Special Deliverance (15 page)

“Somewhere in this city,” she said, “there must be a control room from which this installation can be handled. Maybe booths in which people who are to be subjected to its operation can be placed—although I guess I’d doubt that. The system would be something far more subtle than that.”

“Even if we found such a place,” he said, “it might take years before we could learn to operate it.”

“Could be, but we could have a shot at it.”

“Maybe this is what happened to the people here. Maybe they found another world, a better world, and sent all their people there.”

“In body as well as in mind?” she asked. “That would take some doing.”

“That’s right. I didn’t think of that. Even if they could that wouldn’t explain everything else being gone. Unless they sent along all their possessions as well.”

“I would doubt that,” Mary said. “Unless they used this apparatus to find another place and they could build another door to it. The two could be related, these machines and the doors, although I’d be more inclined to view the installation here as a research tool to be used to learn from alien worlds. Imagine what could be done with it. You could get all kinds of data that could be adapted to your culture. You could revise political and economic systems, steal technological procedures previously unknown to you, overhaul sociological structures, perhaps even learn of new scientific approaches, even entirely unknown scientific disciplines. For any civilized race, it would be a cultural shot in the arm.”

“You touched on it exactly,” he told her. “An intelligent race, you said. Was the race that lived here intelligent enough? Would your culture or mine be intelligent enough to use what we could find by the proper use of this installation? Or would we simply hunker down, clinging to our old ways, the life we were accustomed to, and misuse or abuse what we found on other worlds—perhaps misuse it disastrously?”

“That’s not up to you or me,” she said. “Not at the moment, it’s not. I think we should go out and see if we can locate that hypothetical control room.”

He rose and reached down a hand to help her to her feet. Once up, she still held to his hand.

“Edward,” she said, “the two of us have been through an awful lot together. Even in so short a time…”

“It’s not seemed short to me,” he told her. “I can’t seem to remember a time without you.”

He bent to kiss her and she held him briefly, then stepped away.

They climbed the stairs back to the alley and began their search. They stayed at it until darkness began to fall. They found no control room.

Back at the building where they were camped, they found Sandra and Jurgens busy preparing the evening meal. The Brigadier was not around.

“He went off by himself,” Sandra explained. “We haven’t seen him since.”

“We found nothing,” Jurgens said. “How about you?”

“No business talk, please, until after supper,” Mary pleaded. “By that time the Brigadier should be back.”

He arrived half an hour later and sat down heavily on his rolled-up sleeping bag. “I don’t mind telling you I’m bushed,” he said. “I covered a good part of the northeast section. For some silly idea I had the hunch that if we were to find anything, we would find it there. I found not a thing.”

Sandra dished up a plate of food and handed it to him. “Let’s eat,” she said.

The Brigadier took the plate and began eating, without waiting for the rest of them, shoveling the food into his mouth. He looked tired, Lansing thought. Tired and old. For the first time, the Brigadier showed a touch of age.

When they had finished eating, the Brigadier dug a bottle out of his pack and passed it around the circle. When it came back to him, he took a long pull at it, recapped it and sat cuddling it in his lap.

“This is two days,” he said. “That is what you promised me. I am a man of my word. I will not try to hold you further. Mary, I know you and Lansing will be moving on. How about you other two?”

“I think we’ll go with Mary and Lansing,” Sandra said. “I know I will. The city frightens me.”

“How do you feel?” the Brigadier asked Jurgens.

“With all due respect,” the robot told him, “there seems no point in staying.”

“As for myself,” said the Brigadier, “I’ll stay on for a while. Later I may catch up with you. I’m sure there is something to be found here.”

“Brigadier,” said Lansing, “we found it this afternoon. But I must warn you that—”

The Brigadier leaped to his feet and the bottle went flying from his lap. It hit the floor but did not break. It went rolling across the floor, and Lansing caught it.

“You found it!” yelled the Brigadier. “What is it? Tell me what you found.”

“Brigadier, sit down,” said Lansing, speaking sharply, as one might address a naughty child.

Apparently astonished at the tone of Lansing’s voice, the Brigadier sat down meekly. Lansing leaned forward and handed him the bottle. He took it and placed it back in his lap.

“Now let’s talk about this quietly,” Mary said. “Let us consider it. Let’s not go charging off. I suggested to Edward that we should say nothing of our discovery, but he said we had made a bargain—”

“But why?” shouted the Brigadier. “Why say nothing?”

“Because what we found is beyond our understanding. We know at least one thing that it can do, but there is no way to control it. It’s dangerous. It’s nothing to fool around with. We told ourselves that somewhere there must be a control room, but we couldn’t find it.”

“You’re an engineer,” said Jurgens. “You, of all of us, should know the most about it. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you found.”

“Perhaps you, Edward,” Mary said.

Lansing said, “No, it’s yours to tell.”

She told them and they listened intently. There were a few questioning interruptions, but not many.

After she had finished, a long silence ensued. Finally Jurgens turned to Mary. “What you are saying is that the people here had a thrust toward other worlds. Alien worlds, most likely, rather than alternate Earths.”

“They may not have been aware of the alternate Earths,” said Lansing.

“They wanted to get away from here,” said Jurgens. “The installation that you found and the doors are tied together, part of the same research effort.”

“It seems likely,” Mary told him.

The Brigadier said, quietly, quite unlike his earlier shouting, “You two are the only ones who have seen it. The rest of us, all five of us, should have a look at it.”

“I’m not saying we should not investigate,” said Mary. “What I do say is that we should be careful what we do. Both Edward and I were taken over, but only for a moment. That may be no more than a sample of what it can do.”

“You have searched for a control room?”

“We searched till dark,” said Lansing.

“It would seem the control should be housed with the apparatus,” said the Brigadier.

“We thought of that, of course. But there is no room. All the space is taken up by the installation. Then we figured that in a building close by…”

“That would not necessarily be the case,” said Mary. “I know that now. The control room could be anywhere in the city. Anyplace at all.”

“You say the mechanism is unrecognizable? That you have no idea what it is?”

“There is not a single piece of it,” said Mary, “that I recognized as anything that would correspond to any kind of mechanism familiar to my world. Of course a closer look, a closer examination might make for a marginal understanding. The point is that I wouldn’t want to get that close, get that involved with it. That would be sticking your neck out. Edward and I did not experience the full effect, I’m sure. Get more involved, closer to it, I can’t imagine what might happen.”

“The feature of this city that worries me the most,” said Sandra, “is the flatness of it. Not of the city itself, but the culture that it represents. It exhibits a cultural poverty that is simply impossible. There are no churches, no recognizable places of worship, nothing that ever seems to have been a library or an art gallery or a music hall. It seems impossible to me that any people could have been so destitute of sensitivity, could have been satisfied to live out such flat lives.”

“They may have been a one-idea people,” said Lansing.

“Absorbed, the entire body of them, in one area of research and endeavor. This, of course, is hard to understand, but we cannot know their motives. It would be possible, I suppose, to have so strong a motive…”

“This discussion is getting us nowhere,” growled the Brigadier. “We’ll have a look in the morning. Or at least
I
will have a look. The others of you will be taking off.”

“We’ll stay with you,” said Lansing, “long enough to have that look.”

“But, for God’s sake,” said Mary, “everyone be careful.”

I
DOUBT,“ THE BRIGADIER observed, ”that there is as much danger here as would appear to be the case. The machines may be able to affect a sensitive, whereas a man of stronger fiber who had his feet solidly planted on the ground…”

“I suppose,” said Lansing, “you are thinking of yourself. If that is the case, don’t let me hold you back. Go ahead and walk straight into it.”

“You’re dead wrong,” Mary told the Brigadier. “I’m not a sensitive. It’s just possible Edward may be and Sandra certainly. The Parson was and—”

“The Parson,” said the Brigadier, “could not have been a sensitive. Unstrung, perhaps, unstable, but otherwise a clod.”

Mary sighed in resignation. “Have it your own way,” she said.

The five of them stood on the metal walkway, well clear of the machines, which still were glowing with their cat eyes, still singing to themselves.

“I had anticipated,” said Jurgens, “that being half machine myself I might be able to discern some affinity with this installation. I could not know, of course, for on my world there are only the simplest machines. Nothing remotely like these. As I say, I had looked forward to a possibly interesting experience, but I am deeply disappointed.”

“You feel nothing?” Sandra asked.

“Not a thing,” he said.

“Well, now that we have seen these machines,” the Brigadier asked, “what do we do about them? What do we do next?”

“We promised you nothing,” Lansing said, “except that we would come along with you to have a look at them. For my part, that’s all I’m going to do. Have another look at them.”

“Then what’s the use of finding them?”

“We told you,” Mary said, “that at the moment there is no way of understanding them. You were looking for something—you had no idea what it was—so we went out and found it for you. I told you the other night that this city will kill us one by one. The Parson told you it was evil and he fled the evil that he saw. If the Parson was right and there is evil in this city, the machines may be a part of it.”

“You don’t think this, do you?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think machines have a capacity for evil. But the city is no place to stay and I am leaving it, right now. Are you coming, Edward?”

“You lead the way. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Now wait a minute!” stormed the Brigadier. “You can’t desert me now. Not when we are on the brink.”

“The brink of what?” asked Jurgens.

“The brink of finding the answer we seek.”

“It’s not here,” said Jurgens. “The machines may be a part of it, but they’re not all of it and you can’t get the solution from them.”

The Brigadier sputtered at him, but no words came out. His face was puffed and red with anger and frustration. Then suddenly his sputtering stopped and he shouted at them. “We’ll see about that! I’ll show you. I’ll show all of you!”

As he shouted at them he leaped forward, running down the walkway, straight between the two banks of machines.

Jurgens took two quick steps in pursuit, struggling to get solid footing with his crutch on the smoothness of the metal walkway. Moving deliberately, Lansing kicked the crutch out from under him and sent the robot sprawling.

The Brigadier still was running. He was far down the walkway when suddenly he sparkled all along his entire body. The sparkle flared for a small fraction of a second and the Brigadier was gone.

Blinded by the flare, they all stood stockstill, horrified. Jurgens, using the crutch to pull himself erect, scrambled to his feet.

“I think,” he told Lansing, “that I must thank you for my life.”

“I told you, long ago,” said Lansing, “that if you ever tried another stupid trick, I’d clobber you with whatever was at hand.”

“I can’t see him,” said Sandra. “The Brigadier’s not there.”

Mary directed a flashlight beam down the walkway. “Neither can I,” she said. “The beam doesn’t carry far enough.”

“I think it does,” said Jurgens. “The Brigadier is gone.”

“But it wasn’t that way with us,” Mary said to Lansing. “Our bodies stayed behind.”

“We weren’t as far down the walkway as the general was.”

“That may be it,” she said. “You spoke of the machines being able to take over the body as well as the mind. I told you it would be impossible. Maybe I was wrong.”

“Two of us gone,” said Sandra. “The Parson and the Brigadier.”

“The Brigadier may come back,” said Lansing.

“Somehow I don’t think so,” said Mary. “There was a lot of energy involved. The Brigadier could very well be dead.”

“You can say this for him,” said Jurgens. “He went out in a blaze of glory. No! No! I’m sorry. I apologize. I did not mean that; I should not have said it.”

“You’re forgiven,” Lansing said. “You just beat another one of us to saying it.”

“Now what?” asked Sandra. “What do we do now?”

“That’s a problem,” Mary told her. “Edward, do you have any kind of hunch that he’ll be coming back? As we came back.”

“No hunch. Since we came back, I thought…”

“But this was different.”

“The damn fool,” said Lansing. “The poor, pitiful damn fool. The leader to the end.”

They stood, huddled together, looking down the walkway in all its emptiness. The cat eyes glowed, the machines kept up their crooning.

“Maybe we should wait awhile,” said Mary, “before we leave the city.”

“I think we should,” said Jurgens.

“If he does come back, he’ll need us,” Sandra said.

“Edward,” Mary asked, “what do you think?”

“That we should wait,” he said. “At a time like this, we can’t desert the man. I can’t imagine he’ll come back, but if he should…”

They moved their camp into the alley, near the stairs that went down into the cavern where the machines sang softly to themselves. Each night the lonesome beast came out on the hills above the city and cried out its bitterness and lostness.

On the morning of the fourth day, after consulting the map that might have represented this part of the world, they left the city and found the westward continuation of the road they’d walked to reach it.