Part 8 (1/2)
”No,”he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him.
”In what do you think I am wrong?” it asked.
”I'll show you.” He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn't the d.a.m.ned thing kill him and have done?
The paintings were racked now on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the s.h.i.+p for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth-century statgla.s.s coating.
”This is where you're wrong,” Herron said.
The man-shaped thing's scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. ”Explain what you are showing me,” it said.
”I bow to you!” Herron did so. ”You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question, if one that is somewhat too broad. First, tell me whatyou see here.”
”I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two.
The image is sealed inside a protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him-”
”You see a man with a glove,” Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. ”That is the t.i.tle,Man with a Glove. Now what do you say about it?”
There was a pause of twenty seconds. ”Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?”
Looking now at t.i.tian's thousand-year-old more-than-masterpiece, Herron hardly heard the machine's answer, he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work.
”Now you will tell me what it means,” said the machine without emphasis.
Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open.
The berserker's mouthpiece walked at his side. ”Tell me what it means or you will be punished.”
”If you can pause to think, so can I.” But Herron's stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered even more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach.
His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it as disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year.
The berserker asked: ”What have you made here?”
Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably. ”It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured.” He waved at the storage racks. ”My attempt has failed, as most do.”
There was another pause, which Herron did not try to time.
”An attempt to praise me?”
Herron broke the spoiled brush and threw it down. ”Call it what you like.”
This time the pause was short, and at its end the machine did not speak, but turned away and walked in the direction of the airlock. Some of its fellows clanked past to join it. From the direction of the airlock there began to come sounds like those of heavy metal being worked and hammered. The interrogation seemed to be over for the time being.
Herron's thoughts wanted to be anywhere but on his work or on his fate, and they returned to what Ha.n.u.s had shown him, or tried to show him. Not a regular lifeboat, but she might get away, the captain had said. All it needs now is to press the b.u.t.ton.
Herron started walking, smiling faintly as he realized that if the berserker was as careless as it seemed, he might possibly escape it.
Escape to what ? He couldn't paint any more, if he ever could. All that really mattered to him now was here, and on other s.h.i.+ps leaving Earth.
Back at the storage rack, Herron swung theMan with the Glove out so its case came free from the rack and became a handy cart. He wheeled the portrait aft. There might be yet one worthwhile thing he could do with his life.
The picture was ma.s.sive in its statgla.s.s s.h.i.+elding, but he thought he could fit it into the boat.
As an itch might nag a dying man, the question of what the captain had been intending with the boat nagged Herron. Ha.n.u.s hadn't seemed worried about Herron's fate, but instead had spoken of trusting Herron....
Nearing the stern, out of sight of the machines, Herron pa.s.sed a strapped-down stack of crated statuary, and heard a noise, a rapid feeble pounding.
It took several minutes to find and open the proper case. When he lifted the lid with its padded lining, a girl wearing a coverall sat up, her hair all wild as if standing in terror.
”Are they gone?” She had bitten at her fingers and nails until they were bleeding. When he didn't answer at once, she repeated her question again and again, in a rising whine.
”The machines are still here,” he said at last.
Literally shaking in her fear, she climbed out of the case. ”Where's Gus? Have they taken him?”
”Gus?” But he thought he was beginning to understand.
”Gus Ha.n.u.s, the captain. He and I are-he was trying to save me, to get me away from Earth.”
”I'm quite sure he's dead,” said Herron. ”He fought the machines.”
Her bleeding fingers clutched at her lower face. ”They'll kill us, too! Or worse! What can we do?”
”Don't mourn your lover so deeply,” he said. But the girl seemed not to hear him; her wild eyes looked this way and that, expecting the machines. ”Help me with this picture,” he told her calmly. ”Hold the door there for me.”
She obeyed as if half-hypnotized, not questioning what he was doing.
”Gus said there'd be a boat,” she muttered to herself. ”If he had to smuggle me down to Tau Epsilon he was going to use a special little boat-” She broke off, staring at Herron, afraid that he had heard her and was going to steal her boat. As indeed he was.
When he had the painting in the stern compart-ment, he stopped. He looked long at theMan with a Glove, but in the end all he could seem to see was that the fingertips of the ungloved hand were not bitten b.l.o.o.d.y.
Herron took the s.h.i.+vering girl by the arm and pushed her into the tiny boat. She huddled there in dazed terror; she was not good-looking. He wondered what Ha.n.u.s had seen in her.
”There's room for only one,” he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again. ”After I close the hatch, push that b.u.t.ton there, the activator. Understand?
That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut and waited. Only about three seconds pa.s.sed before there came a sc.r.a.ping sound that he supposed meant the boat had gone.
Nearby was a tiny observation blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the berserker through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near theFrans but none of its commensal machines were in sight.
Looking theMan with a Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel.
The discordant lines of Herron's own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them.
He hadn't time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metalworking had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker portrait. ”When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it.”
The machine-voice squeaked back at him: ”Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good.”