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  He looked at me closely. I knew that my face was showing signs of tension.

  “I’m alright,” I told him evasively. “Don’t forget to salute again when I enter the control room after you.”

  I could still hear his imprecation as I stood on the slowly upwards-gliding steps of the entrance ramp. The three guards snapped to attention. Olavson’s loud voice made me wince. He could not accustom himself to reporting in a normal tone of voice. It was just as well, for Zalitish regulations required such loudness.

  I thanked him, then entered the axial lift in front of Rhodan. The left took us up through the center of the ship, stopping automatically at the anteroom just outside the control center.

  Perry went ahead, opened the massive hatch and once again reported. Only then could I go in. The constant ceremony was gradually becoming irritating. The Zalites had adopted it from old Arkonide military protocol but as time went by it had grown so exaggerated that even I did not feel comfortable with it.

  Besides our men there were also two ‘authentics’ present. Thanks to the enormous class differences in effect on Vega 4, they regarded me almost as a superior being. Lt. Kecc, the communications-radar officer on duty, stood by his swivel chair almost as though petrified long after the Terrans had sat down again.

  Rhodan glanced angrily at the narrow-chested man with the thin face. The second Zalite sat at the control board of the antigravitation system. He could not wreak any havoc there because the ship’s positronicon would eventually automatically correct any errors, even without his participation.

  I looked around attentively, seeing long familiar faces which more or less showed that the men had had quite enough of the game of deception they had been playing for weeks.

  I knew the psychological difficulties too well not to know the pressure under which they labored. So I said with more than one meaning: “The Great Coordinator of Arkon has just informed me that we are to land on Arkon 3 in a few hours. There our final tactical training will begin. In at most four weeks we’ll be sent to the front. Long live the Great Imperium!”

  The two Zalites repeated the last sentence loudly. The Terrans seemed less enthusiastic. Those were the only small details that might have alerted a very observant onlooker to the fact something suspicious was going on. Luckily for us, the ‘authentics’ were not quite so fanatic as that. I knew that at least 40 of the Zalites aboard had been impressed into service.

  John Marshall, chief of the Solar Mutant Corps, nodded to me in a barely noticeable manner. He had checked the Zalites’ thought impulses. Everything seemed to be in order with them.

  Rhodan stood before me to receive the order for takeoff. I gave it tersely and loudly while he looked at me as icily as though I were personally responsible for the fact we had not yet reached Arkon.

  This operation was hardly a cakewalk Dow. It was based strictly on a suspicion that months before had still seemed to me an absolute certainty. By now, however, we had already suffered such difficulties that the calculations and conclusions made and reached then themselves seemed questionable to me. When I thought of that I almost became ill. So I constantly made an effort to let no one suspect that I no longer trusted my own original evaluations.

  It was clear that we could not defeat the Regent by direct means. It was just as clear that the time was past in which an admittedly dangerous but still possible flight into the system of Arkon’s white sun could be undertaken. The Regent had hermetically scaled off that sector of space.

  So there was only one way in which the Robot Brain, growing gradually all-powerful, could be destroyed. We had to slip in as inconspicuously as possible, strike, and then wait to see what happened next.

  During the planning I had made it perfectly clear to Rhodan that escaping from Arkon was no longer possible. He had done it once but that was at a time when the Regent had not yet completed its preparations. Now the situation was entirely different.

  The Arkonide scientist Khrest and I had been of the opinion that our venerable ancestors would not have neglected to install a flawlessly functioning failsafe system during the construction of the Robot Brain. In other words, there must be an overriding emergency circuit that would erase the Brain’s entire programming as soon as the machinery ceased to function dependably and in the manner intended by its Arkonide builders.

  Such a situation was now unquestionably in effect. The Regent seemed to be almost short-circuited and its actions were of such a contradictory nature that the failsafe system envisioned by Khrest and myself should have long since been activated. Why that had so far failed to happen we could not guess.

  We had undertaken this mission simply because we had told ourselves that there must be a way. That was how we had arrived in our current situation. For my part I felt that the men in the Terran commando squad no longer trusted me 100%. Everything had happened just the opposite of the way we had imagined it would. Now we had to convincingly play the role of the loyal and submissive colonial crew of a spaceship and since there were only 150 of us we were hardly capable of effectively manning that ship.

  We were on the verge of either flying to our doom or to our triumph. There was no longer any third alternative. We still could have withdrawn and given up during the preparations on Zalit but now it was too late for that. I was troubled all the more by doubts about the arguments that had formerly sounded so convincing.

  Rhodan seemed to have already noticed something, for otherwise he would not have constantly asked me about the state of my health.

  I was ripped out of my self-torturing musings by a penetrating crack that made the control room shake. Three red lights lit up in control section 18. I overheard Bell’s Zalitish curses and I also saw Rhodan’s angrily flashing eyes. The remorseful face of a Zalite technician appeared on an intercom telescreen.

  “You don’t need to tell me a damned thing!” Bell cried out in anger. “See to it that the machinery gets going again. Look, how many times do I have to tell you how to run antigrav projectors? Not all at once, you sleepyhead! We recorded here during the peak shock a load of about 8000 amperes. Let’s go—start up the machinery.

  “The safety blocks have been activated,” answered the Zalite, trembling.

  Bell was practically beside himself while Rhodan and I fought to retain our composure. It was always the same story with these people, who the gods only knew should have had enough experience to avoid such things. All the power plants aboard the new battleship were running at highest possible voltage so that the amperage could be kept low. That was something Zalite engineers never seemed to understand. They barged ahead as if we only had 10,000 volts with accordingly high amperage.

  “Shut the safety devices off by hand,” Rhodan ordered sharply. “Send some technicians down and have two engineers there to supervise them. Hurry up! Report back to me as soon as we’re in space.”

  The Zalite claimed in a fearful voice that there had been two power failures only the day before, and that was true. Nonetheless, the safety blocks had to be manually deactivated. Only then would they react to remote control.

  Just two minutes before takeoff the ready signal came in. Before that the fuses had still popped three times, which was unmistakable proof that overloads occurred repeatedly in circuit sector 18. If the problem had not been corrected by that point, the automatic fuse bank would have finally shut down altogether. Were such things to happen during a battle, they could mean the end of the ship.

  Ever since we had begun to fly with a partially Zalite crew, we suspected we knew why the Robot Regent’s blockade fleet had suffered such heavy losses. The Druufs were fewer in number but they had vastly better crews.

  Our natures being what they were, the Terrans and I wanted to constantly correct the incompetent Zalites. We were trying to show them that such mistakes did not have to happen. The technicians of our team had looked at me in surprise when I told them several days before how little the more or less good training of the Arkonide colonists meant to us: it was
riot our concern.

  Even Rhodan had only hesitantly accepted the logic of my words. It was simply not his way of doing things to continually tolerate the same old incompetence. The thoroughness and drive for perfection of my friends from the Solar Imperium were slowly becoming irksome. They could fly into terrific rages when a Zalite could not or would not understand something. But this was the way of the human race. Whatever they’d undertake nearly always was done with precision and efficiency.

  I had to consider that undeniable fact while two battlecruisers of the fourth group took off to the left and to the right of our position. I listened to the engines, roar that, despite our functioning noise absorber, was almost unbearable. One giant after the other shot through the thin layer of air covering the moon until it was our turn to go.

  I sat in the high-backed commander’s seat of the Kon-Velete. The main controls had been installed in front of it. If it were necessary, I could shut down the battleship’s most important systems with one flick of a switch.

  Rhodan sat to my right and Bell to the left. Their job was flying the steel spherical colossus, or at least to the extent it was not done for them by the automatic controls.

  A vidscreen lit up and the wrinkled face of Admiral Semekho, appeared. “You have permission for take off,” he announced. “Group in sector 3 and assume course in formation. Follow the instructions given by the flagship. I wish you much luck. Over and out.”

  Rhodan looked at me and I nodded to him. The order to fly in formation was unpleasant but it would have been illusory to hope for some other possibility. We could never reach Arkon alone.

  Ten seconds later our engines began to roar. With an antigrav-compensation value of 100% of Naator’s gravitation, we lifted off. Rhodan held the tips of his fingers on the manual controls since we had determined that the automated synchronizers that had to coordinate the individual yields of thrust were not working as precisely as they should. During the earlier test flights deviations of up to 1.85° had occurred and as yet the problem had not been corrected. That showed us once again that the product of the Regent’s mammoth factories was not necessarily perfect. The automatic assembly lines seemed about due for an overhaul.

  We went into space at only a low velocity and joined the waiting squadron near Naat Spaceport #5. Our Kon-Velete was the lead ship of the fourth battlecruiser group. That convinced me that a commodore would be sent on board by the time of our arrival on Arkon at the latest. There was little ground for hoping that I would be named squadron leader.

  Bitter feelings and dark thoughts of hatred welled up within me. Ten thousand years before I had flown out of that solar system to carry out the order of the Great Council. I was only to stop on the distant Earth and find out why the colonists there were broadcasting constant calls for help.

  What was to have been a routine flight became instead an eternal exile. Now I was coming home after all those millenniums but the old Arkon no longer existed. My venerable ancestors had long since passed on and I felt like a useless leftover whose hopes and longings had become impossible to fulfill.

  A robot ruled the interstellar empire. That being the situation, there would be little point in proudly and arrogantly announcing myself as Atlan of the ruling Gonozal family. My family had probably been long forgotten. No one would remember now that we had once picked the Imperators. My high rank as Crystal Prince of the Realm could no longer be of any influence, just like my rank of Admiral of the Imperium Fleet. So I had no other choice than to hope that I would not be assigned a stupid, arrogant officer with overly-refined upbringing and decadent and unfit patterns of thought as my superior. Since such a danger was indeed a very real one, I now tried to prepare for the inevitable.

  I grasped instinctively at my chest where, beneath the thin fiber of the Zalite uniform, my cell vibration activator pulsed. I had my relative immortality because of it but I still did not know how it functioned. The only thing I had been able to learn in the long time since it had been given to me was that an advanced collective being had felt threatened by the same intelligent creatures that were also my enemies. While halting my natural process by a mysterious microdevice, it had also named me a representative of its interests.

  I pulled myself together in an effort not to lose myself in thought once again. Rhodan’s examining look shamed me, He seemed to know exactly what was going on in my mind.

  “It won’t be long now!” he said lowly.

  There was so much meaning in those few words that I shuddered. What would come of my theories? Was there really an overriding failsafe mechanism in the unknown interior of the largest robot brain in the Milky Way? If so, when would it be activated and what did one have to do to deactivate it?

  There were many questions for which we had no answers. We were only certain of one thing: once we were on Arkon, there could be no going back!

  The squadron continued to form up. When all 68 units had assembled, we received the final departure order. We set out at a speed of only 100 km/sec2. Till now we had not been able to maintain a well-ordered form—and true robots were more reliable than the Zalites.

  Bell’s sarcastic laugh did not please me. These Terrans should not get the idea that they were vastly superior to everyone else.

  Of course, each individual Terran was of more value than 50 trained colonists but that did not allow us to hope that we would be able to solve our problem just like that. So far, we had been lucky—that was all! Someone had always been able to handle each suddenly recognized danger. In that our mutants had played the chief role. Without their parasensory abilities our endeavor would not have been possible at all. Now the question was how well they would stand up under the final tests of fitness on Arkon 3. Because of the pressing circumstances, Pucky and Goratschin had already been dropped from our team. Betty Toufry and Ishy Matsu had also been required to stay behind in the catacombs beneath the Zalite arena.

  The situation no longer looked as hopeful as Bell probably still assumed.

  Rhodan switched the controls to the automatic pilot. He leaned back comfortably in his seat, glanced at the shining vidscreens of the panoramic gallery with an all-encompassing eye and then turned his face to me. “It really looks gorgeous out there, doesn’t it?” he commented. His eyes were expressionless and I had the feeling they saw right through me.

  Yes, Globular Cluster M-13 was indeed gorgeous! Here the stars were much closer together than in other sectors of the galaxy. By Arkonide standards, M-13 was the hub of the universe, even though it lay on the outermost edges of the known galaxy. Here was the germ cell of the Great Imperium; here the conquest, colonization and also the subjugation had begun. It was my home. Now the question was how I would be received. I was more helpless than a prodigal son for here there, was no one left who could remember me.

  2/ NINE MONTHS TILL ANNIHILATION?

  We were treated like tramps who might have chanced to wander in and who ought to be glad not to have been immediately arrested.

  All the lovely memories I had of Arkon were increasingly driven out of my mind to make room for a dull anger.

  The logic sector of my extra-brain no longer spoke up at all. Instead, the section for photographic memory was heard from more and more often and in more urgent tones. Eminent Arkonides whose brains had been activated with the permission of the medical council could forget nothing. So it happened that the bleak steel expanses of Arkon 3 struck me as oddly familiar.

  Nothing had changed on the world that my ancestors had moved into position with powerful gravo-fields in order to make of it an entire planet devoted to the purpose of war.

  It was the largest of the three planets orbiting the huge white star in the form of an isosceles triangle.

  The first planet, the Crystal World, served as before for residential purposes. Number two still functioned as the most important trading center of the Imperium. There landed the spaceships of all known races. However, we were prevented from taking a look at the planet-girdling trade and
freightways. Sorrowfully and filled with an insistent pain, I remembered the full silos and storage warehouses in which the goods of the known galaxy were piled.

  Now all that seemed to be over. The Robot Regent limited itself to the most essential trading activity, its first priority the matter of obtaining vital raw materials.

  Arkon 3, the world of the Fleet and the vast shipyards, required titanic amounts of material to satiate the eternally hungry assembly lines.

  The home of the Arkonides had been and remained even now a galactic wonder. No other race had been able to move two heavenly bodies of a solar system out of their naturally determined orbits and set them exactly according to plan into a new position. Ever since my forefathers had accomplished that scientific miracle, our then-pressing need for more room had been at an end.

  Then the time of the great emigration had come and the interstellar empire began.

  The nearby star of Voga had been our first goal but just 500 years after it had first been settled, the colonists’ descendants no longer counted as pure Arkonides. The environment there had had an effect on body and spirit, as was to happen virtually everywhere else.

  The exact number of Arkonide descendants was unknown but we estimated the number of living intelligent beings scattered through space at about 50,000 times a billion individuals.

  They had grown alien to Arkon. The majority were no longer aware of their true heritage and the result was bitter colonial wars in which ownership claims and stormily demanded rights of independence were fought over.

  This was what we were treated to now! For the first time I experienced firsthand what it is like to be dealt with as a member of an underdeveloped race. If among those mocking us had been some Arkonides with advanced mental faculties, my being there would not have been quite so unbearable an experience. Unfortunately, there were only mindless fools there whose burned-out brains were suited only for carrying out the work dictated to them by the Robot Regent as quickly and as conveniently as possible.