Part 3

He finally dropped in a gasping heap at the base of the flowering komble-plant. To his right was the high flat wall of granite. Huge doors were behind the red clay and dust, waiting to open. A high wide door.

His hands clawed at the red clay. His fingers bled as the hard cracked stuff came away in reluctant layers. His fingers grated on metal. Frantically he tore at the clay binding the small lever.

Below him in the vast valley, the carnage continued. The radioactive field was piled with uncountable bodies. Only deep within the radioactive field did the gamma rays have the intensity to kill quickly. But much further out, thousands were dying as the radioactivity spread through the bodies of comrades. Masses behind kept moving, surging, pressing forward, hurling walls of humanity into the deadly field.

Cadmus shoved the lever. The massive doors broke through the years of clay camouflage behind him. A grinding roar shattered the thin air. Startled, Cadmus cried out, and leaped away. He was running desperately out of the field of the armed men who came darting in deadly ferocity from the silence of their ancient crypt.

Huge, glistening, streamlined metal monsters. They shot from the dark opening. A line of twenty, they glowed with a deadly field of gamma radiation and death-spray. And Cadmus kept running away from them. His heart pounded with a deathly fear and awe as he hurled himself down the steep trail. He glanced back a few times. That was enough.

Those great metal tanks were deadly to any living thing near them. They sped from the cavern, headed in a grim straight line directly for the Machine. Once set as his father had set their automatic robot controls long ago, nothing could divert them from their objective. Straight down the slope they plunged in silent, ferocious intent.

Cadmus remembered other things now. Of how his father had installed secretly a transmat sender in a Terran museum where such curious mementos as giant robot tanks were no longer of interest to Terrans. One by one, via transmat, the tanks had been transported to this hidden cavern on the edge of the valley.

In that last ghastly war, robot tanks and drone planes had been employed almost entirely in place of human beings. Atomic engines were built and used to drive these drone planes, tanks, ships. But no living thing could pilot them, nor come within a quarter of a mile of them, and survive.

They were robot controlled. Man's final contribution to annihilative warfare. Equipped with raw, unshielded atomic engines, the tanks were deadly beyond imagination, with atomic bombs as warheads, and giving off a sheet of robot death-spray. They were impervious to any kind of atomic weapons for they were the ultimate in robot-controlled atomic weapons. Silent, implacable, they rushed down the slope, over rock and through brush, and finally over mounds of dead and dying. The human lemmings rushing to their death didn't notice the tanks. They did not notice anything.

Up and up over mounds of clawing bodies and hills of dead the terrible robot weapons climbed. Over heaps of human lemmings, red and yellow and black Terrans, and yellow Martians. And then they struck the smooth gleaming side of the Machine.

The machine exploded!

The valley was suddenly a seething boiling cloud of chaos. Bits of Gray God rained for miles over the desert, mountains and ruins of Akal-jor. Boiling dust clouds rose blackly, flung by a tremendous flash like a ball of fire the size of the setting sun. Churning debris climbed thousands of feet in the air, while smoke climbed higher. The dying day was relighted by a searing light, golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. Then came the first of a series of air-blasts, to be followed almost immediately by the sustained and awesome roar.

Cadmus stumbled to his knees. He crawled, managed to regain his feet, lurched blindly through clouds of choking dust. His clothing hung in strips. Blood seeped from his ears and nose. Somehow he managed to deactivate the rest of the transmats. For although the Machine was now utterly destroyed the great crater that remained was even more deadly in its neutron and gamma radiation than before.

The last of the matter transmatters stopped working. The rivers of desperate beings were dammed. On Terra and in the Martian cities, waiting worshippers were wondering what had happened as their own transmat senders stopped functioning.

They waited for a long time. They waited until it finally occurred to them that the transmats might never function again. They wondered, and kept on waiting. But three quarters of the Terran and Martian population had been saved from suicide.

* * * * *

Cadmus dragged himself up the sweeping steps of the council tower. It was dark now. And silent. On three worlds, people waited, not yet aware of the full significance of what had happened.

Phobos was a hurtling curse in the sky. Deimos was edging up into the night like an afterthought. Cadmus stumbled. He staggered to the elevator and inside. He watched the lights blinking as he climbed to the Tower's top. He went into a hall leading to the large audi-chamber.

A massive bulk lay sprawled in the shadows. Consar III. His flesh was charred. Even the brilliant jewels that had bedecked him seemed exhausted of their luster.

Cadmus paused. Consar hadn't wanted to die, not really. He, too, had come to the Tower. He hadn't given up his position of power and wealth easily. He had come to the Tower to attempt to assume the direct power that the Machine had once controlled. Someone had prevented him. Johlan?

He peered through the opening into a large, gloomy chamber. It contained the transcription and audiocasting facilities of the council tower. Somewhere, the ten council members, aged children conditioned to voice the dictates of the Machine, were crouched in blank fear.

A large audiocasting set was humming in the far corner of the room, a strip of tape running beneath its electronic needle.

Cadmus stopped in the shadows. He had made his way to the Tower fast. He had heard that voice from the Tower, and it had changed. He knew whose voice had replaced the voice of the Machine. Johlan.

Cadmus' eyes adjusted to the gloom. The Venusians preferred gloom. Then, beside a recorder across the large chamber, Cadmus saw the greenly iridescent body of the Venusian crouched over a microphone, recording more tape for the audiocaster.

Cadmus listened to Johlan's voice coming from the loudspeaker atop the Tower.

"The Great Gray God of stability was only a Machine. It has been destroyed. The Venusians destroyed it to save the System from disaster through the Machine's static pattern of unchange. But a tri-planetary government of organic agency must replace the Machine. There cannot be a return of old inter-world antagonisms. There must be a united System. A tri-planetary government will be established here on Mars. Directives will soon follow from the council tower that once voiced the machine-dictates of the Gray God. The Ven--"

Cadmus fired. Not at Johlan. The Venusian's recorded message stopped as the blast from Cadmus' gun melted the audio unit. The thundering voice from the Tower's summit died. Johlan turned quickly.

"That was enough of that speech," said Cadmus. "So far, you spoke very well. There'll be a new tri-planetary government, but the Venusians aren't dictating terms from this Tower. No one world will dictate any terms from anywhere."

"Wait," interrupted Johlan. "Don't fire, Cadmus. We can rule together."

Cadmus' voice was brittle as steel. "You're worse than Consar, worse than the Machine. Millions have died today because of you. Because of old greeds and ambitions you couldn't bury--dreams of Venusian imperialism."

"The Venusians never got fair representation from the System," cried Johlan. "They never will. Fishmen! That's what you call us!"

His lidless eyes gleamed as his hand flashed. Cadmus yelled once, then fell to his knees as a ray of neuron-shattering force from a paralysis gun swept across his knees. His legs crumbled him to his side. Another stream soaked into his arm. His neutron gun toppled from nerveless fingers.

The fingers of his other hand crawled toward it. That arm went dead. Only his torso was still capable of sensation. Cadmus turned fevered eyes on Johlan. He waited, his heart pounding. The little Venusian's scales glinted with triumph as he padded forward on webbed feet.

* * * * *

"You did a fine job, Cadmus," he said, looking down. "No one else but you could have accomplished it. No one else had the will, the courage, or the strength and audacity. Nor the human gullibility. That's why I used you."

Johlan paused. He looked away from the window. A splash of white moonlight flooded down, rippled over the mosaic floor. It glinted from Johlan's scales and danced in his lidless eyes. His voice was dreamy with power. "My question to the Machine was simple. I merely devised a series of opposed questions, requiring one answer for all of them. In other words, the Machine was forced to make a compromise. But the Machine was fixed. It couldn't make a compromise. It had to go insane."

He looked back down at Cadmus. "That was a magnificent idea of your father's--those ancient tanks from the atom war. He was a great man. Maybe the greatest Terran who ever lived. But I'm a Venusian. I am greater, because I used him. And I used you, his son. So Cadmus slew the dragon and sowed its teeth, and from these sprang armed men!"

Johlan smiled gently. "But the dragon was never really slain, Cadmus. I was the dragon."

Cadmus heard the door open. He heard her voice, sharp and clear. It was beautiful, he thought, like music. Though music could never be so deadly.

"But dragons always die, Johlan."

The Venusian gasped as he turned. He started to die as he faced her. The death ray glowed on his green-scaled chest for a while, then faded as the Venusian stumbled across the room, the neutron gun hanging limply and forgotten in his webbed hand. He finished dying with his face pressed hard against the window.

Far away, Venus shimmered brightly in the sky.

She knelt beside Cadmus. Her kisses were wet on his face. He could feel her hands and her lips.

"You'll be all right, Cadmus," she said as her hands caressed his face. "As long as it didn't get your heart."

Cadmus looked at her hungrily.

"I managed to hide for a while," she said, "when we fled from Consar's palace. I heard that terrible explosion. Later I heard Johlan's voice from the Tower and I came here. I didn't know, until I overheard him talking to you, what had really happened." Her voice broke. "How could he have been--so fiendish--so--"

"Forget it," he murmured. "Or try to anyway. We did it. The Machine's gone."

"Yes." A glitter of faith shone in her eyes. "The System's free again. Free to evolve and grow, and reach greatness or ruin. But at least to be free."

"Zaleel--Where do we go--from here?"

"We're going again, and that's what really matters," she said. "It's us now, Cadmus. It'll be just you and me now for a while. Remember?"

Cadmus remembered.