Colossus and Crab (13 page)

“Now who’s being defeatist?” shouted Blake. “And you can stop thinking about bugs. You’re so right, I’m festooned with them - all inactive! You seem to forget these bastards learned all they know about us from radio and TV programs - not what you’d call a balanced education, would you?”

“TV’s not all late shows. There’ve been plenty of degree courses.”

“In bugging? See reason, Charles.” He got back to his theme, “If my hunch - okay, that’s all it is - is right, you must see we have a chance.”

Forbin saw only the frightening difficulties, and rated them insuperable: his expression said it for him.

“Okay, so we do nothing.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool!” Forbin replied angrily. “We can do nothing! Just suppose the old stations have their memories intact, what then? Reopen the lines - forget the Martians for a moment - to Colossus? Let’s assume we do, where does the input go? Colossus is just a first-class computer, no more. Ninety percent is cut out. There’s no storage.” He laughed bitterly. “And what about time? Even if we have the capacity to redevelop, we’d need days, maybe weeks. Each hour there’d be the increasing risk of a Martian checkout. If taking the cold view is being defeatist, right, I’m defeatist.”

Blake growled.

“And another thing, Ted,” Forbin went on, “we can’t be sure that reactivation would not poop off the entire armory.”

“That’s a risk I’d take.” Blake looked steadily at his boss. “I mean it. If the worst happens, we’ll have jumped in the fire, but is the alternative so good? We’re on the griddle now! Also, I don’t happen to believe the armory would be activated. Both stations were slaves of Colossus; updated and rehooked, the baby downstairs would be no reason for taking out humanity.”

“No. It’s all very well for you to lie here in your ivory tower - your description, not mine but I think - and I have to say it - I think you haven’t thought this thing through.”

Blake took that in silence; the pre-Martian Blake would have reacted very differently. He answered quietly, reasonably. “To a point, you are right, but not quite, Charles. I have thought a bit further. Right, so all your objections are mine, too, except about the risk of a nuclear drench, but here’s another idea: suppose we keep Colossus out of it, reactivate the old USNA/Russian stations, relink their cable communications, and feed in all we have on the Martians?”

“Supposing - for a start - their memory banks are stripped?”

“We’ll have lost.” Blake took a cigar from a box on his bedside table, sniffed it, grimaced, and put it back. “Yes.” he said less flatly, “we’d have lost - but at least we’d have tried!”

“And how would you get into either of the stations? Good God, we of all people know the work that went into proofing them against any human interference!”

“Oh sure, but with the power switched off, there’s no reason why we don’t cut through the cement walls. They’re not that strong - no need to be, with power on. Just one microtouch on the reinforcing mesh - and bang! Not now: hit the mesh with a three-kilo sledge, and apart from a loud twanging sound - nothing.”

Forbin got off Blake’s bed and paced up and down, Blake watching intently. Suddenly he wheeled. “Again, just supposing it worked, have you thought it through? For a start, whoever did the job would have to be very familiar with the old layout. With power on, one false move and we still get that nuclear ‘drench,’ as you so graphically put it.”

Blake nodded.

“It would have to be one of the Old Guard: there’s not so many left. Cleo -” He faltered at the thought of his wife. “No matter, no matter… . Fisher’s dead. That leaves you, me, and perhaps Fultone.”

“Fultone’s out, we both know that. He has to stay with Condiv.”

“Which leaves us. You’re not fit, and I can’t, won’t go.” Forbin spoke with complete finality.

“I don’t see why, Charles. From what you’ve said, this goddam Collector is going ahead only too fast. You don’t have to stand over Fultone. As Ruler, you have other things on your plate. You’d only be gone forty-eight hours.”

Forbin attacked from a different angle.

“Earlier you said that you were right behind me as Ruler.”

“And I mean it!”

“I’m glad to hear it, and assume it includes you as one of my subjects?”

Blake looked blankly at Forbin. “That doesn’t sound much like you, Charles, but yes, it does.”

“So you obey me?”

“Should I stand to attention?”

“Something slightly more difficult: you do the breakin.”

“Oh, come on, Charles-I’m sick. Anyway, no one could do the job as well as you.”

“Rubbish-and you know it!” Forbin smiled, but strain lurked in the corners of his mouth. “I order you!”

Blake stared back, both men in a battle of wits, not wills. “You must go,” he said doggedly. “I’m sick. It could finish me.”

Forbin smiled thinly. “Just now I said you hadn’t thought it out. I take that back. You have, haven’t you?”

His deputy was reluctant to answer. “Maybe.”

“Well, so have I, and I still say you go!”

“You’re crazy! You’re needed, not me!”

“Yes, I thought you’d seen it, but you’ll still do as you’re told, even if I have to send in a squad of men to take you!”

“You wouldn’t have the bloody gall!”

“Watch me,” said Forbin complacently. “At first I didn’t care overmuch for being Ruler, but I find it grows on one. It has advantages - like now.”

Blake changed his approach.’ ‘If I do it, promise me one thing-yes?”

“No.”

“You must!” Blake spoke urgently. “Promise me that if I can get the good word to you, you’ll move!”

Forbin shook his head. “In my place, would you?” Blake laughed grimly. “Too goddam right I would!”

“I doubt it. To run would take more guts than to stay - and do you really think I’d abandon my staff? In any case, this is all pure hypothesis. There’s nothing but a very slim chance.” He shrugged. “But you go, and that’s final.”

“You realize that would leave me -“

“Plus a reactivated USNA/USSR array.”

“Yeah, with that lot, but I’d have to step into your shoes.”

“A temporary state, while the parents built anew. Ted,” went on Forbin earnestly, “when you stormed into the Sanctum after pulling the switch on Colossus, you horrified me - personally, I mean. Now, after the Martian lesson, you’re a different man. You’ll do. So concentrate on your first problem, getting mobile. Good night!”

Alone, Blake pondered on their conversation. Neither of them bad mentioned what was the conclusion reached in their personal “thinking through” - or needed to.

If the old stations were updated with details of the Martian threat, their reaction was obvious: a megaton missile zeroed in on their child, Colossus.

Chapter XIII

AFTER LEAVING BLAKE, Forbin felt strangely lighthearted, more than half hoping Blake’s scheme would work. On the bad side, he would die-and so what? Sooner or later death must come, and although he waved aside his chest cramps, instinct told him he should rest if he wished to survive. But rest was an impossible dream. He was Ruler, Father of his people, and in the natural order of things a father must be prepared to sacrifice himself for his children. In the last analysis, that was the basis of the respect children owed their father… .

And the good side? The Martians would be destroyed. He’d have to take damned good care the strike was when they were in the Sanctum; given one second’s warning, they’d be gone. What else? Well, the crippled Colossus and all the staff would go, too, but as a price for saving the world, that was nothing. Blake would face confusion, and until the parents could give birth to a new Colossus, Earth would have trouble. He’d have to leave a farewell message to the world, confirming Blake’s authority. It was ironical to think that Blake, who had sought to destroy Colossus, would be the most important human in the building of a new Master. Life played funny tricks… .

Walking along a corridor, he was dimly aware of a staff member, a female he thought, making obeisance. A month back he’d have blushed and run; even two weeks ago he’d have been mighty brusque. Now he was neither. Why not? The Sect might be silly in detail, but the general idea of a Superior Being - and his earthly representative - was that so bad?

Another passerby curtsied deeply and got a brief nod. He hardly noticed. Not that Joan minded: naturally Father had much to consider.

Although actively planning his own highly probable demise, Forbin hadn’t lost his euphoric feeling. Not even Fultone’s excited announcement that the first heavy sections of the Collector would be airlifted to the site next day dampened him, but the additional news that Condiv expected to make the first test-run in a week was chilling.

A week! It was all going much too fast. Blake could barely crawl out of his bed. … He prayed the damned thing would fly apart. Was there any preliminary work he could organize?

Forbin thought of the Zone where he’d spent so many years; it seemed a hazy, insubstantial dream of another world, and in a way it was. Technical and scientific memories remained sharp, exact, but the location of the commissariat and the equipment stores eluded him. He’d only to call the Commander, Secure Zone Guard, to be told, but the Ruler inquiring about the stock of thermal lances and hand-drills would cause undesirable speculation. Perhaps Blake knew.

Blake did. No problem. Armed with Forbin’s authority, equipment could soon be fixed. He’d need a technician, and Condiv had just the man, a tight-mouth, and a real all-rounder. Forbin said go ahead and borrow him; he could always tell Fultone he had a new version of his bed in mind. Blake laughed, a tinny sound on the intercom but, to Forbin’s ear, already stronger. Right, he was sure tired of his bed, and aimed to be out of it in three days.

At a quarter of six Forbin entered the Sanctum and, for all his new-found confidence, did so apprehensively. The room was empty.

What did they do up there in orbit, apart from regenerate? Did they think, or was that a too-human view of their unearthly structures? How many simultaneous functions could they perform? Thank God that among their varied unnatural skills they did not possess the ability to be in more than one place at a time. If they were up there, they could hold sensitive areas under surveillance. With an optical/radio beam capable of seeing a man on earth from the Martian orbit, he hated to think what they’d see from a paltry twenty-five kilometers. He’d have to remind Blake; his entry would have to be made under cover.

Noting Fultone’s latest report was on-screen, and telling himself he wasn’t hurrying, he hurried out. The aliens could return, literally, at any nanosecond, the awful image of Mars might be cut down to size, but -

Crossing the concourse, acknowledging absently the many ultrarespectful salutations, his gaze fastened on two Sectpolice. They stiffened to attention, right fist on breast, a salute which until this moment had been just another petty annoyance, relic of Galin’s theatrical rule. Now it struck him as rather dignified, a suitable Roman touch, appropriate to the last days of his shortlived court.

Those stony-faced, hard-eyed men were his. They would die for him, or, he thought grimly, die with him. Let the salute stand.

He dismissed the matter. Of infinitely greater moment was which, and how many, key personnel he could send away without raising suspicions. He had no guarantee the Martians were in orbit; they might assume any shape, or be anywhere, reading human minds. They could be there on the concourse, reading the bovine thoughts of the two Sectpolice. They could be the Sectpolice… .

Showered and changed, he was ready at six-thirty, but his mind, busy with so much, could not remember exactly what he was ready for. Even when Angela arrived, punctual to the minute, it needed her unfamiliar dress in place of the usual gray uniform to trigger him.

“Ah! Yes, of course, Angela! Come in, come in!” Apart from acting as a reminder, the dress threw him; in uniform Angela was a colleague, in a dress a woman - a very different proposition. On top, he had the realization he’d done nothing at all about his impulsive invitation, and that threw him even further. “My dear, do sit down.”

No less awkward, she sat. Never in their years together had this happened. Her unease stemmed not from the fact that he was Ruler and Father of the Faithful; that she could easily toss aside. To her, he was her man, and always had been, from the time when she had been a gauche junior, experimentally brushing her breasts on his arm (typically, he’d not noticed). Thwarted by his blindness, then defeated by Cleo, she’d remained undeterred, constant in aim. To her, the most important human, outside his work, was a rather bumbling, hesitant figure, sloppy of dress, weak on buttons and not much better with zips, a figure crying out to be mothered.

With Cleo gone - Angela didn’t know where, but hoped it was a long way - her hopes had revived. Sexual equality had been a legal fact for most of the world for three generations, but a hundred years’ legislation made small impact on five thousand years’ conditioning, and even less on fifty thousand years of biological differences. The Director’s Secretariat employed over a hundred people and exercised power that was more real than obvious, and she was boss. Cheerfully, joyfully, she would have exchanged her title of Chief Secretary for Mrs. Charles Forbin, housewife, even if he had nothing. Which is nearly incomprehensible to the male mind, but less so to old-fashioned females, of which there are many.

“Ah, er, have a drink. What would you like?”

She smiled, knowing him forwards, sidewards, and backwards. “I’d like a martini, Chief, please.” As a drink, it would be hell, but he needed time to adjust. He busied himself with bottles; the world’s top cyberneticist, he was low on chemistry.

“I hope that’s all right.” He spoke with well-justified doubt, handing her a warm glass in which one ice cube fought a rapidly losing battle. “Well, my dear, here’s to you.”

“And you, Chief.” One sip, and her worst fears were fulfilled.

Anywhere else, with anyone else, she’d have tossed it at the maker, accurately. “Umm-fine!”

“Good.” He gave a short sigh of relief. He’d never known much about cocktails, and was glad he’d got it right. He grappled with the next problem, dinner. He’d ordered nothing.