We took only a few minutes to transfer Marsha and clear out my scout, then I sent for Ham.
He was bursting to hear the details of the raid, but I dismissed his questions curtly. If time was what Seiglein and the others wanted, then time was something they’d not get a second more of than I could manage. My manner and hue told him this was no time to balk.
“Look, Ham, I really need Marsha on this, but without her you’ll have to do. She taught you everything she’d ever known about the Nijinsky.”
He nodded. “I know every bolt in the bucket. You know that.”
“I’m counting on you!” I responded emphatically. “Look, I want to get into the modular section of the Nijinsky computer. Can you get me and Cain there?”
He looked nervous and dubious. “C’mon, Bar! You can’t fool with that stuff. One slip and you could kill
us!”
“But you know where it is and how the net is set
up,” I persisted.
He resisted, but he did know, and as much as he would have fought anyone else, he could not fight me.
We went to the stem, and beyond, into a tiny room with an elevator platform.
“We only go down every once in a while to check,” he said nervously. “Rough ride.”
I made sure Cain was scrunched in with us, and
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Ham punched the control square with his nose. We descended.
We stopped at the lowest level, in the service bay of the freighter. There was a great deal of vibration here from the generators, pumps, recirculating equipment, and the like that kept us going and would for the next fifty years or more at current levels.
We made our way laboriously down a passageway not meant for Choz, a long, long way to the point just under the ship’s midsection. A large metal plate blocked our path.
“There’s another access from the bow,” Ham remarked, “and it ends about a hundred and fifty me-ters from here in another metal plate. That’s the core, Bar. It’s behind there.”
I scanned the wall. It looked extremely solid, but I knew it had to be removable in some way. I fine-scanned the whole thing, line by line, square centimeter by square centimeter.
And there they werespecial bolts with odd shape and size, set flush and disguised as part of the metal superstructure so that a sighted person would never have known they were there.
I turned to Cain. “Odd bolts,” I told the robot. “Look, I’ll touch one. They’re in a pattern from that point. See them?”
The robot scampered up to the wall, then climbed supporting itself half on the wall and half on the panel. It took a free tentacle and felt the bolts, each of the nine in turn.
“Can you get them out?” I asked him, nervous my-self now.
It prodded one lightly. “I believe so,” it replied in its electronic monotone. “However, there are charges in each bolt. If not removed in a certain order they will fuse.”
I sighed. “Any clue as to the order?”
“None,” it replied. “It will have to be tried randomly.”
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The Web of the Chozen “That’s it, then,” Ham said, almost cheerily. “You
can’t get in.”
I wasn’t put off so easily.
“Cain, if they’re programmed for a certain order, then they’re linked to the brain in some way?”
“I do not believe so,” it replied. “There is some connector there. I believe the determination is mechanical.”
I brightened. “You mean it’s a series of gears or
levers?”
“Yes,” it replied. “I can feel it.”
I thought for a moment. What could show the linkages to Cain without lousing up everything?
“Couldn’t we cut through?” I suggested.
“We might,” the robot admitted. “But it is a question of whether we would also injure the computer. I cannot do anything that would injure the computer. That is a mandated pattern in my programming.”
“Uh huh,” was all I could say. I thought carefully.
“How thick is it? Any idea?”
“Not very,” Cain responded. “I cannot determine for certain, but I would say it would not be more than three hundred and ninety nor less than three hundred
and seventy millimeters.” “Close enough,” I said drily. “Cain, how can you
feel the couplers?”
“Through the engine vibration,” the robot responded. “The mechanism is flush with the plate, and
vibrates slightly against it.”
“Then,” I suggested hopefully, “suppose we could vibrate it constantly, at a much higher sound level,
same frequency.”
“That might work,” Cain responded. “Ham,” I said sharply. “Go get George.”
Just as we could broadcast through the virus on the ground at St. Cyril, George could do the same for Ham and me from the scout to the Nijinsky hold. We
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drafted others, and formed a living message chain all the way back to George.
Without me on the scout, he had no way of knowing what was going on.
“Tell George to go ahead,” I said to the man be-hind me, and so on down the incredibly long line it went. All of us nearest the plate faced it; I used all males, because our larger horns and rounder membranes produced more intense sound.
The tone started, and I found it strange; I went blind, because it was outside my own reception limit, down in the bass, really, but I was also out of control I couldn’t not broadcast.
“Cain!” I called out. “Got it?”
“More intensity,” came the response, almost masked in the tonal din.
“Tell George maximum intensity, and give it to everybody down here!” I called back, and so it went. About three minutes later I got what I asked for.
I don’t know how long it was; probably not long, but it seemed like forever. Suddenly I heard Cain, hanging from the ceiling over me. The robot couldn’t be heard otherwise.
“I have it now,” he said, and I could have kissed his spidery, mechanical hide.
It took longer to turn us off; the sound was so intense that I had a hell of a time being heard, and Cain finally had to make its way up to get the message across.
From this point, the job was simple. We’d apply a little webbing to the tip of one of Cain’s tentacles, and he’d slap it immediately on the bolt. It would harden, bonding the two, and the bolt would turn. Then we’d have to free him by tossing small bowls of urine held in our mouthsnot exactly pleasant, I can assure youand do it again.
Finally, the plate loosened, creaked, and fell down with a crash, almost nipping my legs in the process.
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I went into the computer core, scanning it carefully. Finally I found what I was looking fora storage rack, with hundreds of tiny round programming
modules.
I really needed Marsha, but I would have to do it
alone, I knew.
“Cain!” I called. The robot scampered in and waited, expectant. “Can you put these little balls in that chute over there, in the order they are laid out,
top to bottom?”
“The seventh one in the ninth row is missing,” it
pointed out. “I know. Can’t be helped. It’s already in there.
Okay, can you do it?”
“Easily,” responded the robot, and did just that.
I burned. I burned with hatred, I burned with the fires of passion and desperation.
“What are they. Bar?” Ham asked, scared to death at the exposure of his precious computer.
“One hundred and four little programming course balls,” I replied. “One for each possible destination of the Nijinsky. Now we’ll go to the bridge and get a
course readout for each.”
“What are you gonna do, anyway?” he asked me,
confused.
They were all there, all the ward leaders who would take the word back to the people. Nothing stayed quiet in a society this small, but I wanted it done
right.
George was there, too. He already knew what I was planning, and could say nothing more.
“All right, people,” I began hesitantly. “This is our situation, so listen good. Right now there’s a human ship analyzing the world we hit, trying to find a way to kill the virus. Kill it and you kill us. You’ve already heard that. This puts us in a bind.” I paused for effect, then continued.
The Web of the Chozen
“First, we can jump for the unknown stars. I can stay out and make about three hundred jumps. The Nijinsky could make maybe twenty. The odds of us finding a planet of our own in that range would be slim, and we’d be out there, waiting for the systems to finally give out, if we didn’t.”
“So we’re dead,” said one older leader, I think it was Beth, one of Marsha’s second breed, not mine.
“We have one chance,” I told them. “One chance only. There are over thirteen hundred of us. There are one hundred and four human worlds. Allowing some leeway, for ship’s maintenance and the like, that’s twelve of us for every human world.”
“You meanland on all of them?” gasped one named Ruth.
“I mean exactly that,” I responded. “And now before they get a key to the virus and before they get smart enough to think of it themselves and really de-fend against it.”
“Buthow long would this take?” another asked.
“About two years,” I responded. “But, remember, it takes just as much time for them to move as it does for usand they can’t build their defenses fast enough. If you’re good, and if we have a little luck, many of you won’t be discovered until it’s far too late.”
“They’ll kill us,” one breathed.
“Many of us,” I admitted. “Perhaps most of us. I hope not. Butthere it is. If anybody else has a plan, let me know. Otherwise, we do it.”
“There should be a vote!” Ruth protested. “We can’t ask the people to do this without a vote!”
“Extermination or the survival of the race,” George broke in. “That’s what it is, all right. Which one do you vote for?”
“My God!” one swore. “Toto turn every human into the Choz! It’s incredible!”
I smiled. “Yes, isn’t it?” I agreed, a trace of malice in my voice. “So much so they’ll never figure out what
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we’re doing until it’s too late. Then let them come up with a way to kill the virus without killing themselves!”
They left, left to tell the others, to make prepara-tions, to get themselves mentally ready for the task.
George and I weren’t aloneno Choz was ever really alone, not until we broke out of these ships but it was as much privacy as any ever had.
I was grinning, thinking of the Seigleins and the Huangs and the Smombas and the others of the Nine Families as they changed into Choz.
Oh, I’d have my revenge, all right! On all of them!
I looked at George, and saw that he was grinning, too.
“So we all might win,” he said lightly.
“What the hell do you mean?” I responded, knowing I was missing something.
“The revolution!” he laughed. “And what a revolution! No more humanity! No more tight little niches full of Creatovision addicts and stagnancy! The constant pressure for new worlds, for expansion!”
“Those vegetables in the superquads won’t change anything except their routine,” I pointed out. “You yourself said that Patmos was a nice analog of human society.”
“You saw what happened on St. Cyril,” he replied. “Panic, riots, a terrible thing. The Change itself will weed out the least fit. The restwell, their spark might come out. And we still have the technology the computers, the bulk of man’s knowledge and experience. It’s a new start!”