Berserker - Earth Descended Part 1

Earth Descended.

Berserker.

Fred Saberhagen.

YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF DOOR.

That first night there was a police vehicle, what I think they call a K-9 unit, in the little employees' lot behind the Inst.i.tute. I parked my car beside it and got out. The summer moon was dull above the city's air, but floodlights glared at a small door set in the granite flank of the great building. I carried my toolbox there, pushed a b.u.t.ton, and stood waiting.

Within half a minute, a uniformed guard appeared inside the reinforced gla.s.s of the door. Before he had finished unlocking, two uniformed policemen were standing beside him, and beside them a powerful leashed dog whose ears were aimed my way.

The door opened. "Electronic Watch," I said, holding out my identification. The dog inspected me, while the three uniformed men peered at my symbols and were satisfied.

With a few words and nods the police admitted me to fellowship. In the next moment they were saying goodbye to the guard. "It's clean here, Dan, we're gonna shove off."

The guard agreed they might as well. He gave them a jovial farewell and locked them out, and then turned back to me, still smiling, an old and heavy man, now adopting a fatherly att.i.tude. He squinted with the effort of remembering what he had read on my identification card. "Your name Joe?"

"Joe Ricci."

"Well, Joe, our system's acting up." He pointed. "The control room's up this way."

"I know, I helped install it." I walked beside the guard named Dan through silent pa.s.sages and silent marble galleries, all carved by night-lights into one-third brilliance and two-thirds shadow. We pa.s.sed through new gla.s.s doors that were opened for us by photocells. Maintenance men in green uniforms were cleaning the gla.s.s; the white men among them were calling back and forth in Polish.

Dan whistled cheerfully as we went up the wide four-branched central stair, pa.s.sing under a great skylight holding out the night. From the top landing of the stair, a plain door, little noticed in the daytime, opens through cla.s.sical marble into a science-fiction room of fluorescent lights and electronic consoles. In that room are three large wall panels, marked Security, Fire, and Interior Climate. As we entered, another guard was alone in the room, seated before the huge security panel.

"Gallery two-fifteen showed again," the seated guard said in a faintly triumphant voice, turning to us and pointing to one of the indicator lights on the panel. The little panel lights were laid out within an outline of the building's floor plan. "You'd swear it was someone in there."

I set down my kit and stood looking at the panel, mentally reviewing the general layout of the security circuitry. Electronic Watch has not for a long time used anything as primitive as photo-cells, which are relegated to such prosaic jobs as opening doors. After closing hours in the Inst.i.tute, when the security system is switched on, invisible electric fields permeate the s.p.a.ce of every room where there is anything of value. A cat cannot prowl the building without leaving a track of dis-turbance across the Security panel.

At the moment all its indicators were dim and quiet. I opened my kit, took out a multimeter and a set of probes, and began a preliminary check of the panel itself.

"You'd swear someone's in two-fifteen when it happens," said the guard named Dan. Standing close and watching me, he gave a little laugh. "And then a man starts over to investigate, and before he can get there it stops."

Of course there was nothing nice and obvious wrong with the panel.I had not expected there would be; neat simple troubles are too much to expect from the complexities of modern electronic gear. I tapped the indicator marked 215 but its glow remained dim and steady. "You get the signal from just the one gallery?" I asked.

"Yeah," said the guard in the chair. "Flashing a couple times, real quick, on and off. Then it stays on steady for a while, like someone's just standing in the middle of the room over there. Then like he said, it goes off while a man's trying to get over there. We called the officers and then we called you."

I put the things back in my kit and closed it up and lifted it. "I'll walk over there and look around."

"You know where two-fifteen is?" Dan had just unwrapped a sandwich. "I can walk over with you."

"That's all right, I can find it." I delayed on my way out of the room, smiling back at the two guards. "I've been here in the daytime, looking at the pictures."

"Oh. You bring your girl here, hey?" The guards laughed, a little relieved that I had broken my air of grim intentness. I know I often struck people that way.

Walking alone through the half-lit halls, I found it pleasant to think of myself as a man who came there in two such different capacities. Electronics and art were both in my grasp. I had a good start at knowing everything of importance. Renaissance Man, I thought, of the New Renaissance of the s.p.a.ce Age.

Finding the gallery I wanted was no problem, for all of them are numbered plainly, more or less in sequence. Through rising numbers I traversed the Thirteenth Century, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth. A mult.i.tude of Christs and virgins, saints and n.o.blemen, watched my pa.s.sage from their walls of glare and shadow.

From several rooms away I saw the girl, through a real doorway framing the painted one she stands in.

My steps slowed as I entered gallery two-fifteen. About twenty other paintings hang there, but for me it was empty of any presence but hers.

That night I had not thought of her until I saw her, which struck me then as odd, because on my occasional daytime visits I had always stopped before her door. I had no girl of the kind to take to an art gallery, whatever guards might surmise.

The painter's light is full only on her face, and on her left hand, which rests on the closed bottom panel of a divided door. She is leaning very slightly out through the half-open doorway, her head of auburn curls turned just an inch to her left but her eyes looking the other way. She watches and listens, that much is certain. To me it has always seemed that she is expecting someone. Her full vital body is chaste in a plain dark dress. Consider her att.i.tude, her face, and wonder that so much is made of the smile of Mona Lisa.

The card on the wall beside the painting reads: REMBRANDT VAN RUN.

DUTCH 1606-1669 dated 1645 YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR.

She might have been seventeen when Rem-brandt saw her, and seventeen she has remained, while the faces pa.s.sing her doorway have grown up and grown old and disappeared, wave after wave of them.

She waits.

I broke out of my reverie, at last, with an effort. My eye was caught by the next painting, Saftleven's Witches' Sabbath, which once in the daylight had struck me as amusing. When I had freed my eyes from that I looked into the adjoining galleries, trying to put down the sudden feeling of being watched. I squinted up at the skylight ceiling of gallery two-fifteen, through which a single glaring spotlight shone.

Holding firmly to thoughts of electronics, I peered in corners and under benches, where a for-gotten transistor radio might lurk to interfere, conceivably, with the electric field of the alarm. There was none.

From my kit I took a small field-strength meter, and like a priest swinging a censer I moved it gently through the air around me. The needle swayed, as it should have, with the invisible presence of the field.

There was a light gasp, as of surprise. A sighing momentary movement in the air, something nearby come and gone in a moment, and in that moment the meter needle jumped over violently, pegging so that with a technician's reflex my hand flew to switch it to a less sensitive scale.

I waited there alone for ten more minutes, but nothing further happened.

"It's working now, I could follow you every-where you moved," said the guard in the chair, turning with a.s.surance to speak to me just as I re-entered the science-fiction room. Dan and his sandwich were gone.

"Something's causing interference," I said, in my voice the false authority of the expert at a loss. "So. You never have any trouble with any other gallery, hey?"

"No, least I've never seen any-well, look at that now. Make a liar out of me." The guard chuckled without humor. "Something showing in two-twenty-seven now. That's Modern Art."

Half an hour later I was creeping on a catwalk through a clean crawl s.p.a.ce above gallery two-twenty-seven, tracing a perfectly healthy micro-wave system. The reflected glare of nightlights below filtered up into the crawl s.p.a.ce, through a million holes in acoustical ceiling panels.

A small bright auburn movement, almost directly below me, caught my eye. I crouched lower on the catwalk, putting my eyes close to the holes in one thin panel, bringing into my view almost the whole of the enormous room under the false ceiling.

The auburn was in a girl's hair. It came near matching the hair of the girl in the painting, but that could only have been coincidence, if such a thing exists. The girl below me was alive in the same sense I was, solid and fleshly and three-dimensional. She wore a kind of stretch suit, of a green shade that set off her hair, and she held a shiny object raised like a camera in her hands.

From my position almost directly above her I could not see her face, only the curved grace of her body as she took a step forward, holding the shiny thing high. Then she began another step, and half-way through it she was gone, vanished in an instant from the center of an open floor.

Some time pa.s.sed before I eased up from the strain of my bent position. All the world was silent and ordinary, so that alarm and astonishment would have seemed out of place. I inched back through the crawl s.p.a.ce to my borrowed ladder, climbed down, walked along a corridor and turned a corner into the vast shadow-and-glare of gallery two-two-seven.

Standing in the bright-lit spot where I had seen the girl, I realized she had been raising her camera at a sculpture-a huge, flowing ma.s.s of bronze blobs and curved holes, on the topmost blob a face that looked like something scratched there by a child. I went up to it and thumped my knuckles on the nearest bulge of bronze, and the great thing sounded hollowly. Looking at the card on its marble base I had begun to read- RECLINING FIGURE, 1957.

-when a sound behind me made me spin round.

Dan asked benignly: "Was that you raising a ruckus in here about five minutes ago? Looked like a whole mob of people was running around."

I nodded, feeling the beginning of a strange contentment.

Next day I awoke at the usual time, to afternoon sunlight pushing at the closed yellow shades of my furnished apartment, to the endless street noises coming in. I had slept well and felt alert at once, and began thinking about the girl.

Even if I had not seen her vanish, it would have been obvious that her comings and goings at the Inst.i.tute were accomplished by no ordinary prowlers' or burglars' methods. Nor was she there on any ordinary purpose; if she had stolen or vandalized, I would most certainly have been awakened early.

I ate an ordinary breakfast, not noticing much or being noticed, sitting at the counter in the restaurant on the ground floor of the converted hotel where I rented my apartment. The waitress wore green, although her hair was black. Once I had tried half-heartedly to talk to her, to know her, to make out, but she had kept on working and loafing, talking to me and everyone else alike.

When the sun was near going down I started for work as usual. I bought the usual newspaper to take along, but did not read it when I saw the headline PEACE TALKS FAILING. That evening I felt the way I supposed a lover should feel, going to his beloved.

Dan and two other guards greeted me with smiles of the kind that people wear when things that are clearly not their fault are going wrong for their employer. They told me that the psuedo-prowler had once more visited the gallery two-fifteen, had vanished as usual from the panel just as a guard approached that room, and then had several times appeared on the indicators for gallery two-twenty-seven. I went to two-twenty-seven, making a show of carrying in tools and equipment, and settled myself on a bench in a dim corner, to wait.

The contentment I had known for twenty-four hours became impatience, and with slow pa.s.sing time the tension of impatience made me uncon-trollably restless. I felt sure that she could some-how watch me waiting; she must know I was waiting for her, she must be able to see that I meant her no harm. Beyond meeting her, I had no plan at all.

Not even a guard came to distrub me. Around me, in paint and bronze and stone and welded steel, crowded the tortured visions of the twentieth century. I got up at last in desperation and found that not everything was torture. There on the wall were Monet's water lilies; at first nothing but vague flat shapes of paint, then the surface of a pond and a deep curve of reflected sky. I grew dizzy staring into the water, a dizziness of relief that made me laugh. When I looked away at last the walls and ceiling were shimmering as if the glare of the nightlights was reflected from Monet's pond.

I understood then that something was awry, something was being done to me, but I could not care.

Giggling at the world, I stood there breathing air that seemed to sparkle in my lungs. The auburn-haired girl came to my side and took my arm and guided me to the bench where my unused equipment lay.

Her voice had the beauty I had expected, though witha strange strong accent. "Oh, I am sorry to make you weak and sick. But you insist to stay here and span much time, the time in which I must do my work."

For the moment I could say nothing. She made me sit on the bench, and bent over me with con-cern, turning her head with something of the same questioning look as the girl in the Rembrandt painting. Again she said: "Oh, I am sorry."

"S'all right." My tongue was heavy, and I still wanted to laugh.

She smiled and hurried away, flowed away. Again she was dressed in a green stretch suit, setting off the color of her hair. This time she vanished from my sight in normal fashion, going around one of the gallery's low part.i.tions. Coming from behind that part.i.tion were flashes of light.

I got unsteadily to my feet and went after her. Rounding the corner, I saw three devices set up on tripods, the tripods s.p.a.ced evenly around the Reclining Figure. From the three devices, which I could not begin to identify, little lances of light flicked like stings or brushes at the sculpture. And whirling around it like dancers, on silent rubbery feet, moved another pair of machine-shapes, busy with some purpose that was totally beyond me.

The girl reached to support me as I swayed. Her hands were strong, her eyes were darkly blue, and she was tall in slender curves. Smiling, she said: "It is all right, I do no harm."

"I don't care about that," I said. "I want only-not to tangle things with you."

"What?" She smiled, as if at someone raving. She had drugged me, with subtle ga.s.ses in the air that sparkled in my lungs. I knew that but I did not care.

"I always hold back," I said, "and tangle things with people. Not this time. I want to love you without any of that. This is a simple miracle and I just want it to go on. Now tell me your name."

She was so silent and solemn for a moment, watching me, that I feared that I had angered her. But then she shook her head and smiled again. "My name is Day-ell. Now don't fall down!" and she took her supporting arm away.

For the moment I was content without her touching me. I leaned against the part.i.tion and looked at her busy machines. "Will you steal our Reclining Figure?" I asked, giggling again as I wondered who would want it.

"Steal?" she was thoughtful. "The two greatest works of this house I must save. I will replace them with copies so well made that no one will ever know, before-" She broke off. After a moment she added: "Only you will know." And then she turned away to give closer attention to her silent and ragingly busy machines. When she made an adjustment on a tiny thing she held in her hand, there were suddenly two Reclining Figures visible, one of them smaller and transparent but growing larger, moving toward us from some dark and distant s.p.a.ce that was temporarily within the gallery.

I was thinking over and over what Day-ell had said. Addled and joyful, I plotted what seemed to me a clever compliment, and announced: "I know what the two greatest works in this house are."

"Oh?" The word in her voice was a soft bell. But she was still busy.

"One is Rembrandt's girl."

"You are right!" Day-ell, pleased, turned to me. "Last night I took that one to safety. Where I take them, the originals, they will be safe forever."

"But the best-is you." I pushed away from the part.i.tion. "I make you my girl. My love. Forever, if it can be. But how long doesn't matter."

Her face changed and her eyes went wide, as if she truly understood how marvelous were such words, from anyone, from grim Joe Ricci in particular. She took a step toward me.

"If you could mean that," she whispered, "then I would stay with you, in spite of everything."

My arms went round her and I could feel forever pa.s.sing. "Stay, of course I mean it, stay with me."

"Come, Day-ell, come," intoned a voice, soft, but still having metal in its timbre. Looking over her shoulder I saw the machine-shapes waiting, balancing motionless now on their silent feet. There was again only one Reclining Figure.

My thoughts were clearing and I said to her: "You're leaving copies, you said, and no one will know the difference, before. Before what? What's going to happen?"

When my girl did not answer I held her at arms' length. She was shaking her head slowly, and tears had come into her eyes. She said: "It does not matter what happens, since I have found here a man of life who will love me. In my world there is no one like that. If you will hold me I can stay."

My hands holding her began to shake. I said: "I won't keep you here, to die in some disaster. I'll go with you instead."

"Come, Day-ell, come." It was a terrible steel whisper.

And she stepped back, compelled by the machine-voice now that I had let her go. She said to me: "You must not come. My world is safe for paint, safe for bronze, not safe for men who love. Why do you think that we must steal-"

She was gone, the machines and lights gone with her.

The Reclining Figure stands ma.s.sive and immobile as ever, bronze blobs and curved holes, with a face like something scratched on by a child. Thump it with a knuckle, and it sounds hollowly. Maybe three hundred years' perspective is needed to see it as one of the two greatest in this house. Maybe eyes are needed, accustomed to more dimensions than ours; eyes of those who sent Day-ell diving down through time to save choice fragments from the murky wreckage of the New Renaissance, plunged in the mud of the ignorant and boastful twentieth century.

Not that her world is better. I could not live there now.

The painting looks unchanged. A girl of seven-teen still waits, frozen warmly in Rembrandt's light, three hundred years and more on the verge of smiling, secure that long from age and death and disappointment.

But will a war incinerate her next week, or an earthquake swallow her next month? Or will our city convulse and die in ma.s.s rioting madness, a Witches' Sabbath come true? What warning can I give?

When they found me alone and weeping in the empty gallery they talked about a nervous breakdown.

The indicators on the Security Panel are always quiet now and I have let myself be argued out of the little of my story that I told. No world is safe for those who love.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE METAL MURDERER.

It had the shape of a man, the brain of an electronic devil.

It and the machines like it were the best imitations of men and women that the berserkers, murderous machines themselves, were able to devise and build. Still, they could be seen as obvious frauds when closely inspected by any humans.