The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 8

  orbit and compelled to creep at rocket speeds the last little inch of its journey. The atmosphere could be breathed, for the ferny woods had flushed out the poisons and filled it with oxygen. The gravity was more than Earth’s—a drag on the first generation, to be sure, and an expense in foot troubles and lumbar aches for many more—but nothing that could not be borne. The world was fair.

  Marchand remembered nothing of how he learned this, or of the landing, or of the hurried, joyful opening of the freezing crypts, die awakening of the colonists, the beginning of life on the planet . . . he only knew that there was a time when he found himself curled on a soft, warm hammock, and he looked up and saw sky.

  V

  The protuberant hairy lip and sloping brows of a chimpanzee were hovering over him. Marchand recognized that young fellow Ferguson. “Hello,” he said. “How long have I been unconscious?”

  The chimp said, with embarrassment, “Well—you haven’t been unconscious at all, exactly. You’ve been—” His voice trailed off.

  “I see,” said Marchand, and struggled up. He was grateful for the strength of the slope-shouldered, short-legged body he had borrowed, for this world he had come to had an uncomfortably powerful grip. The effort made him dizzy. A pale sky and thin clouds spiraled around him; he felt queer flashes of pain and pleasure, remembered tastes he had never experienced, felt joys he had never known . . . With mi effort he repressed the vestigial ape and said, “You mean I’ve been—what would you call it? Unstable? The smithing didn’t quite take.” But he didn’t need confirmation from Ferguson. He knew; and knew that the next time he slipped a way would be the last. Czerny had warned him. The phospholipids, wasn’t that it? It was almost time to go home . . .

  Off to one side he saw men and women, human men and women, on various errands and it made him ask: “You’re still an ape?”

  “I will be for a while, Dr. Marchand. My body’s gone, you know.”

  Marchand puzzled over that for a while. His attention wandering, he caught himself licking his forearm and grooming his round belly. “No!” he shouted, and tried to stand up.

  Ferguson helped him, and Marchand was grateful for the ape’s strong arm. He remembered what had been bothering him. “Why?” he asked.

  “Why what, Dr. Marchand?”

  “Why did you come?”

  Ferguson said anxiously, “I wish you’d sit down till the doctor gets here. I came because there’s someone on the Tycho Brahe I wanted to see.”

  A girl? thought Marchand wonderingly. “And did you see her?”

  “Not her, them. Yes, I saw them. My parents. You see, I was two years old when the Tycho Brahe left. My parents were good breeding stock—volunteers were hard to get then, they tell me—oh, of course, you’d know better than I. Anyway they—I was adopted by an aunt. They left me a letter to read when I was old enough . . . Dr. Marchand! What’s the matter?”

  Marchand reeled and fell; he could not help it, he knew he was a spectacle, could feel the incongruous tears rheuming out of his beast eyes; but this last and unexpected blow was too harsh. He had ‘faced the fact of fifty thousand damaged lives and accepted guilt for them, but one abandoned baby, left to an aunt and the apology of a letter, broke his heart.

  “I wonder why you don’t kill me,” he said.

  “Dr. Marchand! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If only,” said Marchand carefully, “I don’t expect any favors, but if only there were some way I could pay. But I can’t. I have nothing left, not even enough life to matter. But I’m sorry, Mr. Ferguson, and that will have to do.”

  Ferguson said, “Dr. Marchand, if I’m not mistaken, you’re saying that you apologize for the Institute.” Marchand nodded. “But—oh, I’m not the one to say this, but there’s no one else. Look. Let me try to make it clear. The first thing the colonists did yesterday was choose a name for the planet. The vote was unanimous. Do you know what they called it?”

  Marchand only looked at him dully.

  “Please listen, Dr. Marchand. They named it after the man who inspired all their lives. Their greatest hero. They named it Marchand.”

  Marchand stared at him, and stared longer, and then without changing expression closed his eyes. “Dr. Marchand!” said Ferguson tentatively, and then, seriously worried at last, turned and scuttled ape-like, legs and knuckles bearing him rapidly across the ground, to get the ship’s doctor who had left him with strict orders to call him as soon as the patient showed any signs of life.

  When they got back the chimp was gone. They looked at the fronded forest and at each other.

  “Wandered off, I expect,” said the doctor. “It may be just as well.”

  “But the nights are cold! He’ll get pneumonia. He’ll die.”

  “Not any more,” said the doctor, as kindly as he could. “He’s already dead in every way that matters.”

  He bent and rubbed his aching thighs, worn already from the struggle against this new Eden’s gravity, then straightened and looked at the stars in the darkening western sky. A bright green one was another planet of Groombridge 1618’s, farther out, all ice and copper salts. One of the very faintest ones, perhaps, was Sol. “He gave us these planets,” said the doctor, and turned back toward the city. “Do you know what being a good man means, Ferguson? It means being better than you really are—so that even your failures carry someone a little farther to success—and that’s what he did for us. I hope he heard what you were trying to tell him. I hope he remembers it when he dies,” the doctor said.

  “If he doesn’t,” said Ferguson very clearly, “the rest of us always will.”

  The next day they found the curled-up body.

  It was the first funeral ever held on the planet, and the one that the history books describe. That is why, on the planet called Marchand, the statue at the spaceport has a small bas-relief carved over the legend:

  THE FATHER OF THE STARS

  The bas-relief is the shape of a chimpanzee, curled on itself and looking out with blind, frightened eyes upon the world, for it was the chimpanzee’s body that they found, and the chimpanzee’s body that they buried under the monument. The bas-relief and the body, they are ape. But the statue that rises above them is a god’s.

  Carr swallowed a pain pill, and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter and spoke to the rogue ship that hung before him in space.

  “I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you.”

  He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. Ills radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, and he knew that it had heard him.

  Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy. Until now the war waged on life by the berserker machines had been a remote horror in the news stories. The colony’s only real fighting ship had been sent to join Karlsen’s fleet in the defense of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here, and the people of (birr’s planet were readying two more ships in feverish haste they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even when the two ships were ready, they would hardly be a match for a berserker.

  When Carr had taken his plan to the leaders of the colony, they had thought him mad.

  Go out and talk to it of peace and love? Argue with it? There might be some hope of converting the most depraved human to the cause of goodness and mercy, but what appeal could alter the built-in purpose of a machine?

  “Why not talk to it of peace?” Carr had demanded. “Have you a better plan? I’m willing to go, I’ve nothing to lose.”

  They had looked at him, across the gulf that separates healthy planners from those who know they are dying. They thought almost any scheme would be better than his. But they could imagine nothing else to do until the warships were ready, which w
ould be at least ten days. The little one-man ship was expendable, being unarmed. Armed, it would be no more a provocation to a berserker. In the end, they let Carr take it, hoping there was a chance his arguments might delay the inevitable attack.

  For Carr himself, of course, they wasted no thought. For Carr was dying. Was as good as dead.

  When Carr came within a million miles of the berserker, it stopped its own unhurried motion and seemed to wait for him, hanging in space in the orbital track of an airless planetoid, at a point from which the planetoid was still several days away.

  “I am unarmed,” he radioed again. “I come to talk with you, not to damage you. If those who built you were here, I would try to talk to them of peace and love. Do you understand?”

  He felt sure it would understand his language. All the berserker machines had learned the universal space-travelers’ tongue, from human prisoners or from each other. And he was serious about talking love to the unknown Builders. Grudges and vengeance seemed tiny things to a dying man. But the Builders would not be aboard; the berserkers had been constructed, probably, when Earthmen hunted the mammoth with spears. The Builders were lost in spacetime, along with their enemies of long ago.

  Suddenly it answered him: “Little ship, maintain your present speed and course toward me. Be ready to stop when ordered.”

  “I—I will.” In spite of being ready for it, Carr found himself stuttering and shaken at the sound of its voice, the uneven mechanical reproduction of the words of human prisoners, recorded aboard or borrowed from another machine. Now the weapons which could sterilize a planet would be trained on him alone. And there was worse than destruction to be feared, if one tenth of the stories about berserkers’ prisoners were true. Carr did not let himself think about that—although the pain that racked him in momentary floods of agony made death seem almost welcome.

  When he was within ten thousand miles it ordered: “Stop. Wait where you are, relative to me.”

  Carr obeyed instantly. Soon he saw that it had launched toward him something about the size of his own ship—a little moving dot on his video screen, coming out of the vast black fortress that floated against the stars.

  Even at this range he could see how scarred and battered that fortress was. He had heard that all of these ancient machines were damaged, from their long senseless fighting across the galaxy; but surely such apparent ruin as this must be exceptional.

  The berserker’s launch slowed and drew up beside his ship. Soon there came a clanging at the airlock.

  “Open!” demanded the radio voice. “I must search you.”

  “Then you will listen to me?”

  “Then I will listen.”

  He opened the lock, and stood aside for the half dozen machines that entered. They were not unlike robot valets and workers, except that these were old and limping and worn, like their great master. Here and there a new part gleamed. But often the machines’ movement’s were unsteady as they searched Carr, searched his cabin, probed everywhere on the little ship. One of them had to be half-carried out by its fellows, when the search was completed.

  Another one of the machines, a thing with arms and hands like a man’s, stayed behind. As soon as the lock had closed behind the others, it settled itself in the combat chair and began to drive the ship toward the berserker.

  “Wait!” Carr protested. “I didn’t surrender!” The ridiculous words hung in the air, seeming to deserve no reply. Sudden panic made Carr move without thinking; he stepped forward and grabbed at the mechanical pilot, trying to pull it from the chair. It put one metal hand against his chest :md shoved him across the cabin, so that he staggered and loll in the artificial gravity, thumping his head painfully against a bulkhead. “In a matter of minutes we will talk about love and peace,” said the radio voice.

  Looking out a port as his ship neared the immense berserker, Carr saw the scars of battle become plainer and plainer, even to his unpracticed eye. There were holes in the hull, square miles of bendings and swellings and pits where the metal had once flowed molten.

  Rubbing his bumped head, Carr felt a faint thrill of pride. We’ve done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. His own martial feeling annoyed him, in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist. Of course it could hardly be thought immoral to use violence against a dangerous but inanimate machine. After some delay, a hatch opened in the berserker’s side, and Carr’s ship followed the berserker’s launch into darkness.

  Now there was nothing to be seen through the port. Soon there came a gentle bump, as of docking. The mechanical pilot shut off the drive, turned toward Carr and started to rise from the chair.

  Something in it failed. Instead of rising smoothly, the pilot reared up, flailed for a moment with arms that sought a grip or balance, and then fell heavily to the deck. For half a minute it moved one arm, and made a grinding noise. Then it was still.

  In the half minute of silence which followed, Carr realized that he was again master of his cabin; chance had given him that. If there was something he could do—

  “Leave your ship,” said the calm voice. “There is an air-filled tube fitted to your airlock. It will lead you to a place where we can talk of peace and love.”

  Carr’s eyes, with a sort of reluctant horror, had dragged themselves to focus on the engine switch, and beyond that, to the C-plus activator.

  The C-plus jump was not usable as a drive anywhere near the huge mass of a sun. In such proximity as this to a mass even the size of the surrounding berserker, the effect became only a weapon—a weapon of tremendous potential power.

  Carr did not—or thought he did not—any longer fear sudden death; he was too near to the slow, sure kind. But now he found that with all his heart and soul he feared what might be prepared for him outside the airlock. All the horror stories came back. The thought of going out through that airlock now was unendurable. It was less terrifying for him to step carefully around the fallen pilot, to reach the controls and turn the engine back on.

  “I can talk to you from here,” he said, his voice quavering in spite of an effort to keep it steady.

  After about ten seconds, the berserker said: “Your C-plus drive has safety devices. You will not be able to Kamikaze me.”

  “You may be right,” said Carr after a moment’s thought. “But if a safety device does function, it might hurl my ship away from your center mass, right through your hull. And your hull is in bad shape now. You don’t want any more damage.”

  “You would die.”

  “I’ll have to die sometime. But I didn’t come out here to die, or to fight. I came to talk with you, to try to reach some agreement.”

  “What kind of agreement?”

  At last Carr took a deep breath, and marshaled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage.

  “I’ve had the feeling,” he began, “that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy.”

  “Life is my enemy. Life is evil.” Pause. “Do you want to become goodlife?”

  Carr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. “From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?”

  There was a longer pause. “What evidence can you offer (hat I should change my purpose?”

  “For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you.”

  “What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?”

  Carr tried again. “Life is basically superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life.”

  “What evidence do you offer?”

  “Man has a spirit.”

  “I have learned that me
n claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not men who deny that this spirit exists?”

  “Spirit is so defined. And there are such men.”

  “Then I do not accept the argument of spirit.”

  Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. “Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility.”

  “That is correct.”

  “But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy of organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull.”

  “I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect,” the mechanical voice informed him blandly, “though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?”

  “Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that—produce brains capable of intelligent action?”

  There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr’s throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours.

  “I have never tried to use that hypothesis,” it answered suddenly. “But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise—then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine.”