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of sense. Three steps sideways brought Derron to where he could see what Saile
was gaping at.
He had come in time to see the berserker-wolf take the last hesitant step in
its advance. To see it raise one metal paw
and with its steel claw-fingers gently touch the kneeling friar s extended
hand.
So, my guess was right; it had become a living thing, said
Derron. His head was resting in Lisa s lap, and he could if he chose look up
past her face at the buried park s real tree tops and artificial sun. And,
as such, susceptible to St. Jovann s domination. To his love ... I guess
there s no other way to put it.
Lisa, stroking his forehead, raised her eyebrows ques-
tioningly.
Derron put on a defensive frown. Oh, there are rational explanations. The
most complex and compact machine the berserkers ever built, driven up through
twenty thousand years of evolutionary gradient from their staging area
something like life was bound to happen to it. Or so we say now. And
Jovann and some other men have had amazing power over living things; that s
fairly well documented, even if we rationalists can t understand it.
I looked up the story about St. Jovann and the wolf, said
Lisa, still stroking his brow. It says that, after he tamed it, the animal
lived out its days like a pet dog in the village.
That would refer to the original wolf. ... I guess the little change in
history we had wasn t enough to change the legend. I
suppose it was the berserker s plan all along to kill the original animal and
take its place during the taming episode.
Killing Jovann then might make people think he had been a fraud all his life.
But tearing the original wolf into bits was an irrational, lifelike thing to
do if we d known about that sooner, we might have guessed what d happened to
our enemy.
There were other little clues along the way things it did for no reason that
would be valid for a machine. And I really should have guessed in the
cathedral, when it started babbling to me about passages between life and
not-life. Anyway, Opera-
tions isn t as trusting as Jovann and his biographers. We ve got the thing in
a cage in present-time while the scientists try to decide what to . . .
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Derron had to pause there, to accommodate a young lady who was bending over
him with the apparent intention of being kissed.
... Did I mention how nice some of that country looked around there? he
went on, a little later. Of course, the big hill is reserved for the
rebuilding of the cathedral. But I thought you and I might drop into a
Homestead Office some time soon, you know, before the postwar rush starts, and
put our names down for one of those other hilltops. ...
And Derron had to pause again.
Not science nor music nor any other art encompasses the full measure of life s
refusal to succumb. The pattern is as deep as the blind growth of cells, as
high as the loftiest intellect
and broader than we can see as yet.
SMASHER
CLAUS SLOVENSKO WAS COMING TO THE CONCLUSION THAT THE
battle in nearby space was going to be invisible to anyone on the planet
Waterfall assuming that there was really going to be a battle at all.
Claus stood alone atop a forty-meter dune, studying a night sky that flamed
with the stars of the alien Busog cluster, mostly blue-white giants which were
ordinarily a sight worth watching in themselves. Against that background, the
greatest energies released by interstellar warships could, he supposed, be
missed as a barely visible twinkling. Unless, of course, the fighting should
come very close indeed.
In the direction he was facing, an ocean made invisible by night stretched
from near the foot of the barren dune to a horizon marked only by the
cessation of the stars. Claus turned now to scan once more the sky in the
other direction. That way, toward planetary north, the starry profusion went
on and on. In the northeast a silvery half-moon, some antique stage designer s
concept of what Earth s own moon should be, hung low behind thin clouds. Below
those clouds extended an entire continent of lifeless sand and rock. The land
masses of
Waterfall were bound in a silence that Earth ears found uncanny, stillness
marred only by the wind, by murmurings of sterile streams, and by occasional
deep rumblings in the rock itself.
Claus continued turning slowly, till he faced south again.
Below him the night sea lapped with lulling false familiarity.
He sniffed the air, and shrugged, and gave up squinting at the stars, and
began to feel his way, one cautious foot after another, down the shifting
slope of the dune s flank. A small complex of buildings, labs and living
quarters bunched as if for companionship, the only human habitation on the
world of
Waterfall, lay a hundred meters before him and below. Tonight as usual the
windows were all cheerfully alight. Ino Vacroux had decided, and none of the
other three people on the planet had seen any reason to dispute him, that any
attempt at blackout would be pointless. If a berserker force was going to
descend on Waterfall, the chance of four defenseless humans avoiding discovery
by the unliving killers would be nil.
Just beyond the foot of the dune, Claus passed through a gate in the high
fence of fused rock designed to keep out drifting sand with no land
vegetation of any kind to hold the dunes in place, they tended sometimes to
get pushy.
A few steps past the fence, he opened the lockless door of the main entrance
to the comfortable living quarters. The large common room just inside was
cluttered with casual furniture, books, amateur art, and small and
middle-sized aquariums. The three other people who completed the population of
the planet were all in this room at the moment, and all looked up to see if
Claus brought news.
Jenny Surya, his wife, was seated at the small computer terminal in the far
corner, wearing shorts and sweater, dark hair tied up somewhat carelessly,
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long elegant legs crossed.
She was frowning as she looked up, but abstractedly, as if the worst news
Claus might be bringing them would be of some potential distraction from their
work.
Closer to Claus, in a big chair pulled up to the big communicator cabinet,
slouched Ino Vacroux, senior scientist of the base. Claus surmised that Ino
had been a magnificent physical specimen a few decades ago, before being
nearly killed in a berserker attack upon another planet. The medics had
restored function but not fineness to his body. The gnarled, hairy thighs
below his shorts were not much thicker than a child s; his ravaged torso was
draped now in a flamboyant shirt. In a chair near him sat Glenna Reyes, his
wife, in her usual work garb of clean white coveralls. She was just a little
younger than Vacroux, but wore the years with considerably more ease.
Nothing to see, Claus informed them all, with a loose wave meant to
describe the lack of visible action in the sky.
Or to hear, either, Vacroux grated. His face was grim as he nodded toward
the communicator. The screens of the device sparkled, and its speakers hissed
a little, with noise that wandered in from the stars and stranger things than
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