Part 14 (1/2)

Even as I in my greed have sometimes dealt with the bones of a little roast fowl . . . but no, these bones have not been gnawed for nourishment. Only broken, and broken again, as if by some creature more wantonly savage than any wolf.”

The name of Brother Jovann symbolized gentleness and love to Modern historians as well as laymen, to skeptics as well as the orthodox temple-members who venerated him as a saint. Like Vincento, St.

Jovann had become a towering folk figure, only half-understood.

”We're just this hour catching on to Jovann's practical importance,” said Time Ops' voice in Derron's head, as Derron ran. ”With Vincento stabilized, and all our observers concentrated on the area you're in, we're getting a better look at it than ever before. Historically, Jovann's lifeline goes on about fifteen years from your point, and all along the way it radiates support to other lines. What has been described as 'good-turn-a-day stuff.' Then these other lines tend to radiate life support in turn, and the process propagates on up through history. Our best judgment now is that the disarmament treaty three hundred years after Jovann's death will fall through, and that an international nuclear war will wipe out our civilization in pre-Modern times, if St. Jovann is terminated at your point.”

When Time Ops paused, a girl's voice came in briskly. ”A new report for Colonel Odegard.”

Walking again, Derron asked, ”Lisa?”

She hesitated for just an instant, then continued, business first. ”Colonel, the lifeline that was described to you earlier as having an embryonic appearance is moving out of the safety zone after the other two. It seems to be traveling at a high rate of speed, faster than a man or a load-beast can run. We can give no explanation of this. Also, you're to bear five degrees left.”

”Understand.” Derron turned five degrees left, as near as he could judge. He was getting out of the lowlands now, and there was a little less mud to impede his progress, ”Lisa?”

”Derron, they let me come on because I said I'd tend strictly to business.”

”Understand. You do that.” He judged he had walked fifty steps and began to run once more, his breath immediately turning into gasps. ”I just want to say-I wish-you were carrying my baby.”

There was a small, completely feminine sound. But when Lisa's voice came back on intelligibly, it was cool again, with more bearing corrections to be given.

From the corner of his eye Brother Saile caught the distant moving of something running toward them through the trees and brush. He turned, squinting under the afternoon sun, and with surprise at his own relative calm he saw that their search for the wolf had come to an end. Wolf? The thing approaching should perhaps be called monster or demon instead, but he could not doubt it was the creature that had spread terror among the peasants, come now to find the men who dared to search for it.

Poisonous-looking as a silver wasp, the man-sized creature was still a hundred yards away, running through the scrub forest silent, catlike, four-legged. Brother Saile realized that he should now attempt to lay down his life for his friend, he should shove Brother Jovann back and rush forward himself to distract the thing. And something in Brother Saile wanted to achieve such heroism, but his belly and feet had now turned to lead, leaving him immobile as a statue. He tried to shout a warning, but even his throat was paralyzed by fear. At last he did manage to seize Brother Jovann by the arm and point.

”Ah,” said Jovann, coming out of a reverie and turning to look. A score of paces away, the monster was slowing to a halt, crouching on its four slender legs, looking from one friar to the other as if to decide which of them it wanted. Peasants glimpsing the creature might call it wolf. Shreds of gray fabric festooned it here and there, as if it had been clothed and then had, beastlike, torn itself out of the garment. Naked and hairless and s.e.xless, terrible and beautiful at once, it flowed like quicksilver as it took two rapid strides closer to the men. Then it settled again into a crouching, silent statue.

”In G.o.d's n-name, come away!” Brother Saile whispered, his jaws s.h.i.+vering. ”It is no natural beast.

Come away, Brother Jovann!”

But Jovann only raised his hands and signed the horror with the wedge; he seemed to be blessing it rather than exorcising.

”Brother Wolf,” he said lovingly, ”you do indeed look unlike any beast that I have ever seen before, and I know not from what worldly parentage you may have sprung. But there is in you the spirit of life; therefore never forget that our Father above has created you, as He has created all other creatures, so we are all children of the one Father.”

The wolf darted forward and stopped, stepped and stopped, inched up and stopped again, in a fading oscillation. In its open mouth Saile thought he saw fangs not only long and sharp, but actually blurring with vicious motion like the teeth of some incredible saw. At last there came forth a sound, and Saile was reminded simultaneously of ringing sword blades and of human agony.

Jovann dropped to one knee, facing the crouching monster more on a level. He spread his arms as if willing an embrace. The thing bounded in a blur of speed toward him, then stopped as if a leash had caught it. It was still six or eight paces from the kneeling man. Again it uttered a sound; Saile, half-fainting, seemed to hear the creak of the torture rack and the cry of the victim rise together.

Jovann's voice had nothing in it of fear, but only blended sternness with its love.

”Brother Wolf, you have killed and pillaged like a wanton criminal, and for that you deserve punishment!

But accept instead the forgiveness of all the men you have wronged. Come now, here is my hand. In the name of the Holy One, come to me, and pledge that from this day on you will live at peace with men.

Come!”

Derron, approaching at a staggering, exhausted run, first heard a murmur of speech, and then saw the figure of Brother Saile standing motionless, looking off to one side at something concealed from Derron by a thicket. Derron lurched to a halt, raising his staff but not yet aiming it. He knew now that Saile was not the berserker. What Operations had reported about the embryo-like lifeline had fitted in at last in Derron's mind with something the berserker had said to him in the cathedral, fitted in to make a wondrous kind 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 questioningly.

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 doc.u.mented, 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 pa.s.sages between life and not-life. Anyway, Operations 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 . . .”

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.

Berserker's Planet I.

The dead man's voice was coming live and clear over s.h.i.+p's radio into theOrion's lounge, and the six people gathered there, the only people alive within several hundred light years, were listening attentively for the moment, some of them only because Oscar Schoenberg, who ownedOrionand was driving her on this trip, had indicated thathewanted to listen. Carlos Suomi, who was ready to stand up to Schoenberg and expected to have a serious argument with him one of these days, was in this instance in perfect agreement with him. Athena Poulson, the independent one of the three women, had made no objection; Celeste Servetus, perhaps the least independent, had made a few but they meant nothing. Gustavus De La Torre and Barbara Hurtado had never, in Suomi's experience, objected to any decision made by Schoenberg.

The dead man's voice to which they listened was not recorded, only mummified by the approximately five hundred years of s.p.a.cetime that stretched between Hunters' system, where the radio signal had been generated, andOrion's present position in intragalactic s.p.a.ce about eleven hundred light years (or five and a half weeks by s.h.i.+p) from Earth. It was the voice of Johann Karlsen, who about five hundred standard years ago had led a battle fleet to Hunters' system to skirmish there with a berserker fleet and drive them off. That was some time after he had smashed the main berserker power and permanently crippled their offensive capabilities at the dark nebula called the Stone Place.

Most of the bulkhead s.p.a.ce in the lounge was occupied by viewscreens, and then, as now, they were adjusted for the purpose, the screens brought in the stars with awesome realism. Suomi was looking in the proper direction on the screen, but from this distance of five hundred light years it was barely possible without using telescopic magnification to pick out Hunters' sun, let alone to see the comparatively minor flares of the s.p.a.ce battle Karlsen had been fighting when he spoke the words now coming into the s.p.a.ce yacht's lounge for Schoenberg to brood over and Suomi to record. Briefly the two men looked somewhat alike, though Suomi was smaller, probably much younger, and had a rather boyish face.

”How can you be sure that's Karlsen's voice?” Gus De La Torre, a lean and dark and somehow dangerous-looking man, asked now. He and Schoenberg were sitting in soft ma.s.sive chairs facing each other across the small diameters of the lounge. The other four had positioned their similar chairs so that the group made an approximate circle.

”I've heard it before. This same sequence.” Schoenberg's voice was rather soft for such a big, tough-looking man, but it was as decisive as usual. His gaze, like Suomi's, was on the viewscreen, probing out among the stars as he listened intently to Karlsen. ”On my last trip to Hunters',” Schoenberg went on softly, ”about fifteen standard years ago, I stopped in this region-fifteen lights closer-in, of course-and managed to find this same signal. I listened to these same words and recorded some of them, just as Carlos is doing now.” He nodded in Suomi's direction.

Karlsen broke a crackling radio silence to say: ”Check the lands on that hatch if it won't seal-should I have to tell you that?” The voice was biting, and there was something unforgettable about it even when the words it uttered were only peevish sc.r.a.ps of jargon indistinguishable from those spoken by the commander of any other difficult and dangerous operation.

”Listen to him,” Schoenberg said. ”If that's not Karlsen, who could it be? Anyway, when I got back to Earth after the last trip I checked what I had recorded against historians' records made on his flags.h.i.+p, and confirmed it was the same sequence.”

De La Torre made a playful tut-tutting sound. ”Oscar, did n.o.body ask you how you came by your recording? You weren't supposed to be out in this region of s.p.a.ce then, were you, any more than we are now?”

”Pah. n.o.body pays that much attention. Interstellar Authority certainly doesn't.”

Suomi had the impression that Schoenberg and De La Torre had not known each other very long or very well, but had met in some business connection and had fallen in together because of a common interest in hunting, something that few people now shared. Few people on Earth, at least, which was the home planet of everyone aboard the s.h.i.+p.

Karlsen said: ”This is the High Commander speaking. Ring three uncover. Boarding parties, start your action sequence.”