Buchanan stared at the armored figure. He could see Maran’s anxiety. Turn Maran loose? Certainly the Altair Star’s engines could power a drive—and there was a fully-equipped boat that was capable of reaching the nearer constellations; add one or two of the big engines to its sturdy hull and you would have a ship that could cross the galaxy.
Buchanan thought of Liz Deffant. And then of Kochan’s granddaughter.
“Maran, do you know why I came here?” he said, his voice hollowly echoing around the inside of the helmet and setting up fresh echoes in the wreck of the liner.
“Yes,” said Maran, and Buchanan saw his eyes, always estimating, always planning, full of awareness. “I know, Buchanan. You came to find why you failed.”
“I didn’t fail!”
“You failed.”
“It was the robots!”
“No robot can defeat a determined man.”
“They took the screens down—they let the Altair Star sink into this!” And Buchanan indicated the glittering, menacing tunnel where the lost ships eddied slowly.
“Order the machines to build a drive, and I’ll tell you why you failed.” Buchanan felt a sense of helplessness. “You can’t escape the cruisers.”
“Buchanan, would it help if I said I believed that too?”
Buchanan could not face the self-questioning that stormed into his mind. He said quickly: “Yes, Maran!”
“Then I promise you, Buchanan, that I have every reason to believe escape from the Singularity impossible.”
“Tell me. Where I failed. Why—this.” And he gestured heavily to the gap beyond where the bridge had been, and where Preston had led the assault on the machines in the last vain effort to hold back the long night.
What did it matter that Maran should have a lifeboat, however powered? Buchanan had to know why the robots of the Altair Star had quietly surrendered seven hundred lives.
“The machines were faced with an anomaly,” said Maran.
“I know that.”
“Then you should have expected their reaction.”
Buchanan thought of the last moments of the Altair Star. Think calmly, logically, coherently, at such a time? Yet he had done what he thought best. At the Court of Inquiry there had even been congratulations.
“That’s all?”
“Buchanan, faced with the impossible, they decided that their function was at an end.” And then he could imagine the machines’ calm decision—could almost hear their flat voices, almost see the relays flickering to the inevitable conclusion.
“They gave up because—”
“Because they decided that their context could not be, Buchanan. If their surroundings were becoming impossible, so were they!”
Buchanan repeated hollowly: “If their surroundings were impossible, so were they! Everything about them could not be—could not exist!—so they stopped!”
“Now you have it,” said Maran. “Accept it.”
“You didn’t.”
Maran was almost sympathetic. “I am Maran.” He was silent for a moment, and then his voice boomed around the hulk: “Call to your machines, Buchanan.”
Buchanan laughed. He had found Maran’s weakness, The man had forgotten that the machines were outside the Quasi-warp’s protective fields.
“You’ll have to awaken the dead,” he said. “Maran, how can I reach the memory-banks?”
“Watch!”
Maran spoke and the life-raft seemed to come alive. Its small engines jerked and thrashed at his commands, and the little vessel shivered as power screamed from its drive. Dazed by the blast which rocked the big liner’s hulk, Buchanan became aware only gradually of the increasing strength of the Quasi-warp.
“Don’t!” he yelled suddenly, aware that the tenuous glories of the eerie field were creeping beyond the space where the bridge had been.
“Maran—don’t let it touch them!”
Horrified, he watched as the bizarre forces of time-locked tunnel and strange Quasi-warp met and merged. The strange warp began to invest more of the Altair Star; but Buchanan’s eyes were riveted on the splayed, fresh bodies.
“It has to be done!” boomed Maran.
“But they—they’re not dead!”
He would have hurled himself at Maran had he not been rendered stiff with fresh horror by the sight of the bodies; for, as the Quasi-warp reached them, merging with the tunnel’s coruscating white-gold, the processes of death reasserted themselves; and Buchanan saw time run its course. The bodies decayed. Preston was a ghastly gray-green sight, his handsome features billowing with mold; and, within seconds, the features had gone and only white bone remained. Time surged on and bone crumbled, turned to dust, was swept about in the gusting fields so powerfully countered by the combined drives of the station and the little raft. Buchanan breathed a prayer.
It was for himself. He did not want to think of what was happening throughout the lounges and private cabins of the Altair Star.
“They were always dead!” Maran snapped. “Buchanan, nothing can reverse death—nothing! It was held back, but that’s all—there was never anything you could do for them!” There was more than anxiety in his voice, Buchanan recognized; the man was oppressed by the aura of the doomed ship. The ghosts clamored throughout its deck, now released from some weird limbo that had held them, while outside, in the slowly wheeling Galaxy, three years had passed.
“Buchanan, order the machines to regard me as commander, and then return to the station!” Buchanan moved ponderously toward the small dust-heaps. Why not help Maran? There was nothing he could do now for the Altair Star. Its frozen moment was over. Only he was left, after the passage of the years. The time-locked tunnel had released the undead. The fabric of its grotesque white-gold fields had been burst open. Why not let Maran get what he wanted from its depths?
He passed more heaps of dust where clusters of men and women had waited. Terrified groups, facing eternity together. He reached a master-console and was not even surprised when it glowed into life at his touch. He gave the brief instructions and returned.
“Ask Miss Deffant to watch,” Maran said.
Watch what? But Buchanan did not care.
Maran moved decisively. He pointed to the battered raft, edging Buchanan toward the port. “Go back, Buchanan. Go to Miss Deffant! Tell her Maran said she should watch!”
“I’ll tell her,” said Buchanan.
The last he saw of Maran was his broad back, unnaturally huge in the deep-space armor, radiant with the fires of the Quasi-warp.
CHAPTER 20
Liz Deffant saw the return of the life-raft with anguish. She rushed to the hold to see Buchanan, huge and armored against the gold-shot tiny black pits which opened in the fabric of the station. She waited as the robots took off his suit
She knew that he had seen things too terrible to speak of.
“Come,” she said.
Buchanan did not notice that she was unsurprised to see him return alone. She half pushed, half led him to the grav-chute and the cabin above. Only when they reached the bridge did Buchanan speak.
“Liz,” he said with a disbelieving calm, “Liz, they were there. They were all there—in the ship.”
“Later, Al,” whispered Liz. “See!”
Buchanan automatically reached for sensor-pads as the big screen burst into life. Scanners roved; the screen pulsed, cleared, and settled. It was the Altair Star.
Buchanan and Liz Deffant were fascinated by the rippling, bunding, utterly alien surge of power as the massive engines of the ship began to weave the impossible, monstrous web of forces summoned into being by Maran’s strange genius. They saw a great band of energies eerily combine to form a single Quasi-warp that pushed aside the eddying configurations of the time-locked tunnel.