His voice rose to unwonted passion. "What more can we desire? Shelter? We have it. Food? At the asking. Leisure? All our time. Luxuries? Name any desire and the Machines will gratify it. Everything that our uncivilized, barbarous ancestors yearned for and deemed unachievable. They who worked by the sweat of their brows and the wearied straining of their backs for a hundredth of what we possess today without effort; who lived in a world of suffering and disease and torture, who died before they had lived, who agonized for what they never attained, who were filled with vile thoughts and viler emotions—hate, envy, lust, greed—terrible things that you can never fully appreciate.
"Wars there were, in which man slew man and laughed at him in the doing, vast cataclysms of nature which crushed him, pounded him to pieces. Hunger assailed his wretched stomach, thirst his soul. Now"—Sem's voice took on a whispered longing—"we have peace, comfort, order, security."
FRAN was not moved, however. "That's just it, Sem 15. We have—everything. Everything—and nothing. We have physical comforts—a superfluity of them—and they are meaningless. Life has become a gray blank. We are dead—and do not know it. We are helpless wards of the Machines. We are their slaves. Without them we die. What profit is there, what incentive remains for us? Life is a struggle, a continual striving for something higher, nobler. Evolution taught us that; without that constant struggle we would still be slimy bits of protoplasm crawling along a slimy shore. We have reached the peaks of civilization, and are frustrated.
"There is no other way but down. With all our perfect, too-perfect state, we are immeasurably inferior to that brutal, lustful, bloodthirsty primitive you have depicted. He at least strove upward and onward, groping in his dim way for something higher, something just beyond his reach. When he starved, he lived; when he struggled with a hostile nature for the bare means of subsistence, he lived. When his few years were over, he died, but not in vain. The wine of life had been in his veins; his offspring groped still farther. And that, Sem 15, is what I intend to introduce into the world again."
"It is back to the brute," Sem cried in shaken tones.
"No," Fran exulted. "It is a breaking of our chains. Chance, the ruling, benevolent spirit of the universe, which we have unwisely eliminated, will once more come into its own." He swung his hand in a wide gesture toward the crystal sphere. "This—this will do it. Electrons, protons, neutrons, positrons, matter of which they are component parts, will widen their range of probability. They may be here, they may be there. No one will know; no one, not even the Statistics Machine, will be able to calculate their whereabouts. No longer will life be safe, sane and monotonous; the future, the present, perhaps the past, will be totally unpredictable, obeying no laws except those of chance; wildly illogical, dangerous.
"Thereby will mankind regain his rightful heritage. Nature will once more prove inimical, to be breasted, fought, conquered. Strange and terrible combinations will lurk in every corner; death will be part of our daily burden. Man will live dangerously, die gloriously. It is worth it."
Vic 21 shrank back half afraid of this stranger who had been his friend. He shrank, yet he was fascinated. Fire surged through his veins, made his heart pound with breathless emotion. Sem 15 seemed suddenly a shrunken old man. His thousand years were an insupportable weight. He bowed his head in resignation. "So be it," he mumbled.
"Back! Both of you!" Fran said. "I accept full responsibility for what I am about to do. There are two stages possible. The first affects only a radius of ten feet around the Machine. The second"—he shrugged his shoulders slightly, "the vista, the Sector, the earth, the universe perhaps—I do not know. I shall first experiment upon myself."
They moved slowly out of the charmed circle, staring, finding breathing suddenly uncomfortable. That crystal hollow with the shining metal within seemed a thing of dread, ominous in its very quiescence. Fran 19 made a queer, stiff little gesture of farewell. He did not use the greeting signal. Then his long fingers, now steady, closed on the knob, twisted.
Blue flame sheeted through the filaments. A metal governor bobbed up and down. Tiny balls whirled in smooth, noiseless revolutions. A hissing, crackling sound. The pungent odor of ozone. Involuntarily, Vic 21 thrust a slim arm over his head, as if to ward off a blow. Fran dropped nerveless fingers to his side. His body was tense, rigid. His face was white with agonized strain. That very instant he might whiff into atomic ruin.
The blue flame continued to flare, the balls to revolve, the governor to bob. Seconds passed, minutes. Nothing happened. No sign of any change, no sign of anything abnormal. Fran's tight fists slowly opened. Bewilderment crept into his eyes. Vic let his shielding arm down. Sem straightened a bit; a thin smile played around his half-hidden lips.
Fran saw that smile. A new emotion surged through him. The fear of ridicule. Anger too—at this preposterous Machine he had toiled over.
"You wait," he said thickly. "The Machine's all right. It's just—it's just the limits I tried to place on it. If I open her wide, as far as she will go—"
He turned the second knob. His voice held a confident ring, but inwardly he knew that it was a failure. It would not, could not work.
A little brighter flare, a tense surge of power that set every nerve tingling. But that was all. Sem said almost kindly: "Turn it off, Fran. The frontiers of science are still closed. It is better so."
Fran groped blindly with both hands. The hot tears scalded his eyes. He was crying with shame and humiliation. Something man hadn't done for centuries. That look in Vic's eyes—of scorn, of— His fingers reached for the knob.
IV.
THE HISSING, crackling sound cut off sharply. The blue glow blanked out with startling suddenness. Fran's hand went forward, forward, and met nothing. His eyes were still blurred with unaccustomed tears. But behind him, from Sem and Vic, came quick, frightened cries.
Fran straightened unsteadily, wiped his vision clear with the soft synthetic stuff of his tunic. He spun around in surprise, raked the room with wide-open eyes.
"My Machine!" he demanded thickly. "Where is it?" Vic was up against the farther wall, crouching, panting.
"It was there," he screamed, "right under our eyes. Then—then—it seemed to puff out of existence."
They searched then. But nowhere was there any sign or mark of the Machine. It was as though it had never been, as if the entire affair had been a dream, a hallucination from which they had just awakened. Even the metal cradle that had held the globe rigid and firm was gone.
Sem 15 raised a patriarchal arm, rested it on Fran's trembling shoulder.
"Fran 19," he said with respect, "you are a mere youth, but you have widened the boundaries of knowledge; you have done what you set out to do."
Fran lifted his head incredulously. "You mean—you think—" He gasped.
"I know," the old man said. "Your Machine worked. It enlarged the wave areas of electrons. It created new probabilities of the positions of those electrons."
Fran was shaking. His thoughts were still not coherent. "Then what—"
"Just this," Sem interrupted. "For some reason, as yet unknown, the Ma-chine acted only on itself. It was its own waves of probability that were affected. The Machine has taken another position in that area. It may, as you remarked before, be just outside; it may be in a distant Sector; it may even be in another galaxy."
Involuntarily all three turned to the crystal walls of the vista. Everything was peaceful as before, as if no world-shaking experiment had just taken place. The tempered rays of the sun bathed the Sector in its uniform glow; a few inhabitants soared at different levels; far off, a Carrier Machine was bringing a cargo to the City of the Machines. Nothing else. No sign of the crystal sphere.
Sem spoke with measurable relief. "You have won, Fran, and I am glad." His halting voice deepened. "But I am more happy that it turned out the way it did. We have been saved from terrible catastrophe." He shuddered. "Who knows what might have happened?"
Vic said softly: "Forgive
me, Fran, for doubting you. It—it was miraculous. You are a great man. But it is better so."
Fran's ego healed and expanded under their praise. It was good to hear such things. Shame sloughed off like an outworn garment. Now he could face his fellows proudly. He had accomplished the impossible. He had not been content with mere existence; he had toiled; he had achieved; more, he had suffered strange new emotions.
Aloud he said in a disappointed tone: "I am sorry it did not work the way it should. Perhaps a filament was bent and forced the step-up surge into a circumscribed circle." But inwardly he was very glad.
His eyes had been opened. That swift, unforeseen vanishment of the Machine had frightened him, left him trembling in every limb. Suppose the globe had worked as he had intended. Suppose his waves of probability had extended to the outer reaches of space; suppose he had shifted without warning into the blazing maw of the sun, into the unutterable cold of interstellar emptiness. Suppose—
All his fine, glittering theories fell from him. He had confronted the inscrutable face of reality and he was afraid. Adventure, chance, glorious annihilation, struggle, suffering—empty phrases. He clung to the peace, safety and security of their uneventful existence with a certain desperation. He had been saved from himself.
He sank gratefully upon a couch. His voice was a monosyllabic whisper. He sighed relief.
"Warm—safe!" he muttered drowsily and fell asleep. So did Sem and Vic. They were exhausted. The Feeding Machines came and injected warm nutriment. They did not hear or feel. The Tending Machines transported them gently into the quiet.
But out in space, five hundred miles above the surface of the earth, a new planetoid whirled in ceaseless flight. A tiny crystal sphere, holding in its hollow shell strange metal parts that glowed and revolved and bobbed. And sardonic laughter filled the universe.
THE THREE who had seen the Orb of Indeterminacy vanish came out of the quiet. The even tenor of existence flowed slowly on. Sem 15 and Vic 21 once more rested on their couches as Guardians of the Machines. Fran brooded in his vista, oddly uneasy. A vague restlessness pervaded him. Nothing had happened, nothing could happen now. Yet, somehow, his inner being had been disrupted. Perhaps, he thought, it would have been better if—
It was a small thing that happened first, a most unimportant event. A Cargo Machine from the mines of Sector 112 was two ounces shy in its hundred-ton load of bauxite. The Atom Smasher jerked momentarily in the smooth surge of its operation. It was geared to exact weights. But almost immediately the Compensator made the necessary adjustments, and the swift routine went on.
Two ounces in a hundred tons. An inconsiderable amount. Perhaps the Loading Machine at the mine had erred; perhaps particles of the crushed ore had spilled. Nothing at all. But such a discrepancy had never happened before.
The next item was more disturbing. Sector 87 reported the sudden, fantastic appearance of a human being within the very wall of a vista. Like a fly immersed in a lump of amber. His limbs were distorted, crushed. His face was a pulped agony. He was dead. The immensely strong vita-crystal showed a long, irregular crack, a slight bulging, as if enormous outward pressure had been exerted, as if two bodies had attempted to occupy the same space at once.
The Repair Machines hastened to the spot, excised the shattered stranger, rebuilt the wall to its pristine purity. But not before it had been seen by a passing human. Within seconds the Sector had disgorged its inhabitants. They swarmed to the disturbance; they chattered with tongues that were rusty from disuse; their cheeks flushed and their eyes sparkled. An unprecedented thing had occurred.
Almost at the same time a Tending Machine from Sector 32 reported in passionless pulses of ether to the Communications Board the inexplicable disappearance of its ward, Wil 16.
As the televised representation of the tragedy flashed on the screen of the Board, Vic twitched so violently that his Gravity Vanes thrust him almost to the dome.
"Great Heavens, Sem 15," he gasped on his hurried return, "Fran's invention did that!"
A little shiver passed over Sem; then his face was calm and immovable as before.
"Nonsense," he said slowly. "The sphere removed itself; it had no effect on anything outside. What has happened is an accident, some tiny filament that went wrong in a Gravity Cell unit and smashed the poor fellow against a vista. The Statistics Machine will make the necessary adjustments." But there was a strained unease in his eyes as he settled back to the couch.
Integrations poured out of the Calculator, tremendous mathematical phrases to take up the load of the new order of events, to equate them into the scheme of things. But nothing could be done. For simultaneously, overwhelmingly, from the far corners of the earth, came new reports. Sector after Sector flashed uncanny occurrences.
Then, suddenly, disaster struck home. Half a vista materialized in the clear atmosphere high over the City of the Machines, hung in momentary suspension, then fell with constantly accelerating force to the ground.
Vic uttered a hoarse cry of warning. The recumbent Guardians seemed paralyzed with fear. They gaped upward, unstirring. But Sem 15 had seen, and acted. The inertia of a thousand years swept off him like a cloak. His vanes catapulted him from his seat, sent him with tremendous acceleration straight for the huge round of the Gravity Distortor. This was the Machine that deflected the lines of gravity around the city when Cargo Flyers approached, routed them within range of the Magnetic Clamps. But now it was silent, unstirring even as the Guardians. Only through an impulse-beat from the swift-moving Cargo Flyer could it spring into automatic action.
Sem's hand clutched fiercely at the manual control. He yanked it down with a quick thrust. Already the down-rushing segment of building was almost upon the crystalline dome of the City. Tiny dots sprang away from its sides, darted swiftly through the air. Closer, closer, hurtled the crashing destruction. It filled the sky with its smooth-shorn section; it blazed with the friction of its passage. Contact, and the City with all its Machines, its human Guardians, would be pulverized into primal atoms.
Sem gave a great groan. He had been too late. Involuntarily he closed his eyes. There was a thin, scraping sound. Then a tremendous crash. The world was full of noise and confusion.
Shrill screams, then—silence. Sem opened his eyes unbelievingly. He was safe. So were the others. Outside, a blaze leaped sky-high, fell back. A long grooved scar showed over the crystal dome, where the falling vista had ploughed its way in the sudden swerve of deflected gravity. The Gravity Distorter had worked. Not so the Magnetic Plates. The momentum had been far too great for their calculated power.
Vic 21 was somehow at Sem's side. His body trembled as with ague, but his eyes were shining.
"Sem 15," he cried, "you are a hero."
Sem felt suddenly weak. He sank down on a convenient couch. But the blood raced furiously in his veins. His temples throbbed. The world was askew; danger had shown its dreadful face and barely been averted; peace and sarety were forever gone; death might inclose him any moment; outside men had fallen to flaming annihilation. Yet somehow his blood sang a strange, exultant refrain. He took a deep breath. Even the air seemed more vigorous. He had lived this one fierce moment. He had not known life before.
He bounded up from his couch of ease. Contempt flared in his eyes at those other elderly Guardians, younger all than he. Some had fainted; others were fear-bound to their couches. He was a different breed.
"Come, Vic 21," he said crisply, with new-found authority. "We are going to see Fran 19. There is no question that his Orb of Indeterminacy is functioning."
The youth followed with a new meekness. Discipline, authority, obedience had been reborn into the world!
FRAN 19 listened to their excited accounts with a deepening pallor. He had loosed this terrible engine upon the world; his was the blame. Already thousands had been crushed out of existence. The reports were accelerating now. Holes had yawned in the earth; cubic miles of ocean had overwhelmed all in their path in the interior prairie
s, on the high plateaus of what had once been the Gobi. Whole Sectors had been wiped out of existence, gone no one knew where.
The earth heaved and crumpled as massed matter assumed new positions of probability which coincided with still stable configurations deep within its bowels. Earthquakes spread endless destruction. Loose, masterless electrons shifted their probabilities in undreamed-of trillions of trillions, let loose X-rays, gamma rays, alpha rays, cosmic radiations, upon a groaning, suffering world.
The blanket of ionization was pierced in a hundred places. Winds sprang up, grew to hurricanes. Rain fell, sleet howled, snow came in thick, mantling drifts. The Weather Machines battled valiantly, but some had smashed, others had vanished. The unleashed forces of nature proved irresistible.
"We've got to find my Machine," Fran said with despairing determination.
"How?" Vic asked plaintively. He shivered in his thin synthetic stuffs. A cold rain lashed interminably against the vita-crystal walls. Clouds scudded over a furious sky. A vital part of the Sector's Weather Machine had disappeared. The Repair Machines were tirelessly at work to bridge the gap, but it would take at least a day.
Fran shook his head. "I don't know how—just yet. But there must be a way."
Sem 15's voice was a gusty bellow. His great wide beard whipped around his glowing features. He stood with firm legs spraddled. He did not seem to mind the cold, the damp.
"You'll do nothing of the kind," he roared. "You were right, Fran 19, and I was wrong. You have worked a miracle. This is life!" He tossed his arms wide. "This is living! Struggle, violence, man against nature. Who knows what comes next, who cares? One day like this is worth a hundred thousand of slow rot. Bah!" He spat gustily on the polished floor.
Then the building heaved violently beneath them. The heavens seemed to fall. They fell flat on their faces.
When they dragged themselves painfully to their feet, all was deathly silence. Even the rain had stopped. A strangely brilliant sun, untempered, unshorn, shone mockingly through a rift in ragged, fleeing storm clouds.
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