On the rusted floor a silver marble lay. That was all.
“It was gold before,” I said stupidly.
“Simple transmutation. It’s a tricky pattern of radio-elements.”
“It’s so small,” I said.
“Pick it up.”
I tried. I could easily slip my fingers around it but it wouldn’t budge. It might have been riveted to the floor.
“Nothing—no known force—has power enough to move a negatively-charged activated matrix of this type,” Belem said.
“The well-known immovable body.”
“Eh?”
“You know that paradox. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body?”
“But the existence of one automatically negates—”
“That’s just my compensatory humor,” I said. “I’m scared to death, so I’m joking.” He didn’t seem entirely satisfied. Well, neither was I.
I kicked at the thing and hurt my toes.
I can’t describe that battle because I didn’t understand what was going on. It was probably an epic. I couldn’t tell. Outside the windows the shining wall occasionally sparkled and sometimes bells would ring and the needles on gauges would jump wildly. From outside our protective shell it was probably a more spectacular scene.
Inside there wasn’t even a feeling of tension because the Mechandroids went calmly about their duties and showed no sign of nervousness. Belem got busy on tasks of his own. I wandered around and watched, trying to make myself believe I was a war correspondent. Sometimes I went back and looked into the matter-transmitter at the silver marble. It just lay there.
That was the strange, yet obvious point about this future—I didn’t understand the simplest basic things. I got glimpses of the Galaxy in operation, but I didn’t know why it worked that way. A Neanderthaler legman on the Piltdown Chronicle might have had some similar difficulty in writing a feature story about Oak Ridge so his hairy readers could understand it.
Well, with matter-transmission, you could live on a planet named South Nowhere, right on the edge of the Galaxy at the jumping-off-place, and yet be able to reach out your hand and pick up a California orange, practically fresh off the tree.
Space didn’t mean anything any more, so concepts of thinking based on familiar spatial frames of reference had to change. Except, perhaps, as far as initial exploration went. The first matter-transmitter had to be taken bodily to its destination. After that you could step into a transmitter on earth and step out on South Nowhere.
So, in a war in this time, the trick was to immobilize your opponent. Nail him down—as we were nailed down. After that, just keep pounding.
What we needed was a claw-hammer to pull up that nail.
I had seen enough of this future to begin thinking galactically. Stray thoughts crossed my mind—random concepts involving yanking Centaurus II out of its orbit, clamping on a tractor-beam—what the devil was a tractor-beam?—and letting Centaurus pull up the silver marble, as a tractor pulls a mired car out of the ditch. I mentioned this idea to Belem. He said it was a striking bit of fantasy but not very practical—and what was a tractor-beam?
Discouraged, I sat down and thought some more.
“What makes you think the second-stage Mechandroid can destroy the nekron?” I asked Belem.
He kept working on a cryptic device composed chiefly of vari-colored lenses. His placid face never changed.
“I can only hope so,” he said. “He was designed expressly to solve that problem and he will have a fifty-five-power brain, compared to my twenty-power one. He’ll be a tool—an extension of the social mechanism.”
“With free will?”
“Yes—within obvious limits. He’ll have to fulfill his purpose. He wouldn’t be functional unless he did that.”
“What is his purpose? Besides destroying the nekron?”
“I told you he was an extension. Like the specialized tool of your hand.”
“But I can control my hand.”
“Not always consciously,” Belem pointed out. “If you suddenly found yourself falling your hand would seize the nearest grip. Extend that parallel a bit farther and imagine your hand has a brain of its own.
“It will do—within its limits—what a hand can do best and it would know its potentialities better than you could. And it wouldn’t try to rebel, because it’s part of the unit. The second-stage Mechandroid is a better hand for humanity—or a better brain in matters of intellect and logic.”
He turned to his work again, flashing lights on and off at what looked like random. After a moment he went on speaking.
“As for the nekronic matter itself, it may be symbiotic or vampiric. I wonder. Thought and matter are very similar. It may be that nekronic matter has the potential ability to embody itself provided it finds a suitable host. It’s significant that the creature itself is superficially manlike. Quite possibly it uses whatever prey it feeds on as a pattern from which to shape itself.”
“You think it feeds?’
“You know as much as I about that. Probably more if you were capable of thinking the thing through. We don’t know why the embodied nekronic entity kills. The most obvious solution is to replenish itself, to spread. Even a null-entropy organism might do that, in a sort of reverse pattern from the norm.”
He flashed a blue light thoughtfully and considered the results. So far as I could tell, there had been none but Belem seemed to fall into a minor trance for a few minutes, considering his work.
I was watching a rift like black lightning that ran across the light-wall outside. A red cloud puffed through but the gap healed swiftly and the cloud was dissipated.
Belem twisted a dial, bringing two lenses into sharper focus. “Very likely we’ll never know,” he said. “We can’t last much longer now. A War Council has taken command of this planet.”
“Not Paynter?”
“He’s one of them. That’s odd. They’ve outvoted him three times already on the question of attack. He doesn’t want us destroyed—which means he doesn’t want you destroyed.”
“Nice of him,” I said. “After he tried to kill me in the Subterrane.”
“Paralyze, not kill,” Belem corrected.
Silence after that, while Belem worked and I watched. “What would happen if you had time and material enough to make another of those marbles?” I inquired idly, after a while.
“A great deal. Both matrix-weapons—technically they’re electronic matrices—would be negatively charged, and would repel each other. Unfortunately we have neither time nor equipment for that.”
“What you need is a hacksaw to split that marble in two,” I said. “Then they’d both change from immovable bodies to irresistible forces and shoot each other out of the galaxy. Right?”
“Wrong. Besides being impossible it wouldn’t help. You wouldn’t have two electronic matrices of the same pattern as before. It’s exactly the same reason why the second-stage Mechandroid wouldn’t be dangerous to the social body. The whole is never larger than the sum of its parts, and the sum of the parts always equals the whole.”
“Then you never heard of Banach and Tarski,” I said.
“Who?”
“Once I was assigned to write a feature science story on their experiment. I did plenty of research, because I had to find human interest in it somewhere and it was pure mathematics. The Banach-Tarski paradox, it was called—a way of dividing a solid into pieces and reassembling them to form a solid of different volume.”
“I should remember that,” Belem said, “since I have all your memories. It was only theoretical, wasn’t it?” He searched my memory. I felt uncomfortable as though, under partial anaesthesia, I watched a surgeon investigating my digestive tract.