Cybernetic Controller Read online

  “I was being chased by the guards.”

  “Down there?”

  “Yes. I think we’d better move from here. If they come out . . .”

  “Guards!” said the girl, contemptuously.

  “They can kill. They’ve just killed a friend of mine.” He casually turned away, moving down towards the nearest ruins. His back felt too wide, and a spot on his spinal column was flinching in anticipation of a bullet. If the girl was afraid . . . No, that was about the last thing that was likely to happen. He heard her soft leather boots on the rubble behind him.

  “Don't think I won't blast you if you make a wrong move.” she said. Her voice was not quite so assured as it had been.

  They skirted a broken wall, stopped in the middle of a small, partly enclosed plot, where the grassy ground was being slowly broken by slender green shoots. Lin had seen pictures of it. Grass.

  He turned around again, saw her face fully for the first time. He drew a deep breath at the cloud of dark hair, the small full lips, the smooth aura of confidence that radiated from her and showed in her. clear eyes. What colour were they?

  She had flushed slightly. “What were you doing down there?’”

  “I told you. I was being chased.” She bothered him. The women he had known were dull creatures, fit companions for Grota and the other Fifth's. This girl was

  different. He went on with hardly a pause. “1 take it that you’re First Level?” The words came without conscious thought.

  “Naturally.” Her eyes were frosty. “What were you doing down there, dressed up like a Fifth labourer? You're not ... I don’t know you.”

  Lin felt his sense of proportion being swept away. She, a First, expected to know him. ‘Dressed up’ like a Fifth?”

  “I am a Fifth.”

  “Impossible. Don’t try to fool me. I’m the one with the gun, remember?”

  “Only the pre-war people thought that force altered truth. I am Fifth. I was working in a tunnel, taking earth from a digger-machine to a Vacuaminer. We met one of the old tunnels, and ours fell in. Afterwards, I searched the old tunnel, and found a—train, with books.” He suddenly realised that the books had gone. He must have left them when he climbed the cables. “A friend and myself were found by guards. He was killed.”

  Her voice was sympathetic now. “I’m sorry. But you— have you ever, felt yourself different from the other Fifths?”

  She had lowered the gun, appeared to have forgotten it. One grab would take it, but he had to learn more.

  “Yes, I have. Many times. Especially just now, in the tunnel.”

  “Uh-huh. I may be able to help you. You must meet a—a scientist who is interested in such cases as yours. You may be the one specimen we’ve been waiting—no!” The gun was boring into him, the movement he was about to make was still-born. “I'm honestly trying to help you.”

  “Sorry. I’m not used to being given favours with a gun.”

  They stood for a long moment. Lin, tall, dark, aquiline featured, half-naked body caked with dust from the tunnel, leanly strong; the girl, small, softly rounded, black hair stirring in the breeze, the last light of the evening glinting on the squat gun in her small fist. Silently meeting will to will.

  The breeze blew again, and the geiger on Lin’s wrist ticked softly. They both looked at it.

  “We’ve got to move,” said Lin, unease gripping him.

  “We’re still near that tunnel, and the radiation—”

  She cut him off swiftly. “The radiation is harmless if you don’t take too much. I've been wandering around here for the last couple of days. I’ve had very nearly enough.” His raised eyebrows needed no words.”

  “I’ve been doing research work. But you’re right. It’s not good to wander about here at night. Make for those steps.”

  She waved the gun, and wordlessly he walked over to the broken stone steps, down to a cracked and rubble-strewn road, through a twisting route amongst the ruins on the other side.

  “Don’t try anything,” she said. “I want to take you back. You’re my prize specimen.”

  He looked sharply over his shoulder, surprised a smile on her dimly seen face.

  “Incidentally, my name is Merryl, or to give it the full CC trimmings, One Merryl Four.”

  “I’m Five Lin Twelve.”

  “Keep going, Lin.”

  She brought out a torch, its beam flickering over his shoulder to light the broken walls around them. The geiger clicked now and then.

  A movement ahead, behind a leaning column, brought Lin to a stop, rigid. The girl pushed him on impatiently with the gun muzzle. A short, stocky man stepped into sight, his stained clothes showing no particular Level marks. His gun was as steady as the girl’s.

  “Merryl!” He sounded relieved. “Where have you been?”

  “Collecting specimens. And look what I’ve found. An intelligent Fifth!”

  “Look here,” said Lin, annoyed. “I’ve had enough of that in the city-block If you want to act like Fifths—” His anger broke. “Is it really so unique?”

  The man looked at Merryl. “Bring him along,” he said. “We have some talking to do.”

  The dank walls of the little underground cellar glowed redly in the glare from the small portable heating-unit.

  There were four roughly made bunks spaced around the walls. Lin relaxed in a chair, watching Merryl's quick fingers preparing food from concentrated rations stored here. He had washed in a minute quantity of water and had been given a worn but comfortable worker's tunic by the stocky man, whom the girl called Chayce.

  Now he felt that the only thing to be dreaded was to wake up in his own small room in the dormitory and find that this was all a dream. He wondered if the two figures sleeping in bunks in the comer were also fugitives from the city-block. Amidst all the uncertainty he tried to hold onto the central fact that these people realised that in some subtle way he was different from his fellow Fifths.

  Chayce brought over to the heating unit a small black box, its sides gleaming with dials. He pressed a switch and a deep rustling purr sounded through the cellar.

  “This will record everything we say. Later it will be heard by—others.” Chayce sounded matter of fact. “Whether we admit you into our full confidence will be decided by them.”

  “I understand. But—I’ve always been taught that Firsts —that they are not—that—” He stopped, wondering how to word it.

  Chayce smiled, and helped him out.

  “You’ve been told that Firsts are scarcely human creatures, great brains that care nothing for the world, but only for their own high problems. That's true in part, due to the selections of the Cybernetic Controller. I’m not sure what sort of history the Fifths are taught now about the beginning of all this . . .”

  “We are told that if we obey the dictates of the CC and the First Level controllers everything will be all right.”

  “Ummm. The result of applying a single theory of sociology in extreme. Have you been told that the early forerunners of the controllers were merely calculating machines, electronic computors who solved mathematical problems in hours that men took years to work out? Then in the second World War—yes, as early as that—the machines had the job of computing other problems; range finding, direction of guided missiles, more and more complexities as it was discovered how to turn problems into graphs, punch tapes and feed them into the machines.” Lin leaned eagerly forward. This was opening up a new world for him.

  Chayce went on: “During the wars, great progress was made, and in the Last War a large amount of the actual direction of the war was performed by machines.”

  Merryl brought food and drink in chipped china. “Yes,” she said, bitterly, “machines directed and men died.”

  “It was men who made the machines,” Chayce pointed out. “But these machines were marvels of engineering construction. -Within the limits of the data fed to them they actually thought for themselves in the broad sense. When the Final War, fought with
hydrogen bombs and bacteriological disease, and atomic bombs, drove the remnants of mankind into the early city-blocks away from plagues and deadly rains that precipitated radio-active dust from the air, the survivors were distrustful of the old leaders who had led them into war.”

  Chayce smiled grimly. “With the aid of scientists willing to help, they found that the administration of those underground cities could be left to the machines. Or, rather, to one central Control in each city.”

  “I've heard little about other cities,” Lin put in. “There has been little communication because of plague, radiation sickness, retrenchment. Several cities were wiped out and the rest lost contact with each other. With our atomic piles for heating and the hydroponic gardens, we are self sufficient. Of course, there still is contact, of a sort.”

  Lin let that pass for the moment. “Until I managed to read some of the old books. I’d always believed as I was taught, that the Intelligence Section Unit of the Cybernetic Controller was a post-war invention.”

  “Well, as you see now, it was developed before the war. For many years man tried to measure intelligence, with attempts ranging from examining the size of the head and the weight of the brain, to the complicated IQ tests developed by Binet and Simon. Even the electronic properties of the brain, as shown by electro-encephalograms were used. Then Dawes and Richardson developed a method comprising both simple tests of IQ in a certain environment and a measurement of the average synapse gap.”

  Merry 1 said, as a faintly puzzled expression crossed Lin’s face, “The synapse is the connecting path between the brain-cells—the neurons. Used at first for testing the adaptability of workers to their employment, refinements were made which showed it could measure the potential intelligence of a new born baby. That is, long before the normal tests were applicable.”

  Lin looked back to Chayce. “And the survivors adopted this Dawes-Richardson test, making sure that they would be led by intelligent men.”

  Chayce nodded slowly. “Yes, the fear of future was almost pathological. Better to live in rigid levels of intelligence, each class segregated from the other, than risk misleadership and certain wars.”

  “But something is wrong now!” Lin rose, moved restlessly about the cellar. “Could it be the loss of what the old books call “Parental affection?”

  “The placing of a new born child in its appropriate class, and where necessary the substitution for it by one who is in its parents’ class, has had few ill effects. As far as we can judge. It followed logically from the intelligence-level division. But it is one of the things that is worrying us.”

  Merryl pushed a freshly filled cup towards Lin. “Sociology became a historical study when society ceased to change. And now we have no means of carrying out valid tests.”

  Lin stopped pacing, regarded Chayce and Merryl with a frown. “But who are this ‘we’ you keep talking about?” Merryl smiled and shook her head. “You’ll learn all about it soon. But first Chayce has some questions to ask you. You are the most interesting man we’ve met in many expeditions among the ruins.”

  Lin looked at the two blanket-clad forms in the corner. They had not stirred and he began to find their presence unnerving. Who were they? How did they fit into this new picture of the world that had just been presented to him? He shrugged. He’d find out soon enough. Meanwhile, he’d do his best to help and be helped by these strange Firsts.

  “Sit down, Lin, and we’ll go on with—what was that?”

  Merryl came to her feet, listening.

  “I heard nothing,” she said, her small face worried.

  “Not the door,” Chayce turned his back to the massive, lead-lined door, peered into the darker corners of the cellar. “There it is again!”

  They all heard it now, a scratching, slithering sound that pierced the still gloom of the cellar.

  “Guards?” queried Lin. He reached for a chair. They’d never get him back to the city-block alive, now.

  “Worse than guards,” Chayce flexed his shoulders. “Wake up the others, Merryl.” Blue steel flashed as he checked the clip in his automatic. “Rats!”

  “Rats? But they’re not dangerous—r

  “These are. Mutant giants, a dominant strain, well fitted to survive. Half as large as a man.”

  “Mutants!” Lin shivered. When radio-active rays did filter through the city-block sheathing, and a mutant was conceived, it did not survive birth for more than a few minutes. No chances were taken on beings with unknown powers growing up amongst the population. If one did grow to maturity undetected, it was forced to flee to the Outside, among the ruins.

  It had been the city’s mistake to let it live and the city could not now officially take its life. The chances of surviving Outside—with sudden suspicion, Lin turned his head.

  The men sitting on the edges of their bunks must have been born Outside, sons of the wanderers who made their homes in the ruins, for neither could have passed the CC inspection at birth.

  One, rubbing sleepy eyes with fingers tipped with hornlike talons, had black shoulder-length hair that only partly concealed warty, scaled unhuman skin. Incisors gaped from its mouth in a snarling grin as it looked at Lin, yet the eyes that regarded him were intelligent, doubly shocking in that distorted face.

  The other—he appeared normal, but instead of standing upright, he crouched, quite naturally, on all fours. Merryl came across to Lin, her back to the others, and gave him a small, understanding nod.

  “Mutants,” she murmured softly.

  “What’s the matter with that one on its—his hands and knees?”

  “Eustachian canals, the balancing system near the ear, distorted through growth of the nearby bone structure. He can run as fast as—”

  “Look out!” Chayce’s cry was followed by a thunderous flash that lit the cellar. It revealed a newly-made hole in one wall near the ceiling, a grey-pink snout that sniffed inquisitively and jerked as a bullet thudded into the earth, gleaming eyes and heaving bodies.

  Next moment an area three feet across collapsed into the cellar. Through the hole Lin could hear piercing squeaks and cries, then a loathsome brown form leaped into the radiance from the heating unit.

  Reports hammered through the confined space, the giant-rat jerked and span round. Before its death throes subsided, another rat appeared at the hole, leaped down. Then another. Lin found himself slashing with the chair, coughing in the smoke, feeling the chair’s impact on flesh and bone and fur.

  A red-eyed horror closed fangs on his tunic, then dropped limp as its brains splashed under a high velocity bullet. A gurgling scream. The second mutant was down, a rat tearing at his throat. Lin’s chair swung down with all the force of his muscles, thudded into the furry back with a snap of breaking bones. This was a nightmare. More rats were springing into the cellar, snapping at the humans, tearing at the dead creatures.

  Merryl gave a muffled cry and Lin smashed his chair into a thing fully four feet long, whirled with fear gripping him. She stumbled back, hand over her eyes, and he threw an arm around her, pulling her towards the door.

  Chayce and the other mutant were down, half buried under a furry pile. Lin choked. Better the automatic than that. He snatched Merryl’s gun, fired point-blank into gaping jaws, swung the smoking muzzle towards her.

  Then came inspiration. He fired a last burst that checked the oncoming horde, seized a blanket from the nearest bunk and trailed it over the stove. Flames ate upwards from the glowing metal ring and choking smoke poured from the blanket edge.

  Merryl screamed as a rat sprang for. her throat. Shouting, Lin thrust the flaming blanket into its face, flailed wildly, scorching the slavering muzzle, and the thing somersaulted backwards.

  “Keep behind me with the automatic,” gasped Lin. “Back to the door!”

  They retreated step by step, the pack inching forward to keep a tight semi-circle just beyond reach. The automatic thundered again and again as members of the horde tried to slip around the walls and take them in th
e rear. The cellar filled with smoke, the sulphurous stench of burnt powder and charring wool.

  Then the automatic clicked emptily. Merryl flung it at the foremost horror—and cold metal touched her skin through a great rent in the back of her tunic.

  “The door!”

  Lin threw the last fragments of burning material at the pack, heaved at the heavy door with desperate strength that tore it open in the same instant, thrust Merryl through.

  The nearest rat shrilled and catapulted at him. Frantically he kicked, felt the jar through all his body as the creature fell back.

  Then he was through and slamming the door.

  “Lin, oh, Lin!” Merryl, a dimly seen form in the darkness, clung to him with desperate force for a moment, then her grip slackened and he caught her as she fell.

  They had to get away before the rats came out of their original entrance. Teeth gritted against the pain of his slashes as he swung her small form into his arms, he started through the dark at a half-run. Once more the nightmare had started, with a more horrible death to escape than the guns of the city guards.

  Broken bricks rolled from underfoot. Alleymouths between shattered walls were only slightly less dark than the surrounding blackness. A faint blue radiance glimmered over the wasteland ahead. Fungi, or radio active deposits? Duck into the blackness under this shattered roof; circle the area.

  At lasts panting, he stood upon open ground, lowered Merryl gently to the earth. There were rustlings that might have been the wind, or rats, or ghosts of the thousands who had died here, but he couldn’t run for ever. He turned, fists clenched, eyes peering for a movement. His pupils had dilated enough to enable him to see faint silhouettes against the stars, but, near the ground, pitch darkness still held a thousand perils.

  His ragged breathing sounded loud in his ears. He tried to still it, listen for the squeaks and patter of clawed feet that meant death. At his feet, Merryl moaned and stirred.

  Danger forgotten for the moment, he knelt by her side, lifted her head and shoulders, brushed cloudy black hair from her face. In the starlight he saw her eyes open and widen as memory came flooding back, felt her tense as she looked about.