Part 3

He told himself that he was taking too despairing a view. Deva had lived all her life here, and had been trained as a technical designer of circuits such as those employed by the Machine. She understood its workings, and knew that it could be misled and deceived.

He hoped, too, that someday men would do more than just run away from the Machine. A vague but burning desire had been kindled to activity within him. He would have given his life to be an instrument, no matter how small, in its destruction. But he knew that in his lifetime such a rebellion by the many might well remain only a dream.

He turned his attention to the road as they cleared the advancing edges of the residential section and moved out onto the express highway, heading south.

Deva slowed the car. “We’ll be checked at the first automatic station,” she said. “The scanners will note that this is a car from the city and record our basic identification. We’ll have to abandon the car before then. But that won’t be safe, either--until after dark.”

His spirits rose as darkness descended and the countryside became more open. The sense of confinement, which had been with him ever since he entered the city, dropped away and he began to feel as free as he had felt during all the years of his childhood in the open country of Lonestar.

“We’ll have to turn off soon,” said Deva. “Keep on the alert for some kind of trail that might lead down to the river. We’ll run the car into the water if we can get it safely down the bank.”

A few minutes later, in the glow of the car’s headlights, Rick called attention to a sharp turn-off directly ahead. Deva took the controls and in another moment they had come to a halt by the bank of the river.

She directed Rick to get out, and then set the car in motion again. He held his breath as it descended the steep bank. He thought for a moment she had stayed with it too long, but her running figure stumbled to the ground an instant before it struck the water with a resounding splash, and vanished from sight in the swirling dark current.

“Are you hurt?” he called, hastening down the bank.

“My wrist--” she answered in momentary agony. Then, as he reached her side: “I’ll be all right. We’ve got to keep moving as fast as we can.”

Her speed and endurance astonished him as they moved through the sheltering brush in the darkness. He wondered how her city life could have endowed her with such stamina. But there was little time for questions.

“There’s the check station,” she said, a few minutes later. “That red light over on the highway about a half mile down. Our best bet would be to get in the water and float past it. They might have detectors out if our absence has been broadcast.”

“Can you swim that far in the dark?” he asked.

“We’ll find a driftlog--if we can,” she said.

They found a suitable log in the next few minutes. They made bundles of their clothes, so that they could be held out of the water and kept dry as long as possible. Then they slipped soundlessly into the cold, muddy waters, pushing the log forward laboriously between them.

They kept silent, paddling slowly through what seemed an eternity of cold and darkness, letting the current do most of the work. Rick tried to estimate the distance they had traveled, but the light of the inspection station was invisible from the level of the water’s surface.

At last Deva spoke, her voice thin with cold and anxiety. “This is far enough. I’m sure we must be well past the station.”

They climbed out on the bank once more and saw the signal light a satisfying distance behind them. They dried themselves hastily against the chill of the night and donned their clothes, which had remained fairly dry.

“Don’t you want to rest for a while?” Rick asked.

“No time for that,” Deva said. “We’ve got to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and that station before daylight. We can find a place to rest and hide all day tomorrow.”

As dawn approached, Deva could no longer conceal her fatigue. They had not slowed during the night, but now they began searching for adequate shelter to protect them from observation during the day. They found it at last in a thick cluster of foliage by the river bank. So dense was its canopy of leaves that even the sky was hidden from their sight when they were at rest in its center.

They ate a small quantity of the food concentrate which they had smuggled out, and almost immediately afterwards Deva fell into a deep sleep.

Rick remained awake until the sun was high overhead, keeping an alert lookout for possible pursuit. There was no sign of a hue and cry from any direction. He began to let himself think that they were no longer in any immediate danger. Possibly the Machine and the Watch Police were not even very much concerned about an escape such as theirs. Citizens who wanted to run away were probably considered of very little value to society.

He allowed drowsiness to creep upon him as he contemplated his future plans. His first and major obligation was to see Deva to the nearest settlement of the Outlanders at which she wished to stay. Then he’d drift on. No place in particular. Eventually, he supposed, he’d have to throw in with the Outlanders somewhere. But until that day arrived--well, he’d always wanted to see as much of the land as possible.

He thought, too, of Deva. She had remarkable courage and an amazing spirit of independence, he admitted in admiration. He might even find himself missing that fiery mop of hair and equally burning temper. In any event, he owed her a debt of gratitude he could never repay.

He was aware next of darkness and of hands tugging at him in ungentle persistence. Deva’s voice whispered impatiently in his ear. “Come on, it’s time we were on our way!”

He struggled awake, and snatched up a food concentrate. He munched on it as they made their way cautiously out of the shelter.

“How much farther must we go before we start hitting Outlander settlements?” he asked.

“It’s hard to tell,” she replied. “They move around. But we should be on the edge of their country by morning.”

They moved rapidly through the wilderness again, following the course of the river, but Deva tired more quickly now. She was willing to stop for rest occasionally but not for long. It was approaching dawn when they heard the first faint thread of unfamiliar sound in the air. Deva paused in alarm and glanced up to the sky, listening.

“What is it?” Rick asked.

“I don’t know. Wait--yes, I do. They’re after us! That’s a helicopter, and it’s heading straight this way.”

Frantically, she raced toward the heavy foliage on the shore. The sound increased and seemed to arrow toward them. They settled in a crouch under the densest cover they could find. But still the sound came on.

Suddenly Deva gasped. “I should have remembered--!”

“Remembered what?”

“Quick!” she urged, grasping his arm. “Into the water!”

Not understanding, Rick stumbled riverward through the brush. “What for?” he asked.

“Infra-red detectors. They’re certain to have them. They may be trained on us already. The water may not mask us. But it’s our only chance.”

* * * * *

They were out of the underbrush now and descending the sloping bank. The sound of the beating vanes was so loud in their ears that it seemed almost upon them. Suddenly a tiny spurt of light snapped out of the sky. Momentarily it cast a ball of flaming brilliance about Deva. Then she cried out and fell to the ground.

“I’m hit! Go on, Rick. Into the water. Forget about me--”

VIII

In his office high in the tower of Orientation Center, Dr. Bernard Jackson put down the report of the Twelfth Sector Watch Police and sighed. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, his features haggard with strain.

“Action completed,” he said finally to Dr. Flora Johns, who occupied a chair nearby. “Everything went precisely according to schedule. I hope it works out. I liked those two. Remember what he called himself and the girl? A Rillo range sire and a salt grass heifer! I’ve got an idea he’ll change his mind about her before long!”

“I fail to see why it was necessary to order the Police to deliberately shoot her,” Flora Johns said with a tartness that verged on bitterness. “She might have been killed. We don’t know yet how serious the injury was. The Police aren’t that good at shooting a moving target from a plane.”

“It was a necessary risk. You know that. You read the Machine’s instructions.”

“But I don’t always believe them!”

“It was necessary because he would have taken her to the first Outlander Settlement, left her there, and gone on his own way. And if he had suggested anything else she would have opposed it.

“It was absolutely necessary to put her in a state of complete dependency on him for a long enough period to enable her to overcome her resistance to his presence. The injury was the only available means.”

“So says that idiot Machine!”

Dr. Jackson smiled.

“Careful, Flora--even the walls have ears. Or so it is said.”

“I don’t care! If the Machine was going to drag us in for insubordination it would have happened long ago. Sometimes I wonder just what the devilish thing is up to, anyway!”

“That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he said slowly. “And I think that with this present case I’ve been able to figure it out.”

“What have you figured out?”

“The Machine has recognized from the beginning that we’ve asked it for more than it could deliver. We’ve always assumed that we had succeeded in creating a Machine that could think like a man. We forgot there are two answers to the problem of creating equal thinking in men and machines.

“We haven’t built a Machine that thinks like a man. Instead, we’ve developed a generation of men that think like machines!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just that. We’ve leveled men and machines to the same category, but not by raising machine thinking. We’ve done it by lowering men. So today we have thinking machines, all right. Millions of them. All over the globe. We call them men!”

“The Machine has its judgment circuits--”

“Fortunately, yes. And this gives it just sufficient ability to recognize its own failure--and wisdom enough to turn the problem back where it belongs.

“What essential difference there is between true human thought, and the kind of thought we’ve developed in the Machine, I don’t know. And I don’t think the Machine knows. But it’s throwing the problem back to the only possible source of solution: human beings. Don’t you see?”

Dr. Flora Johns was staring through the windows of the tower to the glistening city beyond. “If only you were right!” she whispered.

“I have to be right!” Dr. Jackson exclaimed. “It’s the only possible answer. If it weren’t, you and I would have been ordered drawn and quartered long ago. But the Machine picked us--and scores of others like us.

“It keeps us in our present positions and gives out wholly insane instructions--by accepted understanding of its purposes. It gives out pairings like this one we’ve just handled. And provides a clear path for their escape to the Outlander settlements, and insures that they will stay together in spite of themselves. I tell you the Machine is bent on seeing that we somehow rectify our own mistakes and make men out of those millions of thinking machines that inhabit the world!”

“But to what purpose?” Flora Johns cried. “We’ll be going back to the chaos from which we escaped by the very creation of the Machine. It has showed us how to insure peace, prosperity, happiness. We’ve got the perfection of society that men struggled for thousands of years to obtain!”

Dr. Jackson shook his head.

“No. What we _have_ got isn’t it. We may have come close, but for all practical purposes we’ve run up a blind alley. We can thank whatever Providence is watching over us that the Machine has been capable of recognizing that fact.

“Our failure is in turning over final thought and judgment to something outside ourselves. Until we are able to take the responsibility and work out answers with our own personal gray matter, we have not solved the problem. Certainly, our existing solution is a failure.

“Maybe a definite, positive solution is unobtainable. Perhaps the only answer is in the continued searching for an answer. I don’t know, and I feel certain the Machine doesn’t know. But it’s trying to develop a sector of humanity that might be able to find out!”

“It sounds right,” Flora Johns whispered again, and now her eyes were aglow. “It _has_ to be right!”

IX

A full harvest season had come and gone, and Rick Theron had stayed with the Outlanders far longer than he had at first had any intention of doing. Deva was on her feet again. She had a little limp, but it had been a long time since her injury had kept her from running and working with the strongest of the Outlander women.

It was time to be moving on.

Yet, as Rick saw her coming from the cabin he’d helped build for her, something caught again deep in the middle of his chest. He wondered what the day would be like that denied him the sight of that red crest of hair, tumbled by the wind, or bound in tender curls.

He moved toward her resolutely.

“You’re on your way?” she asked.

“Deva,” he said. “I’ve been doing some thinking. We don’t know yet where we’re going to end up, and you and I haven’t got any better friends out here than each other. We’ve made out pretty good so far. Why don’t we just kind of stick together and see what comes of it?”

She looked at him almost shyly, with a slow smile starting at the corners of her mouth. “I was just about to suggest the same thing,” she said.

“You think it could be that the Machine was right about us, after all?”

“It might be wise not to be hasty in going against it,” Deva said.

He reached for her suddenly and gathered her into his arms and kissed her long, and passionately.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I could even learn to like that. In time and with practice, darling.”

Transcriber’s Note:

This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, July 1956 (Vol. 5, No. 6). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.

The chapter heading =IX= has been added in this version.