The Invincible

middle of the rocky passage; a short stretch ahead was the first energo-robot that had formed the column’s front. The softly trembling air indicated that the robot was still producing a force field, just as it had earlier when Rohan had left it behind after the catastrophe had befallen his group of men. First the Cyclops switched off the Diracs of the energo-robot via remote control. Then the giant revved up its motor, rose into the air and skillfully floated over the backs of the transporters, which jutted at a 45° angle. Hovering over the narrow defile, the Cyclops descended to the huge boulders. Then — more than thirty-five miles away from the ravine — one of the observers in the control room of the Invincible shouted a warning, just as the black pelt covering the slopes began to smoke and fall over the terrestrial vehicle in big waves, burying it instantly and completely, as if a mantel of pitch-like smoke had been thrown over it. An instant later a widely branched bolt of lightning flashed across the whole width of the attacking cloud. The Cyclops had not deployed its devilish weapon — the lightning was simply caused by the energy fields produced by the cloud itself, which clashed with the machine’s own force barrier. Suddenly, this dome-shaped barrier, to which a heavy layer of heaving blackness seemed to be glued, appeared to come alive. Now it swelled up like a gigantic lava bubble; now it contracted. This strange game went on for quite a while. The observers were under the impression that the hidden vehicle was trying to divide the myriads of attackers, which became more and more numerous, as ever new cloudy avalanches rolled down into the gorge. The luminous glow of the protective sphere could no longer be seen by the observers. Only the weird battle between two powerful inorganic forces continued in the dull silence. Finally one of the men in front of the videoscreen sighed: the twitching black bubble had disappeared into a dark funnel. The cloud had changed into a giant whirlpool which extended beyond the highest rocky peaks. The cloud’s lower end clawed into its invisible opponent while its top rotated like a mile-long maelstrom in wild bluish whirls. No one said a word, but the men knew that the cloud was trying to squash the vehicle trapped inside the bubble like a kernel in a shell.

Rohan heard dimly as the astrogator questioned the chief engineer as to whether the Cyclops’ force field would hold out. But he said nothing; he could barely manage to open his mouth.

The black whirlpool, the walls of the ravine, the black, bushy growths — all vanished in the fraction of a second. It looked as if a fire-spewing volcano had opened up at the bottom of the glen; a fountain of smoke, boiling lava, chunks of rock and, finally, a huge cloud, which dragged behind it a trail of vapor veils. The cloud raced higher and higher, until the steam — from the boiling waters of the little brook, perhaps — reached an altitude of one mile where the teleprobe was flying. The Cyclops had deployed its antimatter cannon.

No one in the control center moved or uttered a sound. A sense of gloating satisfaction ran through the group. It did not really matter, nor did it lessen the intensity of their emotion, that this feeling had no rational foundation. Perhaps their pleasure stemmed from the subconscious impression that the cloud had finally met up with a worthy opponent. Ever since the start of the attack direct communication with the Cyclops had been cut off and the men could only see whatever was sent via the probe’s ultrashort wave rays across forty miles of vibrating atmosphere. Also the men working outside the control center had learned of the battle raging inside the ravine. That part of the crew which had been busy dismantling the aluminum barrack stopped working. The horizon over to the northeast grew bright as day, as if another sun were rising, far mightier than the first sun which now stood high in the sky. Then the brilliant glow was blotted out by a pillar of smoke, which soon spread out into a giant dark mushroom cloud.

The technicians in charge of watching over the probe had to remove it from the thick of the battle by making it ascend to a height of two and one-half miles. Thus it escaped the zone of violent airstreams caused by the constant explosions. Neither the rock walls, lining the sides of the ravine, nor the matted slopes, and not even the black cloud that had crept out of the brushy tangle were visible. Bubbling tongues of flame and wisps of smoke, criss-crossed by the parabolic trajectories of glowing debris, filled the videoscreens. The probe’s phonometer transmitted continuous rumbling thunder, sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger again, as if a considerable part of the continent were shaken by an earthquake.

It was astonishing that this ghastly battle just kept going. A few seconds more and the bottom of the ravine and the entire area around the Cyclops would reach the melting point. The rocks would sag, collapse and change into lava. Indeed, the observers were now able to see the fiery glistening stream make its way toward the exit of the gorge a few miles away.

Horpach wondered whether the electronic switches of the Cyclops’ antimatter cannon were stuck, for it seemed unlikely that the cloud would persist in attacking an adversary who dealt it such destructive blows. However, after the probe had been given instructions to climb still higher, and had reached the border of the troposphere, the image on the picture screen proved to Horpach that he was mistaken.

By now the visual field comprised some fifteen square miles. The entire jagged terrain was in motion. The men watched as black conglobulations oozed forth from the darkly spotted rocky slopes, emerging from fissures and caves haltingly, as if photographed in slow motion (of course this optical illusion was only caused by the distance). The black billowing masses rose upwards, fused and grew denser during their journey as they pushed ahead in the direction of the battle scene. For several minutes it looked as if the dark avalanches that were continually thrown into the battle zone from the rear might suppress the atomic fires, suffocating them by their sheer mass and extinguish the flames. Yet Horpach knew better; he was well aware of the energy reserves contained in the manmade monster.

An earsplitting, endless roll of thunder roared from the loudspeakers and filled the control center. At the same time flames two miles high bored into the shapeless mass of the attacking cloud. The burning pillars rotated slowly, forming a fiery mill. The air vibrated in layers, which bent in the heat as its core shifted.

Inexplicably, the Cyclops now drove backwards and retreated gradually toward the glen’s exit, without halting its attack for a single second. Perhaps the machine’s electronic brain had considered that the atomic explosions would cause the rock walls to burst and fall on it. Although the Cyclops could survive such a calamity, its maneuverability might be affected considerably. For whatever reason, the Cyclops tried to reach open terrain, and in this broiling turmoil the observers could no longer distinguish between the fire from its cannons, smoke, wisps of cloud or debris of the rocky pillars.

The gigantic cataclysm of nature seemed to have reached a climax. The next moment, however, something incredible happened. The image on the videoscreen flared up, brightened to a terribly glaring, blinding white. The screen was covered by a swarm of innumerable explosions. In a renewed influx of anti-matter every thing lying beneath the Cyclops was annihilated. The air, debris, steam, smoke and gasses were transformed into hardest radiation to split the ravine in two. Within a radius of three hundred yards the cloud was hurled skywards.

More than forty miles from the epicenter of the earth-shaking explosion, the Invincible reeled under the impact. Seismic waves traveled through the desert. The transporters and energo-robots standing under the ramp slid to the side. A few minutes later a violent howling storm swept down from the mountains. Its fiery breath seared the faces of the men who sought shelter behind the machines, whipped whirling sheets of sand high into the air and raced on across the wide desert.

Evidently, a fragment must have hit the teleprobe, which by that time was over eight miles from the scene of the catastrophe. Communication was not disrupted but the picture blurred considerably. Another minute passed by. As the wisps of smoke dissipated a little, Rohan, who had kept his eyes glued to the screen all this time, was able to witness the next stage of the fight.

The battle was not over yet, as he had thought a short while before. If the attackers had been living beings, the massacre would have induced the reinforcements coming up from the rear to turn around, or at least have forced them to stop in the face of this flaming hell. But this was a battle between inanimate things. The atomic holocaust continued; only form and direction of the main attack were altered. For the first time Rohan understood what the battles must have been like that had once raged on the desolate and deserted surface of Regis III, when the robots had destroyed each other. He sensed dimly what forms of selection had been used by this defunct evolutionary process, and what lay behind Lauda’s hypothesis that the pseudo-insects had been victorious because of their optimum adaptation. At the same time, it occurred to him that something similar must have occurred here before solar energy fixed the inorganic, indestructible memory banks in the mammoth cloud’s myriads of tiny crystals. These inanimate particles — mere nothings compared to the all-consuming flames, the rock-devouring explosions — had had to overcome similar stragglers thousands of years ago — heavily armored giants and atomic monsters, descending from the species of robots. Whatever had enabled the crystals to survive, whatever had allowed the metal hulls of those giant behemoths to be torn into rusty shreds and dragged through the immense desert together with the skeletons of once indestructible electro-mechanisms (which now lay buried in the sand) — whatever had wrought this utter havoc represented an unbelievable, indescribable bravado, if such a term could be