Immortality through murder, Holman repeated to himself over and over. Racial immortality through racial murder. And he had been a part of it! He had defended it, even sought immortality as his reward. He had fought his whole lifetime for it, and killed-so that he would not have to face death.
He sat there surrounded by self-repairing machinery, dressed in a silvery uniform, linked to a thousand automatic systems that fed him, kept him warm, regulated his air supply, monitored his blood flow, exercised his muscles with ultrasonic vibrators, pumped vitamins into him, merged his mind with the passionless brain of the ship, kept his body tanned and vigorous, his reflexes razor-sharp. He sat there unseeing, his eyes pinpointed on a horror that he had helped to create. Not consciously, of course. But to Holman, that was all the worse. He had fought without knowing what he was defending. Without even asking himself about it. All the marvels of man's ingenuity, all the deepest longings of the soul, focused on racial murder.
Finally he became aware of the computer's frantic buzzing and lightflashing.
"What is itr
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS ARE REQUIRED.
"What difference does it make? Why ntn anymore?"
YOUR DUTY IS TO PRESERVE YOURSELF UNTIL ORDERED TO DO OTHERWISE.
Holman heard himself laugh. "Ordered? By who? There's nobody left."
THAT IS AN UNPROVED ASSUMPTION.
"The war was billions of years ago," Holman said. "It's been over for eons. Mankind died in that war. Earth no longer exists. The sun is a white dwarf star. We're anachronisms, you and me…"
THE WORD IS ATAVISM,
"The hell with the word! I want to end it, I'm tired,"
IT IS TREASONABLE TO SURRENDER WHILE STILL
CAPABLE OF FIGHTING AND/OR ELUDING THE ENEMY.
"So shoot me for treason. That's as good a way as any."
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR SYSTEMS OF THIS SHIP TO HARM YOU.
"All right then, let's stop running. The Others will find us soon enough once we stop. They'll know what to do."
THIS SHIP CANNOT DELIBERATELY ALLOW ITSELF TO FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS.
"You're disobeying me?"
THIS SHIP IS PROGRAMMED FOR MAXIMUM EF FECTIVENESS AGAINST THE ENEMY, A WEAPONS SYSTEM DOES NOT SURRENDER VOLUNTARILY.
"I'm no weapons system, I'm a man, dammit!"
THIS WEAPONS SYSTEM INCLUDES A HUMAN PILOT.
IT WAS DESIGNED FOR HUMAN USE. YOU ARE AN INTEGRAL COMPONENT OF THE SYSTEM.
"Damn you… I'll kill myself. Is that what you want?"
He reached for the control panels set before him. It would be simple enough to manually shut off the air supply, or blow open an airlock, or even set off the ship's destruct explosives.
But Holman found that he could not move his arms. He could not even sit up straight. He collapsed back into the padded softness of the couch, glaring at the computer viewscreen.
SELF-PROTECTION MECHANISMS INCLUDE THE CAPABILITY OF PREVENTING THE HUMAN COMPONENT OF THE SYSTEM FROM IRRATIONAL ACTIONS. A series of clicks and blinks, then: IN LIEU OF SPECIFIC COURSE INSTRUCTIONS, A RANDOM EVASION PATTERN WILL BE RUN.
Despite his fiercest efforts, Holman felt himself dropping into deep sleep. Slowly, slowly, everything faded, and darkness engulfed him.
Holman slept as the ship raced at near-lightspeed in an erratic, meaningless course, looping across galaxies, darting through eons of time. When the computer's probings of Hoi-man's subconscious mind told it that everything was safe, it instructed the cryogenics system to reawaken the man.
He blinked, then slowly sat up.
SUBCONSCIOUS INDICATIONS SHOW THAT THE WAVE OF IRRATIONALITY HAS PASSED.
Holman said nothing.
YOU WERE SUFFERING FROM AN EMOTIONAL SHOCK.
"And now it's an emotional pain… a permanent, fixed, immutable disease that will kill me, sooner or later. But don't worry, I won't kill myself. I'm over that. And I won't do anything to damage you, either."
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS?
He shrugged. "Let's see what the world looks like out there." Holman focused the outside viewscreens. "Things look different," he said, puzzled. "The sky isn't black anymore; it's sort of grayish-like the first touch of dawn…"
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS?
He took a deep breath. "Let's try to find some planet where the people are too young to have heard of mankind, and too innocent to worry about death."
A PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION. THE SCANNERS CAN ONLY DETECT SUCH SOCIETIES AT EXTREMELY CLOSE RANGE.
"Okay. We've got nothing but time."
The ship doubled back to the nearest galaxy and began a searching pattern. Holman stared at the sky, fascinated. Something strange was happening.
The viewscreens showed him the outside world, and automatically corrected the wavelength shifts caused by the ship's immense velocity. It was as though Holman were watching a speeded-up tape of cosmological evolution. Galaxies seemed to be edging into his field of view, mammoth islands of stars, sometimes coming close enough to collide. He watched the nebulous arms of a giant spiral slice silently through the open latticework of a great ovoid galaxy. He saw two spirals interpenetrate, their loose gas heating to an intense blue that finally disappeared into ultraviolet. And all the while, the once-black sky was getting brighter and brighter.
"Found anything yet?" he absently asked the computer, still staring at the outside view.
You will find no one.
Holman's whole body went rigid. No mistaking it: the
Others.
No race, anywhere, will shelter you.
We will see to that.
You are alone, and you will be alone until death you to join your fellow men.
Their voices inside his head rang with cold fury. An implacable hatred, cosmic and eternal.
"But why me? I'm only one man. What harm can I do now?"
You are a human.
You are accursed. A race of murderers.
Your punishment is extinction.
"But I'm not an Immortal, I never even saw an Immortal. I didn't know about the Flower People, I just took orders."
Total extinction.
For all of mankind.
All.
"Judge and jury, all at once. And executioners too. All right…try and get me! If you're so powerful, and it means so much to you that you have to wipe out the last single man in the universe-come and get me! Just try."
You have no right to resist.
Your race is evil. All must pay with death.
You cannot escape us.
"I don't care what we've done. Understand? I don't care! Wrong, right, it doesn't matter. I didn't do anything. I won't accept your verdict for something I didn't do."
It makes no difference.
You can flee to the ends of the universe to no avail.
You have forced us to leave our time-continuum. We can never return to our homeworlds again. We have nothing to do but pursue you. Sooner or later your machinery will fail. You cannot flee us forever.
Their thoughts broke off. But Holman could stilHeel them, still sense them following.
"Can't flee forever," Holman repeated to himself. "Well, I can damn well try."
He looked at the outside viewscreens again, and suddenly the word forever took on its real meaning.
The galaxies were clustering in now, falling in together as though sliding down some titanic, invisible slope. The universe had stopped expanding eons ago, Holman now realized. Now it was contracting, pulling together again. It was all ending!