Fugitive of the Stars

Time had passed. Horne didn't know how much. Probably a period short enough to be measured in minutes, but everything seemed to take years. In the plaza outside, groups of slaves still stalked and shambled and hopped among the broken glass, looking for someone to kill. But the bulk of the aliens were massed in the two main tunnels that led into the mountain from Rillah and from the port. Fighting was already joined.

In the room, one of many in the operations center where data and problems were fed to the brain and the answers received, a white-faced technician hung over his input-output mechanisms. It had taken a little hard persuasion to make him code the question, How can you be most quickly destroyed? He had pointed out that “you” had no meaning for the brain, and they in turn had pointed out that he had better find a way of phrasing that would have meaning for it, and that he had better do so fast.

He had done so and the problem had been fed in. Now they waited — Horne, Yso, and Chell, and Ardric securely shackled and guarded. Far away in its mighty vaults and chambers, the brain coldly pondered the problem of its own destruction.

It shook Horne, a little, to think of it — this colossal instrument of knowledge being willfully and deliberately destroyed. It seemed almost to be a crime worse than human murder, to strike down an intelligence that might be capable of giving men the answers to the deepest riddles of the universe. For a moment, he was tempted to refrain from doing this thing.

But legend had it that a man had been tempted once before by a Tree of Knowledge, to his regret. And it was certain that a day would come when many men, many worlds would bitterly regret it if they held back their hands now. The iron-hard laws of the Federation against the creation of electronic brains beyond a certain capacity had not been evolved out of mere theory. Three times in the past, worlds like Skereth that had secretly nourished monstrous, mindless intelligences like this one had taken the powers and the weapons derived from them and had set the galaxy aflame before their ambitions were stopped. It would happen again, here, if the intelligence seated in this hollow mountain was not ended.

Horne stared out the window and waited for the brain's answer, and worried.

A very long-legged creature with snow-white skin and a little crest of horns came leaping across the plaza and into the building. Horne went to meet him.

'I bring word from D'quar,” the creature said. “I am to say that the Vellae come against us with many men, and these we could fight, but that also they have very heavy weapons that fill the halls with flame, and these we cannot fight. I am to say that unless other ways of escape are found we will all die, and that they should be found very soon. Very soon.'

Horne indicated the engineering office across the plaza where Fife and a selected group of aliens were extracting information from charts and some reluctant men.

'That's being done now. Tell D'quar and the others to hold out as long as they can.'

Yso called him and he went back into the office. The machine was typing out a bewildering mass of symbols. Horne said, “Read it!'

The technician began to laugh hysterically. “'A nuclear bomb of 80 megaton capacity placed in the position represented by the figures…'

Ardric too began to laugh. “You might as well give up, Horne. You couldn't destroy the brain if you had all the time in the world, and you don't have. We've got you trapped.'

Horne said quietly to the technician, “Try again. Substitute another word for destroyed—something meaning maximum damage.'

The technician hesitated. Chell reached out a couple of tentacles and he flinched and began hurriedly to punch out a tape.

It clicked into the machine and again they waited.

The first stragglers came into the plaza, retreating ahead of the line of battle.

Fife came out of the engineering section with a rolled-up chart in his hand. He came running. “There are other ways out,” he said. “Look here.” He flung the chart open on the floor. “Some of the original borings, where they first started work on the brain, were left open for emergency exits. They blocked the others.” He pointed. “See? Here and here, there are ways.'

Horne saw. “That's fine,” he said, “except that we'd have to go through the brain again to get to them.'

Fife looked out the window. The groups of stragglers were growing and coming faster. “I don't see that we have much choice,” he said.

The machine was click-clacking a message. Chell laid the end of one bright-red tentacle like a necklace around the technician's throat. The man looked agonized, but resigned. He picked up the message and read it.

'It's a list of critical relays and safety switches to be opened, and the precise increase in voltage necessary to burn out all circuits.'

A shiver went through Horne. There was something so unhuman, so uncanny, in the icy calmness with which the mighty computer had calculated its own destruction, on order. But after all, though it was called a brain, it was without will or personality, without any realization of self. It computed, nothing more — and it computed its own destruction as passionlessly as anything else.

'Get to it,” Horne said. “Fife, see that he has all the help he needs and send messengers to the tunnels to tell them to start falling back. Chell…'

Chell wrapped his tentacles around Ardric. Horne saw Ardric's face briefly as he was lifted up, and for the first time he read despair there, and it gave him a warm, good, joyous feeling. He picked up the chart on one hand and took hold of Yso with the other. “Let's go.'

The slaves were coming faster and faster now out of the two streets leading to the main entrances. Many of them were hurt. There was a confused din and roar, punctuated with ominous boomings. Fife and the technician, with whatever help they had gathered up, had disappeared.

Now Ardric began to struggle fiercely. “You'll never get out of the mountain. Look at them run! The Vellae are close behind!'

'Not close enough,” said Horne. “Not quite, I don't think.” He smiled at Ardric, the smile of a happy man. “They may hunt us all down and kill us, but they can't stop Fife, not now. The brain is finished, Ardric. All the hard work, and all the people enslaved and killed, all the plotting, me and Morivenn and the Vega Queen all for nothing, Ardric. Just time wasted.'

Chell said uneasily, “Horne—'

'Keep him quiet,” Horne said. Chell tightened his tentacles and Ardric gasped, and his eyes became dim and disinterested. Horne shook open the chart.

'Which way?” asked Yso, pale and tired now that she had come down from the peak of emotion after the battle.

Horne got himself oriented. “Behind that block of buildings. Come on.'

He began to run, still holding Yso and helping her along. Chell came after them with Ardric.

They passed down the street and into the space behind the Administration Center, where the living rock of the mountain stood in a curved wall. There was a massive door in it. Horne pushed it open and stepped through onto a balcony about halfway up the side of a huge cavern, a balcony so unexpected that he was momentarily stunned by the sensation of the ground falling out from under his feet.

This was the occipital opening where all the nerves of the mountain-high cranium channeled together to the primary control center. From every level the glistening tubes with their cores of bright bundled wire came, running out of their holes in the rock and descending in orderly rows to their ultimate terminals.

Yso caught her breath and cried out, “Look!'

In one, two, then three of the tubes, fire flashed like a bolt of lightning, vanishing into the rock. Behind it the bright tube became opaque, blackened, dead.

Horne looked at the chart again. “One on each side,” he said, and pointed. “There, and there. These lower levels, naturally, were built first, and the main ganglia on this level connect with passages to these old outlets. Good.'

He left Yso with Chell and ran back to face the growing confusion in the plaza.

The business of falling back in the main tunnels had become more of a business of running frantically away from the Vellae weapons that were too powerful to face. Horne got them started down the right street. Pretty soon he had helpers. D'quar joined him, and then Fife.