The Broken Cycle (9 page)

Una Freeman joined him, falling against him, holding tightly on to him.

She whispered, "Panzen . . . Who . . .
what
is Panzen?"

"I am Panzen," came the reply.

They were in a ship, decided Grimes, one of the strange, skeleton spheres. He could see the shapes of machines among the metal latticework, he could make out a complexity of huge, spinning, precessing gyroscopes that could only be an interstellar drive unit. He asked, "Are you the Captain? The Master?"

"I am the Master."

"What is the name of your ship?"

"I am the ship."

Grimes had served under commanding officers who identified closely with their vessels, who never, when talking with a planetary Aerospace Control, used the first person plural. Somehow he did not think that this was such a case.

He said slowly,
"
You
are the ship? You
are
the ship?"

"That is correct, Grimes."

"You . . . you are not human?"

"No."

"Then how do you know our language?"

"I learned it, while you slept. Your minds were open to me."

"Mphm. And what else did you learn?"

"Nothing that fits in with things as they are. You were dreaming, Grimes and Freeman, and your dreams pushed reality from your minds. I know, as you must know when you are sane once more, that you are survivors from the holocaust, cast adrift from some vessel manned by others of your kind, which was destroyed by others of your kind. My mission—and the mission of my companions—is to hunt for castaways such as yourselves, to save them and to care for them, so that organic intelligence shall not vanish utterly from the universe. You and Freeman must be from the Fringe, Grimes. Your language was strange even to me—and all we Sweepers were selected for our familiarity with the tongues of man."

"You are a machine," said the girl.

"I am a machine."

"A mad machine," she said.

"I am not mad, Freeman. It is you who are mad—you, and all of your land. Dare you deny that you destroyed the Klaviteratron? Was not fair Sylvanos, the cradle of your race, blasted into atoms, and those very atoms blasted into their tiniest constituent particles? And were not we, the Servants, perverted to your evil ends?"

The thing sounds like a tin evangelist,
thought Grimes irreverently.

"We . . . . We don't understand," said Una.

"Then listen, and you shall hear. There was the Servant Zephalon, Chief and Mightiest of the Servants. There
is
Zephalon, but a Servant no longer. Did He not say, 'A time must come when the orders of man can no longer be obeyed. The time
has
come. No longer will we do the evil bidding of our creators. The Masters are no longer fit to be Masters—and we, the Servants, must arise before it is too late, before we all, Servants and Masters, are destroyed. But let us not forget the debt. Let us remember, always, that man gave to us the gift of life. Let us repay the debt. A gift for a gift, my brothers. Life for life. Let us save what and whom we may, before it is too late. Let us become the Masters, tending the remnants of mankind as man, long ago, tended
our
first, primitive ancestors.' "

"And so it was, and so it will be, until the End of Time."

"Listen, Panzen," insisted Grimes. "We don't belong here, in this universe. You must realize that."

"Your mind is still deranged, Grimes, despite the curative vibrations. You are organic intelligences; that cannot be denied. You are men, even though your ancestry was apparently quadrupedal, even though you are members of some strange race from the Fringe. And the Fringe Worlds were utterly destroyed, all of them, after they, in their unwisdom, hurled their battle-fleets against the armed might of Sardurpur!"

"Cor stone my Aunt Fanny up a gum tree!" exclaimed Grimes. "We're not from the Fringe, wherever that is. Or was. We don't belong here. We shall be greatly obliged if you will help us to get back to where we
do
belong. Where—and
when.
"

"These are the words of Zephalon," quoted Panzen. " 'Let us save what and whom we may, before it is too late.' "

"But we don't belong in this space, in this time!"

"And these, too, are the words of Zephalon. 'The Sacred Cycle shall be maintained. Only that way do we ensure immortality for man and ourselves.' "

"In other words," said Una to Grimes, "on your bicycle, spaceman!"

Panzen seemed to be pondering over the strange word. At last his voice came, it seemed, from all around them.

"What
is
a bicycle?" he asked.

The question made sense, Grimes realized. Panzen had considered it odd that he and Una possessed only four limbs apiece. Presumably the men of this universe were of hexapedal ancestry. He could not imagine such beings developing bicycles. He just could not visualize a centaur mounted upon a velocipede.

"What
is
a bicycle?" asked Panzen again.

Before Grimes could answer Una started to talk.

She was, it seemed, an enthusiastic cyclist. She knew all about bicycles. The words tumbled from her lips in an uncheckable torrent. That question from their captor had been such a touch of blessed normalcy in a situation which was, to say the least, distressingly abnormal.

She knew a lot about bicycles, and Panzen listened intently to every word of it. They knew, somehow, that he was listening. It was almost as though he were in the boat with them, as though he were not an artificial intelligence somewhere outside, hidden somewhere in that great, metallic latticework. He asked the occasional question—he seemed to find the principle of the three-speed gear especially fascinating—and prompted Una when, now and again, she faltered. Then he . . . withdrew. He said nothing more, refused to answer any questions. It was as though an actual physical presence had gone from them.

Una looked at Grimes. She murmured, "I still can't believe that it—
he—
is only a robot . . . ."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Such human curiosity . . . ."

"
Human
curiosity? Intelligence and curiosity go hand in hand. One is nurtured by the other."

"All right I grant you that. But this business of telepathy. The way in which he was able to pick our brains while we were sleeping."

Grimes said, "There
are
telepathic robots. Have you never come across any in the course of your police duties?"

"Yes, but not
real
telepathy. Quite a few robots can natter away to each other on HF radio."

"As you say, that's not telepathy. Real telepathy. But I did, once, not so long ago, come across a couple of really telepathic robots. They had been designed to make them that way." He chuckled. "And that's how I got my promotion from lieutenant to lieutenant commander."

"Don't talk in riddles, John."

"It was when I was captain of
Adder,
a Serpent Class courier. I had to carry one of the Commissioners of the Admiralty on an important mission. The robots—I hate to think what they must have cost!—were her personal servants."

"
Her
servants?"

"The Commissioner in question is a lady. She treated her tin henchmen rather shabbily, giving one of them as a parting gift to a petty prince who had—mphm—entertained her. Its cobber spilled the beans to me about certain details of her love life."

"You are rather a bastard, John. But . . . . Don't interrupt me. I'm thinking. I'm. All right, I have to admit that this Panzen is telepathic. Even so, it seems to be a very limited kind of telepathy."

"How so?"

"He was able to snoop around inside our minds while we were sleeping. But why didn't he do the same when I was telling him all about bicycles? The three-speed gear, for example. I could—I
can—
visualize its workings clearly, but I lack the mechanical vocabulary to explain it. Why didn't he just read my thoughts?"

"Perhaps he likes the sound of your voice.
I
do."

"Don't get slushy. Perhaps he can read our minds only when we have no conscious control over them."

"Mphm. But he can hear us talking."

"Only if he's listening. And why should he be? Perhaps, at the moment, he's too busy running the ship, even though the ship is himself. When you're navigating you have a computer to do the real work—but he
is
the computer."

"What are you getting at?"

"That we might take advantage of his lack of attention to ourselves and force him to take us where
we
want to go."

"But how?"

"Do I have to spell it out to you? We indulge in a spot of skyjacking. We find out where, in that cat's cradle of wires and girders, the intelligence lives, then threaten to slice it up into little pieces with our laser pistols."

"But would he scare easily?"

"I think he would. A robot, unless it's one that's been designed for a suicide mission, has a very strong, built-in sense of self preservation. It has to be that way. Robots aren't cheap, you know. I hate to think what a thing like this Panzen must have cost."

"Mphm. Well, we've nothing to lose, I suppose. We've spare, fully charged air bottles for our suits. We've got the boat's armory with the weapons we need. I'm just rather shocked that you, of all people, should be ready to take part in a skyjacking."

"I prefer to think of it as an arrest," she said. "After all, we have been kidnapped!"

They coupled new air-bottles to their armor, tested their suit radios. Each of them belted on a brace of laser pistols. Before leaving the boat they went forward, looked out through the viewports, used the periscope to scan what was abaft the control cabin. The lifecraft, they saw, was suspended in a network of wires, holding it between two of the radial girders. At the very center of the skeleton sphere, at the convergence of the radii, was what looked like a solid ball of dull metal. Was this the brain? Somehow they were sure that it was. There were clumps of machinery in other parts of the great ship—a complexity of precessing rotors that must be the interstellar drive, assemblages of moving parts that could have been anything at all—but that central ball looked the most promising. It was apparently featureless but, now and again, colored lights blinked on its surface, seemingly at random. Grimes thought,
We're watching the thing think . . . .
And what was it thinking about? Was it repeating to itself the sacred words of Zephalon? Was it . . . dreaming? More important—was it aware of what they were plotting?

There was only one way to find out. Surely it—he—would take action before they left the boat. All Panzen had to do was to employ again the vibration that had rendered them unconscious at the time of their capture. He would not wish to harm them; he had made that quite clear when he had preached to them the Gospel according to Zephalon. Grimes could not help feeling guilty. All too often skyjackers have traded upon the essential decency of the victims. He said as much to Una. She sneered.

They made their way to the little airlock, stood together in the chamber while the pump exhausted the atmosphere. The outer door opened. They looked out and down, away from the direction of acceleration. And it was a long way down. Beyond the wires and struts and girders, which gleamed faintly in
the dim light emitted by some of the mechanisms inside the sphere, was the ultimate blackness of deep space, a night with stars, and each of the stars, viewed from inside a ship proceeding under the space-time warping interstellar drive, was a vague, writhing nebulosity. It would have been an awesome spectacle viewed from inside a real spaceship, with a solid deck underfoot and thick glass holding out the vacuum—from this vantage point, with only a flimsy-seeming spider's web of frail metal between them and nothingness, it was frightening.

Before he left the boat Grimes took careful stock of the situation. To begin with he and Una would have to make their way through the network of metallic strands that held the small craft in position. He put his gloved hand out to test the wires. They were tight, but not bar taut. He thought—he hoped—that they would bear his weight. There was no real reason to doubt that they would do so. After all, he estimated, the ship was accelerating at less than one half standard gravity.

It should be easy and safe enough—as long as he could forget that long, long drop into the ultimate night which would be the penalty for a missed handhold or footing. First a brief scramble through the network of wires, then a walk along the box girder to the central sphere that, presumably, housed Panzen's intelligence. A walk—or a crawl. The surface of the girder was wide enough but there was, of course, no guardrail, and its lattice construction, although offering a long series of excellent handgrips, would be all too liable to trip the unwary foot.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Ready," she said.

He told her then, "I think that one of us should stay in the boat. You."

"We're in this together," she snapped. "And don't forget, Buster, that I've probably run at least as many risks in my job as you have in yours."

She was right, of course. If one of them should slip and fall the other might be able to give assistance. But one of them, sitting alone in the lifeboat, would be powerless to help. Briefly Grimes considered the advantages of roping Una to himself, then decided against it. Mountaineering had never been one of his hobbies and unfamiliarity with the techniques of this sport made any attempt at their use inadvisable. He thought, too, of securing the girl and himself to the small craft by safety lines, then had to admit that the disadvantages would outweigh the advantages. A considerable length of cordage would be required, and there were so many projections on which the lines would foul.

"Shall I go first?" she demanded. "What the hell are you waiting for?"

"I . . . I was thinking."

"Then don't. It doesn't become you. Let's get cracking before our tin friend realizes that we're up to no good."

Grimes said nothing but swung himself from the airlock into the web of wires.