An angry peal from the linkbox. "That is self-evidently false," sang the cool voice of Sister Delta Four. "No star possesses any such power to share. No mind in the universe is more powerful than the Machine."
She paused while the black box snarled again. "If the falsehood is Harry Hickson's, the truth will be extracted when he is captured," she translated sweetly. "If the falsehood is yours, Major Gann, you are in grave danger of the Body Bank."
He cried, "I'm telling the truth! I'm loyal to the Plan of Man!"
The box sang; the girl intoned, "The Machine rejects such merely verbal assurances. One moment. The Machine is receiving additional data through another input."
Queerly, the girl's voice was fading. Gann blinked at her. She seemed to be moving—dwindling—as if she were falling away from him, down through the long, dark emptiness of space. It was as if Gann were looking at her through a zoom lens, pulling away. She receded a thousand yards . . .
Then she was back. Gann felt a moment's vertigo, as if the Planner's suite down in the bowels of the earth were somehow dancing a slow waltz. The feeling passed.
The linkbox whirred menacingly, and Sister Delta Four sang, "The Machine terminates this interview." A sharp hum from the linkbox. "It reminds you that unplanned ideas, like unplanned words and unplanned actions, must be severely corrected. But it reserves judgment on your ultimate disposition."
Her white, perfect face was smiling slightly, perhaps in contemplation of her instant rapture that was soon to come, when the buried electrodes would excite her brain to the incomparable bliss of electronic communion. But the linkbox was not yet through with her. It buzzed again, harshly.
"The Machine finds your narrative incomplete," she recited melodiously, contemplating Gann with her dark, serene eyes. "You have not identified the Starchild. You have revealed no facts about the Together-ship. You have not accounted for the so-called Writ of Liberation. You have not explained how you got into the vault of the Machine."
Gann shook his head. "I don't know what to tell you," he said. The box whirred implacably.
"Your statements are inadequate," Sister Delta Four sang again. "But the interview is concluded . . ."
There was that surge of unreal motion again. Gann gripped his chair. This time even the girl felt it; her perfect lips opened, her eyes shook a flicker of surprise.
The linkbox twittered urgently. At the same moment loud bells and sirens began to sound elsewhere in the Planner's warrens.
"Earth temblors," the girl began haltingly, "have been detected at several points . . ."
Then the linkbox crashed out a loud, despairing sound. Sister Delta Four gasped. Instinctively she reached out and caught Boysie Gann's arm. "Pyropods!" she cried. "The . . . the . . . Oh, you've got to help! The Planner's hall has been invaded by pyropods! Dozens of them! They're there now!"
The private room in which Sister Delta Four had been interrogating Boysie Gann was one tiny office in the immense network of corridors and chambers that was the administrative and living headquarters of the Planner. It had been locked, but the door opened instantly to the pattern of the girl's fingertips on the knob. It flung wide, and Gann and the girl ran through* the open doorway, into a wide, gold-walled hall. Broad as a highway, tall as a two-story building, it ran straight through the heart of a mountain, the Planner's rooms opening off it at intervals all the way. It was a great ceremonial thoroughfare, lined with glittering gold and crystal statuary, hung in gold brocades, paneled with murals and viewscreens.
And it was filled with the reeking, choking, dusty smoke of jet exhausts. i
A scream of some huge rocketing body ripping through the air smote their ears. A human shout of anguish—the cries of men taken by surprise—the thin, ear-splitting volley of laser guns. In all the noise and confusion Gann saw one thing clearly—saw it, grabbed the girl by her arm and pulled her back into the shelter of the doorway.
A pyropod was rocketing toward them down the hall.
It roared at them at a speed nearing Mach One; in the cramped quarters of the hall the shriek of its passage was physically painful, deafening. And the look of the thing was that of an avenging angel come to Earth, set on destruction.
It was a nightmare come to life. Wilder than the most fantastic of the Planner's toys, it was shaped a little like a scorpion, larger than a charging buffalo. Its eyes were great mirrors with stalked receptors at the center—natural radio telescopes, glowing red. Its jaws were mighty enough to crunch steel bars. Its talons could rip through armor plate. Its body was armored with darkly shining scales; a long, wicked, saber-like tail was arched over its back. And the whole thing was screaming through the air of the tunnel toward them.
The girl cried out in fear; Gann pulled her head against his chest, quieting her—though in truth the sound of her terror was lost in the ear-splitting din of the pyropod's passage. This was no baby, like the one Gann had played with on Harry Hickson's reef. It was an armored juggernaut, full-grown, capable of battling a Plan space cruiser on equal terms.
It passed them and rocketed into a group of armed guardsmen, knotted a hundred yards down the hall. They were firing wildly with laser and projectile weapons; it struck them, passed . . . and they were gone. Only a jackstraw heap of corpses and stirring near-dead marked where they had been.
"Great Machine!" gasped Sister Delta Four, her impeccable serenity gone, her black hood thrown back, the bright metal plaque blinking out of a terrified face. "What was that?"
"You told me," snapped Gann. "Pyropod! If it comes back, we're dead!"
She whimpered and tugged at his arm. "Back in here ... we can hide."
"No! There are others. If one finds us this way we don't have a chance. But if I can get a gun . . ."
He stared down the broad, long hall. The bright jet of the pyropod's tail was out of sight. Perhaps the monster had gone into another room, or down another hallway. Meanwhile, the guardsmen were still in a heap of death.
He came to a fast decision. "Julie—I mean ... oh, never mind that. Listen! These things can be killed if you know where to aim. I'm going after a gun. You stay in the room!" And he was off, running as hard as he could, straight down the broad hall toward the dying men. He fought the temptation to skulk along the sides. There was no concealment here. If the creature came back, he would be dead; it was that simple. His only chance was speed. He did that hundred yards in Olympic time.
And it was nearly too slow, at that. Gasping, wheezing, his chest and muscles on fire, he heard a sudden growing volume of sound and looked up. A howl of sound was coming toward him, and behind it, almost as fast as the sound itself, a pyropod was rocketing at him.
He flung himself to the floor.
The thing missed him by inches; he caught a quick glimpse of metal jaws and crystal tusks, of enormous talons reaching out for him; then it was past, and he was up and running.
He heard the thing crashing, smashing, battering into the statuary and the walls of the hall, stopping itself at heedless cost, but he did not turn. He leaped to the fallen guardsmen, caught up a laser gun, checked its charge and whirled.
The pyropod had completed its turn.
It caught Gann in its pulsing red headlamps. It was screaming at him, a living battle rocket. He fired one maximum-blast shot into its eye, and tumbled to the ground again.
It screamed in agony as it passed over him. It blundered blindly into a wall, sideswiped a cluster of statuary, gouged out a bright streak in the hard metal of the corridor. Its jet flamed brightly and faded. Gann fired one more shot, then covered his head with his hands.
There was a great distant explosion. He felt the shock waves pass over him. Some of the corpses near him were stirred by the thrust of it, their bleeding limbs flopping wildly, their unseeing faces nodding.