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hesitated, fell back. A final lone alien unit, scarred and burned, came relentlessly on, rocked to our
bombardment, then veered to one side and plunged over a precipice.
I gave the cease-fire, and watched the aimless maneuvering of the moron units below and still they
came over the horizon, in Brigade strength, their sensors seeking out targets and finding none.
I saw a damaged unit go berserk, charge down on a comrade, firing, and in automatic response, a
thousand guns, glad of a target, vaporized it in a coruscation of ravening energies.
And still they came, blindly seeking the programmed enemy who no longer awaited them in the
traditional line of defense . . . until they crowded the plain, lost under a blanket of ever-renewed dust
clouds.
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I probed into the confusion of mind-babble, met a deafening roar. All firing had ceased now. The aliens
formed a ragged front five miles away, ringing our crater fortress.
"Looks like we mixed 'em up pretty good, Jones," Joel said.
"We gained a little time. They're not what you'd call flexible."
"What's our next move? We're in a kind of a dead end here. Once they figure what's going on they'll
surround the place and lob it in on us from all sides and then we're goners."
"Meanwhile, things are quiet. Now's our chance to hold a council of war."
"Jones, I been looking over these units of ours and there's something funny about 'em. It's like they
wasn't really machines, kind of."
"They're not. Every machine here has a human brain in it."
"Huh?"
"Like you and me. They're all human just unconscious."
"You mean every one of those machines down there all of them?"
"You didn't think we were the only ones, did you? These damned ghouls have been raiding us a long
time for battle computer."
"But they don't act like men, Jones! They don't do nothing but follow orders; look at 'em! They're just
sitting there, not even talking to each other!"
"That's because they've been conditioned. Their personalities have been destroyed. They're like
vegetables but the circuits are still there, all ready to be programmed and sent into battle."
There was a pause while Joel probed the dulled mind of the nearest slave unit, which waited, guns
aimed, for the order to carry on the fight.
"Yeah, Jones. I see the place. It's all blanked off, like. It's like trying to poke a hole through a steel plate
with your finger. But "
"But what?"
"Oh, I don't know, Jones. I just got a feeling if I touched it just right . . . Look, let me show you."
I extended awareness, touched the probe that was an extension of Joel's mind-field. I followed as it
reached into the dim glow of the paralyzed mind, thrust among layered patterns of pseudolight, past
complex structures that towered into unguessed levels of existence, deep into the convoluted intricacy of
the living brain, to touch the buried personality center encysted, inert, a pocket of nothingness deep
under a barrier of stunned not-thought.
"Don't you see, Jones? It ought to be like, say, a taut cable with the wind making it sing. Something
stopped it, clamped it down so's it can't move. All we got to do to set it free is give it a little push, and it'll
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start up again."
"All I see is a dead spot, Joel. If you can see all that, you're way ahead of me. Go ahead and try it."
"Here goes."
I saw the finger of pure, focused energy reach out, touch the grayness and the opacity faded and was
gone.
"Okay so far," Joel said. "Now "
Like a jeweler cleaving a hundred-carat rough diamond, Joel poised, then struck once, sharply
And the glow that had been the moron mind of a slave sprang up in dazzling light; and into the gray
continuum where thought moved like a living force, words came:
"FAEDER URE, HVAD DEOFELS GIRDA HA WAER-LOGAS CRAEFT BRINGIT EORLA AV
ONGOL-SAXNA CYNING TILL!"
Chapter Fifteen
The huge fighting machine parked forty feet away across the rocky ledge backed suddenly, lowered its
guns, traversed them across the empty landscape, brought them to bear on me.
"Watch him, Jones!" Joel said sharply. "He's scared; he's liable to get violent!"
In the instant that the strange voice had burst from the slave unit, my probing contact had been thrust
back by an expanding mind-field as powerful as Joel's.
"We're friends!" I called quickly in the Command code. "Fellow prisoners!" I thrust against the pressure
of the newly awakened mind, found the automated combat-reflex circuitry, clamped down an inhibiting
field enough to impede a fire-order, at least for a moment.
"VA' EORT THE, FEOND?" the strange voice shouted, a deafening bellow in my mind. "STEO FRAM
AR MOET EACTA STOEL AV KRISTLIG HOEDERSMANN!"
I plucked the conditioned identity-concept from the mind before me, called to it in the Command code:
"Unit twenty-nine of the Anyx Brigade! Listen "
"AHH! EO MINNE BONDEDOM MID WYRD! AETHELBERT AV NION DOEDA, COERLA
GEOCAD TI' YFELE ENA "
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