Beyond Control Page 7

  “Of course,” Perine said haltingly. “Once we get into the factories and start setting up our own assembly lines . . .”

  “Is there anything left?” Judith inquired.

  “There must be something left. My God, there were levels going down miles!”

  “Some of those bombs they developed toward the end were awfully big,” Judith pointed out. “Better than anything we had in our war.”

  “Remember that camp we saw? The ruins-squatters?”

  “I wasn’t along,” Perine said.

  “They were like wild animals. Eating roots and larvae. Sharpening rocks, tanning hides. Savagery. Bestiality.”

  “But that’s what people like that want,” Perine answered defensively.

  “Do they? Do we want this?” O’Neill indicated the straggling settlement. “Is this what we set out looking for, that day we collected the tungsten? Or that day we told the factory-truck its milk was—” He couldn’t remember the word.

  “Pizzled,” Judith supplied.

  “Come on,” O’Neill said. “Let’s get started. Let’s see what’s left of that factory—left for us.”

  They approached the ruined factory late in the afternoon. Four trucks rumbled shakily up to the rim of the gutted pit and halted, motors steaming, tailpipes dripping. Wary and alert, workmen scrambled down and stepped gingerly across the hot ash.

  “Maybe it’s too soon,” one of them objected.

  O’Neill had no intention of waiting. “Come on,” he ordered. Grabbing up a flashlight, he stepped down into the crater.

  The shattered hull of the Kansas City factory lay directly ahead. In its gutted mouth, the ore cart still hung caught, but it was no longer struggling. Beyond the cart was an ominous pool of gloom. O’Neill flashed his light through the entrance; the tangled, jagged remains of upright supports were visible.

  “We want to get down deep,” he said to Morrison, who prowled cautiously beside him. “If there’s anything left, it’s at the bottom.”

  Morrison grunted. “Those boring moles from Atlanta got most of the deep layers.”

  “Until the others got their mines sunk.” O’Neill stepped carefully through the sagging entrance, climbed a heap of debris that had been tossed against the slit from inside, and found himself within the factory—an expanse of confused wreckage, without pattern or meaning.

  “Entropy,” Morrison breathed, oppressed. “The thing it always hated. The thing it was built to fight. Random particles everywhere. No purpose to it.”

  “Down underneath,” O’Neill said stubbornly, “we may find some sealed enclaves. I know they got so they were dividing up into autonomous sections, trying to preserve repair units intact, to reform the composite factory.”

  “The moles got most of them, too,” Morrison observed, but he lumbered after O’Neill.

  Behind them, the workmen came slowly. A section of wreckage shifted ominously and a shower of hot fragments cascaded down.

  “You men get back to the trucks,” O’Neill said. “No sense endangering any more of us than we have to. If Morrison and I don’t come back, forget us—don’t risk sending a rescue party.” As they left, he pointed out to Morrison a descending ramp still partially intact. “Let’s get below.”

  Silently, the two men passed one dead level after another. Endless miles of dark ruin stretched out, without sound or activity. The vague shapes of darkened machinery, unmoving belts and conveyer equipment were partially visible, and the partially completed husks of war projectiles, bent and twisted by the final blast.

  “We can salvage some of that,” O’Neill said, but he didn’t actually believe it. The machinery was fused, shapeless. Everything in the factory had run together, molten slag without form or use. “Once we get it to the surface . . .”

  “We can’t,” Morrison contradicted bitterly. “We don’t have hoists or winches.” He kicked at a heap of charred supplies that had stopped along its broken belt and spilled halfway across the ramp.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” O’Neill said as the two of them continued past the vacant levels of inert machines. “But now that I look back, I’m not so sure.”

  They had penetrated a long way into the factory. The final level lap spread out ahead of them. O’Neill flashed the light here and there, trying to locate undestroyed sections, portions of the assembly process still intact.

  It was Morrison who felt it first. He suddenly dropped to his hands and knees; heavy body pressed against the floor, he lay listening, face hard, eyes wide. “For God’s sake—”

  “What is it?” O’Neill cried. Then he, too, felt it. Beneath them, a faint, insistent vibration hummed through the floor, a steady hum of activity. They had been wrong; the hawk had not been totally successful. Below, in a deeper level, the factory was still alive. Closed, limited operations still went on.

  “On its own,” O’Neill muttered, searching for an extension of the descent lift. “Autonomous activity, set to continue after the rest is gone. How do we get down?”

  The descent lift was broken off, sealed by a thick section of metal. The still-living layer beneath their feet was completely cut off; there was no entrance.

  Racing back the way they had come, O’Neill reached the surface and hailed the first truck. “Where the hell’s the torch? Give it here!”

  The precious blowtorch was passed to him and he hurried back, puffing, into the depths of the ruined factory, where Morrison waited. Together, the two of them began frantically cutting through the warped metal flooring, burning apart the sealed layers of protective mesh.

  “It’s coming,” Morrison gasped, squinting in the glare of the torch. The plate fell with a clang, disappearing into the level below. A blaze of white light burst up around them and the two men leaped back.

  In the sealed chamber, furious activity boomed and echoed, a steady process of moving belts, whirring machine-tools, fast-moving mechanical supervisors. At one end, a steady flow of raw materials entered the line; at the far end, the final product was whipped off, inspected and crammed into a conveyer tube.

  All this was visible for a split second; then the intrusion was discovered. Robot relays closed as automatic reflexes came into play. The blaze of lights flickered and dimmed. The assembly line froze to a halt, stopped in its furious activity.

  The machines clicked off and became silent.

  At one end, a mobile unit detached itself and sped up the wall toward the hole O’Neill and Morrison had cut. It slammed an emergency seal in place and expertly welded it tight. The scene below was gone. A moment later the floor shivered as activity resumed.

  Morrison, white-faced and shaking, turned to O’Neill. “What are they doing? What are they making?”

  “Not weapons,” O’Neill said.

  “That stuff is being sent up”—Morrison gestured convulsively—“to the surface.”

  Shakily, O’Neill climbed to his feet. “Can we locate the spot?”

  “I—think so.”

  “We better.” O’Neill swept up the flashlight and started toward the ascent ramp. “We’re going to have to see what those pellets are that they’re shooting up.”

  The exit valve of the conveyer tube was concealed in a tangle of vines and ruins a quarter of a mile beyond the factory. In a slot of rock at the base of the mountains, the valve poked up like a nozzle. From ten yards away, it was invisible; the two men were almost on top of it before they noticed it.

  Every few moments, a pellet burst from the valve and shot up into the sky. The nozzle revolved and altered its angle of deflection; each pellet was launched in a slightly varied trajectory.

  “How far are they going?” Morrison wondered.

  “Probably varies. It’s distributing them at random.” O’Neill advanced cautiously, but the mechanism took no notice of him. Plastered against the towering wall of rock was a crumpled pellet; by accident, the nozzle had released it directly at the mountainside. O’Neill climbed up, got it and jumped down.

>   The pellet was a smashed container of machinery, tiny metallic elements too minute to be analyzed without a microscope.

  “Not a weapon,” O’Neill said. The cylinder had split. At first he couldn’t tell if it had been the impact or deliberate internal mechanisms at work. From the rent, an ooze of metal bits was sliding. Squatting down, O’Neill examined them.

  The bits were in motion. Microscopic machinery, smaller than ants, smaller than pins, working energetically, purposefully—constructing something that looked like a tiny rectangle of steel.

  “They’re building,” O’Neill said, awed. He got up and prowled on. Off to the side, at the far edge of the gully, he came across a downed pellet far advanced on its construction. Apparently it had been released some time ago.

  This one had made great enough progress to be identified. Minute as it was, the structure was familiar. The machinery was building a miniature replica of the demolished factory.

  “Well,” O’Neill said thoughtfully, “we’re back where we started from. For better or worse . . . I don’t know.”

  “I guess they must be all over Earth by now,” Morrison said, “landing everywhere and going to work.”

  A thought struck O’Neill. “Maybe some of them are geared to escape velocity. That would be neat—autofac networks throughout the whole universe.”

  Behind him, the nozzle continued to spurt out its torrent of metal seeds.

  Adam and No Eve

  Alfred Bester

  This story by the celebrated author of The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination was first published more than thirty years ago, and we know now that its central situation—a secret rocket flight by a private inventor—is unlikely to occur. Going into space is an expensive proposition, feasible only for nations and perhaps some giant corporations, and free-lance experiments of this kind are out of the question. Aside from that, though, the story remains valid and powerful—for it reminds us once again of the ecological fragility of our planet’s environment, and in dramatic, powerful style sounds an alarm against those who rush heedlessly forward, blindly waving the banners of progress.

  CRANE KNEW THIS must be the seacoast. Instinct told him; but more than instinct, the few shreds of knowledge that clung to his tom, feverish brain told him; the stars that had shown at night through the rare breaks in the clouds, and his compass that still pointed a trembling finger north. That was strangest of all, Crane thought. Though a welter of chaos, the Earth still retained its polarity.

  It was no longer a coast; there was no longer any sea. Only the faint line of what had been a cliff, stretching north and south for endless miles. A line of gray ash. The same gray ash and cinders that lay behind him; the same gray ash that stretched before him. Fine silt, knee-deep, that swirled up at every motion and choked him. Cinders that scudded in dense mighty clouds when the mad winds blew. Cinders that were churned to viscous mud when the frequent rains fell.

  The sky was jet overhead. The black clouds rode high and were pierced with shafts of sunlight that marched swiftly over the Earth. Where the light struck a cinder storm, it was filled with gusts of dancing, gleaming particles. Where it played through rain it brought the arches of rainbows into being. Rain fell; cinder-storms blew; light thrust down—together, alternately and continually in a jigsaw of black and white violence. So it had been for months. So it was over every mile of the broad Earth.

  Crane passed the edge of the ashen cliffs and began crawling down the even slope that had once been the ocean bed. He had been traveling so long that all sense of pain had left him. He braced elbows and dragged his body forward. Then he brought his right knee under him and reached forward with elbows again. Elbows, knee, elbows, knee—He had forgotten what it was to walk.

  Life, he thought dazedly, is wonderful. It adapts itself to anything. If it must crawl, it crawls. Callus forms on the elbows and knees. The neck and shoulders toughen. The nostrils learn to snort away the ashes before they inhale. The bad leg swells and festers. It numbs, and presently it will rot and fall off.

  “I beg pardon,” Crane said, “I didn’t quite get that—”

  He peered up at the tall figure before him and tried to understand the words. It was Hallmyer. He wore his stained lab jacket and his gray hair was awry. Hallmyer stood delicately on top of the ashes and Crane wondered why he could see the scudding cinder clouds through his body.

  “How do you like your world, Stephen?” Hallmyer asked.

  Crane shook his head miserably.

  “Not very pretty, eh?” said Hallmyer. “Look around you. Dust, that’s all; dust and ashes. Crawl, Stephen, crawl. You’ll find nothing but dust and ashes—”

  Hallmyer produced a goblet of water from nowhere. It was clear and cold. Crane could see the fine mist of dew on its surface and his mouth was suddenly coated with dry grit.

  “Hallmyer!” he cried. He tried to get to his feet and reach for the water, but the jolt of pain in his right leg warned him. He crouched back.

  Hallmyer sipped and then spat in his face. The water felt warm.

  “Keep crawling,” said Hallmyer bitterly. “Crawl round and round the face of the Earth. You’ll find nothing but dust and ashes—” He emptied the goblet on the ground before Crane. “Keep crawling. How many miles? Figure it out for yourself. Pi-R-Square. The radius is eight thousand or so—”

  He was gone, jacket and goblet. Crane realized that rain was falling again. He pressed his face into the warm sodden cinder mud, opened his mouth and tried to suck the moisture. He groaned and presently began crawling.

  There was an instinct that drove him on. He had to get somewhere. It was associated, he knew, with the sea—with the edge of the sea. At the shore of the sea something waited for him. Something that would help him understand all this. He had to get to the sea—that is, if there was a sea any more.

  The thundering rain beat his back like heavy planks. Crane paused and yanked the knapsack around to his side where he probed in it with one hand. It contained exactly three things. A pistol, a bar of chocolate and a can of peaches. All that was left of two months’ supplies. The chocolate was pulpy and spoiled. Crane knew he had best eat it before all value rotted away. But in another day he would lack the strength to open the can. He pulled it out and attacked it with the opener. By the time he had pierced and pried away a flap of tin, the rain had passed.

  As he munched the fruit and sipped the juice, he watched the wall of rain marching before him down the slope of the ocean bed. Torrents of water were gushing through the mud. Small channels had already been cut—channels that would be new rivers some day. A day he would never see. A day that no living thing would ever see. As he flipped the empty can aside, Crane thought: The last living thing on Earth eats its last meal. Metabolism plays its last act.

  Wind would follow the rain. In the endless weeks that he had been crawling, he had learned that. Wind would come in a few minutes and flog him with its clouds of cinders and ashes. He crawled forward, bleary eyes searching the flat gray miles for cover.

  Evelyn tapped his shoulder.

  Crane knew it was she before he turned his head. She stood alongside, fresh and gay in her bright dress, but her lovely face was puckered with alarm.

  “Stephen,” she cried, “you’ve got to hurry!”

  He could only admire the way her smooth honey hair waved to her shoulders.

  “Oh, darling!” she said, “you’ve been hurt!” Her quick gentle hands touched his legs and back. Crane nodded.

  “Got it landing,” he said. “I wasn’t used to a parachute. I always thought you came down gently—like plumping onto a bed. But the gray earth came up at me like a fist—And Umber was fighting around in my arms. I couldn’t let him drop, could I?”

  “Of course not, dear—” Evelyn said.

  “So I just held on to him and tried to get my legs under me,” Crane said. “And then something smashed my legs and side—”

  He paused, wondering how much she knew of what really had happ
ened. He didn’t want to frighten her.

  “Evelyn, darling—” he said, trying to reach up his arms.

  “No dear,” she said. She looked back in fright. “You’ve got to hurry. You’ve got to watch out behind!”

  “The cinder storms?” He grimaced. “I’ve been through them before.”

  “Not the storms!” Evelyn cried. “Something else. Oh, Stephen—

  Then she was gone, but Crane knew she had spoken the truth. There was something behind—something that had been following him all those weeks. Far in the back of his mind he had sensed the menace. It was closing in on him like a shroud. He shook his head. Somehow that was impossible. He was the last living thing on Earth. How could there be a menace? ,

  The wind roared behind him, and an instant later came the heavy clouds of cinders and ashes. They lashed over him, biting his skin. With dimming eyes, he saw the way they coated the mud and covered it with a fine dry carpet. Crane drew his knees under him and covered his head with his arms. With the knapsack as a pillow, he prepared to wait out the storm. It would pass as quickly as the rain.

  The storm whipped up a great bewilderment in his sick head. Like a child he pushed at the pieces of his memory, trying to fit them together. Why was Hallmyer so bitter toward him? It couldn’t have been that argument, could it?

  What argument?

  Why, that one before all this happened.

  Oh, that!

  Abruptly, the pieces fitted themselves together.

  Crane stood alongside the sleek lines of his ship and admired it tremendously. The roof of the shed had been removed and the nose of the ship hoisted so that it rested on a cradle pointed toward the sky. A workman was carefully burnishing the inner surfaces of the rocket jets.

  The muffled sounds of an argument came from within the ship and then a heavy clanking. Crane ran up the short iron ladder to the port and thrust his head inside. A few feet beneath him, two men were buckling the long tanks of ferrous solution into place.