The Pandora Effect by Jack Williamson

Author:Jack Williamson [Williamson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction Collection
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1969-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

VI

Gaunt and bent, the old man moved stiffly in the thickening gloom. Underhill shifted his balance, careful of the crippled chair. He waited until the slow deep voice went on:

“I never learned just who he was, or exactly how he came. No ordinary man could have accomplished what he did. I used to wish that I had known him sooner. He must have been ii remarkable physicist and an expert mountaineer. I imagine that he had also been a hunter. I know that he was intelligent and terribly determined.

“Yes, he really came to kill me.

"Somehow, he reached that great island, undetected. There were still no other inhabitants—the humanoids allowed no man but me to come so near the Central. But somehow he came past their search beams and their automatic weapons.

“The shielded plane he had used was later found, abandoned on a high glacier. He came down the rest of the way on foot through those raw new mountains, where no paths existed. Somehow, he came alive across lava-beds that were still burning with deadly atomic fire.

"Concealed with some sort of rhodomagnetic screen—I was never, allowed to examine it—he came undiscovered across the spaceport that now covered most of that great plain, and into the new city around the Central tower. It must have taken more courage and resolve than most men have, but I never learned exactly how he did it.

“Somehow, he got to my office in the tower. When he screamed at me, I looked up to see him in the doorway. He was nearly naked, scraped and bloody from the mountains. He had a gun in his raw, red hand. But the thing that shocked me was the burning hatred in his eyes.”

Hunched on that high stool, the old man shuddered.

“I had never seen such monstrous, unutterable hatred, not even in the victims of the war. I had never heard such hatred as rasped at me, in the few words he screamed. ‘I’ve come to kill you, Sledge. To stop your mechanicals, and set men free.’

“Of course he was mistaken, there. It was already far too late for my death to stop the humanoids, but he didn’t know that. He lifted his unsteady gun in both bleeding hands, and fired.

“His screaming challenge had given me a second or so of warning. I dropped down behind the desk. That first shot revealed him to the humanoids, which somehow hadn’t been aware of him before. They piled on him, before he could fire again. They took away the gun and ripped off a kind of net of fine white wire that had covered his body— that must have been part of his screen.

“His hatred was what awoke me. I had always assumed that most men, except for a few thwarted predators, would be grateful for the humanoids. I found it hard to understand his hatred, but the humanoids told me now that many men had required drastic treatment by brain-surgery, drugs, and hypnosis to make them happy under the Prime Directive.

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