The Invincible Read online

  It was astonishing that this ghastly battle just kept going. A few seconds more and the bottom of the ravine and the entire area around the Cyclops would reach the melting point. The rocks would sag, collapse and change into lava. Indeed, the observers were now able to see the fiery glistening stream make its way toward the exit of the gorge a few miles away.

  Horpach wondered whether the electronic switches of the Cyclops’ antimatter cannon were stuck, for it seemed unlikely that the cloud would persist in attacking an adversary who dealt it such destructive blows. However, after the probe had been given instructions to climb still higher, and had reached the border of the troposphere, the image on the picture screen proved to Horpach that he was mistaken.

  By now the visual field comprised some fifteen square miles. The entire jagged terrain was in motion. The men watched as black conglobulations oozed forth from the darkly spotted rocky slopes, emerging from fissures and caves haltingly, as if photographed in slow motion (of course this optical illusion was only caused by the distance). The black billowing masses rose upwards, fused and grew denser during their journey as they pushed ahead in the direction of the battle scene. For several minutes it looked as if the dark avalanches that were continually thrown into the battle zone from the rear might suppress the atomic fires, suffocating them by their sheer mass and extinguish the flames. Yet Horpach knew better; he was well aware of the energy reserves contained in the manmade monster.

  An earsplitting, endless roll of thunder roared from the loudspeakers and filled the control center. At the same time flames two miles high bored into the shapeless mass of the attacking cloud. The burning pillars rotated slowly, forming a fiery mill. The air vibrated in layers, which bent in the heat as its core shifted.

  Inexplicably, the Cyclops now drove backwards and retreated gradually toward the glen’s exit, without halting its attack for a single second. Perhaps the machine’s electronic brain had considered that the atomic explosions would cause the rock walls to burst and fall on it. Although the Cyclops could survive such a calamity, its maneuverability might be affected considerably. For whatever reason, the Cyclops tried to reach open terrain, and in this broiling turmoil the observers could no longer distinguish between the fire from its cannons, smoke, wisps of cloud or debris of the rocky pillars.

  The gigantic cataclysm of nature seemed to have reached a climax. The next moment, however, something incredible happened, The image on the videoscreen flared up, brightened to a terribly glaring, blinding white. The screen was covered by a swarm of innumerable explosions. In a renewed influx of antimatter everything lying beneath the Cyclops was annihilated. The air, debris, steam, smoke and gasses were transformed into hardest radiation to split the ravine in two. Within a radius of three hundred yards the cloud was hurled skywards.

  More than forty miles from the epicenter of the earthshaking explosion, the Invincible reeled under the impact. Seismic waves traveled through the desert. The transporters and energo-robots standing under the ramp slid to the side. A few minutes later a violent howling storm swept down from the mountains. Its fiery breath seared the faces of the men who sought shelter behind the machines, whipped whirling sheets of sand high into the air and raced on across the wide desert.

  Evidently, a fragment must have hit the teleprobe, which by that time was over eight miles from the scene of the catastrophe. Communication was not disrupted but the picture blurred considerably. Another minute passed by. As the wisps of smoke dissipated a little, Rohan, who had kept his eyes glued to the screen all this time, was able to witness the next stage of the fight.

  The battle was not over yet, as he had thought a short while before. If the attackers had been living beings, the massacre would have induced the reinforcements coming up from the rear to turn around, or at least have forced them to stop in the face of this flaming hell. But this was a battle between inanimate things. The atomic holocaust continued; only form and direction of the main attack were altered. For the first time Rohan understood what the battles must have been like that had once raged on the desolate and deserted surface of Regis III, when the robots had destroyed each other. He sensed dimly what forms of selection had been used by this defunct evolutionary process, and what lay behind Lauda’s hypothesis that the pseudo-insects had been victorious because of their optimum adaptation. At the same time, it occurred to him that something similar must have occurred here before solar energy fixed the inorganic, indestructible memory banks in the mammoth cloud’s myriads of tiny crystals. These inanimate particles—mere nothings compared to the all-consuming flames, the rock-devouring explosions—had had to overcome similar stragglers thousands of years ago—heavily armored giants and atomic monsters, descending from the species of robots. Whatever had enabled the crystals to survive, whatever had allowed the metal hulls of those giant behemoths to be torn into rusty shreds and dragged through the immense desert together with the skeletons of once indestructible electro-mechanisms (which now lay buried in the sand)—whatever had wrought this utter havoc represented an unbelievable, indescribable bravado, if such a term could be applied to the tiny crystals of the gigantic cloud. But what other name could you give it? Rohan could not help an involuntary feeling of admiration as he continued to watch the cloud.

  Even in the face of the massacre the cloud kept on attacking. Now only the highest mountain tops peeked out from the cloud bank which covered the entire area picked up by the telelenses of the probe. Everything else—the entire valley—disappeared beneath a flood of concentric black waves which raced up from the horizon and were sucked into the funnel of fire at whose center the Cyclops stood, though it could no longer be seen inside the conflagration. This advance had been gained at the cost of apparently senseless sacrifice; but at least it offered some chance of success.

  Rohan and the men realized this as they helplessly watched the spectacle unrolling before their eyes on the videoscreens in the control center. The Cyclops’ energy reserves were practically inexhaustible. But the longer the annihilation bombardment lasted, the hotter it would get inside the machine. For at least a fraction of the star temperatures was imparted to the cannons and thus returned to its point of origin, despite the powerful protective installations, despite the antiray reflectors mounted on the Cyclops’ armored hull. That was why the attack was continued on all fronts simultaneously. The denser the concentration of antimatter particles clashing with the doomed hailstorm crystals on the armored plates, the higher the temperature rose in the Cyclops’ engines. A human being would have long succumbed to the conditions inside the Cyclops. The ceramic hull had probably turned a glowing red, but beneath the canopy of smoke, the observers could see nothing but the pulsating light blue bubble of fire as it crept slowly toward the exit of the ravine. Thus the spot where the cloud’s first onslaught had taken place appeared two miles to the north; they recognized the horribly burnt-over ground, covered with a crust of slag and lava. From the shattered rocks hung the ashes of the brush-like growth. Small clumps of metal clung to them—the remains of molten crystals struck by nuclear explosions.

  Horpach gave orders to switch off the loudspeakers, whose ear-splitting noise filled the control center. He asked Jazon what might happen once the temperature inside the Cyclops exceeded the heat resistance of the electronic brain.

  The scientist answered without hesitating: “The cannons are shut off automatically.”

  “And the force field as well?”

  “No.”

  Meanwhile the battle area had shifted to the plain outside the exit of the ravine. The inky ocean of flames boiled, welled up, began to whirl about, then rushed into the fiery gullet with devilish leaps.

  “That should happen any minute now.” Kronotos spoke into the silence that emanated from the violently heaving picture. Another minute went by. Suddenly the glow of the fiery funnel grew considerably weaker. The cloud had covered it.

  “Thirty-five miles from here,” said the communications technician in answer to a questio
n from Horpach.

  The Astrogator sounded the alarm. The crew manned their stations. The Invincible pulled up the ramp and the personnel elevator; all the hatches were closed. Once again a fiery glow could be seen on the videoscreens. The funnel of fire had returned. This time the cloud no longer attacked; only a few wisps were ignited and flared up brightly. The main body of the cloud receded in the direction of the ravines, penetrated into the labyrinth which was overlaid by dense shadows. The Cyclops, apparently undamaged, came back into view. It was still very slowly pushing backwards, keeping up its steady bombardment all the while, annihilating the entire surrounding terrain—rocks, sand, dunes.

  “Why doesn’t the Cyclops shut off its cannons?” somebody called out.

  As if in reply to these words, the machine stopped firing, turned and rolled toward the desert with increasing speed. Far overhead, the teleprobe pursued the machine’s course. Suddenly the men saw something like a thin band race toward the probe with incredible speed. Before they realized that the Cyclops had fired at the probe, and that the fiery streak was due to the annihilated air particles along the missile’s trajectory, the men recoiled instinctively, perhaps out of fear that the discharge might jump off the screen and detonate right in the command center. Then the image vanished and only the empty white screen stared at them.

  “The Cyclops has smashed the probe, Astrogator!” shouted the technician at the steering console. Horpach gave orders to send up another teleprobe. Meanwhile the Cyclops had come so close to the Invincible that they could recognize the colossus as soon as the second probe had gained a little altitude. Another thread of light, and the second probe was destroyed. Just before the picture vanished from the screen, they barely managed to recognize their own spaceship. The Cyclops was no more than six miles away now.

  “That damn thing has gone off its rocker!” swore the second technician at the steering console, and his voice trembled with agitation. On hearing these words, Rohan suddenly knew. He glanced at the commander and was aware that Horpach had been seized by the same thought. He felt a senseless, leaden heaviness creep through his limbs, his head, throughout his entire body. But the command had been issued: the astrogator had ordered a fourth and a fifth teleprobe sent up. They were all destroyed by the Cyclops, who picked them off like a sharpshooter at target practice.

  “I need maximum thrust,” said Horpach without taking his eyes off the videoscreen.

  The chief engineer’s fingers struck full chords on the distributor keyboard as if he were playing an organ.

  “Full power for takeoff in six minutes,” he replied.

  “I need maximum thrust,” Horpach repeated in the same tone of voice. Silence fell over the control center. One could even hear the hum of the relays behind the enamel walls. It sounded as though a swarm of bees had awakened there.

  “The reactor shell is too cold,” the chief engineer argued.

  But now Horpach turned around and, facing him directly, repeated for the third time in the same unchanged voice: “I need maximum thrust.”

  Without a word the chief engineer grasped the main lever. Alarm signals bleated in staccato bursts throughout the spaceship, and followed the men’s steps like a distant roll of drums as they hurried to their battle stations. Once more Horpach glanced at the videoscreen. Nobody said a word, but everyone knew by now that the impossible was about to happen: the astrogator was preparing to go into battle with his own Cyclops.

  The quivering needles of the instruments lined up like soldiers. On the lit-up face of the output meter the numbers jumped up to five and six figures. Sparks burst from somewhere in the supply network, and it began to smell of ozone. In the rear of the control center the technicians communicated to each other by hand signals which control system was to be switched on.

  Shortly before it was destroyed, the next teleprobe showed the elongated head of the Cyclops, and the men watched as it tried to squeeze through the narrow gap between the rock walls. Then once again the screen was blank, blinding the eyes of the observers with its silvery white. Any moment now, the machine would become visible via direct transmission. The radar operator was ready to drive an outside TV camera beyond the nose of the spaceship in order to enlarge the view field. The communications technician shot off another probe. The Cyclops did not seem to be heading straight toward the waiting Invincible, positioned under the protective energy dome and ready for battle. Teleprobes sped from the spaceship’s nose at even intervals.

  Rohan knew that the Invincible was capable of stopping a discharge of antimatter, but to intercept the energy of the thrust would cost them their energy reserves. Under the circumstances Rohan thought it wisest to turn back—in other words, to go into stationary orbit. Any minute now he expected to hear the command, but Horpach remained inexplicably silent, as if he believed it possible that the electronic brain might regain its senses. Indeed, while following the silent movements of the dark shape amongst the dunes with a worried expression, Horpach asked: “You keep calling the Cyclops, don’t you?”

  “Yes. No contact.”

  “Send: Stop immediately!”

  The technicians at the console got busy. Two, three, four times, streaks of light flashed under their hands.

  “No reply, Astrogator.”

  Why doesn’t he start? Rohan was puzzled by the astrogator’s reluctance. Maybe he won’t admit defeat? What nonsense! Horpach! He made a move … and … now … he’s going to issue the order to take off…

  But the astrogator simply took a step backward.

  “Kronotos?”

  The cyberneticist came closer. “Here.”

  “Whatever have they done to that Cyclops?”

  Rohan felt consternation. Horpach had said “they”—as if he were actually dealing with thinking opponents.

  “The autonomous circuits are running on cryotrons,” began Kronotos with a voice which revealed that he was merely voicing theories. “The temperature has gone up. The circuits have lost their supraconductivity…”

  “Do you know this for sure or are you just guessing?” asked the astrogator.

  What a strange conversation! Everybody stared at the videoscreen on which the Cyclops could now be seen in direct transmission. It was creeping forward, its movements fluid yet somewhat unsteady. Now and then it deviated from its course as if it were still in doubt about its real destination. It fired several times at the teleprobe before hitting its target. Then the men saw the probe plummet to the ground like a ball of fire.

  “The only thing I can imagine that would explain its strange behavior would be resonance,” said the cyberneticist after a moment’s hesitation. “If their field has overlapped with the brain’s own—”

  “How about the force field?”

  “A force field can’t screen out a magnetic field.”

  “Too bad,” the astrogator remarked dryly.

  Gradually the tension eased inside the Invincible’s control center. The Cyclops was obviously no longer steering for its homeport. The distance between them, that had been very slight, increased again. No longer subject to human control, the vehicle ambled off to the wide expanses of the northern desert.

  “Chief engineer, take over for me for a while,” requested Horpach. “The rest of you will accompany me downstairs.”

  The Long Night

  The intense cold woke Rohan up. Drugged with sleep, he curled up under his blanket and pressed his face into the pillow. Then he placed his hands over his face, trying to shield it from the biting cold, but it was no use. He realized that he had to wake up completely. But he kept putting the moment off without knowing why. Suddenly he sat up. The cabin was pitch black. An icy blast of air hit him directly in the face. He jumped off his bunk, cursing softly as he groped his way in the dark toward the air conditioning. As he had gone to bed, he had felt so warm that he had turned the knob to “cold.”

  Little by little the air in the small cabin heated up, but Rohan, huddling under his blanket, could not go back to
sleep again. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch—3:00 A.M. Only three hours of sleep again, he thought furiously and still freezing. The conference had lasted a long time. It was almost midnight when they had finally broken up. All that useless talk, he thought. Now, enveloped by this darkness, he would give anything to be back at the space station, not to have to see or hear any more of this damned Regis III and its dead nightmare of a world. Most of the strategists had been in favor of going into orbit, except for the chief engineer and the head physicist. From the beginning the latter had strongly supported Horpach’s opinion: remain here as long as possible. The probability of finding the men of Regnar’s group was one in a million, or not even that much. If they weren’t already dead, only the great distance between them and the battle scene could have saved them from this atomic inferno. Rohan wished he knew whether the astrogator had stayed solely because of the four lost men, or if other considerations had played a role in his decision. The way it appeared from Regis III was just one side of the story; it would look very different indeed in the dry words of some report and in the bright calm of the space station. The report would simply state that the Invincible had lost half its overland vehicles and its main weapon, the Cyclops (which would represent a future threat for any spacecraft landing on the planet). In addition, they had suffered six casualties, and more than half the crew had to be hospitalized and would most likely remain unfit for duty for many years to come. And because of these losses in human lives, machines and their most valuable instruments, they had run away from microscopic crystals, the creatures of a small desert planet, the dead remainder of the Lyre civilization that had long since been surpassed by Earth. What else but flight would it be, if they turned back now? But was Horpach the kind of man who would take such motives into consideration? Maybe he himself did not know why he had not ordered them to take off? Was he waiting for something? Surely, the biologists had discussed the possibility of defeating the inorganic insects with their own weapons. If that species had already undergone evolution, they concluded, it should be possible to introduce further changes. To begin with, the scientists would need to experiment with a considerable quantity of captured specimens and bring about certain genetic changes that would reappear in future insect generations, changes that would render harmless this whole crystalline race. Such genetic changes would have to be of an extremely specific nature; they would need to offer an immediate, exploitable effect, and ensure that succeeding generations would develop an Achilles heel, a vulnerable feature that could be attacked. But this was just the usual, speculative, idle talk of the theoreticists: they hadn’t the faintest idea what type of a mutation this would require, how to produce it, how many of these cursed crystals could be captured without risking another battle whose outcome might mean an even more serious defeat than on the previous day. Even if everything should go smoothly, how long would they have to wait for the results of this new evolution? Not just days or weeks, surely. Were they supposed to circle around Regis III like children on a merry-go-round, for one or two or even ten years? The whole thing was totally absurd.