had picked up from Spear. He had more work to do.
He had more battles to fight.
He heard the jangling metal and crow-call of Zoya beside him as the bitter grandeur of the Earth began to take shape, floor, walls, wood, stone, fire…
*
Voss closed the porthole and put away his Webley revolver. "No more Sardinians, sir," called Dawkins at the periscope.
"Jolly good." Voss stood up and looked at the Arithmometer. "We won't need to use the rocket launcher, then. Just as well. I don't think Lady Padbury would pay for the repair of another bridge."
"Sir!" one of the crew called from the main cabin. "I think Mr. Gregory's waking up!"
Voss hurried back into the cabin. On both sides of the table, the men were twitching and moaning, their eyes still closed but their brows sweating and their faces twitching as if they were caught in the most terrible nightmare.
"Now what," Voss muttered.
Mr. Gregory opened his eyes.
Without saying a word, he jumped to his feet, wrenched the pistol out of the hand of the guard standing next to him, and shot Lentz through the forehead. The charge of blood and brains spattered outward and redecorated the canvas of Salisbury Cathedral.
"God's teeth!"
Instantly, Gregory was restrained by most of the Jolly Boatman's crew, as Voss ran up to him in panic. "What the bloody hell have you done? Have you gone off your rocker?"
"Look at him," Gregory yelled hoarsely, managing to point at the body in the chair. "Just look at him!"
Voss turned and looked with revulsion at the dead Colonial. Leaning closer, he noticed something about the exit wound; fragments of metal seemed to be mixed with the mess of blood, brain and bone.
"Surgery!" Voss realized. He stretched out a hand to support Gregory, who wavered on his feet. He smiled a giddy smile and almost collapsed.
"I think we have just performed some surgery of our own," croaked Mr. Gregory.
"What do you mean, sir?"
"We have prevented what you might call…an infection. A mechanical epidemic!"
"Get some brandy."
They put Gregory in a chair and covered his legs with a blanket. He sipped the brandy while Voss and his cronies watched him. After realizing the danger had passed, Voss called for pipe tobacco and more glasses, and the gentlemen joined Gregory in celebrating their apparent victory.
Gregory told them haltingly of what had happened in the Gardens of Melancholy. "It was a ghost. Not the ghost of a human, but the ghost of an artificial intelligence that Spear had accidentally created."
He gestured to the sheet-covered corpse with his pipe. "It spoke to the members of the cult in their dreams, telling them to perform surgery upon themselves; to turn themselves into machine-people. They would be the hosts when I brought it back."
"Back? Back here?"
"The machine wanted my powers, to help it return to the world of the living into a tangible, mechanical housing. The world of steam and iron that created it."
Voss turned around in his chair. "Kilby?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Get Mr. Gregory's dosh. So…what's going to happ
en to the Company of Electricizers, sir?"
"They will perish. They have lost their guiding intelligence, so they will slowly wither and die, I'm afraid. But then, in a sense, they were already dead."
"And us, sir? What does it mean to the Empire?"
Gregory sighed, and settled himself properly in his chair, pulling the blanket further over his knees. "I can't see it will be any different. Her Majesty the Queen will still keep pushing onwards and upwards, and yes, we shall have that promised prosperity without the Electricizers, even without broadcast power…but we shall always be anxious, and watching, shall we not, Mr. Voss? Waiting for the next card to fall."
"And the spirits, sir? Are they for us, or against us?"
Gregory smiled. "The dead have their own agenda, Mr. Voss. It has always been so."
Kilby returned with a large envelope that rustled with the quantity of banknotes within. He placed it gently on the table, looked nervously at Gregory, and sat down with the rest of the crew.
"So how does it feel, sir?" Voss said after a while.
"How does what feel?"
"To have saved an empire that you don't care about."
Gregory waved at the envelope and grimaced. "Tell Lady Padbury she should choose her friends more carefully."
"She doesn't need friends, sir."
The medium looked up in surprise. Voss was staring back at him with a grave expression on his face.
"She's got us."
Gregory stared at Voss for a moment, and then smiled tiredly. He reached out and lightly clinked his brandy glass against the other man's.
"I'll drink to that."
"The cabin lurched, and the Landship crawled forward…"
One
"Halt! Who goes there?"
Captain Martin Blake pointed his revolver at the figures moving at the end of the trench.
"Don't shoot!" came a voice. "Don't shoot! We're from the War Office!"
Blake kept his gun trained on the shadowy figures, their boots thudding on the duck boards of the trench, advancing into the half-light cast by the shielded electric lanterns. Blake could feel the tense silence of the soldiers behind him as they watched and waited.
The first person to advance was a tall, sandy-haired man, in a greatcoat with a Sergeant's pips on the shoulder, and the second…
Blake stared in shock. "Good God, what's a woman doing in No-Man's-Land?"
She stood blinking in the night's last shadows, her face pale, long dark hair tied back, her slender frame wrapped in an ill-fitting greatcoat.
"We're from the Royal Engineers," the man said, his voice urgent.
The woman stepped forward. "We've brought a message for you. We have papers."
"It's five o'clock in the morning!" Blake yelled.
The woman sounded British, and well-educated. Blake put down the accent as West Country. The man was definitely American, and he was staring at Blake, and grinning. The Captain had seen quite a few men smiling in the trenches, and some laughing. It usually meant that the war had got to them, unhinged them, cut their minds loose to flap in the wind.
Blake realized that if these two were spies, and he had accidentally captured them, he'd be a hero. If they were genuine Ministry Officials, and he bungled their treatment, he'd be court-martialed.
But either of those outcomes depended on them getting back to allied lines alive…
Blake cocked his revolver as the man slowly put his left hand into his inside coat pocket and withdrew a tiny booklet and several tightly folded sheets of paper. He handed them over to Blake, who holstered his gun and quickly scanned them, turning them over while the soldiers behind him kept their rifles trained on the newcomers. It identified the newcomers as Doctor Alan Kelsey and Miss Virginia Browning; he was attached to the Royal Engineers, and his companion was a driver to the Royal Ambulance Corps.
"These are fake," announced the Captain. "The texture and color of the paper, they're all wrong."
"Would you be Captain Blake?"
He blinked. "Yes, I am."
"Please, Captain Blake, we are here to help."
"We weren't able to request any help. We're cut off from the Communications Trench and our radio isn't working."
"We have an urgent message and we have a machine that can help you."
For the first time the man indicated the large black box he'd been carrying. He set it down gingerly on a pile of sandbags. He was about to click the two brass handles open, when Blake's fear and tension returned. He drew his revolver again and waved him away from the case.
"Captain," Kelsey said patiently, "this is a Mark V Ultra computing machine. We've brought it here because we believe you're all in great danger."
"Danger?" Blake coughed out the word in disbelief. "We're in the middle of a bloody war!"
Someone at the back started to laugh, and Blake felt the situation slipping out of his hands.
"They're spies, sir! Lock 'em up!" This was Private Gerrard's Welsh voice.
"He's got a bomb!"
"They don't sound like Germans."
"Maybe the Angels sent them!"
Kelsey was on to the remark like a flash. "Did you say Angels?"
"Be quiet." Blake leveled his revolver. "Both of you will be confined under close watch until we find out who you really are."
Blake waved to Corporal Ford, and the soldier advanced. "Wait," said Kelsey. "You must listen to us! You need to see this machine, and see what it can do…"
"And I must insist."
Blake had turned away to give his men orders but at the tone of the woman's voice, he looked back. The woman had a gun. A Webley self-loading pistol, by the look of it.
It was unfair. Most of the time, Blake was fighting the weaknesses of his own body. Fighting the turmoil in his bowels, the urges of his bladder; constant activity, within and without, constant stimulation. There was never a moment when he could not think, could not feel; the nervous engines within him never allowed him to rest. Suffragette, he thought, his mind furiously working out possible outcomes to the situation. I see. The woman was one of those Emily Pankhurst types.
"You are not confining me anywhere," she said.
"Madam. Put the gun down."
Blake could sense the men behind him tensing and getting ready to fire – but none of them, he was sure, would shoot a woman. Blake himself was revolted at the very idea. He caught himself doing what he always did when stressed – holding his breath. It was like shifting gears; quieting his emotions, keeping him within range of his own sanity.
"Please listen to us," the woman said. "We are not spies, and we do not want to hurt anyone. We are here to help."
Blake finally drew in some of the foul, smoky air. "My men will shoot you if I order them to."
"Your men? You don't seem to have many of them, Captain. Where's the rest of your squad?"
The situation was insane. Of course, the whole bloody war was insane, so Blake shouldn't have been surprised at anything.
Two
It was October 1917, just outside Ypres.
For the last two months, home to Blake had been this elaborate trench network, a web of trench lines, concrete pillboxes, dugouts, firing bays, and underground tunnels. Over the parapets of the trenches, and between the Allied encampment and the Germans, lay a desolate muddy wasteland strewn with rain-filled craters and barbed wire. The Germans had their firing lines higher up on the Passchendaele Ridges, closer to Ypres and overlooking the Allied encampments.
For the last few weeks, it had been like toiling in a slaughterhouse.
Three days ago, on the twelfth of October, Blake and his squad had been part of the advance on Passchendaele. Amidst the chaos of the shelling, they had been cut off from the main battalion of the British Fifth Army, and forced down here, into the salient – a zig-zag maze of assembly trenches and dead-end saps, situated perilously close to the enemy.
"Sir!" called Tate, on sentry duty. "Movement near the German lines."
Blake s
hot a furious glance at the woman and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. In a way, he was grateful for the interruption. He holstered his revolver, grabbed a pair of binoculars from the shelf next to the useless field telephone and climbed up the filthy rungs of the trench ladder.
He cautiously eased his head over the parapet and into the lookout hole, protected by sandbags and steel plating.
Around him in the cold darkness before the October dawn stretched a landscape of dislocation and dismemberment, a ravaged vista of splintered trees, flattened farmhouses, and craters full of stinking water. To the right, a few yards away, squatted the massive dark lozenge of the Landship in silhouette, the ironclad vessel that was now an injured giant of clogged caterpillar tracks and useless, seized-up gears. The bombardment from heavy artillery had stopped – no, paused, for nothing ever stopped in this godforsaken war, nothing ever ended, nothing was ever silent. Blake and his men were always surrounded by noise; the crack of the carbines, the moaning of the wounded.
He saw the first flickers of morning light through shadowed coils of barbed wire. Ripped fragments of flesh and uniform hung on the wire like quavers and semiquavers on a page of sheet music. He could see, as well as hear, the music of the trenches; the shrieks and groaning, the bangs and cracks, the whistling and hissing – and with the crimson dawn would come the shells, like drums played by a berserk god of war.
A starshell burst overhead, white trails showering down in jerky, swooping rhythms. They were to light targets for night-snipers, and Blake put down the binoculars hastily, wary of reflections. The starburst trails fizzled to the ground.
He was still alive.
In the light of the flare, with his bare eyes he could make out running figures, carrying backpacks and holding rifles. Most likely a wire-cutting party, getting ready for the next bombardment and raid, running across the parapet with frenetic, marionette-like movement.
Tales From Beyond Tomorrow: Volume One Page 4