In Deep (12 page)

Krisch knew that this world could not have supported indigenous life more recently than ten million years ago; but there was not a trace of corrosion in any of the artifacts.

He said, “Why did you fail to report this until I called you?”

Viar said apologetically, “I thought it could wait for my weekly report. It didn’t seem to have any importance, until today. Then I noticed that this box was open.”

Krisch looked at it. The seam gaped very slightly around three sides. He tested it, and found that the enclosed face would not move in either direction. It seemed unlikely that anything but a gas could have escaped.

He remembered the dead cadet’s description of the strange thing that had spoken to him on the training ground. “It was made of lines…” None of the others had duplicated this phrase: they had simply said that it was like a man, but different. The fanciful thought occurred to him that if the first description was correct, and the word “lines” had been. used mathematically, even this millimeter gap would not have been necessary.

“Is it possible that one of the cadets could have opened it?” he demanded.

“Perhaps,” Viar granted, willing to consider every possibility, “but it does not seem probable.” He gestured toward the box. “I made several attempts to open it when I first got it out,” he said. “Perhaps something I did had a delayed action. At any rate, I would swear that not only was it heavier then than it is now, but there was a force lock of some nature holding it shut. I’ve looked in with a microprobe, and there is a small mechanism of some kind attached to one corner. I believe the box can be opened fully now, but I thought I had better wait until you could inspect it.”

“You believe, then,” said Krisch, “that there was a device in this thing which was still in operation until yesterday?”

Viar looked at him with a trace of hangdog defiance. “I believe that there was something in that box which is still operating, now.”

Krisch controlled his irritation and said nothing. Viar escorted him back to the exit tube. Krisch told him, “Proceed with normal activities, but monitor every cadet. And open that box, but not inside the Unit. And report to me hourly.” He strapped himself into the speedster again and turned its nose back to Unit Ten.

Three more cases of aberrant conduct were waiting for him, and the reports from the other units were similar and equally alarming. Krisch interviewed a few more, then cubed a standard interview form and turned the process over to robot mechanisms. Viar called him later in the day, to report that he had succeeded in opening the box but could make nothing of its contents.

Krisch got the collated reports from the robot interviewers and ran up a tentative prediction. In twenty-six hours the unknown agent—which might or might not have escaped from the box unearthed by Viar—had corrupted one hundred and fifty-three cadets, or approximately one every ten minutes. If it continued at the same rate, which of course could not be assumed with so little data, ten per cent of the total student body would have been aberrated at the end of three hundred hours. Twelve and a half Galactic Standard days—and at the end of that time, Krisch reckoned grimly, the Project would be hopelessly crippled.

Monitoring the cadets had been totally ineffective; Krisch ordered it discontinued. His only other defensive move would have been to suspend normal activities altogether and keep the cadets in monitored groups, but that would have had a psycbological effect nearly as bad as the one he was trying to avert. He ordered the aberrees to be confined and then destroyed personally by the Director of each Unit, without the knowledge of the student leaders.

He carried out this duty himself in Unit Ten, and then went to bed.

He awoke from a nightmare in which he had been surrounded by silent metal bodies—the bodies of ten-year-old cadets; but instead of the egg-shaped headpieces, they had worn open helmets; and where their faces should have been were raw, bleeding disks of flesh.

Deliberately he relaxed his body and sank back onto the sweat-drenched cushion. Then he sat up again with a start, realising that what had waked him had been someone’s entrance into the room.

And that was simply, starkly impossible. His apartment was guarded while he slept by armored walls and a massive door which would have held back a regiment. Moreover, there were alarm devices which would signal any attempt to enter. Still further, no one in this Unit or any other had the slightest sane motive for trying to enter without permission.

That realisation exploded in his mind, and faded against toe fact registered by the outmost corner of his vision: there was someone in the room.

He raised his head, looking full at the archway that separated his sleeping room from his office. There was a dim glow from the instrument panels.

A strange man stood there.

That was his first dominant impression; and it was so strong that for a long minute, even while he saw that he was mistaken, he could not rid himself of it.

The eye does not see a man; it sees a grouping of lines which are capable of almost infinite variation. The visual center interprets those lines, compares them with a
gestalt
, a perception-of-form, and the mind says, “Man.”

With an effort, Krisch put aside his preconceptions and accepted what he saw.

He saw a collection of lines that enclosed no form. The glow from his office shone between them. There was a series of curlicues that might have suggested hair; then a gap; then two incomplete spirals that vaguely suggested eyes; another gap; and a straight line for a nose; farther down, a line for the mouth, curved into an idiotic smile. On either side was a handle-shaped line for the ear.

The body was like that of a stick man drawn by a child; one line for the torso, two for the arms, two for the legs, and three stiffly curling lines for each hand.

The figure said, “Ask me anything.”

The voice spoke without sound, the words coming spontaneously into Krisch’s mind as if written with a phosphorescent crayon on a sheet of black glass. Krisch realised this without surprise, and briefly wondered why: then he recalled the interview with the first cadet. The boy had said he had spoken with the “training device” outside the Unit area, during airless maneuvers.

Krisch thought, “Who are you?”

The answer was immediate. “I am a device to entertain and instruct you. Ask me anything.”

Krisch’s hand rested on the button that controlled a battery of force pencils focused on the area in front of his couch, but he had no intention of using it. There was every reason to suspect that such methods would fail; and if they did he would have surrendered his only chance.

He decided to take the thing at its word. “How can you be destroyed?”

“I can not be destroyed.”

“How can you be immobilised, then?”

“By—” The figure went. without a pause, but the visual images replaced the words. There were, Krisch realised, no words in his language for those images. They flashed briefly before him, each one trailing glimpses of the process that produced it. Krisch could not even retain the sequence, much less interpret it. “Repeat,” he thought.

The same images came and went; and at the end of it, Krisch knew that he would never learn anything useful from them. What he was seeing was the terminal end of a thousand-year chain of technology. He could not expect to grasp it from one simple explanation, any more than a savage could be taught metallurgy in a sentence.

Krisch remembered, with panic, that the thing’s average indoctrination period was ten minutes. He said, “What governs the length of time you stay with one person?”

“If he asks me to stay, I stay.”

Krisch relaxed for the first time since he had seen the figure standing there in the doorway. If that were true then his battle was won. “There are a great many questions I want to ask you,” he thought. “Stay with me until I ask you to go.”

There was no reply. He demanded, “Will you do as I ask?”

“Yes.”

Fully awake now, Krisch raised the backrest of the cushion and pressed the buttons for nourishment. His mind was racing. A thought was half born in his mind that made him tremble. He asked, “Of what substance are you composed?”

The figure said, “Of no substance. I am the Pattern.”

Krisch leaned forward. “Do you mean that you are not material?” he demanded.

“I am not material. I am a pattern of forces which adapts itself to each individual I serve. You see the sketch of a man; my makers would see something quite different.”

“Are you intelligent?”

“I am not intelligent. I have no will or independent existence. I am merely a device for answering questions.”

Krisch thought for a moment. He said, “A minute ago you described yourself as
the
Pattern. Does that mean you are the only one of your kind ever created?”

“No. There were many others, but those who came after my makers did not like us. We disturbed them. Therefore they imprisoned us, like the jinn in your legend, since they could not destroy us.”

Krisch asked, “Are you capable of lying?”

“No.”

That was the central question, and unfortunately the answer meant nothing. But Krisch was beginning to see a strong possibility that his first estimate of the thing as a saboteur was mistaken. The other explanation fitted the facts more readily and completely. The Pattern was what it called itself, “a device to entertain and instruct you.” It presented itself to a cadet who was alone and idle—probably it had been designed never to interfere with anyone who had something better to do. The cadet asked questions; the Pattern answered them. At the end of ten minutes or so—a cadet was rarely unoccupied for longer—the cadet released it and it looked for another client.

And because the fields about which the cadets were most curious were precisely those whose knowledge would destroy them—they went insane.

The Pattern had said that “those who came after my makers did not like us.” It was understandable. Every culture had its areas of forbidden knowledge and politely ignored facts. The Pattern would be inhibited in those areas—where its own makers were concerned. But in an alien society, its truthful answers could be explosive.

He asked, “Were you intended for the use of children, or of adults?”

“For the use of both.”

The knowledge he wanted was there, then, and by asking enough questions, he could get it. You could not teach metallurgy to a savage in one sentence, or even in one day—but you, could teach him.

Assuming that the pattern was truthful, there was still one open question that gave Krisch reason to hesitate. An absolutely truthful oracle could be a dangerous thing: witness the insanity of the cadets, and the “disturbance” of “those who came after our makers.” Krisch’s mind was not the artificial, delicately balanced creation that the cadets’ were, but he knew very well that he had areas of instability; he could even concede that there might be such areas of which he was not aware. Could he ask the right questions—the ones which would not evoke dangerous answers?

He thought so. What he wanted from the pattern was nothing that could be intimately bound up with his emotional drives or the structure of his ego; he wanted technical information.

Prove to a religious fanatic that there is no God, and you destroy him. But give him a flame thrower, and he will destroy the ungodly.

Finally, there was the question that capped all others: just how had the Pattern kept up an average rate of one cadet every ten minutes—counting the time spent in traveling from one Unit to the next, and in finding an available subject?

The answer was the one he had suspected and hoped for: the Pattern moved by instantaneous transport, out of the normal fabric of spacetime.

“How?” asked Krisch. Again he got a series of incomprehensible images. “Explain that first picture,” said Krisch, and, “Break that down further,” and “What is that component?” And, very slowly, the Pattern began to teach him.

The problem of limiting the Pattern’s activities while Krisch slept bothered him. He solved it, finally, by setting up a pool of cadets to be admitted by a robot monitor, one at a time, into a room where the Pattern could talk to them without interruption. As soon as one cadet stopped asking questions, he was removed and another was admitted. Krisch found that although the Pattern could plant the seeds of insanity in a cadet in less than ten minutes, it took an average of nearly two hours to reduce the same cadet to such a mindless state that he was no longer useful as a questioner. Thus, during each of Krisch’s six-hour sleep periods, the Pattern disposed of only three cadets. During the remaining eighteen hours of each day, Krisch kept it fully occupied.

All knowledge is power, rightfully applied. But Krisch needed a particular kind of lever and a special place to stand. Slowly and painfully he was getting it.

The balance of forces which had made the cadets possible and necessary included, as one of its basic assumptions, transport at finite speeds. Under this limiting condition, attack from space on a fortified planet was enormously costly and by itself could not succeed. It was necessary for the attacker to expend twenty ships in order to land one: thereafter the war proceeded on the ground, under the enemy’s own defensive umbrella, as wars had always been fought—in hand-to-hand, street-to-street combat. Superiority in ground troops, therefore could be the decisive factor.

But an object moving instantaneously could not, by definition, be interrupted or affected in any way while in transit. And therefore: the man who brought the secret of such transport to Cynara or any other great power could ask his own price. Since the power which brought the secret would shortly rule the galaxy, the price would be high.

If Krisch had been required to understand everything he was taught, the project would have been nearly hopeless. As it was, his task was difficult enough. The Pattern’s knowledge included minutely detailed plans for every stage of the operation that were required, and for all the subsidiary operations that produced the components, and the still more subsidiary operations that produced them. Krisch had to follow these step by painful step, like a savage smelting ore to build a smeltery to smelt the ore better, to build a foundry to cast the metal to make tools that made other tools that built a machine that built another machine to draw wire, that another machine shaped and threaded: result, a bolt.