Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

He felt the Quadulan ooze up next to him. The thing was furry, but it felt more like being touched by a porcupine. He rolled back to give it full access to the hole. “Think you can get in there?”

Although it was a bit larger around than the hole, it was an enormously flexible creature and very, very tough. “Piece of meat,” it said.

“Piece of cake,” N’Gana corrected.

“Whatever. Question is, if security is still powered on, will it take passwords from Hamille?”

“That’s part of why I’m here. It’s aware of us now, so we might as well get started.”

The Quadulan eased up to the hole and then began pulsing its body, stretching itself out as much as it could, and then it pushed on in, oozing through like paste through a straw. It was not as easy as it looked, and Hamille was extremely slow and cautious. More than once, one of the sharp edges snagged the skin or threatened to dig deeper, and the creature had to stop, back up a bit, and try it again. Still, within a quarter of an hour, it was through.

Almost as soon as it hit the floor, a series of tight red beams struck it, and a voice that sounded very machine-like and inhuman said, “Halt and give the proper password signs or leave as you came. You are targeted by seven different lethal devices.” It was designed to sound artificial so that there would be no doubt in the intruder’s mind that it was dealing with a tightly programmed machine.

N’Gana felt some sharp pains in his chest that brought him up short for a minute, but he willed himself to ignore them. They had not come this far to have him blow it.

He took a deep breath, pressed his face against the hole in the wall, and said, in his best theatrical voice, “And let the heralds Zeus loves give orders about the city for the boys who are in their first youth and the gray-browed elders to take stations on the god-founded bastions that circle the city!” he intoned. “Let it be thus, high-hearted men of Troy, as I tell you! Let that word that has been spoken now be a strong one, and that which I speak at dawn to the Trojans, breakers of horses. For in good hope I pray to Zeus and the other immortals that we may drive from our place these dogs swept into destruction whom the spirits of death have carried here on their black ships!”

There was silence for a moment, and Hamille felt as tense as N’Gana. Then, just as the old colonel feared he had blown a line, the red targeting beams switched off.

“Code accepted,” announced the security voice.

It was an appropriate passage from a little-known translation, with a devilish little trap in it. A part of Hector’s great speech before the battle, but with some sentences left out here and there. The result fit the defenders of Helena against the Titan invaders as well as it did the defenders of Helen thousands of years ago on a far distant planet.

The Trojans, too, had lost to the invaders in their black ships just as the defenders of Helena had lost to the invaders in their shimmering white craft. The Trojans stupidly fell for a simple trick and lost it all; the defenders of Helena dithered until the invaders had already breached the inner walls and they could no longer decide. In both cases, their worlds died by the unwitting duplicity of their defenders. Ancient Troy vanished off the face of the earth for three thousand years, and existed after only in partly excavated ruins. Helena was in a century of darkness which might last as long as Troy’s but for this one second chance.

It was odd, he thought, fighting the pains, that only military men knew any history in this day and age. Nobody else really cared. Nobody else had to repeat the mistakes of the past.

He leaned back into the hole. “Hamille! Do you have them?”

For a moment there was no answer. Then the croaking voice of the Quadulan came back, echoing slightly, “Yes. I see them. Old-fashion memory bubbles, but labels are clear. Need to type in code phrases to unlock case. Very hard with my tentacles. Will do it.”

“Take it slow! No mistakes!”

The three phrases, one from each member of the triumvirate who created this project so long ago, were all in Greek. One was a line from a poem about Helen of Troy, the second a quotation from the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, the third a line from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. All had to be typed in on a Greek alphabet manual keyboard embedded in the security casing by a creature for whom the instrument was not designed.

The pains had subsided, almost vanished, but now they seemed to be starting up again as he saw in his mind’s eye the serpentine alien trying hard to hit every last alpha and omega.

It could have been worse, he told himself. It could have been ancient Mandarin.

And if it worked, if Hamille got it all right, if that case popped open and the electronic code keys were in its grasp, could they make it back up? Could he make it back up? It was a very long way, and he was so very, very tired.

Time passed slowly while they could do nothing but sit and wait, hungry and thirsty, and very, very tense. With so much idle time, though, none of them could avoid talking about things most on their minds.

“What happens when and if N’Gana and Hamille come back with the keys?” Kat mused. “I mean, how the hell do we send it up to the others? Whoever does will be the same kind of target that Jastrow was.”

“I will send them from the spaceport security system, which is still operational if I can shift the majority of power to it,” the mentat told them. “The codes are supposed to be on standard data keys, although encrypted. I can’t read them or copy them, but I can transmit the encrypted codes. If, as you say, your people have the station in standby mode, then it will receive the signals. Once it does, then targeting and shooting will be as simple as someone up there in the command and control chair willing it so.”

“The moment you send, they’ll blast you,” Harker pointed out. “Probably send some of their creations down to make sure we’re not hiding any other surprises, then they’ll reduce this whole thing to lava.”

“I know. I do not know how to deal with that, but I must accept it. It is difficult for me to contemplate the end of my conscious existence, but I see no other way. I have understood this ever since Jastrow filled in the blanks, as it were. You must be well away when I transmit. Out of the coastal plain, certainly. We have no way of knowing how long it will take those on Hector between getting the codes and being ready to implement them. I should like to be able to see it in action, even once. If I am to cease to exist, I should like to know that it was for a good cause.”

God, I think we’re building our machines too well, Kat thought, but said nothing. Instead, she asked, rather rhetorically, “And then what happens to us, I wonder? We’re not going to get back to the ship. Not with those monsters in the way and the rafts surely dissolved by now…

“We survive until they come to find us and take us off,” Harker said. “And you get to really do a field study.”

She sighed. “I wonder if they’ll bother to try and find us? How could they anyway? We’ll just be two more savages out there on a world that, even if it’s freed of the Titans, will be a pretty low priority for exploration and rebuilding, I suspect.”

“Well, we have nothing else we can do but settle down and wait for them, no matter when or if they come,” he noted. “Not unless we build and launch a boat that can sail out to the island. It’s a possibility, if we use all natural wood and have the time—and I think we’ll have the time.”

“Do you really think that’s possible?” she asked, genuinely interested.