“Hurry,” Belem said in my mind. “Out here, around the next corner and step on the black disc in the pavement. If you move fast I don’t think anyone will recognize you, though a cordon must be out for you by now. They’ll expect us.”
“Me, not us,” I said, dodging through the doorway. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Paynter let me go and then trailed me with the idea I might lead him to you. He’ll have a lot of explaining to do now that I’m missing. But he can’t have guessed you were there—more or less—all the time. Here’s the disc. Now what?”
“Step on it,” Belem said. “The dark half.”
The circle was six feet across, half dark, half palish.
The pale half was unmarked, but the dark half had an arrow inlaid in it which was pointing right.
I stepped gingerly on the arrow.
I was standing on the pale half of a large disc. But not the same one. The buildings were different around me. A carload of soldiers drifted rapidly past toward one of the bigger discs, floated over it, centered and vanished.
“At the next corner,” Belem urged me. “Take the dark half again. Hurry!”
Leap by miraculous leap I traversed the dark clear air of that curious city. And as I went it seemed to me I began to get a glimmer of the decoration which had once made it spectacular in its heyday, something one couldn’t see from a single standpoint but grasped bit by bit as one went through great arcs and vistas of its streets.
One bit at a time showed nothing but each leap through space, each glimpse from a different point, built up a little more of the plan in the memory, so that eventually a strange concept of the art emerged, a step farther than the architecture of my own day, when solids and surfaces were used. Here movement and distance were of equal importance. Like a moving picture, except that it was the city which stood still and the watcher who moved.
Presently Belem halted me. We had come out near a fenced enclosure full of hunks of junked machinery, floating cars that still hovered motionless just off the ground, all their ribs showing, small lifeboats from beached spaceships, odds and ends of jetsam wholly nameless to me.
“Over there, the little ship under the girders,” Belem said. “Make sure nobody’s watching, then climb into it.”
I did, wondering who had last sat in the tattered leather bucket-seat before the instrument panel, what he had seen through the glass, what wrecked liner and whirling stars. Belem interrupted the fancies impatiently. Under his orders I pushed the seat aside and pulled up a trap in the floor. A ladder went down.
Nobody had discovered this passage yet, though I expected to find at any corner that somebody was waiting for me with a paralyzer that puffed rubber lips in and out. At the end I tapped a signal on a metal door and after awhile someone pulled it creaking open.
The gigantically braced laboratory was blue with smoke and bluer with the blinding light of the cone that hung above it, glaring through the broad windows.
Belem’s motionless figure waited where he had left it.
19. The Marble
It was curious to look into his face and find it alien, he who had been so intimate a part of my mind. The emotionless features, the strange, quicksilver eyes belonged to De Kalb but the voice was—as I pointed out to him—the voice of Esau.
He wasn’t amused. He seemed to find his own body rather strange for a moment or two, for after he had left me he tried it out stiffly, moving to and fro with short steps.
“You look like De Kalb,” I said, watching him. “You move like De Kalb. Belem,were isDe Kalb now?”
He gave me a swift, strange, emotionless look. “I told you I was beginning to understand,” he said. “I was. But I haven’t the full answer yet and—look, Cortland.”
I followed his gesture. The enormous room, braced with its monstrous girders, lay before us. There was orderly activity all through the vast place, centering around a control panel that might be the device creating the dome of light that shielded this area, a white wall curtaining off everything outside the windows. Sometimes coruscating flashes sparkled here and there along the curtain. Attacks—failing? So little time had elapsed, really, since we left Paynter. This siege must be less than half an hour old and its full violence yet to come.
Under a web of shimmering fire at the far side of the room the table still stood with a body stretched out on it. Here most of the figures were at work on their second-stage Mechandroid, waiting for it to come alive.
“That’s the most important thing that’s happening here now,” Belem said gravely. “I’m needed. I have no time nor mental energy to spare to solve your puzzles for you. Later, if we live, I’ll try.”
He turned swiftly away from me and crossed the big room toward the table. I followed in silence.
The second-stage Mechandroid lay quiet on its table, its eyes closed, the face serene and not quite human. There was, I thought, a remote familiarity about it too. Belem? I glanced at him, recognizing a likeness but not enough to explain the feeling that I had seen this man before. Man? Machine? Both and either.
“Is he alive yet?” I asked.
“It should take about four days more,” one of the workers answered in English, speaking with mechanical precision. He sounded as if he had learned the language from records, so accurately that he reproduced even the buzz and click of the recording machine.
“He is beginning to think and be alive already, but he will not be finished for four days. Before then our defenses will have gone down, I think. We haven’t enough power to maintain the blocking screens for long.”
“Couldn’t we all go out the way I came in?” I asked. “We could not take him along.”
“No, it’s impossible. All we can do is defend ourselves as long as we can and hope to finish in time. I doubt if we will,” he added casually.
“The other time a second-stage Mechandroid was attempted,” I said rather tactlessly, “they blew up the whole city, didn’t they? Why don’t they do it now?”
“That was recognized as an error at the time,” Belem told me. “They have improved siege weapons now and they will be curious about our devices. We must do the blowing up ourselves to prevent them when the time comes.”
“But you’ll go right on working until—”
“Naturally.” Belem sounded surprised. “There is a demonstrable mathematical chance that we may succeed. It would be foolish to throw such a chance away. I was set a problem, you see, and I must work to solve it as long as I am able to move and think. This is part of the solution—this second-stage Mechandroid.”
“I should think,” I said with even less tact, “that you’d have a sort of built-in block against making anything really dangerous to civilization.”
“So we have, within limits. This creation will not be basically destructive. Paynter is wrong. Human thinkers are very often wrong. The Man-Machine will endanger only obsolete things that should be destroyed. Humans ignore the obvious fact that machines can evolve exactly as men can. They have evolved.
“What is a city but a machine? Sooner or later it would have been necessary to create a second-stage Mechandroid anyhow. The coming problems will be too complex for solution by either humans or Mechandroids.”
Belem looked down impassively at the serene sleeping face. Then he turned and walked away with a purposeful stride. I trailed him curiously. We ducked under girders and circled groups of workers who ignored us, reaching at last a rusty wall that opened under Belem’s touch. I looked into the time-worn room of matter-transmission from which I had first glimpsed this scene.