‘But why?’ asked Harrington and he was seeking furiously for some way out of this, for some defense that might be more substantial than a knotted shirt.
‘I do not know how to say this so you will believe it,’ Madison told him earnestly, ‘but the father-feeling was no trick at all. You are closer at this moment to Harvey and perhaps even to myself than you can ever be to any other being. No one could work with you as long as Harvey worked with you without forming deep attachments. He, and I, have no thought but good for you. Won’t you let us prove it?’
Harrington remained silent, but he was wavering – even when he knew that he should not waver. For what Madison had said seemed to make some sense.
‘The world,’ said Madison, ‘is cold and merciless. It has no pity for you. You’ve not built a warm and pleasant world and now that you see it as it is no doubt you are repelled by it. There is no reason you should remain in it. We can give you back the world you’ve known. We can give you security and comfort. Surely you would be happy then. You can gain nothing by remaining as you are. There is no disloyalty to the human race in going back to this world you love. Now you can neither hurt nor harm the race. Your work is done…’
‘No!’ cried Harrington.
Madison shook his head. ‘Your race is a queer one, Harrington.’
‘My race!’ yelled Harrington. ‘You talk as if -‘
‘There is greatness in you,’ said Madison, ‘but you must be pushed to bring it out. You must be cheered and coddled, you must be placed in danger, you must be given problems. You are like so many children. It is my duty, Harrington, my sworn, solemn duty to bring out the greatness in you. And I will not allow you nor anyone to stand against the duty.’
And the truth was there, screaming through the dark, dread corridors of belated recognition. It had been there all the time, Harrington told himself, and he should have seen it.
He swung up the maul in a simple reflex action, as a gesture of horror and revulsion, and he heard his screaming voice as if it were some other voice and not his own at all:
‘Why, damn you, you aren’t even human!’
And as he brought the maul up in its arc and forward, Madison was weaving to one side so that the maul would miss, and his face and hands were changing and his body, too – although changing was perhaps not the word for it. It was a relaxing, rather, as if the body and the face and hands that had been Madison were flowing back again into their normal mould after being held and imprisoned into human shape. The human clothes he wore ripped apart with the pressure of the change and hung on him in tatters.
He was bigger, or he seemed to be, as if he had been forced to compress his bigness to conform to human standards, but he was humanoid and there was no essential change in his skull-like face beyond its taking on a faintly greenish cast.
The maul clanged to the floor and skidded on the steel face of the catwalk and the thing that had been Madison was slouching forward with the alien sureness in it. And from Harvey poured a storm of anger and frustration – a father’s storming anger at a naughty child which must now stand in punishment. And the punishment was death, for no naughty child must bar the great and solemn duty of a sworn and dedicated task. In that storming fury, even as it rocked his mind, Harrington sensed an essential oneness between machine and alien, as if the two moved and thought in unison.
And there was a snarling and a coughing sound of anger and Harrington found himself moving toward the alien thing with his fingers spread and his muscles tensed for the seizing and the rending of this enemy from the darkness that extended out beyond the cave. He was shambling forward on bowed and sturdy legs and there was fear deep-rooted in his mind, a terrible, shriveling fear that drove him to his work. But above and beyond that fear there was as well the knowledge of the strength within his own brute body.
For a moment he was aghast at the realization that the snarling and the coughing was coming from himself and that the foam of fighting anger was dripping from his jaws. Then he was aghast no longer, for he knew with surety who he was and all that he might have been or might ever have thought was submerged and swept away in sheer bestiality and the driving urge to kill.
His hands reached out and caught the alien flesh and tore at it and broke it and ripped it from the bones, and in the wild, black job of killing scarcely felt or noticed the raking of the other’s talons or the stabbing of the beak.
There was a screaming somewhere, a piercing sound of pain and agony from some other place, and the job was done.
Harrington crouched above the body that lay upon the floor and wondered at the growling sounds which still rumbled in his throat.
He stood erect and held out his hands and in the dim light saw that they were stained with sticky red, while from the pit he heard Harvey’s screams dwindle into moaning.
He staggered forward to the railing and looked down into the pit and streams of some dark and stringy substance were pouring out of every crack and joint of Harvey – as if the life and intelligence were draining out of him.
And somewhere a voice (a voice?) was saying: You fool! Now look at what you’ve done! _What will happen to you now?_
‘We’ll get along,’ said Harrington, not the final gentleman, nor yet Neanderthaler.
There was a gash along one arm and the blood was oozing out and soaking the fabric of his torn coat and one side of his face was wet and sticky, but he was all right,
_We kept you on the road_, said the dying voice, now faint and far away. _We kept you on it for so many ages…_
Yes, thought Harrington. Yes, my friend, you’re right. Once the Delphian oracle and how many cons before that?
And clever – once an oracle and in this day an analytical computer. And where in the years between – in monastery? in palace? in some counting house?
Although, perhaps, the operation need not have been continuous. Perhaps it was only necessary at certain crisis points.
And what the actual purpose? To guide the toddling footsteps of humanity, make man think as they wanted him to think? Or to shape humanity to the purpose of an alien race? And what the shape of human culture if there had been no interference?
And he, himself, he wondered – was he the summer-up, the man who had been used to write the final verdict of the centuries of patterning? Not in his words, of course, but in the words of these other two – the one down in the pit, the other on this catwalk. Or were there two of them? Might there have been only one? Was it possible, he wondered, that they were the same – the one of them no more than an extension of the other? For when Madison had died, so had Harvey.
‘The trouble with you, friend,’ he said to the thing lying on the floor. ‘was that you were too close to human in many ways yourself. You got too confident and you made mistakes.’
And the worst mistake of all had been when they’d allowed him to write a Neanderthaler into that early story.
He walked slowly toward the door and stopped at it for a moment to look back at the twisted form that lay huddled on the floor. They’d find it in an hour or two and think at first, perhaps, that it was Madison. Then they’d note the changes and know that it could not be Madison. And they’d be puzzled people, especially since Madison himself would have disappeared. They’d wonder, too, what had happened to Harvey, who’d never work again. And they’d find the maul!
The maul! Good God, he thought. I almost left the maul! He turned back and picked it up and his mind was churning with the fear of what might have happened had he left it there. For his fingerprints would be all over it and the police would have come around to find out what he knew.
And his fingerprints would be on the railing too, he thought. He’d have to wipe them off.
He took out his handkerchief and began to wipe the railing, wondering as he did it why he went to all the trouble, for there would be no guilt associated with this thing he’d done.