Which it was—for its size the most complicated robot-type the science of Vega and her allies had yet developed.
“Two armed space-craft, Lycannese destroyer-type, attempting interception!” it announced. After the barest possible pause, it added: “Instructions?”
Iliff grinned a little without raising his head. No one else would have noticed anything unusual in the stereotyped warning, but he had been living with that voice for some fifteen years.
“Evasion, of course, you big ape!” he said softly. “You’ll have had all the fighting you want before you’re scrapped.”
His grin widened then, at a very convincing illusion that the ship had shrugged its sloping and monstrously armored shoulders in annoyed response. That, however, was due simply to the little leap with which the suns of Lycanno vanished from the tank in the abruptness of full forward acceleration.
In effect, the whole ship was the robot—a highly modified version of the deadly one-man strike-ships of the Vegan battle fleet, but even more heavily armed and thus more than qualified to take on a pair of Lycannese destroyers for the split-second maneuverings and decisions, the whole slashing frenzy of a deep-space fight. Its five central brains were constructed to produce, as closely as possible, replicas of Iliff’s own basic mental patterns, which made for a nearly perfect rapport. Beyond that, of course, the machine was super-sensed and energized into a truly titanic extension of the man.
Iliff did not bother to observe the whiplash evasion tactics which almost left the destroyers’ commanders wondering whether there had been any unidentified spaceship recorded on their plates in the first place. That order was being carried out much more competently than if he had been directing the details himself; and meanwhile there was other business on hand—the part of his job he enjoyed perhaps least of all. A transmitter was driving the preliminary reports of his actions on Lycanno Four across nearly half the galaxy to G.Z. Headquarters Central on the planet of Jeltad.
There, clerks were feeding it, in series with a few thousand other current intermission reports, into more complex multiple-recorders, from which various sections were almost instantaneously disgorged, somewhat cut and edited.
* * *
“She has not responded to her personal beam,” the robot announced for the second time.
“Sure she just wasn’t able to get back at us?”
“There is no indication of that.”
“Keep it open then—until she does answer,” Iliff said. Personal telepathy at interstellar ranges was always something of an experiment, unless backed at both ends by mechanical amplifiers of much greater magnitude than were at Pagadan’s disposal.
“But I do wish,” he grumbled, “I’d been able to find out what made the Ceetal so particularly interested in Tahmey! Saving him up, as host, for the next generation, of course. If he hadn’t been so touchy on that point—” He scowled at the idly clicking transmitter before him. Deep down in his mind, just on the wrong side of comprehension, something stirred slowly and uneasily and sank out of his awareness again.
“Correlation ought to call in pretty soon,” he reassured himself. “With the fresh data we’ve fed them, they’ll have worked out a new line on the guy.”
“Departmental Lab is now attempting to get back on transmitter,” the robot informed him. “Shall I blank them out till you’ve talked with Correlation?”
“Let them through,” Iliff sighed. “If we have to, we’ll cut them off—”
A staccato series of clicks conveying an impression of agitated inquiry, rose suddenly from the transmitter. Still frowning, he adjusted light-scales, twisted knobs, and a diminutive voice came gushing in mid-speech from the instrument. Iliff listened a while; then he broke in impatiently.
“Look,” he explained, “I’ve homed you the full recorded particulars of the process they used. You’ll have the stuff any minute now, and you’ll get a lot more out of that than I could tell you. The man I got it from was the only one still alive of the group that did the job; but he was the one that handled the important part—the actual personality transfer.
“I cleared his mind of all he knew of the matter and recorded it, but all I understood myself was the principle involved—if that.”
The voice interjected a squeaky, rapid-fire protest. Iliff cut in again quickly:
“Well, if you need it now—You’re right about there not having been any subjective switching of personalities involved, and I’m not arguing about whether it’s impossible. These people just did a pretty complete job of shifting everything that’s supposed to make up a conscious individual from one human body to another. From any objective point of view, it looks like a personality transfer.
“No, they didn’t use psychosurgery,” he went on. “Except to fill in a six-months’ sequence of memory tracts to cover the interval they had Tahmey under treatment. What they used was a modification of the electronic method of planting living reflex patterns in robot brains. First, they blanked out Tahmey’s mind completely—neutralized all established neural connections and so on, right down to the primary automatic reflexes.”
“The `no-mind’ stage?” Lab piped.
“That’s right. Then they put the Lycannese Deel in a state of mental stasis. They’d picked him because of his strong physical resemblance to Tahmey.”
“That,” Lab instructed him sharply, “could have no effect on the experiment as such. Did they use a chemical paralyzing agent to produce the stasis?”
“I think so. It’s in the report—”
“You—Zone Agents! How long did they keep the two nerve systems linked?”
“About six months.”
“I see. Then they broke the flow and had a complete copy of the second subject’s neural impulse paths stamped into the first subject’s nervous system. Re-energized, the artificial personality would pick up at the exact point it entered mental stasis and continue to develop normally from there on. I see, I see, I see . . . but what happened to the second subject—Deel?”
“He died in convulsions a few seconds after they returned him to consciousness.”
Lab clicked regretfully. “Usual result of a prolonged state of mental stasis—and rather likely to limit the usefulness of the process, you know. Now, there are a few important points—”
“Correlation!” the robot said sharply into Iliff’s mind.
The squeaky voice thinned into an abrupt high whistle and was gone.
* * *
“I’m here, Iliff! Your friend and guide, Captain Rashallan of Correlation, himself. You haven’t started to close in on that Tahmey bird yet, have you? You aren’t anywhere near him yet?”
“No,” Iliff said. He squinted down at the transmitter and was surprised by a sudden sense of constriction in his throat. “Why?”
The Correlation man took about three minutes to tell him. He ended with:
“We’ve just had a buzz from Lab—they were trying to get back to you, but couldn’t—and what they want us to tell you fits right in—”
“The neutralization of a nervous system that produces the no-mind stage is an effect that wears off completely within two years. Normally, the result is the gradual re-establishment of the original personality; but, in this case, there can be no such result because all energy centers are channeling constantly into the Deel personality.
“However, there’s no reason to doubt that `Tahmey’ is now also present in the system—though unconscious and untraceable because unenergized. Obviously, the Ceetal could have no reason to be interested in a commonplace mentality such as Deel’s.
“Now you see how it ties in! Whether it was the Ceetal’s intention or not—and it’s extremely probable, a virtual certainty, that it was—the whole artificial creation remains stable only so long as the Deel personality continues to function.
“The instant it lapses, the original personality will be energized. You see what’s likely to happen to any probing outsider then?”
“Yes,” Iliff said, “I see.”
“Assuming it’s been arranged like that,” said Captain Rashallan, “the trigger that sets off the change is, almost certainly, a situational one—and there will be a sufficient number of such triggered situations provided so that any foreseeable emergency pattern is bound to develop one or more of them.
“The Ceetal’s purpose with such last-resort measures would be, of course, to virtually insure the destruction of any investigator who had managed to overcome his other defenses, and who was now at the point of getting a direct line on him and his little pals.
“So you’ll have to watch . . . well, Zones wants to get through to you now, and they’re getting impatient. Good luck, Iliff!”
Iliff leaned forward then and shut off the transmitter. For a moment or so after that, he sat motionless, his yellow eyes staring with a hard, flat expression at something unseen. Then he inquired:
“Did you get Pagadan?”
“There’ve been several blurred responses in the past few minutes,” the robot answered. “Apparently, she’s unable to get anything beyond the fact that you are trying to contact her—and she is also unable to amplify her reply to the extent required just now. Do you have any definite message?”