The patrol pilot was beginning to put the pieces of the Forbidden
Moon's riddle together at last. And Paul Harwich must have been doing
the same. The evidence, as far as it went, was clear.
Perfected science! The fat printer had told them that all you had to do
was think your wishes in that queer little pillared structure. And the
machines translated your wishes into fact. Unless Bayley had lied, and
there was small reason to suppose that he had, the rest was maybe not
so difficult to understand.
First, the great envelope of force around Io. That was to keep
possibly dangerous intruders away, of course. Thus, the ancient
Ionians had lived in carefree idleness and luxury, tended by their
perfected machines. The thing in the pyramid must be the master servant
mechanism, reachable in that pillared kiosk, by telepathy. It must be
the coordinator, in contact with the other mechanisms by radio, or
something. Adding and calculating machines, way back in the Twentieth
Century, had thought and reasoned, after a fashion. More recently, on
Earth, apparati of a similar nature had done far more, working out
intricate mathematical problems, far more swiftly and accurately than
any human being could.
And the apparatus within the pyramid must be much the same thing, but
developed to the nth degree! A vast planning, calculating device that
could reason and invent with a swiftness and perfection far beyond any
living mind. But it was still just mechanical; a servant apparatus that
thought by the turning of the wheels and the movement of levers inside
it with no more consciousness than an adding machine of the Twentieth
Century!
This was the way Harwich figured it all out. And he saw something else,
too.
"Uh-uh, Bayley," he remarked suddenly. "Soon after that new space flier
was brought here at your command, you decided that you were complete
boss around here, didn't you? There were no ancient Ionians in your
way. All you had to do was wish, inside that telepathy kiosk, and it
was just like Aladdin wishing with his lamp, eh?"
For the first time, cold, comprehending anger had come into the patrol
pilot's tone.
"Why sure--sure!" Bayley growled back at him. "And why not? Just about
anything I can think of is possible! And, let me tell you something
else, you poor dope! You and Arnold wouldn't be alive now, if I hadn't
wished it! I thought you might have gotten through the Ionian force
shield somehow, when the RQ257 cracked up. I thought you might be
somewhere out there on the desert still living. So I just wished that
the machines go and get you, and revive you if you needed it. I thought
maybe it might be fun."
It was enough. Cold anger reborn in Evan Harwich's breast was suddenly
rekindled into blazing fury by the memory of the RQ257, and a wire
filed almost through in a Gyon condenser. Evan Harwich's muscles
tightened. Wordlessly he was about to leap at George Bayley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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