And Draken was entirely correct in all that he had said. This
World-City of Mohln had achieved an ultimate--an ultimate lostness. It
was a magnificent hollow shell of a City. There were no people in it.
All the mighty wonder was lost to the semi-living marionettes that
wandered through it. But it meant life to them, nevertheless. They
never had to exert a finger, nor expend the energy of one thousandth of
a gram of thinking energy to live. But the technocratic creations of
long preceding times, of even a few still working scientists, kept them
alive. But they neither knew this, nor cared.
They were fed, clothed, bathed and even reborn by robots. They were put
to sleep, awakened, vitalized, and exhausted by machines. They were
parasitic non-entities, dependent on the machines that other, _vital_
minds, had built.
Back on the balcony, Draken continued in that squeaky, uncertain quaver
of his:
"Everything here is done by robots. There are different castes of
robots. Their functional system is graduated up through ever lessening
numbers until it reaches what is only a master switch. One single
switch in this World-City, pushed too far--" Draken looked at me
suggestively and added hoarsely:
"If the master switch was ever pushed too far, this entire
civilization, as you call it, would stop functioning with any set
mechanical pattern. All the robots and machines and the system they
operate would cease activity. There would be your chaos. There would
be the needed situation under which the unthinking slaves will have to
think for themselves, solve their own problems once again. Or die. I
think they will solve them. I have that much faith in them. They always
have. So far."
It was a statement on Draken's part. But it was really a question.
Would I push that master switch--too far?
"Why haven't _you_ done this before?" I asked. "Why drag a man from
another world, a million years in the past, to do this simple thing?"
Draken lowered his head in the first display of real, understandable
emotion I had seen in him. Shame. "I can't," he said simply. "I do
not have the will, the free will to do it. My intellect tells me it
is the correct thing to do. But my psycho-conditioning has created an
insurmountable antipathy toward such an act."
His dried up monkey-like hands clenched into tiny impotent fists. "Many
times I have gone into that room and tried to pull that switch. But
each time I have failed. I know now that I shall never be able to. No
one in this world could do it until you came. You can. Your age was a
dynamic one, of destruction and construction, each inseparable from the
other. You could do it, not only with ease, but with the satisfaction
of knowing you were taking a necessary step forward in human progress.
The question is--will you?"
* * * * *
A lot of time clambered through my fogged mind then before I formulated
a logical sequence of thoughts that led to what seemed to me a logical
reply.
"I believe I will," I finally answered slowly. "I can't see that there
is any other way out."
"Execution," a familiarly brittle voice said behind me, and I turned.
Draken began whimpering pathetically and cowered back against the
colonnade.
Jokan stood a few feet from me, wearing a thin, semi-transparent gown
that seemed anachronistic and out of place, as though she had gotten
the idea for it out of an old history book. Her body was a lithe shadow
behind it. But her eyes burned irrascible hatred.
"Execution for you, and for Draken; that is a better way."
"I wish I could agree," I said. "But you see our concern is for society
as a whole, rather than with a small minority that benefit from the
apathy and ignorance of the majority. For your satisfaction, and that
of a few others, you may be right. Frankly, dear Jokan, though you're
very very lovely to look at, your mind is ugly and warped. And I would
rather see you dead."
I sprang and reached for her. She screamed once, before the robots came
in and lumbered for me. I remember mumbling about the monotony of the
robot act; as she eluded me, and I eluded them. And I kept on trying to
grab Jokan. It was an obsession with me.
A quick glance revealed Draken cowered down in his corner, his old
child's face twisted in stunned horror.
My only intention at that moment was to get my hands around Jokan's
perfect neck just one more time. It was a mad, fanatical urge now. I
hated her. I hated her with a blind madness.
The robots weren't nearly as dexterous as they should have been.
Physical encounter was undoubtedly alien to their primary purpose.
This place of Draken's was bigger, with a few articles in it, than the
laboratory had been. There were pneumatic chairs and couches and ray
lamps and vitamin globes. I ducked, sprawled, ran and careened in and
out of these rooms and around the strange looking fixtures. I, close
on Jokan's sandaled heels, and the robots close on mine. It might even
seem more or less a comical scene in retrospect, but--
Then I saw that silver sphere of Draken's, hanging in the air about
four feet from the floor, smooth, mysterious, but very suggestive. As I
ran back past Draken, I yelled at him.
I doubt if Draken understood my words, he was so stricken with horror,
but he grasped my meaning, and somehow managed to stagger onto his
quavering legs and tottered wild-eyed toward the sphere.
But Jokan understood my meaning, too. And through some telepathic
direction I still don't understand, she guided the robots onto poor
Draken. Draken never had a chance.
I don't think he even comprehended conflict. He could neither fight
back, nor try to escape. It seemed that violence, either offensive or
defensive, was beyond his understanding. That was why he could not
bring himself to pull the master switch that would have accomplished
his desired destruction of Mohln. That was also the reason why the
robot was able to take him into its inexorable metal arms and crush him
into something not far removed from pulp.
His delicate, deep pocketed eyes looked beseechingly into mine, once.
Then the tremendous pressure bulged them horribly and unconsciously at
me. His bony arms flapped and waved spasmodically and blood spurted
from his small almost invisible ears and equally minute nose. Then
his whole frail body seemed to crack through the middle and deflate.
At another telepathic command from Jokan, the robot's arms raised and
unbent, and the body of Draken thudded on the inlaid floor.
I heard myself yelling. I wasn't retreating from the other two robots
then, or trying to get away at all. Something gave way inside me.
What I had seen just now shocked every sense that might have been
ethical or moral in me. One word churned inside my brain. The word was
revenge. And then another word was added to it that seemed better.
Compensation. Then another word etched in capital letters overshadowed
and encompassed the other two. _Kill._
* * * * *
The first robot reached out with its very utilitarian and
gadget-studded arms to rake me in. I had no idea how much the monster
weighed. But the Frankensteinian creation was off balance as it reached
for me. I twisted and grasped the metalic tentacle, heaved forward,
throwing my hip into the gleaming stomach and heaved down.
The robot seemed light-weighted enough as it flew ceilingward, and
clanged hollowly against the wall. There was a flash of current, a
slight odor of ozone as the teleo-electronic man twitched about at my
feet.
The violence evidently stunned my fair and wicked Circe. Her telepathic
control over the remaining robots faltered and in that instant I seized
her. A dead, hot rage swelled through my head and heart so I could
hardly draw a breath. I wrenched at her neck, felt it crack dangerously
and felt her long sleek muscles tremble against mine.
I felt almost bestial in the power of my rage. I twisted sidewise
and felt her body give, and heard her breath coming in short jagged
whines like a dog's. Her finger nails weren't clawing now. The cold,
emotionless cruelty of her eyes was dying behind fear and indecision.
She hadn't been reluctant to dream of blood and guts and shattered
bones, but too much of the real thing hurt even her atavistic senses.
"Keep them off me," I said in her ear. She tried to pull away. I held
her at arm's length and began slapping her. Her face was white as
powder until red finger marks appeared on it. I hit harder and her
perfect upper lip split and a narrow line of blood ran down and stained
the dark hollow between her perfect marble breasts. The gold-flecked
pupils of her eyes widened, and the horror deepened in back of them.
The the horror went out like a flame and the lids with the perfect long
lashes blinked over them and tears flowed down as from a weeping statue.
I threw a quick circuit about the room. The robots were immobile;
tensed, though, for action. At any moment Jokan might regain her Circe
faculties and summon them, even if it meant her own life. I didn't know
then what emotions surged around inside her strange heart. I lifted her
onto my shoulder and started through the rooms.
I had no idea how to escape. Whatever inconceivable manner the walls
dissolved through the manipulation of incredible advanced force
fields, I of course didn't know. But I put three rooms filled with the
futuristic mores between myself and the robot minions of Jokan before I
dropped her on a pneumatic couch and wrapped my hands about her throat
for the third time and began to squeeze.
I began slowly and methodically, looking all the time into her eyes.
Then I saw it. I saw the real depths of her eyes, and a shock trembled
through me. Jokan had changed. How she had changed!
She read the implacable purpose in my eyes that I felt in my heart, and
as her arms came up, mine slid down softly from about her throat. I
kissed her. I lifted her passive softness up and felt it respond. The
hands with the feral nails caressed the back of my neck, and her lips
were hungry.
I had seen in her eyes a change, and had answered it. Then I said:
"Lead me to the room that holds the master switch. Then we'll go."
She slid out of my arms languidly and onto her feet. She leaned toward
me, and her fingers grasped mine. They were warm, not cold; how could
they ever have been cold? "Go where?"
"Can you run that space-time apparatus that brought me here?"
She nodded, then looked fearfully over my face.
"Take me to the main switch," I repeated.
We went back, and she somehow attracted the translucent, yet not
translucent, sphere to her side. It followed after her like a monstrous
being, a cosmic slave.
She led me toward the wall and it dissolved. I still am not able to
understand the phenomenon. We continued through and into an elevator.
We dropped down through a blur of distance. She led me through a
glowing tunnel and into a tubecar and there was a dim sensation of
movement in which we might have sped a thousand miles, or ten thousand.
She led me out of the tubecar and we crossed a walkway, where lines
of listless people stood moving in various directions. The little
swollen-headed men and the tall austere but listless women. They were
all going places, but it didn't matter. They had eyes, ears, senses,
but they might have been machines reacting through photo-electric
devices. I thirsted for the main switch that would send them all into
blind chaos. It was a hellish thing for the world I had risked my life
many times to build upward and progressively toward greatness. But it
had all ended here, a blind alley of despair, and the hell I planned
would be its only salvation.
Suddenly, from all sides, robots converged on us, directed by a number
of the little white-skulled men with velvet togas flapping about
slug-white spindly legs.
"The Council," said Jokan. "They are afraid now. They attack, and they
are half mad because they have been conditioned that such an act of
violence is atavism, the inexcusable social crime."
* * * * *
Their puckered faces, in the center of the bloated domes of heads,
were strained and flinching. The robots shambled onto Jokan and me,
and Jokan did something to them with her mind which evidently was more
powerful in this capacity at least than all the Council combined. And
the robots turned and began flailing each other into lumps of smoking
twisted metal.
My stomach crawled. The Council, supreme intellects of a million years
of progress, had fallen down onto the moving walkway, slobbering and
twitching in the final stages of dementia. Even a thousand gram brain
breaks when faced with an insolvable problem. The gleaming expanse of
moving plastic carried the Council out of our sight. The little men and
the Amazonian women who slouched past didn't even notice. And if they
did, it was foreign to their conditioning. They couldn't think about it.
They would soon have to think. When I pushed the master switch too
far....
We encountered no more resistance, if that feeble expression of the
apex of human development so far met could be called resistance.
Finally we emerged into a room that surprised me with its lack of
grandeur and its barrenness. All the World-City that was meaningless
was a dream of ostentation and color and beauty of intricate design.
This room, in contrast, the heart of the World-City, the key to its
life, was completely denuded. A small plastic shell and in the middle
was a conical dais and on the dais was a lever.
Jokan nodded toward the lever and her eyes that followed me as I
walked to it and moved it, were bright with some inner fire I couldn't
diagnose.