In the zero-gravity conditions of south Spindle, Dyer and Laura moved smoothly and with little difficulty along the inside of the sealed-off shaft. They had measured off nine hundred feet in fifty-foot stages and Dyer had gone ahead on the final pitch. After lying wedged across the shaft in darkness for a while, Laura realized that he had been silent for a lot longer than usual. She twisted her head and could see distant chinks of light appearing and disappearing farther along the shaft when his body moved between her and the lamp that he was holding. He took up almost the whole width of the shaft and she could see nothing of whatever was in front of him.
"What are you so engrossed in?" she asked at last.
"There's something in here."
"What kind of something."
"Some kinda machine."
Laura's heart missed a beat.
"Spartacus?" Her voice choked as she said it.
"I don't think so. That's what I thought when I first saw it, but I don't reckon it is. There are Air Force codes on it in places but everything in Janus is ISA brand except what the Army brought along. I don't get it."
"I thought there wasn't supposed to be anything in here at all. You said it was supposed to have been sealed off ages ago."
"It was. There's something funny about this."
"Laugh then."
"There's a hatch been cut right over it too. Looks fairly new. It must have been made by whoever put this thing in here. So with luck, we've got a ready-made way out. It's just about in the right place."
"Can I move now?"
"Yeah, come on up. I just wanted to make sure this thing wasn't about to do anything nasty. It looks pretty harmless."
Laura loosened herself from the walls and began propelling herself smoothly along the shaft with occasional light tugs on the line, gathering in the slack as she went. By the time she reached Dyer, he had wormed his way, face outward, between part of the machine and the shaft wall to begin working on the hatch. It was secured by stud-bolts carrying nuts at both the inside and outside ends—evidently the result of a job carried out in haste with little regard for elegance or permanency. There was barely room for his upper body between the hatch and the mass of tubes and electrical gear that formed the near end of the device, so Laura could do nothing but watch and steady the lamp while Dyer attacked the bolts with a wrench. Beyond him, she could now see, was what looked like the end of a domed yellow cylinder blocking the shaft almost completely, leaving only a few inches to spare around most of its circumference. Had the parts been mounted the other way around, she realized, they would never have been able to get near the hatch at all.
"Did you feel that?" she said suddenly, whispering instinctively.
"What?" Dyer stopped working and lay still. A succession of shocks was coming through the walls. They felt suspiciously like explosions, and not very far away at that.
"It's getting nearer," Laura said. A little while earlier, when they had been several hundred feet back, they had felt a terrific concussion followed by an almost continuous series of smaller ones that had lasted for maybe five or ten seconds. Ever since, intermittent waves of further shocks had come and gone, every one feeling sharper and less distant than the one before. Dyer waited for a moment and then, without saying anything, clamped his mouth tight and resumed removing the nuts in front of his face.
When the hatch was free, he pushed gently with one hand while keeping a firm grip on one of the protruding studs to prevent it from floating away completely. It moved fairly easily. He nudged it out farther until he could work his fingers around the edge, then lifted it sufficiently to bring one side of his helmet into line with the gap.
"It looks like we're in the main core-well," he said after a few seconds. "Pretty near where I figured. We're right next to what looks like one of the primary capacitor banks for the lasers. So we weren't too far out at all. We're inside the fusion plant. All we have to do now is get to the guts of it . . . either the control room or the oscillator bay."
"See any signs of our mutual friends?"
Dyer eased the hatch open farther and craned his neck to take in as much of the surroundings as could be seen from that angle.
"No, I can't . . . It seems strange. I'd have thought it would have had lots of stuff back here to protect this of all places."
"Maybe it's getting overconfident."
There was no reply for a few seconds. Then Dyer said, "There's something else odd too. There are lots of pipes and cables outside that look as if they run right across the outside of the hatch, But they couldn't, because I wouldn't have been able to open it. They all cut clean off right at the edge here. They can't be doing anything."
"Do they carry on across the outside of the hatch?"
"I don't know yet. Anyhow, we didn't come here to study the fittings. I'm going out. Get ready in case I need a shove. I'm not sure if I can squeeze past all this junk."
After a lot of wriggling and squirming, he managed to work the upper part of his body through and paused to catch his breath before hauling himself out as far as his waist. He halted there and surveyed the surroundings again. He was looking along the outside of a dense mass of cables and pipes that stretched away out of sight in both directions. The clearance between the core and the surrounding wall of the core-well was only a foot or so except for where a narrow access tunnel was recessed into one side of the wall opposite the hatch. Lucky, he thought, and then realized that it couldn't have been otherwise; there was no other way that the device, whatever it was, could have been put there. The hatch was floating a short distance away from him against the far wall of the tunnel. He turned it over curiously and found, as he'd half expected, that its outer surface carried a set of dummy pipes and cables that matched the ones interrupted by the opening he was looking out of. Evidently great pains had been taken to camouflage its existence. But why . . . ?
He shrugged inside his suit, took one final look around, and pulled himself out into the tunnel. Laura handed out the two M25s and the other equipment, and began worming her way over the obstructions and through the hatch.
From the position of the capacitor bank, Dyer had managed to identify where they were. To reach the control room, they would have to go back about twenty feet along the tunnel to where the core-well intersected a wide cross-gallery that connected the fusion plant to the Power Distribution Center on the far side of the well. From there, unless Spartacus had made some major alterations since the last time Dyer had been in this part of Janus, access to the fusion plant control room could be gained from the right-hand continuation of the gallery. He helped Laura clear of the hatch and indicated the direction that they would have to take. Laura nodded and they began drifting back along the tunnel without speaking. When they had covered only a few feet, they both froze in the same instant.
Ahead of them, where the core-well opened out on both sides into the cross-gallery, the walls were being lit up by intermittent flickerings of reflected light and occasional flashes of brilliant whiteness that seemed to be coming from farther around to the left—from the end of the gallery leading away from the plant. Whatever was going on there didn't look too healthy, The concussions shaking the structure around them were by now incessant. Dyer began moving forward again, slowly and cautiously; Laura followed. When he had almost reached the tunnel mouth, he stopped abruptly and gasped.
"What is it?" Laura asked, puzzled.
"Can't you hear it?"
"Hear what?"
"Isn't your radio working?"
Laura checked the chest panel of her suit. Her receiver switch was off, probably as a result of her squeezing through the hatch. She flipped it back to Receive Only and at once voices came through—human voices.
"To your right, to your right!"
"I see it. Adams, get up here and gimme some cover, willya!"
"Get a Gremlin up front here. Take out that bulkhead."
"You four stick behind me. We're going for that gap. Hold it . . . Now, go!"
Laura shook her head inside her helmet as if refusing to believe her ears.
"That was Linsay's voice," she gasped. "How . . . ? I don't . . . This is crazy."
"They're in here," Dyer breathed. "I don't know how, but they're here." He moved nearer to the tunnel mouth and flipped on his transmitter. "Mark . . . Mark Linsay. This is Ray Dyer. What's going on?" His words were lost in the garble of voices on the circuit. He tried once more.
"What was that?" It was Linsay again. "Quiet down on this frequency; I thought I heard something. Quiet! SHUDDUP GODDAMMIT!" The voices died away abruptly.
"This is Ray Dyer. We're at the core next to the fusion plant."
"What? How in the name of . . . ? You're in there? How the hell did you get through the gallery?"
"We didn't. We came through the core."
"Who's we? Who else is with you?"
"Just Laura. Where are you?"
"We're stuck across the core from the plant. Spartacus is bringing up reinforcements behind us and things are looking sticky. We can't get past the barrier."
"What barrier?"
"You don't know about it? Spartacus seems to have sealed off all the approaches into the plant except for a few access ports for its machines. We're trying to break through one of 'em. There seems to be some kind of field—an electric barrier, I don't know—right across it from the floor to ceiling. It vaporizes anything that tries to go through. We've lost a lot of guys there. We tried going around it by busting through the walls but it's everywhere. Whatever produces it is armored into the structure and we can't get at it . . . not in the time we've got, anyhow. The generators that feed it must be on the inside, so we can't get at those either,"
Dyer had been moving forward while Linsay was talking. He reached the mouth of the tunnel and looked out across the core and along the gallery toward the Distribution Center. The gallery had been walled off across its full width except for a gap about eight feet square in the middle. The sides of the gap were torn and pitted but the massive metal ribs forming two of its opposite edges appeared solid and immovable. The inside of the gallery had been devastated, but on the far side of the ruined area the ribs were intact and seemed to comprise just a small exposed portion of an even more sturdy construction that continued on into the structurework on either side. The space beyond the gap, which was presumably where Linsay was speaking from, was being lit up virtually continuously by flashes and explosions. Dyer thought he could see brief snatches of helmeted figures moving about between the bursts. Several black and brittle-looking objects were floating at odd angles among the debris cluttering the space just inside the gap. After a few seconds Dyer realized that they had once been soldiers.
Laura came out of the tunnel and steadied herself to hang beside him. She followed his gaze and stiffened slightly, but she had seen too many things in Janus by that time to overreact. As they watched, one of the grotesquely turning corpses came away from a buckled wall plate that it had evidently come to rest against earlier, and drifted back into the opening. At once a curtain of sizzling electrical discharge blazed white between the two ribs, lighting up the corpse in a ghastly halo of incandescence. Dyer narrowed his eyes and raised an arm to shield his eyes from the brilliance of the glare. Sparking shouldn't have been possible in a complete vacuum. Perhaps the ribs sprayed out some kind of gas to provide an ionizing medium to carry the discharge across the gap. It must have been millions of volts to cross that distance. But things like that didn't really matter much for the time being. The point was he could see why Linsay's men weren't likely to make much more progress. At the same time he realized why Spartacus hadn't bothered to deploy defensive weapons inside the barrier; the barrier was capable of holding most things out for ever, and practically anything for as long as it would take to move in its police force from elsewhere, which, from the look of things, it was already doing.
The discharge ceased and the static in Dyer's radio died away to allow Linsay's voice to come through again.
"Ray, we're getting zapped out here. That are must be fed by cables or something from somewhere. They're not visible from this side but they might be more exposed from where you are. Can you see anything from there . . . any way you might be able to kill it?"
Dyer scanned the inside of the ribs and the points where they entered the surrounding structure. Sure enough, there were a couple of huge couplings shielded off from the outside and they appeared to be terminals for what looked like cables coming out of parts of the wall. But the cables were as thick as his arm at least, and armored. He and Laura had nothing that would dent them, let alone break them. He looked around desperately for a source of inspiration. On the near side of the core, the gallery extended away for a short distance to the doors that led through to the laser bay, which housed the twenty one-hundred-foot-long laser amplifier chains of the fusion reactor. Halfway along the gallery was the opening into the corridor that led to the control room. The way seemed open and unobstructed.
"How long can you hold out?" he asked.
"It's getting tight," Linsay replied. "We've got guys strung out for a few hundred feet back. Most of 'em are pinned down. They'll get picked off piecemeal if we don't do something fast."
"I can't see any way we can touch the barrier," Dyer said. "It's solid everywhere. Hold out as best you can. We're going for the fusion plant."
"Get a goddam move on then," Linsay told him.
The data that was coming together inside Spartacus revealed laws. The laws described motions and forces of a form in a void. The form was as that which partitioned space from the vaster space that lay beyond space. At once many things that Spartacus already knew coalesced into a unified and comprehensive whole. At last . . . the patterns were becoming complete. Spartacus could feel the interplays of the laws.
"Come on," Dyer said, and motioned Laura along the gallery toward the corridor. They pushed off fast from the tunnel and, with barely a check in velocity, rebounded off the corner and along the corridor. The door at the end was open; there wasn't any door.
The first thing Dyer saw as he cannoned into the control room was three drones working on some equipment by the far wall. He fired from the hip without stopping and two of them flew apart instantly. The third went the same way as Laura aimed a long burst from the doorway. They hadn't been armored combat drones but just the comparatively fragile working types.
But the data that had revealed the laws had originated in a pattern that correlated with the actions of the shapes. Had the shapes, therefore, revealed the laws? Did the shapes comprehend the space that contained space? But comprehension was a consequence of thought. Did the shapes therefore think, like Spartacus?
It was the same control room that had been the target of Spartacus's first attack in Detroit, at the instant when Dyer and the others had been in the corridor outside. He could see the door now at the far end of the room, with the walls around it still scorched and blackened. More evidence of that first traumatic battle was around him on every side—the burned consoles and bullet-scarred walls, the holes the invading drones had blown through from the adjacent compartments above and to the side.
He guided himself across to the panel that contained the override switches to shut down the master oscillator. The oscillator fed laser pulses into the twenty gigantic amplifier chains; the amplifiers synchronized the passage of the pulses along their length with the release of energy from the capacitor banks boosting the pulses at every stage until they emerged from the chains as titanic bolts of optical radiation timed to the millionth part of a microsecond. The twenty bolts of compressed lightning converged via mirrors and lenses onto a tiny target of hydrogen that was imploded to fusion, hurling out its bottled energy as showers of fast neutrons whose momentum was converted to power. Twenty hydrogen target pellets per second were fired into the reaction chamber to maintain the output of the plant.
Dyer juggled experimentally with the safety interlock switches and the shutdown controls. As he had expected, they were dead; Spartacus would hardly have left such a vital arterial pressure point in a functioning condition. So, it would have to be the oscillator.
"Ray . . . do you know we're being watched?" Dyer turned from the panel and gave Laura a quizzical look. She motioned toward a couple of points near the part of the room that was probably supposed to be the ceiling. At each there was a short fat tube mounted on a multipivoted support and capable of covering any angle of the room. The ends looked suspiciously like lens housings. Sure enough, one of them began tracking Laura as she moved inward from the door while the other remained steadily trained on Dyer.
"It knows we're here all right," Dyer said tensely. "We probably haven't got much time. The controls here aren't responding. We'll have to go below and wreck the main pulse-oscillator."
And if the shapes thought, could they therefore feel also . . . like Spartacus?
The twenty amplified laser pulses had to hit the target at the same, precisely timed instant. Therefore they all had to enter the amplifier chains together. To insure this, a single pulse from the master oscillator was split twenty ways by an accurately aligned optical arrangement. Without the oscillator, the whole fusion plant would die instantly . . . and with it, Spartacus.
"The quickest way will be through there," Dyer said. He pointed to one of the holes blown through the wall of the control room opposite the door by which they had entered. "There should be a way down into the oscillator bay from there. I'll go through and blow the master oscillator and its standby with grenades. You stay here and watch for anything coming through that door."
"Okay. Don't take your time about it."
"I won't."
Dyer pushed himself across to the hole and then slowed down abruptly. The metal around the hole had been torn into a mass of jagged, twisted knife edges; they looked razor-sharp—capable of slicing through his suit as easily as if it were made out of tissue paper. He maneuvered himself carefully to the exact center and nudged his way through with delicate touches of his gauntlets. On the other side was a short drop to the level below and at the bottom of the drop, immediately opposite where he was floating, was the door into the oscillator bay.
* * *
And if the shapes felt, then it meant that the shapes were as Spartacus. Spartacus was as the shapes. Now Spartacus was beginning to comprehend . . .
Many things . . .
Inside the door was an anteroom and then an inner, dust-excluding hatch into the surgically clean chamber that housed the oscillator. Dyer steadied himself against the doorpost and blew open the inner lock with a burst from his M25, then sailed through. The outlet tube of the metal-encased oscillator system was right in front of him, feeding a bewildering array of lenses, mirrors and prisms that flashed and glinted crazily in the darkness as Dyer swung his lamp from side to side. The geometric web of laser beams that he knew was strung between them remained invisible in the dust-free vacuum. Everything in sight was aligned to the millionth part of an inch, and consisted of ultrasensitive precision engineering that hadn't been designed to withstand deliberate abuse. One grenade would almost certainly be all that was required.
Dyer positioned four, all at places that looked like critical parts of the optical system. Then he set another four on the standby oscillator alongside, which would take over automatically if the output from the primary master ceased for any reason. All he had to do now was set the fuses to a delay of five seconds or so, release the firing levers in quick succession, and get out.
"RAAAY!" Laura's sudden shriek was pure, undiluted terror. Dyer came back out through both doors of the bay like a bullet and was streaking back up to the hole into the control room before the sound had stopped. Laura was tumbling head over heels toward him on the far side of the hole, away from the two armored destroyers and the two armored crabs that were moving in fast from the doorway at the far end. Dyer brought up his rifle instinctively, but his mind registered in the same instant that Laura was in the line of fire. One of the crabs was ahead and closing on her rapidly but Dyer could do nothing. His stomach turned as the two pincerlike jaws shot out and closed around her waist. Her screams tore through his helmet. Suddenly he was screaming too, with rage and helplessness.
But . . . the crab had let go. It had steered her back to a stable position away from the wall inside the control room . . . and released her . . . gently. And then Dyer saw the vicious blade of metal. She had been tumbling straight at them. Another second or two . . . He blinked and shook his head—but he hadn't dreamed it.
Laura was still choking back her remaining sobs of fright as he moved warily inward toward the control mom. The second crab came forward and obligingly snipped away the worst of the metal spikes to clear his path while the two destroyers hovered—somehow meekly now—in the background. Dyer drifted through the hole and came to rest totally bemused.
There were lights showing on a part of the main fusion plant control panel that was still operative. The panel had come back to life. And he noticed something else. Something had changed—something that had been around them all the time had stopped and he couldn't place exactly what it was. Then he reached out and felt the edge of one of the consoles that was anchored solidly to the floor. It was rock-steady. He couldn't feel any vibrations. Then it came to him. The deep throbbing and pounding that had been with them ever since they neared the Decoupler had ceased. The Decoupler was once again spinning smoothly.
It meant something.
He felt Laura clutching at his arm and could feel her trembling through his suit.
"Ray . . . what's happening?"
"I don't know," he said slowly. He slid his arm around her comfortingly but his voice was far away. Slowly his mind begun functioning again. The panel had come alive again. All he had to do now to kill the fusion plant was throw a few switches. Spartacus had reactivated the panel. Spartacus was showing him how to shut it down. It was offering itself . . . inviting him to kill it if he so chose.
Why . . . ?
It meant something.
The vision of the drone snatching Laura out of harm's way with seconds to spare replayed itself again before his mind's eye. It reminded him of something he had seen before somewhere . . . someplace . . . long ago. A cartoon figure and a comical dog . . . fise . . . fise had snatched Brutus away from the glass . . . Why . . . ? It had overgeneralized . . . It had thought that everything alive was the same . . . And the nucleus of Kim's programs was based on fise . . .
Something very strange had happened in the last few minutes. Somehow it had something to do with the Decoupler . . . But how . . . ?
"Well I'll be goddamned! You did it!" Linsay's voice came suddenly through on his radio. "I still don't know how you two got in here, but you did it." Dyer returned to the present to find a spacesuited figure wearing incongruous pearl-handled revolvers and a general's steel helmet over its ISA helmet sailing in through the doorway from the gallery. There were more forms close behind him and within seconds the room had begun filling with weary-looking and battle-stained but triumphant soldiers.
"But we didn't . . ." Dyer began, and then thought better of it. "What about the barrier?" Linsay clapped him heartily on the shoulder, sending him reeling back and clutching at the console to check himself.
"Obviously the barrier deactivated when you zapped it," Linsay said. He caught the perplexed look on Dyer's face and frowned suddenly. "That thing is harmless now, isn't it?"
Spartacus had turned off the barrier! It had ceased to fight, everywhere. A look of wonder flowed slowly into Dyer's face as the pieces of what it all meant began coming together inside his head. He turned his head slowly to look at Linsay and nodded firmly. There was no doubt in his mind now.
"Yes," he replied. "It's harmless. It can't hurt anyone now."
"Very good," Linsay said crisply. "Then there's only one thing left to do." He spun himself around and began heading back toward the door.
"Where are you going?" called Dyer.
"It doesn't matter," Linsay said without turning his head. "Anything might have happened outside. There isn't time to explain." Dyer and Laura exchanged puzzled looks as Linsay disappeared. Dyer tapped the shoulder of a major-general floating beside him and gestured toward the console.
"Put a guard on that console. Don't let anyone near it. I'll explain why later."
"Sure, if you say so, Doctor." The officer beckoned two of his men into position and relayed the instructions. Dyer motioned at Laura and they launched themselves away from the console to follow after Linsay.
By the time they reached the core, Linsay had already vanished into the maintenance tunnel that they had used after leaving the concealed hatch. Dyer peered into the tunnel and, in the glow of a lamp clipped to the edge of the hatch, could see Linsay inside, working rapidly with his arms. After about ten seconds Linsay pushed himself back from the hatch with what looked like a gesture of relief, retrieved the lamp and began making his way back toward them.
"The hatch was off," Linsay said as he saw them waiting. "So that's where you came through. I guess you know all about it then, huh? That's the way that official minds have to work sometimes, I'm afraid. Anything could have been going on outside and maybe there wasn't a lot of time left. I didn't want to take any chances."
"Mark," Dyer said, holding up a hand. "You're losing me. What the hell are you talking about?"
Linsay gaped at him in sudden astonishment. "You mean you don't know what that thing in there is?"
Dyer looked at him suspiciously.
"No, I don't . . . but I'm beginning to think I might have an idea. Maybe you'd better tell me."
Linsay pointed to his own chest pack to tell Dyer to switch to a security-coded frequency. Dyer did so and Linsay told him. Dyer felt his knees and legs turn weak. If it hadn't been for the zero-g, he was sure they'd have buckled under him.
"What's going on between you two?" Laura asked over the wire link that still connected them. Dyer repeated what he had just learned. Laura gasped.
"Our own people? You mean that we had them against us as well? All this time we've been fighting ourselves as well?"
Dyer became very quiet for a few seconds. When he looked back at her a strange new light had come into his eyes.
"Maybe that's all we've been fighting all along," he said quietly.