There was a bustle in the outer office and it sounded like Miss Fink getting ready to leave, or maybe it was the new girl coming back with the supplies. In any case it was late, and he had to go now.
Quickly, before he could change his mind, he ran full tilt at the window, his weight bursting through the glass, hurtled the twenty-three stories to the street below. Miss Fink heard the breaking glass and screamed, then screamed louder when she came into the room. Martin, complaining about the noise, followed her, but shut up when he saw what had happened. A bit of glass crunched under his shoes when he looked out of the window. The doll-like figure of Pachs was visible in the center of the gathering crowd, sprawled from sidewalk to street and bent at an awful angle as it followed the step of the curb.
"Oh God, Mr. Martin, oh God look at this…." Miss Fink wailed.
Martin went and stood next to her in front of the drawing board and looked at the page still pinned there. It was neatly done, well drawn and carefully inked.
In the first panel was a self-portrait of Pachs working on a page, bent over this same drawing board. In the second panel he was sitting back and washing out his brush, in the third standing. In the fourth panel the artist stood before the window, nicely rendered in chiaroscuro with backlighting. Five was a forced perspective shot from above, down the vertical face of the building with the figure hurtling through the air toward the pavement below.
In the last panel, in clear and horrible detail, the old man was bent broken and bloody over the wrecked fender of the car that was parked there: the spectators looked on, horrified.
"Look at that, will you," Martin said disgustedly, tapping the drawing with his thumb. "When he went out the window he missed the car by a good two yards. Didn't I always tell you he was never any good at getting the details right?"
SURVIVAL PLANET
But this war was finished years before I was born! How can one robot torpedo — fired that long ago — still be of any interest?" Dall the Younger was overly persistent — it was extremely lucky for him that Ship-Commander Lian Stane, both by temperament and experience, had a tremendous reserve of patience.
"It has been fifty years since the Greater Slavocracy was defeated — but that doesn't mean eliminated," Commander Stane said. He looked through the viewport of the ship, seeing ghostlike against the stars the pattern of the empire they had fought so long to destroy. "The Slavocracy expanded unchecked for over a thousand years. Its military defeat didn't finish it, just made the separate worlds accessible to us. We are still in the middle of that reconstruction, guiding them away from a slave economy."
"That I know all about," Dall the Younger broke in with a weary sigh. "I've been working on the planets since I came into the force. But what has that got to do with the Mosaic torpedo that we're tracking? There must have been a billion of them made and fired during the war. How can a single one be of interest this much later?"
"If you had read the tech reports," Stane said, pointing to the thumb-thick folder on the chart table, "you would know all about it." This advice was the closest the commander had ever come to censure. Dall the Younger had the good grace to flush slightly and listen with applied attention.
"The Mosaic torpedo is a weapon of space war, in reality a robot-controlled spaceship. Once directed it seeks out its target, defends itself if necessary, then destroys itself and the ship it has been launched against by starting the uncontrollable cycle of binding-energy breakdown."
"I never realized that they were robot-operated," Dall said. "I thought robots had an ingrained resistance to killing people?"
"In-built rather than ingrained would be more accurate," Stane said judiciously. "Robotic brains are just highly developed machines with no inherent moral sense. That is added afterward. It has been a long time since we built man-shaped robots with human-type brains. This is the age of the specialist, and robots can specialize far better than men ever could. The Mosaic torpedo brains have no moral sense — if anything they are psychotic, overwhelmed by a death wish. Though there are, of course, controls on how much they can kill. All the torpedoes ever used by either side had mass detectors to defuse them when they approached an object with planetary mass, since the reaction started by a torpedo could just as easily destroy a world as a ship. You can understand our interest when in the last months of the war, we picked up a torpedo fused only to detonate a planet.
"All the data from its brain was filed and recently interpreted. The torpedo was aimed at the fourth planet of the star we are approaching now."
"Anything on the record about this planet?" Dall asked.
"Nothing; it is an unexplored system at least as far as our records are concerned. But the Greater Slavocracy knew enough about this planet to want to destroy it. We are here to find out why."
Dall the Younger furrowed his brow, chewing at the idea. "Is that the only reason?" he finally asked. "Since we stopped them from wiping out this planet, that would be the end of it, I should think."
"It's thinking like that that shows why you are the low ranker on this ship," Gunner Arnild snapped as he came in. Arnild had managed to grow old in a very short-lived service, losing in the process his patience for everything except his computers and guns. "Shall I suggest some of the possibilities that have occurred even to me? Firstly — any enemy of the Slavocracy could be a friend of ours. Or conversely, there may be an enemy here that threatens the entire human race, and we may need to set off a Mosaic ourselves to finish the job the Slavers started. Then again, the Slavers may have had something here — like a research center that they would rather have destroyed than let us see. Wouldn't you say that any one of these would make the planet worth investigating?"
"We shall be in the atmosphere within twenty hours," Dall said as he vanished through the lower hatch. "I have to check the lubrication on the drive gears."
"You're too easy on the kid," Gunner Arnild said, staring moodily at the approaching star, already dimmed by the forward filters.
"And you're too hard," Stane told him. "So I guess it evens out. You forget he never fought the Slavers."
Skimming the outer edges of the atmosphere of the fourth planet, the scout ship hurled itself through the measured length of a helical orbit, then fled back into the safety of space while the ship's robot brain digested and made copies of the camera and detector instrument recordings. The duplicates were stored in a message torp, and only when the torp had started back to base did Commander Stane bother personally to examine the results of their survey.
"We're dispensable now," he said, relaxing. "So the best thing we can do is to drop down and see what we can stir up." Arnild grunted agreement, his index fingers unconsciously pressing invisible triggers. They leaned over the graphs and photographs spread out on the table. Dall peered between their shoulders and flipped through the photographs they tossed aside. He was first to speak.