sounding voice. “I have captured your ship, and I will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my meaning?”
“I understand as well as I need to.” Herron had not yet seen the berserker itself, but he knew it was probably drifting a few miles away, or a few hundred or a thousand miles, from the ship it had captured. Captain Hanus had tried desperately to escape it, diving the Frans into a cloud of dark nebula where no ship or machine could move faster than light, and where the advantage in speed lay with the smaller hull.
The chase had been at speeds up to a thousand miles a second. Forced to remain in normal space, the berserker could not steer its bulk among the meteoroids and gas-wisps as well as the Frans’s radar-computer system could maneuver the fleeing ship. But the berserker had sent an armed launch of its own to take up the chase, and the weaponless Frans had had no chance.
Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron bowed to the machine. “Will you join me?”
“I need no organic food.”
Herron sat down with a sigh. “In the end,” he told the machine, “you’ll find that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I’m not right.” He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought. Evidently his body still feared death—this surprised him a little.
“Do you normally function in the operation of this ship?” the machine asked.
“No,” he said, making himself chew and swallow. “I’m not much good at pushing buttons.” A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When capture was only minutes away, Captain Hanus had come dashing aft from the control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft past all the stored art treasures.
“Herron, listen—if we don’t make it, see here?” Tooling open a double hatch in the stern compartment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drainpipe. “The regular lifeboat won’t get away, but this might.”
“Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?”
“There’s room for only one, you fool, and I’m not the one who’s going.”
“You mean to save me? Captain, I’m touched!” Herron laughed, easily and naturally. “But don’t put yourself out.”
“You idiot. Can I trust you?” Hanus lunged into the boat, his hands flying over its controls. Then he backed out, glaring like a madman. “Listen. Look here. This button is the activator; now I’ve set things up so the boat should come out in the main shipping lanes and start sending a distress signal. Chances are she’ll be picked up safely then. Now the controls are set, only this activator button needs to be pushed down—”
The berserker’s launch had attacked at that moment, with a roar like mountains falling on the hull of the ship. The lights and artificial gravity had failed and then come abruptly back. Piers Herron had been thrown on his side, his wind knocked out. He had watched while the captain, regaining his feet and moving like a man in a daze, had closed the hatch on the mysterious little boat again and staggered forward to his control room.
“Why are you here?” the machine asked Herron.
He dropped the forkful of food he had been staring at. He didn’t have to hesitate before answering the question. “Do you know what BuCulture is? They’re the fools in charge of art, on Earth. Some of them, like a lot of other fools, think I’m a great painter. They worship me. When I said I wanted to leave Earth on this ship, they made it possible.
“I wanted to leave because almost everything that is worthwhile in any true sense is being removed from Earth. A good part of it is on this ship. What’s left behind on the planet is only a swarm of animals, breeding and dying, fighting—”
“Why did you not try to fight or hide when my machines boarded this ship?”
“Because it would have done no good.”
When the berserker’s prize crew had forced their way in through an airlock, Herron had been setting up his easel in what was to have been a small exhibition hall, and he had paused to watch the uninvited visitors file past. One of the man-shaped metal things, the one through which he was being questioned now, had stayed to stare at him through its lenses while the others had moved on forward to the crew compartment.
“Herron!” The intercom had shouted. “Try, Herron, please! You know what to do!” Clanging noises followed, and gunshots and curses.
What to do, Captain? Why, yes. The shock of events and the promise of imminent death had stirred up some kind of life in Piers Herron. He looked with interest at the alien shapes and lines of his inanimate captor, the inhuman cold of deep space frosting over its metal here in the warm cabin. Then he turned away from it and began to paint the berserker, trying to catch not the outward shape he had never seen, but what he felt of its inwardness. He felt the emotionless deadliness of its watching lenses, boring into his back. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, like cold spring sunshine.
“What is good?” the machine asked Herron, standing over him in the galley while he tried to eat.
He snorted. “You tell me.”
It took him literally. “To serve the cause of what men call death is good. To destroy life is good.”
Herron pushed his nearly full plate into a disposal slot and stood up. “You’re almost right about life being worthless—but even if you were entirely right, why so enthusiastic? What is there praiseworthy about death?” Now his thoughts surprised him as his lack of appetite had.
“I am entirely right,” said the machine.
For long seconds Herron stood still, as if thinking, though his mind was almost completely blank. “No,” he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him.
“In what do you think I am wrong?” it asked.
“I’ll show you.” He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn’t the damned thing kill him and have done?
The paintings were racked row on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the ship for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth-century statglass coating.
“This is where you’re wrong,” Herron said.
The man-shaped thing’s scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. “Explain what you are showing me,” it said.
“I bow to you!” Herron did so. “You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question, if one that is somewhat too broad. First, tell me what you see here.”
“I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two. The image is sealed inside a protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him—”
“You see a man with a glove,” Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. “That is the title, Man with a Glove. Now what do you say about it?”
There was a pause of twenty seconds. “Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?”
Looking now at Titian’s thousand-year-old more-than-masterpiece, Herron hardly heard the machine’s answer; he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work.
“Now you will tell me what it means,” said the machine without emphasis.
Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open.
The berserker’s mouthpiece walked at his side. “Tell me what it means or you will be punished.”
“If you can pause to think, so can I.” But Herron’s stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered even more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach.
His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it as disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year.
The berserker asked: “What have you made here?”
Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably.” It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured.” He waved at the storage racks. “My attempt has failed, as most do.”
