In Deep (11 page)

“That’s what they’re aiming for!” He struck the console with his fist. “Not now—but a hundred, two hundred years from now! When we start expanding out to the stars—when we go a-conquering—we’ll have already been conquered! Not by weapons, Aunt Jane, not by hate—by love! Yes, love!
Dirty, stinking, low-down, sneaking love!
”

Aunt Jane said something, a long sentence, in a high, anxious voice.

“What?” said Wesson irritably. He couldn’t understand a word.

Aunt Jane was silent. “What, what?” Wesson demanded, pounding the console. “Have you got it through your tin head or not?
What?
”

Aunt Jane said something else, tonelessly. Once more, Wesson could not make out a single word.

He stood frozen. Warm tears started suddenly out of his eyes. “Aunt Jane—” he said. He remembered,
You are already talking longer than any of them
. Too late? Too late? He tensed, then whirled and sprang to the closet where the paper books were kept. He opened the first one his hand struck.

The black letters were alien squiggles on the page, little humped shapes, without meaning.

The tears were coming faster, he couldn’t stop them: tears of weariness, tears of frustration, tears of hate. “
Aunt Jane!
” he roared.

But it was no good. The curtain of silence had come down over his head. He was one of the vanguard—the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars.

The console was not working any more; nothing worked !hen he wanted it. Wesson squatted in the shower stall, naked, with a soup bowl in his hands. Water droplets glistened on his hands and forearms; the pale short hairs were just springing up, drying.

The silvery skin of reflection in the bowl gave him back nothing but a silhouette, a shadow man’s outline. He could not lee his face.

He dropped the bowl and went across the living room, shuffling the pale drifts of paper underfoot. The black lines on the paper, when his eye happened to light on them, were worm shapes, crawling things, conveying nothing. He rolled slightly in his walk; his eyes were glazed. His head twitched, every now and then, sketching a useless motion to avoid pain.

Once the bureau chief, Gower, came to stand in his way. “You fool,” he said, his face contorted in anger, “you were supposed to go on to the end, like the rest. Now look what you’ve done!”

“I found out, didn’t I?” Wesson mumbled, and as he brushed the man aside like a cobweb, the pain suddenly grew more intense. Wesson clasped his head in his hands with a grunt, and rocked to and fro a moment, uselessly, before he straightened and went on. The pain was coming in waves now, so tall that at their peak his vision dimmed out, violet, then gray.

It couldn’t go on much longer. Something had to burst.

He paused at the bloody place and slapped the metal with his palm, making the sound ring dully up into the frame of the Station:
rroom, rroom
.

Faintly an echo came back: boo-oom.

Wesson kept going, smiling a faint and meaningless smile. He was only marking time now, waiting. Something was about to happen.

The kitchen doorway sprouted a sudden sill and tripped him. He fell heavily, sliding on the floor, and lay without moving beneath the slick gleam of the autochef.

The pressure was too great: the autochef’s clucking was swallowed up in the ringing pressure, and the tall gray walls buckled slowly in…

The Station lurched.

Wesson felt it through his chest, palms, knees and elbows: the floor was plucked away for an instant and then swung back.

The pain in his skull relaxed its grip a little, Wesson tried to get to his feet.

There was an electric silence in the Station. On the second try, he got up and leaned his back against a wall. Cluck, said the autochef suddenly, hysterically, and the vent popped open, but nothing came out.

He listened, straining to hear. What?

The Station bounced beneath him, making his feet jump like a puppet’s; the wall slapped his back hard, shuddered and was still; but far off through the metal cage came a long angry groan of metal, echoing, diminishing, dying. Then silence again.

The Station held its breath. All the myriad clickings and pulses in the walls were suspended; in the empty rooms the lights burned with a yellow glare, and the air hung stagnant and still. The console lights in the living room glowed like witchfires. Water on the dropped bowl, at the bottom of the shower stall, shone like quicksilver, waiting.

The third shock came. Wesson found himself on his hands and knees, the jolt still tingling in the bones of his body, staring at the floor. The sound that filled the room ebbed away slowly and ran down into the silences: a resonant metallic sound, shuddering away now along the girders and hull plates, rattling tinnily into bolts and fittings, diminishing, noiseless, gone. The silence pressed down again.

The floor leaped painfully under his body: one great resonant blow that shook him from head to foot.

A muted echo of that blow came a few seconds later, as if the, shock had traveled across the Station and back.

The bed
, Wesson thought, and scrambled on hands and knees through the doorway, along a floor curiously tilted, until he reached the rubbery block.

The room burst visibly upward around him, squeezing the block flat. It dropped back as violently, leaving Wesson bouncing helplessly on the mattress, his limbs flying. It came to rest, in a long reluctant groan of metal.

Wesson rolled up on one elbow,thinking incoherently,
Air, the air lock
. Another blow slammed him down into the mattress, pinched his lungs shut, while the room danced grotesquely over his head. Gasping for breath in the ringing silence, Wesson felt a slow icy chill rolling toward him across the room… and there was a pungent smell in the air.
Ammonia!
he thought; and the odorless, smothering methane with it.

His cell was breached. The burst membrane was fatal: the alien’s atmosphere would kill him.

Wesson surged to his feet. The next shock caught him off balance, dashed him to the floor. He arose again, dazed and limping; he was still thinking confusedly,
The air lock, get out
.

When he was halfway to the door, all the ceiling lights went out at once. The darkness was like a blanket around his head. It was bitter cold now in the room and the pungent smell was sharper. Coughing, Wesson hurried forward. The floor lurched under his feet.

Only the golden indicators burned now: full to the top, the deep vats brimming, golden-lipped, gravid, a month before the time. Wesson shuddered.

Water spurted in the bathroom, hissing steadily on the tiles, rattling in the plastic bowl at the bottom of the shower stall. The lights winked on and off again. In the dining room, he heard the autochef ducking and sighing. The freezing wind blew harder: he was numb with cold to the hips. It seemed to Wesson abruptly that he was not at the top of the sky at all, but down,
down
at the bottom of the sea… trapped in this steel bubble, while the dark poured in.

The pain in his head was gone, as if it had never been there, and he understood what that meant: Up there, the great body was hanging like a butcher’s carrion in the darkness. Its death struggles were over, the damage done.

Wesson gathered a desperate breath, shouted, “Help me! The alien’s dead! He kicked the Station apart—the methane’s coming in! Get help, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

Silence. In the smothering blackness, he remembered:
She can’t understand me any more. Even if she’s alive
.

He turned, making an animal noise in his throat. He groped his way on around the room, past the second doorway. Behind the walls, something was dripping with a slow cold tinkle and splash, a forlorn night sound. Small, hard, floating things rapped against his legs. Then he touched a smooth curve of metal: the airlock.

Eagerly he pushed his feeble weight against the door. It didn’t move. Cold air was rushing out around the door frame, a thin knife-cold stream, but the door itself was jammed tight.

The suit! He should have thought of that before. If he just had some pure air to breathe, and a little warmth in his fingers… But the door of the suit locker would not move, either. The ceiling must have buckled.

And that was the end, he thought, bewildered. There were no more ways out. But there had to be—He pounded on the door until his arms would not lift any more; it did not move. Leaning against the chill metal, he saw a single light blink on overhead.

The room was a wild place of black shadows and swimming shapes—the book leaves, fluttering and darting in the air stream. Schools of them beat wildly at the walls, curling over, baffled, trying again; others were swooping around the outer corridor, around and around: he could see them whirling past the doorways, dreamlike, a white drift of silent paper in the darkness.

The acrid smell was harsher to his nostrils. Wesson choked, groping his way to the console again. He pounded it with his open hand, crying weakly: he wanted to see Earth.

But when the little square of brightness leaped up, it was the dead body of the alien that Wesson saw.

It hung motionless in the cavity of the Station, limbs dangling stiff and still, eyes dull. The last turn of the screw had been too much for it: but Wesson had survived…

For a few minutes.

The dead alien face mocked him; a whisper of memory floated into his mind…
We might have been brothers
… All at once Wesson passionately wanted to believe it—wanted to give in, turn back. That passed. Wearily he let himself sag into the bitter now, thinking with thin defiance,
It’s done—hate wins. You’ll have to stop this big giveaway—can’t risk this happening again. And we’ll hate you for that—and when we get out to the stars—

The world was swimming numbly away out of reach. He felt the last fit of coughing take his body, as if it were happening to someone else besides him.

The last fluttering leaves of paper came to rest. There was a long silence in the drowned room.

Then:

“Paul,” said the voice of the mechanical woman brokenly; “Paul,” it said again, with the hopelessness of lost, unknown, impossible love.

It began with the crutch. Then came the iron hook, then the first mechanical limbs. And finally—

Bedlam. Thin metal legs switching by, a moving forest of scissors. Metal arms flashing in balance; torsos of metal, like bright dented beetles. Round metal skulls—that cupped the swift wink and stare of human eyes.

Krisch, watching them in his desk scanner, kept the volume turned down. The unit walls were deliberately made sound-reflecting; the children grew up in the atmosphere of their own clattering noise, and they learned to shout against it. To soldiers so reared, there would be no terror in the roar of battle. But Krisch, who was only human, wore earplugs when he walked among them.

The river of metal funneled into classrooms, stopped. tights flashed on over the scanners, on the board that covered the twenty-foot wall facing Krisch’s desk. Instruction had begun.

Krisch watched the board for a while, then switched on the illuminated panel that carried his notes and began to dictate his weekly report. He was a small, spare man, with thinning strands of iron-gray hair roached stiffly back over his freckled brown scalp. His mouth was straight, and the lines around it showed that he never smiled; but there was a glint of controlled, ironic humor in his watchful eyes.

A bell spoke and a red light gleamed. Krisch looked up sharply, identified the scanner under the warning light, and transferred its image to his own desk screen. Half a thousand pairs of eyes stared back at him from the massed metal forms in the amphitheater.

Krisch set the playback cube for one minute preceding. The robot instructors were equipped to answer all permissible questions; therefore a nonpermissible question had been asked.

The harsh voice of the robot said, “—along the inguinal canal and enters the abdomen through the internal abdominal ring. Yes? What is your question?”

There was a pause. Krisch scanned the rows of gleaming beads, could not tell which one had signaled “Question.” Then the abnormally loud but still childish voice spoke, and simultaneously the student’s number appeared in the recording circle at the lower left corner of the screen. Krisch statted it automatically. The ten-year-old voice bellowed:

“What is a kiss?”

There was a five-second pause. The robot answered, “Your question is meaningless. It has been reported to the Director and you will hold yourself in readiness for his orders.” Then it resumed its lecture.

Krisch switched the scanner back to normal operation. The robot was now discussing the prostate gland. Krisch waited until it had reached the end of a sentence and then pressed the “Attention” button on his console. He said, “Cadet ER17235 will report to the Director’s office immediately.” He cleared the board and sank into his cushioned chair, frowning.

A nonpermissible question was bad enough in itself; there bad not been one in the oldest class in the last six years of the Project’s existence. It was not only bad; it was indefensible. Logically, it should not have happened—the entire student body of the unit, according to a check made not a week ago, was correctly conditioned.

But that was not all. The robot instructor had been perfectly truthful, to the extent of its own knowledge, when it had said the cadet’s question was meaningless. The subject of normal human love relationships was not on the curriculum for two more years. To introduce it earlier, with the desired effect of repugnance, would seriously damage discipline.

Krisch turned his selector to the appropriate list, but he knew the answer already. The word “kiss” was not in the student’s vocabulary. And there was no one in the Unit, besides himself, from whom the cadet could have learned it.

Krisch stood up and went to the transparent wall behind his desk—one huge window that looked out on the parade ground and beyond it to the chill, airless surface of the planet. Only starlight gleamed from the jagged points of that landscape which faced eternally away from the sun; the force screen that maintained the Unit’s atmosphere also acted as a light trap. Krisch could look up and see, one thousand light years away, the cold dim glow that was the cluster of which Cynara was a part, and the whole frightening majesty of space in between. But a hypothetical enemy scout, pausing in space to scan this waste planet, would see nothing but a tiny disk of blackness that might be a vitreous plain, or the crater of a long-dead volcano.

Krisch had been here a little more than ten years, moving along from one installation to the next with his class, turning over the vacated office and its duties to the next lowest man in the hierarchy. Each year a new Director was shipped out With a new load of embryos and equipment, and at the end of ten more years Krisch would be permanently installed as Director of the final Unit, and as senior officer of the entire Project. That was all he had to look forward to, for the rest of his life. Many ships arrived here, but none left, or would ever leave, except those that carried the troops themselves when they were needed. Krisch’s rewards were solitude, achievement, power, and the partial satisfaction of boundless curiosity.

His penalty, if the Project were to fail or even be seriously delayed while it was under his command, would be painful in the extreme.

The door speaker said, “Cadet ER17235 reporting as ordered, sir.”

Krisch returned to his desk. He said, “Enter.”

The metal thing stalked into the room and stood at attention in front of the Director’s desk. Only the irreducible minimum of it was organic: the boy’s head, pared to a functional ball, the blue eyes staring through the metal skull piece, a surgically simplified torso, the limb stumps. By itself it would be no more than a disgusting, useless lump of meat; but, housed in the metal body, it was a sketch of the perfect fighting man.

The cadet, like the rest of his class, was only ten years old; the living part of him had been transferred many times from articulated metal shell to another. For that reason his present body was comparatively crude. When he had reached full growth he would be given his final body—so fantastically armored as to be almost indestructible, so powerful that it could outrun any land vehicle over broken terrain. The weapons built into his arms, controlled directly by his nerves, would be sufficient to destroy a city. And he would be completely without fear.

Krisch let the silence frown between them while the boy stood at attention. Just now the boy knew fear. It was necessary for discipline, and the repressed hostility toward Krisch would later be translated into a useful hatred for all non-mechanical human beings. To use physical pain as a means of punishment was out of the question. That, in fact, was the root idea of the entire Project.

The crutch went back to prehistoric times. The metal hook, to replace a lost hand, was born early in the Iron Age. The Twentieth Century knew prosthetic devices which looked almost like flesh, and adequately performed all mechanical functions of natural limbs. But it remained for the galactic culture and the warlike nation which Krisch was a part of to discover that artificial limbs could be more than a lesser evil; that the metal arm, the metal finger, was better than flesh. Better. Its cleverly articulated segments reported pressure, temperature and position as well as flesh. Its strength was incomparably greater. And it felt no pain.

Man is so soft, thought Krisch, in comparison with the metal he uses; so soft, and so easily hurt. Every cubic inch of flesh, excepting only the brain itself, contains its minuscule fuse of agony. But metal feels no pain. Those boys will conquer the galaxy; no human troops can stand against them.

He amended the thought. Five minutes ago that had been almost a certainty. Now, it was only possible.

He said, “Where did you learn the word ‘kiss’?”

The boy’s eyelids fluttered behind the steel mask. “From a—” He hesitated. “A training device, sir,” he finished uncertainly.

Krisch said sharply, “Are you sure?”

A long pause. “I—I think it was, sir.”

“You think it was,” said Krisch. “Describe this ‘training device.’ ”

“It’s—like a human being, sir.”

“Mechanised, or all flesh?”

Silence. The boy’s eyelids blinked, and Krisch could imagine the rest of the face, screwed up in an agony of uncertainty. “Answer the question,” he said.

“Neither one, sir,” said the boy painfully. “It was—”

“Well? What was it made of?”

“Of—”

“Well?”

“Of—just lines, sir.”

Krisch sat back a moment, looking at the cadet in frowning silence. The boy’s hesitant answers showed either that he was lying—which was inconceivable—or that he was conscious of guilt.

“Of just lines,” he repeated. He put a skeptical note into his voice. “Explain.”

“That’s all, sir,” the boy said eagerly. “It was made of lines, and it looked like a human being, and it talked to me.” His voice stopped abruptly.

Krisch pounced on that. “What did it talk about?”

“About—about love, sir.”

Another word the cadets had not been taught. “Go on,” said Krisch. “What did it say about love?”

“About human beings meeting, flesh to flesh, and—how good it was. About one human being loving another one—it said that means when you know the other human being is lonely and afraid like you, and you give the other one part of the way you feel about yourself, instead of keeping it all. And you show how you feel by meeting flesh to flesh, and it makes you feel wonderful, like killing something, but much better.”

The cadet paused. “But I didn’t understand about kisses. It seemed to be very complicated.”

Krisch felt a ball of coldness settle in his chest. This boy was ruined; he would have to be scrapped. And how many others?

“Where did all this take place?” he demanded.

“During airless maneuvers yesterday, sir.”

Krisch tried to visualise it: the cadets scattered out there in the cold blackness, carrying out one of the prescribed war games under the direction of student squad leaders. One of them isolated from the rest, waiting for a signal. And while he waited—something—had approached him, and spoken to him of love…

“No one else saw or heard?”

“No, sir.”

“Why did you fail to report it?”

A pause. “I—I thought it was part of the training.”

“Tell the truth!” Krisch snapped.

The cadet’s eyes blinked. As Krisch watched, horrified, they grew unmistakably moist. “I—don’t know, sir! I don’t know!”

The moisture brimmed over: two tears ran down the shining mask that was the boy’s face.

Another signal light blinked red on the master board. Then another. Krisch knew, finally, that the test had come ten years ahead of time: the Project was at war.

Krisch strapped himself into the speedster and eased it out . through the exit tunnel. He had put the entire student body through interrogation and a psych check, and had turned up fifty-three more cases of induced aberration. For the time being he had left them all at liberty but carefully monitored; he hoped that one of them might be approached again by the saboteur, whoever or whatever it was.

Something flashed dully in the starlight outside the transparent nose of the speedster. Krisch stared at it, then inched the speedster over until the object lay almost directly under him.

It was a cadet, without the space gear that should have closed the openings in his faceplate and made his body airtight. The body was sprawled lifelessly. The staring eyes were blood red with burst capillaries.

Krisch peered through the transparent metal and read the serial number etched into the cadet’s foreskull. It was the boy he had interviewed an hour ago.

He contacted his desk relays and gave orders for the disposal of the body and the detention of the other fifty-three. For the moment, it was all he could do.

He took the speedster up and set its course toward Unit I, three hundred miles away. After his interview with Cadet ER17235, he had called the Directors of the other nine installations and ordered immediate psych checks. The results, gathered two hours later, showed that every unit had been affected. Viar, Director of Unit I and the newest member of the Project’s staff, had had an additional and equally disturbing report to make.

Krisch watched the backdrop of white fire and black velvet move ponderously past. Even if he were able to remove the disturbing factor before it had done further harm, it might prove impossible to knit the structure together again. The oldest of the cadets had not yet reached the stage in which the circle of their conditioning would be unbreakable. Normal emotions and a normal biological life had no place in that circle; but it was still possible to introduce them. The result was—insanity. A flood of emotion for which no outlet had been or could be provided; impossible desires: the classic insoluble dilemma.

He remembered the blood-red, staring eyes of the dead boy. The symbolism was appropriate. His eyes were the only organs of expression left to him; and he had certainly used them , effectively enough.

For the first time in many years, the Director wished he had not been born into a nation with a history of thwarted development and a psychology of resentment. He wished that he were an underpaid pedagogue on a world at peace. He wished that he had not been forced by circumstances to put that boy in a metal cage.

Viar met him, by request, at the bottom level of Unit I—the level that housed the huge atomic converter which powered the unit. Viar was a youngish man with a large, white, perspiring face that expressed conscientiousness and insecurity. His eyes were milk-blue, surrounded by white lashes. Krisch disliked him thoroughly.

They stood by the shaft that the converter had dug in the stone of the planet. Viar said nervously, “I first noticed that we had stumbled on something when I checked the meter readings. They showed mostly granite, but there were occasional fluctuations that indicated refined metal. I was curious, so I set the converter to extract only the stone. Yesterday I shut off the converter briefly, and sent a cadet down to see what was left.”

Krisch looked at the curious array of objects spread out on the plastic floor. There were three metal tablets incised with neat rows of dots, ovals, squares, and crosses. There was a long curved trough, with an attachment at one end that suggested it might have been designed to fit a wrist—or a tentacle. There was a set of concentric ellipses, with little balls that seemed designed to run along them; clearly an orrery of this solar system. There was a six-foot metal box, curiously fashioned in a complexity of intersecting planes.