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Depressed about it, he turned to meet her.
"Through with me?"
"No, Don." He saw she wasn't sure. "I hope not."
"I've been waiting three days now."
Waiting for another session in the scanner. He felt baffled and bored. Still
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too lame for much activity, he had tried to read the tattered magazines on the
rack, dry technical journals on computers and astronautics and genetics. Tried
to read a paperback novel, a war story written by a
romantic fool who had never been in combat. Tried to plan what to do next if
Megan let him go.
"Let's talk to Ben," she was saying. "We took the problem to him."
"Ben?"
"Ben Bannerjee." He heard a special softness in her voice. "You haven't met
him because he's too frail for the scanner. But he's the brain of Raven
Foundation."
He followed her out of the lounge.
"Ben knows you," she said. "From editing your scanner pickups. Converted into
audio, which he has learned to read. He says he wants to see you because
you've done so much that he could only dream about. You'll admire him, Don, if
you'll give yourself a chance."
He heard the admiration in her own voice.
"It's Benjamin Franklin Bannerjee." They were crossing the parking lot toward
a building where Omega had fabricated weapon components. "A name he picked for
himself because he never knew his parents. Born deformed, somewhere in India.
He doesn't know the place or even his age. Maybe five or six years old when my
uncle found him on a Calcutta street. In the hands of a one-eyed Fagin type
who had him squatting there in rags and filth, playing chess against anybody.
"Winning every game.
"My uncle had never married. Or cared much for children, not even Egan and me.
But he was taken with Ben from that first glimpse. Bought him from the thug
who claimed him. Got him back to New York for medical care - nearly too late.
"He'll be a shock to you, Don."
She stopped on the walk outside the building.
"That's why I'm warning you. He does turn people off. His brains, I guess, as
much as his looks. But I've known him since I was seven. And loved him as much
as Uncle Luther did. So did Egan. Toward the end, I think he was Egan's only
friend.
"Uncle Luther always trusted him. For business advice and finally about the
seedship. Egan's idea, but Uncle Luther never listened to Egan. Ben saw how to
make it real. Without him, we wouldn't be here."
He followed her inside. A white-starched nurse made
them put on surgical masks and wash their hands at a surgical sink before she
let them into a windowless room in which the overheated air had a thin,
antiseptic bite. He heard a queer screechy quavering and tried not to recoil
when he saw Ben.
A child-sized thing in an odd-looking wheelchair.
A withered head, hairless, brown, and scarred. Its face narrow and dark and
shapeless, a mask of long suffering, twitching strangely. The body too small
for the head, grotesquely crumpled.
The nurse spoke, and the quavering changed. The powered chair spun toward him.
He saw a single fleshless arm, the only useful limb. Dark, pain-haunted eyes
peered up at him. Uneasy before them, he looked back at Megan.
"Ben - " Her easy warmth seemed strange in the lab-like room. "Here's Don."
"Hi, Mr. Brink." That gnarled mask had tried to smile, and Ben's single
spidery claw scuttled across a computer keypad. Croaking from a speaker on the
stark white wall, the words set a shiver in him. "Thanks for coming in. Miss
Zorrilla will find you a seat."
The nurse brought a seat, and he sat uneasily before those disconcerting eyes,
expecting to be grilled again about his life and his hopes and his ethics.
Megan came to stand behind the wheelchair, one hand on Ben's shrunken
shoulder, a tender-smile behind her own white mask.
"Mr. Brink, I believe you play chess."
"Not often."
"Neither do I." The dreadful face seemed to grin. "Too many urgencies
interfere. Have you time for a game?"
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"Time's all I have."
Miss Zorrilla brought a board. Ben announced a two-minute limit, but that
agile claw needed only seconds for a move. Though Brink tried to play a
cautious game, in twenty moves he was beaten.
"Good game, Don." Those queerly brilliant eyes stabbed at him again. "I was
asked for advice about you. I think we do need you in the Defender."
"Thanks - " The word came out with more emotion than he wanted. "Thanks!"
"I'm glad," Megan whispered.
"I've talked to Marty and Ivan."
Ben looked up at her, yellow fingers poised, that tragic mask transformed with
love.
"They agreed?"
"We worked out a compromise." The fingers were flashing again. "The ships may
need defense. The new colonies may till they can care for themselves. But we
aren't launching conquistadores."
The haunted eyes came from Megan back to him.
"Marty's writing a new control program for the computers. A triple test, to
protect any inhabited worlds the ships may reach. The first is technological,
to turn them away from any planet that shows evidence of electronic
communication or nuclear energy or space navigation. The second is economic
and political, to protect any global social system. The third is cultural. It
goes somewhat farther, intended to prevent the murder of any intelligent race
or evolving culture. The program will kill the seed, even after landing, if
any creatures simply say they don't want us there."
"You mean we can't fight - anything?"
"Our decision." Ben's skeletal head nodded unsteadily. "If you are challenged
by anything intelligent, you will yield without resisting."
"Can't you - " That took his breath. "Can't you reconsider?"
"We did reconsider." The wheelchair was rolling away, and again the overhot
room was filled with the audio chirps and squeaks and drones of the scanner
recording. That electronic voice rang through it, inhumanly remote. "We've
made the rules, Mr. Brink. The game's yours to play. We expect you to play it
well - "
"But - "
"Thanks, Mr. Brink. Thanks for coming in."
The nurse waved them toward the door.
"Better than nothing, I guess." Unhappily, he followed Megan out. "But still a
deadly handicap. If you build a suicide drive into the ships, what sort of
chance is left?"
"Chance enough." She paused to take off the mask, looking back toward Ben with
what he thought was wistful sadness. "We aren't setting out to conquer the
stars. Just to keep mankind alive. If just a single seed finds a place where
it can grow, that's all we need - and maybe more than we've earned, if you
look at human history."
"I can't guess what enemies we'll meet - "
"But I've begun to know you, Don." She gave him an odd half smile. "I think
you can cope with any handicap - "
Land!
A broken coast beneath the belted clouds, creeping over the world's bright
curve. Brighter than the sea and softly tinged with green - which must mean
chlorophyl or something very like it. Trembling, he watched its slow roll
toward him.
A bright line shone along the horizon. He watched it climb, widen, become an
enormous mountain mass that towered out of the clouds. A dead volcano, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]