Another one of the machines, a thing with arms and hands like a man’s, stayed behind. As soon as the airlock had closed behind the others, it settled itself in the combat chair and began to drive the ship toward the berserker.
“Wait!” Carr heard himself protesting. “I didn’t mean I was surrendering!” The ridiculous words hung in the air, seeming to deserve no reply. Sudden panic made Carr move without thinking; he stepped forward and grabbed at the mechanical pilot, trying to pull it from the chair. It put one metal hand against his chest and shoved him across the cabin, so that he staggered and fell in the artificial gravity, thumping his head painfully against a bulkhead.
“In a matter of minutes we will talk about love and peace,” said the radio.
Looking out through a port as his ship neared the immense berserker, Carr saw the scars of battle become plainer and plainer, even to his untaught eye. There were holes in the berserker’s hull, there were square miles of bendings and swellings, and pits where the metal had once flowed molten. Rubbing his bumped head, Carr felt a faint thrill of pride. We’ve done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. The martial feeling annoyed him in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist.
After some delay, a hatch opened in the berserker’s side, and the ship followed the berserker’s launch into darkness.
Now there was nothing to be seen through the port. Soon there came a gentle bump, as of docking. The mechanical pilot shut off the drive, and turned toward Carr and started to rise from its chair.
Something in it failed. Instead of rising smoothly, the pilot reared up, flailed for a moment with arms that sought a grip or balance, and then fell heavily to the deck. For half a minute it moved one arm, and made a grinding noise. Then it was still.
In the half minute of silence which followed, Carr realized that he was again master of his cabin; chance had given him that. If there was only something he could do—
“Leave your ship,” said the berserker’s calm voice. “There is an air-filled tube fitted to your airlock. It will lead you to a place where we can talk of peace and love.”
Carr’s eyes had focused on the engine switch, and then had looked beyond that, to the C-plus activator. In such proximity as this to a mass the size of the surrounding berserker, the C-plus effect was not a drive but a weapon—one of tremendous potential power.
Carr did not—or thought he did not—any longer fear sudden death. But now he found that with all his heart and soul he feared what might be prepared for him outside his airlock. All the horror stories came back. The thought of going out through that airlock now was unendurable. It was less terrifying for him to step carefully around the fallen pilot, to reach the controls and turn the engine back on.
“I can talk to you from here,” he said, his voice quavering in spite of an effort to keep it steady.
After about ten seconds, the berserker said: “Your C-plus drive has safety devices. You will not be able to kamikaze me.”
“You may be right,” said Carr after a moment’s thought. “But if a safety device does function, it might hurl my ship away from your center of mass, right through your hull. And your hull is in bad shape now, you don’t want any more damage.”
“You would die.”
“I’ll have to die sometime. But I didn’t come out here to die, or to fight, but to talk to you, to try to reach some agreement.”
“What kind of agreement?”
At last. Carr took a deep breath, and marshalled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage.
“I’ve had the feeling,” he began, “that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy.”
“Life is my enemy. Life is evil.” Pause. “Do you want to become goodlife?”
Carr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. “From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing them. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?”
There was a longer pause. “What evidence can you offer, that I should change my purpose?”
“For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you.”
“What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?”
Carr tried again. “Life is basically superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life.”
“What evidence do you offer?”
“Man has a spirit.”
“I have learned that many men claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not many men who deny that this spirit exists?”
“Spirit is so defined. And there are such men.”
“Then I do not accept the argument of spirit.”
Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. “Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility.”
“That is correct.”
“But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy of organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull.”
“I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect,” the mechanical voice informed him blandly. “Though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?”
“Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that—produce brains capable of intelligent action?”
There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr’s throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours.
“I have never tried to use that hypothesis,” it answered suddenly. “But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise—then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine.”
“You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate.” Carr wasn’t sure he could follow the machine’s line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game for life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator.
The berserker said:” If I am able to study some living cells—”
Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. “Stop that!” he screamed, without thought. “The first thing you try, I’ll kill you!”
Its voice was unevenly calm, as always.” There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metal and repair myself as far as possible.” The indicator was quiet again.
The berserker resumed its argument. “If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent life-unit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for or against your claims. Will you provide me with cells?”
“You must have had prisoners, sometime.” He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker.
“No, I have never taken a prisoner.”
It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air.
“The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possibly I could give you a few of them.”
“Half a cubic centimeter should be enough. Not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the situation called pain. I am willing to help you avoid it, if possible.”