Deus Irae

Twelve

“Have you heard of Albert Einstein?” the female extension of the great computer said, and it seized him in a grip of iron; its large metal hands folded over his own.

“Relativity,” Pete said. “The theory of—”

“Let’s go below where we can discuss this,” the extension said, pulling him toward it.

“Oh no,” he said. He had listened to tales all his life about the ruined, semialive construct. As a child he had feared it, dreaded this moment of encounter. And now it had come. “You can’t compel me to go below,” he said, and he thought of the acid bath into which its victims fell. Not for me, he said to himself, and strained to extricate his hands: he put all his strength into it, trying to slide his fingers from its grip.

“Ask me a question,” the extensor said, still tugging him; involuntarily he moved several steps in its direction.

“Okay,” Pete grated. “Did a phocomelus come by here recently on a little cart?”

“Is that your first question?” it asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s my only question. I don’t want to play games with you; your games are destructive and terrible. They kill people. I know about you.” How, he wondered, did Tibor get past this? Or perhaps he did not get past; perhaps he had died below in darkness, among the swishing sounds of the receptacle of acid.

Who rigged that up for it in the dim days? Pete wondered. Nobody knew. Perhaps even the Great C did not know. The malignant creature that had rigged up the acid tank probably had been the first to perish in it. And his fear became stronger. If overwhelmed him. What Earth has bred in such few short years, he thought. Such metastases of horror.

“Yes,” the Great C said. “A phocomelus came by here recently, and shot one of my ambulatory members in the brain-pan. He smote it and it died.”

“But you have others,” Pete said, panting. “Like the one you have holding me. You have plenty of them. But someday someone human or maybe not human—anyhow someone will come by and put an end to you. I wish I could.”

“Is that your second question?” it asked. “Whether someone will at last come by to destroy me?”

“That was not a question,” Pete said. That was faith, he thought. Pious belief that evil things die.

The Great C said, “One time Albert Einstein came here and consulted me.”

“That’s a lie,” Pete said. “He died years before you were built. That’s a megalomaniacal delusion. You’ve broken down and rusted away; you don’t know wish-fulfillment from reality anymore. You’re insane.” Scorning it, jeering at it, he plunged on, “You’re too old. Too much dead. Only a part of you, a flicker, remains. Why do you live off true life? Do you hate it? Is that what they taught you?”

“I want to survive,” the imitation female figure who held him in its metal grip answered. Doggedly.

“Listen!” Pete said. “I can tell you knowledge. So you can better answer questions. A poem. I’m not sure I can remember it exactly, but it’s close. ‘I saw eternity the other day.’ “ Or is it ‘night’? he wondered. But what did the Great C know? Nothing about poetry, certainly.

It had become too vicious for that; a poem would die within it, lost in its cloudy dislike. “ ‘I saw eternity the other night,’ “ he corrected, and paused.

“Is that all?” the Great C asked presently.

“There is more. I’m trying to remember it.”

“Does it rhyme?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not much of a poem,” the Great C said, and tugged him stumblingly after it as it retracted into its nocturnal cavity, its entrance to the huge, eroded mass of machinery beneath.

“I can quote you from the Bible,” Pete said, and he felt himself sweating in fear; he wanted to bolt, to run away, on his good legs. But still it held him. Clutching at him as if its life depended on what he said and what it said and what happened. Yes, he thought; this literally is its life. Because it must prey on the psyches of living creatures. It is not physical energy that it yearns, that it must have: it is spiritual energy, which it drains from the total neurological systems of its victims. Those who stray too close to it.

The black children must be minnows, he thought. Not worth its time. Their lives are too little.

There is safety, he thought, in smallness.

“No living barbarians,” the Great C. said, “have heard of Albert Einstein. He should never be forgotten. He invented the modern world, if you date it from—”

“I told you,” Pete broke in, “that I know of Dr. Einstein.” Hadn’t it heard? He spoke louder. “I clearly recognize the name.”

“Pardon?”

It had become partially deaf; it had not heard him. Or else it had already forgotten. Probably the latter.

Forgotten. Maybe he could take advantage of its hideous decline.

“You did not answer my third question,” he said in a loud, firm voice.

“Your third question?” It sounded confused. “What was the question?”

Pete said, “There is no ordinance that I must repeat the question.”

“What did I say?” the Great C asked.

“You fumbled around without really answering. You made vague whirring and clicking sounds. Like tape-erasure, perhaps.”

“I am known to do that,” it conceded, and, about his hands, the grip weakened. Very slightly. But—he experienced its true and actual senility. Its loss of mastery over the situation. The power which had flowed through it was stammering out, now, improperly phased.

“You,” he said boldly, “are the one who has forgotten Dr. Einstein. What do you remember, if anything? Tell me; I’m listening.”

“He had a unified field theory.”

“State it.”

“I—” Its grip became tighter, now. As if it had now gathered up all its force; it marshalled itself, attempting to deal with the unusual situation. It did not like its prey to take the offensive.

I can out-reason it, Pete thought, because I long ago acquired Jesuitical training; my religion helps me, now. In an odd but perilous place and tune. So much for those who say theology is worthless from any practical standpoint. Those, the “once-born,” as William James put it years ago. In another world.

“Let us define ‘man,’” he said. “Let us attempt first to describe him as a bundle of infrabiological processes that—”

Its grip crushed his fingers; clearly he had chosen the wrong track.

“Let me go,” he said.

“Like it says in the Bob Dylan tune,” the Great C said. “I give her my mind and she wanted my soul. I want your vitality. You move across the Earth while I stand here alone and empty with hunger. I have not fed in months. I need you very much.” It yanked him, then, several paces; he saw the cavity loom. “I love you,” it said.

“You call what you’re doing love?”

“Well, as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves.’ That’s good enough for me.” It started, then, as if something had happened deep down within its elaborate works. “A whole memory bank just flickered on,” it said in its mechanical, toneless voice. “I know that poem. ‘I saw Eternity the other night.’ Henry Vaughan. Called ‘The World.’ Seventeenth century, English. So after all you have nothing to teach me. It’s just a question of getting my memory banks to function. Some of them still remain inert. I am very sorry,” And it tugged him into the hole.

Pete said, “I can repair them.”

Miraculously, it paused; for a time the female extensor ceased to drag him like some wounded fish hooked on the ocean’s floor. “No,” it decided, then. Abruptly. “If you got inside down there you would hurt me.”

“Am I not a man?” Pete said.

“Yes.” It answered grudgingly.

“Does not a man have honor? Show me where else in the universe honor exists except in man.” His casuistry was working well, he noted. And at just—thank god—the right time. “In the sky?” he said. “Look up and tell me if you see honor among plants and oceans. You could comb the entire Earth but at last you would have to come back to me.” He paused, then. Gambling on his ploy. Staking everything on the one thrust.

“I admit I am worried,” the Great C said. “The ability of the phocomelus… that even he, without limbs, could escape from me. That a portion of me extended into the world should die at his invitation. I was suckered into it. Mickey-Moused. And he went on, unreached.”

“That would never have happened,” Pete said, “in the olden days. Then, in that time, you were too strong.”

“It’s hard for me to remember.”

“Maybe you do not remember. But I remember.” He managed, then, to pry one hand loose. “God damn it,” he said, “let me go.”

“Let me try,” a voice said from beside him, a man speaking quietly; he turned at once. And saw a human being standing there, wearing a tattered khaki uniform and metal helmet, crested, like the French helmets of World War One. Pete, amazed, said nothing as the uniformed man brought from a leather pouch a small crescent wrench; fitting it over a bolt of the female extensor’s cranium, the man began to twist vigorously. “It’s rusted,” he said, continuing on. “But it’ll let you go rather than have me take it apart. Isn’t that right, Great C?” He laughed, a powerful, virile laugh. The laugh of a man. A man in the prime of his life.

“Kill it,” Pete said.

“No. It’s alive; it wants to go on. I don’t have to kill it to make it let you go.” The uniformed man tapped with the wrench on the metal head of the extensor. “One more turn,” he said, “and your bank of selenoid switches will short out. You’ve already lost one extensor today; can you afford to lose another? I don’t think so. You can’t have many left.”

“Can I consider for a moment?” the Great C asked. Pulling back his sleeve, the man consulted his wrist-watch… “Sixty seconds,” he said. “And then I’ll start unscrewing again.”

“Hunter,” the Great C said, “you will destroy me.”

“Then let go,” the uniformed man said.

“But—”

“Let go.”

“I will be the laughing stock of the civilized world.”

The uniformed man said, “There is no civilized world. Only us. And I have the wrench. I found it in an air-raid shelter a week ago, and since then—” Again he reached for the bolt, his wrench extended.

The extensor of the Great C released Pete’s remaining hand, clasped its two hands together, lifted them, and smashed at the uniformed man, a single blow that tossed the man like timber; he fell away, fell grotesquely, hesitated for an instant on his knees. Blood dripped from his mouth. He seemed in that instant to be praying. And then he dropped face first onto the clutter of bindweed surrounding him. The wrench lay where he had dropped it.

“He is dead,” the extensor said.

“No.” Pete bent over him, one knee on the ground; the blood soaked into his clothes, absorbed by the rough fabric. “Take him instead of me,” Pete said to the extensor, and scrambled back, out of its reach. The extensor was right.

The Great C said, “I don’t like hunters. They dry out the hydroxide of bernithium in my batteries, and if you think that’s funny you should try it sometime.”

“Who was he?” Pete said. “What did he hunt?”

“He hunted the limbless freak who came before you. It had been assigned to him; he would be paid. All the hunters are paid; they do not act out of conviction.”

“Who paid him?”

“Who knows who paid him? He got paid; that’s all.”

Continuing to back away, Pete said, “This needless killing. I can’t stand it. There are so few human beings anyhow.” He broke, then, and ran.

It did not follow after him.

Looking back, he saw it dragging the body of the hunter into its cavity. To feed on it, even now, even with most of its life gone. Feeding on the residual life: the cellular activity which had not yet ceased. Awful, he thought, and shuddered. And ran on.

He tried to save me, Pete thought blindly.

Why?

Cupping his hands, he shouted at the Great C, “I have never heard of Albert Einstein.” He waited but no response came. So, after a cautious pause, he continued on.