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badlife in here. He sank down to the floor and wrapped his arms around the
base of the scanner-speaker console. Once long ago the machine had given him
a thing that was soft and warm when he held it... he closed his eyes.
"What are my orders?" he asked sleepily. Here in this chamber all was steady
and comforting, as always.
"First, do not tell the badlife of these orders. Then, do what the man
Hemphill tells you to do. No harm will come to me."
"He has a bomb."
"I watched his approach, and I disabled his bomb, even before he entered to
attack me. His pistol can do me no serious harm. Do you think one badlife can
conquer me?"
"No." Smiling, reassured, he curled into a more comfortable position."Tell me
about my parents." He had heard the story a thousand times, but it was always
good.
"Your parents were good, they gave themselves to me. Then, during a great
battle, the badlife killed them. The badlife hated them, as they hate you.
When they say they like you, they lie, with the evil untruth of all badlife.
"But your parents were good, and each gave me a part of their bodies, and
from the parts I made you. Your parents were destroyed completely by the
badlife, or I would have saved even their non-functioning bodies for you to
see. That would have been good."
"Yes."
"The two badlife have searched for you. Now they are resting. Sleep,
Goodlife."
He slept.
Awakening, he remembered a dream in which two people had beckoned him to join
them on the stage of the theater. He knew they were his mother and father,
though they looked like the two badlife. The dream faded before his waking
mind could grasp it firmly.
He ate and drank, while the machine talked to him.
"If the man Hemphill wants to be guided to the strategic housing, take him
there. I will capture him there, and let him escape later to try again. When
finally he can be provoked to fight no more, I will destroy him. But I mean
to preserve the life of the female. You and she will produce more goodlife
for me."
"Yes!" It was immediately clear what a good thing that would be. They would
give parts of their bodies to the machine, so new goodlife bodies could be
built, cell by cell. And the man Hemphill, who punished and damaged with his
fast-swinging arm, would be utterly destroyed.
When he rejoined the badlife, the man Hemphill barked questions and
threatened punishment until Goodlife was confused and a little frightened.
But Goodlife agreed to help, and was careful to reveal nothing of what the
machine planned. Maria was more pleasant than ever. He touched her whenever
he could.
Hemphill demanded to be taken to the strategic housing. Goodlife agreed at
once; he had been there many times. There was a high-speed elevator that made
the fifty mile journey easy.
Hemphill paused, before saying: "You're too damn willing, all of a sudden."
Turning his face to Maria. "I don't trust him."
This badlife thought he was being false! Goodlife was angered; the machine
never lied, and no properly obedient goodlife could lie.
Hemphill paced around, and finally demanded: "Is there any route that
approaches this strategic housing in such a way that the machine cannot
possibly watch us?"
Goodlife thought. "I believe there is one such way. We will have to carry
extra tanks of air, and travel many miles through vacuum." The machine had
said to help Hemphill, and help he would. He hoped he could watch when the
male badlife was finally destroyed.
There had been a battle, perhaps fought while men on Earth were hunting the
mammoth with spears. The berserker had met some terrible opponent, and had
taken a terrible lance-thrust of a wound. A cavity two miles wide at the
widest, and fifty miles deep, had been driven in by a sequence of shaped
atomic charges, through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of
armor, and had been stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried
unliving heart. The berserker had survived, and crushed its enemy, and soon
afterward its repair machines had sealed over the outer opening of the wound,
using extra thicknesses of armor. It had meant to gradually rebuild the whole
destruction; but there was so much life in the galaxy, and so much of it was
stubborn and clever. Somehow battle damage accumulated faster than it could
be repaired. The huge hole was used as a conveyor path, and never much worked
on.
When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity-what little of it his tiny suit lamp
could show-he felt a shrinking fear that was greater than any in his memory.
He stopped on the edge of the void, drifting there with his arm instinctively
around Maria. She had put on a suit and accompanied him, without being asked,
without protest or eagerness.
They had already come an hour's journey from the airlock, through weightless
vacuum inside the great machine. Goodlife had led the way through section
after section, with every show of cooperation. Hemphill had the pistol ready,
and the bomb, and two hundred feet of cord tied around his left arm.
But when Hemphill recognized the once-molten edge of the berserker's great
scar for what it was, his delicate new hope of survival left him. This, the
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