Chapter III

It was as gray as the sand-blown skies of Earth in every direction; once past its artificial veil of luminescence, the machine-planet was a colder, more sterile thing than the widest valley on the dark side of the moon. His mind refused to believe what it knew to be true--that the surface of the sphere was hard, unyielding metal, worked in some gigantic factory on some impossible world to an almost frictionless smoothness. After he touched down, Cragin had to keep his forward jets checked in at almost ten times their normal landing thrust to bring the SP-15 to a skittering halt.

Quickly he donned magnetic boots, space-helmet and suit, and buckled two short-barrelled Krell guns around his waist. They were loose in his holsters as he clattered toward the opening airlock of the Starwasp. He opened up the suit's intercom.

"Just keep your hands at your sides."

"Don't be ridiculous. I'm here to do a job, not play Junior SP-man. If you want to help me, I can use you. If not, just keep out of my way."

"Miss Griffin, I--" But Cragin let the words trail off because he knew that for the first time in his life, he was out of his element. True, he was in an unknown Space on an unknown sphere, as he'd been too many times before to count--but this was somehow different. And Lin Griffin knew more answers than he did. He thought about showing her the small white rectangle of enamelite that Kirkholland had given him, but it would make him more the fool. She knew what he was; she had not defied his authority. She had not actually tried to evade him. She had simply talked him into something and he didn't know what it was. Believing her was his fault.

He followed her about a quarter mile over the smooth metal plain until she stopped before a ragged mar that had been forcefully seared into its surface by a dis-torch. Cragin saw what it was; it was a cross. The girl paused a moment.

He had never seen anyone bow their head to pray before. He stood silent.

Finally all she said was, "Someday I'll make them tell me what they did with him."

"All right. Let's get on with it. Where to now?"

"Not far."

It was only a hundred yards further that they stopped; this time the sear in the hard metal was shapeless, not as deep as the one before and obviously more hastily made. She fumbled in the pocket of her suit, and by instinct, Cragin's hands fell lightly over the butts of his guns. She produced a small, circular thing, pushed a catch on its side, and placed it near the ragged burn.

"A vibrokey," she said matter of factly. "Something father devised. You can find anything with it, once you know the object's vibration pattern. And you can open anything with it. It experiments with all possible combinations of magnitudes and speeds of vibrations, until it simply hits the particular pattern needed. Without it I would never have found the burns I left, and without it we wouldn't get in. Father said it could shake a whole building down...."

Within seconds a panel less than a meter square slid back, and he and the girl were beneath it. Then it was closing. There was a passageway of some sort with a totally invisible source of illumination. Almost like what he'd run across beneath the abandoned gold mines on Venus, except....

"Now we have to move quickly," Lin interrupted his thoughts. "We have very little time. They know we're here."

"I didn't hear--"

* * * * *

"They know. Down this way." There was another burn, this time on the wall of the long, gently twisting tube. It hurt his eyes; it was like walking down a huge, brightly-polished gun barrel, except that it was not quite straight, and it was hard to tell just when it turned.

"Can you do what your father failed to do?" Cragin said. He asked only to hear his own voice; it gave him at least a finger-hold on reality.

"Perhaps, if there is time. I did not waste those weeks in the hospital."

A panel telescoped silently into itself. It opened on a cylindrical chamber that had seemingly been made of a single sheet of metal, so flawlessly had the banks of control boards which it contained been built into it. The soft green-blue glow with which the chamber was suffused was generated by an ingredient of the metal itself.

Circling the room at about shoulder height was a continuous row of what were obviously telescreens; below and above them were the banks of machines which were constructed according to an electro-mechanical concept with which Cragin was totally unfamiliar. According to Earth standards, it was so much junk, a distorted caricature of scientific equipment.

And in the center of the chamber, just at eye level, was what Cragin knew must be the "brain" of the entire assembly. A cylinder within a cylinder, its inner workings thoroughly screened by a shifting yet motionless opalescence through which he could not see. What lied in the heart of the thing would be as completely beyond his knowledge as were the visible machines over which it was master.

The girl watched him as his eyes remained fixed on it. "It's the power source, as far as we could determine. For everything."

"For the entire planet."

"For the entire solar system."

"Sure, but not today."

"Not only for today, but for all time. Gravity, warp, everything. If you don't believe me, try explaining the difference between Space as it exists inside and outside the Barrier sometime. Those--" she gestured toward the upper rows of machines, "control the power. When you know how to manipulate them, you can move any body within the system at will--in any direction, at any speed. The sun itself, if you want to."

"All right, I'll admit it's smooth," Cragin said. His hands went to his hips, resting just an inch or so above the butts of his Krells.

"You're a fantastic man, Cragin."

"_I_--" and he laughed a little. "The trouble is, Miss Griffin, you people just never know when to quit. The average Patrol officer may not have much imagination; police never were supposed to have. It's true if you spin a good enough yarn to begin with, you might get away with it. But if you take it too far--well, it's sort of like overacting a part. The audience just doesn't believe it any more. You might almost have convinced me, I'll admit. But as it is--"

His words were falling uselessly about him. Lin Griffin had begun her work near the largest of the telescreens. In a moment she had made it come alive, and in a moment more Cragin was watching the entire system. She made another adjustment, and he was watching Earth alone. A second later, he was watching Earth, Venus and Mercury in their stolid journeys around the sun.

Something that sounded very much like a comptometer was whining somewhere, and he watched as the girl began working a three dimensional orbit plot.

Cragin didn't interrupt. He knew that had he been sure that she was trying desperately to bluff out a well-staged fake, he would have stopped the whole performance but there was something in the way she had turned from him, had simply started at her work.

"I could take a chance now," she said suddenly. "Do you think I should take a chance, Cragin?" She looked full at him. Whatever she was talking about, he knew she was not kidding.

"Chance? I'm just a dumb cop, remember?"

"I think I could move it. I think I've uncovered the secret of at least Earth's orbit and axis control. It's the balance resultants that worry me ... and if I were wrong--"

"According to you, Earth is a dead duck anyway, princess. So go ahead and make a mistake. You fast-talked me into tailing you here. Or I fast-talked myself. But according to your story, you can move the whole damn system and make it grow little men with big ears right from this cozy little spot. O.K. I'm watching."

The look in her eyes said she thought of him as something only a little more than a Venusian crag lizard, and then as her hand moved toward a console of circuit stabilizers, the look changed. Her hand stopped where it was.

"You haven't been any help so far. I brought you because there was no getting rid of you. But Patrolman, right now we've got trouble. Do your duty or something--"

The voice simply said,

"You did not obey."

Cragin spun around, the Krell barrels coming level. But he found himself completely helpless to press their switches. The mind that had spoken within his own had taken control.

* * * * *

What Cragin saw was like a man. The similarity continued beyond the shape and size of body; it went further to his dress, and there it stepped backward in time. The wide shoulders supported a cloak of so dark a hue that its outlines seemed to become a part of the space around it; the large, perfectly proportioned body beneath them bore with the same arrogance a uniform of deep scarlet mail which seemed to shimmer although its wearer stood immobile. He wore no space-helmet, nor any weapon that Cragin could see.

"You have tampered with a work of the Owners," the voice said, "and have thereby broken their law." His cloak alone moved, as though sheltering a statue in a pre-storm breeze.

"That takes a death penalty in your book I suppose," Cragin said.

"There is another kind?"

"It's a cinch you never heard of civilized society. If there's anything we've got, it's lots of different penalties. But we've got our share of death, too. Ask goldilocks here."

"Death is nothing new to the people of Earth," the girl said evenly. "Nor are penalties."

"Yet you defied the warning."

"Because it might have meant life to us."

"Life and death are not yours to direct," the voice said. "That lies solely with the Owners. That is universal."

"By what universal right?" The girl's voice rose to the pitch of half anger, half contempt.

"How?" Cragin's voice was touched with the mixed overtones of curiosity and incredulity.

"By their own right. Through methods of their own."

"That's a hell of a scientific answer," Cragin said.

"It is no answer at all!" the girl said. She took a step forward toward the intruder, and there was high color in her cheeks. Only his cloak moved. "Perhaps you control your own destinies, if that is what you care to think. But not ours! For the use of your machinery, we will gladly repay you, in any medium that you desire that we are capable of supplying. But our role isn't that of intruder or wrong doer; it is simply one of desperation. With your machines, our planet, its life, might be saved. If you know of life, you know of the high value men put upon it. If you believe in--"

"Save your breath, honey. I think the bull of the woods here is trying to work up an angle. He's a phony. All he's got here are a bunch of damn good telescreens, and they've never moved anything yet.... Right, Buster?"

The figure in scarlet mail moved then. There was no sound, and hardly a show of motion as his fingers played over a switch-studded panel. The telescreens came to life. In each were pictured solar systems, some binary; one with three suns. All were circled about with planets turning in a precise geometry of motion. With barely a nod, the figure singled out the screen in which the binary and its brood of planets shown like so many pin-points of light rolling in eerie slow motion through Infinity. A finger flick that Cragin could not follow and--

Three planets suddenly plunged headlong; in seconds there was a blinding flash. Even as he shielded his eyes, Cragin knew that he had been witness to the destruction of an entire system. Although it had been light-years distant, and the telescreen had relayed the coruscations of its destruction instantaneously, Cragin knew that there was no way to deny what he had seen.

"Ours is the power," the voice said, "of life and of death."

He wanted desperately to convince himself that it was all part of the same colossal fake--that it was simply one of the most fabulous illusions ever devised behind which to direct a system or galaxy-wide bootlegging net. It had to be that.

It had to be, he realized with uncomfortable suddenness, because if it were not, it represented a science which had no regard for the laws that impeded men; one that had risen to far greater heights than that of which men boasted so proudly. And that of course could not be. It was that knowledge alone which had made life worth the living for centuries. Perhaps, when she had refused to speak of what she had seen, Lin Griffin had been wiser than he thought. But she had said--

Cragin felt himself becoming sickeningly mixed up.

And whether he wanted to believe his own senses or not, he knew that here was no phony, no fake, no illusion. Realizing it hurt like hell.

* * * * *

The cockiness was gone from his voice; he tried, but he couldn't keep it as he spoke.

"You are one of the Owners?" The girl said nothing. Her face was white, yet Cragin did not think her confidence was gone, just shaken for the moment. She had seen the hand of what seemed to be a man hurl a solar system to instantaneous destruction at will.

"I am not," the voice said. "I serve. I am of the second rank, as are all of my race, in the service of the Owners."

"You are here alone?"

The hand touched another stud, and a smaller screen wavered into luminescence. Cragin saw a fleet of spaceships, hovering in a geometrically perfect formation, any one ship of which would have been, by itself, capable of searing to dust the entire Stellar Patrol in a single, brief engagement. The formation of sleek juggernauts extended as far as the eye could see. It was like looking into two opposed mirrors.

"My guard," the voice said. "Manned by a race of the third rank."

"I think I get it. The Owners sit home and quietly rule the universe while somebody else does the--" Cragin cut himself off. It was the wrong track entirely. It must be done differently. "The woman and I," he said evenly, "would be willing servants."

For the briefest moment there was silence, save for the muffled gasp that Cragin heard at his shoulder. But the girl said nothing.

Cragin watched as the hand of the red-mailed figure grazed other banks of relays. In quick succession all telescreens went dark.

"On each screen," the voice said, "you have seen a complete system of planets. In this control point there are exactly three hundred screens. Throughout the Owners' domain there are perhaps slightly less than a full billion of such control points as these. And there have seldom been any which have not been so well concealed, in suitable relationship to the intelligence level of that system-group controlled, as to have yielded to discovery."

"You have not answered my proposal," Cragin retorted. "You're as aware as I am of what's going on in my mind or you wouldn't bother with all the gory details. You know we could serve, even on the--the 97th rank or so...."

"Proceed."

"Don't try to cover up your own slip. You talk slow, but you get a little ahead of yourself. This outfit is supposed to be cached away with such cleverness that an Earth-mind wouldn't be up to locating it. Only we did. We're not as dumb as we look, even to you. Your record would get a little smeared up if you did away with a couple of potential servants. The wheels might not like that. Tell me I'm wrong."

"You think quickly. You dare to offer a proposition to an emissary of the Owners."

"It's no proposition, it's a statement of fact."

Cragin could feel the sweat behind his ears start to roll down his neck, and his clothes were beginning to stick to his back again. But he had been in jams before. When you couldn't shoot, you had to talk. About anything that came into your head, but you had to talk.

"Servants of the second rank do not err, Earthman. Upon reexamining my logic, I find it sound. Yet in the process of carrying it to its ultimate, I conclude that inasmuch as the mathematical possibility exists that you are capable of being tested successfully for a servant of the menial ranks, a final decision warrants the deferment of your destruction pending administration of such examination."

"You mean we live."

"Failure to qualify as a servant will mean your destruction."

There was near hysteria in Lin Griffin's voice as it broke the spell Cragin's argument had created.

"Cragin, you can't realize what you're doing! You're selling us into sl--"

"Service, Lin Griffin," he cut her off. He knew he was bruising her arm with the quick pressure of his fingers. "Service to the Owners."

"Then follow me," the voice said.