The sunlight poured down on the mountainside. Quarrying with a tiny shovel and a light hammer, the explorer revealed segments of folded sedimentary rock; one fold cracked apart and bright metal glinted.
The metallic sheen was everywhere, casting back the glow of the fluorescents in the ceiling. Quiet music came from a green box on a shelf, connected by a cable to a socket in the wall; humming the melody, a man in a white coat tipped the contents of a glass vial into a jar. The mixture turned black.
Black all around him, the pilot concentrated on the instruments. On a pillar of fire the vessel settled to the surface of the new planet. The pilot tested the air and emerged to look about him. A creature with tentacles like whips crawled across the alien ground toward him; he waited till it had raised him over its reeking maw, then slashed it with the weapon mounted in the arm of his protective suit.
“Enough!” thundered Alexander.
The suit was of shiny metal, twelve feet tall. It was ultralloy. The voice that boomed from it made the heavens ring. The creature with the tentacles resisted the blast of the weapon, closing its arms tighter and tighter, flowing together to mend the gashes in its tissue. The jaws stretched and engulfed him, then clamped shut. There was darkness.
“Enough!” roared Alexander again, and tramped down from the imperial dais to confront Amaliel and the sallow youth, on whose face was a hint of petulance he dared not give voice to. “Amaliel, what world is that you have been showing me?”
“No world you can reach,” Amaliel said softly. “Your Supremacy, do you not wonder why the pilot of the spaceship failed to defeat the monster after all—and why at the end he bore so close a resemblance to your magnificent self?”
There was silence, during which the youth began to edge away out of reflex rather than any honest hope of escape if Alexander’s rage extended to embrace him.
Alexander stood quite still, however, while Amaliel went on.
“If it had been in keeping with what the records tell us of ancient custom, the purpose of this gathering would have been for you to proclaim yourself absolute ruler of the galaxy. I have just shown you a world you never knew existed, one where your attempt at intrusion resulted in your destruction. Eight hundred thousand years have not sufficed to gain you entry to that world, and were you to endure a million times longer you still would be barred from it. Your conquests, my lord, have been in vain.”
Alexander sought an exit from this dilemma, and found none. He surveyed the packed billions of those whom he had brought together, and contemplated destroying them—for with them would go the unattainable world. But what would that profit him? After so many millennia of victory, was he to concede defeat to those whom he so greatly despised, by acknowledging his inability to live in the same universe with them?
The paradox that he could only conquer if he abolished, and thus fail to enjoy what he had conquered, ate at the edges of his mind. Areas of knowledge blanked out one by one; his sense of purpose eroded; vocabularies, histories, sciences disappeared into a catatonic limbo.
“Who am I?” he cried in the silent caverns of his ultralloy frame, and . . .
And there was no answer.
“But he’s stopped,” the sallow youth said wonderingly. “He’s—dead, isn’t he?”
Amaliel gave a solemn nod.
“What did you do to him?” the youth cried.
“With the aid of this machine they have devised on Earth,” said the old man, “I showed him a world he can never overrun.”
“What world? It seemed familiar, and yet—”
“I showed him,” said Amaliel, “the imagination of a man.”
The Protocols
of the Elders of Britain
Behind an unmarked door on the entrance floor of an ordinary-seeming office block hoods were put over the heads of the four-member trouble-shooting team from Acey-Acey—Accounting Computers and Automation Corporation.
Guided by anonymous unseen hands, they were escorted into a lift, which went down. Then there was a ride on what, by the vibration and the faint smell of ozone, must be a miniature electric train. The tunnel it ran through was very far below the streets of London; one could tell that by the frequent need to pop one’s ears.
The ride lasted only a few minutes. Next they were ushered into another lift. Desmond Williams, naturally enough, was expecting it to go up.
But it too went down. A long way, and quickly.
He had still only half-recovered from the surprise of that when, after a short walk along a corridor with a resilient floor to the accompaniment of a shushing sound, presumably an airconditioning system, he heard a polite voice saying that they had arrived at their destination and might remove their hoods.
He was nervous, and fumbled with the drawstring fastening.
Or. . .
Well, not really nervous. More excited. He had of course been aware that the company he had joined six months ago, on completion of his studies at university, undertook numerous government contracts. But he had had no personal involvement with such work so far. He felt that he had done little except get acquainted with Acey-Acey’s products.
Still, they were obviously very pleased with him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been included in this group.
The string of the hood came loose. Blinking, he found himself in a brightly-lit room which would have been spacious but for the fact that all down both its long walls were ranked the man-high grey cases used to house Acey-Acey’s top-of-the-range model, the X Ten Thousand computer. It had been a tremendous feather for the company’s cap when the government opted for their, rather than their rivals’, equipment.
Although, given they were here, something must have gone radically wrong. That tarnished their collective satisfaction with the sight.
In addition to the computer itself, there were
