The Automated Goliath

by William F. Temple

  At every station I located the name board and identified it by the brief light of the flash-pistol. Each time, I reported to Cross where we were.

  So we groped to the mouth of the new tunnel at West Hampstead, and there waited for Cross’ crowd to catch up with us.

  Cross congratulated us, and said, “That’s the worst part of the journey over.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’d have preferred a little opposition. Seems to me things are going too smoothly.”

  Gerry laughed. “Some people are just afraid of their own good luck. Good luck and your good brain—it’s an unbeatable combination.”

  I remained cautious. “Pete and I will keep a hundred yards ahead of you through the tunnel. We’ll phone every few yards. Leave twenty men at this end as a rear guard. The rest of us to consolidate in the Hampstead subway station.”

  “Right,” said Gerry Cross.

  Pete and I set off. Being in a tunnel felt no different. It had seemed to us that we’d been walking through a black tunnel all the way from Harrow. Presently we came on a train standing in .the tunnel. There was no room to squeeze past, so we climbed through the door at the back and fumbled our way through the communicating doors along the whole length of the train. Then we phoned Cross and warned him the train was there.

  Eventually we emerged into the Hampstead underground station. All was quiet. We scrambled up onto a platform. As we stood there, a faint rumbling came from the tunnel mouth behind us. A fear spasm shot through me. I thought the Makkees had switched on the power and the train was beginning to move through the tunnel—to mow down Cross and his men. But the rumbling was brief and ended suddenly.

  Pete was gripping my wrist. He whispered, “What was that?”

  I didn’t answer. I swung down from the platform and felt my way back to the tunnel mouth. I could go no farther: something was blocking the way. Pete joined me. Grim and apprehensive, we investigated. A massive metal door had slid across the tunnel, sealing it off.

  I thumped at it. It gave a flat, dead sound and bruised my fist.

  Pete said, “Cross’ crowd can go back and out the other end. The thing is, can we get out at this end?”

  “If we can, I promise you we’ll find a Makkee reception committee waiting. We’ve walked into a nice little trap. Well, there’s no way back, so let’s give the reception committee a warm reception. I’m banking on Drahk being one of them. If I can put an electric needle through him, I’ll have done something really useful—he’s the mastermind.”

  We regained the platform. I had the flash-pistol ready in one hand, the needle-pistol in the other. At least I was on my home ground now. I’d used this station a thousand times and knew all its corners. But as we progressed, we found no committee hiding in any of them. The station seemed deserted.

  We climbed the emergency stairs around the elevator shaft—still the deepest in London. Right near the top we emerged into dazzling daylight. We had to wait until our eyes became adjusted to it.

  It was great to be able to see again. My tension eased. I realized just how hard I’d been fighting the old fear of the dark and what it might conceal. I feared much less an enemy I could see.

  But there was still no enemy to see.

  High Street was as bare as it might be at dawn on a Sunday. Heath Street contained only clear air and sunlight. This area of Hampstead seemed totally depopulated; probably the Makkees had cleared it.

  We hesitated at the station exit. It didn’t seem right to leave Gerry down there in the darkness. I said, “The only way we can open that door is locate the person who shut it. I think I know where we can find him.”

  I led the way up towards the Heath and the street I’d lived in. Away to our left was the vast black cloud which had engulfed London, an empty plain of jet with a few birds flying over it.

  The windows of the houses watched us with a hundred blank eyes as we walked the naked roads. I felt that other eyes were watching us also. That was a feeling I’d had even in the fog. Imagination?

  I whispered to Pete, as though afraid of being overheard by the empty air, “They’ll expect us to make straight for their HQ—a house called Moravia, round the next turning. They’re probably tracking us now through TV cameras. But I’ve got an ace in the hole, too. Follow me.”

  I struck off sharply across the corner of the Heath which lay behind my road, and picked a way through close trees and heavy undergrowth. No watcher could follow us. It was years since I’d visited this spot but I remembered the way.

  There was the flat stone slab, moss over gray so that it was scarcely visible in the long grass. I knelt beside it, fumbled, found the slight projection. The slab rose slowly on creaking hinges and disclosed a narrow well.

  “The family vault, I presume,” said Pete.

  “In a sense. I told you my father was a crook. He always thought ahead of the police. Every house he built had its secret bolt hole. I’m a crook, too, so I followed his example. This is the rathole in my house, which a she-rat is at present occupying. Our best way to get at Drahk is through her. She’s tough, our Sarah, but I’ll make her talk. We’ll find out just what the Makkees are up to.”

  Pete said dubiously, “From what you told me of her, I feel she won’t be helpful—if she doesn’t choose to be.”

  “She may choose to be. She likes to be on the winning side, and we’re going to be the winning side. If she joins us, she may be able to reopen that tunnel before the Makkees realize what she’s doing. It’s ten to one the master control is operated from their HQ.”

  I lowered myself into the well, feeling with my feet for the rungs. It was only a short ladder and at the bottom I flicked a light switch. When Pete was safely on the way down, I tripped another switch which closed the trap door above us.

  We walked along a low, dimly lit and roughly concreted passage—all my own work. The cracks seemed to exhale foul air at us, smelling of damp and rotting things. I found myself trembling with the anticipation of seeing Sarah again. My emotions were veering like a fitful wind that tried to choose all directions. I knew it now as a truth that hate and love are the two sides of the same coin. But I could not tell which way the coin was going to fall.

  The passage ended at a camouflaged door in my wine cellar. There seemed to be as many bottles as I’d left there. Good! I hoped soon to have something to celebrate with my friends. Treading as though I were afraid of awakening the children, I led the way upstairs. The place was even quieter than I was.

  I tiptoed into the lounge. It was empty. I glanced at the wide window which once had offered a fine view of London. Then I called Pete softly.

  “Look.”

  He came and looked. The tide of darkness had risen in the past few minutes and had lapped over the wall at the bottom of my sloping garden. Most of the streets we’d just climbed were now under it.

  “Looks bad,” said Pete quietly. “We’re just about marooned here. Think they’re deliberately cutting off our retreat?”

  I thumbed the safety catch of my needle-gun. “Let’s take a look upstairs.”

  As we climbed the stairs, I kept looking over my shoulder to see if the darkness were yet invading the house. I feared it might start climbing the stairs behind us.

  My bedroom door was open. Cautiously, I peered in. Then, started; I saw Sarah lying on the floor by the window. At least, I presumed it was Sarah. Her back was towards me, but she wore that same pale yellow dress. And yet, something was wrong. There was no grace about her now, and no femininity. Instead, a sort of lumpishness. She looked dead.

  Sick with uncertainty, I went over there, stepped across her, looked down at her face. My cry brought Pete running.

  I pointed down dumbly, and found tears coming suddenly to my eyes. Another part of myself seemed surprised at this reaction, regarded me detachedly and thought, Did she really mean as much as this?

  I felt again all the anguish and horror of that moment when I saw my father lying dead. And the same sense of awful loss.


  But at least my father had died without pain. Sarah had died horribly. Every joint of her body was twisted, every muscle a hard knot. She had bitten through her lower lip, and her eyes, lifeless as glass, were turned inward.

  “My God!” Pete muttered and turned away.

  Quite gradually, it seemed, we became aware of the little figure standing in the bedroom doorway.

  “These tedious human emotions,” said Drahk’s thin, whistling voice. “They killed Sarah, you know. A little more self-control and she would still have been with us.”

  Pete started for him, but couldn’t brave the ray-emitter which Drahk instantly levelled at him. He had tasted that pain and had just seen how it could kill. For myself, I was in the grip of another kind of pain. I couldn’t even feel hate. I gazed at the Makkee but hardly saw him. He might have been an actor in a play I was no longer following.

  “This,” said Drahk, glancing at Sarah’s body, “is not a congenial setting for social intercourse. Come along to my place, Magellan. I want to talk to you.” He addressed Pete. “You had better come also, if you wish to stay alive.”

  Pete looked at me questioningly. Like a zombie I began to walk from the room. Drahk stopped me, took my needle-gun and circuit breaker and tossed them on the bed. He made us walk before him down the stairs under the threat of the ray-emitter. We went out into the road. Dully I noticed that the fog had ceased to rise and lay at road surface level. Drahk shepherded us along and up the gravel drive to Moravia. The front door opened and admitted us to the clammy heat within.

  Chapter 8

  The reception committee, waiting in the control room at the back, was smaller than I’d expected—just Willoughby and two other jet-eyed Makkees who might have been his brothers.

  The wall of screens was alive with images. Some flickered with the meaningless patterns I’d seen before, others showed street scenes and people moving slowly and seemingly aimlessly.

  Pete exclaimed and pointed, “There’s Gerry!”

  I stared dazedly at the screens. The streets were familiar; they were all in the vicinity of the Hampstead underground station. The faces of some of the men were familiar, also. They were my men. Gerry Cross had a screen all to himself. From the waist down, his clothes were soaking wet, in common with the others.

  “Yes,” said Drahk, “there’s your deputy leader, in full command now. A case of the blind leading the blind—literally.”

  “You’ve blinded them?” I whispered.

  “Only in the way you were all blinded—by fog. They look as though they’re in daylight, but they’re under the fog. You’re seeing them by courtesy of our light amplifiers, just as we watched you feeling your way along the railroad. We saw you, and heard you, all the way. Perhaps you overlooked the fact that your telephone sent signals along the line ahead of it, as well as behind it. We’d tapped in, as signalers say, at this end of the line.”

  I hadn’t overlooked it, but I’d thought the risk minimal. And now, because I’d underrated Drahk, I was a captive watching the dissolution of my own commando raid. There was Gerry Cross groping his way, with the dubious help of a hand lamp, along the shopfronts. He didn’t know Hampstead, was quite lost and wandering away from us. Now and then he stopped to call out, as others did, but they were all losing contact in the dark. Some had formed small groups and were walking hand in hand. But I, who knew those streets, could see that they were unconsciously walking in large circles.

  Still, it was a relief to see them alive and realize that somehow they had got out of that tunnel.

  Willoughby suddenly piped up, all malice. “How do you feel now, Mr. Napoleon Magellan? We’ve been looking up the records concerning your favorite military genius. I’m afraid that, like him, you’ve come to the day of Waterloo.”

  “We admit you’ve fought well,” said Drahk, “but you owe a lot to your ally, whom you call Prospero. Beside him you are pigmies. He’s always been difficult. But time has conquered him for us. Uvova informs us, from the evidence, that he’s dead. You can expect no more help from him. Uvova is never wrong.”

  “Uvova?” I repeated mechanically.

  “Our name for the electronic computer which is the mastermind of our network of automation. It gives all the answers. For instance, we fed into it all the information we had concerning your battle tactics. It analyzed them and predicted your future moves before you consciously planned them yourself. Before you reached Harrow we knew you would attack from that direction. When we added the fog factor to the data, Uvova made exactly the decisions you would make. It told us you would follow the monorail here. So we prepared to receive you. You walked into our trap—that section of tunnel. We purposely let you and your friend here emerge. Then we sealed both ends of the tunnel, capturing your whole commando force.”

  “I see, and yet I don’t see,” said Pete. “You sealed our men in the tunnel. Yet now they’re wandering loose.”

  There was a short silence.

  Then Drahk said, “Uvova is never wrong when in possession of all the facts. It happened that one fact hadn’t been fed into it. A water main passes over the tunnel. We made a connection fitted with valves which could be opened from this room. We meant to drown the elite of your army in the tunnel. That would have decided the war in our favor; Uvova guaranteed it. The fact that upset calculations, the one thing we didn’t know, was the fact that Sarah Masters had become infatuated with Magellan here.”

  That penetrated my apathy like the stab of a sword. I stared at Drahk. His blank eyes remained as expressionless as holes.

  He continued, “Mistakenly, she thought you, Magellan, were trapped in the tunnel with the others and about to be drowned. When the water poured in, she turned the switch to reopen the tunnel doors—then smashed it and ran from the house. Your men escaped with no more than a soaking. But to no avail; we’ve drowned them again—in fog, this time.”

  “And Sarah?” I asked strainedly.

  “She was no longer to be trusted. She had reverted to type. I went after her. She tried to take refuge in what was previously your house. I cornered her in the bedroom, and rayed her to death. A few moments after she died, I heard you two moving about on the lower floor. I stood behind the door of another room, and waited for you to come up.”

  It nearly broke my heart to realize that Sarah had been alive while I had been within yards of her. And that she hadn’t known I was there, nor that I had fought this long battle to London as much to see her again as to defeat the Makkees.

  To have missed her for ever—and by so little!

  A few minutes earlier and I might have saved her.

  And yet I had wasted no time. Fate itself seemed the ally of the conscienceless killers of this universe, like Drahk.

  A cold and merciless hatred took possession of me. I resolved at that moment that, although it took the rest of my life, I should take vengeance on Drahk.

  I started to go for him. He raised the ray-emitter, holding it at arm’s length, taking deliberate aim at me. Its big, round, translucent eye stared coldly into mine. I felt no fear of it. I was icily in command of myself. I became still. Suicide was pointless. My moment of vengeance would come when it would come, and I felt certain of it.

  Peter Butler had no second thoughts. He launched himself at that stiffly outstretched arm. Maybe he thought Drahk was about to ray me. Drahk merely dropped his arm. Pete lunged at nothing and fell. Drahk rayed him briefly where he lay, and immediately covered me again.

  Willoughby and the other two Makkees watched this without the slightest reaction. It could have been a sort of game. I understood then how much Drahk was the head man. So long as he was around, no Makkee was expected to do anything except wait for orders.

  Twisted with cramp, Pete cried aloud. He had faced this agony on my behalf, this man I’d once called a defeatist.

  Drahk motioned towards the single chair at the desk. “Sit there, Magellan. People leaping constantly at one’s throat tend to disturb the flow of conversa
tion.”

  I obeyed silently. Drahk said something to the two nameless Makkees. They went and returned with lengths of nylon cord. They bound my wrists to the chair’s arms and my ankles to its legs. Then they hog-tied Pete.

  Meantime, Drahk and Willoughby were whispering sibilantly by the control panel. They were dividing their attention between us and the TV screens. The changing patterns were obviously conveying sense to them. Whatever the messages, Drahk made no attempt to answer them. He went to the window, peered at the huge flying saucer still reposing on the wide lawn. His expression was as wooden as ever but I sensed he wasn’t entirely happy.

  I studied the screens. Gerry Cross had realized he was wandering down hill and therefore away from the crest where I’d told him the Makkees’ house was. He had about-faced and was coming uphill on the road that passed this house.

  Unknown to him, five of his men, hands linked, were slowly mounting the slope from another direction, which would bring them to the bottom of the garden behind the house. I wondered if they would let the fence there divert them. And if it didn’t, and they came on, the Makkees would be waiting for them.

  Rescue was a slight prospect. More hopeful to me, as I regarded Drahk, were the faint but detectable signs of his unease.

  I suddenly said, “My men are considerably nearer than your reinforcements, aren’t they?”

  It was a shot in the dark which he ignored. But Willoughby shrilled, “Your men can do nothing, Magellan, even though there are only four of us left—”

  “Be quiet!” snapped Drahk, rounding on him and making the mistake himself of speaking in English.

  I smiled grimly. “So Prospero wiped out your vanguard.”

  Drahk came across to me, ray gun uplifted. I tried to brace myself to take the rays. But he changed his mind and just stared at me. As I was sitting, his eyes were on a level with mine. The direct gaze was certainly hypnotic. I had to resist that, instead.