But when Hemphill recognized the once-molten edge of the berserker’s great scar for what it was, his delicate new hope of survival left him. This, the damned thing had survived. This, perhaps, had hardly weakened it. Again, the bomb under his arm was only a pathetic toy.
Goodlife drifted up to them. Hemphill had already taught him to touch helmets for speech in vacuum.
“This great damage is the one path we can take to reach the strategic housing without passing scanners or service machines. I will teach you to ride the conveyor. It will carry us most of the way.”
The conveyor was a thing of force fields and huge rushing containers, hundreds of yards out in the enormous wound and running lengthwise through it. When the conveyor’s force fields caught the people up, their weightlessness felt more than ever like falling, with occasional vast shapes, corpuscles of the berserker’s bloodstream, flickering past in the near-darkness to show their speed of movement.
Hemphill flew beside Maria, holding her hand. Her face was hard to see, inside her helmet.
This conveyor was yet another mad new world, a fairy tale of monsters and flying and falling. Hemphill fell past his fear into a new determination. I can do it, he thought. The thing is blind and helpless here. I will do it, and I will survive if I can.
Goodlife led them from the slowing conveyor, to drift into a chamber hollowed in the inner armor by the final explosion at the end of the ancient lance-thrust. The chamber was an empty sphere a hundred feet across, from which cracks radiated out into the solid armor. On the surface nearest the center of the berserker, one fissure was as wide as a door, where the last energy of the enemy’s blow had driven ahead.
Goodlife touched helmets with Hemphill, and said: “I have seen the other end of this crack, from inside, at the strategic housing. It is only a few yards from here.”
Hemphill hesitated for only a moment, wondering whether to send Goodlife through the twisting passage first. But if this was some incredibly complex trap, the trigger of it might be anywhere.
He touched his helmet to Maria’s. “Stay behind him. Follow him through and keep an eye on him.” Then Hemphill led the way.
The fissure narrowed as he followed it, but at its end it was still wide enough for him to force himself through.
He had reached another vast hollow sphere, the inner temple. In the center was a complexity the size of a small house, shock-mounted on a web of girders that ran from it in every direction. This could be nothing but the strategic housing. There was a glow from it like flickering moonlight; force field switches responding to the random atomic turmoil within, somehow choosing what human shipping lane or colony would be next attacked, and how.
Hemphill felt a pressure rising in his mind and soul, toward a climax of triumphal hate. He drifted forward, cradling his bomb tenderly, starting to unwind the cord wrapped around his arm. He tied the free end delicately to the plunger of the bomb, as he approached the central complex.
I mean to live, he thought, to watch the damned thing die. I will tape the bomb against the central block, that so-innocent looking slab in there, and I will brace myself around two hundred feet of these heavy metal corners, and pull the cord.
Goodlife stood braced in the perfect place from which to see the heart of the machine, watching the man Hemphill string his cord. Goodlife felt a certain satisfaction that his prediction had been right, that the strategic housing was approachable by this one narrow path of the great damage. They would not have to go back that way. When the badlife had been captured, all of them could ride up in the air-filled elevator Goodlife used when he came here for maintenance practice.
Hemphill had finished stringing his cord. Now he waved his arm at Goodlife and Maria, who clung to the same girder, watching. Now Hemphill pulled on the cord. Of course, nothing happened. The machine had said the bomb was disabled, and the machine would make very certain in such a matter.
Maria pushed away from beside Goodlife, and drifted in toward Hemphill.
Hemphill tugged again and again on his cord. Goodlife sighed impatiently, and moved. There was a great cold in the girders here; he could begin to feel it now through the fingers and toes of his suit.
At last, when Hemphill started back to see what was wrong with his device, the service machines came from where they had been hiding, to seize him. He tried to draw his pistol, but their grippers moved far too quickly.
It was hardly a struggle that Goodlife saw, but he watched with interest. Hemphill’s figure had gone rigid in the suit, obviously straining every muscle to the limit. Why should the badlife try to struggle against steel and atomic power? The machines bore the man effortlessly away, toward the elevator shaft. Goodlife felt an uneasiness.
Maria was drifting, her face turned back toward Goodlife. He wanted to go to her and touch her again, but suddenly he was a little afraid, as before when he had run from her. One of the service machines came back from the elevator to grip her and carry her away. She kept her face turned toward Goodlife. He turned away from her, a feeling like punishment in the core of his being.
In the great cold silence, the flickering light from the strategic housing bathed everything. In the center, a chaotic block of atoms. Elsewhere, engines, relays, sensing units. Where was it, really, the mighty machine that spoke to him? Everywhere, and nowhere. Would these new feelings, brought by the badlife, ever leave him? He tried to understand himself, and could not begin.
Light flickered on a round shape a few yards away among the girders, a shape that offended Goodlife’s sense of the proper and necessary in machinery. Looking closer, he saw it was a space helmet.
The motionless figure was wedged only lightly in an angle between frigid metal beams, but there was no force in here to move it.
He could hear the suit creak, stiff with great cold, when he grabbed it and turned it. Unseeing blue eyes looked out at Goodlife through the faceplate. The man’s face wore a neat short beard.
“Ahhh, yes,” sighed Goodlife inside his own helmet. A thousand times he had seen the image of this face.
His father had been carrying something, heavy, strapped carefully to his ancient suit. His father had carried it this far, and here the old suit had wheezed and failed.
His father, too, had followed the logical narrow path of the great damage, to reach the strategic housing without being seen. His father had choked and died and frozen here, carrying toward the strategic housing what could only be a bomb.
Goodlife heard his own voice keening, without words, and he could not see plainly for the tears floating in his helmet. His fingers felt numbered with cold as he unstrapped the bomb and lifted it from his father . . .
Hemphill was too exhausted to do more than gasp as the service machine carried him out of the elevator and along the air-filled corridor toward the prison room. When the machine went dead and dropped him, he had to lie still for long seconds before he could attack it again. It had hidden his pistol somewhere, so he began to beat on the robotlike thing with his armored fists, while it stood unresisting. Soon it toppled over. Hemphill sat on it and beat it some more, cursing it with sobbing breaths.
It was nearly a minute later when the tremor of the explosion, racing from the compounded chaos of the berserker’s torn-out heart, racing through metal beams and decks, reached the corridor, where it was far too faint for anyone to feel.
Maria, completely weary, sat where her metal captor had dropped her, watching Hemphill, loving him in a way, and pitying him.
He stopped his pointless pounding of the machine under him, and said hoarsely: “It’s a trick, another damned trick.”