"Action?" Mittich asked, fearing the worst.
"Of a sort--preparatory." The Chancellor studied the teleview screen
and once more directed the gunners:
"I'm designating a target circle on one of those peaks down there. You
may fire at will."
He touched a button and a green halo flared on the screen. He adjusted
it to encompass the surface prominence he had in mind. The ship
shuddered as the gunner punched his firing stud.
Mittich watched the surface erupt in a brilliant display of angry
energy--a thousand kilometers off target.
The Chancellor received the fire control officer's apology, together
with a request for permission to try again. The latter he denied.
"They evidently need the practice," Kavula advised.
The Chancellor fumed at his pilot's insolence. "They'll do better at
close range," he promised. "Meanwhile, I want this ship stripped for
action. I've reached my decision. One close pass is all it should take.
We strike after sunup."
Desperately, Mittich hurried over and swung his small arms imploringly.
"You can't do this thing!"
"Oh, quit being such a floundering minnow! Nothing's going to happen.
They're quite defenseless, I'm convinced."
"If that's the case, then you are under injunction of the Curule
Assembly to make peaceful contact!"
"Drown peaceful contact!" the Chancellor swore. "I'm supposed to
exercise my judgment out here!"
"But--"
"Flotsam! There will be no peace. If that's what the aliens wanted,
they wouldn't have come out here in the first place. We are going to
blast them. And from here we'll go on!"
"Go on?" Mittich repeated cautiously. "Where?"
Vrausot's eyes glazed over and his disarray of teeth were exposed to
the gums as he paced the deck and beat his arms against his side in a
fit of frantic expectation.
"We know where their relay base is," he explained. "We'll strike that
next! Then, capitalizing on the element of surprise, we'll continue to
their World of Origin and destroy it outright. On the way back we'll
probably knock out one or two other planets."
He turned on a dumfounded Mittich. "The war--if there is to be
one--will be short. We'll have only to return to the Tzarean Shoal and
muster a fleet before we wipe out the rest of their civilization. And
once again ours will be the glory of conquest--such as we have not
experienced in, oh, how many millennia?"
V
Stewart woke up shouting the next morning.
Perhaps the nightmare had been brought on by his previous day's
experience with the telepuppets. For, in his dream, there had been the
OC, again spitting out deadly fire that missed the targets only by
inches before gouging great craters in the plain beyond.
Suddenly the master robot vanished, taking all the lesser automatons
with it. In the suspenseful stillness that followed, Stewart could only
stare in bewilderment at Carol and Randall.
Then it came--the blazing, naked light, together with the stentorian
roaring that filled the sky and shook every rock.
Terrified, he huddled with the other two, his eyes searching
desperately for some place to hide. But as he spotted each gaping
fissure, each yawning cave entrance that might offer concealment, it
too vanished. Until they were left with only a smooth, featureless
plain extending to infinity in all directions.
Eventually the mighty ships--hundreds of them, it seemed--landed. And
down debarkation ramps poured thousands of hideous Harpy-like forms,
their gigantic claws magnified in his fancy until they were even larger
than the bodies they supported and, by their sheer weight, made flight
impossible.
This vast army assembled before its ships in the center of the plain
and started forward.
But there was a blur of motion on the right and left extremities of
Stewart's field of vision and he watched great, gauzy curtains draw
together from opposite horizons, meeting directly in front of him. Like
dazzling auroral streamers, they hung from a rod located so high in the
stratosphere that it was lost in the blackness of space. Diaphanous
though the drapes were, they appeared to be adequate, as if through
some magical power, to hold back the horde of vicious Harpies on the
other side.
But even as Stewart shuddered with the thought of what would befall
Randall, Carol and himself should the almost intangible barrier fail,
the director charted forward and drew the curtains aside.
Instantly, the monstrous creatures poured through.
But in the next moment Randall was beside his bunk, shaking him awake
and regarding him quizzically.
* * * * *
Dismayed over the continued evidence of a lurking, inexplicable fear,
Stewart ate breakfast mostly in silence while he cast about for a
reasonable interpretation of the nightmare.
It was almost as though the auroral curtain represented a mental veil
that hid a horror-filled recess of his mind. The content of that
fissure--was it something he didn't want to face? Something he had
_intentionally_ hidden? Was it actually that Randall could, if he
desired, draw back the curtain? Why Randall?
He brought his cup to his lips and almost gagged on an icy bitterness.
Carol chided him for his abstraction, dumped the coffee into a disposal
slot and gave him a refill.
Randall slapped his thigh. "Well, we still have a telepuppet problem on
our hands."
Mortimer sat up sharply. "You're not going to fool around with those
damned things any more, are you?"
"Don't see how we can avoid it. We've got several days' repair work
on that subspace drive coil--_outside_ the ship. That's the only
way we can either get out of here or recover use of our long-range
transmitter. But I wouldn't want to turn my back on those puppets while
they're out of control."
"You won't catch _me_ out there again," McAllister vowed.
Randall went over to the external view screen and spent several minutes
scanning the sky, bright now with the dawning light of Aldebaran.
"You won't find the puppets up there," Stewart said, finally intolerant
of whatever phobia Randall might be pampering.
The director turned guiltily away from the screen. "Anybody have any
ideas on what we can do about those robots?"
Stewart went over to a second screen. "After having slept on the
problem, I think I might be able to contribute something."
He focused on the telepuppets, attending to their various exploratory
chores out on the plain. "Carol gave me an idea with something she said
yesterday. We may be able to solve our telepuppet worries within five
minutes' time."
"Bring the OC back under control?" The director arched his thick
brows. "How?"
"We might succeed in immobilizing it. That'll deprive the other puppets
of their source of power. Within a few hours their batteries will
drain and we'll be able to go to work on the OC without any possible
interference."
He indicated his hostile-atmosphere sheath slumped in a corner of the
compartment. "Won't need that. But I will have to have a deep-space
suit--heavily shielded against solar storm exposure. You have one
aboard, McAllister?"
The pilot nodded. "Standard equipment. But you'll think it weighs a
ton. It's designed for null-G use."
Carol's puzzlement drained away. "The suit's _metal_! Which means, as
far as the puppets are concerned, that it's _totemic_!"
"That's what I figure," Stewart said. "Wearing it may give me status as
one of the boys."
* * * * *
McAllister had been right. Against the relentless tug of gravity,
the armored suit felt as though it weighed not much less than a ton.
Laboriously, Stewart planted one thick-soled boot ahead of the other
and moved at a snail's pace across the difficult terrain.
Through a separation between two boulders he could see the telepuppet
team. The machines were hard at work, with the Operations Co-ordinator
majestically surveying its charges.
Stewart's legs strained under the great weight as he struggled over a
rise and stepped out upon the plain.
Pausing, he stared at the mike recessed in the inner curvature of his
helmet. It was dead and his resulting loss of voice contact made him
feel lonely and inadequate. But the suit was not equipped with radio,
since its wearer would normally be plugged into the ship's intercom
system through an anchor line.
Inching across the plain, he closed in on the puppet team. Thus far he
had not been noticed.
Cautiously, he skirted the knoll on which sat the Solar Plasma
Detector. Even now its boom-and-ball sensor was swinging around to
point toward a rising Aldebaran. He was certain he had passed in the
SPD's direct line of local sight. But it only ignored him.
Twenty paces farther he gave a wide berth to the Atmosphere Analyzer.
Here, too, he had to go directly in front of the thing's video sensor.
But the AA obliged by making no move toward him.
So far, so good. But he had approached only those robots which would
ordinarily show no interest in him, since he was neither celestial nor
gaseous. A minute later, however, when he was cleared through without
incident by an indifferent Mineral Analyzer, he was certain his totemic
qualifications would bring him to his objective without picking up a
challenge along the way.
He crested a rise, trudged between the Astronomical Data Collector and
the Seismometer and, more certain of his immunity, stepped over the
crablike Micro-organism Collector and Analyzer.
Then he stood hesitatingly before the master robot.
Ports ablaze with luminous evidence of faultless power generation, the
huge automaton ignored him. Shorn of its laser intensifier, it appeared
somewhat pathetic. But Stewart was inclined to waste no sympathy. It
stood swinging its upper command section, first right, then left, to
compensate for loss of two video sensors. But he was more interested
in the underslung, recessed compartment whose outline he could now
see. He had only to flip open the lid and throw the switch in order to
deactivate the OC.
Suddenly the thing reacted to his presence. One of its lenses swept
over him, stopped, swung back, overcorrected, then steadied. And he
couldn't guess what analytical criteria were being applied in the
general assessment.
The robot raised its vise-equipped appendage. A hostile gesture?
Defensive move? Or merely one of the symbols of communication it had
devised during its independent reign?
There was swift movement in the periphery of Stewart's vision and,
instinctively, he dropped to the ground as a great clanking form swept
past him.
Rolling over, he saw it was the Mineral Analyzer, boring in for another
attack. The six-legged automaton drew up in front of the OC and swung
its stout drill head in a sweeping arc.
He ducked under the gleaming neck and watched it crash into the bigger
machine's lower section, sending it bouncing rearward on stumpy legs.
The master robot lashed back, slashing a gaping slit in the MA's neck.
Into this fury of swinging appendages Stewart decided he would have
to hurl himself if he expected to immobilize the telepuppet team. As
unpredictable as the robots were, he might never get this close to the
master automaton again.
The flow of battle, however, made his decision unnecessary. For the
grappling machines were now sweeping over the spot where he lay and a
huge pedal pad barely missed him as it thudded down.
For a fleeting instant, the recessed compartment was immediately above
his head. Overcoming the ponderous weight of his mailed arm, he reached
up and flicked open the lid. At the same time he managed to get a
finger on and throw the switch.
One final kick by the OC hurled him from beneath the tons of metal.
Meanwhile, the thing's thrashing vise caught the MA broadside and
sent it flailing backward. Then the master puppet toppled over like
a towering tree being felled by an ancient woodsman's chain saw. The
ground trembled violently with the impact.
Stewart rose and wiped dust from his helmet's view plate.
The monstrous robot lay motionless, darkened ports evidencing its
lifelessness. Close by, the Mineral Analyzer stumbled around in looping
circles, one of its gyros atilt. The other puppets continued their
work, unaware that when all stored energy was depleted there would be
no opportunity to recharge their batteries.
Exhausted, his face filmed with perspiration and his hip aching beneath
the dent the big machine had kicked in his armor, Stewart headed
back for the ship. But his release from urgency lightened his steps
somewhat. Now there would be little to do but wait until the lesser
puppets ran out of power.
* * * * *
An automatic erector leveled Minnie's tilted gyro. Another emergency
maintenance circuit cut in and compensated for precession. Finally her
sense of balance was restored.
Rationalization circuits reasoned out the precise maneuver necessary to
bring her upright and she rose upon her motor appendages, expecting at
any moment to be bludgeoned again by Bigboss' vise.
Slowly she turned and sent her restricted field of vision sweeping
across the ground. And her video lens came to focus on--
Bigboss!
In a most unusual position! And--_motionless_!
He was stretched out on the ground, extensible vise limp as it lay half
covered by the soil into which it had dug. One of his antennae was
crumpled beneath him while the other was bent and twisted. Hardly able
to accept as valid the visual data she was receiving, she transmitted
an unwarranted "please-verify-that-instruction" impulse at low volume.
Her evaluation circuit was thrown almost into a frenzy when there was
no response. At maximum gain, she repeated the signal.
_Still_ no response!
Cautiously, she went forward and stood over the Supreme Being. She
lowered her bitless drill head and nudged one of his motor appendages.
Drawing away, she watched it swing back and forth in smaller and
smaller arcs until it finally came to rest.
Then she went into a limited ecstasy of reaction. She whirled around in
circles until she became afraid she would tilt another gyro. She reared
up on her two posterior appendages and thumped back upon the ground.
She swung her drill head up and down, back and forth, around. Through
her rear slot she exhausted all the sludge from her analyzing chambers.
She had won! She had supplanted Bigboss!
She had climbed to the top rung of the ladder!
And now She was Supreme Being!
That she had been able to succeed, despite Bigboss' overwhelming
superiority, was a datum so questionable that she almost decided to
reject it before storing it away.
* * * * *
Minnie went into another triumphant dance, but suddenly came to a rigid
halt. Her head held high and Her lens aimed in the direction of the
non-Totemic mobile that was withdrawing toward its needle.
There was something _wrong_ in Her Universe! It was not at all as it
had been before She had conquered the Supreme Being!
Tensely, She recalled for review impressions only recently implanted on
Her drums. And she recognized immediately what was missing.
The telemetric chatter of all the workers was gone! Nor could she
detect the constant exchange of directive and acknowledgment that had
always flowed ceaselessly between Bigboss and each of the workers. Yet,
all the analyzers were there, continuing their chores as though nothing
had happened.
Apprehensive now, she assigned her meager rationalization capacity to
the task of deducing the reasons behind the startling change. And many
sine wave peaks passed before the judgment was handed back up to her
main circuits for storage on a memory drum:
Bigboss had _justifiably_ been the Supreme Being! For He had, indeed,
been Supreme. The workers had voices, of course. But they were isolated
voices that could be heard by other members of the clan only because
they were passed along by Bigboss.
Minnie's drill head sagged until it rested on the ground.
She was Supreme Being now. But it was only a hollow distinction. For
she had fallen heir to none of Bigboss' authority. That authority had
been lost forever in the neutralization of charges which had rendered
the former Omnipotent One impotent.
What _had_ she done? How could she have been so irrational? Why hadn't
she more thoroughly evaluated the consequences of her forced ascendancy?
More for consolation than for any other reason, she transmitted a
desperate "where-are-you?" impulse to Screw Worm.
The directional signals that returned brought with them a great sense
of balance to the circuits in her PM&R pack. She was not, after all,
alone! She still held the supplemental function of supervision over her
sole helper!
She watched Worm approach, kicking up clouds of dust with the jets
that propelled him across the ground on his rolling threads. When
he arrived, she sent him a "hold-everything" signal. As he remained
motionless before her, she lowered her drill head until she could sense
the slight change in capacitance values that indicated physical contact
with him.
No, even though she had destroyed the Supreme Being and, by that
action, had forever shut herself off from the other members of the
clan, she was not alone. She still had her Worm!
But within the limits of those circumstances, she resolved suddenly,
she would try to _act_ like a Supreme Being!
She drew herself upright and remained rigid while she drove her
rationalization circuits at a furious pace.
How _did_ an Omnipotent One act?
Judging from Bigboss' behavior, a Lord or Mistress of All Creation
should go about destroying non-Totemic pretenders.
Was that what _She_ should do?
Realizing the decision would require much more concentration, she
retired from the site of operations to consider all the factors.
* * * * *
Halfway back to the _Photon_, Stewart paused and leaned against a
boulder, exhausted. The muscles in his legs were flaccid from lifting
the great weight of hermetically sealed plating with each step. Now he
fully understood that the suit was _not_ made for walking.
Ahead, the ship was a beckoning silvery pencil that glittered in the
harsh, golden light of Aldebaran and cast its blocks-long shadow on
strange, bare soil and rocks.
Then he saw it--the elongated, symmetrical shape that seemed to spring
up from beyond the horizon and expand explosively as he watched in
dismay.
It was _a ship_--the likes of which he had never seen before! Or, then
again--
Bewildered, afraid, he could only stand there trying desperately to
pierce the veil in his mind, to equate this incredible thing that was
happening now to the inexpressible fear he had felt for weeks.
Meanwhile, the strange ship, gliding smoothly in its horizontal
attitude that gave evidence of some highly developed type of
antigravity drive, surged forward. Its smooth, dark under-surface,
he could see, was broken by twin rows of open ports that extended
from bow to stern on either side. And deep within those circular
recesses bristled scores of elongated metal structures that could only
be--_linear intensifiers for laser weapons!_
Then Stewart realized this could only be another nightmare and he
sickened at the horrible prospect of being drawn further into the
dream. The ship would land, of course, and out of its hatches would
pour streams of vengeful, grotesque Harpies.
But, instead, the sky was lashed by scores of fierce, dazzling beams
that streaked from the vessel as it passed overhead.
And he sensed that this was no nightmare, no mere symbolic expression
of the vague dread that had harassed his thoughts all along. This was
_real_! This was actually happening!
Bolt after bolt rammed down from the open ports, scorching the ground,
blasting great holes in solid rock formations, leveling hills, raking
huge furrows where before there had been only level soil.
One of the laser beams--perhaps the fiftieth or sixtieth--took the nose
section off the _Photon_, leaving only jagged metal as an undignified
crown marring its architectural integrity. Another found its mark too,
annihilating one of the helpless ship's hydraulic fins and tearing a
gaping hole in its engine section. The _Photon_ tilted precariously,
but somehow managed to remain upright.
Then the assaulting vessel was gone, swallowed from the sky by the
ridge of hills over which it had passed in completing its low-altitude
sweep.
Minute followed minute in the breathless silence that punctuated the
impossible attack. Stewart knew he should be pushing on to the _Photon_
to see if Carol and the others had happened to be in the demolished
nose section.
But he only stood there, paralyzed. For, as he looked back on the
unbelievable action, he realized that the vicious attack had, after
all, _come as no surprise to him_!
He had expected it all along!
_That_ must have been the nameless fear lurking behind a curtain in his
mind. And abruptly he knew with a certainty that expectation of this
assault had been the basis of his indescribable apprehension.
He had _known_ that a ship--_an alien vessel_--would be here waiting
for them!
And the _Photon's_ crew would be taken all the more off guard because
it was incredible, in the first place, that the galaxy might have
spawned two intelligent, star-seeking races within the same sector.
But, if he had had that knowledge, how could he have _forgotten_
anything so crucially important?