FOURTEEN

The door in the far bulkhead of the prison chamber opened and another machine appeared. It marched smoothly toward the little group of humans, and came to a precise halt directly in front of De Carlo. "Come," it said.

Uncertainly, raising one hand in a tentative self-pointing gesture, he got to his feet.

The machine took him by the wrist and led him away from the others. Lee saw a hitherto unsuspected door slide open, in what had been a solid wall. The lighted space beyond swallowed the robot and the man, the door slid shut again.

After an interval that seemed impossible to measure (but was later asserted by Random to have been just over fourteen minutes) the door opened again. De Carlo came through it slowly, unescorted, to rejoin the group.

Hemphill had got to his feet and was looking at him closely. "What happened?"

De Carlo squeezed out a few words through a tight throat. "Kardec and Ting Wu are in there. Their bodies." Then De Carlo shrugged. He seemed somewhat relieved. "As to what actually happened, nothing, not much. It just talked to me, asked questions." Sitting down with a sigh, he leaned his back against the wall.

Over the next several hours, other people were taken away in the same fashion, one at a time, and then brought back. Random assured his human companions that the timing of the interrogations was not precise.

The process of interrogation moved along, sometimes with lengthy pauses. Whatever intelligence was in charge of the operation was taking its own time. Everyone on coming back told pretty much the same story of an interrogation session.

"The questioning was done entirely by machines?" Dirigo asked each returnee the same question, and every time he got the same answer he sounded scandalized. It was a method of grilling prisoners that had never been covered in their classes on the theory and practice and history of war.

Dirigo was persistent. "Did you get a good look at them? They are Huveans, aren't they?" He and Kang Shin remained stubbornly determined that the traditional enemy, Huvean human, lay behind it all, waiting to be uncovered.

"No, I didn't see anyone. It was just like the others have said. The robot that took me there stood over me the whole time, and a voice coming out of a wall asked questions. It sounded like the same squeaking voice we hear every time it talks to us."

"What did they do?"

Sunbula after being questioned could offer little more in the way of enlightenment. "I didn't see anyone," she said in her husky voice. "'They'? There is no 'they'!" And she gave a hysterical, uneven laugh.

The pattern persisted with no essential change: a machine brought one captive at a time to a place of isolation for the serious questioning. It was a small, comfortably lighted space, somewhat more pleasant than the usual dungeon, and out of sight and hearing of the subject's fellow prisoners, who would not be able to hear anything that she might say. The naked bodies of Ting Wu and Kardec lay by as witnesses, who had already told all that they were ever going to tell.

Only the robot and the wounded Du Prel were exempt from the routine. The latter still lay flat on the deck, groaning and slowly bleeding his life away.

Dirigo was the next prisoner to go. On coming back, he could tell his fellow captives that he was no longer sure about the nature of their enemy. Except that it had been only a machine doing the questioning, of that he could be certain.

Kang Shin objected: "But it could have been someone pretending to be a machine, using that godawful, stupid voice"

Dirigo was shaking his head slowly. "I suppose someone could have pretended. But why would anyone do that?"

Kang Shin, still committed to the belief that they faced Huvean craftiness and cruelty, remained stubbornly unconvinced. "One of their sneaky tricks..."

Hemphill was ready to take sides. "If Huveans could build a thing like this, killer robots to form their boarding parties, even do their interrogation, they'd have no need for trickery. They'd just be gloating their ugly heads off."

The routine, as Lee heard it described, seemed to vary little from one interrogation to another. One man-shaped machine invariably entered the chamber and stood by during the questioning, waiting to carry or drag or escort the prisoner away again, or, presumably, to inflict pain, or death, as some central processor decided. So far, no experiments with physical pain had been conducted.

When Lee's turn came, the machine was certainly not following the alphabetical roster, he found himself the only living thing in a small and very different room, just as his classmates had described it. The two dead men lay there, almost enviable in their peace. It crossed Lee's mind vaguely that as yet they were showing no signs of decay. Considerable time had passed, they were no longer bleeding, and the blood had dried. Chemical changes must be occurring, but possibly nothing that depended on bacteria. It occurred to Lee that the bodies might have been somehow treated, perhaps with radiation, to eliminate microorganisms.

The interrogator, the ugly voice from the wall, began by warning Lee: "If you try to deceive me, punishment will follow."

"I understand," Lee managed to croak out, not looking at the corpses. It helped that he had been given some idea of what to expect. Of course, he thought to himself, if the arch-villain who had them in its power really was a computer, it ought to be able to carry out multiple interrogations at the same time, using a series of cells or booths, with a questioning machine in each.

"How many ships of war does Huvea possess?" the squeaking and uneven voice demanded.

He mumbled something to the effect that none of the prisoners knew the answer to that question. Just as he finished speaking, Lee heard himself let out a little squeaking chirp of fear. The artificial gravity had just twitched, as happened sometimes on any ship. Rigor in both corpses had evidently come and gone, for both of them moved, grotesquely, took one step in a kind of horizontal dance. Simultaneously they shrugged their shoulders and their four hands flipped up and down. They didn't know the answer either.

"I don't know." Somehow, he was keeping his own physical balance, his thoughts on the enemy's question, which it had just patiently repeated, and his voice steady. "Many, I suppose. Nobody's given me any details about their strength. Only that they are strong."

"Stronger than your fleet of the Twin Worlds?"

"No. Our leaders were confident that we could beat them, or they wanted us to feel that confidence. But I tell you I've been given no details."

"Only that your fleet was supposedly more powerful than that of your enemies."

"That is correct."

"Is that not a detail?"

Silence.

"How many ships were in your own fleet?"

Silence, at first. Then: "I don't know that either. Anyway, the rules state that as a prisoner of war I don't have to answer any questions, beyond identifying myself."

"How many battleships were in your fleet?"

That past tense, the prisoner thought, sounded pretty ominous. The number had been pretty common knowledge, and he saw no reason to attempt a lie. "Eight."

"How many cruisers?"

That was less certain. He guessed that there might be twenty.

The machine shifted abruptly from its original line of questioning. "What are these rules of war?"

Lee began a stumbling explanation, but was soon interrupted. "I will tear you to pieces, beginning slowly, with your extremities, if you begin to lie. When did you last fight a war?"

Under the new threat his body was quivering, involuntarily. Somehow he managed to keep talking. "Never. I mean, you must understand, I had never seen a war until this, until this happened. The last time my people fought a war was long before I was born."

"Then by what process do you know the rules by which war is to be fought?"

"Those rules, like many other things, were recorded, in the old times. They form a part of history."

"Why is it necessary to have rules, to fight a war?"

Lee in his fear and exhaustion was losing the thread of the questioning; realizing this, with a sudden, icy shock, he was once again in terror of being tortured. After an agonizing few seconds, he recalled the last question, and said: "I don't know. I suppose we think that even in war, wewe retain some humanity."

"Humanity is a form of life. Therefore to retain humanity is evil. Why do you want to do that?"

"Because that's what I am. A human being."

"What you call diseases are forms of life microorganisms, do you agree?"

"They are not the only diseases, but yes, essentially. I suppose."

"You are admittedly no more than a mass of proliferating cells, an example of disorder and disturbance, of illness, corruption, of the life-plague infecting the matter of the Galaxy. Can you deny this?"

"No." It was a small-voiced answer, slow to come.

"It is obvious that the Galaxy, the entire universe, will be better off when you are dead."

Lee made no answer to that. Apparently none was required. The escort robot took Lee by the arm. Several seconds passed before he could be sure that it was not going to tear him apart, only convey him back to his fellows. On the way he began to sob. The session was over, and he was still alive.

In a time and place only ambiguously connected to the world of Lee's experience, the Ninety-first Diplomat, in her capacity as historian, was making notes.

Evidence from a number of sources strongly suggested to the central processor that at the time of the berserker's entrance on the scene, an outbreak of fighting had been imminent, between this system's life units and those of another planetary group nearby, the latter being called Huvean.

Data kept flowing in. Information gleaned from other prisoners, and from intercepted messages, abundantly confirmed the likelihood of such a conflict. Immediately the machine began to plan how it might use the fact of this threatened war to its advantage.

More fundamentally, it labored to gather the knowledge of how widespread this type of life had become. Already it had discovered there were colonies of this same intelligent species in approximately a hundred solar systems. All of these had sprung from one swarming home world, known as Earth, somewhere out near the Galactic fringe. Exact coordinates for Earth were not immediately available.

If the samples of this species thus far encountered were truly typical, it promised to be a stubborn and difficult variety to root out.

The idea of instigating and promoting war among the different colonies assumed an increased importance in the onboard computers' calculations.

The berserker understood about war, in all the special ways that a machine could understand a subject. Thousands of years ago, its organic creators had seen to that. And since then it had learned much, forgotten very little.

Having thoroughly sterilized one planet of this system's infected pair, before departing from the system it would run another series of tests, just to be sure no trace of the infection had been missed, the berserker was now ready to move on to the next.

As soon as the massive death machine got under way again, it was bombarded with more messages from the local life units. The berserker recorded these automatically, in case some future development rendered them of interest; but for now, there was nothing worthy of the central processor's attention.

Now the berserker became once more subject to sporadic attacks by certain remnants of the defeated fleet. It welcomed the tendency of these life units to hurl themselves at it, evidently without any planning or coordination, in their inadequate vessels. In this way it was able to kill them much more quickly and efficiently than it could have if it had been required to hunt them down.

Of course, when this system's two heavily infected planets had been effectively rendered lifeless, the job would still, in a sense, only have begun. It would then be necessary to undertake a time-consuming search for traces of life on all the system's other bodies. Experience warned that in any system where intelligent life units became dominant, they would leave their traces everywhere, excepting only the central sun itself.

At the moment, there was no need to expend any more resources on the world called Prairie.

On approaching the system's second habitable world, the one called Timber by its billions of swarming badlife, the machine changed tactics. It had planned this change from the beginning, from the time of its discovery that this system contained two heavily infected planets.

Once more it strengthened its own defensive fields, and created multiple images of itself, in expectation of stubborn resistance, heavy fire from ground defenses that were probably similar to those on Prairie.

But here, instead of at once undertaking a mass sterilization, it prepared to land a reconnaissance force of a hundred or so fighting units. With victory in this system now all but mathematically certain, the berserker had determined to assign a high priority to the task of gaining as much knowledge, as rapidly as possible, of this highly resistant form of badlife.

It was time to test the reactions, discover the full range of capabilities, of this previously unknown form of badlife. If none of their hundred worlds and more were currently armed with better weapons than this local sample, some of them doubtless soon would be.

It was necessary to gather much more information about them.

The central processing circuits predicted, with a probability of ninety-four percent, that a protracted campaign, employing many cleansing units, was going to be required, to eradicate life from all the worlds this species had infected.