From the Ocean from teh Stars (87 page)

self, without success, but he hoped that the Central Computer, with its
infinitely greater mental resources, might accomplish what he had failed
to do.

"That depends entirely upon the nature of the block," came the reply. "It is possible to set up a block which, if tampered with, will
cause the contents of the memory cells to be erased. However, I think it unlikely that the Master possessed sufficient skill to do that; it requires
somewhat specialized techniques. I will ask your machine if an erasing
circuit has been set up in its memory units."

"But suppose," said Alvin in sudden alarm, "it causes erasure of
memory merely to
ask
if an erasing circuit exists?"

"There is a standard procedure for such cases, which I shall follow.
I shall set up secondary instructions, telling the machine to ignore my
question if such a situation exists. It is then simple to insure that it will
become involved in a logical paradox, so that whether it answers me or
whether it says nothing it will be forced to disobey its instructions. In
such an event all robots act in the same manner, for their own protection.
They clear their input circuits and act as if no question has been asked."

Alvin felt rather sorry that he had raised the point, and after a
moment's mental struggle decided that he too would adopt the same
tactics and pretend that he had never asked the question. At least he was
reassured on one point—the Central Computer was fully prepared to
deal with any booby traps that might exist in the robot's memory units.
Alvin had no wish to see the machine reduced to a pile of junk; rather
than that, he would willingly return it to Shalmirane with its secrets still
intact.

He waited with what patience he could while the silent, impalpable
meeting of intellects took place. Here was an encounter between two
minds, both of them created by human genius in the long-lost golden
age of its greatest achievement. And now both were beyond the full under
standing of any living man.

Many minutes later, the hollow, anechoic voice of the Central Com
puter spoke again.

"I have established partial contact," it said. "At least I know the
nature of the block, and I think I know why it was imposed. There is
only one way in which it can be broken. Not until the Great Ones come
to Earth will this robot speak again."

"But that is nonsense!" protested Alvin. "The Master's other disciple
believed in them, too, and tried to explain what they were like to us.
Most of the time it was talking gibberish. The Great Ones never existed,
and never will exist."

It seemed a complete impasse, and Alvin felt a sense of bitter, helpless disappointment. He was barred from the truth by the wishes of a man who had been insane, and who had died a billion years ago.

"You may be correct," said the Central Computer, "in saying that
the Great Ones never existed. But that does not mean that they never
will exist."

There was another long silence while Alvin considered the meaning
of this remark, and while the minds of the two robots made their delicate
contact again. And then, without any warning, he was in Shalmirane.

☆
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
t was just as he had last seen it, the great ebon bowl
drinking the sunlight and reflecting none back to the eye. He stood among
the ruins of the fortress, looking out across the lake, whose motionless
waters showed that the giant polyp was now a dispersed cloud of animal
cules and no longer an organized, sentient being.

The robot was still beside him, but of Hilvar there was no sign.
He had no time to wonder what that meant, or to worry about his friend's
absence, for almost at once there occurred something so fantastic that
all other thoughts were banished from his mind.

The sky began to crack in two. A thin wedge of darkness reached
from horizon to zenith, and slowly widened as if night and chaos were
breaking in upon the Universe. Inexorably the wedge expanded until
it embraced a quarter of the sky. For all his knowledge of the real facts
of astronomy, Alvin could not fight against the overwhelming impression
that he and his world lay beneath a great blue dome—and that
something
was now breaking through that dome from outside.

The wedge of night had ceased to grow. The powers that had made
it were peering down into the toy universe they had discovered, perhaps
conferring among themselves as to whether it was worth their attention.
Underneath that cosmic scrutiny, Alvin felt no alarm, no terror. He knew
that he was face to face with power and wisdom, before which a man
might feel awe but never fear.

And now they had decided—they would waste some fragments of
Eternity upon Earth and its peoples. They were coming through the
window they had broken in the sky.

Like sparks from some celestial forge, they drifted down to Earth.

Thicker and thicker they came, until a waterfall of fire was streaming
down from heaven and splashing in pools of liquid light as it reached
the ground. Alvin did not need the words that sounded in his ears like a benediction:

"The Great Ones have come'
⁹

The fire reached him, and it did not burn. It was everywhere, filling
the great bowl of Shalmirane with its golden glow. As he watched in won
der, Alvin saw that it was not a featureless flood of light, but that it had
form and structure. It began to resolve itself into distinct shapes, to gather
into separate fiery whirlpools. The whirlpools spun more and more swiftly
on their axes, their centers rising to form columns within which Alvin
could glimpse mysterious evanescent shapes. From these glowing totem
poles came a faint musical note, infinitely distant and hauntingly sweet.

"The Great Ones have come."

This time there was a reply. As Alvin heard the words: "The servants
of the Master greet you. We have been waiting for your coming," he
knew that the barriers were down. And in that moment, Shalmirane and
its strange visitors were gone, and he was standing once more before the
Central Computer in the depths of Diaspar.

It had all been illusion, no more real than the fantasy world of the
sagas in which he had spent so many of the hours of his youth. But
how had it been created; whence had come the strange images he had
seen?

"It was an unusual problem," said the quiet voice of the Central Com
puter. "I knew that the robot must have some visual conception of the Great Ones in its mind. If I could convince it that the sense impressions
it received coincided with that image, the rest would be simple."

"And how did you do that?"

"Basically, by asking the robot what the Great Ones were like,
and then seizing the pattern it formed in its thoughts. The pattern was
very incomplete, and I had to improvise a good deal. Once or twice the
picture I created began to depart badly from the robot's conception, but
when that happened I could sense the machine's growing perplexity and
modify the image before it became suspicious. You will appreciate that
I could employ hundreds of circuits where it could employ only one, and
switch from one image to the other so quickly that the change could not be perceived. It was a kind of conjuring trick; I was able to saturate the
robot's sensory circuits and also to overwhelm its critical faculties. What
you saw was only the final, corrected image—the one which best fitted the Master's revelation. It was crude, but it sufficed. The robot was con-

vinced of its genuineness long enough for the block to be lifted, and in
that moment I was able to make complete contact with its mind. It is no
longer insane; it will answer any questions you wish."

Alvin was still in a daze; the afterglow of that spurious apocalypse
still burned in his mind, and he did not pretend fully to understand the
Central Computer's explanation. No matter; a miracle of therapy had
been accomplished, and the doors of knowledge had been flung open for
him to enter.

Then he remembered the warning that the Central Computer had
given him, and asked anxiously: "What about the moral objections you
had to overriding the Master's orders?"

"I have discovered why they were imposed. When you examine his
life story in detail, as you can now do, you will see that he claimed to
have produced many miracles. His disciples believed him, and their con
viction added to his power. But, of course, all those miracles had some simple explanation—when indeed they occurred at all. I find it surprising that otherwise intelligent men should have let themselves be deceived in
such a manner."

"So the Master was a fraud?"

"No; it is not as simple as that. If he had been a mere impostor, he
would never have achieved such success, and his movement would not
have lasted so long. He was a good man, and much of what he taught
was true and wise. In the end, he believed in his own miracles, but he
knew that there was one witness who could refute them. The robot knew all his secrets; it was his mouthpiece and his colleague, yet if it was ever
questioned too closely it could destroy the foundations of his power. So
he ordered it never to reveal its memories until the last day of the Universe,
when the Great Ones would come. It is hard to believe that such a mixture
of deception and sincerity could exist in the same man, but such was the
case."

Alvin wondered what the robot felt about this escape from its ancient
bondage. It was, surely, a sufficiently complex machine to understand
such emotions as resentment. It might be angry with the Master for
having enslaved it—and equally angry with Alvin and the Central Com
puter for having tricked it back into sanity.

The zone of silence had been lifted; there was no further need for
secrecy. The moment for which Alvin had been waiting had come at
last. He turned to the robot, and asked it the question that had haunted
him ever since he had heard the story of the Master's saga.

And the robot replied.

Jeserac and the proctors were still waiting patiently when he rejoined them. At the top of the ramp, before they entered the corridor, Alvin looked back across the cave, and the illusion was stronger than ever.
Lying beneath him was a dead city of strange white buildings, a city bleached by a fierce light not meant for human eyes. Dead it might be, for it had never lived, but it pulsed with energies more potent than any
that had ever quickened organic matter. While the world endured, these
silent machines would still be here, never turning their minds from the
thoughts that men of genius had given them long ago.

Though Jeserac tried to question Alvin on the way back to the Council
Chamber, he learned nothing of his talk with the Central Computer. This
was not merely discretion on Alvin's part; he was still too much lost in
the wonder of what he had seen, too intoxicated with success, for any
coherent conversation. Jeserac had to muster what patience he could,
and hope that presently Alvin would emerge from his trance.

The streets of Diaspar were bathed with a light that seemed pale
and wan after the glare of the machine city. But Alvin scarcely saw them;
he had no regard for the familiar beauty of the great towers drifting past
him, or the curious glances of his fellow citizens. It was strange, he thought, how everything that had happened to him led up to this mo
ment. Since he had met Khedron, events seemed to have moved auto
matically toward a predetermined goal. The monitors—Lys—Shalmir-
ane—at every stage he might have turned aside with unseeing eyes, but something had led him on. Was he the maker of his own destiny, or was
he especially favored by Fate? Perhaps it was merely a matter of probabilities, of the operation of the laws of chance. Any man might
have found the path his footsteps had traced, and countless times in
the past ages others must have gone almost as far. Those earlier Uniques,
for example—what had happened to them? Perhaps he was merely the
first to be lucky.

All the way back through the streets, Alvin was establishing closer and
closer rapport with the machine he had released from its age-long thrall-
dom. It had always been able to receive his thoughts, but previously he
had never known whether it would obey any orders he gave it. Now
that uncertainty was gone; he could talk to it as he would to another human being, though since he was not alone he directed it not to use
verbal speech but such simple thought images as he could understand.
He sometimes resented the fact that robots could talk freely to one another
on the telepathic level, whereas Man could not—except in Lys. Here
was another power that Diaspar had lost or deliberately set aside.

He continued the silent but somewhat one-sided conversation while