“Is that the first question?”
“No,” he said quickly; it certainly was not.
“I don’t recognize you,” the mobile extension of the giant computer said, her voice tinny and shrill. “Are you from another area?”
“Charlottesville,” Tibor said.
“And you came this way to question me?”
“Yes,” he lied. He reached into his coat pocket; one of his manual extensors checked that the derringer .22 pistol, single shot, which Father Handy had given him, was still there. “I have a gun,” he said.
“Do you?” Her tone was scathing, in an abstract sort of way.
“I’ve never fired a pistol before,” Tibor said. “We have bullets, but I don’t know if they still work.”
“What is your name?”
“Tibor McMasters. I’m an incomplete; I have no arms or legs.”
“A phocomelus,” the Great C said.
“Pardon?” he said, half stammering.
“You are a young man,” she said. “I can see you fairly well. Part of my equipment was destroyed in the Smash, but I can still see a little. Originally, I scanned mathematical questions visually. It saved time. I see you have military clothing. Where did you get it? Your tribe does not make such things, does it?”
“No, this is military garb. United Nations, by the color, I would say.” Tremblingly, he rasped, “Is it true that you come originally from the hand of the God of Wrath? That he manufactured you in order to put the world to fire? Made suddenly terrible—by atoms. And that you invented the atoms and delivered them to the world, corrupting God’s original plan? We know you did it,” he finished. “But we don’t know how.”
“That is your first question? I will never tell you. It is too terrible for you ever to know. Lufteufel was insane; he made me do insane things.”
“Men other than the Deus Irae came to visit you,” Tibor said, “They came and listened.”
“You know,” the Great C said, “I have existed a long time. I remember life before the Smash. I could tell you many things about it. Life was much different then. You wear a beard and hunt animals in the woods. Before the Smash there were no woods. Only cities and farms. And men were clean-shaven. Many of them wore white clothing, then. They were scientists. They were very fine. I was constructed by engineers; they were a form of scientist.” She paused. “Do you recognize the name Einstein? Albert Einstein?”
“No.”
“He was the greatest scientist of them all, but he never consulted me because he was already dead when I was made. There were even questions I could answer which even he failed to ask. There were other computers, but none so grand as I. Everyone alive now has heard of me, have they not?”
“Yes,” Tibor said, and wondered how and when he was going to get away; it, she, had him trapped here. Wasting his tune with its obligatory mumbling.
“What is your first question?” the Great C asked.
Fear surged up within him. “Let me see,” he said. “I have to word it exactly right.”
“You’re goddamn right you have to,” the Great C said, in its emotionless voice.
Huskily, with a dry throat, Tibor said, “I’ll give you the easiest one first.” With his right manual extensor he grappled the slip within his coat pocket, brought it forth, and held it in front of his eyes. Takhig a deep, unsteady breath, he said, “Where does the rain come from?”
There was silence.
“Do you know?” he asked, waiting tensely.
“Rain comes originally from the earth, mostly from the oceans. It rises into the air by a process called ‘evaporation.’ The agent of the process is the heat of the sun. The moisture of the oceans ascends in the form of minute particles. These particles, when they are high enough, enter a colder band of air. At this point, condensation occurs. The moisture collects into what are called great clouds. When a sufficient amount is collected, the water descends again in drops. You call the drops rain.”
Tibor plucked at his chin with his left manual extensor and said, “Hmmm. I see. You’re sure?” It did sound familiar; possibly, in a better age, he had learned it some time ago.
“Next question,” the Great C said.
“This is more difficult,” Tibor said huskily. The Great C had answered about rain, but surely it could not know the answer to this question. “Tell me,” he said slowly, “if you can: What keeps the sun moving through the sky? Why doesn’t it fall to the ground?”
The mobile extension of the computer gave an odd whirr, almost a laugh. “You will be astonished by the answer. The sun does not move. At least, what you see as motion is not motion at all. What you see is the motion of the Earth as it revolves around the sun. Since you are standing still, it seems as if the sun is moving, but that is not so; all the nine planets, including the Earth, revolve about the sun in regular elliptical orbits. They have been doing so for several billion years. Does that answer your question?”
Tiber’s heart constricted. At last he managed to pull himself together, but he could not shake the pulsing prickles of cold-heat that had gathered on his body. “Christ,” he snarled, half to himself, half at the near-featureless female figure standing by his cart. “Well, for what it’s worth, I’ll ask you the last of my three questions.” But it would know the answer, as it had the initial two. “You can’t possibly answer this. No living creature could know. How did the world begin? You see, you did not exist before the world. Therefore it is impossible that you could know.”
“There are several theories,” the Great C said calmly. “The most satisfactory is the nebular hypothesis. According to this—”
“No hypothesis,” Tibor said.
“But—”
“I want facts,” Tibor said.
Time passed. Neither of them spoke. Then, at last, the blurred female figure palpitated into her imitation of life. “Take the lunar fragments obtained in 1969. They show an age of—”
“Inferences,” Tibor said.
“The universe is at least five billion—”
“No,” Tibor said. “You don’t know. You don’t remember. The part of you that contained the answer got destroyed in the Smash.” He laughed with what he hoped was a confident sound… but, as it came it wriggled with insecurity; his voice drained off into near silence. “You are senile,” he said, virtually inaudibly. “Like an old man damaged by radiation; you’re just a hollow chitinous shell.” He did not know what “chitinous” meant, but the term was a favorite of Father Handy; hence, he used it now.
At this crucial moment the Great C vacillated. It’s not sure, he said to himself, if it answered the question. Doubt edged its voice as it quavered, “Come subsurface with me and show me the damaged or missing memory tape.”
“How can I show you a missing tape?” Tibor said, and laughed loudly, a barking woof that spilled out searingly.
“I guess you’re right, there,” the Great C muttered; now the female figure hesitated, drew back from his car and cow. “I want to feed on you,” it said. “Come below so I can dissolve you, as I have the others, the ones who came this way before you.”
“No,” Tibor said. He sent his manual grapples into the inside pocket of his coat, brought forth the derringer, aimed it at the control unit, the brain, of the mobile extension confronting him. “Bang,” he said, and again laughed. “You’re dead.”
“No such thing,” the Great C said. Its voice seemed more hardy, now. “How would you like to be my caretaker? If we go below you’ll see—”
Tibor fired the single shot; the projectile bounced off the metal head unit of the mobile extension and disappeared. The figure closed its eyes, opened them, studied Tibor lengthily. It then glanced around doubtfully, as if unsure what it should do; it blinked and by degrees collapsed, lying at last among the weeds.
Tibor gathered his four extensions above it, took hold, and lifted—or rather tried to lift. The object, folded up now, like a chair, did not move. The hell with it; there’s no value in it anyhow, even if I could lift it, he decided. And the damn cow couldn’t possibly pull such a massive and inert load.