“A
ngela!” Gill shouted then as the sight of the thing clambering up over the rim of the escarpment stopped him dead in his tracks. “For God’s sake—
look out
!” But she’d already seen it, and so had Haggie.
The little redhead let out a single, bubbling, inarticulate shriek which rose into the night and came echoing back from the face of the escarpment, and started running. Angela fled with him, not caring where she was going but only that she put distance between herself and the glittering, metallically tinted monstrosity which had now dragged itself fully onto the rock shelf. And still Gill stood frozen with his jaw hanging slack, staring at the thing in the starlight.
It was … an elongated crab, a rearing scorpion or mantis, a nightmare given form and substance and grown to monstrous proportions. Nine feet long, five wide, four high, with stalked eyes, incredibly articulate claws, antennae, a stinger arced over its back, and other appendages whose functions could only be guessed at. It was blue-gleaming chitin, ivory mandibles, feathery, flickering feelers. All of these things and something else, for Gill knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was also Haggie’s pursuer.
For as he’d stared at the creature in stunned amazement, so in its turn the thing had gazed at him. Its feelers and antennae had strained in his direction, and its glittering faceted eyes had seemed to focus upon him—but only for a second. Then it had rejected him, turned like a living tank on its own axis and gone scurrying after Haggie and Angela. Except Gill guessed it wasn’t especially interested in Angela. She wasn’t its target. But she was in its way.
“Angela!” he yelled again, his voice hoarse with fear for her. “Come back. Get away from Haggie. It isn’t coming for you. If’s after him!”
If she heard him it made no difference; and then it dawned on Gill that of course she hadn’t heard him. She’d been panicked, at first by Haggie and now by this thing. Also, they were running towards the falls; Gill’s voice would have been mainly drowned out by the thunder of the waters. Cursing under his breath, he ran after them.
He glanced back once and saw that Varre had at last come awake. Anderson and Clayborne were there, too, stumbling about like lost souls in the starlight. Clayborne carried a flaring brand taken from the fire. Only Bannerman was still missing—but right now Gill didn’t have the time or inclination to worry about Bannerman or anything else. His head (and his heart, too?) was full of Angela. Gnawing fear for Angela.
The lobster-scorpion thing was now directly in front of him; always choosing the easiest route, it scurried around and between a pebble-dash smatter of domed boulders where they littered the wide shelf. The thing didn’t seem capable of a lot of speed; it was terrifying mainly by virtue of its looks, and awesome in its determination, its single-minded concentration upon the job in hand. No wonder Haggie feared it so. For already Gill knew—as Haggie himself knew—that the monster wasn’t going to give up the chase until it had achieved its aim, which was to take the redhead. But why?
He drew parallel with the scuttling creature but a little apart from it, skirted it and clambered across crumbling ledges of rock and domed boulders to get in front. His intention was to reach Angela first and separate her from Haggie. But then … disaster!
Scrambling across spray-damp boulders, he slipped; his feet shot out from under him; he crashed down on soft, wet shingle directly in the creature’s path. Winded, almost exhausted by a combination of panic and unaccustomed exertion, Gill lay on his back and looked up at the thing as it bore down on him.
It jerked to an uncertain halt; great pincers swung high and poised there; the thing’s stalked eyes swivelled to peer down on Gill, angling this way and that to encompass his whole body. Its mandibles clashed inches from his face as its blue-glinting legs straddled him, firmly anchoring the monster where it stood astride him. And Gill thought:
It’s breathing right into my face and I can’t smell a thing! Not anything animal, anyway …
And then, as surely as he was gifted with a sixth sense, he knew what he was up against. He knew what it was, and why it pursued Haggie with such grim intent: because it had been programmed to do just that. Programmed, yes—for it was a machine!
A pair of pincers came swinging down and Gill’s flesh went cold. He batted uselessly at the hinged crab claws with both fists; they ignored him, took him by the waist, lifted him to one side and dumped him. Unharmed in any way, he fell mere inches to the shingle at the rim of the cataract’s pool. Without more ado, the monster lumbered by and splashed many-legged into the water. And from across the pool: “Oh, Jesus!
Jesus!”
Haggie’s shrill shriek of terror rang out over the thundering of the water. “It’s after me—it’s coming!”
Gill got to his knees. He saw Angela and Haggie at the very edge of the pool, where the water flowed over its smooth rim and down the face of the escarpment. Wreathed in spray, they crouched there—and the nightmare machine wading or swimming towards them—and in the next moment Haggie grabbing Angela and throwing her bodily down. No, throwing her
over
the edge! Gill cried out,
“No!”—
felt an emotional agony tearing at his insides—as Haggie himself slipped over the edge and followed Angela down out of sight.
No!
Gill said again, but this time to himself. And in the next moment he was in the chilly water, swimming for all he was worth in the wake of the grotesque machine; and only vaguely was he given to wonder how his weak, dying body could possibly sustain him through all of this. Or perhaps that was why he was able to do it: because he was dying anyway and it would make no difference. But the thought of Angela dying was something else.
The machine trailed its rearmost limbs in the water; Gill made a supreme effort and grabbed one of them, then hung on panting and gasping until the hunting thing reached the rim of the pool and rose up from the water. Its eye stalks swayed out over the gulf, directing its gaze downward. Faceted eyes focused, swivelled this way and that, and appendages at the front and rear of the body elongated, extending themselves silently but with pneumatic precision. Claws clamped to rock and the creature (even knowing it for a machine, still Gill thought of it as something alive) tilted sharply forward. It was preparing to go down—headfirst!
Gill stood up in the pool so close to the thing that he could reach out and touch it. The plated rear of its carapace was towards him, but even if he’d been visible to it, he suspected it would not interfere with him. It tilted more yet and inched forward, flattening itself to the ledge.
Gill knew a raging frustration; he stood there undecided with his jaw jutting, fists knotted. This damned thing was going to follow Haggie to the bitter end. If the redhead lived, it would find him. And if Angela lived, it would probably find her with Haggie. The one thing Gill wanted now was to find Angela, which meant that he must make an impossible decision. But impossible or not, he made it. As hoarse, shouting voices reached him from the far side of the pool, he climbed up onto the hunter’s back and clung there, deliberately snagging his clothing on its many sharp projections. And not a moment too soon.
With a sickening lurch the machine upended itself, turning through ninety degrees and into the vertical as it began its descent. Gill felt his clothes start to tear as he slid forward, was brought up short with a bump when his shoulder rammed up against the hunter’s stinger. Arcing forward over its back, that otherwise menacing scythe of chitin and arachnid-insect-crustacean flesh was something Gill could cling to. He did—for his life!
After that … all was a nightmare of lurching limbs, of gravity defied—but barely, Gill felt—and of claws and pincers grasping projecting rocks with such fierce energy that they occasionally burst asunder. That would be bad enough in itself—the fear that at any moment the machine could err and carry itself and its limpet passenger into oblivion—but there was a further complication. While it was an entirely mental thing, still it was a distraction which Gill couldn’t afford; and yet it insisted upon distracting him. It was this:
He was astride a machine, in closest possible contact with it, and his talent was confused to the point of breakdown. For he “knew” in his way that there was never a machine like it—not on Earth, anyway. What, an
un
mechanical machine? Unheard of! Or if there was something like it, then what it was was the mighty and enigmatic structure which men had called the Castle—now the House of Doors. He had sensed, felt, experienced these alien machines working, and for the first time in his life had failed to understand
how
they worked—because they were alien. Given time he might understand them, though that wasn’t something which would come easily.
But now there was something else, something which hitherto Gill had sensed only as a vague awareness. The House of Doors and the hunting thing both solicited the same response from his machine-oriented mind: he had accorded them the same instinctive recognition. Them and one other piece of … machinery? Previously he had put it down to the environment, to the fact that he was inside the House of Doors, which must be affecting or deflecting his talent as a magnet deflects a compass. But now he wasn’t so sure.
The thing that had been disturbing him was Bannerman—and the fact that he could no longer be sure that Bannerman was a man.
But a “tourist”? Possibly …
S
ith of the Thone was mainly liquid, as most living things are. But since the Thone were essentially low-gravity creatures, in them the proportion of liquid to solid was far higher than the norm; in a low-grav situation, it is easier to flow than to walk. He did have microscopic solids in his chemical soup of a makeup, of course, but the only really “solid” thing about him now was a cylindrical exoskeletal sleeve of super-flexible plastic protecting that midsection of his person which contained his three vital organs: brain, primary motor system, and the spongy cartilaginous siphon-cum-nerve chain that linked them, corresponding in Earth-type creatures to the spinal column.
He was in aspect very much as Smart Alec Haggie had described him: an upright jellyfish going on three tentacles. Of eyes, ears and nostrils he had none; bands of sensors formed an intricate pattern of luminous blue dots all about his person, and with these he perceived more than adequately of three-dimensioned space and was aware of time—but not so conscious of it as are men. Men are mainly conscious of it because they have so little. Sith, on the other hand, had already spent more than a dozen human lifetimes in hypersleep alone.
Apart from the protection of his organs, his exoskeletal tube served one other very important purpose: it contained microconverters and gravitic deflection shields which drew energy from the synthesizer and converted it to combat the effect of Earth gravity, thus enclosing Sith’s person in a low-grav envelope. Without this envelope he would be little more than a stain on the floor.
Above the “waist”, Sith’s body contained a secondary motor system which functioned without direct physical connection to his brain. In fact it reacted to inward-beamed messages from his light- and other wave-sensitive sensor spots, thus negating any necessarily tedious brain activity. Therefore, his reactions were literally lightning fast; for the function of the upper motor system was the extrusion and control of manipulators, “hands”, with which to operate the synthesizer’s controls. Those of them, at least, which required sentient adjustment or instruction.
A second brain, now vestigial, formed a pale grey oval the size of a walnut central in Sith’s upper mass. Some Thone individuals extruded their atrophied brains as useless matter; others formed them into sigil-shapes by which they might be recognised without first revealing their names. Since the pinnacle of all Thone ambition was to achieve almost total seclusion and insularity, however, Sith had always considered this a symptom of disordered identity or hereditary inferiority; he had kept his own nonfunctioning brain pristine, retaining it for curiosity value only. Perhaps he would do something with it when (if) he mounted the crystal pedestal to become Grand Thone. By which time he would be above reproach, of course.
The other important difference between Sith’s race and mankind was this: their body temperature was more than twice that of men. This came of having evolved on a mainly arid, hothouse world; which in turn meant that their basic body fluid was closer to mercury than to water. It was not mercury, however, and having a curious molecular structure was indeed very much lighter than water. In short, Sith was very insubstantial by human standards. Physically, if not mentally.
The Bannerman construct, on the other hand, was just the opposite.
The original Jon Bannerman had in fact been a Portuguese tourist. Having an older, retired friend in Scotland, he had visited him during a tour of the British Isles. His friend had been something of a local dignitary with connections sufficient that Bannerman was granted a visit to the Castle in the secure area at the foot of Ben Lawers. That had been four months ago, when first Sith had decided to go out among the native inhabitants of this world. Bannerman’s visit to the Castle had coincided with Sith’s preparations.
Since a model was required (on which Sith would base his construct) Bannerman had been taken. It could just as easily have been someone else, but it was him. Standing alone at the base of a side wall, he had known a moment’s dizziness—and that was all. His reception within the synthesizer had been well organized; in the space of mere moments he had been copied; anyone watching him might well have been puzzled by a trick of the light which made him seem to disappear for a few seconds, only to reappear moments later.
The Castle hadn’t greatly impressed Jon Bannerman—indeed it had given him a headache which persisted for a day and a night. But he was grateful for having seen it anyway. And at the end of a week he’d gone back home to Portugal.
Outwardly the construct
was
Jon Bannerman. Tall and by local standards slightly foreign-looking, especially its dark eyes—strong, with a blocky figure and broad chest, and a sturdy neck bearing a moderately handsome head; with dark, short-cropped, prematurely greying hair, and having a straight nose and a narrow, serious mouth—it (he) would not go entirely unnoticed in the streets. But neither would he attract too much attention. There seemed nothing especially unusual about him.
But his external appearance was entirely superficial, a cosmetic shell for Sith’s life-support system, and inwardly there was little or no similarity to a human being. Cut Bannerman or hit him on the nose and he might bleed. Tear off a finger (or indeed all of them) from one of his hands and you would get blood, bone, apparently human flesh—all of it synthetic, but close enough to pass merely cursory inspection. Cut him a good deal deeper in the trunk or a major limb, and there you’d find the grey fluids of an incredibly versatile microhydraulic system—which would not be recognised as such, but as “ichor”. There would be no time for analysis, because the fluid would rapidly devolve. Remove an eye and you’d find sensor membranes which a biologist
might
identify but never fathom; likewise within his ears and nostrils.
His chest cavity contained not only sufficient space for Sith’s upper body but also for energy receptors and a powerful converter. He was … neither a robot nor an android, for these were human terms describing types of mechanisms, and Bannerman wasn’t any kind of mechanism which human science could yet understand or even credit. He
was
a vastly efficient engine, composed in its entirety of fluids, whose only limitations lay in the strictures of its size and shape.
This, at least, is how a human scientist might have viewed him. But to Sith of the Thone …
By analogy, Bannerman was in fact something between a deep-sea diving suit and an aqualung, synthesised by Sith for his own use, and as cumbersome to him as the analagous mechanisms are to men. And being a brand-new model and as yet only partially tested, it was only to be expected that there would be minor problems.
For unlike the human body it imitated, the Bannerman construct wasn’t self-repairing. It could have been, but not within such rigid space limitations. In all honesty, Sith couldn’t blame the current malfunction on design alone; nor would he, for it was his design. But in fact Bannerman had taken several hard knocks, and it was doubtless these which had brought on the trouble.
First there had been the brief but vicious attack of those thugs in the alley in Edinburgh, and more recently the climbing, carrying, leaping into waterfalls and such, and finally Clayborne’s display of savagery. Add to all of this the aggravated wear and tear of high gravity, and … it shouldn’t have been difficult to foresee the development of small problems.
As for that other incident—the loss of a hand—that must not be forgotten either. Oh, the hand had been repaired easily enough, but not Sith’s pride. The man Turnbull had taken him by surprise that time, but that wouldn’t happen again. While carrying his unconscious body, Sith-Bannerman had removed and disposed of his gun.
Sith still felt anger that he had let a primitive get the better of him. But of course, that
had
been the fault of the construct: the fact that it so restricted him. Alas, but movement in the world of men were entirely impossible without it.
The world of men, yes … but for how much longer? While he programmed several small design modifications and instructed the synthesizer to carry out the required restructuring, Sith reflected on his mission: the discovery of new worlds for the ever-expanding Thone.
Sleeping in the womb of the synthesizer—and bearing with him a transmat receptor, for use if this world should prove habitable and available—he had crossed countless light-years of space. His findings would determine whether or not the planet was fit for Thone colonization. And in fact he’d discovered that given a minimum of geothermal engineering and perhaps a delicate realignment of orbit around the parent star, it could have been. Such measures would, of course, render the planet quite
un
inhabitable to all of its native species—wherein had lain the source of a bitter disappointment.
For it was a principle of the Thone never to threaten or in any way disturb higher life-forms, but to distance themselves from them and let them go their own ways in peace. The Thone were neitner mercenary nor greedy within the boundaries of their cause; they respected developing species to a point, that point depending upon their
stage
of development, and the likely route further development would take. A race inspired towards barbarism would probably receive short shrift, but not until it had been “tried” and found wanting beyond reasonable doubt.
These things being so, and the rules governing his investigations being strict and no-nonsense, Sith had soon concluded that indeed the peoples of Earth were sufficiently advanced as to preclude Thone interference: they had made this world their own, and had almost arrived at that stage of development beyond which Thone law and ethics forbade interference. And
specifically
forbade their destruction! A million years earlier it would have been different. Even three or four thousand years ago. But no longer. Oh, it could still be argued that they were borderline barbarians, but Sith had little or no doubt how the verdict would go—namely, in their favour.
That being so, he had set up and activated the transmat. The matter transmitter would not work in hyperspace, which meant that messages could not be transmitted while the synthesizer was in flight across the void. Now, however, having charted this world and categorised its inhabitants, he could send all relevant details to his nearest Higher Authority. Doubtless Earth would be struck from the list of possible habitats; Sith would receive instructions to move on; his search would recommence at once.
But before he could use the transmat, an incoming message had reached him. And it was this:
The Grand Thone was retiring! The palace of the crystal pedestal was being made ready for a new occupant! The way was now open for Thones of merit to make their once-in-a-lifetime bids for the ultimate seat of power and authority! Sith had long declared himself an aspirant; his work for Thone expansion may have gone unrewarded, but it had not gone unrecognised; he had been short-listed!
He had been granted permission to use the transmat and journey to the palace of the pedestal, there to make the case for his own ascension to Grand Thonedom. The current Grand Thone would of course preside, and there were to be five other contenders. These were named, and Sith saw that he was up against five serious rivals. The choice would be made in (the equivalent of) three years’ time, when the presence of all six aspirants on the palace planet would be imperative … .
Sith had given the matter a little thought, and had then transmatted a simple answer: in all humility he would be there at the appointed hour. Following which, in something less than humility, he’d considered his position. To have been named as a candidate for Grand Thonedom! But … he knew he couldn’t win. Two of his opponents were elders, which would weigh heavily in their favour; two more were scientists of astonishing range, one of which descended from Lakkas himself, inventor of the synthesizer! Even the least of the five was arguably Sith’s equal—another locator and invigilator, like Sith himself.
Except … he might indeed stand a chance—could even possibly win—if only he could take home with him something of extraordinary value. And with that thought in mind, Sith had once more turned his sensors upon this new world, this Earth, to view it in a somewhat different light … .
For human minds were not the only devious ones in the universe, and now Sith was discovering that his could be one of the most devious of all.
Some weeks had then passed, during which Sith did very little. Eventually, emerging one. period from a brief state of voluntary stasis or sleep—and almost before he was fully awake and knew what he was about—he’d erased all of his records concerning Earth and its peoples and prepared to start afresh. Except that this time his findings would go against humankind, and indeed he would take home a singular prize for the Grand Thone. One which would doubtless make Sith the new, rightful, all-powerful occupant of the crystal pedestal.
He would take home a claim on the planet Earth itself!