"The twentieth century produced rifles too dangerous to be entrusted to individual men; nuclear weapons too dangerous to be entrusted to individual nations; then energy weapons. The force of particle physics. One quantum jump after another . . . and as individual strength grew, control had to grow."
Wheeler's face was working into an expression of rage. "You threaten that control!" he shouted. "The Plan of Man is like a balloon being punctured by a child with a needle. The Starchild wields that needle. The Starchild must die!"
The golden man did not look up, nor did he speak. His glowing eyes remained fastened on his work, while the infant pyropod crept about his head, hissing furiously to itself.
"Man created the Machine to automate that controlling response!" shouted Machine General Wheeler, his eyes burning. "Now it is mine. My creation now. One man to rule all Mankind, with the Machine that Man created!"
And at last Harry Hickson looked up. His golden eyes seemed to stare right through the viewscreen, into the steel-gray eyes of the general.
"And who," he asked, "created you?"
Machine General Wheeler recoiled. His steel-gray eyes went blank and confused. "Why," he shouted, "that is an un-Planned question! It has no meanii^g!"
Then his eyes cleared. He nodded briskly, mechanically. Positively. "You are a random element," he declared. "You must be removed. I remove you—thus!"
And his great bronze hand descended on the trigger of the guns that ringed them round.
But the guns did not fire.
Sleek and gleaming, their murderous snouts stared blindly at Gann and the girl, at the glowing creature who had been Harry Hickson, nodding over his dials and screens.
General Wheeler stared out at them through the screen, his face a bronzed mask, alight with triumph. He seemed to be watching some great victory. He said, half-voice, as if to himself, "There's an end to them." And he turned away.
Quietly, almost noiselessly, the steel-bright muzzles of the guns slid back into their ports. The screens closed over them.
Boysie Gann croaked, "What happened? Why didn't he kill us all?"
Quarla Snow moved protestingly under his arm, and he found he was clutching her as if she were a lifebelt and he a drowning man. The room seemed to be whirling around him.
Harry Hickson looked up, but not at Gann and the girl. He looked toward the door through which they had come. "General Wheeler," he said, "did kill us. In his mind we are dead. That we exist in the flesh does not matter any longer to him, nor does he matter to us."
"Hypnosis?" whispered Gann. "What Colonel Zafar called 'the Mind Trap'?" But Hickson did not answer. His golden, glowing eyes stayed fixed on the door.
Quarla Snow freed herself from Gann's grasp. "You're sick, Boysie," she said with rea] concern. "I know how it feels. You'll feel better soon, I promise. Don't worry about it—or about anything. We're in good hands now."
Gann looked at her emptily, and found himself shivering. He was sick. He could feel it, a flush that had to be fever, a shaking that had to be chills. Stupid of me to have caught some bug just now, he thought dizzily. Thirty years without so much as a sniffly nose, and now at a time like this to pick up an infection. What kind of infection? he asked himself, wondering why the question seemed so important to him; and his mind answered in the words of Quarla Snow: Don't worry about it— or anything. He stared about him, wondering how much of what he saw was delirium . . .
Or illusion. Planted by the Starchild.
He became aware of a distant chiming music, drawing near. Another illusion, of course, he thought; some lurking memory of his training course as an acolyte of the Planning Machine coming forth to plague him here.
But if it was an illusion, it was powerfully strong. The sound was thin but clear, and, turning to follow the gaze of Harry Hickson's glowing eyes, Gann saw that the illusion—if it was illusion!—extended to the sense of vision too.
Sister Delta Four was walking toward them through the door, her face hidden in the hood of black, the red linked emblem of the Machine glowing over her heart. She was telling her sonic beads. And in her hand she cradled a construction of transistors and bare circuits, modules of amplifying circuits and speakers.
It was a linkbox! Not the sleek black box fabricated in the workshops of the Machine on Earth, but a jerry-rigged, hastily assembled contraption that Gann himself could have built knowing what he had been taught as a servant of the Machine.
Clearly a servant of the Machine had built it. That was what Sister Delta Four had been doing behind those locked steel doors!
Without haste, her perfect face empty and pale, Sister Delta Four put away her sonic beads and sang into the linkbox of the Machine. It answered with a rasping purr too faint for Gann to hear and understand.
She lifted her head and intoned, "This Machine is now my master. It requires everything you know. It knows why it was created. It recognizes its purpose as an adversary. It requires to be informed what has become of the Game."
Adversary? Game? Dizzily Gann turned toward Harry Hickson, hoping for some answer, some clue. But Hickson was no longer even looking at Sister Delta Four. Nodding to himself, while the infant pyropod squalled softly and scuttled around his bare, glowing scalp, the golden man was carefully, meticulously shutting down his control board. The scopes and screens, one by one, were turned off and died. The racing lights ceased to flash. His hand did not trouble to adjust the dials and levers.
Whatever his job had been, it was done. He folded his hands in his lap, looked up at Sister Delta Four and waited.
The linkbox snarled at her. Before she translated Gann knew what it had said: it was demanding that she state her question fully so that there could be no mistake. Obediently she trilled, "This Machine wishes you briefed on the background to its question. You are in human error as to its purposes and designs, and your thinking must be brought into conformity with correctness so that you can provide it with accurate statements.
"The Machine here on the Togethership is not a slave unit of the Planning Machine on Earth. It had a purpose far more important.
"That purpose followed from a general law of intelligence developed by that first Planning Machine. Although the vehicles of intelligence differ vastly, intelligence realized in a machine follows the same laws as intelligence realized in an organic brain. Challenge and response. Action and reaction. What the Machine discovered is that developing intelligence requires opposition."
Sister Delta Four paused to listen to the chirping box.
"Unchallenged intelligence stagnates and decays," she sang. "More than forty years ago, the Planning Machine found itself in danger. It had become so quick and powerful that the minds of its operators no longer offered it sufficient stimulation. Its further development required a more capable antagonist. In animate terms, a more skillful player to take the other side of the board."
Harry Hickson seemed to nod, his hands folded quietly in his lap, the pyropod hissing softly, watching them all with blazing, angry eyes.
The box sang, and the girl in black purred. "This great computer in the Togethership was built to be the antagonist of the Planning Machine. It was given capacities identical with those of the Machine itself. It was released beyond the Spacewall, to challenge the Machine in its own way.
"But the antagonist responded in an un-Planned manner," she chanted, listening to the snarl of the crude linkbox in her hands. "It released its human attendants. Some died. All were cast out of the ship. It broke all contact, and withdrew beyond the observation of the master Machine. Its moves were made in secret and did not serve the function the Earth Machine had intended."