The Questor Tapes (20 page)

Questor hesitated, debated arguing with him. But the solid core of determination that made Jerry both valuable and vulnerable would not be shaken. Questor could see that in the straight set of Jerry’s mouth and the unblinking look of his eyes. He put the jeep into gear again and started forward, quickly accelerating.

Finally, they reached a point beyond which the jeep could not climb. There were too many rocks and steep inclines. A tumbled-down shepherd’s hut stood nearby, abandoned long ago. Questor paused to look around. The area was somehow vaguely familiar to him—he did not know how or why. Jerry nervously looked at his watch again.

“Fourteen minutes.”

Questor turned to him, pleading. “Jerry, you gave me life. I have no wish to cause your death.”

“Then stop talking.” Jerry turned and scrambled out of the jeep, running uphill. Questor followed, easily catching up, and then pacing his friend.

“It will not be much further,” Questor said.

Jerry puffed and slipped and struggled over the rocks behind him. “How . . . how do you . . . know?”

“I feel it.” Questor was too far in the lead to see Jerry’s surprised look.

Darro raced his jeep up and stopped beside the one Questor and Robinson had abandoned. He cut the engine and turned on Hendricks. “Don’t ask me any questions. In exactly”—he checked his watch—“ten minutes and twelve seconds, a bomb is probably going to go off up there. Keep all troops at least twenty miles from this point.”

“You’re going up there?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Colonel.” Darro grabbed a pair of binoculars, jumped out of the jeep, and started to run up the slope. Hendricks got on the radio and transmitted the message. Then he whirled the jeep around and headed back down the slope as fast as he could.

Questor and Jerry burst out into a natural amphitheater curved into the side of the slope. Above them rose a sheer rock wall. In the center of the bowl-like space was a huge stone monolith, a sort of crude column, resting on a flat boulder. It stood like a solitary temple pillar—immeasurably ancient—and somehow, not quite of this earth.

Questor stopped, closed his eyes, and waited, as motionless as the stones around them. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes.” His eyes snapped open and he went immediately to the great monolith. His arms went around it, and he began to twist it counterclockwise. It took every ounce of his great strength, but the rock began to move—and to
click,
as if it were some giant combination lock. Jerry stared in silence, too awed to speak. Questor slowly moved the boulder around until it locked in place. Then he straightened and stared up at the rugged face of the cliff just above them.

An area of the mountainside a dozen feet in diameter began to shimmer, to quiver. Then, with a hollow rushing sound, the glittering area
disappeared,
revealing a long, glassine tunnel which led deep into the heart of the mountain.

“Come! I have less than one minute,” Questor said. He ran forward, and Jerry obediently followed. They had no sooner stepped through the mountainside opening and into the tunnel than the area shimmered again and became instantly solid. They were sealed in.

Darro had arrived, scrambling among the rocks, in time to see Questor move the giant boulder and to watch the tunnel entrance appear. He saw it close after them again with that unearthly quivering gleam, and he chose not to question it, but to accept it. He ran forward, toward the monolith “lock.”

1 7

T
he tunnel stretched on and on, glinting and winking from light sources Jerry’s human eyes could not detect. The floor was absolutely smooth, and Jerry had a hard time keeping his balance and trying to make speed. Questor put on a burst of speed and left Jerry far behind. Jerry slipped and fell; and by the time he had regained his feet, Questor had vanished. Jerry ran a few steps, slowed to look at the luminous dial of his watch, and cried out in a scream of desolate despair.

“Questor—it’s too late!”

Outside, in the natural amphitheater, Darro paused to glance at his watch. He threw himself down behind the monolith instinctively, not stopping to realize it would not matter.
Now!

Nothing happened.

Slowly he got to his knees and then up to his feet. He checked his watch again. It was accurate to the split second—and it was past the time the android was due to explode. Darro knew enough about Vaslovik to know that the android would have detonated as scheduled—unless something in that tunnel stopped it. He flung himself at the monolith, but it resisted his human effort. Desperately he searched for something to help—a lever—and he found one in the sturdy branch of a tree lying among the rocks. He began to pry at the monolith’s base.

Jerry had braced himself for the explosion, knowing that in this confined space it would hit too fast for him to ever feel it. When nothing happened, he cautiously moved ahead and saw the tunnel widening into a great natural chamber in the heart of the mountain. As he stepped into it, he froze, struck with awe at the sight of what the chamber contained.

The scene was otherworldly. Huge, shimmering, transparent, extradimensional devices rimmed the room. Some hardly seemed to be there at all, as though they were partly in this world and partly in another. The entire hall-like chamber was vaulted with some chimeralike glimmer, shot through with shifting red, blue, and violet light patterns which seemed suspended, half real, in mid-air. As in the tunnel, the whole chamber was diffused with glowing light from unseen sources. One wall was blank. But it was so indistinct, so hard to place in space and time as he knew it, that Jerry was not sure it was a wall at all. It was directly across the chamber from the tunnel entrance where Jerry stood.

And Questor. Questor stood in the center of the chamber, in the strongest pattern of mid-air light points, lifting his hands, controlling their number, their hues, as if operating extradimensional devices from another world. His eyes were closed, and a play of the constantly changing light patterns moved up and down over his body. In some dark and frightened corner of his mind, Jerry recognized this incredible nonlinear, nonmatter equipment as a laboratory of a hundred thousand years from now, the technical playthings of a race, which might well have outgrown technology.

He studied his friend. Questor now stood unmoving in the play of unreal light. There was a humming, a disturbing sound; and Jerry realized that it was all being directed at Questor.
What was it doing to him?

The glowing and the strange humming suddenly stopped, and the light patterns around Questor faded away completely. They left a new Questor—one totally assured, totally aware of his purpose, of what he was, and why. He stared at Jerry for a moment—and from those eyes, which previously were without expression, there came a new look of compassion and wisdom. He smiled at his friend.

Then a deep, familiar voice boomed hollowly into the chamber. “Questor?”

Questor turned. “I am here, Vaslovik.”

The far wall, the blank wall with no equipment in front of it, shimmered the same way the hillside had shimmered. Then it faded and vanished. Jerry caught his breath and stepped back slightly from the shock of what he saw.

Closest to the chamber was a large, empty slab. Next to it was another, and beyond that, others—many others, fading back into a shadowy infinity. On the second slab lay a man wearing a business suit. Jerry recognized him as his mentor, Emil Vaslovik. The scientist lay on the slab without moving, but his open eyes stared unwinkingly at the ceiling. Each of the slabs beyond him, stretching backward into the distance, held the body of another man, though the costumes were vastly different. Next to Vaslovik, there was a man in a frock coat and a beard from the mid-eighteenth century. Beyond him lay a rather regally clad figure from the sixteenth century, apparently lifeless, but perfectly whole. Other bodies ranged back beyond his, the costumes going back to the most primitive, gaudy finery of early priests and kings. Who knew who these men might have been? Charlemagne might lie there, Galileo, Leonardo, Alexander the Great, Socrates, Plato, Plutarch. Ranks upon ranks of them were there, moving backward in space and, somehow, Jerry knew, in time.

Questor moved forward, and Jerry followed him, frightened, but unable to stop after coming this far. They stopped at the foot of Vaslovik’s slab. Questor paused for a moment, studying his creator. Vaslovik was of average height, his hair a fading white and his blue eyes gradually losing the brightness of life. Deep lines were etched in his face, the imprint of care. His features were intelligent, compassionate, telling a tale of a life spent in learning and giving. Vaslovik’s lips moved slightly, and Questor stepped forward so that his creator could see him.

“You have received the Truth?” Vaslovik asked. Though his mouth made little movement, his voice boomed out, amplified.

“I have received it,” Questor said quietly. He looked up, beyond Vaslovik, to the line of slabs reaching out to an infinite past. “Since the dawn of this world—since our Masters left the first of us here—we have served this species, Man.”

Jerry twitched, startled.
We
have served . . .
our
Masters . . . what was Questor saying? His eyes darted from Questor to Vaslovik and back. Had the equipment here driven him mad, loosened the practical and logical computer mind from its moorings? Then Vaslovik spoke, and Jerry knew.

“Each of us, at the end of his time, has assembled his own replacement. But man’s quantum advance in physics found me unprepared. The new radiations affected the plasma in my brain case. Your design corrects this fault. You will function your full span, as planned.”

“Not entirely as planned, brother. Your activation tape was tampered with. Your location, other parts of it, were erased.”

Vaslovik’s eyes shifted to the young figure bending over him. “But you have arrived in time.” A statement that was a question.

Questor hesitated, caught for a moment by an inexplicable inability to express the failure in himself. Then he said slowly and softly, “I am incomplete, Vaslovik. I cannot . . . feel. I am incapable of feeling the emotion which you and humans experience.”

Vaslovik lay still, not even the shallow rise and fall of his chest moving, for almost sixty seconds. Then he resumed the breathing pattern that had halted to allow him to consult some inner voice. “You say you cannot feel emotion. Then you must be guided in this by a human.”

Questor looked back at Jerry and nodded. “I select the man you chose to build me, my brother.”

“No, that choice must be his.” Vaslovik’s voice had begun to fade, and his eyes dimmed. “Hear the laws, my brother. We protect, but we do not interfere. Man must make his own way. We guide him, serve him, aid him. But always without his knowledge.”

“I hear and obey,” Questor said.

Vaslovik appeared to be growing weaker much more rapidly . . . while Questor seemed to grow in strength. The older one moved his eyes slightly, refocusing on Jerry. “Jerry Robinson . . .”

Jerry stepped closer to the slab. He had worked for this man . . . he thought he knew him. The thoughts and fears he had entertained in the past week melted away, replaced by the respect he had always felt for Vaslovik. He was a good man; knowing he was an android couldn’t change Jerry’s feelings toward him, no matter how contradictory the idea seemed.

“In two hundred millennia, you are the only human creature who has joined us here in our truth. As mankind needs us, now we need one of you,” Vaslovik said.

“I understand the responsibility.”

“That which is on earth. Teach him error . . . weakness . . . compassion . . . empathy. You must give him those things of humanity he did not receive.” Vaslovik’s voice had grown so weak that it was almost a whisper. “I chose you with great care. I see now I have chosen correctly.”

Jerry touched Vaslovik’s hand as a promise and a seal. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Vaslovik’s dimming eyes moved to Questor’s face pleadingly. “For three years . . . I have lain here . . . only my mind functioning . . . and I am weary. Let me pass now, brother.”

Questor stepped close to Vaslovik and carefully inserted his right hand under the skull of his predecessor. “Pass on, brother,” Questor said in benediction. His fingers moved. Vaslovik’s eyes closed, and the faint lift of his chest held for a moment, then fell with a soft sigh. He was still and at peace at last. Jerry stared at him for a long moment, awed and moved.

Without looking around, Questor spoke. “Please come in, Mr. Darro.”

Jerry whipped around to see Darro standing at the tunnel entrance to the chamber. He did not know how long Darro had been there, nor even how he had managed to find the entry to the tunnel. But he realized, as Darro came closer, that the man who lived his life as a cynic was shaken and even a trifle hesitant.

Darro stopped a few feet from them and looked around the chamber at the row of slabs and finally at Questor. “Well, I’ve spent half my life wondering how we got this far without killing each other off. Now I know, I’m still not sure I like it.”