"The control room?"
She nodded. "That's where I'm supposed to bring you. It's four levels farther up, down an access passage marked bridge."
"You've seen it? You've been in this ship before?"
"Oh, no. I just know. Come on, Boysie. We have to hurry now."
He shrugged and turned to follow her—then slipped and almost fell. He caught himself easily enough in the point-one gravity, glanced to the floor to see what had been underfoot.
A string of sonic beads lay before the locked steel doors of the slave unit of the Planning Machine. Sister Delta Four's beads.
Boysie Gann stared at them, knowing at that moment who it was who was inside those doors, striving with what frantic eagerness he could very well understand to come once again into communion with the Planning Machine.
The door marked bridge hung ajar. From inside it a pale beam of yellow light fanned across the landing.
"Come on, Boysie," said Quarla Snow clearly. "There's nothing to be afraid of. He's waiting for us."
Gann entered through the lighted door, his hand holding hers, prepared for almost anything.
Beyond the door was a vast circular room, which surrounded the shaft passageway. It must have extended, Gann thought, to the hull of the ship. The floor was crowded with clustered gray-metal cabinets, all linked with a many-colored jungle of heavy cables hanging from the ceiling. There were observation stations, instrument technicians' duty posts, chairs for navigators and weapons officers. Every station was empty. Every station but one.
There was one human figure in the control room, and it was the source of the light.
"Harry!" cried Quarla Snow.
And Gann echoed, "Harry Hickson! You! You're the Starchild, the one who sent that Writ of Liberation!"
He glanced up at them casually, then returned to his work. He sat on a stool at a console near the shaft. His head bent over flashing scopes and screens. His broad, stubby-fingered hands were moving swiftly, twisting verniers, touching buttons, clicking keys. And the golden light streamed out of him as from a sun.
He looked younger than when Gann had seen him, no longer wasted, no longer worn. He had the same straggling beard, glowing now as if made of incandescent wire, and the same bald head. And atop that head there crawled the same infant pyropod, its bright eyes glaring at Gann and the girl.
At last he turned away from his instruments and regarded them. "I do as I was commanded," he said casually. His eyes were golden too, glowing like the rest of him; but he saw them, and there was something like affection, something like love, in his look. He raised one arm, crooked the hand and wrist in the sign of the Swan, and said, "The Star tells me what my work is. It is the Star's purposes which matter, not me." The tiny pyropod hissed and squealed softly, glaring at them with its pulsing eyes. Casually and affectionately, the radiant creature that had been Harry Hickson reached up and caressed the creature. It settled down.
"Did you put out the Sun?" Gann demanded. "The stars? How?"
"Not I," said Harry Hickson, "but the Star." He made that serpentine, looping sign again. "Ten years the Star has planned for me. Ten years ago it sent the first star wink on its way to Earth, then a dozen more, all arriving at the same moment. I could not do that, Boysie Gann, but there is nothing impossible to the Star. As you will know."
He reached out a hand as he spoke. It looks like a benediction, thought Boysie Gann; but it was something more than that. From the end of the golden man's arm a cloud of golden light swirled, shaped itself into a tiny pulsing sphere, reached out and lightly touched Gann.
He jumped back, his nerves crackling. But he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He said harshly, "What's that? What are you doing?"
"The Star's will," said Harry Hickson, and bent again to his board. His bright fingers flew again over the knobs and keys, while the tiny pyropod scuttled to the back of his head, peering at them with pulsing yellow eyes.
"Sister Delta Four has achieved communion with the Machine," he said softly, not taking his eyes from the scopes and screens. "She has programmed it with sensing data so that it can link with the old Machine on Earth. In thirty hours its signals will be received on Earth. In thirty hours after that the return will be received here."
Gann cried, "But the old Machine's gone mad! You should know! You did it." The radiant man did not answer, did not even look up. "We can't let her establish contact," shouted Gann. "And General Wheeler—where is he? He's mad too—or mad for power, which is the same thing. How can you just sit there? What's he up to while we're wasting time here?"
"As to that," said the golden man, glancing up and around him, "we will hear from General Wheeler very soon."
And Wheeler's harsh laugh rang out. "Very soon indeed!" his voice rapped, coming from nowhere. "I have you now, all of you. I have mastery of the Togethership! Its weapons systems are mine—and that means the worlds are mine! All of them! As soon as I finish disposing of you!"
A soft sliding sound of metal reinforced his words.
Behind the jungle of looped cables, behind the vacant stations for navigators and communications officers, portholes were opening in the steel wall. And through them the slim, bright snouts of energy weapons were lifting themselves, precisely centering themselves on target.
The targets were Boysie Gann, the girl, and the glowing golden creature that once had been Harry Hickson. General Wheeler had captured control of the Together ship'% armaments—both outside the ship and in.
Their lives now rested in the crook of his finger on a remote-automated trigger. One man, with one motion, could destroy them all. And that man was mad.
16
The radiant man looked up. "Thrust and counter," he said gravely. "Action and reaction. Challenge and response." His golden hand turned a lever on the panel before him, and one of the dozen blank viewscreens over his head lighted up to show the hard, bronzed face of Machine General Wheeler, his steel-gray eyes alight with the glow of triumph. "He is our challenge," said Harry Hickson, and returned to his screens and scopes.
Wheeler rasped, "You have no response! You are defeated. All of you! You and the foolish, romantic illusion of freedom."
He was glorying in his moment, Gann realized. Quarla Snow crept close to him. Unconsciously he circled her with his arms, both of them staring at the screen and the deadly snouts of the energy weapons that circled it.
"You are victims of the romantic fallacy," Wheeler proclaimed, his bronzed hand stroking the triggers that would destroy them. "That is understandable. The animal part of man always frets under discipline. It seeks the monkey goal of freedom, and that cannot be tolerated, for the good of all.
"Especially," he added, his steel-gray eyes gleaming, "for the good of that man who must think for all. Caesar. Stalin. Napoleon. Me!"
Gann felt Quarla's slight body shaking, and tightened his grasp. If only there were some way of reaching Wheeler! Some weapon. Some hope of engaging him before he could touch the trigger. The radiant golden creature that had been Harry Hickson was nodding silently, abstractedly, not looking up but surely hearing Wheeler as he orated to his victims.
"You have been tolerated," cried Wheeler, "because you could do little harm. In the past one free man could not prevail against the forces of order. A free savage with a stone ax can damage his society in only a very limited way before it reacts to control him. But the advance of technology has changed all that.