Part 2
Frances shook her head, and a healthy cloud of black hair reflected the steady glow of the flueros. “You know about the electronic set up. The originators didn’t bother to shield the vital parts of World Brain on the logical premise that if anyone could get that far, it was inevitable, only a matter of time, before they could wreck it anyway. Wreck the grids, Rolly, the pipes of the electrons. Wreck the big vacuum brains in which our little wild electrons play. They’ve been free too long. Imprison them again in the air. It’s exciting, isn’t it, Rolly?”
His eyes, his brain were filled only with her image, her vivid loveliness. He hesitated, thinking Frances might get up and come to him. She only smiled, her eyes wet and glistening with pride. Roland turned and left the room. There was promise in those eyes. And he would be back.
He was walking toward the levitation shaft at the end of the corridor when he met the Martian in the hall.
* * * * *
Somehow, he had an idea that unless it wanted it that way, no one could see it there. It seemed less grotesque now, standing there against the wall looking at him. He stood tautly, watching it. And suddenly he knew why it didn’t seem so grotesque. Why its formless, limbless, upright length of almost translucent stuff swaying like an underwater plant seemed less a peril now. It was afraid. It was not an attacker or even a pursuer. It was frightened, and, telepathically, in sharp bursting impressions, it pleaded with Roland. _No! Oh, no! You do not understand. Wait! Wait and you can know of the countless facets of re_--
Something like pain shot through his skull. The Martian trembled, vibrated, and then--disappeared. Roland spun around. Frances stood there. She was smiling, but there had been another expression. He couldn’t--
She was close to him now. He felt her animal warmth. “We sensed it out here,” she said softly, “and came to your rescue, Rolly. He was a weaker one, and we got him. We must work fast. Go, dear Rolly. This--this is for good luck.”
He leaned against the wall. She was gone. The kiss ... he had been waiting for that. None of the other things made any difference now. But now she was gone and the wall felt cold. He wanted warmth. He wanted Fran’s warmth. He wanted it more than anything. He--
--he was out on an autowalk among the shifting listless crowd. He moved toward the five-acre expanse of World Brain. He was aware of nothing about him, only of Frances. He would soon be back with her. Destroying World Brain was only a means to that end. He noticed then, abruptly, that the people around him had only five fingers on their hands. But he didn’t think about it. It had no meaning anyway.
Then, suddenly, he was aware that there were no more people. No more buildings, either. A cool wind blew across his hot face. He stood awed on the long, sweeping rim of an abyss, the edge of a bowl. Its sides curved down and away in gracious gleaming sweeps, down, down and away into a colossal valley. In its center was World Brain. A gigantic, unbroken cylinder, a mile away and a thousand meters down.
He knew he was on the periphery of the ultrasonic field now. He walked along the railed edge of the abyss until he faced the plastic man who was standing before the opening of a levitation shaft that would take him directly into the arteries of World Brain.
He tried to edge past the plastic man. There wasn’t room enough; the plastic man wasn’t designed to make any room. The creation was very close to a perfect synthesis. There was no other way. Roland charged head down into the waiting figure and hurled him upward over the railing.
Roland watched him spin out end over end, then flatten out on the sweeping curvature and go sliding with fantastic silent slowness, away and down, down the long, seemingly endless curve into the depths of the gigantic plastic bowl. Roland stepped into the shaft. Dwarfed, Roland walked slowly across the gleaming expanse of floor toward the nakedly exposed rows of electronic brain cases. A few blows, a pull or two, and the circuit would be shattered. His sandals rustled softly.
But he hesitated.
There was a guilty feeling and a lost loneliness. Who was he, really? Taken in infancy from some birth center by the Underground. Conditioned precisely as they desired--a completely selective mentality. Had never had a name. But a label someone pulled out of a hat to satisfy a beautiful woman’s peculiar liking for nicknames. The amnesiac’s isolated fear of what he didn’t know and couldn’t remember, mustn’t remember, but what he must know--
But Frances waited for him back in the secret apartment. Warmth would replace a cold emptiness. Meaning and purpose would fill the lonely places in his heart.
He went forward--
* * * * *
Later, Roland paused outside their apartment door. He had come back. Frances had brought him back. World Brain was finished. He knew that. He could remember the subtle changes beginning to occur even as he came back through Worldcity. Soon the whole intricate structure would collapse.
The hall was still. He looked at the back of his hand against the wall. It shook a little. And the coldness came back. It crept into his muscles from his extremities, his hands and feet, and worked inward. He wondered why the loneliness should return here. There was a steady comfort, though, in knowing that behind that panel, Frances was waiting with her gigglings and her soft shoulders and promising eyes.
The photoelectric banks opened the panel and closed it behind him.
They were standing there together, looking at him. He stumbled back against the flat panel, resting his back against it. Something had happened to them. They made him feel alien and afraid. They--
And then Berti said, “Odd. It has come back. What went wrong with our charts, I wonder?”
Her voice wasn’t emotional now. It had never been, he knew that. Her giggling. The smile, the wet eyes. False. “Our calculations couldn’t have been off very much. It’ll die soon.”
Roland edged toward her. “Frances,” he said weakly. “Frances, you said--‘_it_’. You mean me? Fran. _Fran?_”
Berti said, “Our conditioning was most effective. Fran, it actually _loves_ you. Remarkable.”
She didn’t smile now. She couldn’t. There was no feeling at all, never had been. All false. Nothing now but cold awareness of power.
He felt weak and dizzy. A hazy outline moved toward him. Berti. “I still regret seeing you die. You’re interesting. A peculiarly interesting experiment. If I had time--almost fifty years of trial and error to create you, Rolly.”
“A good job, too,” said the woman. “Though we did take an awful chance, making it so rational. It might have solved the enigma of its own existence.”
Berti shook his bald head. “We had to make it human so it would be sympathetic. Emotional. No human was ever able to solve the enigma of himself. We can’t either, Fran. Or can we?”
From a far hazy distance, he saw Berti’s head turn back, his pouting lip thrust out, his shiny head reflecting the cold light.
“And you never suspected at all that you were a robot, Rolly? Just a lot of electrons and polarizable cells, eh? Remarkable. But then, the last thing a robot would ever realize would be that it was a robot, I suppose.”
Roland shut his eyes. He was tired. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to forget about the imaginative creature he had known for a time as Frances, too.
“We gave you a heavy overload of romanticism and sentimentalism. So you would be glad to die for Frances, for humanity. But you needed logic with it, and that was a very delicate balance to establish. All that work to construct a machine that was to function only a few hours. And your allotted time is about up, Rolly.
“We misled you by omission only, Rolly. Our purpose wasn’t humanity. We needed you to destroy World Brain, not for humanity. But for us. World Brain restricted our development, kept us from defeating the Martians by shielding atomic power. Rolly, the Underground was a race of mutants that developed after the Atomic War. Humanity never knew about us. Homo-superior. We’ve developed the same degree above mere human intelligence that the Martians have. We’re their equals; that’s why we could fight them. They outnumbered us, though, that’s why we had to have your help. You have all the human attributes, Rolly. You want to know what qualities the next step above human is, don’t you?”
* * * * *
Roland scarcely heard the man. He was cold. He was tired.
“We’ve developed the physiological relation between the nervous system and the consciousness. Instinctualism, a high degree of predictability--but then your human brain wouldn’t understand.”
Roland sank to his knees. He dropped his head in his folded arms.
“Let’s go,” said the woman. “Leave it here. It’ll die soon.”
“Just a minute, Fran. Don’t you find this interesting? This creation of grids, filaments, plates, vacuums, is probably the last genuine human type we’ll see--that’s sane. And we made it!”
She sighed resignedly. “It probably wants to know what the fate of its beloved humanity is. We gave it that social consciousness. Tell it.”
“Of course it’s concerned, but Rolly’s dying now, and the important thing to it is that it’s dying for humanity.” Berti paused. “And the horrible thing for Rolly, is to know that humanity really died from over-specialization when it launched the final Atomic War.”
Roland’s head raised slowly and shook back and forth. “No.”
Berti smiled. “Human intelligence never had the slightest possibility of survival. Its high cerebral specialization never had any physiological unity with the primitive muscles and nervous system. A slight chemical disturbance of the blood and the human went mad. Take away a little oxygen--his great mind was gone. Decrease the blood’s calcium--convulsions, coma, death. Slight reduction in sugar--and his mighty cerebrum blotted out, died. A slight environmental change could destroy man--aside from his obvious willingness to destroy himself. But, Rolly, in one way, perhaps, extinction, the price of evolution, isn’t too high. After all, you made us possible.”
Roland heard himself say, weakly, “But they still live out there--humans--surely they’re not--”
“But we rule,” said the woman coldly. “They--what will they do? That will be interesting. Anyway, it’s their twilight, like apes and saurians. Our dawning.”
“You’re almost gone, Rolly, dwindling away like a stream,” said Berti. “World Brain was proof against any _organic_ enemy, including us. But not against you. A matter of kind against kind. Remember De Morgan’s familiar lines? But then you wouldn’t, would you? ‘Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em; and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on, ad infinitum; and the great fleas themselves in turn have greater fleas to grow on, while these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.’ We used you, Rolly. A machine to bite a machine. That was the only way it could have been done.”
Very far away, dim and wavering, Roland heard the woman saying, “Logically, any species has some overly-specialized characteristic that might defeat it. I wonder what particular little flea will bite us?”
“And that, too, will be interesting,” thought Roland grimly, as his electronic brain thinned into meaningless chaos, and he returned into the hazes of unconsciousness from which he had emerged three hours before.