Queer, lonely, self-isolated soul, she’d got to know me through these brash and rash journals.
On the last page she’d written, “It’s 2 a.m. and I’m just going to put out the light and lay and think of you—and if I’m lucky, dream of you—fighting your way back to London. Every morning I wake up and hope the night’s battle has brought you nearer. We’ve got such a lot in common, Charlie boy, we’ll talk for a week nonstop when you get here. And I know you’re going to get here, because I know you now. You always get what you want, by fair means or foul. I’m hoping you’ll want me, for I want you. Good night, darling.”
Soberly, I turned off the light and stared into the darkness. Good night, darling. I always get what I want. That’s good for a laugh—so why aren’t I laughing? I feel like crying into my pillow like a kid.
“Drahk,” I said aloud to the night, “I’m coming after you, wherever you’ve gone. And Sarah says I always get what I want. Do you remember Sarah? I’m going to make sure you remember Sarah.”
PART FOUR
Chapter 9
In the morning I awakened with no clear idea of where I was, but a perfectly clear idea of what I had to do. My subconscious dreams, building on memory, had taken care of it. Again I’d lived through Captain Madden’s story of Prospero and Moble Island, and my imagination had taken it from there.
There was immediate and necessary work to do in London. A lot had to be laid on the line. But when duty was served, my emotional needs would get the attention they cried out for. I would set off on the trail of vengeance, knowing it would be a long one, knowing that the rest of my Me must be dedicated to it, if need be. Or else my life would be a story abandoned in the middle, and so a failure.
For a week I worked like fury night and day. That, too, was a kind of anaesthetic.
In default of an elected ruling body, we flung together a caretaker government. I was appointed Director, and spent half of each day at the visaphone communicating with other new-fledged governments. First, we worked to restore some order to the world, and having achieved a measure of it, agreed on a policy of calculated disorder.
The idea was to make Earth permanently unattractive to Makkees. They were gristle-tough and pitiless of soul but soft physically. The comforts of automation were as necessary to their way of life as electricity on tap had become to our world.
So a worldwide plan of taking apart the web of Goliath was put in hand. Decentralization was the aim. Standardization had all but caused our downfall. Henceforth it was out.
Everything was to become local and self-contained, a cellular society. Each cell had to create its own source of power. Systems had to be various, so that no nationwide hookup could be easy again. We had to learn to live without central heating. That deprivation alone would make Earth a kind of hell for Makkees.
At first, anyhow, it wasn’t going to be all that pleasant for us. But man was still young enough to be adaptable. The Makkees were an ancient race, set in their pampered ways, like very old people who’d been spoiled all their lives. They couldn’t take it. All Makkees weren’t as resilient as Drahk; he was an exception, which was why he’d won high rank.
I didn’t wait around for him to come back. As soon as the new world disorder had begun its planned course, I delegated a lot of authority and set out for Cornwall. The journey was a foretaste of things to come, for our demolition squads had already been over this ground in the wake of the long battle to London.
I started out with Gerry in the old Rolls. We left Pete in London, absorbed in the mysteries of Uvova. It came as a surprise to me to learn of Pete’s interest in electronics. I’d thought all artists were too vague for the exact sciences. But, years before, a critic surveying Pete’s abstract designs, said, “Wave motions—nothing but wave motions. You should have been a goddam physicist.”
And Pete told me “You know, he was right. That’s my kind of mind. That stuff comes easy to me. But because painting was more difficult, I thought it was more important. Perhaps it is. But after this I stick to what I can do.”
A tire blew on Salisbury Plain. The car swerved into a signpost. The world-famous shape of its radiator became totally unrecognizable. It would take a week to repair, if the job were possible these days.
I bit my lip (I’d already bitten my tongue) and said to Gerry, “We’ll have to walk to the nearest monorail station.”
He answered muffledly through the bloody handkerchief over his nose, “Five miles, at a guess.”
Between that station and Merthavin we had to change trains six times. That was the way it was going to be now.
We came to Merthavin around midday. The sunlight was glancing off the windows of the fishermen’s cottages which stared out at the Atlantic—and at the tiny point jutting from the rollers four miles out—Moble Island.
We lunched at the Piskie House, now reverted to the tavern pretty much as Madden and Brewster had known it. I thought of them constantly, and made inquiries about Pam and Arthur Coney. I had hoped to meet them, but they had never returned to Merthavin. Someone said they’d settled in Bath.
In the afternoon we hired a motor launch and cruised out to the island. As we neared the beach we saw Prospero’s weirdly mobile chair standing seat-deep in the surf. I grounded the launch alongside it. We both heaved at the chair, but the wet sand kept its grip on the sunken base. The chair was sun-blistered and otherwise weathered and obviously had been in the open for some time.
“He can’t get around without that chair, Gerry,” I said.
“According to Uvova, he can’t get around anyhow, old man. He’s dead.”
“Probably. But where’s the body?”
“Washed away, by the looks of it.”
I said, pointing, “From Madden’s description, his den should be just over there.”
I led the way, and was proven right. A large mossy rock was gaping open like a split bun. We’d brought torches, and needed them, for the power in there had been switched off. Prospero’s cell, with its mass of electronic apparatus, was as Madden had described it. On a desk we found a message on a long sheet of paper. It was in poorly formed block letters; possibly Prospero was unfamiliar with handwritten English.
It seemed to be addressed to the human race at large.
I think now you will drive the Makkees from your planet. I underestimated you.
Where I could, I helped your fight against the Makkees. I destroyed a hundred miles from this shore the big fleet of their ships flying here from North and South America. (This was the first we’d heard about that.)
But the Makkees will always remain your enemies. If they decide to attack again, they will come in force. You have
fighting spirit but your science is too primitive; it cannot save you.
I shan’t be here to help you, for my heart stopped beating an hour ago. In your physiological terms, I am dead. And in truth I am. My consciousness is almost dispersed. But it has been in existence for a long time—a whole epoch, by your standards—and the sheer inertia and habit of thought temporarily survives the ceasing of the bloodstream. I am thinking in my nerves and can still command their function.
But this residual mind-power is steadily weakening. Soon I shall become mentally a child again, then a mere babe. Then will follow the falling apart of the last neural patterns, until Prospero will be nothing but a billion random motions among, and indistinguishable from, countless other random motions.
But something of my mind will remain here tangibly—the machines I have created. I bequeath them to you. Master the principles behind them—particularly the spaceship—and the Makkees can never conquer you. Perhaps my judgment is affected by my condition, but I do not dismiss the possibility that before the history of your still young race is closed, you may even conquer the Makkees.
As a measure of aid, I began writing for you a manual covering the operation and navigation of the spaceship. But it is a complex matter and impossible to render simply. Death is taking me before that work i
s half completed. You must use your brains to finish it; mine is no longer capable.
My last movements will be those of a child swimming in the sea he had loved as a babe. I was born in water and wish to end the way I began.
There was no expression of farewell, no signature. The last three paragraphs were almost illegible. The badly shaped letters zigzagged across the paper.
I imagined Prospero then gliding from his hideout for the last time, down to his beloved sea—and final dissolution.
I left Gerry still deciphering the document by torchlight while I explored further. Beyond the cell was a tunnel leading into a great cavern. And there was the spaceship.
So far as I recalled, even Madden and Brewster had not been permitted to see it. Old Cornelius had seen it long ago as a ball of white fire at Some stage of its matter-energy transition. But almost certainly I was the first human being to see it at rest.
It was unimpressive. Just an iron-hued sphere, looking as dull and solid as a cannon ball. I’m told that the atom bombs of old looked dull and solid.
I walked around to the other side of it and saw that it was far from solid. There was a sizeable open door and a ramp to it. The shell was incredibly thin; the thing was little more than a rigid bubble. Prospero had used it as a one-man ship, but he was a giant. There was room for half-a-dozen small men like myself.
I flashed my torch over the strange controls. This is it, I thought. This is what I came here to find. This, if its secrets could be learned, could be my instrument to track down Drahk wherever in the wide universe he might be.
Hate and distress returned. I became emotional and melodramatic.
I said in a fierce whisper, “I take possession of this ship and name it the Revenge.”
Detachedly now, I see the subconscious links of association. The Revenge was Sir Francis Drake’s little ship, in which he set out against the huge invading Armada. Drake was the first Englishman to sail through the Strait of Magellan. Drake and Drahk…
But at the time I was conscious only of my consuming ache for revenge. And it seemed to me then it was in sight.
A whole decade later I stood in that same spot and still the Revenge hadn’t sailed. It hadn’t budged an inch.
I’d learned that scientific research is geared to a somewhat slower pace than melodrama. Pete Butler provided the right perspective. After endless irritating delays, I contacted him from Merthavin via a dozen buzzing visaphone ex-changes^the picture was dim and flickering—and told him to forget Uvova for a while and come down and sort out the spaceship. I described it to him and read out bits from Prospero’s manual, which were meaningless to me.
He arrived at Merthavin eventually with a whole gaggle of scientists, theoretical and practical, headed by Gilbert Nunn, the best all-rounder in the country—atomic physicist, mathematician, cybemetician, engineer, and coward. They spent three days going over things, and then Pete came to me with their report.
“Right,” I said, “when do we take off?”
“In anything from five to ten years. Maybe more.”
“You’re not serious?”
“Look, Charles, half the instructions are missing, and it’s not a kid’s toy. It’s a damn sight more complicated than Uvova, but the real difference is that we know the laws by which Uvova works but hardly anything of the laws governing this thing. We’ve got to probe a new realm of physics before we can write the other half of the book.”
I felt like a racing car at full pelt suddenly taken out of gear. There was a sickening sense of anticlimax.
Pete flicked over the pages of the report.
“I’m only an amateur scientist, so I can interpret this only amateurishly…”
I tried to attend to what he was saying. It seemed that it had long been known (but not by me) that electrons, tiny knots of energy, sometimes jumped from one orbit to another without taking any measurable time over the trip. It was as though an electron unknotted itself and the energy seeped across some timeless dimension and reformed itself in the same electron pattern in practically the same instant in quite another orbit.
Somehow, Prospero’s ship and all its contents could be transformed into pure energy, flow across the timeless dimension and reform itself at some different point in the space-time continuum. Any point, in fact. Distance was irrelevant in this dimension, and time, of course, nonexistent.
Prospero had claimed his science superior to that of the Makkees. The claim appeared genuine.
When Pete finished, I said, “I’m correct in assuming you need only pick the point in space you wish to reach, pre-set the navigation controls accordingly, push a button and you’re there—literally in no time?”
“In effect, yes. But—”
Then why the hell didn’t Prospero go home to die? He said he’d come here to die because there wasn’t time to return home. Yet you say his ship could have shot him home in no time.”
“I didn’t say that, Charles. But it could if he had been able to pinpoint the position of his home planet in the flux of the whole expanding cosmos. You’ve got to set some figures on the navigation dials, you’ve got to have some idea of distance and direction. In stellar distances a small error in direction could land you millions or even billions of miles wide of the target. You could become hopelessly lost. Like crossing a river by hopping moving ice floes, you’ve got to do it in short stages, stopping to calculate each hop. Prospero was 95,000 light-years from home. He’d come by a devious, wandering route. To return, he’d have needed to plot his course stage by stage, stopping every so many light-years to take fresh bearings. The Galaxy contains over a hundred thousand million stars. He would have had to stop hundreds of times. He was right; there wasn’t time.”
I was silent, accepting the fact I’d known from the first and hadn’t wanted to face. My chance of locating Drahk was infinitesimal.
Then I said, “Nunn’s the best, isn’t he?”
“The best.”
“Then I want you to stand over him with a whip until he can hand me a working manual of the ship that even I can understand. Press Button A, count to five, press Button B—that sort of thing.”
“Okay, Charles. Uvova is going to be an immense help, but even so… five, ten, fifteen years, maybe.”
“I’ll wait,” I said, grimly.
As I said, it took ten years. I filled them as far as I could with my own kind of work, helping to organize the cellular society.
Even in a decade, these cells fostered the seeds of new cultures. Necessity had forced on us a way of life promising infinite variety. In his own cell a man felt, and could be, significant. Formerly, he was faceless, nameless in the world’s multitude.
Communication between cells was always possible, but you had to make an effort; the only barrier was your own laziness. Travel could be healthy exercise, an aid to mens sana in corpore sano. In our small country, people rediscovered that they had feet, for walking or pedalling. In larger countries, there was more public transport, but it was still limited and disjointed.
Patience plus effort was the price to be paid for immunity from a Makkee take-over.
Patience, however, was never one of my virtues. As the years passed, I began to feel almost as much out of my element in this pattern of orderly disorder as any Makkee would be—though for different reasons.
In a world of live and let live, I had no opposition, no one to fight. And I was spoiling for a fight. I didn’t even have a woman to tangle with. No one could take Sarah’s place in my heart.
Every dawn I would find myself hoping this would be the day Drahk came for me, and that overriding issue would be settled one way or another. But the Makkee time scale was not mine. Tomorrow to Drahk could mean half a hundred years hence. I could die of old age before he came.
I spent more and more time on Moble Island. Had I a scientific mind, it could have been exciting. The research was mostly theoretical, and what was practical was largely dull; the calibration of dials and the instrumental checki
ng of circuits. Nothing visually stimulating.
All the same, constant progress was being made.
Pete Butler had to commute between Cornwall and Hampstead, collecting data and taking it to feed to Uvova. I made an exception in his case and let him have a fast helicopter. At times when new data was in short supply, Pete continued his own research into the multiform purposes of Uvova. I remember his delight at the discovery that it could be used as a translating machine. This aspect was to prove more useful to my purpose than either of us could have foreseen.
One day in the tenth year, Gerry and I were sitting on the beach lethargically throwing stones into the sea when Pete came looking for us. He was trying not to hurry and betray his excitement.
“We’ve just got the last answer, Charles.”
I felt myself coming alive. “You mean you know what makes the spaceship tick?”
“Yes. The answers are as simple as BCA.”
“Don’t you mean ABC, old chap?” asked Gerry.
“No. They’ll be as simple as ABC when we learn the correct sequence.”
“Which you haven’t as yet?” My hope began to dim.
“Not yet, Charles, but we shall. It’s this way. Suppose we were unfamiliar with cars and were trying to discover how to drive your old Rolls. We’ve learned that the combustion of gasoline in a closed chamber is the driving force. What we’re chasing now is the Otto Cycle, the sequence of control. Once we’ve got that, the transmission system and the use of gears, throttle, clutch, brakes, requires only straightforward deduction, aided by Prospero’s handbook—what there is of it.
“The next step is to try to feed Uvova the questions in the right order. When we succeed, we’ll get the answers in the correct sequence. ABCDEF instead of BCAFDE. That shouldn’t take long. All the real donkey work is over, thanks to old Nunn. I’m flying him to London this afternoon. Together we’ll keep feeding Uvova until the thing’s so sick it’ll throw up your manual, Charles.”
“Fine,” I said.
The Automated Goliath Page 11