The Invincible (20 page)

The quivering needles of the instruments lined up like soldiers. On the lit-up face of the output meter the numbers jumped up to five and six figures. Sparks burst from somewhere in the supply network, and it began to smell of ozone. In the rear of the control center the technicians communicated to each other by hand signals which control system was to be switched on.

Shortly before it was destroyed, the next teleprobe showed the elongated head of the Cyclops, and the men watched as it tried to squeeze through the narrow gap between the rock walls. Then once again the screen was blank, blinding the eyes of the observers with its silvery white. Any moment now, the machine would become visible via direct transmission. The radar operator was ready to drive an outside TV camera beyond the nose of the spaceship in order to enlarge the view field. The communications technician shot off another probe. The Cyclops did not seem to be heading straight toward the waiting
Invincible,
positioned under the protective energy dome and ready for battle. Teleprobes sped from the spaceship’s nose at even intervals.

Rohan knew that the
Invincible
was capable of stopping a discharge of antimatter, but to intercept the energy of the thrust would cost them their energy reserves. Under the circumstances Rohan thought it wisest to turn back—in other words, to go into stationary orbit. Any minute now he expected to hear the command, but Horpach remained inexplicably silent, as if he believed it possible that the electronic brain might regain its senses. Indeed, while following the silent movements of the dark shape amongst the dunes with a worried expression, Horpach asked: “You keep calling the Cyclops, don’t you?”

“Yes. No contact.”

“Send: Stop immediately!”

The technicians at the console got busy. Two, three, four times, streaks of light flashed under their hands.

“No reply, Astrogator.”

Why doesn’t he start? Rohan was puzzled by the astrogator’s reluctance. Maybe he won’t admit defeat? What nonsense! Horpach! He made a move … and … now … he’s going to issue the order to take off…

But the astrogator simply took a step backward.

“Kronotos?”

The cyberneticist came closer. “Here.”

“Whatever have they done to that Cyclops?”

Rohan felt consternation. Horpach had said “they”—as if he were actually dealing with thinking opponents.

“The autonomous circuits are running on cryotrons,” began Kronotos with a voice which revealed that he was merely voicing theories. “The temperature has gone up. The circuits have lost their supraconductivity…”

“Do you know this for sure or are you just guessing?” asked the astrogator.

What a strange conversation! Everybody stared at the videoscreen on which the Cyclops could now be seen in direct transmission. It was creeping forward, its movements fluid yet somewhat unsteady. Now and then it deviated from its course as if it were still in doubt about its real destination. It fired several times at the teleprobe before hitting its target. Then the men saw the probe plummet to the ground like a ball of fire.

“The only thing I can imagine that would explain its strange behavior would be resonance,” said the cyberneticist after a moment’s hesitation. “If their field has overlapped with the brain’s own—”

“How about the force field?”

“A force field can’t screen out a magnetic field.”

“Too bad,” the astrogator remarked dryly.

Gradually the tension eased inside the
Invincible’s
control center. The Cyclops was obviously no longer steering for its homeport. The distance between them, that had been very slight, increased again. No longer subject to human control, the vehicle ambled off to the wide expanses of the northern desert.

“Chief engineer, take over for me for a while,” requested Horpach. “The rest of you will accompany me downstairs.”

The intense cold woke Rohan up. Drugged with sleep, he curled up under his blanket and pressed his face into the pillow. Then he placed his hands over his face, trying to shield it from the biting cold, but it was no use. He realized that he had to wake up completely. But he kept putting the moment off without knowing why. Suddenly he sat up. The cabin was pitch black. An icy blast of air hit him directly in the face. He jumped off his bunk, cursing softly as he groped his way in the dark toward the air conditioning. As he had gone to bed, he had felt so warm that he had turned the knob to “cold.”

Little by little the air in the small cabin heated up, but Rohan, huddling under his blanket, could not go back to sleep again. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch—3:00
A.M.
Only three hours of sleep again, he thought furiously and still freezing. The conference had lasted a long time. It was almost midnight when they had finally broken up. All that useless talk, he thought. Now, enveloped by this darkness, he would give anything to be back at the space station, not to have to see or hear any more of this damned Regis III and its dead nightmare of a world. Most of the strategists had been in favor of going into orbit, except for the chief engineer and the head physicist. From the beginning the latter had strongly supported Horpach’s opinion: remain here as long as possible. The probability of finding the men of Regnar’s group was one in a million, or not even that much. If they weren’t already dead, only the great distance between them and the battle scene could have saved them from this atomic inferno. Rohan wished he knew whether the astrogator had stayed solely because of the four lost men, or if other considerations had played a role in his decision. The way it appeared from Regis III was just one side of the story; it would look very different indeed in the dry words of some report and in the bright calm of the space station. The report would simply state that the
Invincible
had lost half its overland vehicles and its main weapon, the Cyclops (which would represent a future threat for any spacecraft landing on the planet). In addition, they had suffered six casualties, and more than half the crew had to be hospitalized and would most likely remain unfit for duty for many years to come. And because of these losses in human lives, machines and their most valuable instruments, they had run away from microscopic crystals, the creatures of a small desert planet, the dead remainder of the Lyre civilization that had long since been surpassed by Earth. What else but flight would it be, if they turned back now? But was Horpach the kind of man who would take such motives into consideration? Maybe he himself did not know why he had not ordered them to take off? Was he waiting for something? Surely, the biologists had discussed the possibility of defeating the inorganic insects with their own weapons. If that species had already undergone evolution, they concluded, it should be possible to introduce further changes. To begin with, the scientists would need to experiment with a considerable quantity of captured specimens and bring about certain genetic changes that would reappear in future insect generations, changes that would render harmless this whole crystalline race. Such genetic changes would have to be of an extremely specific nature; they would need to offer an immediate, exploitable effect, and ensure that succeeding generations would develop an Achilles heel, a vulnerable feature that could be attacked. But this was just the usual, speculative, idle talk of the theoreticists: they hadn’t the faintest idea what type of a mutation this would require, how to produce it, how many of these cursed crystals could be captured without risking another battle whose outcome might mean an even more serious defeat than on the previous day. Even if everything should go smoothly, how long would they have to wait for the results of this new evolution? Not just days or weeks, surely. Were they supposed to circle around Regis III like children on a merry-go-round, for one or two or even ten years? The whole thing was totally absurd.

Rohan noticed that he had turned the heat up too high: it had become uncomfortably hot in his cabin. He threw back his blanket, got up, took a shower, dressed quickly and left the cabin.

The elevator was not there. While he waited in the semi-darkness, broken only by the moving lights of the indicator, he listened to the nocturnal quiet enveloping the spaceship. His temples were throbbing, his head felt heavy with the torment of sleepless nights and days filled with tension. Occasionally a blubbering sound could be heard in the pipe lines. From the levels below came the muffled murmurings of the idling engines, which were ready for takeoff at any moment. Dry metallic air wafted from the ventilation shafts next to the platform on which he was standing. When the door slid open, he entered the elevator. He got off on the eighth level. Here the corridor made a turn and followed the curve of the main hull. Rohan walked ahead without really knowing where he was going. Mechanically he lifted his feet in the right spots in order to step over the high thresholds of the separating walls that could be hermetically sealed off, until finally he caught sight of the shadows of the crew working at the main reactor. The room was dark; only a few dozen luminescent hands flickered over the control panels.

“They can’t possibly be alive any more,” said one of the men sitting at the instrument panel. Rohan could not recognize who he was. “A thousand Roentgen went out to a radius of five miles. They’re dead by now, you can bet on that.”

“What are we sitting around here for, then?” grumbled another man. Not the voice, but the seat the man occupied—he was sitting at the gravimetrical control panel—told Rohan that Blank had spoken.

“Why? The old man doesn’t want to turn back, that’s why.”

“How about you? Would you do it?”

“What else can we do?”

It was warm in the room. The air was filled with the peculiar artificial pine scent used in the air conditioning units to alleviate the odor given off by the plastic parts and the tin casing when the reactor was on. The result was a blend which could be found only here on the eighth level.

The men could not see Rohan as he leaned with his back against the foam-rubber padding of the partition wall. Not that he was hiding there on purpose; he simply did not wish to participate in this conversation.

“It’ll be right on our heels,” another man said after a brief silence, and bent forward. For a fleeting instant his face became visible, half pink, half yellow from the glow of the little control lamps on the reactor wall, whose lights seemed to glare at the men huddled in front of the instrument panel. Rohan, like the rest of the men, knew at once what he was talking about.

“We have the field, and there’s our radar,” muttered Blank, annoyed.

“A fat lot of good that’ll do us if it shoots at one billierg.”

“The radar won’t let it get close enough,”

“Who are you trying to kid? I know it like the inside of my own pocket.”

“So what?”

“It’s equipped with an antiradar system. Interference systems—”

“But it’s gone off its rocker—an electronic looney.”

“Looney, you say? Were you in the command center?”

“No. I was here the whole time.”

“Well, I was there. Too bad you didn’t see how that monster smashed our teleprobes.”

“Do you mean they reprogramed it? The Cyclops is already under their control?”

They’re talking about “them,” thought Rohan, as if it were really something rational.

“Who knows? Supposedly the only thing that’s off is the communication system.”

“Then why is it shooting at us?”

Again there was a moment of silence.

“Don’t we even know where it is?” asked the man who had not been in the command center.

“No. The last report arrived at eleven. Kralik told me so. The Cyclops was sighted toddling along through the desert.”

“Was it far from here?”

“Are you crazy? Ninety miles. That’s just under an hour’s drive for it. Maybe less.”

“Why don’t you two shut up? Just speculating won’t help any of us,” Blank snapped at them. His sharp profile was silhouetted against the colorful flickering of the little lights.

The men fell silent. Slowly, Rohan turned around and left as quietly as he had come. His way led past the two laboratories. The light was out in the big lab but in the small one all was lit up brightly. Rohan glanced inside. Only cyberneticists and physicists sat around the table—Jazon, Kronotos, Sarner, Liwin, Saurahan and someone else who had his back turned to the rest and, half hidden in the shadow of the slanting partition wall, was busy programing a big electronic brain.

“There are two potential solutions to this problem: annihilation or self-destruction. Anything else would amount merely to changing the cloud’s conditions for existence,” Saurahan said. Rohan did not budge. Once again he was just standing there and listening.

“The first solution is based on triggering a snowballing process. For that you need an antimatter projector that will drive into the ravine and stay there.”

“We already tried that once,” somebody remarked.

“If it doesn’t have an electronic brain, it will still be able to function at temperatures of more than one million degrees. We’d need a plasma missile too. Plasma is insensitive to star temperatures. The cloud will react the same way as before—it will try to strangle it, to find resonance in its steering circuits—but there won’t be any steering circuits. Nothing will happen except for a low-yield nuclear reaction. The more matter is drawn into this reaction, the more violent it will become. That way we can gather up the entire necrosphere of this planet in one place and then annihilate it…”

Necrosphere, thought Rohan. Oh, sure—inorganic crystals. Just leave it to the scientists to come up with a fancy new name.

“I’d prefer the self-destruction alternative,” Jazon said, “How would that work?”

“First you’d need to bring about two separate consolidations of two giant cloud brains. Then cause the two to collide with each other. Get each cloud to consider the other a threat to its own survival in the struggle for existence.”

“Sounds good. How do you plan to accomplish this?”

“It won’t be easy, but it is feasible—provided that the cloud is only a pseudo-brain, incapable of drawing logical conclusions.”