To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (63 page)

“Yes, but not
real
telepathy. Quite a few robots can natter away to each other on HF radio.”

“As you say, that’s not telepathy. Real telepathy. But I did, once, not so long ago, come across a couple of really telepathic robots. They had been designed to make them that way.” He chuckled. “And that’s how I got my promotion from lieutenant to lieutenant commander.”

“Don’t talk in riddles, John.”

“It was when I was captain of
Adder,
a Serpent Class courier. I had to carry one of the Commissioners of the Admiralty on an important mission. The robots—I hate to think what they must have cost!—were her personal servants.”

“
Her
servants?”

“The Commissioner in question is a lady. She treated her tin henchmen rather shabbily, giving one of them as a parting gift to a petty prince who had—mphm—entertained her. Its cobber spilled the beans to me about certain details of her love life.”

“You are rather a bastard, John. But. . . . Don’t interrupt me. I’m thinking. I’m. All right, I have to admit that this Panzen is telepathic. Even so, it seems to be a very limited kind of telepathy.”

“How so?”

“He was able to snoop around inside our minds while we were sleeping. But why didn’t he do the same when I was telling him all about bicycles? The three-speed gear, for example. I could—I
can—
visualize its workings clearly, but I lack the mechanical vocabulary to explain it. Why didn’t he just read my thoughts?”

“Perhaps he likes the sound of your voice.
I
do.”

“Don’t get slushy. Perhaps he can read our minds only when we have no conscious control over them.”

“Mphm. But he can hear us talking.”

“Only if he’s listening. And why should he be? Perhaps, at the moment, he’s too busy running the ship, even though the ship is himself. When you’re navigating you have a computer to do the real work—but he
is
the computer.”

“What are you getting at?”

“That we might take advantage of his lack of attention to ourselves and force him to take us where
we
want to go.”

“But how?”

“Do I have to spell it out to you? We indulge in a spot of skyjacking. We find out where, in that cat’s cradle of wires and girders, the intelligence lives, then threaten to slice it up into little pieces with our laser pistols.”

“But would he scare easily?”

“I think he would. A robot, unless it’s one that’s been designed for a suicide mission, has a very strong, built-in sense of self preservation. It has to be that way. Robots aren’t cheap, you know. I hate to think what a thing like this Panzen must have cost.”

“Mphm. Well, we’ve nothing to lose, I suppose. We’ve spare, fully charged air bottles for our suits. We’ve got the boat’s armory with the weapons we need. I’m just rather shocked that you, of all people, should be ready to take part in a skyjacking.”

“I prefer to think of it as an arrest,” she said. “After all, we have been kidnapped!”

They coupled new air-bottles to their armor, tested their suit radios. Each of them belted on a brace of laser pistols. Before leaving the boat they went forward, looked out through the viewports, used the periscope to scan what was abaft the control cabin. The lifecraft, they saw, was suspended in a network of wires, holding it between two of the radial girders. At the very center of the skeleton sphere, at the convergence of the radii, was what looked like a solid ball of dull metal. Was this the brain? Somehow they were sure that it was. There were clumps of machinery in other parts of the great ship—a complexity of precessing rotors that must be the interstellar drive, assemblages of moving parts that could have been anything at all—but that central ball looked the most promising. It was apparently featureless but, now and again, colored lights blinked on its surface, seemingly at random. Grimes thought,
We’re watching the thing think. . . .
And what was it thinking about? Was it repeating to itself the sacred words of Zephalon? Was it . . . dreaming? More important—was it aware of what they were plotting?

There was only one way to find out. Surely it—he—would take action before they left the boat. All Panzen had to do was to employ again the vibration that had rendered them unconscious at the time of their capture. He would not wish to harm them; he had made that quite clear when he had preached to them the Gospel according to Zephalon. Grimes could not help feeling guilty. All too often skyjackers have traded upon the essential decency of the victims. He said as much to Una. She sneered.

They made their way to the little airlock, stood together in the chamber while the pump exhausted the atmosphere. The outer door opened. They looked out and down, away from the direction of acceleration. And it was a long way down. Beyond the wires and struts and girders, which gleamed faintly in
the dim light emitted by some of the mechanisms inside the sphere, was the ultimate blackness of deep space, a night with stars, and each of the stars, viewed from inside a ship proceeding under the space-time warping interstellar drive, was a vague, writhing nebulosity. It would have been an awesome spectacle viewed from inside a real spaceship, with a solid deck underfoot and thick glass holding out the vacuum—from this vantage point, with only a flimsy-seeming spider’s web of frail metal between them and nothingness, it was frightening.

Before he left the boat Grimes took careful stock of the situation. To begin with he and Una would have to make their way through the network of metallic strands that held the small craft in position. He put his gloved hand out to test the wires. They were tight, but not bar taut. He thought—he hoped—that they would bear his weight. There was no real reason to doubt that they would do so. After all, he estimated, the ship was accelerating at less than one half standard gravity.

It should be easy and safe enough—as long as he could forget that long, long drop into the ultimate night which would be the penalty for a missed handhold or footing. First a brief scramble through the network of wires, then a walk along the box girder to the central sphere that, presumably, housed Panzen’s intelligence. A walk—or a crawl. The surface of the girder was wide enough but there was, of course, no guardrail, and its lattice construction, although offering a long series of excellent handgrips, would be all too liable to trip the unwary foot.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” she said.

He told her then, “I think that one of us should stay in the boat. You.”

“We’re in this together,” she snapped. “And don’t forget, Buster, that I’ve probably run at least as many risks in my job as you have in yours.”

She was right, of course. If one of them should slip and fall the other might be able to give assistance. But one of them, sitting alone in the lifeboat, would be powerless to help. Briefly Grimes considered the advantages of roping Una to himself, then decided against it. Mountaineering had never been one of his hobbies and unfamiliarity with the techniques of this sport made any attempt at their use inadvisable. He thought, too, of securing the girl and himself to the small craft by safety lines, then had to admit that the disadvantages would outweigh the advantages. A considerable length of cordage would be required, and there were so many projections on which the lines would foul.

“Shall I go first?” she demanded. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

“I . . . I was thinking.”

“Then don’t. It doesn’t become you. Let’s get cracking before our tin friend realizes that we’re up to no good.”

Grimes said nothing but swung himself from the airlock into the web of wires.

Chapter 16

It was not easy
to make a way through the web of tight cables. The strands could be forced apart without much difficulty to allow passage, but they caught the holstered pistols, the backpack with its pipes and air bottle. Grimes tried to be careful; the tearing adrift of a supply pipe could—would, rather—have fatal consequences. He told Una to be careful. She snarled, “What the bloody hell do you think I’m being?”

Grimes was tempted to draw one of his lasers to slash a way through the net, decided against it. If he did so some sort of alarm would be sure to sound in Panzen’s brain. He could not help thinking of the filament that warns a spider when some hapless insect is trapped in its web. Perhaps an alarm had already sounded.

He was through the entanglement at last, hanging by his hands. The only way for him to get his feet on to the flat upper surface of the girder was to drop—a distance of perhaps half a meter. It seemed a long way, a very long way, and a spacesuit is not the best rig for even the least strenuous gymnastics. He told himself, he almost convinced himself, that there was nothing to it, that if the girder were resting on solid ground he would feel no hesitation whatsoever. But it was not resting on solid ground. Beneath it were incalculable light years of nothingness.

He dropped. He felt rather than heard the
clang
as the soles of his boots made contact with a cross member. He wavered, fighting to retain his balance. There was nothing to hold on to. He fell forward, on to his knees, his hands outstretched to break his fall. His fingers seized and clung to the latticework. He was safe—as long as he stayed where he was. But that he could not do.

Slowly he started to crawl forward. He tried not to look down, tried to keep his regard riveted on the dull, metal sphere that was at the center of the globular ship. He felt the vibration as Una landed behind him. He was able to contort himself to look back over his shoulder. She was standing upright, was making no attempt to follow his example.

He heard her voice through his helmet phones. “Get a move on, Buster.” Then, disgustedly, “Can’t you
walk?
”

“If you have any sense,” he told her, “you’ll crawl, too.”

Her sneer was audible. Then she seemed to trip. There was nothing that he could do to save her. She fell sidewise rather than forward, but her left hand closed about his right ankle. The jerk, as the full weight of her body came on to it, felt as though it would tear him in two. But he clung to the girder grimly with both hands, with his left toe wedged in the angle between two diagonal cross pieces. It was, essentially, his suit that was their salvation. It was far tougher than the human body. Without it to save him from the worst effects of the mauling he would have let go, and both of them would have plunged into the black abyss.

Her right hand scrabbled for purchase at the back of his knee, found it in the accordion pleats of the joint. If the metallic fabric tore, he thought, that would be it.

In spades. But it held, somehow. The grip on his ankle was released, then her right hand was clutching at one of his pistol holsters. He willed the belt not to carry away. It did not.

He whispered, “Good girl!” Then, “See if you can manage the rest without hanging on to an air pipe. . . .” He added magnanimously, “Of course, if you have no option. . . .”

“Don’t be noble. It doesn’t suit you,” she got out between gasps—but he could tell from her voice that this was no more than an attempt at gallows humor. She got a hand on his shoulder, then, and the worst of it was over.

Slowly, carefully—very slowly, very carefully, so as not to destroy her precarious balance—he crawled away from under her, inching forward along the top, openwork surface of the box girder. He heard her little grunts as she extended her arms, found her own handgrips. And then they rested for long seconds. She admitted, “That was hairy. . . .” And then, “I was a show-off fool, John,”

“Forget it. Ready?”

“Ready.”

He led the way in a clumsy, quadrupedal shamble. The human body was not designed for that sort of progress, especially when wearing heavy, movement-hampering armor. If only there had been a guard rail. . . . But Panzen’s builders had not anticipated that the girders would ever be used for walkways.

Something was coming toward them from the center, scuttling along rapidly on a multiplicity of limbs. It was like a metal arthropod, its cylindrical body about a meter in length. It did not appear to possess any external sensory organs. Grimes stopped crawling, managed to get one of his pistols out of its holster. He thumbed off a brief flash, was rewarded by a brilliant coruscation of blue sparks as the deadly beam found its target. The thing fell, its tentacles feebly twitching. It struck one of the lower girders, bounced off it, then dropped clear through the skeletal structure of the great ship.

“And what was that?” demanded Una.

“I don’t know. A maintenance robot, maybe. Making its normal rounds, perhaps.”

“You don’t think that . . . that
he
sent it?”

“No,” said Grimes, with a conviction that he did not feel.

Ahead of them the colored lights still played randomly over the surface of the sphere. There was no indication that Panzen was aware of their escape from the boat—but what indication would there, could there be? Certainly it did not seem as though that hapless little machine had been sent to attack, to subdue and recapture them. If it had been an attack it had been a singularly ineffectual one. Even so, it had come to meet them.

They had almost reached their objective. The central sphere was suspended in the hollow, openwork globe at which the girders terminated by relatively light structural members. It was within easy range of the pistols. It hung there, apparently ignoring them. Was Panzen asleep? Were those colored lights no more than a visual presentation of his dreams?
And do robots sleep, and do robots dream?
wondered Grimes. He had never known of any that did—but there has to be a first time for everything.

Crouching there, on the girder, he set the pistol that he still held in his hand to wide aperture. He did not wish to destroy Panzen, only to force him to do the bidding of the humans. The laser, when fired, would do no more than induce not very extreme heating of the metal shell.

He aimed. His thumb pressed the button. Abruptly more lights flickered all over the dull, metal surface.