Fugitives of the Stars [The Two Thousand Centuries] Read online

  Shedding the red coat, Horne barely looked at him. He did not trust himself to do so.

  "This time you won't get away,” said Ardric. “None of you.” He raised his voice so that all those around him could hear. “The alarm is out. The Vellae are already on the way here with every man they can raise. They'll tear the guts out of you."

  One of the aliens said, “I know this one.” It was a thin creature, yellowish in color and scaled all down its back with diamond-shaped scales. Its eyes were brilliant, catching the light on many facets, peering close at Ardric.

  "This is the leader one,” it said, its voice high and clear, carrying with the soft insistence of a blowing wind, and the rough noise and babble began to subside as the people listened. “This is Ardric, the leader one, the leader one, the one who tells us when and how we die."

  Its voice was almost a chant, repeating the phrase, “The leader one.” And now the crowd sound began again, deep and angry.

  It began to move, a wall of grotesque masks and weird-shaped bodies, pressing in around Ardric.

  Horne stepped in front of him. “Wait! This man must stay alive. He—"

  "He came in the ship that took me from my world,” said another voice out of that mounting of voices. “I saw him in the village. He came from the ship and told the slavers how to take us."

  So that, Horne thought, was where Ardric had gotten his experience at piloting—on the Vellae slave ships. Well, of course, it was a fleeting thought. The wall of bodies was pressing close now. He pulled his gun. “Wait!” he shouted, and fired a blast at the roof. They paused and stared at him, startled but not afraid, and he saw in their faces that they could just as easily include him in their thirst for revenge. He was human. The fact that he was also Jim Horne might be unknown to most of them at the moment, and he didn't think they would greatly care anyway.

  Ardric was laughing. It was a strange kind of laughter, but genuine. “Think fast, Horne!"

  "Get him back inside if you can,” said Horne to Lurgh. They started a backward movement, and Chell, who had been hovering nervously overhead, shot suddenly away.

  "We will kill that one,” said the yellowish one with the scales, in his soft-carrying voice. And they came on again.

  Ardric said maliciously, “Start shooting, Horne. Aren't you going to shoot? They'll kill me and you'll never get me into court."

  Lurgh said, “Be careful, Horne. He would like you to do that. If you kill any of them the rest will..."

  Chell came shooting back, crying shrilly. “Yso is coming! Morivenn's daughter!” He went up and down over the crowd shouting Yso's name, and Horne saw others of his race doing the same, and in a moment the crowd was looking for Yso, getting their attention away from Ardric as a wild ragged cheering broke out and grew louder and more continuous.

  Lurgh took the opportunity to get Ardric back into the smashed communications center and out of sight. Yso's cone appeared overhead, unable to land in the mining crowd. The canopy was open. She shouted down at him, wild-eyed and half hysterical. “It's done, Horne!"

  He shouted back at her, in a harsh voice that was intended to shock her out of it.

  "Nothing's done yet, except that we've killed some guards and captured some others. The Vellae will be coming in force! Use your amplifier there and tell this mob to go and guard the entrances against the Vellae!"

  She stared, and then obeyed him. The alien horde's excitement ebbed a little, but not their ferocious purpose.

  "More Vellae to kill,” called one of the hairy giants. “Come, brothers!"

  As the horde thinned away, hurrying to block the entrances, Yso was able to land her cone. She came to Horne, and all her emotion of triumph had left her.

  "Do we have any chance of holding the Vellae back?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not for long. We—the slaves—took the guards here by surprise, this time. We jumped them before they knew what was going on. But there'll be no more surprise. The humanoids are full of courage but how long will their courage stand up against the odds of numbers and weapons?"

  Yso said after a moment, “Horne, if we do not get out of this, we do not. But the brain of the Vellae must be destroyed, whether we escape or not."

  Horne nodded. “That's my thought too. But the question is ... can we do it, in the limited time we have?"

  "Surely, if we cut the nerve-cables and smash the relay switchboards—” she began, but Horne shook his head.

  "How long do you think it would take the Vellae to repair any damage like that? A few days, a few weeks ... and the thing would be functioning again."

  "Then there is no way?"

  "There may be a way,” said Fife. The little alien had remained with Horne and his yellow eyes were glowing like coals. “It will be a cruel blow we will deal the Vellae. Whether we die or not, their great creation will be destroyed by their slaves."

  "But how?” said Horne. “You said you knew a way...

  "Oh, no,” said Fife, “I did not say that for I do not know the human science, I would not know how to do it. But there is someone who does know, and could tell us."

  "Who?"

  And when Fife answered, Horne realized that the proposal was so uncanny that he would never have thought of it, whereas the little alien had.

  "You have said that the brain has no will, is not alive, and holds its tremendous knowledge at the service of its human masters,” said Fife. “Ask the brain itself how we can destroy it!"

  CHAPTER XVI

  TIME HAD passed. Horne didn't know how much. Probably a period short enough to be measured in minutes, but everything seemed to take years. In the plaza outside, groups of slaves still stalked and shambled and hopped among the broken glass, looking for someone to kill. But the bulk of the aliens were massed in the two main tunnels that led into the mountain from Rillah and from the port. Fighting was already joined.

  In the room, one of many in the operations center where data and problems were fed to the brain and the answers received, a white-faced technician hung over his input-output mechanisms. It had taken a little hard persuasion to make him code the question, How can you be most quickly destroyed? He had pointed out that “you” had no meaning for the brain, and they in turn had pointed out that he had better find a way of phrasing that would have meaning for it, and that he had better do so fast.

  He had done so and the problem had been fed in. Now they waited—Horne, Yso, and Chell, and Ardric securely shackled and guarded. Far away in its mighty vaults and chambers, the brain coldly pondered the problem of its own destruction.

  It shook Horne, a little, to think of it—this colossal instrument of knowledge being willfully and deliberately destroyed. It seemed almost to be a crime worse than human murder, to strike down an intelligence that might be capable of giving men the answers to the deepest riddles of the universe. For a moment, he was tempted to refrain from doing this thing.

  But legend had it that a man had been tempted once before by a Tree of Knowledge, to his regret. And it was certain that a day would come when many men, many worlds would bitterly regret it if they held back their hands now. The iron-hard laws of the Federation against the creation of electronic brains beyond a certain capacity had not been evolved out of mere theory. Three times in the past, worlds like Skereth that had secretly nourished monstrous, mindless intelligences like this one had taken the powers and the weapons derived from them and had set the galaxy aflame before their ambitions were stopped. It would happen again, here, if the intelligence seated in this hollow mountain was not ended.

  Horne stared out the window and waited for the brain's answer, and worried.

  A very long-legged creature with snow-white skin and a little crest of horns came leaping across the plaza and into the building. Horne went to meet him.

  "I bring word from D'quar,” the creature said. “I am to say that the Vellae come against us with many men, and these we could fight, but that also they have very heavy weapons that fill the halls
with flame, and these we cannot fight. I am to say that unless other ways of escape are found we will all die, and that they should be found very soon. Very soon."

  Horne indicated the engineering office across the plaza where Fife and a selected group of aliens were extracting information from charts and some reluctant men.

  "That's being done now. Tell D'quar and the others to hold out as long as they can."

  Yso called him and he went back into the office. The machine was typing out a bewildering mass of symbols. Horne said, “Read it!"

  The technician began to laugh hysterically. “'A nuclear bomb of 80 megaton capacity placed in the position represented by the figures..."

  Ardric too began to laugh. “You might as well give up, Horne. You couldn't destroy the brain if you had all the time in the world, and you don't have. We've got you trapped."

  Horne said quietly to the technician, “Try again. Substitute another word for destroyed—something meaning maximum damage."

  The technician hesitated. Chell reached out a couple of tentacles and he flinched and began hurriedly to punch out a tape.

  It clicked into the machine and again they waited.

  The first stragglers came into the plaza, retreating ahead of the line of battle.

  Fife came out of the engineering section with a rolled-up chart in his hand. He came running. “There are other ways out,” he said. “Look here.” He flung the chart open on the floor. “Some of the original borings, where they first started work on the brain, were left open for emergency exits. They blocked the others.” He pointed. “See? Here and here, there are ways."

  Horne saw. “That's fine,” he said, “except that we'd have to go through the brain again to get to them."

  Fife looked out the window. The groups of stragglers were growing and coming faster. “I don't see that we have much choice,” he said.

  The machine was click-clacking a message. Chell laid the end of one bright-red tentacle like a necklace around the technician's throat. The man looked agonized, but resigned. He picked up the message and read it.

  "It's a list of critical relays and safety switches to be opened, and the precise increase in voltage necessary to burn out all circuits."

  A shiver went through Horne. There was something so unhuman, so uncanny, in the icy calmness with which the mighty computer had calculated its own destruction, on order. But after all, though it was called a brain, it was without will or personality, without any realization of self. It computed, nothing more—and it computed its own destruction as passionlessly as anything else.

  "Get to it,” Horne said. “Fife, see that he has all the help he needs and send messengers to the tunnels to tell them to start falling back. Chell..."

  Chell wrapped his tentacles around Ardric. Horne saw Ardric's face briefly as he was lifted up, and for the first time he read despair there, and it gave him a warm, good, joyous feeling. He picked up the chart on one hand and took hold of Yso with the other. “Let's go."

  The slaves were coming faster and faster now out of the two streets leading to the main entrances. Many of them were hurt. There was a confused din and roar, punctuated with ominous boomings. Fife and the technician, with whatever help they had gathered up, had disappeared.

  Now Ardric began to struggle fiercely. “You'll never get out of the mountain. Look at them run! The Vellae are close behind!"

  "Not close enough,” said Horne. “Not quite, I don't think.” He smiled at Ardric, the smile of a happy man. “They may hunt us all down and kill us, but they can't stop Fife, not now. The brain is finished, Ardric. All the hard work, and all the people enslaved and killed, all the plotting, me and Morivenn and the Vega Queen all for nothing, Ardric. Just time wasted."

  Chell said uneasily, “Horne—"

  "Keep him quiet,” Horne said. Chell tightened his tentacles and Ardric gasped, and his eyes became dim and disinterested. Horne shook open the chart.

  "Which way?” asked Yso, pale and tired now that she had come down from the peak of emotion after the battle.

  Horne got himself oriented. “Behind that block of buildings. Come on."

  He began to run, still holding Yso and helping her along. Chell came after them with Ardric.

  They passed down the street and into the space behind the Administration Center, where the living rock of the mountain stood in a curved wall. There was a massive door in it. Horne pushed it open and stepped through onto a balcony about halfway up the side of a huge cavern, a balcony so unexpected that he was momentarily stunned by the sensation of the ground falling out from under his feet.

  This was the occipital opening where all the nerves of the mountain-high cranium channeled together to the primary control center. From every level the glistening tubes with their cores of bright bundled wire came, running out of their holes in the rock and descending in orderly rows to their ultimate terminals.

  Yso caught her breath and cried out, “Look!"

  In one, two, then three of the tubes, fire flashed like a bolt of lightning, vanishing into the rock. Behind it the bright tube became opaque, blackened, dead.

  Horne looked at the chart again. “One on each side,” he said, and pointed. “There, and there. These lower levels, naturally, were built first, and the main ganglia on this level connect with passages to these old outlets. Good."

  He left Yso with Chell and ran back to face the growing confusion in the plaza.

  The business of falling back in the main tunnels had become more of a business of running frantically away from the Vellae weapons that were too powerful to face. Horne got them started down the right street. Pretty soon he had helpers. D'quar joined him, and then Fife.

  "We wrecked the controls,” Fife said, “after he opened the switches, so they can't stop what's been started.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning.

  The last of the alien slaves ran across the plaza. After them, close on their heels, came the first of the attacking Vellae.

  Fife said, “It's time to go."

  They ran with the rest of the running slaves, at first firing behind them as they went and then just running.

  In the great cavern now the balcony on both sides was filled with a grotesque stream of creatures hurrying into the two galleries. The place had taken on the eerie look of an inferno. Fire flashed and ran in the tubes, and now in some places the plastic tubing itself had begun to melt and burn. The cavern was thick with choking smoke. Frantic slaves crowded toward the tunnels.

  Chell was hovering, holding Ardric tightly, and another one of his breed had picked up Yso and was keeping her safe from the trampling rush.

  Horne coughed and fired at a red uniform dimly glimpsed in the street outside. “You did a good job,” he told Fife. “Too damn good."

  "Well,” said Fife, “it's too late now. If we live, I'll see you in Rillah!"

  He ran off along the right hand gallery. Horne took the left. And they fled into the tunnels of the dying brain.

  They ran, the unhuman, the semi-human, the light-footed and the huge, the fleet and the clumsy, along the narrow swaying catwalks. And around them and under them the brain died in convulsions of smoke and fire and arcing flame.

  The bundled wires in the tubes heated as current from the unchecked generators poured into them, through the broken gateways of protective devices that no longer functioned. They heated until the insulation burned away and the fusing fire raced along the slender filaments. It raced through every branching nerve-path into the cells and chambers where the brain did its remembering, its computing and comparing, its almost human learning and associating. Circuits fused; arcs of blue fire leaped over the panels and the tube banks; holocausts of energy were released to fill the rocky chambers with destruction.

  Horne ran, clinging to the handrail because he could no longer see, along the wildly swaying catwalk. Now and again, as they passed the mouth of some burning chambers, he could see through the swirls of smoke ahead the weird forms of the slaves running, leaping, s
hambling, striving in a desperate attempt to outrace the destruction that was following with such swiftness on their heels.

  Because now the galleries themselves were burning. The plastic tubes, the network of suspension cables that held them, the very catwalk, were melting and crumbling behind them in the smoke and heat.

  The Vellae who had followed them into the galleries were caught in that swift-racing destruction.

  Horne heard the echo of a shattering explosion and felt the whole mountain shake, as though it felt suddenly the insecurity of its hollowed and honeycombed mass. A very great panic came over Horne and he ran with fire at his heels and the mountain shivering uneasily over his head, and smoke strangling in his lungs. Then there was a rocky corridor full of smoke but without fire, and a small barred opening through which another light shone—the light of sunset.

  They cleared the bars away and fought madly out through the hole onto the mountain's flanks, while the mountain itself rocked and groaned around them and echoed with dim cracking sounds. The brain had calmly plotted the basis of its own destruction. Fife's reckless release of power had augmented it. The work of the Vellae themselves in constructing the physical housing of the brain and leaving little more than the shell of a mountain, was finishing it. It felt, and sounded, as though the galleries were collapsing inward by levels upon the huge hollow center of Administration.

  Horne and his alien-bodied comrades ran, in the clear air and the sunset light, down the lower slopes toward the safety of the plain, and above them the face of the mountain changed.

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE SHIPS loomed along the spaceport in a long row, with lights and sound and movement around their bases but with their great hulls going up into the starless night. Toward them, in long shuffling files, went those who were to embark in them, shambling, hopping, or walking like humans. The lights glanced off hide and scale and wing, off strange faces, strange eyes. They moved into the ships silently, but with a straining eagerness. For these were the ships that were to take the humanoids home to a score of different lonely worlds far-scattered through the Fringe.