are the badlife. Someone built it, you know, some living people built it, long ago. They were the real badlife.”
“Badlife.” He might be agreeing with Maria, or accusing her.
“Don’t you want to live, Goodlife? Hemphill and I want to live. We want to help you, because you’re alive, like us. Won’t you help us now?”
Goodlife was silent for a few moments, contemplating a bulkhead. Then he turned back to face them and said: “All life thinks it is, but it is not. There are only particles, energy and space, and the laws of the machines.”
Maria kept at him. “Goodlife, listen to me. A wise man once said: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ ”
“A wise man?” he questioned, in his cracking voice. Then he sat down on the deck, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth. He might be thinking.
Drawing Maria aside, Hemphill said: “You know, we have a faint hope now. There’s plenty of air in here, there’s water and food. There are warships following this thing, there must be. If we can find a way to disable it, we can wait and maybe be picked up in a month or two. Or less.”
She watched him silently for a moment. “Hemphill—what have these machines done to you?”
“My wife—my children.” He thought his voice sounded almost indifferent. “They were on Pascalo, three years ago; there was nothing left. This machine, or one like it.”
She took his hand, as she had taken Goodlife’s. They both looked down at the joined fingers, then raised their eyes, smiling briefly together at the similarity of action.
“Where’s the bomb?” Hemphill thought aloud suddenly, spinning around.
It lay in a dim corner. He grabbed it up again, and strode over to where Goodlife sat rocking back and forth.
“Well, are you with us? Us, or the ones who built the machine?”
Goodlife stood up, and looked closely at Hemphill. “They were inspired by the laws of physics, which controlled their brains, to build the machine. Now the machine has preserved them as images. It has preserved my father and mother, and it will preserve me.”
“What images do you mean? Where are they?”
“The images in the theater.”
It seemed best to accustom this creature to cooperation, to win his confidence and at the same time learn about him and the machine. Then, on to the strategic housing. Hemphill made his voice friendly: “Will you guide us to the theater, Goodlife?”
It was by far the largest air-filled room they had yet found, and held a hundred seats of a shape usable by Earth-descended men, though Hemphill knew it had been built for someone else. The theater was elaborately furnished and well-lighted. When the door closed behind them, the ranked images of intelligent creatures brightened into life upon the stage.
The stage became a window into a vast hall. One person stood forward at an imaged lectern; he was a slender, fine-boned being, topologically like a man except for the single eye that stretched across his face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid to and fro like mercury.
The speaker’s voice was a high-pitched torrent of clicks and whines. Most of those in the ranks behind him wore a kind of uniform. When he paused, they whined in unison.
“What does he say?” Maria whispered.
Goodlife looked at her. “The machine has told me that it has lost the meaning of the sounds.”
“Then may we see the images of your parents, Goodlife?”
Hemphill, watching the stage, started to object; but the girl was right. The sight of this fellow’s parents might be more immediately helpful.
Goodlife found a control somewhere.
Hemphill was surprised momentarily that the parents appeared only in flat projected pictures. First the man was there, against a plain background, blue eyes and neat short beard, nodding his head with a pleasant expression on his face. He wore the lining coverall of a spacesuit.
Then the woman, holding some kind of cloth before her for covering, and looking straight into the camera. She had a broad face and red braided hair. There was hardly time to see anything more before the alien orator was back, whining faster than ever.
Hemphill turned to ask: “Is that all? All you know of your parents?”
“Yes. The badlife killed them. Now they are images, they no longer think they exist.”
Maria thought the creature in the projection was assuming a more didactic tone. Three-dimensional charts of stars and planets appeared near him, one after another, and he gestured at them as he spoke. He had vast numbers of stars and planets on his charts to boast about; she could tell somehow that he was boasting.
Hemphill was moving toward the stage a step at a time, more and more absorbed. Maria did not like the way the light of the images reflected on his face.
Goodlife, too, watched the stage pageant which perhaps he had seen a thousand times before. Maria could not tell what thoughts might be passing behind his meaningless face which had never had another human face to imitate. On impulse she took his arm again.
“Goodlife, Hemphill and I are alive, like you. Will you help us now, to stay alive? Then in the future we will always help you.” She had a sudden mental picture of Goodlife rescued, taken to a planet, cowering among the staring badlife.
“Good. Bad.” His hand reached to take hold of hers; he had removed his suit gauntlets. He swayed back and forth as if she attracted and repelled him at the same time. She wanted to scream and wail for him, to tear apart with her fingers the mindlessly proceeding metal that had made him what he was.
“We’ve got them!” It was Hemphill, coming back from the stage, where the recorded tirade went on unrelentingly. He was exultant. “Don’t you see? He’s showing what must be a complete catalogue, of every star and rock they own. It’s a victory speech. But when we study those charts we can find them, we can track them down and reach them!”
“Hemphill.” She wanted to calm him back to concentration on immediate problems.” How old are those images up there? What part of the galaxy were they made in? Or do they even come from some other galaxy? Will we ever be able to tell?”
Hemphill lost some of his enthusiasm. “Anyway, it’s a chance to track them down; it’s information we’ve got to save.” He pointed at Goodlife. “He’s got to take me to what he calls the strategic housing; then we can sit and wait for the warships, or maybe get off this damned thing in a boat.”
She stroked Goodlife’s hand, soothing a baby. “Yes, but he’s confused. How could he be anything else?”
“Of course.” Hemphill paused to consider. “You can handle him much better than I.”
She didn’t answer.
Hemphill went on: “Now you’re a woman, and he appears to be a physically healthy young male. Calm him down if you like, but somehow you’ve got to persuade him to help me. Everything depends on it.” He had turned toward the stage again, unable to take more than half his mind from the star charts.” Go for a little walk and talk with him; don’t get far away.”
And what else was there to do? She led Goodlife from the theater while the dead man on the stage clicked and shouted, cataloguing his thousand suns.
Too much had happened, was still happening, and all at once he could no longer stand to be near the badlife. Goodlife found himself pulling away from the female, running, flying down the passages, toward the place where he had fled when he was small and strange fears had come from nowhere. It was the room where the machine always saw and heard him, and was ready to talk to him.
He stood before the attention of the machine, in the chamber-that-has-shrunk. He thought of the place so, because he could remember it clearly as a larger room, where the scanners and speakers of the machine towered above his head. He knew the real change had been his own physical growth; still, this compartment was set apart in a special association with food and sleep and protective warmth.
“I have listened to the badlife, and shown them things,” he confessed, fearing punishment.
“I know that, Goodlife, for I have watched. These things have become a part of my experiment.”
What joyous relief! The machine said nothing of punishment, though it must know that the words and actions of the badlife had shaken and confused his own ideas. He had even imagined himself showing the man Hemphill the strategic housing, and so putting an end to all punishment, for always.
