Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

“And maybe he’s right,” Conway thought. “Maybe if we can’t get him whatever he needs nothing down here is worth keeping.”

Behind him he heard Broome and the communications officer conferring in strained voices above the tumult.

“I don’t know,” the officer was shouting. “It tore up the library so fast we couldn’t tell what it had read and what it hadn’t. You see how it’s going now. It moves so fast—”

Broome leaned over the communications officer’s shoul­der and punched the two-way button on the intercom for Sub-Seventeen where the robot was raging.

“Ego,” he said into the mike. “Do you hear me?”

The robot ripped down the side of the last cabinet, swept its contents out in a rhythmic shower. Amplified over the screen they heard Broome’s voice echo back to them from the tiny greenish storeroom on the wall. The robot paused very briefly. Then it stood up straight, turned around once in a very rapid circuit that swept its cone of light across the walls.

“ Want—” its hollow voice howled, and instantly shut itself off into silence again. It crashed its hands together like something in the last extremity of desperation, and then walked straight for the wall at the corner of the room.

The wall bent, cracked and opened. The robot stalked through and out of sight.

It seemed to Conway that every face in the room swung around toward his, pale ovals glistening with drops of gold and red and greenish sweat in the darkness. It was up to him now. They waited for instructions.

He wanted to lash out as the robot had lashed, tear these floating luminous screens down and smash the glowing panels with them, silence the yammering voices from the walls. Responsibilities he could not handle buzzed like hot bees around his head. It was too much, too much. A deep wave of exhaustion washed over him, followed by a wave of hysteric exhilaration, both so ghostly and so far away they hardly seemed to touch Conway at all. He was somebody else entirely, infinite distances off, with ghostly problems that had no relation to the vacuum of the here and now…

“General?” Broome’s voice said. “General?”

Conway coughed. “The robot,” he said briskly. “We’ve got to stop him. You plotting his course so far, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir. Screen Twelve.”

Twelve was one of the hanging panels, transparent in the dark, a net of luminous gold lines on it marking the corridors, with the sectors showing in dim blue numerals. “The red dots are the robot, sir,” the sergeant told him.

They watched a disembodied hand float forward from behind the screen arid add fluorescent grease-dots to the lengthening red line which had started in Broome’s lab, crossed the library and storeroom and gone out by the solid wall. They stalked now across the next three sectors, wading through the walls, as they went in an elongating luminous chain of red.

Their goal was obvious to everyone. About seven inches ahead in the heart of the map lay a round room with bright green squares glowing around its walls. They all knew what the green squares were. They all knew how intimately their own survival hinged upon the blizzard of electronic impulses storming through those incredibly complex cal­culations in the computers. Every mind in the room clicked over like the computers themselves, considering what would happen when the robot reached that room.

“The supersonic team,” Conway said crisply. “The heavy-duty robots. Where are they?”

“The supersonics are coming up from level six, sir. About five minutes for them. The HD robots should in­tersect in about three minutes. You can see them in—what is it? purple?—on the plot panel.”

A slow line of purple dots was moving inward down a gold-lined corridor from the periphery of the chart.

“Too slow,” Conway said, watching the red dots which marked the footsteps of the thinking robot. Or was it thinking, now? “Anybody know if those walls between are plaster or stone?” There was a silence. Nobody did. But as they watched, the red dots paused at a gold line, rebounded twice, reversed themselves and made for a break in the line that indicated a door.

“Stone,” Conway said. “That one, anyhow. I hope he didn’t jar anything loose trying.”

“Maybe we’d better hope he did,” Broome said.

Conway looked at the old man. “I’m going to stop him,” he said. “Understand? We’re not going to junk Ego. We need him too badly. I’m sorry we weren’t better prepared to handle him, but I’d do it again if I had to. We can’t wait.”

“He’s moving fast, sir,” the communications officer said.

Conway looked at the screen. He bit his lip painfully and then said, “Volunteers. I want somebody to jump in there and delay him. I don’t care how. Trip him. Wave a red rag in his face. Anything to gain time. Every second counts. All right, Corporal. Lieutenant, that’s two.”

“We can’t spare any more from here,” the communications officer said.

“All right, on your way,” Conway snapped. “Get him on the screens, sergeant.”

Three round television screens clicked into bluish life, showing a trail of wrecked desks and smashed equipment. In the third screen Ego, looking very small and remote and innocent, was smashing himself head-on against a too-narrow door. On the last smash the door-frame gave way and Ego surged through and stalked off down the tiny, diminishing corridor beyond. On the plot board the red dots showed him only about five inches away from the calculator room.

“But what do you want with the calculators?” Broome was murmuring as he stared after the vanishing figure on the screen. He tapped irritatingly with his nails on the metal table. “Maybe,” he said, and paused. He looked up at Conway. “I’m no good here, General. I’m going to the calculator room. I have some ideas, but the analogue com­puter thinks a lot faster than I do. Ego moves too fast. It may take machines to figure out machines. Anyhow, I’ll try.”

“Go on, go on then,” Conway said. “You’ve got between five and ten minutes. After that—” He didn’t finish, but in his mind he said, “—I can rest. One way or the other, I can rest.”

The communications officer had been clicking television screens on and off, hunting. Now he said, “Look, sir! The volunteer team—God, he’s tall!” The observation was spontaneous; until now the communications room hadn’t seen Ego alongside human figures.

Ego was a stalking giant in a dimly lit corridor on the screen. The volunteers had just burst out of a corridor door ten paces ahead of him, and he towered mightily over them. You could see their tiny, scared faces no bigger than peas turned up toward the oblivious, striding giant as he followed the searchlight splash of his single eye down the hall.

The two men must have moved at a dead run from here to there. They hadn’t had time to pick and choose, and their instructions had been ambiguous, but somewhere on the way they had snatched up a stout steel beam which now showed like a bright thread across the corridor. One man darted across the hall just ahead of the robot, and the two of them braced the beam shoulder high from opposite doorways, making a barrier across the path.

The robot didn’t even glance at the obstacle. He struck the beam squarely, the clang echoing through the corridor and reverberating from the screen into the communica­tions room. Ego bounced a little, recovered his balance, measured the situation and then stooped to pass under the bar. Hastily the two men lowered their burden. Again a clang and a recoil, and this time the bar bent into a deep V at the point of impact. Over the screen they heard one of the men yell as the end of the bar caught him. Ego heaved upward with both hands, stepped under the bar and stalked off down the hall.