Kirby's heart came up and hit him under the chin and the enormous vault of stars reeled and wheeled around him, and his helmet audio was filled with the sounds of anguish from the four other shapes that rolled and sprawled and kicked in the unthinkable void.
"Get those rockets working!" Kirby bellowed. The five hand rockets flared raggedly, and then all together. The combined push was enough. The little skiff went on away from them, alone and empty, beginning its long curve toward its final destiny.
"Just take it easy." Kirby said. "Relax. You can't possibly fall."
Not possibly. There is no place to fall to. There is nothing. You wonder why He made so much space and never used it.
Man wasn't made for this. Man was born and bred for a million years on a planet; he needs solid ground under his feet. Or else he needs the illusion of it, an iron deck, a shell to close him in so his littleness looks its normal size, so he doesn't shrink and vanish and become no more than a tiny unheard shriek in a vastness where even the stars are small.
Courage. A man is supposed to have it. But where do you go to look for courage in the deep primeval darkness where no sun shines?
"Kirby—"
"Kirby!"
"Kirby!"
"What do you want? You're all right. All you have to do is wait."
"But Kirby—"
"I tell you we're okay, on time, in the right place. We can't miss."
Can't we? Were the calculations right? Will the R-ship swerve the way we want it to, or will it do something unexpected, something clever and uncanny? It isn't right for a ship to fly itself, to think and feel as though it were alive. And it's on its own out here. Pluto base is too far away for any contact now.
All by itself. It isn't right.
Wish they had lights, like human ships. Hard to see one black blot against half the blackness in the universe, which is a lot of blackness. Kirby's eyes ached, looking into nothing, at nothing. He felt sick, and very cold. Voices spoke, and one of them was Shari's, and—
Did that star wink out?
A flicker. Another. A red streak. That's it, that's the laterals of the R-ship, its sensor-field has picked up the skiff curving round on the far side, and the so-and-so is swerving.
A thin voice cried, "It's coming right into us!"
Kirby shouted. Orders, prayers, curses. Not many. There wasn't time. A black shape loomed. It did not seem, in that weird and silent gulf, to be moving. It merely grew, without sound or rush or roar. It was small. It grew and was large. It was enormous. It was close beside them.
It has sensed us, Kirby thought, but it's overrun its ability. It can't swerve two ways at once, and in avoiding the skiff it's come right into us. So far so good, but fast now, make it fast! There won't be any other chances, and this is no place to be left behind.
Hand-rockets. Tiny sparks in the overwhelming All. Magnetic grapples, clanging hard on the cold metal, only there is no clang, it's as quiet as a deaf man's dream, and there are stars over and under and all around, except where the solid blackness is beneath your feet.
It's swerving again, to get away from these five little intruders into its sensor-field. There is still no sense of motion, but you can feel the change of direction. The grapple lines come taut. Old Man Inertia again, but this time he isn't big enough and a burst from the hand-rockets takes care of him. The lines slack again, the magnetic plates on your iron boots bite strongly. You have outwitted an R-ship. It is a triumph few men have achieved. Few men? No men, until now. You are weak. The blood, the bone, the guts have run out of you. You merely cling, and stare at the emptiness where you might so easily have been left, and tell Fenner inanely over the radio, "We made it."
The hull shuddered slightly. Kirby thought, "It's trying to shake us off, like a dog!" A wave of superstitious horror lifted the hair on his head and then he saw the space-suit that had Weiss' name on it pointing astern, where a slim torpedo shape had begun its journey with a dignified, terrible deliberation.
"It's taking care of the skiff," Weiss said.
"Yeah," said Kirby. First things first. The cold neat brains. First the skiff, and then—us. "Okay, Krejewski, Wilson—it's your show. Take over."
Shari had been silent, very silent since they had begun their clinging to the dark hull. Now she spoke, saying Kirby's name hesitantly. "Are you getting anything?"
"I don't know. Something. Cold and strange. It's not like human thought at all. Very cold, and clear like one single note, if I could only read it. I think it knows we're here."
"The sensor-field would have told it that," said Weiss. "It sends all the data on everything it touches to the cybernetic control center in the bridge, where the information is correlated and—"
"I think," said Shari, "It hates us."
Again the chill of superstition crept and crawled in Kirby's nerves. He said angrily, "Don't go imagining things. It's only a machine. It can't feel."
"I suppose it can, in a way," Weiss said slowly. "As a safeguard against sabotage, against just what we're doing now. They're built that way, to regard humans as a menace. All their power has to be cut off before we can get in the ships on the ground, to service them."
Kirby growled, "Three experts and a telepath ought to be able to out-guess one lousy mechanical brain." It sounded good. He tried hard to believe it.
Wilson and Krejewski had been unhooking the cutting-torches from their belts. Wilson said nervously, "Might as well cut in here as anywhere. We'd never crack the doors. But remember these things have got automatic repair devices, so get in fast when we hole through. Now stand clear."
Out in the void that they had left behind, bright period to his words, a flare lit up the eternal night, burned savagely, and was gone.
"There goes the skiff!"
Kilson said again, "Keep clear."
The others moved back to the limit of their slack on the long line. The small hypnotic flicker of the torch-flames ate away at the metal.
Kirby questioned Shari. She only answered, in a queer remote voice, "It's still thinking."
Krejewski suddenly yelled as the metal they were cutting bulged up under them. The lines snapped taut as the others pulled them back, and there was all at once a big ragged hole in the ship's flank. And the ship stirred inwardly, as though it could feel the wound, as though the fine-drawn nerves of platinum that threaded all its bulk were carrying a message of pain.
Krejewski grunted. "Air blew out. The interior compartments will seal off automatically. Air pressure and temperature have to be kept constant. These sensitive gadgets don't do well in a vacuum at absolute zero."
"Quit gabbling and get in," Wilson said.
Kirby thrust himself into the hole. The knife-edge beam of his belt lamp slashed into the blackness, picking out the enormous ribs of the ship, touching a network of steel struts and braces.
Shari said abruptly. "Something is coming. The . . . the brain of the ship has sent it. It doesn't think for itself, I don't know what it is."
"An automatic welder, to patch this hole," said Wilson. "Hurry!"
Kirby glimpsed movement in the interior darkness. He pulled with all his strength on the rope that linked him to Weiss. A flash of Weiss' belt lamp hit the thing that was coming, a thing moving ponderously on gliding bands of magnetized metal, a huge distorted spider crawling toward the hole.
Weiss came through, with Shari's feet almost on his shoulders. They were pushing each other from outside now, in a panic. Shari was in, and Wilson came through with three pairs of hands hauling hard, and Wilson pulled frantically on Krejewski's boots.
"The thing's stopped," shrilled Weiss. "Right at the edge of the hole, right beside us."
It's measuring, Kirby thought. Give it a second or two to determine the size of the hole, and—damn these robots! Damn every one that was ever made, right back to thermostats and laundromats and self-turning-off ovens. Men ought never to have surrendered to machines! What the hell's keeping Krejewski? I never knew he was thirty feet high.
He wasn't, of course. He was only man-high, and he came in swiftly through the hole, but it was a near thing, even so. The calculating circuits in the welder had finished their computation. From out of its unlovely body it produced a steel plate of the proper size and clapped it over the hole, clearing Krejewski's helmet by less than a foot. He was barely out of range of the backlash when the welding flames went into action.
There was a catwalk. The humans worked their way to it and clung there, watching while the inexorable machine welded them securely inside the R-ship. No one mentioned that. Their thoughts were too unpleasant for utterance.
Finished with its duty, the welder moved away, returning to whatever place it occupied in the dark silence of the hull when it was not needed. Krejewski muttered, "Wait until the air is replaced in this section. That will unseal the bulkhead doors."
They waited. Kirby's heart pounded fast and hard. He was sweating inside his suit. Presently the hard-edged lamp beams softened and diffused. There was air again. He opened his helmet. The air was warm, stale, unused, unbreathed, tainted with inhuman smells of metal and oil and plastics and hot glass.
Shari's face emerged from the obscurity. "It knows we're here inside it," she whispered. "Kirby, it does hate us—not as a man would hate; I've seen hate and it conies hot and bright into the mind, a red thing like fire—this is different. This is cold. Dark. It's not living, and yet it is. It knows how to destroy us, and it will."
"Can you see how?" asked Kirby.
She whimpered, and he thought she was going to weep, "If I were not so frightened, if I could keep my own mind clear." With shocking suddenness she did break into tears. "I told you I was not good enough for this. I told you not to depend on me!"
Kirby said quietly, "There was no one else."
She did not answer, and he did not know what she was thinking now. The light was better now, the air diffusing the glare of the lamps. Aft and forward ran the catwalks, and the arching braces, and the walls of gleaming metal. It was not like a proper ship. It was not made for men. The catwalks, for the use of maintenance crews, were the one small concession to them.
Kirby said, "We'd better get a move on."
Krejewski pointed. "It—what we're after—is up in the bridge."
They tried to hurry, but in that almost zero-gravity they moved like swimmers, floating, stumbling. The catwalks were floored with a yielding plastic tile, no good for magnetized boots. They seemed to be fumbling their way through a brooding metal labyrinth, and Kirby had a nightmare vision of failure, of four men and a woman trapped and dying slowly in an unmanned ship that would bear their bodies back to Sol as mute evidence of a mission accomplished. He dreaded each moment to hear the lateral rockets begin firing, to know that the ship had headed the Lucy B. Davenport and that it was too late.
"If we tried for the torpedoes," Wilson mumbled. "Maybe, if we could have fired them off."
"They're locked in tight," Weiss said. "And even without them, the ship could still destroy the Lucy by ramming."
"They can't have it under control now, not at all this distance!"
"They don't have to. The pattern of its mission was carefully programmed for it, with all the alternate methods of achieving it. The little cams and relays will do the rest."
"Shut up and bring that torch here," Kirby said. "Quick."
He was at the bridge-room door, and it was closed and locked. A key back at Pluto base would open it, but nothing else would except brute force.
A torch bit into the metal. Wilson muttered as he played it, "Never been up this high before. Nobody but the top cyberneticists rated access to the bridge. I wonder—"
"Don't wonder."
The lock, burned through, grated and sagged. Kirby pushed the door open.
"Listen, what's that?"
Kirby had heard it too, the snick of a relay closing and a soft humming. The humming kept on.
He was looking into darkness. There were no windows in this bridge-room. The mariner who navigated here had surer senses than sight.
He swung his lamp.
There was an odd relief about seeing what they had all come to think of as It. One had almost imagined a great figure, a monstrous metallic face, a something. Here was only a machine. Humans had made it, humans had given it its orders. That was all. It was no more than a familiar calculating machine, the tall bank of transistor cells, the intricate complex of wiring, the shielded power leads, the vernier dials. No metal face, no staring eyes, nothing humanoid or menacing.
Nothing but a machine that humans had made, and that humans could unmake. He lifted his heavy wrench and started forward.
"Kirby, wait!"
Shari's voice had something in it he had never heard before. That, rather than the warning in her words, stopped him.
"There's danger," she said. "Wait. Don't go. I can get it—I can almost get it. It's waiting; something warned it when we came, it's—"
"Oh, hell," said Wilson.
"I'm not hysterical!" she cried. "It's hard to explain, I get it just over the limits of consciousness, but this—this thing—it's prepared."
Kirby felt the hairs lift on the back of his neck. "All right," he said, "we'll try it this way. Keep back."
He swung the heavy wrench and hurled it at the machine.
What happened, happened fast. The wrench, a yard from the delicate transistor banks, flew back at them with a flash of light. Weiss screamed. There was a metallic clang. Then silence.
"It hit me! I think my arm is broken," Weiss groaned.
"It threw the wrench back at us," Wilson said. His voice was hoarse. "Like . . . like . . ."
Kirby got control of his own feelings, not without an effort. "Listen. There's a force-field around it. It came on automatically when we broke in. Of course. It came on to protect it, for only intruders would break in."
"But we can't get through that," Krejewski said. "There's no way."
"So we're licked?"
Then suddenly a sweet, high-pitched note of sound rang from the ball banks of cells. Nothing else, no movement, no lights. But, almost instantly, there came the low rumble of the port laterals firing.
Kirby, at the first vibration of that rumbling thunder, dived toward the others. They were in a group close behind him. He knocked them roughly, staggering, toward the door opening. Weiss yelled as his arm hit something.
Their tangled little group wedged against the door. The ship canted sharply. It moved in a turn too sharp for any human crew to endure without warning and protection, but perfectly practicable for a ship that had no crew. It crushed them against the doorframe, Kirby desperately holding onto Shari.
The rumble of rockets stopped. The pressure relaxed. Weiss was sobbing in pain.
"It tried to throw us into that force-field," Wilson was saying. "Let's get out of this." He started to scramble away.
Kirby hauled him back. "Get out to where? Empty space? Not to the ark; she won't exist if we leave here now. That wasn't for us, don't you understand? The R-ship is starting to head around. It's altering course, and that means it'll be launching its warheads at the Lucy, unless we stop it."
"But how? We can't get near it. We can't touch it. How?"
Kirby did not answer. He looked at the thing that lay so securely beyond their reach. He hated it. It was the symbol and the force of the power that had enchained mankind. It was everything he and the others on the ark had fought and fled from, and it had won, reaching even here into the emptiness between the stars to grasp at human aspiration and make it not. A great rage rose up in him.
"Weiss, you're the cybernetics man. Damn it, stop blubbering and listen! We can't smash it up by brute force. All right. Isn't there another way? Men build these things. They can't be smarter than men. They can't be all-powerful."
Weiss answered wearily, "They might as well be as far as we're concerned. Even if we knew the frequency and the code that controls this particular ship, it wouldn't do us any good. See that master panel?" He pointed to an assembly of dials and indicators that meant nothing to Kirby. "It's different from any other I've seen, designed for a star-ship that has to be out of touch with its base, on its own. It's locked. Nothing's going to change the settings on it until the orders they represent have been carried out. Then they'll shift into the "Return to Base" position. And that's that."
"It has an order," Kirby said. "It can't disobey that order." He was fishing for an idea, a nebulous thing out of human psychology remembered from a lot of long dark years. He took Weiss by the shoulders. "These cybernetic brains aren't very different from the human variety, are they? Functionally, I mean."
"No. Look out, you're hurting my arm. They're simpler, of course. Faster reaction time on a lot of things, no emotional complications, so they're more efficient, but then they're not adaptable to change, either. No, they're not basically very different."
"All right. Weiss, you and Wilson are going to figure out from watching its reactions what wavelength the thing is sensitive to. And you've got no time to do it in. Fenner? Fenner!"
The voice of the radioman on the Lucy Davenport spoke inside his open helmet "Yeah, Kirby. Yeah. What's—"
"Fenner, stand by with every amp you've got. Give me a scatter band in the UH frequencies, the banned-off ones." The Lucy's communicator had been built before the banning, before there was no longer any need for ships to talk together across space. Near a control center it would have been drowned out by the vastly more powerful transmitter, but here in this untracked waste of nothingness it might work. It might.
"Watch it," he said to the two men hanging irresolute by the doorway. "Switch in, and give your readings direct to Fenner."
"Kirby," said Wilson, "you're crazy. But I guess it doesn't matter now. I'm sorry we all did this thing, though. I should have stayed on Mars. I don't want Sally and the kids to die. I don't want to die myself."
Kirby hit him, clumsily, savagely, across the back. "Then watch it, damn you! There!"
A bank of transistors that had been dark glowed briefly and were dark again. Weiss began to talk, very fast, very nervous, to Fenner. Kirby got busy on the space-line. There were railings on the catwalk. He threw hitches over them, made himself and the others fast so they could not be pitched forward into that deadly room, or smashed against the struts. He took Shari in his arms and said to Krejewski, "Hang on hard. If this works, it'll be rough."
"Narrow it down," Weiss was saying. "What have you got there? No, you lost it again. Higher. That's it, I think. Oh God, my arm hurts! No, no, Fenner, try it again, slower, hold it—hold it! It's receiving now but it isn't reacting; what good is the frequency without the code word? It could be anything." A gray flatness had come into his voice, and Kirby knew that it was the sound of despair. "Run through the alphabet," Weiss said. "Fast. Maybe—"
Again that one sweet note rang out, and then there was the following thunder of the laterals. Again the terrible hand of inertia struck them, crushed them, left them dazed and gasping.
"Hurry it up," said Kirby. "Hurry."
Wilson wept and cursed him. Weiss, half conscious in the doorway, was muttering his ABC's.
"M, N, O—no reaction yet, go on—P, Q, R, S—S! Hold it, Fenner There was a flicker on S. It's waiting for the rest of the word."
"The rest of the word." said Wilson. "There's a million of 'em beginning with S."
"Try STAR," said Kirby.
It didn't work.
It was Fenner who suggested STELLA.
It worked.
"Pour it on!" Kirby shouted. "Tell it to sheer off, change course."
The receiving unit glowed and a humming, soft and busy, arose in the relays of the brain.
"Hang on!"
This time it was the starboard laterals. Krejewski and Wilson yelled together in mingled anguish and delight. Weiss had fainted. Kirby, holding tight to Shari and enduring the pressure, did not exult. The burst was short. Almost at once the port laterals roared again. The locked master control and the compensators were not to be defeated so lightly. The RSS-1 was back on course again.
"Keep it coming," Kirby said to Fenner. He thought of Fenner in the communications room with Pop Barstow and Marapese and Shaw sweating it out with him. He thought of the broad-beamed Lucy forging sturdily ahead with her freight of human life, and how it would be when her belly split open in a burst of flame and spewed the wash lines and the cooking pots, the babies and the children, the mothers and their men, all out across the black gulf to drift forever on the slow-wheeling tide of the galaxy.
Desperately, and with no real hope, he said, "Tell it to return to base. Tell it to by-pass its master circuit. I don't suppose it can, but we might at least confuse it."
Past Wilson's crouching shape he could see the glow and flicker of the banked transistors. Celebration, naked and visible. Fenner's voice spoke in his ears, remote and twanging like a taut wire. "Shaw says it's getting awful close to us. What's it doing there?"
The starboard laterals swung the ship over in a vicious arc. Kirby braced himself. "It's beating us to death," he gasped, "but that's all right, that's what I want—" One breath, one burst of speech, before the compensators took over. "Pour it on!"
Krejewski whispered, "We can't take much more of this."
Fenner's voice muttered in Kirby's ear, "Return to base. Return to base." He was talking to himself, to his transmitter key, to God, while the Lucy's generators labored to make strong that silent voice that spoke from her across the void to the R-ship. "Return to base."
Shari, who sagged in Kirby's arms, like a limp rag doll, lifted her head and said, "It's confused. It—if it were human it would scream; it suffers, it has pain." She quivered and clung to him. "Hold me, I'm afraid!"
Thunder. Chaos. Pressure. Vertigo, a gasping and a straining and a cry, five small soft humans crushed and trapped between titanic forces. The laterals boomed and kicked, fighting each other, hurling the ship into a mad pinwheel flight that spiraled wildly nowhere. Kirby, blinded, deafened, barely conscious, cried triumphantly, "Pour it on!" The darkness was full of sound, the pain-cries of metal strained to the limit of its strength.
In the bridgeroom, in the brain, something blew.
Convulsion, the throes of death. It can't be dying, Kirby thought, it never lived, it's only an iron hulk, a cold thing, soulless, so why does it kick and lash itself about like a living thing in agony?
Shari wailed, a weird high keening, and over that and beyond it Kirby heard the strands of the brain parting, the snap and the tearing and the brittle, delicate crack of a million tiny cells falling in minute shards.
And suddenly it was very still.
Shari whispered, "It's dead." She was weeping. "It couldn't understand. Kirby, it knew, and at the end it was afraid. It was afraid of its own madness."
Kirby shook his head. He did not want to admit that what she said was true. "It wasn't human," he said, and then he thought, but wasn't that a human trick we played on it? Give it orders it can't possibly obey, impulses it can't possibly satisfy, and what happens? What happens to the infinitely more complex, more flexible and reasoning brain of a man, when it is tortured with conflicting problems it cannot solve? It splits wide open. The doctors have a name for it, but names don't matter. We have just lived through the actuality.
And it was dead, and the ship was only a drifting wreck.
Kirby got up. He set Shari aside and freed himself from the rope, and stumbled forward over the squirming, groaning bodies of men who were, miraculously, still alive to squirm and groan. He went into the bridgeroom.
It was silent. It had always been silent, but now there was no Presence in it. Kirby got his hands on something and threw it. It crashed with a bursting tinkle into the master panel, where the dials remained unaltered, inexorable in authority. The force-field was gone. Kirby picked up the wrench that had broken Weiss' arm. For a moment he ceased to be Kirby, or any other man. He was rebellion. He was all the people in the ark. He was the people who would follow them in other ships. He was the might and the power of his kind, the impatient ones who will not wear chains forever, no matter how they are ornamented and disguised. He walked forward to the master control and smashed it. It was a purely symbolic gesture, quite useless but somehow immensely satisfying. The inexorable needles broke and skewed, the dial faces fell awry, and Kirby smiled. Then he let the wrench drop. He turned and left the bridgeroom, slowly, because he was tired and his battered body hurt.
"Come on." he said, "come on, we still have to cut our way out of this." Into the radio, to Fenner, hysterical on the other end, he said, "Tell Pop to get over here and pick us up."
He roused up his army of four and stumbled away the catwalk in the silence and the dark.