Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition Read online

  Gorg and Hedda left after awhile, so I plugged directly into the fastcom and relayed Maita's secret code for the unbreachable line. I explained what we had and what had happened.

  *I think maybe you have overlooked something. It could be very important. I am not familiar with the planetary system there. Ah. Few asteroids, but they are there. That machine, as your personal experience should have shown you, likes to hide among asteroids. Seek there. I doubt it's still on Flimt. What? Oh, yes. It has a penchant for hiding on satellites and outbases, too. You'll have a wide area to look over. Thing says it likes to get close to a massive object and to cut almost all power use so it isn't easy to detect. You know that. What? Yes. Z says it hides on bases where its own power use is lost in the normal background. It's out there somewhere.*

  "There are no missing ships!" TR interjected.

  *It didn't arrive in one of those trader ships, so will leave as it came. I think it won't be housed in a robot as its brain is far too large for that. Its builders didn't have the same types of miniaturizations you do. It simply sent a servo to send that ship out and used the time you were gone to make its own escape on STL drive. It may head outsystem. It has all the time in the universe. It's insane, and we have each and together added to its paranoia. It's what Z calls a berserker machine and is now insane on top of that. If you can't find that thing or if you believe it to be a danger I will come and will bring the fleet, though I don't really believe the fleet will be of much real help. It can outmaneuver any military approach.*

  We talked for awhile, then TR asked me, "Well?" as soon as Maita signed off.

  "I guess we do a floater search of the other worlds and their moons, then the asteroid belt. It likes moons, too. Energy use seekers.

  "Agreed?"

  "Yo!" TR replied, and I called Hedda to say we were going to do a search and would report back.

  We headed sunward to start when I had an idea. Every now and again on extremely rare occasions I can think of a logical thing to do in these little matters.

  "TR, go back along Flimt's orbital path to the point it was thirty hours ago, then seek residue from STL drive. It should be easy enough to find where it left the planet and we can then follow the residue path to it.

  "We'll also know that if we don't find any infra-red traces it hasn't left the planet. You should know from your check earlier which ships left the planet for in-system travel and can pretty much eliminate those."

  "Hmm. Unless it was able to leave as one of them. There were only six from or to Flimt, so that should be easy enough. Those things are always on automatic recording trackers in case of emergency and to keep the routes from crossing."

  We did the scan and didn't find any traces not on the records.

  "So logically, which one would it be?" I asked.

  "Not logically, cleverly. With great cunning. We're going to trace each one to its destination. The one that diverges out of followup sensor beam range will be it."

  This time I grinned to myself, but TR can feel that.

  "Awright! What?" it snapped shortly (How DOES it DO that?). "What's so damned funny? You radiate that stupid smugness like a nova radiates light!"

  "You just got through telling me we can't use logic, we have to use clever," I replied dryly (I'M programmed for all kinds of intonation). "Then you tell me you're going to follow the most logical search pattern."

  "So stick it! What do you suggest?"

  "That it'll go to the obvious destination, then leave again. It would be safest to assume it left very soon after we went after the gimmick. It knows we're an empire ship and it's paranoid, so would fear we'd have another ship secreted somewhere close to aid us. It would have to hope we'd get a ways outsystem before we simply destroyed the ship. It was definitely on that spaceport where PPF oh forty five was sent, so we can concentrate on those leaving there soon after we left first."

  "Only two. One went to the satellite base with a load of supplies and one went to the next planet outward to the base there."

  "Both of which have the ... Tr! How can we be so stupid?"

  "We get a lot of practice. What did we do now?"

  "TR, we went out to get that robot ship. We returned to find PPF oh forty five gone and traced it through the beacon. We then returned here to seek this very clever ship and have been looking for ships that left AFTER oh forty five!"

  "Well, it WAS here to send oh forty five. Forget I said that! How damned obvious! It looks like we'd learn after a century or two of making the same mistakes over and over and over again! Surely it'll weaken in some way or another."

  "It's getting low on servos, and can't afford to throw any away. The minute I found there wasn't a servo on oh forty five I should've known. It simply put the takeoff on timer. It may have been gone ever since we chased the robot ship.

  "We keep saying how clever the damned thing is and we keep letting it outsmart us because we insist on putting things into OUR system of chronology. I wish Z were here because he can just turn his logic off, where we have to consciously try to think illogically.

  "NOW how do we find the thing? It could be anywhere by now."

  "By going through exactly the process we almost started before we thought of this. We do what Maita suggested. Z was right there on Maita and was probably asked what the brain might do.

  "Z said it has a preconditioned response to these situations. It hid among asteroids several times and on moons and out-bases. That's the military programming. Z said at the time it wanted to take the high ground and dig in there.

  "He uses these expressions that don't mean anything and we tend to skip over them. I think I'm beginning to finally see what he was talking about. Thing obviously did, because it threw in the point about massive objects."

  "Then we have a very good idea of where to look. A massive asteroid or a moon with a base.

  "We can use logic this time, because it's following a standard programmed military strategy. The problem with 'book' learning is that all those military books are alike. If you know one you know the others.

  "What're you using the fastcom for?"

  "I'm calling Rollo on Ac. He's had some experience with that thing and knows military thinking inside out. He never was military himself, so learned the military method and was very successful BECAUSE he could look at how the military mind works from outside. He could see the inconsistencies a true strategist would be blind to.

  "Ah!"

  TR communicated with Rollo for half an hour silently while I listened in and heard the important parts.

  Rollo tends to take a long time before he answers a question, because he considers what he's going to say. He very seldom is forced to retract anything.

  The brain would seek a fairly massive body for several reasons including the fact it wasn't in a position of strength. It had only its own wits to live by, and almost no troops or servos. The larger the body, the more places to hide.

  A larger body absorbs any number of radiations. Sensors can be placed around the body to detect anything approaching from any direction, meanwhile leaving no detectable emanations to locate it exactly to a searcher.

  There were a few good reasons to suppose an asteroid wouldn't suffice. Unless things had changed drastically since the last meeting it was using fusion generators for power, so was severely limited, and would try to conserve.

  Shields take tremendous power, so the military trick was to find a world with a lot of water or ammonia ice. The cold tends to conserve energy in electronics-based machines by making them more efficient, and the ices would reinforce a minimal shield by adding backwash to the equations.

  TR knew full well what water ice backwash could do.

  It would seek a body with some kind of energy use already in place to add confusion to a search mechanism. The enemy would have to sort through all the data, which could give the brain the few needed seconds to escape.

  It would also be quite natural for organic lifeforms to not consider such a cold body as a lo
ng-term refuge because their own need for heat energy would make it inefficient. That was a strong psychological advantage that would make a search of such a world cursory at best and, with the other factors all added together, would seem to have tremendous advantages militarily against an unknown enemy.

  When they finished and I had exchanged some short conversation with Rollo, TR said, "Well! Wouldn't it be just too much for even that thing to believe if we were able to figure where it is and go directly after it?

  "Talk about a psychological advantage! We've already ... say! It knows my identification code and it knows Maita's! Do you think it would be the greatest mental trick in the galaxy if we dropped in and announced who we are? We drove it into insanity already, so it would really burn a few circuits if it traveled for centuries, only to find us there waiting for it! That would make the confusion a major factor right away, then we could keep it off balance with other tricks."

  "Yeah. We can add to that advantage. We wait until we know pretty well precisely where it is, then announce we were called by Flimt and came directly to the place where it must be.

  "It's truly devastating to the military mind so would be to a military machine for the enemy to know what, when, why, and how it'll act in a given circumstance. It's already a berserker type of machine. Maybe we can use the literal definition of the word as a psychological point to make it go berserk in the figurative sense!"

  "You really fascinate me!" TR growled disgustedly (How does it DO that?). "A whole civilization at peril here, and you get into stupid semantic games with yourself. That machine isn't the only insanity here!"

  "Civilization at peril? I play semantic games? Dear me! I'm so glad you called it to my attention!"

  We were both feeling pretty good then, so we could insult one another in fun. What had seemed such an insurmountable problem a short few minutes ago was now a simple matter of stopping to use our brains a bit. What seemed to be an impossible difficulty was, in reality, going to be rather easy, instead. All we had to do was to consider the programming of the machine to figure pretty much what it would do in any given situation.

  Like TR noted earlier, we have a lot of practice in being stupid.

  Too Many Possibilities

  TR called up the complete survey of the system. There were eight planets. The one closer to the sun from Flimt was too hot and unlikely, Flimt was out, so far as we knew. Its moons were out. The station satellite was out.

  The next planet outward was almost like Flimt, except for a highly sulfurous atmosphere, and was heavily colonized in domes. It wasn't likely, and had no moons of any size. There would be enough sensors and traffic control there to fairly well assure the brain wouldn't chance trying to hide on it. It was a military mind, and the place wasn't defendable from that standpoint.

  The asteroid belt would remain a strong possibility, because there weren't many of them, but they were large, as asteroids go. They were less likely than the cold planets, because it would be too easy to detect the fusion reactors the brain was probably using, but the response was programmed into the thing to go to the asteroids – unless that program was modified because of the lack of success the brain had in the original confrontation with Maita.

  The next planet was a gas giant with numerous large moons. It produced a certain internal heat, but the moons would fit most of what we were looking for. There was scientific equipment on all six of the moons, and two of them were mostly ices.

  We marked those for most likely spots. Aldrin and Forkep. TR noted them with markings to say they were first on the list of likely targets.

  Next planet was a gas giant with one likely moon, Derwop. The only other likely moon was Leeker, and the last planet outward was small and all ices. It was called Worfeq, which meant "Is it there?" in Flimt.

  TR decided it would probably be best to start out there and work inward, to first eliminate those we could be reasonably sure weren't what we were after. We started by backtracking orbit for any signs of infra-red radiating detritus from the STL drive, but found none. This far out, the brain could have come into free-fall, so not finding the residue meant nothing.

  We covered the entire planet almost meter-by-meter with the sensor floaters. We knew the brain used fusion generators, so that's the energy leakage type we looked for. It can't be hidden completely and it can't be shut down, because it's too hard and energy expensive to restart. The shields the brain had to hide the reactors would be detectable themselves, so nothing would be gained there.

  The brain wasn't on Worfeq.

  Leeker was another without possibility. There simply wasn't anything at all there to indicate any possibility it was recently visited by anything.

  Derwop was a problem, because Nestar, the planet around which it revolved, produced a fusion reaction that interfered with our readings, so we had to use directionals from the direction of the planet and wait for it to revolve, which took forty one hours.

  There was no evidence of anything on Derwop but the standard scientific equipment.

  "I'm thinking the asteroids," TR said. "Two more moons to go."

  Neepod, the planet around which our last two planets revolved, was also a fusion reactor at its core, so we had to place sensors planetward from them and wait thirty seven and a half hours.

  Nothing.

  "So you were right. The asteroids. I'm the one who found fifty reasons it couldn't be among them, because I fell right back into the logic patterns I said I'd avoid.

  "Can't we deploy all the floaters in the orbital and wait for answers? We've spent so much time waiting already it shouldn't make any difference."

  "Yo. I have one I want to check myself, simply because that thing's so clever it might figure the obvious one is the last place we'd look."

  There was one large asteroid that was almost a solid lump of magnetite. It would definitely wreak havoc with sensors so, as TR said, would be the most obvious place in the galaxy for the brain to go, which was why it could be sure no one would search there. It could shield internally against the magnetic field, which was immense, but the magnetism would also divert signs of the fusion reactors. The problem was, anything containing any iron or other magnetic material quickly added to the mass of the huge magnet. The attraction for those materials now was tremendous, so the asteroid was a perfect globe from the bombardment, and anything larger than a cubic meter would stand out starkly against it.

  Of course, we wouldn't be expected to look there, either.

  As we approached the asteroid a heat laser was focused on us. It wasn't strong enough to break TR's shields, so we went in closer, where a fusion missile was shot at us. We were able to locate the area the missile came from and slagged the little ship-like object that was attacking us.

  "Oh goody!" TR exulted. "We got it! Shall we go back to Flimt now or to EC for a well-deserved vacation? We were so good, maybe Maita will make a special medal for us!"

  "Why, I think we should pat ourselves on the back and take the vacation! That thing knows we won't fall for that! It decoyed us as much as it ever will already!"

  "You forget. It doesn't know it's us. It may think all it has to do is outsmart the locals, who don't know anything about it."

  "You've got a point. Where is the damned thing, though? It's not on that lump."

  "I'm a saucer ship! I don't have points!"

  We waited twenty one hours for all the floaters to return with their data. Nothing on any asteroid large enough to hide it.

  "It once disguised itself as an asteroid," TR suggested. "And one time Maita almost turned it into one with a bombardment – or one of its decoys, anyhow. It may have learned a lot."

  We waited another sixteen hours while the floaters did a quick sensor scan of all the smaller asteroids.

  "We can now say definitely it isn't in the asteroids, and it isn't on any moon, and it isn't on Worfeq," I said. "It isn't on any station or satellite. It isn't likely it's on Flimt, but I don't see where else it could be. It hasn't left the sys
tem.

  "Damn! I thought it would be easy!"

  "We have to stop at this point and go through a lot of old records," TR said. "There has to be something we're overlooking in all of this. It doesn't make sense as it is!"

  TR called up the full recordings of the first encounter Maita and crew had with the robot brain. There was a lot of information at hand, because Maita was always extra thorough in these things. Proof the care was smart was the fact we were looking through it for clues right now.

  /Tlesson taken by brain-servos through satellites/

  /Tlesson people migrate to New Home/

  /Maita discovers New Home and agrees to help Tlessons/

  /Brain emplacements destroyed in all of Old Home Tlesson system/

  /Brain fought in asteroid belt/

  /Brain fought in asteroid/

  /Brain satellite destroyed/

  /Brain falls into gas giant, where it is destroyed/

  /Emplacements on Old Home taken and servos destroyed or deactivated./

  /Tlessons homecoming planned/

  /Brain found on moon/

  /Brain decoyed and destroyed second time/

  /Maita apprised Brain alive in system/

  /Maita, TR, Tab, Z, Thing return to system and destroy Brain/

  "Whoopee!" TR said sarcastically (Damn it, HOW?). "It's been declared destroyed three times!"

  "Oh, for the galaxy's sake!" I cried.

  "I take it that means you know where it is?"

  "Look at item eight in your little history. Bring up the whole file for study."

  "Eight? Satellite is destroyed.... Oh, no! We can't go into a gas giant's atmosphere to look for that thing! There's no visibility, the damned planet produces fusion reactions to make our sensors useless, it's far too big to search.

  "It's a matter of volume, not area. The pressure wouldn't get too much until it was several thousand kilometers down.

  "Damn!"

  "Bring up the file!"