The ore cart reached the edge of the ruined plain and halted briefly. Above it, the dot of black still circled the sky. For a time, the cart remained frozen.
“The factory's trying to decide,” Perine said. “It needs the material, but it's afraid of that hawk up there.”
The factory debated and nothing stirred. Then the ore cart again resumed its unsteady crawl. It left the tangle of vines and started out across the blasted open plain. Painfully, with infinite caution, it headed toward the slab of dark concrete and metal at the base of the mountains.
The hawk stopped circling.
“Get down!” O'Neill said sharply. “They've got those rigged with the new bombs.”
His wife and Perine crouched down beside him and the three of them peered warily at the plain and the metal insect crawling laboriously across it. In the sky, the hawk swept in a straight line until it hung directly over the cart. Then, without a sound or warning, it came down in a straight dive. Hands to her face, Judith shrieked, “I can't watch! It's awful! Like wild animals!”
“It's not after the cart,” O'Neill grated.
As the airborne projectile dropped, the cart put on a burst of desperate speed. It raced noisily toward the factory, clanking and rattling, trying in a last futile attempt to reach safety. Forgetting the menace above, the frantically eager factory opened up and guided its mobile unit directly inside. And the hawk had what it wanted.
Before the barrier could close, the hawk swooped down in a long glide parallel with the ground. As the cart disappeared into the depths of the factory, the hawk shot after it, a swift shimmer of metal that hurtled past the clanking cart. Suddenly aware, the factory snapped the barrier shut. Grotesquely, the cart struggled; it was caught fast in the half-closed entrance.
But whether it freed itself didn't matter. There was a dull rumbling stir. The ground moved, billowed, then settled back. A deep shock wave passed beneath the three watching human beings. From the factory rose a single column of black smoke. The surface of concrete split like a dried pod; it shriveled and broke, and dribbled shattered bits of itself in a shower of ruin. The smoke hung for a while, drifting aimlessly away with the morning wind.
The factory was a fused, gutted wreck. It had been penetrated and destroyed.
O'Neill got stiffly to his feet. “That's all. All over with. We've got what we set out after—we've destroyed the autofac network.” He glanced at Perine. “Or was that what we were after?”
They looked toward the settlement that lay behind them. Little remained of the orderly rows of houses and streets of the previous years. Without the network, the settlement had rapidly decayed. The original prosperous neatness had dissipated; the settlement was shabby, ill-kept.
“Of course,” Perine said haltingly. “Once we get into the factories and start setting up our own assembly lines …”
“Is there anything left?” Judith inquired.
“There must be something left. My God, there were levels going down miles!”
“Some of those bombs they developed toward the end were awfully big,” Judith pointed out. “Better than anything we had in our war.”
“Remember that camp we saw? The ruins-squatters?”
“I wasn't along,” Perine said.
“They were like wild animals. Eating roots and larvae. Sharpening rocks, tanning hides. Savagery, bestiality.”
“But that's what people like that want,” Perine answered defensively.
“Do they? Do we want this?” O'Neill indicated the straggling settlement. “Is this what we set out looking for, that day we collected the tungsten? Or that day we told the factory truck its milk was—” He couldn't remember the word.
“Pizzled,” Judith supplied.
“Come on,” O'Neill said. “Let's get started. Let's see what's left of that factory—left for us.”
They approached the ruined factory late in the afternoon. Four trucks rumbled shakily up to the rim of the gutted pit and halted, motors steaming, tailpipes dripping. Wary and alert, workmen scrambled down and stepped gingerly across the hot ash.
“Maybe it's too soon,” one of them objected.
O'Neill had no intention of waiting. “Come on,” he ordered. Grabbing up a flashlight, he stepped down into the crater.
The sheltered hull of the Kansas City factory lay directly ahead. In its gutted mouth, the ore cart still hung caught, but it was no longer struggling. Beyond the cart was an ominous pool of gloom. O'Neill flashed his light through the entrance; the tangled, jagged remains of upright supports were visible.
“We want to get down deep,” he said to Morrison, who prowled cautiously beside him. “If there's anything left, it's at the bottom.”
Morrison grunted. “Those boring moles from Atlanta got most of the deep layers.”
“Until the others got their mines sunk.” O'Neill stepped carefully through the sagging entrance, climbed a heap of debris that had been tossed against the slit from inside, and found himself within the factory— an expanse of confused wreckage, without pattern or meaning.
“Entropy,” Morrison breathed, oppressed. “The thing it always hated. The thing it was built to fight. Random particles everywhere. No purpose to it.”
“Down underneath,” O'Neill said stubbornly, “we may find some sealed enclaves. I know they got so they were dividing up into autonomous sections, trying to preserve repair units intact, to re-form the composite factory.”
“The moles got most of them, too,” Morrison observed, but he lumbered after O'Neill.
Behind them, the workmen came slowly. A section of wreckage shifted ominously and a shower of hot fragments cascaded down.
“You men get back to the trucks,” O'Neill said. “No sense endangering any more of us than we have to. If Morrison and I don't come back, forget us—don't risk sending a rescue party.” As they left, he pointed out to Morrison a descending ramp still partially intact. “Let's get below.”
Silently, the two men passed one dead level after another. Endless miles of dark ruin stretched out, without sound or activity. The vague shapes of darkened machinery, unmoving belts, and conveyer equipment were partially visible, and the partially completed husks of war projectiles, bent and twisted by the final blast.
“We can salvage some of that,” O'Neill said, but he didn't actually believe it. The machinery was fused, shapeless. Everything in the factory had run together, molten slag without form or use.“Once we get it to the surface …”
“We can't,” Morrison contradicted bitterly. “We don't have hoists or winches.” He kicked at a heap of charred supplies that had stopped along its broken belt and spilled halfway across the ramp.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” O'Neill said as the two of them continued past vacant levels of machines. “But now that I look back, I'm not so sure.”
They had penetrated a long way into the factory. The final level lap spread out ahead of them. O'Neill flashed the light here and there, trying to locate undestroyed sections, portions of the assembly process still intact.
It was Morrison who felt it first. He suddenly dropped to his hands and knees; heavy body pressed against the floor, he lay listening, face hard, eyes wide. “For God's sake—”
“What is it?” O'Neill cried. Then he, too, felt it. Beneath them, a faint, insistent vibration hummed through the floor, a steady hum of activity. They had been wrong; the hawk had not been totally successful. Below, in a deeper level, the factory was still alive. Closed, limited operations still went on.
“On its own,” O'Neill muttered, searching for an extension of the descent-lift. “Autonomous activity, set to continue after the rest is gone. How do we get down?”
The descent-lift was broken off, sealed by a thick section of metal. The still-living layer beneath their feet was completely cut off; there was no entrance.
Racing back the way they had come, O'Neill reached the surface and hailed the first truck. “Where the hell's the torch? Give it here!”
&
nbsp; The precious blowtorch was passed to him and he hurried back, puffing, into the depths of the ruined factory where Morrison waited. Together, the two of them began frantically cutting through the warped metal flooring, burning apart the sealed layers of protective mesh.
“It's coming,” Morrison gasped, squinting in the glare of the torch. The plate fell with a clang, disappearing into the level below. A blaze of white light burst up around them and the two men leaped back.
In the sealed chamber, furious activity boomed and echoed, a steady process of moving belts, whirring machine-tools, fast-moving mechanical supervisors. At one end, a steady flow of raw materials entered the line; at the far end, the final product was whipped off, inspected, and crammed into a conveyer tube.
All this was visible for a split second; then the intrusion was discovered. Robot relays came into play. The blaze of lights flickered and dimmed. The assembly line froze to a halt, stopped in its furious activity.
The machines clicked off and became silent.
At one end, a mobile unit detached itself and sped up the wall toward the hole O'Neill and Morrison had cut. It slammed an emergency seal in place and expertly welded it tight. The scene below was gone. A moment later the floor shivered as activity resumed.
Morrison, white-faced and shaking, turned to O'Neill. “What are they doing? What are they making?”
“Not weapons,” O'Neill said.
“That stuff is being sent up”—Morrison gestured convulsively—“to the surface.”
Shakily, O'Neill climbed to his feet. “Can we locate the spot?”
“I—think so.”
“We better.” O'Neill swept up the flashlight and started toward the ascent ramp. “We're going to have to see what those pellets are that they're shooting up.”
The exit valve of the conveyer tube was concealed in a tangle of vines and ruins a quarter of a mile beyond the factory. In a slot of rock at the base of the mountains the valve poked up like a nozzle. From ten yards away, it was invisible; the two men were almost on top of it before they noticed it.
Every few moments, a pellet burst from the valve and shot up into the sky. The nozzle revolved and altered its angle of deflection; each pellet was launched in a slightly varied trajectory.
“How far are they going?” Morrison wondered.
“Probably varies. It's distributing them at random.” O'Neill advanced cautiously, but the mechanism took no note of him. Plastered against the towering wall of rock was a crumpled pellet; by accident, the nozzle had released it directly at the mountainside. O'Neill climbed up, got it, and jumped down.
The pellet was a smashed container of machinery, tiny metallic elements too minute to be analyzed without a microscope.
“Not a weapon,” O'Neill said.
The cylinder had split. At first he couldn't tell if it had been the impact or deliberate internal mechanisms at work. From the rent, an ooze of metal bits was sliding. Squatting down, O'Neill examined them.
The bits were in motion. Microscopic machinery, smaller than ants, smaller than pins, working energetically, purposefully—constructing something that looked like a tiny rectangle of steel.
“They're building,” O'Neill said, awed. He got up and prowled on. Off to the side, at the far edge of the gully, he came across a downed pellet far advanced on its construction. Apparently it had been released some time ago.
This one had made great enough progress to be identified. Minute as it was, the structure was familiar. The machinery was building a miniature replica of the demolished factory.
“Well,” O'Neill said thoughtfully, “we're back where we started from. For better or worse … I don't know.”
“I guess they must be all over Earth by now,” Morrison said, “landing everywhere and going to work.”
A thought struck O'Neill. “Maybe some of them are geared to escape velocity. That would be neat—autofac networks throughout the whole universe.”
Behind him, the nozzle continued to spurt out its torrent of metal seeds.
THE MINORITY REPORT
I
The first thought Anderton had when he saw the young man was: I'm getting bald. Bald and fat and old. But he didn't say it aloud. Instead, he pushed back his chair, got to his feet, and came resolutely around the side of his desk, his right hand rigidly extended. Smiling with forced amiability, he shook hands with the young man.
“Witwer?” he asked, managing to make this query sound gracious.
“That's right,” the young man said. “But the name's Ed to you, of course. That is, if you share my dislike for needless formality.” The look on his blond, overly confident face showed that he considered the matter settled. It would be Ed and John: Everything would be agreeably cooperative right from the start.
“Did you have much trouble finding the building?” Anderton asked guardedly, ignoring the too-friendly overture. Good God, he had to hold on to something. Fear touched him and he began to sweat. Witwer was moving around the office as if he already owned it—as if he were measuring it for size. Couldn't he wait a couple of days—a decent interval?
“No trouble,” Witwer answered blithely, his hands in his pockets. Eagerly, he examined the voluminous files that lined the wall. “I'm not coming into your agency blind, you understand. I have quite a few ideas of my own about the way Precrime is run.”
Shakily, Anderton lit his pipe. “How is it run? I should like to know.”
“Not badly,” Witwer said. “In fact, quite well.”
Anderton regarded him steadily. “Is that your private opinion? Or is it just cant?”
Witwer met his gaze guilelessly.“Private and public. The Senate's pleased with your work. In fact, they're enthusiastic.” He added, “As enthusiastic as very old men can be.”
Anderton winced, but outwardly he remained impassive. It cost him an effort, though. He wondered what Witwer really thought. What was actually going on in that close-cropped skull? The young man's eyes were blue, bright—and disturbingly clever. Witwer was nobody's fool. And obviously he had a great deal of ambition.
“As I understand it,” Anderton said cautiously, “you're going to be my assistant until I retire.”
“That's my understanding, too,” the other replied, without an instant's hesitation.
“Which may be this year, or next year—or ten years from now.” The pipe in Anderton's hand trembled. “I'm under no compulsion to retire. I founded Precrime and I can stay on here as long as I want. It's purely my decision.”
Witwer nodded, his expression still guileless. “Of course.”
With an effort, Anderton cooled down a trifle. “I merely wanted to get things straight.”
“From the start,” Witwer agreed. “You're the boss. What you say goes.” With every evidence of sincerity, he asked: “Would you care to show me the organization? I'd like to familiarize myself with the general routine as soon as possible.”
As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: “You're acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted.”
“I have the information publicly available,” Witwer replied. “With the aid of your precog mutants, you've boldly and successfully abolished the post-crime punitive system of jails and fines. As we all realize, punishment was never much of a deterrent, and could scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead.”
They had come to the descent lift. As it carried them swiftly downward, Anderton said:“You've probably grasped the basic legalistic drawback to pre-crime methodology. We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.”
“But they surely will,” Witwer affirmed with conviction.
“Happily they don't—because we get them first, before they can commit an act of violence. So the commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. We claim they're culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they're innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent.”
The lift let them out, and t
hey again paced down a yellow corridor. “In our society we have no major crimes,” Anderton went on, “but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.”
Doors opened and closed, and they were in the analytical wing. Ahead of them rose impressive banks of equipment—the data-receptors, and the computing mechanisms that studied and restructured the incoming material. And beyond the machinery sat the three precogs, almost lost to view in the maze of wiring.
“There they are,” Anderton said dryly. “What do you think of them?”
In the gloomy half-darkness the three idiots sat babbling. Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared, reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots. All day long the idiots babbled, imprisoned in their special high-backed chairs, held in one rigid position by metal bands, and bundles of wiring, clamps. Their physical needs were taken care of automatically. They had no spiritual needs. Vegetable-like, they muttered and dozed and existed. Their minds were dull, confused, lost in shadows.
But not the shadows of today. The three gibbering, fumbling creatures, with their enlarged heads and wasted bodies, were contemplating the future. The analytical machinery was recording prophecies, and as the three precog idiots talked, the machinery carefully listened.
For the first time Witwer's face lost its breezy confidence. A sick, dismayed expression crept into his eyes, a mixture of shame and moral shock. “It's not—pleasant,” he murmured. “I didn't realize they were so—” He groped in his mind for the right word, gesticulating. “So—deformed.”
“Deformed and retarded,” Anderton instantly agreed. “Especially the girl, there. Donna is forty-five years old. But she looks about ten. The talent absorbs everything; the esp-lobe shrivels the balance of the frontal area. But what do we care? We get their prophecies. They pass on what we need. They don't understand any of it, but we do.”
Subdued, Witwer crossed the room to the machinery. From a slot he collected a stack of cards. “Are these names that have come up?” he asked.