The Long Sleep

XXV

They were all in the top-level garage waiting for him when he drove the tank back and parked it: Henry Galing, Richard, Gina, Dr. Harttle, the faceless man named Brian the others who had not participated in the Disorientation Therapy. Seeing them now, his own creations, he wondered how he could ever have feared them or failed to recognize them even if he had been suffering from a temporary drug-induced amnesia.

He recalled how, in such fine detail, they had planned his Disorientation Therapy Puzzle: the removal of every scrap of paper from every floor of the pyramid so that there was no clue to the real nature of the place; propping the skeleton in that office chair; re-programming the computer to misuse the nucleotide vats and form a faceless man who could nonetheless see and speak; the working out of the story he had been told about falling off a roof while rescuing a cat, and the story about sybocylacose-46 which he had been meant to see through; the building of that dungeon room, the honeymoon suite; even the little oddities like the dust in Harttle's hair and between Allison's breasts had been carefully planned. It had worked admirably well. He was cured of both his guilt and his prejudice — and the therapy had made Allison especially precious to him.

He had difficulty remembering only one thing: the Overmaster. He thought that the term, which he had first heard from Galing, must refer to the moving fungus that had reacted more like an animal than a plant. To the best of his knowledge, no such entity had existed before his drug-induced amnesia; and he was certain that nothing like that could have been included as a part of this therapy.

Henry Galing came forth to meet him when he stepped out of the tank, and to Joel's surprise the android was crying. He took Joel's hand and shook it vigorously. “Thank God you're back!” he said.

“It was touch and go… I don't know what that stuff could have done to the tank if the flamethrowers hadn't kept it back. And I'm just as happy not to have to find out.”

“Allison?” Galing asked anxiously, peering past Joel into the cab of the tank.

“She's fine. Still sleeping.”

The android was obviously relieved. When Joel saw how happy all of them were to know that Allison was in good shape, Joel couldn't understand how he could ever have looked upon their kind as little more than animals. They clearly had human emotions, attachments, relationships, and needs.

“What did I get myself into when I went outside?” Joel asked. “What was that fungus, that damned gray—”

“Just that,” Galing said. “Fungus, moss, lichens, hundreds of types of vegetation — and all of it under the control of the Overmaster.”

“You've used that name before,” Joel said. “But it doesn't mean anything to me.”

“It will in a moment.” Galing wiped a hand over his face, giving himself a moment to think about where he should begin. “During those thousand years that you slept, before you made the twelve of us in the images of your dead friends, the world's ecological systems changed a great deal more than we knew. These new, grotesque plantforms were bred, and they came to dominate the surface of the earth; they began slowly to function in harmony and then became rapidly interdependent. Finally, between them, they evolved a rudimentary intelligence.”

“The Overmaster.”

“Yes,” Galing said.

Richard said: “You have to realize how incredibly polluted the earth was. Poisonous air. Poisonous water. The air was superheated because the particles of suspended pollutants magnified the effects of the sun… The whole world became a genetic pressure cooker that boiled up mutations faster than anyone would ever have thought possible/'

“Exactly,” Galing said. “In surprisingly short order that rudimentary intelligence became a formidable mind equal to that of any man. Maybe even superior. In a couple of centuries it developed animal-like mobility in some of its components— which you witnessed a few minutes ago.”

“Did I ever!” He was still soaked with perspiration. His stomach fluttered as if it had wings. “But when did you learn all of this?”

“After you went through the Puzzle Therapy for the first time,” Galing said.

He frowned. “I've been through it more than once?”

“Five times,” the faceless man said.

“You see,” Galing said, “when you were first given those amnesic drugs and placed in your pod, we were unwittingly consigning you to the Overmaster.”

Joel leaned against the tank tread, closed his eyes, tried to find the switch that we shut off his merry-go-round mind. He couldn't find the switch, but he did manage to get on a brake that slowed the revolutions. “I don't understand.”

Galing said: “Our mistake was in not monitoring developments in the outside world as closely as we should have. We knew things had changed, but we didn't know how much they had changed, and therefore we took inadequate precautions. The Overmaster, through various of its mobile components — mosses, fungi — infiltrated the lowest computer cell blocks and even the fusion power plant beneath the last public level of the pyramid. Taproots breached nearly every computer memory bank with access to all our records; it learned all there was to know about us — especially, you. The Overmaster could not get to the upper levels of the computer, because they were on floors that had no direct contact with the earth; therefore, it couldn't open the door and come in after us. Apparently, it decided we could live and not be a threat to it — but you must be given absolutely no quarter, no chance.”

“Why did it think I was so much more dangerous to it than the rest of you?”

“Because you'll play the most vital, maybe the only vital, role in any war against the Overmaster,” Gina said.

“We need you if we're to restore the earth,” Galing said. “For one thing, only you can create more of us, because the operation of the vats requires a womb-born man whose fingerprints are on file in the installation's computer. Androids were never permitted to make more of their own. Certainly, we could mate and produce children… But in the decades that we would need to raise and educate a community opposed to the Overmaster, we would lose the battle. And only you can give Brian his face again. And only you have the first-hand, pre-disaster knowledge that we need to channel our energies in the proper research.”

Joel stood away from the tank. “But when the Overmaster had control of me in the pod, why didn't it kill me?”

“It couldn't,” Galing said. “All it could do was feed you subliminal data. And it did that with a vengeance. Prior to the start of that first Disorientation Therapy Puzzle, the Overmaster fed you highly compressed subliminal propaganda which reinforced your neuroses. It turned your distaste for androids into active hatred, then ballooned that hatred into fanatical loathing. It made an eventual cure remote indeed. So… When you went through the first Disorientation Puzzle so differently than we'd anticipated, and when, at its conclusion, you were a great deal more bigoted than you had been before we'd put you in the pod, we knew something serious had gone wrong. Indeed, your neurosis was now a psychosis, so fierce that it would now have endangered the future of the entire installation. Therefore, we put you to sleep, and we began to search for an answer.”

“And you discovered the Overmaster.”

“Only after a full decade of probing,” Galing said. “But when we finally knew it existed, we were quick to find the breach in the pyramid, the computer tap, and the propaganda tape link to your pod. We purged the computers of contamination, used the Overmaster's propaganda tapes to structure pro-android propaganda to cure you. That was only a partial success, so we were forced to put you through the Disorientation Therapy Puzzle four more times to fully cure you.”

Joel ran his fingers through his damp hair. “But now it's over at last.”

“No,” Allison said, “it isn't over.”

Both men turned and looked up at her. She had come awake while they were talking. She had slid to the edge of the seat and was gazing down at them from the open door of the tank's cab.

“It isn't over?” Joel asked, perplexed.

“She's right,” Galing said. “It's taken nearly a century and a half to undo what the Overmaster did to you.”

One hundred and fifty years …

“Meanwhile,” Allison said, “we've been besieged. We're constantly on guard, waiting for the Overmaster to breach the pyramid again.”

“It wants to destroy us,” Richard said, “but it also wants to ruin all the things we've preserved of the Old World. It's made several attempts to open the freezers that contain the animal and plant samples, the Old World life tissues we'll one day use to clone new animals and plants. If those were destroyed, we'd never have a chance of restoring the Earth.”

“Sooner or later,” Allison said, “if we can't go outside and take the initiative, if we can't put the Overmaster on the defensive, we'll be finished.”

“It's already reaching into the upper levels of the pyramid,” Joel said. He told them about the deadly vegetation that he had encountered in the drain tunnels.

“We've got to burn that out and fast,” Galing said. “Before it gets to the main computer.” He turned to the other androids and gave them assignments.

Joel reached up and helped Allison down over the tank tread. When she was at his side he put his arm around her tiny waist as she put her arm around him. “It's not over after all,” he said. “This was the smallest battle. The real war hasn't even begun.”

She kissed him, leaned against him. She was warm, firm, slightly damp with perspiration. “It's sad in a way… Before the war could even be waged we had to purge you of old hatreds. Now, we have to build a new hatred in you. We have to make you share our hatred of the Overmaster.”

“After what I've been through,” he said, “I already do.”

“It's still sad,” she said.

“I guess it is.”

“And from now on,” she said, “the horrors won't be illusory.”