To the Admiralty, the Victory project was already an unqualified success. All over the Caroline, although its physical appearance had changed very little, one could sense the same spirit that Limpkin had seen rampant in Palace Park. Carefully planted legends took their place beside the quaint native ones that travelers heard at the Yards and then spread, suitably embroidered, throughout the rest of the World; the Admiralty had hired several writers to manufacture synthetic mythology about the Builders and Home; almost anything that they might dream up, if it was about peace, and power, and plenty, was readily accepted and incorporated into the very soul of the People.
But as Amon Macalic, then head of the Yards, sometimes felt the legends and myths were joining the People to the Ship in a tie much more binding and absolute than that of simple hope. Over the whole of the Caroline, not just in the Yards, one could see this tie growing and solidifying, drawing the Victory and the People closer and closer together—and farther away from the benevolent rule of the Techno class and the Admiralty. Even in the lands beyond the Caroline, peoples were reorienting limited thinking capacity to include stories of this new creation.
The People of the Yards, however, were the most passionate in their attachment to the Victory. The growing status of the Ship in their minds began to be quietly manifested in a singular manner: under the completed sections of the fuselage, small mausoleums could be found. Even more disturbing, some of these gruesome little constructions had what appeared to be provisions for worship; a hundred recognized religions existed in the Caroline and her territories, venerating everything from ancestors to Great Men (Miolnor IV being a current favorite) to the usual brands of pantheism, but now the Ship had truly acquired a capital "S" and all that went with it.
Even the character of the Yards had changed. By their nature and occupation the Technos felt at home in the Yards' bright new steel. That they knew and loved almost as much as the First World had. But since its first awakening, the Yards had grown into something less orderly; in places, it was a metal forest where stories could grow as easily as they had in the Karback Cyprus marches. Under the enormous darkness of the Victory, an incredible tangle of pipes, power lines, and ventilation shafts had grown up. Mobile cranes that could no longer reach a section of the hull stood unused for months; steel fittings from under the Yards sometimes waited years before they were lifted into position. The whole lot of it was much too untidy for the Techno mind to tolerate; the People, on the other hand, were quite taken up with it. But even these jarring discontinuities only served to make the eastern bank of the Tyne delta a place that even the First World might not have been able to outdo.
A traveler cresting the mountains around the Yards would suddenly feel all the wretched hopelessness of the World swept away. His eyes would sweep down the mountains, astounded by the designs of the homes he would see there: large, spacious, open, and clean they were, surrounded by rich gardens. Magnificent carriages and horses moved smoothly along the wandering roads carrying proud men in black and silver.
Further down the traveler would see a great city with tall, close-packed tenements and ringed by factories belching smoke and noise. Color, activity and an atmosphere of purpose that he had never felt in all his travelings would drift up to his high perch; he would see great motor vehicles upon the broad avenues, laden with unrecognizable cargoes.
Then, his eye would reach to the Yards and be blinded by what lay there.
The psychological reaction to such a sight, especially after having spent a lifetime getting used to the World, was quite predictable. One would either flee in disbelief, mentally paralyzed by the scene, or, more likely, one would stumble down the slopes, utterly captivated by the Victory and all that it suddenly meant to you.
The Technos were continually delighted that their creation promoted such strong feelings in such a short time, and usually let it go at that. Then some duty-conscious Techno decided to send one of their converts back to the Admiralty as an example of the job they were doing out in that godforsaken wilderness.
The Admiralty people questioned the man, a lordless knight from Enom, and were similarly gratified until someone pointed out that the instant devotion of the Victory depended to a great extent on the shock of seeing all that accomplishment in the middle of the World. "Quite," replied the other Admiralty people, "just shows how much we've done." Then the man continued to point out that the knight had first journeyed to the Caroline and then followed the Tyne to Bloody Ford and then by devious routes to the Yards. The smiles faded into worried frowns as the Admiralty people began to realize that the knight had noticed no difference between the Caroline and the rest of the World. Seventy years and the Yards had grown tremendously but it seemed that the land had hardly been touched. An eager cipher clerk immediately began to run off a progress report request to the Office of Procurement in Knightsbridge, but a more suspicious mind suggested that any studies that they make of the Ship and the program that supported it be conducted by the Admiralty alone.
To this end a new and regrettably short-lived agency was established. The Office of Extraterritorial Intelligence was meant to be the coldly determined branch of the Admiralty that was to keep watch on all aspects of a program that suddenly seemed to need watching desperately. But the men who were responsible for its creation were still strictured by a childish belief that all was going well, and by a jealous concern that this new agency would find something wrong with their particular aspect of the project.
When the Office of Extraterritorial Intelligence was finally put into operation it had a total complement of fifteen men, six horses and some sub-standard stationery. Ironically, its sole office was established in an old church in the Knightsbridge quarter: 25 Stewart Street, a mere two blocks from the O.P. and the People's Palace. The placement of the office was quite accidental and no one took advantage of it until it was too late.
The only mission of the O.E.I. was launched in the early fall of the seventh decade of the Ship.
As the Admiralty began to look about itself, it realized just how completely it had removed itself from direct contact with the rest of the nation and how utterly it had come to depend on mere reports to keep the whole enterprise moving.
Thus it was decided that for a beginning the O.E.I. should send out two parties. The first was to go to the Yards and make as complete a survey as possible of how, if at all, the purpose and meaning of the Victory might have become perverted. Three men were assigned to this task and they left the city for Kelph the day after receiving their orders. They were never heard from again and one can only suppose that they perished in the subsequent disturbances in the Tyne delta.
The second party of four men was to confirm a progress report from the Armories. According to the report, a "modification" had been performed on a power chain leading from a hydroelectric dam on the Denligh River in southern Yuma to the Yards. Three transformer stations had been established on the line before its eight cables reached the Yards. All in all the line ran for several hundred miles through four new protectorate nations of the Caroline and the Badlands. That the lines had reached the Yards at all—all but two being dummies—was a bit of a miracle, for while the southern lands that the line traversed did not carry the legendary stigmata that the far north and west did, they still held the more pedestrian horrors in abundance. It was thus only slightly incredible that the Armories reported that only three men had been lost in its modification; two hundred men in the original crew had died. It had taken the Armories five months to carry out its mission; the War Office engineers had needed three years to build the real and fake power lines.
The first station was reached, but a repair crew from the Armories was at work there. Only a single line was diverted here, but it was impossible to check out its operation without arousing the curiosity of the Armories' men; the secret line was supposed to lead to a village named Kendreal, fifty miles to the northeast. Since the line covered the distance in almost a hundred miles of serpentine wanderings, the O.E.I. party decided to assume that it was working properly.
The second station was two hundred miles beyond the first; even in those latitudes the coming winds of winter could be felt. The station itself was situated among the worn, low mountains that reached up from the Sea and encircled the southeastern corner of the Black Barrens. It was a depressing, sterile place, but relatively safe because there was not enough food to support large life forms. There the three heaviest lines were diverted, two to garrison towns along the Tyne and one to a provincial capital in one of the new protectorates.
The lines had been set up about two years ago, and although no mention of the new power had reached the Admiralty from the garrisons and the capital, it aroused no concern, for the whole scheme was carried out in secrecy, not even the lower echelons of the War Office being fully aware of what was happening. The object was the introduction of the new power into the selected areas in as subtle a manner as possible. Occasionally the lines had to await the construction of a dummy power plant in some suitably visible spot so that no one would guess that the lines had been robbed from the Ship.
The party quickly set to work, for they wanted to reach the Yards before the end of the month. Preliminary tests indicated that all three of the diversionary lines were dead. Fearing that the transformers involved in the switching of power had succumbed to the fierce sun or to the dust storms that seasonally plagued the area, the crew attempted to discover the difficulty: all seemed fine as far as they could tell.
Then, out of desperation, one of the crew ran a test on all eight of the original lines, and was horrified to discover that all of them carried full power.
Understandably shaken, the four set off for the last station, a hundred and seventy miles southeast of the Yards. It was set on the plain separating the mountains that ringed the Yards and the worst parts of the Barrens; here the final two lines were supposed to have been diverted all the way back to the capital of Yuma; standing on an artificial mound and surrounded by a stone wall, the station presented a forbidding face to an already vicious land.
The party had followed the wooden transmission poles from a cautious distance, fearing nothing in particular but having vague premonitions that they might find another detachment from the Armories heading for the same station.
They reached the little compound just before nightfall and hurriedly shut and barred the door behind them. The sun had almost disappeared behind the mountains to the west, but none of the group could contain their morbid curiosity; testing equipment was applied to the transformers and the lines leading into and away from the station. The line running to Yuma's capital was another inoperative dummy, the eight lines going to the Yards all registered full power, and the diversionary equipment was patently phony.
Their worst expectations confirmed and the unavoidable conclusions being drawn, the four men settled down for the night, resolving to make a dash for the nearest Government garrison on the Tyne, two hundred miles to the northwest.
They posted only a single man on watch, despite their fears, so desolate was the surrounding wilderness; the man was named Annandale. Born and raised on the Great Plains east of the Caroline, he was the best horseman of the lot and much more at home amid the loneliness than the others, He had been trained as a weapons expert, which meant that he was lost with anything bigger than an automatic rifle, and had thus been given one of the O.E.I.'s treasured submachine guns; he was the party's protector, but at the moment he felt much less qualified for that post than the others deemed him.
Around three in the morning his drowsy attention was captured by a strange growling noise to the east. Thinking it to be some loathsome creature that had wandered down from the more fertile lands of the east or north—and consequently a very hungry, loathsome creature—he fearfully retreated to the farthest corner of the fort.
The noise became louder and less natural; there was a vehicle of some sort out there. Reassuring himself that he was, in fact, encountering a humanly-created force, Annandale decided to make a reconnaissance of the situation.
Being careful not to disturb the others—for it might after all be only the wind and his imagination—he saddled his horse, briefly checked his weapon, and moved out through the west-facing secondary gate.
He felt safer now, out beneath a familiar sky, even if the ground under his feet was hardly the soft grasslands of his home. Now he had space; space to run, he thought, but tried to dismiss that. Annandale led his horse directly west for a quarter of a mile, using the bulk of the fort to shield his movements from eastern eyes. He then traveled in a wide circling movement that should bring him up a little behind and to the south of the intruder.
Picking his way carefully through the dead scrub and rock, he reached his destination half an hour later. All he could hear now was a low metallic bubbling and what he supposed to be men talking in muffled tones. But he had miscalculated: the sounds were still to the east of him and the station was closer than he planned it to have been.
The moon had set by now, but the brilliant desert stars gave Annandale enough light to see by. He crouched and saw a black, crab-like object silhouetted against the false dawn. As his eyes became better adjusted to the faint light, he detected the stick-figures of men standing by the shape in groups or at work on its hide.
Annandale found a short length of rope and hobbled his horse. He approached as quietly as possible. It was a tank—that he recognized as soon as he got within fifty yards of it. But the armored vehicles that he knew were either rotting hulks, dead and lonely in the green immensities of the Plains, or pictured in the few First World books he had read. Then, of course, there were the miserable, ox-drawn fighting wagons that had been the tanks of his childhood.
This was neither. It was motor driven—even at low idle the vehicle's engine sounded like a sleeping storm. Annandale thought it might be a patrol from the Yards, a resurrected giant sent to guard the Victory; indeed that must have been it, for he knew that only the Yards had the ability to put out such a mechanism. But that would have made it a First World machine, and this was definitely not. Annandale could not say exactly what disqualified it; it was the feeling of wanton, purposeless evil that invested the hulking shadow in front of him. No, even that was wrong, for he had sensed much the same thing when examining the plans for First World tanks; but, dammit, they were different. Cold and cruel they were and their evil was of a rigidly directed character; with them, Death sounded out its victims with a ponderous but jewel-like micrometer. They were lower and sleeker, too, clean and light in their titanic manner.
But in this machine, Death was a drunken, moronic brute, careening about the countryside, his ragged scythe ravaging the land in senseless, ghastly arcs. It was anything but clean: even though he was upwind of the tank he could still smell it. Not the sharp odor of polished steel and fine oil, so beloved by the Technos, but one of metallic and human corruption. The starlight played over the cancerous, cobbled skin and Annandale saw that the smooth curves and faceted turrets of the First Days had been replaced by harsh angles and rough surfaces. Nondescript tubes and pipes crawled over its huge exterior like maggots over a corpse.
It was larger than any First World tank he had ever read about; it was not more dreadful or terrifying, for those were qualities inherent in any tank's function, but it was infinitely more repellent. Annandale had always thought of the tankers of old as skilled technicians, accomplishing a job they detested as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The crew of this tank, Annandale knew, would revel in their killings and slaughter—butchers instead of surgeons.
Annandale strained to identify the vehicle. His attention was attracted by the scraps of metal. Some of the men were working on a panel just in back of the turret. One of the men on the ground picked something up and swung himself aboard on the tank's colossal gun barrel. He walked aft to the men; as he reached them, he switched on a torch.
Annandale saw that the turret was a mass of rust and clumsy welds; green lichens seemed to be growing around the twin hatches, and black blast stains marked the punctures where machine guns were hidden. He also saw a black triangle with a white border encircling a star: the ensign of the O.P. and the Armories. There was a crude device ahead of it, a mailed fist and winged horse, but he did not recognize it and assumed it to be a regimental or personal crest.
The men slammed the panel tight and disappeared into the tank through various openings. The engine was revved up, splitting night and polluting the false dawn with its exhausts.
The tank lurched forward, and Annandale saw just how big the thing really was. It began to move toward the station, and panic seized him. Leaping to his feet, Annandale ran to his horse and flicked off the fetters; he rode unthinkingly for the station, his insane yelling all but lost in the tank's roarings.
He turned to see a piercing light spring from a mount beside the main gun. Blue-white it was, and it played like a hunting fire over the dead land, the grim walls of the station, and finally the horseman. The light steadied on Annandale. Another sound: his companions had awakened and were firing their useless rifles at the monster. The beam was lost in another, redder brilliance; an incredible hollow thud joined the wavering fire. Annandale crouched, trying to hide in his horse's mane. A roaring, like the winter gales compressed and intensified a hundredfold, swept by, almost tossing him from the saddle.
He looked up, partly to follow the shell and partly to call to his mates. The projectile hit the station near the northern corner, sending stone and metal in all directions.
Annandale wheeled his horse violently away from the station as yet another thud and another blast tore the rest of it to pieces.
The tank halted and followed the fleeing rider with its turret, peppering the ground behind and in front of him with automatic fire, apparently unwilling to waste a heavy shell on so insignificant a target; besides, Annandale was wearing the long fur-lined riding coat of the Plains and the men must have thought him to be nothing more than a lone nomad.
Nearly crazed with fear as he was, Annandale still retained his heritage of fine horsemanship; he fled the burning fort and circled around in back of the tank. He rode for several minutes, stopping on top of a blasted hillock half a mile north of the station. The tank still sat there, its evil hide undulating in the leaping of electrical sparks. It lobbed a third shell into the ruins and then finally moved forward; small geysers of dust spouted where its light batteries raked over the wreckage.
The vehicle plowed into the station, shoving rubble from the hill. Once the hill was cleared, the tank circled and its men began rigging a crane on its rear deck; they started to rebuild the station, even then. The only trace of his companions that Annandale could detect was the severed, maimed head of a horse that one of the Armories' men had thrown from the hill; the dawn, just beginning, caught the bloody object and made it seem to sparkle like an obscene, black baroque pearl.
* * *
Annandale reached the Tyne garrison after three days of constant riding, killing his beloved stallion. During those days he had apparently spent much time deliberating on the things he had seen; the man that stumbled into the Government compound was definitely not the young horseman who had left the Caroline. His eyes, which once shone with delight at the smell of wind and grass, loving the smallest facet of life, had turned gray and dull. His frame sagged as with a great weight; a sorrow had descended upon him from which he could not escape.
He walked to the commander'soffice, his Admiralty identification serving to admit him. He told his story simply, almost in a lyric manner, as if the facts that he had discovered had already been cast into a minstrel's song. The commander listened in astonishment, punctuating Annandale's narrative with "you can't be serious," and later on, "Gods save us."
The commander directed that all the information be sent to the capital, but he was abruptly informed that all telegraph communication had been mysteriously cut off early that morning. A fast power boat was then dispatched to the capital while the quickest galley available was sent to the Yards.
Annandale seemed more weary now than ever. "Sir, I fear that the storm has already begun. I request only a good horse and rations from you—and my gun, if you please—that I may escape from it for a little while."
"But if what you say is true, then I should think your Office will need you and your gun. The Caroline has need of men like . . . " The commander looked into Annandale's eyes. "Where will you go?" he asked.
"Home," the horseman said.