It was as gray as the sand-blown skies of Earth in every direction;
once past its artificial veil of luminescence, the machine-planet was
a colder, more sterile thing than the widest valley on the dark side
of the moon. His mind refused to believe what it knew to be true--that
the surface of the sphere was hard, unyielding metal, worked in some
gigantic factory on some impossible world to an almost frictionless
smoothness. After he touched down, Cragin had to keep his forward jets
checked in at almost ten times their normal landing thrust to bring the
SP-15 to a skittering halt.
Quickly he donned magnetic boots, space-helmet and suit, and buckled
two short-barrelled Krell guns around his waist. They were loose in his
holsters as he clattered toward the opening airlock of the Starwasp. He
opened up the suit's intercom.
"Just keep your hands at your sides."
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm here to do a job, not play Junior SP-man. If
you want to help me, I can use you. If not, just keep out of my way."
"Miss Griffin, I--" But Cragin let the words trail off because he knew
that for the first time in his life, he was out of his element. True,
he was in an unknown Space on an unknown sphere, as he'd been too many
times before to count--but this was somehow different. And Lin Griffin
knew more answers than he did. He thought about showing her the small
white rectangle of enamelite that Kirkholland had given him, but it
would make him more the fool. She knew what he was; she had not defied
his authority. She had not actually tried to evade him. She had simply
talked him into something and he didn't know what it was. Believing her
was his fault.
He followed her about a quarter mile over the smooth metal plain until
she stopped before a ragged mar that had been forcefully seared into
its surface by a dis-torch. Cragin saw what it was; it was a cross. The
girl paused a moment.
He had never seen anyone bow their head to pray before. He stood silent.
Finally all she said was, "Someday I'll make them tell me what they did
with him."
"All right. Let's get on with it. Where to now?"
"Not far."
It was only a hundred yards further that they stopped; this time the
sear in the hard metal was shapeless, not as deep as the one before and
obviously more hastily made. She fumbled in the pocket of her suit, and
by instinct, Cragin's hands fell lightly over the butts of his guns.
She produced a small, circular thing, pushed a catch on its side, and
placed it near the ragged burn.
"A vibrokey," she said matter of factly. "Something father devised.
You can find anything with it, once you know the object's vibration
pattern. And you can open anything with it. It experiments with all
possible combinations of magnitudes and speeds of vibrations, until it
simply hits the particular pattern needed. Without it I would never
have found the burns I left, and without it we wouldn't get in. Father
said it could shake a whole building down...."
Within seconds a panel less than a meter square slid back, and he and
the girl were beneath it. Then it was closing. There was a passageway
of some sort with a totally invisible source of illumination. Almost
like what he'd run across beneath the abandoned gold mines on Venus,
except....
"Now we have to move quickly," Lin interrupted his thoughts. "We have
very little time. They know we're here."
"I didn't hear--"
* * * * *
"They know. Down this way." There was another burn, this time on the
wall of the long, gently twisting tube. It hurt his eyes; it was like
walking down a huge, brightly-polished gun barrel, except that it was
not quite straight, and it was hard to tell just when it turned.
"Can you do what your father failed to do?" Cragin said. He asked only
to hear his own voice; it gave him at least a finger-hold on reality.
"Perhaps, if there is time. I did not waste those weeks in the
hospital."
A panel telescoped silently into itself. It opened on a cylindrical
chamber that had seemingly been made of a single sheet of metal, so
flawlessly had the banks of control boards which it contained been
built into it. The soft green-blue glow with which the chamber was
suffused was generated by an ingredient of the metal itself.
Circling the room at about shoulder height was a continuous row of
what were obviously telescreens; below and above them were the banks
of machines which were constructed according to an electro-mechanical
concept with which Cragin was totally unfamiliar. According to Earth
standards, it was so much junk, a distorted caricature of scientific
equipment.
And in the center of the chamber, just at eye level, was what Cragin
knew must be the "brain" of the entire assembly. A cylinder within a
cylinder, its inner workings thoroughly screened by a shifting yet
motionless opalescence through which he could not see. What lied in the
heart of the thing would be as completely beyond his knowledge as were
the visible machines over which it was master.
The girl watched him as his eyes remained fixed on it. "It's the power
source, as far as we could determine. For everything."
"For the entire planet."
"For the entire solar system."
"Sure, but not today."
"Not only for today, but for all time. Gravity, warp, everything. If
you don't believe me, try explaining the difference between Space as it
exists inside and outside the Barrier sometime. Those--" she gestured
toward the upper rows of machines, "control the power. When you know
how to manipulate them, you can move any body within the system at
will--in any direction, at any speed. The sun itself, if you want to."
"All right, I'll admit it's smooth," Cragin said. His hands went to his
hips, resting just an inch or so above the butts of his Krells.
"You're a fantastic man, Cragin."
"_I_--" and he laughed a little. "The trouble is, Miss Griffin, you
people just never know when to quit. The average Patrol officer may not
have much imagination; police never were supposed to have. It's true if
you spin a good enough yarn to begin with, you might get away with it.
But if you take it too far--well, it's sort of like overacting a part.
The audience just doesn't believe it any more. You might almost have
convinced me, I'll admit. But as it is--"
His words were falling uselessly about him. Lin Griffin had begun her
work near the largest of the telescreens. In a moment she had made
it come alive, and in a moment more Cragin was watching the entire
system. She made another adjustment, and he was watching Earth alone. A
second later, he was watching Earth, Venus and Mercury in their stolid
journeys around the sun.
Something that sounded very much like a comptometer was whining
somewhere, and he watched as the girl began working a three dimensional
orbit plot.
Cragin didn't interrupt. He knew that had he been sure that she was
trying desperately to bluff out a well-staged fake, he would have
stopped the whole performance but there was something in the way she
had turned from him, had simply started at her work.
"I could take a chance now," she said suddenly. "Do you think I should
take a chance, Cragin?" She looked full at him. Whatever she was
talking about, he knew she was not kidding.
"Chance? I'm just a dumb cop, remember?"
"I think I could move it. I think I've uncovered the secret of at least
Earth's orbit and axis control. It's the balance resultants that worry
me ... and if I were wrong--"
"According to you, Earth is a dead duck anyway, princess. So go ahead
and make a mistake. You fast-talked me into tailing you here. Or I
fast-talked myself. But according to your story, you can move the whole
damn system and make it grow little men with big ears right from this
cozy little spot. O.K. I'm watching."
The look in her eyes said she thought of him as something only a little
more than a Venusian crag lizard, and then as her hand moved toward
a console of circuit stabilizers, the look changed. Her hand stopped
where it was.
"You haven't been any help so far. I brought you because there was no
getting rid of you. But Patrolman, right now we've got trouble. Do your
duty or something--"
The voice simply said,
"You did not obey."
Cragin spun around, the Krell barrels coming level. But he found
himself completely helpless to press their switches. The mind that had
spoken within his own had taken control.
* * * * *
What Cragin saw was like a man. The similarity continued beyond the
shape and size of body; it went further to his dress, and there it
stepped backward in time. The wide shoulders supported a cloak of so
dark a hue that its outlines seemed to become a part of the space
around it; the large, perfectly proportioned body beneath them bore
with the same arrogance a uniform of deep scarlet mail which seemed to
shimmer although its wearer stood immobile. He wore no space-helmet,
nor any weapon that Cragin could see.
"You have tampered with a work of the Owners," the voice said, "and
have thereby broken their law." His cloak alone moved, as though
sheltering a statue in a pre-storm breeze.
"That takes a death penalty in your book I suppose," Cragin said.
"There is another kind?"
"It's a cinch you never heard of civilized society. If there's anything
we've got, it's lots of different penalties. But we've got our share of
death, too. Ask goldilocks here."
"Death is nothing new to the people of Earth," the girl said evenly.
"Nor are penalties."
"Yet you defied the warning."
"Because it might have meant life to us."
"Life and death are not yours to direct," the voice said. "That lies
solely with the Owners. That is universal."
"By what universal right?" The girl's voice rose to the pitch of half
anger, half contempt.
"How?" Cragin's voice was touched with the mixed overtones of curiosity
and incredulity.
"By their own right. Through methods of their own."
"That's a hell of a scientific answer," Cragin said.
"It is no answer at all!" the girl said. She took a step forward toward
the intruder, and there was high color in her cheeks. Only his cloak
moved. "Perhaps you control your own destinies, if that is what you
care to think. But not ours! For the use of your machinery, we will
gladly repay you, in any medium that you desire that we are capable of
supplying. But our role isn't that of intruder or wrong doer; it is
simply one of desperation. With your machines, our planet, its life,
might be saved. If you know of life, you know of the high value men put
upon it. If you believe in--"
"Save your breath, honey. I think the bull of the woods here is trying
to work up an angle. He's a phony. All he's got here are a bunch of
damn good telescreens, and they've never moved anything yet.... Right,
Buster?"
The figure in scarlet mail moved then. There was no sound, and hardly
a show of motion as his fingers played over a switch-studded panel.
The telescreens came to life. In each were pictured solar systems,
some binary; one with three suns. All were circled about with planets
turning in a precise geometry of motion. With barely a nod, the figure
singled out the screen in which the binary and its brood of planets
shown like so many pin-points of light rolling in eerie slow motion
through Infinity. A finger flick that Cragin could not follow and--
Three planets suddenly plunged headlong; in seconds there was a
blinding flash. Even as he shielded his eyes, Cragin knew that he
had been witness to the destruction of an entire system. Although
it had been light-years distant, and the telescreen had relayed the
coruscations of its destruction instantaneously, Cragin knew that there
was no way to deny what he had seen.
"Ours is the power," the voice said, "of life and of death."
He wanted desperately to convince himself that it was all part of
the same colossal fake--that it was simply one of the most fabulous
illusions ever devised behind which to direct a system or galaxy-wide
bootlegging net. It had to be that.
It had to be, he realized with uncomfortable suddenness, because if it
were not, it represented a science which had no regard for the laws
that impeded men; one that had risen to far greater heights than that
of which men boasted so proudly. And that of course could not be. It
was that knowledge alone which had made life worth the living for
centuries. Perhaps, when she had refused to speak of what she had seen,
Lin Griffin had been wiser than he thought. But she had said--
Cragin felt himself becoming sickeningly mixed up.
And whether he wanted to believe his own senses or not, he knew that
here was no phony, no fake, no illusion. Realizing it hurt like hell.
* * * * *
The cockiness was gone from his voice; he tried, but he couldn't keep
it as he spoke.
"You are one of the Owners?" The girl said nothing. Her face was white,
yet Cragin did not think her confidence was gone, just shaken for the
moment. She had seen the hand of what seemed to be a man hurl a solar
system to instantaneous destruction at will.
"I am not," the voice said. "I serve. I am of the second rank, as are
all of my race, in the service of the Owners."
"You are here alone?"
The hand touched another stud, and a smaller screen wavered into
luminescence. Cragin saw a fleet of spaceships, hovering in a
geometrically perfect formation, any one ship of which would have been,
by itself, capable of searing to dust the entire Stellar Patrol in a
single, brief engagement. The formation of sleek juggernauts extended
as far as the eye could see. It was like looking into two opposed
mirrors.
"My guard," the voice said. "Manned by a race of the third rank."
"I think I get it. The Owners sit home and quietly rule the universe
while somebody else does the--" Cragin cut himself off. It was the
wrong track entirely. It must be done differently. "The woman and I,"
he said evenly, "would be willing servants."
For the briefest moment there was silence, save for the muffled gasp
that Cragin heard at his shoulder. But the girl said nothing.
Cragin watched as the hand of the red-mailed figure grazed other banks
of relays. In quick succession all telescreens went dark.
"On each screen," the voice said, "you have seen a complete system
of planets. In this control point there are exactly three hundred
screens. Throughout the Owners' domain there are perhaps slightly less
than a full billion of such control points as these. And there have
seldom been any which have not been so well concealed, in suitable
relationship to the intelligence level of that system-group controlled,
as to have yielded to discovery."
"You have not answered my proposal," Cragin retorted. "You're as aware
as I am of what's going on in my mind or you wouldn't bother with all
the gory details. You know we could serve, even on the--the 97th rank
or so...."
"Proceed."
"Don't try to cover up your own slip. You talk slow, but you get a
little ahead of yourself. This outfit is supposed to be cached away
with such cleverness that an Earth-mind wouldn't be up to locating
it. Only we did. We're not as dumb as we look, even to you. Your
record would get a little smeared up if you did away with a couple of
potential servants. The wheels might not like that. Tell me I'm wrong."
"You think quickly. You dare to offer a proposition to an emissary of
the Owners."
"It's no proposition, it's a statement of fact."
Cragin could feel the sweat behind his ears start to roll down his
neck, and his clothes were beginning to stick to his back again. But
he had been in jams before. When you couldn't shoot, you had to talk.
About anything that came into your head, but you had to talk.
"Servants of the second rank do not err, Earthman. Upon reexamining
my logic, I find it sound. Yet in the process of carrying it to its
ultimate, I conclude that inasmuch as the mathematical possibility
exists that you are capable of being tested successfully for a servant
of the menial ranks, a final decision warrants the deferment of your
destruction pending administration of such examination."
"You mean we live."
"Failure to qualify as a servant will mean your destruction."
There was near hysteria in Lin Griffin's voice as it broke the spell
Cragin's argument had created.
"Cragin, you can't realize what you're doing! You're selling us into
sl--"
"Service, Lin Griffin," he cut her off. He knew he was bruising her arm
with the quick pressure of his fingers. "Service to the Owners."
"Then follow me," the voice said.