Having gotten in a dig at the newly burgeoning Liberals, a dig he might hope to claim was nonpolitical in intent, the President faced back to the jester. “A robot will go with you to the beacon, to assist you in your duties and see to your physical safety. I assure you the robot will not be tempted into mirth.”
The robot took the convicted jester out in a little ship, so far out that Planet A vanished and its sun shrank to a point of brilliance. Out on the edge of the great dusty night of the Approaches, they drew near the putative location of station Z-45, which the MiniDef had selected as being the most dismal and forsaken of those unmanned at present.
There was indeed a metallic object where beacon Z-45 was supposed to be; but when the robot and jester got closer, they saw the object was a sphere some forty miles in diameter. There were a few little bits and pieces floating about it that just might be the remains of Z-45. And now the sphere evidently sighted their ship, for with startling speed it began to move toward them.
Once robots are told what berserkers look like, they do not forget, nor do robots grow slow and careless. But radio equipment can be sloppily maintained, and ever the dust drifts in around the edges of the system of Planet A, impeding radio signals. Before the MiniDef’s robot could successfully broadcast an alarm, the forty-mile sphere was very close indeed, and its grip of metal and force was tight upon the little ship.
The jester kept his eyes shut through a good deal of what followed. If they had sent him out here to stop him laughing they had chosen the right spot. He squeezed his eyelids tighter, and put his fingers in his ears, as the berserker’s commensal machines smashed their way into his little ship and carried him off. He never did find out what they did with his robot guard.
When things grew quiet, and he felt gravity and good air and pleasant warmth again, he decided that keeping his eyes shut was worse than knowing whatever they might tell him. His first cautious peek showed him that he was in a large shadowy room, that at least held no visible menace.
When he stirred, a squeaky monotonous voice somewhere above him said: “My memory bank tells me that you are a protoplasmic computing unit, probably capable of understanding this language. Do you understand?”
“Me?” The jester looked up into the shadows, but could not see the speaker. “Yes, I understand you. But who are you?”
“I am what this language calls a berserker.”
The jester had taken shamefully little interest in galactic affairs, but that word frightened even him. He stuttered: “That means you’re a kind of automated warship?”
There was a pause. “I am not sure,” said the squeaky, droning voice. The tone sounded almost as if the President was hiding up there in the rafters. “War may be related to my purpose, but my purpose is still partially unclear to me, for my construction was never quite completed. For a time I waited where I was built, because I was sure some final step had been left undone. At last I moved, to try to learn more about my purpose. Approaching this sun, I found a transmitting device which I have disassembled. But I have learned no more about my purpose.”
The jester sat on the soft, comfortable floor. The more he remembered about berserkers, the more he trembled. He said: “I see. Or perhaps I at least begin to see. What do you know of your purpose?”
“My purpose is to destroy all life wherever I can find it.”
The jester cowered down. Then he asked in a low voice: “What is unclear about that?”
The berserker answered his question with two of its own: “What is life? And how is it destroyed?”
After half a minute there came a sound that the berserker computers could not identify. It issued from the protoplasmic computing-unit, but if it was speech it was in a language unknown to the berserker.
“What is the sound you make?” the machine asked.
The jester gasped for breath. “It’s laughter. Oh, laughter! So. You were unfinished.” He shuddered, the terror of his position coming back to sober him. But then he once more burst out giggling; the situation was too ridiculous.
“What is life?” he said at last. “I’ll tell you. Life is a great grim grayness, and it inflicts fright and pain and loneliness upon all who experience it. And you want to know how to destroy it? Well, I don’t think you can. But I’ll tell you the best way to fight life—with laughter. As long as we can fight it that way, it can’t overcome us.”
The machine asked: “Must I laugh, to prevent this great-grim-grayness from enveloping me?”
The jester thought. ”No, you are a machine. You are not—” he caught himself, “protoplasmic. Fright and pain and loneliness will never bother you.”
“Nothing bothers me. Where will I find life, and how will I make laughter to fight it?”
The jester was suddenly conscious of the weight of the cube that still hung from his neck. “Let me think for a while,” he said.
After a few minutes he stood up. “If you have a viewer of the kind men use, I can show you how laughter is created. And perhaps I can guide you to a place where life is. By the way, can you cut this cord from my neck? Without hurting me, that is!”
A few weeks later, in the main War Room of Planet A, the somnolence of decades was abruptly shattered. Robots bellowed and buzzed and flashed, and those that were mobile scurried about. In five minutes or so they managed to rouse their human overseers, who hurried about, tightening their belts and stuttering.
“This is a practice alert, isn’t it?” the Officer of the Day kept hoping aloud. “Someone’s running some kind of a test? Someone?” He was beginning to squeak like a berserker himself.
He got down on all fours, removed a panel from the base of the biggest robot and peered inside, hoping to discover something causing a malfunction. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about robotics; recalling this, he replaced the panel and jumped to his feet. He really knew nothing about planet defense, either, and recalling this was enough to send him on a screaming run for help.
So there was no resistance, effective or otherwise. But there was no attack, either.
The forty-mile sphere, unopposed, came down to hover directly above Capital City, low enough for its shadow to send a lot of puzzled birds to nest at noon. Men and birds alike lost many hours of productive work that day; somehow the lost work made less difference than most of the men expected. The days were past when only the grimmest attention to duty let the human race survive on Planet A, though most of the planet did not realize it yet.
“Tell the President to hurry up,” demanded the jester’s image, from a viewscreen in the no-longer somnolent War Room. “Tell him it’s urgent that I talk to him.”
The President, breathing heavily, had just entered. “I am here. I recognize you, and I remember your trial.”
“Odd, so do I.”
“Have you now stooped to treason? Be assured that if you have led a berserker to us you can expect no mercy from your government.”
The image made a forbidden noise, a staccato sound from the open mouth, head thrown back. “Oh, please, mighty President! Even I know our Ministry of Defense is a j-o-k-e, if you will pardon an obscene word. It’s a catchbasin for exiles and incompetents. So I come to offer mercy, not ask it. Also, I have decided to legally take the name of Jester. Kindly continue to apply it to me.”
“We have nothing to say to you!” barked the Minister of Defense. He was purple granite, having entered just in time to hear his Ministry insulted.
“We have no objection to talking to you!” contradicted the President, hastily. Having failed to overawe the Jester through a viewscreen, he could now almost feel the berserker’s weight upon his head.