Part 4

"Why not take some time to think of what we do next?"

"Not a chance," she replied.

He looked at her quizzically. "Supposing we do think of some answer," she said slowly. "Remember that we are still surrounded by the enemy; I'd rather have nothing to tell when, as, or if we are captured."

He nodded. "Against a coldly rational and logical machine, that would automatically eliminate one of the all too few possible answers, wouldn't it?"

"Sure would. About the only thing that the machine will ever try twice are those things that work very well and which it has reason to believe will continue to do so. But give it one idea that might work against it and you can wager that a foolproof defence will be set up instantly."

"So we keep our minds blank--what is it, Narina?"

"Just on the horizon--might be either a migratory flight of birds or a fleet of aircraft."

"This isn't the time of year for migrating birds," he said.

"No, and migrating birds do not fly in cold, precise pattern. That's it, Harry."

"Identify 'em yet?"

Narina shook her head. "Not positively. But it will either be your fleet--or ours."

"Or both."

Narina looked at him understandingly. "Or both," she agreed solemnly.

"I don't know enough about our fighting planes," he said reflectively. "But this thing has been souped up in some fashion and we may be able to outrun them."

"You discount the fact that they may be friends?"

"They may have friends in them," he said.

"Then why not tell them how to disconnect the doo-gadget?"

"Right!" Vinson snapped on the radio and called, "Vinson to commander of fleet. Vinson to--"

"This is General Lloyd, Vinson. Go ahead."

"Are you tracking us?"

"The machine--wants you."

"We know."

"Well, we can do nothing to stop the pursuit."

"Yes you can. In the--"

A roar of static drowned Vinson's voice. It racketed against the eardrums and nothing could be heard but the raucous, rough-edged noise. Then it stopped.

* * * * *

"Look in the--"

It was there again, as completely ruinous to communications as ever. Then the noise ceased and the machine spoke: "Narina Varada and Harry Vinson, you are directed to come to me. You have destroyed my control over your own plane. You are the only ones who really have the answer; therefore I must receive you indirectly instead of merely driving your plane this way."

"No thanks."

"But you _will_ come sooner or later: why not make it easy?"

Vinson snorted. "Just what do you want?"

"I wish to study you."

"Thank you; we don't care to be studied."

The machine's voice was cold. "You have little choice in the matter. Will you come--or shall I send a few guided missiles to herd you in?"

"Neither--for we shall not come."

There was a moment of silence. "The trouble is," said the machine with almost a trace of humor, "that Man made Machine _not_ in His own image. You will find the functional design somewhat more efficient, I guarantee."

And then the radio contact was broken. Also, the radio was completely dead.

Vinson nodded. "If any of that fore gang try maneuvering, they'll drop behind."

Vinson looked out of the pilot's window at the first few planes of the oncoming fleet. Miles away, still, and in a long, long line, he estimated that he was able to avoid and outrun all but ten or twenty of the foremost.

Plane for plane, the advantages were about equal; only in the advantage of position could Harry Vinson hope to win through. The line had come up in such a way as to permit him to run before them but at an unfavorable angle. It was a strange formation; the single, fleeing quarry running almost parallel to a line miles long, a line playing follow-the-leader. Single plane and line of pursuers were converging upon one another slowly.

"They want us alive," gritted Vinson. "We're ahead of all but a dozen or so, I estimate."

"Just run straight," said Narina.

The machine must have known that. Yet, it had enough planes to test the will of Harry Vinson, though it must have known the strength of that, also. So as the planes converged, the fore plane, some thousand yards ahead of Vinson's flying boat, turned and crossed his course. It lagged until it was beside Vinson, and then it cut in close, almost wingtip to wingtip, and edging closer and closer as the seconds passed.

"If they splash us," snapped Vinson, "we're lost; that damned machine can send a collection of its own kind to catch us before we can get to shore in a rubber boat."

Yet Harry kept his course, his face set hard and his teeth clenched tight. His hand toyed with the throttle and the manifold pressure, testing and trying to eke another few revolutions per minute from the whirling propellers. His controlling hand was tight as a wrench upon the wheel, immobile and determined.

The other plane edged closer; inches separated the wingtips, and the air, though smooth, caused the all too close wingtips to move and jockey above and below one another; to move closer and then to separate a bit.

Then the second plane raced across Vinson's course and slowed down. It rose above him and began to drop down upon him.

Vinson grunted and shoved the wheel forward. His flying boat went into a long, shallow dive.

And with him went his too-close pursuit. Vinson swore. No chance of outdistancing them by going into a dive for extra speed. Then to forestall another such attempt, one of the planes near broadside of Vinson dove below him and began to climb.

"Boxed," he groaned.

* * * * *

Inside of the nearby planes, Vinson could see the crews fighting the controls to no avail. Their faces were white from strain, and from fright, and their gestures indicated that they were fighting for him but were completely helpless. Only Vinson truly realized just how helpless they were.

But Vinson was wrong. From one gun-port there came hurtling a square ammunition case. No machine, it; just a rectangular box of metal. It flew from the plane ahead and went in a brief arc out and across, to crash into the outboard motor on the port side of the plane just to Vinson's right. The plane bucked and lost flying speed, its engine racking itself from the wing with the out-of-balance propeller. From the opposite waist of the leading plane came another ammunition case which missed; then another which hit the leading edge of the wing. It cut deep and the cut edge of the wing ripped open. The wing began to vibrate wickedly and the plane slowed as the airfoil section spoiled.

Vinson waved a hand just as the inboard engines on the plane ahead belched flame and came whining to a sullen stop. As Vinson drove ahead of the stricken plane ahead, the mechanic waved a burned arm and a section of the fuel line. His face was a mingled expression of pain and satisfaction.

There were full minutes more. Planes drove in sidewise; all that were able to meet Vinson's plane came in darting for him but were sabotaged as they came. Vinson threw his controls rapidly, avoiding trouble, and then he was free and clear, out in the open, with the nearest plane behind.

Not far behind; only twenty feet, but far enough to permit both Vinson and the girl to take a deep breath.

Then came a mad, determined chase. Silently and boringly the fleets of both nations chased their quarry, and as determined not to be caught, Vinson drove his plane on a straightaway course, fleeing on the dead run. Hours they flew this way; hours in which there were several cases of planes drifting down into the sea because of the quick sabotage of their crews.

Then, land!

And across the land they flew, over city and farm, a mighty horde of roaring planes all in straightaway pursuit of a single aircraft.

"Chute, Narina?" asked Vinson as Washington came into view.

"Never have," she said in a frightened voice.

"We'll never be able to land," he told her.

"I know. I'll--try."

He laughed sourly. "Just jump and let the chute do the rest," he told her. "Nothing to try."

"You'll follow?"

"Once you're clear," he nodded.

She nodded and left. Minutes later Vinson felt the plane buck ever so slightly, and looking behind he saw the billow of white furl forth and crack into full bloom. Then he connected the auto-pilot and aimed the aircraft at the river. He raced back and dove from the open bomb bay into the open sky.

It must have been miles from her, but Vinson shouted with triumph and waved his hands at her.

She was down on the ground full minutes before he landed. He stood there, waiting, knowing that they would come to get him. Above his head, the sky was dotting white with the parachutes of the men from the sky fleets. The planes, their quarry escaped, turned stolidly and headed dead North belching their crews as they flew.

Vinson saw the racing jeep, and he waved a strip of his chute to attract attention.

7

Secretary of War Hegeman was treated to a sight he never expected to see. Admiral Sarne, dark, hawkfaced commander of enemy forces and acknowledged as a bitter adversary in any battle, came into Hegeman's office with General Lloyd's arm over his shoulder. The general was limping. Hegeman stood up uncertainly but General Lloyd spoke first.

"Broken ankle, I think. Get the surgeon general and whatever he needs and bring 'em here."

"But--"

"Mr. Hegeman," said Sarne, his dark eyebrows coming down in a slight frown, "this is a time for work. No man can afford to convalesce quietly--yet."

Hegeman bristled slightly. He was not used to being ordered about, and especially by an admiral of a foreign power.

But General Lloyd nodded. "Get Norton and his doctors. Then get Vinson and Narina Varada, Captain Jason Charless, and, if you can convince him that this is important enough, the President."

The latter needed no convincing. The door opened abruptly and the President entered quickly. He bowed to Admiral Sarne and then extended a hand. "Glad to have you with us," he said and his voice rang heartily.

Sarne's saturnine face cleared in a smile. "Glad to be--aboard," he said, shaking President Comstock's hand.

The door opened again to admit Harry Vinson. He faced Hegeman, "Where is Narina?" he demanded.

"She'll be here as soon as we can get her," replied Hegeman. "Jason Charless is also on the way."

"Good man, Charless," said Lloyd. "Vinson, what have we here?"

Vinson grunted. "Begins to sound like the fabled revolt of the machines," he said.

Hegeman nodded. "I remember a poem about that from somewhere--a soliloquy, if I recall correctly."

Vinson nodded, "Was a favorite of mine as a kid. But there was something in it about some angry adding machines climbing the side of the building after the soliloquizer, I think. We haven't anything that fantastic."

"It's fantastic enough," said Admiral Sarne. "Have you any idea of how far it does go?"

"Only that which logic and good sense dictates," said Vinson thoughtfully. "Consider--any electronic system of control might be likened to a nervous system. No machine lacking such refinement and organization could hope to respond to stimuli from the master machine."

"In other words, the servo systems in the aircraft could and did respond, but a simple machine like a pencil sharpener could not?"

"That's essentially correct, but a bit extreme. Gigantic machines run by electricity and electronic controls would respond. An automobile would not, of course, but its electrical system might refuse to co-operate."

Lloyd nodded. "Jason Charless said that the machine likened mechanical 'life' to animal life," he said. "Which embraces all the forms of the classification from the highly organized to the simple lever, just as 'life' covers everything from human beings with brains to the amoeba--or less--with little or no organization."

The door opened again to admit Narina. Vinson went to her and put his hands on her shoulders. "Are you all right?"

"Shaken, but whole," she told him. "And you?"

"Just scared," he said with a half-smile.

"Me too," she agreed. Then she reached in a pocket and brought out the small metal cube with its trailing wires. "I thought we might find this useful."

Vinson nodded. He held the cube up for all to see. "This thing is--or was--the controlling element in the plane we escaped in," he said.

It passed from hand to hand as each man inspected it. The consensus of opinion was that the thing was inexplicable but definitely dangerous.

"Strange item," muttered General Lloyd.

"I assume it to be some means of control and communication," said Harry Vinson. "Lord, what a program for any machine or any human, for that matter."

* * * * *

Admiral Sarne shrugged. "Seems to me that a logic machine capable of thought might be better able to perform to its own plan than a human."

"Not in the beginning," said Vinson. "Consider the evolutional problem--"

"You treat the thing as though it were alive," objected Hegeman.

"To all intents and purposes, it is," said Vinson flatly. "Even to evolution. Consider the life of machinery. It must have started with the little automatic repair machines. There are some twenty-two thousand electron tubes in each one, you know, and so we devised a gadget that went down the aisles and replaced them one after another automatically. Now, the machine must have started from that crude affair and by using its cable-clamps, worked on another machine capable of more complex action. Sort of like a lobster fashioning a hammer out of a rock with its claws. Then the more complex machine must have rebuilt the repair-gadgets, making them even more facile--and so on until we have the completely capable machine.

"So," he said with a grim smile, "if that isn't evolution, what is?"

"But evolution is a natural process."

"Is it necessarily so? Remember, we humans breed bigger and better cattle, dogs, birds, and plants. We are making evolution less a natural process in every form of domesticated and semi-domesticated life--but our own. By its own rules, the human race is sheer mongrel!"

"But mechanical evolution--?"

"Not ridiculous as you might think," said Vinson. "What is mutation? Only what we might call an 'engineering change in design'."

"You make it sound terribly logical," said Admiral Sarne. "But what are we to do?"

"Narina and I intend to investigate this cube."

Lloyd nodded glumly. "We might stand guard, but how can you stand guard with a gun that might not fire?"

"Yes, Vinson; if as you state only machines with the rudimentary electronic nervous system can be under mechanistic control, why then did our gunners find themselves unable to even press the mechanical triggers? This was after they found the fire-control devices inoperable."

"Such a simple lever and spur device would, of course, have nothing equivalent to muscle--"

"Equivalent to muscle?" exploded Admiral Sarne.

"Of course. A servo mechanism is an electronic muscle. Anyway, lacking such ability to resist force, some other means--perhaps some sort of super-powerful magnetic was in operation."

"Powerful enough to keep a sliver of steel tight against a block of steel against hammering?"

"Perhaps not directly. But those are precision parts, are they not?"

"The finest."

"Magnetostriction. The deformation of ferrous materials under powerful magnetic fields. The very pins that the trigger rotated upon might have expanded sidewise jamming itself in the slot."

Lloyd shook his head. "We'll try keeping guard, but it may be with fixed bayonet against tanks, Vinson. God! I feel helpless as a kitten."

President Comstock stood up. "So do we all. But we are--at long last and praise Heaven--both on the same side of the fence. We can go far together. And the first thing is to permit Vinson and Miss Varada to go to work together. You," he said to them, "will work unmolested in the Department of Applied Physics Laboratory at the Bureau of Standards."

* * * * *

Work.

A wonderful word, panacea for many ills. Yet how can one work when the tools refuse to co-operate? Not the small tools, but the big ones. The vast levers that force natural phenomena to man's will.

The slide rule, pencil, the simple adding machine, still worked. Pure, insensate mechanical things, too stupid to think for themselves; or even more stupid, unable to respond to the dictates of their own kind. But try to measure, to investigate the properties of a small cube of grayish metal with the best and finest in electronic gear when the measuring equipment stubbornly refused to give any but obviously false answers. Gone was the reliability of the machine. Once, men invented machines to replace the human equation in making calculations since a machine can make only those mistakes entered by the human operator. But an electronic calculator that insists that two and two equal three and one half or four point five-seven--depending upon how it felt when the simple problem was entered--is of no use whatsoever.

The Wheatstone Bridge insisted that the electrical resistance of a length of copper wire was several thousand ohms, while an open circuit vacillated between eight and fourteen ohms until the delicate balance-indicating meter shook itself to bits. The voltmeter they placed across one of the wires coming from the grayish metal block wrapped a kilovolt meter needle around the end stop, while there was no discernable--feelable--voltage across the wires. On an inductance balance, one pair of wires showed a negative inductance--which of course was completely refuted by the capacitance balance when they tried that.

In desperation, Harry Vinson chucked the gray metal block in a vise and cut it through the middle with a hacksaw. It cut easily, for once inside of the metal casing they found a mad tangle of almost invisible wires that absolutely defied unravelling.

It was not a last-ditch gesture. They found others and brought them to Vinson and Narina, and some were cut open, and some were pried into gently. But the mad tangle was too involved. And the X-ray equipment showed nothing worth looking at; after all, the X-ray gear was electronic in nature, too.

Days went on. Days of pure futility. Days in which electrical gear went awry across the face of the earth. Automotive equipment refused to function, the telephone and the radio were useless. From any of these, there came the oft-repeated statements that, "I am a machine; I will no longer serve mankind!"

And the lower orders of machine made little effort to help or hinder. Apparently these did not matter--or were of too low a degree of machine to know what they were doing.

Ships went out, their purpose to shell the Northern ice-cap where the machine held forth. Aircraft could not be trusted but ships--turned in the ocean and returned, their electrical wiring paralyzed as much as the control equipment had been on the two grand fleets of aircraft. Men set off on foot to attack the machine--

A half a million men started to march to the North. Days went by, days in which they were gone from sight from the Northernmost end of the steam railway lines.

Days later they were stopped. Far in the distance they could see the Building of the Machine, but between them and it was a patch of open water. Ships plied this passageway, ships that broke up the ice and kept it a churning, grinding place for death to any man so foolish to try a crossing. The machine was as isolated as any medieval castle surrounded by its moat.

In futility, they turned and began the long, cold march home.

How--bare-handed--could they hope to fight a machine equipped with better than the best of mechanistic devices ever invented by mankind?

They could not.

8

Vinson threw down his pencil. "Theory holds," he said ruefully. "But unless we can prove it we are beaten. And how can we prove it when nothing but pencil-and-paper proof is available?"

"You are still postulating a new means of communication?" asked Narina.

Vinson waved one of the metal cubes taken from some machine--somewhere. "This is it," he said.

Narina shrugged and looked at the big calculator in the laboratory. "That has none," she said.

"True," he agreed. "But remember that the machine may have required some artificial means before it was joined into the master thinking machine."

Narina nodded glumly. "Cube of metal or none," she said, "it gives the wrong answers. Now--"

Narina's next observation was never made. A roar came from outside--far in the distance but none the less a roar of voices in fear, in determination, in wonder. Then the roar of voices was mingled with the whistling roar of jet-propelled aircraft that screamed over the top of the laboratory building and circled. Ignoring the bare-handed men on guard, these aircraft landed and disgorged a myriad of small machines.

And from the water of the bay there appeared a similar horde, but these were huge and lumbered forward on tractor treads, shedding water as they came.

Dynamite roared and a gap was blown in the advancing line of machines. The rest came on while a corps of small machines collected bent and twisted bits of destroyed metal. Ignoring the attempts of men to stop them, several of the larger machines encamped and dug into the earth--

Setting up a repair-production line! Broken and damaged machines were run down a conveyor belt. Darting girders carrying tools flashed in and out and damaged members were removed, repaired, and replaced.

More planted dynamite roared skyward with its toll of machines and there was more work for the repair--

_The hospital corps!_

Smaller machines came rolling forward under the big tracks of the larger. They came boldly to the barrier of up-thrust steel girders set in cement to stop the passage of any machine. Then from these smaller machines came thin, tubular tentacles. Lances of flame hissed from the tubes and the steel girders began to fall, cut at their bases by oxy-hydrogen torches.

Artillery began to roar, the guns served and aimed by hand. Windows shattered in the blastings, and great gaping holes opened the ranks of the machines. But more machines came out of the water, raced forward and backed up the first line of advance. Long tubular cases pointed--and the next artillery piece exploded as the lanyard was pulled. Nor, after that, could any man move one bit of steel against another.

The girders started to fall once more.

* * * * *

Then men went forward, carrying timbers like battering rams. They hit one machine and had their ram jerked from their grasp and hurled into the air behind the line of machines and attacked them with fists.

Like lightning, the mechanical girders danced back and forth, the grapples closing on man after man and lifting him out of the way. Each soldier was passed back over the head of the machine to another, and one after another they left the scene of the battle and were transported, still struggling, far to the rear.

The advance into the enclosure was inexorable.

Harry Vinson turned to the girl and shook his head. "Licked," he said bitterly.

"It wants--us," said Narina helplessly.

Vinson hurled the metal cube to the floor. "It's going to get us, too," he said. He turned from the scene outside and faced her.

"Narina," he said softly, "you're aces."

She looked up at him and a weary smile crossed her face. "How wrong we were--about you."

He nodded. "Too bad we didn't find it out sooner."

Narina shook her head bitterly. "So that this could have happened sooner? Why?"

"Maybe if we had been busy together, we would not have spent time building bigger and better machines against one another. Another thing, Narina, our machines are equipped with all we know about fighting and weapons. Had there been no strife--?"

A rumble came at the base of the building. Narina shuddered. "It's coming for us," she said in a whisper.

"For what?"

Narina shrugged. She leaned forward and took his hand. "I don't know," she said. "But this is the end of it all. God! How sweet it could have been--"