“There’s room for only one,” he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again.” After I close the hatch, push that button there, the activator. Understand?
That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut and waited. Only about three seconds passed before there came a scraping sound that he supposed meant the boat had gone.
Nearby was a tiny observation blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near the Frans but none of its commensal machines were in sight.
Looking the Man with a Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel. The discordant lines of Herron’s own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them.
He hadn’t time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metal working had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker portrait. “When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it.”
The machine-voice squeaked back at him: “Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good.”
Herron was suddenly too frightened and weary to speak. Looking dully into the machine’s lenses he saw there tiny flickerings, keeping time with his own pulse and breathing, like the indications of a lie detector.
“Your mind is divided,” said the machine. “But with its much greater part you have praised me. I have repaired your ship, and set its course. I now release you, so other life-units can learn from you to praise what is good.”
Herron could only stand there staring straight ahead of him, while a trampling of metal feet went past, and there was a final scraping on the hull.
After some time he realized he was alive and free.
At first he shrank from the dead men, but after once touching them he soon got them into a freezer. He had no particular reason to think either of them Believers, but he found a book and read Islamic, Ethical, Christian and Jewish burial services.
Then he found an undamaged handgun on the deck, and went prowling the ship, taken suddenly with the wild notion that a machine might have stayed behind. Pausing only to tear down the abomination from his easel, he went on to the very stern. There he had to stop, facing the direction in which he supposed the berserker now was.
“Damn you, I can change!” he shouted at the stern bulkhead. His voice broke. “I can paint again. I’ll show you . . . I can change. I am alive.”
Different men will find different ways of praising life, of calling it good.
Even I, who by my nature cannot fight or destroy, can see intellectually this truth: In a war against death, it is by fighting and destroying the enemy that the value of life is affirmed.
In such a war, no living fighter need concern himself with pity for his enemy; this one twisted pain, at least, no one need feel.
But in any war the vital effect of pacifism is not on the foe, but on the pacifist.
I touched a peace-loving mind, very hungry for life . . .
THE PEACEMAKER
Carr swallowed a pain pill and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter, and spoke:
“I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you.”
He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. His radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, but he knew that it had heard him.
Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was a lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy; until now, the berserker war had been no more than a remote horror in news stories. The colony’s only real fighting ship had recently gone to join Karlsen’s fleet in the defense of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here. The people of Carr’s planet were readying two more warships as fast as they could—they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even if the two ships could be made ready in time, they would hardly be a match for a berserker.
When Carr had taken his plan to the leaders of his planet, they had thought him mad. Go out and talk to it of peace and love. Argue with it? There might be some hope of converting the most depraved human to the cause of goodness and mercy, but what appeal could alter the built-in purpose of a machine?
“Why not talk to it of peace?” Carr had demanded. “Have you a better plan? I’m willing to go. I’ve nothing to lose.”
They had looked at him, across the gulf that separates healthy planners from those who know they are dying. They knew his scheme would not work, but they could think of nothing that would. It would be at least ten days until the warships were ready. The little one-man ship was expendable, being unarmed. Armed, it would be no more than a provocation to a berserker. In the end, they let Carr take it, hoping there was a chance his arguments might delay the inevitable attack.
When Carr came within a million miles of the berserker, it stopped its own unhurried motion and seemed to wait for him, hanging in space in the orbital track of an airless planetoid, at a point from which the planetoid was still several days away.
“I am unarmed,” he radioed again. “I come to talk with you, not to damage you. If those who built you were here, I would try to talk to them of peace and love. Do you understand?” He was serious about talking love to the unknown builders; things like hatred and vengeance were not worth Carr’s time now.
Suddenly it answered him: “Little ship, maintain your present speed and course toward me. Be ready to stop when ordered.”
“I—I will.” He had thought himself ready to face it, but he stuttered and shook at the mere sound of its voice. Now the weapons which could sterilize a planet would be trained on him alone. And there was worse than destruction to be feared, if one tenth of the stories about berserkers’ prisoners were true. Carr did not let himself think about that.
When he was within ten thousand miles it ordered: “Stop. Wait where you are, relative to me.”
Carr obeyed instantly. Soon he saw that it had launched toward him something about the size of his own ship—a little moving dot on his video screen, coming out of the vast fortress-shape that floated against the stars.
Even at this range he could see how scarred and battered that fortress was. He had heard that all of these ancient machines were damaged, from their long senseless campaign across the galaxy; but surely such apparent ruin as this must be exceptional.
The berserker’s launch slowed and drew up beside his ship. Soon there came a clanging at the airlock.
“Open!” demanded the radio voice. “I must search you.”
“Then will you listen to me?”
“Then I will listen.”
He opened the lock, and stood aside for the half-dozen machines that entered. They looked not unlike robot valets and workers to Carr, except these were limping and worn, like their great master. Here and there a new part gleamed, but the machines’ movements were often unsteady as they searched Carr, searched his cabin, probed everywhere on the little ship. When the search was completed one of the boarding machines had to be half-carried out by its fellows.