Berserker Omnibus - Berserker Man Part 36

Presently his mother's face appeared at a cleared port on one side of the scout, and she exchanged waves with her s.p.a.cedrifting son.

Tupelov, appearing just beside her, now began to speak on radio, using his public voice. "Michel?

Today we're going to let you set the pace. Choose your own alt.i.tude and direction, but we'd like you to fly completely around Miranda on as direct a route as you can manage. Then if you can, return to this starting point from a direction exactly opposite from that of your departure. We'll just follow and observe. Got that?"

"I understand." Michel had never got into the habit of calling Tupelov "sir," as almost everyone else did.

At one time it might have been easy to catch the habit; now it seemed that he never would.

The Secretary had turned away from the port, and was speaking to someone else, in what he must suppose was off-mike privacy: " . . . order of a thousand kilometers, and I'd guess it might take him an hour, based on the kind of velocity he's achieved so far. We'll just have to see. If he gets lost we'll continue observing for a time before we offer help, see how he copes." Back on radio again, Tupelov resumed: "Michel? Any time you're ready."

Michel let his purpose of movement flow into Lancelot. By now this was for him no trickier a process than sending a will to walk into his own legs. His feet brushed the ground, then left it as his body tilted forward, a slow toppling dive that turned into a headfirst horizontal acceleration. His arms and legs trailing, his chin slightly raised so that his/Lancelot's eyes could better see what lay ahead, Michel made a silent, fast departure from his starting mark.

He set his flight at an alt.i.tude where all but the tallest fingers of the scarred-gla.s.s Mirandan landscape were beneath him. Now he could see that the surface skimming by below him was pocked with geometric drifts of some whitish frozen gas. Vaguely impatient, he willed an effortless speed increase. A thousand kilometers, approximately, to go. Should he try to finish the flight in one hour exactly, to the second, just to see what Tupelov's reaction would be? Or maybe in exactly half that time?

The scouts.h.i.+p, in flight as dark and silent as Michel's own, came ghosting after him. Michel let an invisible tendril of Lancelot's being trail where the s.h.i.+p would run into it, an extension of something less than matter and more than thought. It formed a tenuous connection through which Michel could hear another unintended transmission of Dr. Iyenari's voice: " . . . other reason for coming way out to Ura.n.u.s is of course the isolation."

"Security." That was Michel's mother's voice.

"Yes."

Tupelov's voice put in: "Security's not what I'd like it to be, frankly. Most people even in the government sort of pooh-pooh the goodlife threat in Sol System. But now there are eight billion people living on Earth, and a couple of billion more on Mars and Venus and in the Belts. If only one out of ten thousand had any goodlife tendencies . . . and there are thousands of s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing in and out of the system daily, and no one really keeps track of all of them . . ."

Michel withdrew his contact from the s.h.i.+p and retreated into his own thoughts. To stay on course needed only a glance ahead from time to time. No one else yet understood how well he had already learned to live with Lancelot.

Concentrating his attention mainly on the s.h.i.+ps that he could pick out in interplanetary s.p.a.ce, he soon discovered how to make his perception of their drive energies a little plainer than before. Presently he decided that four of them, fairly near and moving very little relative to Ura.n.u.s, were patrol craft keeping watch on the proving grounds' invisible boundaries. One other s.h.i.+p, smaller, was a little more distant but definitely headed into the Uranian system.

What if he were to abandon the test, and instead fly out a million kilometers or so to meet one of those s.h.i.+ps? The people aboard would goggle at him through their screens and ports, and wonder also at the scouts.h.i.+p full of angry radio voices on his tail. His mother would, of course, be horrendously upset. But there would be nothing much that Tupelov could do. . . .

One of the patrol craft was now moving toward the small visitor, which perhaps was bringing more important people up from Earth. The two s.h.i.+ps seemed to be directly approaching Miranda, though they were not going to get much closer before Michel's own rock-hopping flight dropped them below his small horizon.

Gliding through s.p.a.ce, an easy swimmer, he looked back and down at his own body in its orange gym suit and vague gauze that fluttered as if with wind. Hormone treatments would mean some kind of chemicals to make him grow and develop faster. Maybe, after all, that wouldn't be a bad idea. The faster he grew, the sooner he would be able to protect himself.

Ahead of him now loomed a cone of rock ten meters high, a real Mirandan mountain. Lancelot felt the obstacle coming in plenty of time for Michel to glance ahead and alter course. Like a darting fish he flashed around the rock, and on an impulse he picked up speed in the same instant. He wondered if he could, today, outmaneuver Frank's scouts.h.i.+p in a game of hide and seek.

But he didn't really want to contend against Frank any more, or make Frank mad at him. Here came Oberon, right overhead, the intricate orbital dance of Ura.n.u.s' attendants turning the satellite momentarily retrograde against the stars.

Six flashes of light, intense bright pinpoints, appeared on Oberon's dark flank.

Six flashes that were answered by five streaks, five dingy-looking tracer bullets fired along five cl.u.s.tered paths. The streaks began in s.p.a.ce somewhere above Miranda, between the two satellites, and headed unerringly back to the original flash-points on black Oberon. Halfway there, the five were joined and completed by the sixth.

It took only a moment for Michel's memory to find and extract the understanding that he needed, from descriptions in the s.p.a.ce-war stories of his childhood. He had just seen six s.h.i.+ps or missiles fired from supposedly deserted Oberon. Sixthings, that, as soon as they had effectively cleared the Oberonian surface, started toward Miranda at a speed effectively faster than light. They must have moved in a series of c-plus microjumps, so that the light emitted by them at mid-course reached Michel's eyes before that radiated earlier, causing the appearance of backward movement. Six things had been launched toward Miranda at a speed almost suicidal this deep inside a gravitational system, one of them indeed destroyed by its own reckless speed midway, five of them obviously slowing to some extent, or they would be here now. . . .

Michel had not yet altered his own flight. But the scouts.h.i.+p that had been following him was now suddenly bulking almost against him, forcing him with delicate precision to change his flight path, urging him almost against the jagged rock that sped below. From inside the scout he could hear the fright in his mother's voice, the anger in Tupelov's, both raised in unbelieving protest against their newly clumsy pilot.

Frank, his volume turned up, easily overrode them both. "Michel, get in." The order was bellowed, but still delivered with serenity, with happiness.

Simultaneously the scouts.h.i.+p's entry hatch, already positioned almost exactly before Michel, snapped open like a fish's jaw. Obediently he slid inside, and the hatch had closed on him again before it occurred to him to wonder whether Frank might possibly, for once, be wrong. Frank of course knew a lot, but where Lancelot was concerned only Michel himself really knew. . . . The scout was accelerating, smooth but ferocious power piling up gravities that Michel could sense despite his cus.h.i.+oning against them. The sealing outer hatch had actually closed on a portion of Lancelot's robe train, which now slid in anyway without a tug. He was going to have to get inside where the others were right away and talk to Frank- Horrendous shock came, slamming the scouts.h.i.+p in a direction that had to be down, because initial shock was followed a millisecond later by a crumpling impact of the hull against Mirandan rock.

Somewhere inside the inner airlock door, Michel's mother was screaming, and he knew that her arms were reaching out with an instinct to protect her baby. But there was no protection there inside the s.h.i.+p for him, and none for her while he was near. Michel had to draw away from her the forces that were coming to kill him, and he saw now that he dared trust his own survival to nothing and no one save Lancelot.

He touched the switch to open the outer airlock door, and despite the jolting it had received a moment ago the mechanism responded promptly. In an instant Michel was out, and even as his buffered feet touched rock, the door was slammed shut again behind him. Frank was wrenching the scouts.h.i.+p back up into s.p.a.ce, where it vanished at once from Michel's perception in a sky gone white with an artificial storm of weapons radiation. Miranda's automated defenses, whatever they might be, had opened up. The enemy was here in force; a fight was on.

The shockwave of some explosion, no more than a thin wall of expanding gas, caught Michel up like a b.u.t.terfly and hurled him across the jagged gla.s.s of a landscape that he could not feel with Lancelot insulating him from injury. He floated for long moments in a blind, deaf void. Intermittent flashes of the Mirandan surface came to him, as if by lightning's illumination, and were immediately wiped away to nothingness again. He understood that all-too-efficient protection was guarding his senses against annihilation; somehow there ought to be a way to make Lancelot let in just enough sensory input to carry information. . . .

Groping for controls that were, as usual, within himself, Michel managed an adjustment. When the world came back, he found himself crouching on all fours, surrounded by boiling rock in molten puddles.

Around him in the poor gravity gobs of lava drifted, like one-celled organisms. Under a bridge made by his gloveless fingers, a red-hot crevice in some solider material jetted smoke and flames at gunshot velocity.

Above his head the thunderstorms of weaponry still raged. He ought to fly for shelter, find help, try to attack the enemy, do something, but he had no idea of which way to turn for any of these purposes.

Simply flying up into the melee above would be as pointless and perhaps as dangerous as jumping into the teeth of a ripsaw. He crouched motionless, listening in desperation. At last he could make out, under the continued battle noise, that a new network of intense radio communication had been established, among many stations unfamiliar to him. Messages were being sent and answered at superhuman speed, in what sounded like no human code that he had ever heard.

What must be a detector beam of some kind came fingering at him. It went away, then came back to lock on.

Michel sprang to his feet. As in a nightmare, from a childhood that now could be no more, he ran. He sprinted in blind panic, his tentative plans and even the powers of Lancelot forgotten for the moment. A drifting cloud of boulders loomed ahead, jarred up in the fighting and weightless as bubbles in feeble Miranda's grip. Panic drove Michel right in among the great rock ma.s.ses, trying to lose himself. As he ran directly beneath a house-sized chunk of glowing slag, Michel suddenly found himself with no surface at all beneath his feet. In desperate fear he reached at last for active aid from Lancelot. Arms thrust forward like a diver's, he flew among stone ma.s.ses that closed him between them into darkness, momentary peace. He slid between a thousand tons on either side, feeling no more than a brus.h.i.+ng, as by enormous pillows, as Lancelot's delicate fringes ground away the rock.

He was out in free s.p.a.ce again. Ahead, a cloud of smaller fragments beckoned, and he flew into it as quickly as he could. Now he/Lancelot was at last alone, the enemy's radio gabble for the moment left behind. On other wavelengths he could now distinguish chattering human voices. Help was going to come for him, eventually . . . if he could survive until it did.

The respite allowed his mind to surface from its panic, for a gasp of sanity and an attempt at planning.

Should he stay where he was, or keep moving? He was disoriented; he no longer knew in which direction the operations building lay. Nor was he certain that he ought to try to reach it.

There came a great blast in the middle distance, and the wave of gases from it started a quick dispersal of Michel's protective cloud of debris. The human radio talk was blown away as well, to be replaced by a fresh flow of enemy code.

A locator beam flicked at him again. This time he could pinpoint its source, less than a hundred meters off. Something not human was moving there, picking its deliberate way toward him.

He launched himself at once, at top speed, in the opposite direction. Behind him a throng of pursuers came on at the speed of racing aircraft, things human-sized but of the wrong shape to be human, jetting and bounding over the black and broken surface. Michel managed an acceleration, and the enemy momentarily fell behind. But their signals beaming past him now were answered, from above him and from in front.

He halted his flight, braced Lancelot's feet as well as he could upon the surface. Hard-edged shapes were closing in upon him from all sides. Blind panic clutched at Michel again, but with a great effort he eluded it, escaping through an inward door. Lancelot bore him into the domain whose borders Michel had only glimpsed before, during the last fractal second of his sparring match with Frank. Time hardened into an almost motionless sea carved out of congealed energy.

With this altered perception he saw a hard inhuman arm come reaching for him. Then they were not out to kill him, after all . . . they wanted something else. Through Lancelot's fields the contact of the arm felt infinitely less human than the touch of the steel that Frank had sometimes brushed him with. Michel poured toughness into his own right arm's extension, and with a motion enormously pure and swift he knocked the approaching limb away. He could see the details of the metal gripper that formed the berserker android's hand, watch it recede with what appeared to be infinite slowness, then as slowly start to swing back again.

Meanwhile another faceless machine-shape had jumped almost within reach. Michel, with no sense that he was hurrying, turned to face it. His forefingers were raised and pointing, in a gesture that his conscious mind had never planned. A fierce flow from his fingertips exploded blindingly and a metal form vanished in radii of molten ceramics and burned metal. But already another berserker stood at his other side, arms reaching for him. They could move as quickly as he could, and they were going to win.

Not yet.Again a pointing finger bore his will. Along the interface between Michel's own mind and the ent.i.ty called Lancelot, his terror and rage and hate were melded with the power of fusing hydrogen nuclei. Again a blast came, shattering machines and armor.

But always more grippers, and still more, came reaching for him. The whole horde was close upon him now. With carefulness as great and inhuman as their strength and speed they closed their hands upon his neck, his legs, one arm. Yet somehow (Michel himself could not perceive it happening) Lancelot once more fought him free, and bore him away into a close orbit of Miranda, at speeds Michel had never before attempted. s.p.a.ce was barred to him, the sky in all directions dominated by the great machines of the enemy, victorious for the moment. But this was the proving grounds, Sol System, and ma.s.sive help had to be on the way. . . .

Unexcited and unworried, the hornets' droning of the berserker androids' radio voices followed in his flight. The operations building loomed up suddenly before Michel and he braked to a stop. All of the structure's defensive s.h.i.+elds, mirror-s.h.i.+ny and insubstantial in appearance, had been erected. Atop the s.h.i.+elds, fifteen meters above Miranda's crack-ruined rock, a metal giant squatted, dull monster on a silver toadstool. It was hunched in a position that meant that all its might was bent on forcing a way down into its perch.

Will you fight against berserkers, little one?

Yelling to one another in their clipped radio bursts, s.h.i.+fting formation in perfect teamwork, the pack of Michel's surviving pursuers caught up with him again.

Again Lancelot guided him into the realm that seemed to lie beyond time. And now Michel began for the first time to feel fully the stresses that Lancelot could impose upon a connected human mind. A feeling of unreality sapped his will, even as exhaustion dragged at his muscles. He grappled with a steel berserker arm, and saw and felt it bending in his grip, metal rupturing in the grip of Lancelot. Then something heavier tangled his own arms, his neck-a net of some kind, its strands burning with fierce energies that he was not going to be allowed the time to solve.

Still, somehow, Lancelot had him halfway through the net before the machines surrounding him could manage to bring the escaping motion to a halt. Too many active weights were on him now, too many devices gripping; he could not bend or break or blast them all.

He heard a shrill and childish voice, his own, go screaming out across the void. Then a thing with the strength of a log-hauler pulled Lancelot's legs out from under him, and under all the weights his s.h.i.+elded face was slammed against Mirandan rock.

With all the powers that he knew how to draw from Lancelot, Michel strained in a last effort to get free.

A meter before his eyes, a berserker's legs had been somehow drilled into rock for greater purchase.

The legs pulled out now, rock shattering as Lancelot tore them free. But still, with its cohort's help, the pinning berserker held.

Michel's awareness, now somewhere on the far side of panic, remained clear through it all. They had him pinned at last, and now they were inflating over him something that proved to be a plastic bubble holding air.

In the distance there were still flashes of radiation, rock-shuddering jolts that told of an ongoing fight. But there was no signal of approaching help as yet, and now help was going to come too late. With great deftness his captors' metal fingers were searching out the fastenings of Lancelot. They found them, one by one, and with a motherlike gentleness they severed Michel/Lancelot in half.

NINE.

Even while its own internal a.n.a.lytical systems were still working with the sample of blood from the female life-unit, the Co-ordinator ordered itself moved to the control room of the goodlife s.h.i.+p. There it established itself in direction control of all important s.h.i.+p's systems. A few nanoseconds' difference in reaction time could be crucial in s.p.a.ce combat, and the odds were overwhelming that intense s.p.a.ce combat was imminent. The badlife proving grounds could not be so nearly defenseless as they seemed.

But the Co-ordinator was going to have powerful help. Its programming informed it that the time was at hand when all available reserves must be risked in an attempt either to take control of or destroy the life-unit designated Michel Geulincx.

From the start of its long, clandestine journey to Sol System, the Co-ordinator had carried in its unliving memory detailed information on every known local resource that it might be able to call upon for help when it arrived. The resources that made the present plan look feasible were the combat units that had long ago been hidden on Oberon, in antic.i.p.ation of the day when Sol System itself could be successfully attacked. Six berserker fighting s.h.i.+ps of intermediate cla.s.s, with their auxiliary robots and machines, had been secretly cached there decades before the badlife had established their proving grounds in the same region. The six s.h.i.+ps had originally been intended, by the master berserker computers sometimes known to humanity as the Directors, to form one small squadron of the armada required for a successful a.s.sault on Earth itself. But now the Directors' agent had been instructed that seizure of Michel Geulincx had as high a priority as destruction of the badlife homeworld itself.

Correct timing was, as usual, essential. The possibly valuable female captive was secured in a cabin-all records of human behavior indicated that immature life-units such as Michel Geulincx were often greatly dependent upon parental units. The possibly-still-valuable goodlife units were a.s.signed chairs, protected by emergency webbings, in the control room. The berserker, now in complete control of the s.h.i.+p, ignored the signals of the human guard-s.h.i.+p that had now begun a moderately fast course of interception.

In a range of frequencies that ranged from light to radio waves the Co-ordinator fired toward Oberon a quick burst of code, information enormously condensed. This message roused the sleeping fighters hidden there and at the same time programmed them with the tactical necessities of the new situation.

The battle following, most of it fought on and around the Mirandan surface, was sharp but short. With an electronic a.n.a.log of satisfaction, the Co-ordinator observed the rapid disabling of local resistance. The patrol craft were beaten off, the one s.p.a.ceborne scouts.h.i.+p knocked down and crippled, the operations building effectively isolated inside the stubborn knot of its automated defenses. It would be hours before the very large human forces routinely posted elsewhere in Sol System could reach the scene. Indeed, it would be hours before they knew that anything was amiss.

With the Michel Geulincx unit captured, as well as the weapons system it had been using, both life-unit and weapon appearing essentially undamaged, the Co-ordinator had achieved the highest-priority goals for which it had been programmed. To remain near Miranda for even the short time necessary to expunge all remaining life from the satellite would have meant risking this great success, as very strong and persistent pursuit had to be expected. Therefore the Co-ordinator ordered immediate departure. In the center of a protective formation made up of the three surviving berserker warcraft, the goodlife s.h.i.+p under the Co-ordinator's direct control departed the Uranian system at maximum practical acceleration and roughly in the direction of solar north, along a line where it could be computed that interception would be least probable.

As the goodlife aboard were instructed to divest themselves of acceleration harness, a premature celebration broke out among them, which the Co-ordinator at once quelled with a few spoken words.

There was no time; there was business that needed urgently to be conducted and in which their help would be used. It was possible that the weapons system code-named Lancelot had been designed to self-destruct somehow when captured. Or it might rapidly deteriorate from some other cause. Therefore an immediate examination of the system, and some preliminary testing of it, was essential.

Even cus.h.i.+oned in a berth and isolated in a cabin, Elly Temesvar had no difficulty in recognizing a s.p.a.ce battle when the s.h.i.+p in which she rode was thrust into the middle of one. The timing and the roughness of the c-plus jumps were unmistakable, as were the sounds with which the hull around her rang. They were certainly not the sounds of a routine boarding from an armed patrol craft, which was what she had been expecting.

Before being introduced to the Co-ordinator, she had thought herself to be in the hands of a small group of people of psychotic audacity but quite limited intelligence. The presence of an authentic berserker as their leader changed these estimates completely. Still, it had seemed almost incredible that her captors should have on call enough armed force to mount a successful raid against the Uranian proving grounds-this was Sol System, after all!

But there was no denying what she heard and felt. While the hull still rang with nearby shooting, there came an additional grating vibration that told Elly the s.h.i.+p was down on the rocky surface of some Uranian satellite. Airlocks were cycled and recycled several times. Minutes later, the fighting died away, and with a last sc.r.a.ping of her hull the goodlife vessel was off into s.p.a.ce again, on what course Elly had no way of guessing. Then her heart sank as human voices, the goodlife voices on the s.h.i.+p, were raised in a brief burst of jubilation.

After a timeless interval of apparently peaceful flight, the door to Elly's prison-cabin was opened once again. Without surprise, but still with a shock that seemed almost to stop her heart, she saw a man-sized robot enter. Through her mind pa.s.sed images, not entirely repellent, of quick death. Her pale body thrown out from an airlock . . .

But the machine was not killing her. After undoing the ties that held her to the bunk, it simply stood back, gesturing with one human-shaped hand toward the open door. She got to her feet and on uncertain legs moved the other way instead, toward the cabin's small sanitary alcove. It did not stop her, but it followed closely, staying within reach of her and watching her every movement closely.

Having her privacy violated by a machine was not at all the same as suffering the same offense from a human being, though in some obscure way she felt it ought to be. The discovery that her fate was not, after all, to be instant death was enough to make her a little giddy with relief. She kept the thing waiting a moment longer while she rinsed her hands and got a drink of water. Then she offered no argument or resistance when it took her by the wrist and tugged her out into the narrow corridor. Their flight was still steady and smooth, the artificial gravity constant. For most of the short walk to the control room the machine that led Elly followed another, similar robot. This one was carrying a small human form, fair-haired, in an orange costume of some kind. At her first glimpse of the face, Elly thought: The boy from the picture. At least there was a considerable resemblance.

Her own biological son? Michel? It must be, if any of this was going to make sense. But the idea aroused no feeling at all within her.

The small s.h.i.+p's control room was somewhat larger than Elly had expected. It had room for six humans, two goodlife women and two men standing crowded together. The second woman was dark, with an Oriental face, much thinner than she who had visited Elly in the cabin. Seeing the goodlife together, Elly was struck by the idea that they all looked somehow s.e.xless; more than that, inhuman, though exactly what gave her this impression in each case was more than she could think out now.

Michel was in the room also, still in the grip of the machine that had been carrying him, though the boy's feet were on the deck now and he appeared to be able to stand unaided. His dazed child's eyes brushed Elly's, but she could see no reaction in them.

In the center of the chamber, the Co-ordinator now rode on top of the s.h.i.+p captain's control console, presenting an image, no doubt unintentional, of a huge spider on a stump, bound in place by a connective complex of wires and cabling. Directly before it, draped as though carelessly across the otherwise empty captain's chair, lay folds of something that looked at first glance like large sheets of loosely crumpled, almost transparent gauze.

For a few moments after Elly's arrival, the tableau held in silence. The goodlife, unrestrained by machines, seemed to be waiting humbly, perhaps with just a trace of boredom, and Elly was reminded momentarily of some of the gatherings for services in the Temple. Then a wordless order must have been given by the Co-ordinator. The robot holding Elly dropped her wrist and moved to the chair before the console. There it deliberately picked up the gauze in one of its almost human hands. Only now did Elly notice that its other hand depended from a badly damaged arm. The bone-shaped upper arm had been crippled and bent somehow, the metal surface ruptured. In the recent fighting, no doubt. What kind of weapon, though, would have produced . . . ?

The Co-ordinator's squeaky voice was speaking, and to her: "Life-unit Temesvar, you will identify this weapons system."

Taken unawares, Elly looked around the cabin desperately, thinking that she must have missed something somehow. Then she saw that the eyes of the goodlife were all focused on the gauze.

"That-stuff, on the chair? Is it some kind of body s.h.i.+eld, then? I know nothing about it. It's been many years since I've dealt with weapons." She felt surprise and a touch of shame at her own eagerness for survival, her willingness to answer the Co-ordinator as fully as possible.

The Co-ordinator said: "Life-unit Michel Geulincx. Answer."

The boy's eyes had begun to study Elly's face, and they continued to do so even as he replied to the berserker. He did not seem terribly afraid; perhaps he was still too dazed by what must have been the awesome shock of capture. He said, "It's what we call Lancelot . . . you must already know that."

There was a silent pause. The goodlife, just a little restless, continued waiting. Michel turned his gaze from Elly toward the machine that was eventually going to order them all killed.

Then a new order was evidently given, at some non-human level. The man-sized robot with the crippled arm, moving slowly but with great deftness despite its disability, began putting on the gauze sheets. It dressed itself like an actor with an unfamiliar cloak, or perhaps a skeleton trying on an unfamiliar wedding dress. The folds of what it put on went swirling slowly, fading with distance from the wearer. From solid reality where they embraced the robot's body, they pa.s.sed into invisibility at a couple of meters' distance.

They were complex forcefields, obviously, though of exactly what kind, Elly could not begin to guess.

. . .the badlife have grasped at least the fact that he is unusual, and they mean to use him as part of a weapons system. Have you ever heard the code name Lancelot?

With the strange gauze now fastened more or less firmly to its torso and its head, the robot began to move about a little. Gently, with a certain skeletal engineering grace, it stepped and postured. To Elly's mind there came the image of a Dance of Death that she had seen somewhere.

Michel's small gasp, a couple of meters to her left, broke in upon her fascinated concentration. The boy was staring at the robot with an expression Elly could not read. She looked back at the grotesquely draped machine herself, and watched it several seconds longer before it was borne in upon her that something about the test was going badly.

The robot's good hand had moved to one of the fasteners on its chest, as if it might be going to tear itself free of what it had put on, but could not quite make up its electronic mind to do so. The damaged arm meanwhile rose in an astonis.h.i.+ngly human gesture, flapping a useless hand and forearm across its own head as if in madness or dismay. Then, stiffly as a toppled statue, the machine fell to the deck in an abrupt swirl of gauze.

Two others of its kind were at its sides at once. With hands moving faster than human eyes could follow, they manipulated fastenings, stripping away the slow-billowing robes from the inert body, which remained inert even when they were done.

The Co-ordinator itself gave no evidence of having been affected in the least. "One human volunteer," it presently called out.

Four human hands were raised. Stal's hand, Elly noticed, came up just a little less promptly than the others.

"Life-unit Mabuchi," uttered the machine. The stocky deacon stepped forward, and reached to take up the strange garment from where it had been replaced upon the chair. His eyes were rounded with an emotion that Elly read as a blend of ecstasy and fear.

Then he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back as if it had been burned, when the berserker startled him by speaking again: "You will put on Lancelot. Having done so, you will then not move or act in any way except at my direct command."

"Yes, lord and master." The deacon's answer was so low that Elly lip-read rather than heard it. Quite psychotic, she thought, looking at the man's rapt face. Why didn't I ever see that in him in the Temple?

Mabuchi hesitated about his gray smock, then eventually decided to leave the garment on as the robots began to help him fit the s.h.i.+mmering stage-wrappings over it. At first Elly thought that his head remained uncovered, but then she caught a glimpse of haze that clung round his dark-haired cranium like a ghostly helmet.