Fugitive of the Stars

CHAPTER XIV

The mountain was a skull and Horne walked within it, a micro-organism moving through the convoluted tunnels of the brain that filled its great domed hollowness.

There was light in the brain, for the other human microorganisms that served it must see to move. There were catwalks provided for their moving. One of these stretched from an arched opening on the far side of the entrance chamber, a narrow spidery thing that stretched away and away, apparently into infinity, one long straight thread traversing a mass of support cables.

After the dim rock gallery, the suffused fight and complex perspectives of this place confused Horne's eyes and made him dizzy. For comfort he looked upward to the smooth round roof of the bore, but it was too close above his head and gave him a claustrophobic feeling of being smothered and deep-buried.

So he looked down.

The catwalk hung above a huge transparent tube. This was what the webbed cables supported, this glassy vein that ran from everlasting to everlasting, carrying inside itself a thick mass of wires in many colors. The wires were like a schematic diagram of a bundle of nerve fibers, and Horne realized that that was exactly what they were. This, according to the guard, was one of the main ganglia, serving a whole portion of the brain. Looking at the bundled wires, it was difficult for Horne to rid himself of an unpleasant feeling that they were alive.

Was thinking aliveness? Where did you draw the fine line between sentience and unawareness?

And if this mighty thing inside of which they walked was conscious was it conscious of them? The skin between Horne's shoulders crawled when that idea crossed his mind.

"It's nothing but a damned big overgrown computer,” he said, as much to reassure himself as the others.

It did not seem to reassure the others. There was not much expression at any time in the purple face of D'quar, but it seemed to Horne that the gargoyle moved slowly, unwillingly, looking from side to side and saying nothing. The others, especially Lurgh and his hairy big double from Allamar, were obviously uneasy. These simple humanoids, who knew next to nothing of science, didn't like being here at all.

Nor were Horne's words any reassurance to himself. He might fight down the semi-superstitious repulsion he felt, but he could not disguise the fact this colossal computer-call it a brain, call it living, or not — gave those who possessed it a tremendous power to wield against their enemies. More and more, Horne began to understand the horror and fear that Yso and Ewan had felt when they had learned the nature of the Project.

"Come on," he said roughly to his hesitating, motley crew of followers.

Below the tube, a long way down from the catwalk on which they stood, was the bottom of the round bore.

Horne looked over his shoulder at D'quar, who was standing hesitantly with one big-clawed foot on the catwalk, as though he didn't like the idea of trusting his knotty bulk to this frail strand.

"Think how much worse it'll be for your nine-foot friends like Lurgh,” he said. “But at that, I think we'd better space ourselves out. Don't follow me too closely and don't have two heavy ones right together."

He started out along the narrow way, hanging tightly to the hand ropes.

The catwalk was not rigid. He felt the sway as D'quar came on behind him. The cables, woven of some neutral, nonmagnetic plastic, creaked and sprang. Horne set his teeth and walked on, trying not to think of how far it was to the floor and the inevitable alarms that would be set off if they all came crashing down into the tube.

It was hard to tell in this place how far you had come or how far you had yet to go. Horne looked back once or twice and saw his little band of all-sized, all-colored, all-shaped monstrosities strung out behind him, stepping with infinite care, the two hairy giants separated by large intervals and bent almost on all fours.

"Horne's Foreign Legion,” he thought sourly, and then was a little ashamed of the thought. The humanoids were coming back into a place of torment from which they had escaped, of their own free will, and that took bravery.

Behind the strung-out line of them, the catwalk ended at the arch from which they had come. The next time he looked back, the arch had dwindled into the pinpoint nothingness of distance.

There was something hypnotic and horrifying about it, as though you had gotten into a spatial warp without beginning or end and would go on through eternity until the whole cosmos collapsed and prepared to recycle.

He was glad when he came upon a branching sideline where a slim bundle of fibers separated from the parent stem and curved off into a huge chamber. There was a branch of the catwalk, too, and he could have gone into the chamber, but he only stopped long enough to see that it was crammed with banks of tubes and transistors and miles of circuiting. There was a constant flickering of little lights and a soft buzzing and clicking that sounded eerily like somebody muttering busily to himself.

They passed several of these huge chambers. Horne thought about how many more of them there must be in the bulk of the mountain and how deep and far the labyrinthine twinings of these nerve paths and chambered cells must reach on all sides of him. And they're building it still bigger, he thought. And think what men like Ardric can do with such power.

He wondered how Yso and Ewan and the aliens with them were doing with their side of it.

He was sure of one thing. If he couldn't do both, it was more important to smash this great lurking giant than to clear his own name. In the long run, he supposed, the one would follow the other anyway, even though he might not be around to see it.

Out of the hypnotic web before him emerged an archway much like the one they had left behind. This would be the main-ganglion relay-center the guard had described.

Horne lifted his hand in warning. In utter silence he moved forward and the others followed him like ghosts.

This arch had a door in it. Horne pushed it open.

There was a big circular room with panels all around it. Two men, obviously engineers and wearing no uniforms, were going about their business of seeing that the impulse streams were flowing properly in this division of the brain, that there was no block or overload. They looked up startled as Horne came through the door and one of them said, “Is there trouble along the line there? The instruments didn't show—"

"Yes,” Horne said, “there's trouble. But not quite the kind you mean. D'quar!"

He pulled the stolen gun from the holster of his stolen uniform and said to the engineers, “Stand perfectly still and you won't be harmed."

They stood still and their eyes grew big and their faces white as D'quar and giant Lurgh and the rest of the motley crew poured in through the doorway.

"Is this a slave rising?” asked one of them.

Horne said devoutly, “I hope so."

The man made a brave but perfectly futile rush for a communicator. Lurgh was nearest him and the nine-foot giant picked the man up and cuffed him along the side of the head, and there was no further movement from him.

The other man resigned himself to being bound. While D'quar saw to this, Horne was opening other hatch-doors.

Three of them gave onto main tubes like the one they had just come from. The fourth opened onto a lift.

If the guard they had captured had told the truth, at the bottom of the lift was the central room of Administration.

Horne took a deep breath and turned to his tensely waiting alien followers. “Well,” he said, “we, might as well go."

They crowded in and Horne pushed the button. The round chamber dropped with vertiginous swiftness down the shaft.

When Horne heard the first whine of the air cushion he said, “Come out with a rush and arm yourselves as soon as you can."

D'quar said, “What if the others do not come?"

"Then,” said Horne, “we'll just have to hold on until they arrive."

Brave words, he thought. The only trouble was that he didn't feel that way at all. He had been forced to do more fighting the last few days than he had done in his whole life, but he still didn't like it and didn't think he ever would. They were committed now and he might as well put on a good front.

The lift slowed and stopped and the door slid open.

There was a narrow corridor in front of the lift, with rows of identical doors on either side of it. There was nobody in the corridor. Horne led the way swiftly to the end of it.

Here a round space perhaps three hundred feet in diameter and almost as high had been hollowed out of the very heart of the mountain. Buildings of steel and glass filled all the circular space except for the center and the streets that radiated from it, dividing the buildings into separate blocks.

The streets, Horne knew, connected with the entrances from Rillah and the private base where the Vellae ships landed with slaves, and also with the galleries and work-centers around the periphery of the brain. It was from one of these streets that the other slaves led by Yso and Ewan, were supposed to pour in to the attack.

There was no sign of them yet. But some sort of alarm had roused the center. Behind the glass window-walls of the buildings, technicians at the many input-output devices of the brain were turning from their work and peering out into the plaza. Here there was a noise and men were running, technicians and scientists hurrying for cover, red-uniformed guards coming from various directions and disappearing along one particular street that lay to Horne's left.

A number of them were coming out of a building with a sign that said, Project Guard Office. It was not too far around the plaza, to Horne's right.

All Horne's muscles tightened and the old hate burned up in him so strongly that he felt invincible.

"Ardric's there,” he said to his companions. “Let's get him."

He ran out across the plaza.

There was a sudden cessation of movement among the people as they became aware of him in his red uniform and then saw the monstrous group that followed him. Somebody shouted in a voice of panic that the slaves were already here. The unarmed, non-uniformed men began to run away, spreading wild confusion around the plaza, and the guards stopped going wherever they were headed and swung around to shoot at Horne's little mob. But they could not fire effectively for the moment without killing a lot of their own people. They hesitated and, in the meantime, Horne had reached the door of the Guard Office and pushed it violently open and gone through it into the place beyond, with the aliens pouring in after him.

The Guard communication center was here. Operators bent tensely over their instruments, listening to a bedlam of voices, transmitting orders and instructions given by their chief.

The chief, wearing the red guard uniform but otherwise unchanged since the last time Horne had seen him aboard the Vega Queen, was a man with a clean-cut intelligent face, too thin and cruel around the mouth and too flint-hard in the eyes, not trying now to be pleasant but full of the alert anger of a man attacked.

Horne sprang, just as Ardric looked up.