Del saw his computers, recovering from the effect of the beam, lock his aiming screen onto the berserker’s scarred and bulging midsection, as he shot his right arm forward, scattering pieces from the game board.
“Checkmate!” he roared out hoarsely, and brought his fist down on the big red button.
“I’m glad it didn’t want to play chess,” Del said later, talking to the Commander in Foxglove’s cabin. “I could never have rigged that up.”
The ports were cleared now, and the men could look out at the cloud of expanding gas, still faintly luminous, that had been a berserker; metal fire-purged of the legacy of ancient evil.
But the Commander was watching Del. “You got Newt to play by following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?”
Del grinned. “He couldn’t, but his toys could. Now wait before you slug me.” He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal’s hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of one possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-colored arrow indicating each possible move of Del’s pieces.
“It took a couple of hundred of these boxes,” said Del. “This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking—that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way,” said Del, demonstrating. “Ah, this one’s blue. That means, make the move indicated on the cover by a blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position, see?” Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. “No orange beads left; there were six of each color when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly.”
“Well,” said the Commander. He thought for a moment, then reached down to scratch Newton behind the ears. “I never would have come up with that idea.”
“I should have thought of it sooner. The basic idea’s a couple of centuries old. And computers are supposed to be my business.”
“This could be a big thing,” said the Commander. “I mean your basic idea might be useful to any task force that has to face a berserker’s mind beam.”
“Yeah.” Del grew reflective. “Also . . . ”
“What?”
“I was thinking of a guy I met once. Named Blankenship. I wonder if I could rig something up . . . ”
Yes, I, third historian, have touched living minds, Earth minds, so deadly cool that for a while they could see war as a game. The first decades of the berserker war they were forced to see as a game being lost for life.
Nearly all the terrors of the slaughters in your past were present in this vaster war, all magnified in time and space. It was even less a game than any war has ever been.
As the grim length of the berserker war dragged on, even Earthmen discovered in it certain horrors that they had never known before.
Behold . . .
GOODLIFE
“It’s only a machine, Hemphill,” said the dying man in a small voice.
Hemphill, drifting weightless in near-darkness, heard him with only faint contempt and pity. Let the wretch go out timidly, forgiving the universe everything, if he found the going-out easier that way!
Hemphill kept on staring out through the port, at the dark crenelated shape that blotted out so many of the stars.
There was probably just this one compartment of the passenger ship left livable, with three people in it, and the air whining out in steady leaks that would soon exhaust the emergency tanks. The ship was a wreck, torn and beaten, yet Hemphill’s view of the enemy was steady. It must be a force of the enemy’s that kept the wreck from spinning.
Now the young woman, another passenger, came drifting across the compartment to touch Hemphill on the arm. He thought her name was Maria something.
“Listen,” she began. “Do you think we might—”
In her voice there was no despair, but the tone of planning; and so Hemphill had begun to listen to her. But she was interrupted.
The very walls of the cabin reverberated, driven like speaker diaphragms through the power of the enemy force field that still gripped the butchered hull. The quavering voice of the berserker machine came in:
“You who can still hear me, live on. I plan to spare you. I am sending a boat to save you from death.”
Hemphill was sick with frustrated rage. He had never heard a berserker’s voice in reality before, but still it was familiar as an old nightmare. He could feel the woman’s hand pull away from his arm, and then he saw that in his rage he had raised both his hands to be claws, then fists that almost smashed themselves against the port. The damned thing wanted to take him inside it! Of all people in space it wanted to make him prisoner!
A plan rose instantly in his mind and flowed smoothly into action; he spun away from the port. There were warheads, for small defensive missiles, here in this compartment. He remembered seeing them.
The other surviving man, a ship’s officer, dying slowly, bleeding through his uniform tatters, saw what Hemphill was doing in the wreckage, and drifted in front of him interferingly.
“You can’t do that . . . you’ll only destroy the boat it sends . . . if it lets you do that much . . . there may be other people . . . still alive here . . . ”
The man’s face had been upside-down before Hemphill as the two of them drifted. As their movement let them see each other in normal position, the wounded man stopped talking, gave up and rotated himself away, drifting inertly as if already dead.
Hemphill could not hope to manage a whole warhead, but he could extract the chemical-explosive detonator, of a size to carry under one arm. All passengers had put on emergency spacesuits when the unequal battle had begun; now he found himself an extra air tank and some officer’s laser pistol, which he stuck in a loop of his suit’s belt.
The girl approached him again. He watched her warily.
“Do it,” she said with quiet conviction, while the three of them spun slowly in the near-darkness, and the air leaks whined.” Do it, The loss of a boat will weaken it, a little, for the next fight. And we here have no chance anyway.”
“Yes.” He nodded approvingly. This girl understood what was important: to hurt a berserker, to smash, burn, destroy, to kill it finally. Nothing else mattered very much.
He pointed to the wounded mate, and whispered: “Don’t let him give me away.”
She nodded silently. It might hear them talking. If it could speak through these walls, it might be listening.
“A boat’s coming,” said the wounded man, in a calm and distant voice.
“Goodlife!” called the machine-voice, cracking between syllables as always.
“Here!” He woke up with a start, and got quickly to his feet. He had been dozing almost under the dripping end of a drinking-water pipe.
“Goodlife!” There were no speakers or scanners in this little compartment; the call came from some distance away.
“Here!” He ran toward the call, his feet shuffling and thumping on metal. He had dozed off, being tired. Even though the battle had been a little one, there had been extra tasks for him, servicing and directing the commensal machines that roamed the endless ducts and corridors repairing damage. It was small help he could give, he knew.