I mean to live, he thought, to watch the damned thing die. I will tape the bomb against the central block, that so-innocent looking slab in there, and I will brace myself around two hundred feet of these heavy metal corners, and pull the cord.
Goodlife stood braced in the perfect place from which to see the heart of the machine, watching the man Hemphill string his cord. Goodlife felt a certain satisfaction that his prediction had been right, that the strategic housing was approachable by this one narrow path of the great damage. They would not have to go back that way. When the badlife had been captured, all of them could ride up in the air-filled elevator Goodlife used when he came here for maintenance practice.
Hemphill had finished stringing his cord. Now he waved his arm at Goodlife and Maria, who clung to the same girder, watching. Now Hemphill pulled on the cord. Of course, nothing happened. The machine had said the bomb was disabled, and the machine would make very certain in such a matter.
Maria pushed away from beside Goodlife, and drifted in toward Hemphill.
Hemphill tugged again and again on his cord. Goodlife sighed impatiently, and moved. There was a great cold in the girders here; he could begin to feel it now through the fingers and toes of his suit.
At last, when Hemphill started back to see what was wrong with his device, the service machines came from where they had been hiding, to seize him. He tried to draw his pistol, but their grippers moved far too quickly.
It was hardly a struggle that Goodlife saw, but he watched with interest. Hemphill’s figure had gone rigid in the suit, obviously straining every muscle to the limit. Why should the badlife try to struggle against steel and atomic power? The machines bore the man effortlessly away, toward the elevator shaft. Goodlife felt an uneasiness.
Maria was drifting, her face turned back toward Goodlife. He wanted to go to her and touch her again, but suddenly he was a little afraid, as before when he had run from her. One of the service machines came back from the elevator to grip her and carry her away. She kept her face turned toward Goodlife. He turned away from her, a feeling like punishment in the core of his being.
In the great cold silence, the flickering light from the strategic housing bathed everything. In the center, a chaotic block of atoms. Elsewhere, engines, relays, sensing units. Where was it, really, the mighty machine that spoke to him? Everywhere, and nowhere. Would these new feelings, brought by the badlife, ever leave him? He tried to understand himself, and could not begin.
Light flickered on a round shape a few yards away among the girders, a shape that offended Goodlife’s sense of the proper and necessary in machinery. Looking closer, he saw it was a space helmet.
The motionless figure was wedged only lightly in an angle between frigid metal beams, but there was no force in here to move it.
He could hear the suit creak, stiff with great cold, when he grabbed it and turned it. Unseeing blue eyes looked out at Goodlife through the faceplate. The man’s face wore a neat short beard.
“Ahhh, yes,” sighed Goodlife inside his own helmet. A thousand times he had seen the image of this face.
His father had been carrying something, heavy, strapped carefully to his ancient suit. His father had carried it this far, and here the old suit had wheezed and failed.
His father, too, had followed the logical narrow path of the great damage, to reach the strategic housing without being seen. His father had choked and died and frozen here, carrying toward the strategic housing what could only be a bomb.
Goodlife heard his own voice keening, without words, and he could not see plainly for the tears floating in his helmet. His fingers felt numbered with cold as he unstrapped the bomb and lifted it from his father . . .
Hemphill was too exhausted to do more than gasp as the service machine carried him out of the elevator and along the air-filled corridor toward the prison room. When the machine went dead and dropped him, he had to lie still for long seconds before he could attack it again. It had hidden his pistol somewhere, so he began to beat on the robotlike thing with his armored fists, while it stood unresisting. Soon it toppled over. Hemphill sat on it and beat it some more, cursing it with sobbing breaths.
It was nearly a minute later when the tremor of the explosion, racing from the compounded chaos of the berserker’s torn-out heart, racing through metal beams and decks, reached the corridor, where it was far too faint for anyone to feel.
Maria, completely weary, sat where her metal captor had dropped her, watching Hemphill, loving him in a way, and pitying him.
He stopped his pointless pounding of the machine under him, and said hoarsely: “It’s a trick, another damned trick.”
The tremor had been too faint for anyone to feel, here, but Maria shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She saw that power still seemed to be on the elevator, and she watched the door of it.
Hemphill went away to search among the now-purposeless machines for weapons and food. He came back, raging again. What was probably an automatic destructor charge had wrecked the theater and the star-charts . They might as well see about getting away in the boat.
She ignored him, still watching an elevator door which never opened. Soon she began quietly to cry.
PATRON OF THE ARTS
After some hours’ work, Herron found himself hungry and willing to pause for food. Looking over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line! Aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the critic might be praising something good.
Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm’s length behind him, for all the world like some human kibitzer.
He had to chuckle. “I suppose you’ve some idiotic suggestion to make?”
The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it, going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and captured it; and Piers Herron, the only passenger, had not yet had time to learn his way around.
It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it—it was meant to be a place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew weary of staring at pictures. The Frans Hals had been built as a traveling museum; then the war of life against berserker machines had grown hot around Sol, and BuCulture had wrongly decided that Earth’s art treasures would be safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. The Frans was ideally suited for such a mission, and for almost nothing else.
Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Herron could see that the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as indifferent to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Frans’s crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to fight off the berserker’s boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred death to capture.
Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being—apart from a few bacteria—within half a light year; and he was pleased to discover that his situation did not terrify him; that his long-growing weariness of life was not just a pose to fool himself. His metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the kitchen devices to work.
“Still no suggestions?” Herron asked it. “Maybe you’re smarter than I thought.”
“I am what men call a berserker,” the man-shaped thing squeaked at him suddenly, in an ineffectual-
