GODS OF RIVERWORLD

No. He wouldn't do that. The Computer was not sentient; it had no imagination. Its output never exceeded its input. In that, it was unlike and inferior to human beings. Some human beings.

You're too cynical, he told himself. But am I? Aren't millions, billions, of people protein robots? They differ only in that they can feel sorrow, grief, disappointment, love, ambition, despair, frustration, irritation, amusement, rage, sympathy, empathy ... well, not many could feel that... imagination ... some of them ... Vive la difference!

Frigate had once said that most people were persons and a minority were human beings. "What the Ethicals are trying to do is to turn the many persons into human beings. I wish them success, but I don't have high expectations. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm not as yet a human being."

Frigate talked much about proper philosophical principles but did little to act them out. Nur was also a philosopher, but he acted out his philosophy. And you, Burton? What about you?

He had explored continents and minds, those of the legion of devils known as Burtonia excepted.

"There is only one great adventure," Frigate had said, "and that is the descent into oneself." He was quoting or paraphrasing some twentieth-century writer, Henry Miller, whom the American greatly admired at the same time that he despised some of his attitudes.

"The darkest Africa, the highest Everest, the deepest Pacific Abyss is your own mind. So why do so few set out to conquer it?"

"Because it's like a fish trying to find out the nature of water," Burton had said.

Talk, talk, talk. Parrots. Language was the plumage of human beings.

How did one burst through the self-erected barriers?

At that moment, something did break through. There was a crash and a roar. Burton leaped into the air and whirled toward the noise, his heart beating almost loud enough to drown out the uproar.

When he looked around the doorway, he saw that the corridor was dark except for the lamplight coming from inside Loga's room and through the half-opened door of the laboratory. No. There was also light shining through a huge hole in the brick wall. It dimly revealed a monstrous thing, a horizontal cylinder with a conical nose, a dark mass that rolled on wheels toward him.

Burton jumped inside the doorway, turned, and stuck his head out far enough to see the thing. It was moving slowly, though it must have been traveling Very swiftly to breach the wall, the bricks of which were held together by cement far stronger than anything on Earth in his time. The light from the corridor walls beyond the big hole showed that the monster was traveling on ten wheels.

Burton pointed his beamer at a spot behind the nose. The end of the scarlet rod-shaped ray struck, but though it could burn through twelve inches of nickel-steel in five seconds, it made no visible impression on the gray metallic-looking surface. He pulled back into the doorway and hurled himself backward and to one side as a violet-colored ray from the side of the machine leaped over his shoulder. Other rays followed; then the conical end of the monster was passing him. Daring to look around the doorway again, he saw that its large beamers were projecting the rays at various angles from both sides and many places.

When it was within a few feet of the other wall blocking the corridor, it stopped and began moving back. The beams were still going off and on at intervals of a few seconds. Moreover, the angles of fire were changing. Where they had struck were bare spots. The paint had been burned off.

Burton backed up behind the wall. A ray streaked through the doorway and burned off the paint on the far wall. Another, at a higher angle, destroyed more paint.

De Marbot called, "Dick, are you all right?"

"I'm not hurt!" Burton yelled. "Don't expose yourself!"

"I am not stupid!" the Frenchman screamed back.

But he was stupid; at least, from Burton's viewpoint, he was. De Marbot ran past him and out into the corridor toward the machine. Burton cried out after him to stop. The Frenchman did not hesitate but leaped upon the back of the juggernaut and grabbed a rung near the top. Burton had expected him to be cut through by a ray, but the beams had stopped the moment de Marbot had run into the corridor. Later, Burton wondered if the rays that had been shot at him had only been to discourage him from getting close to it or following it when it left.

Now the machine rolled backward and past the opening to Loga's room. De Marbot, clinging with one hand and smiling, waved at Burton.

"Get off it!" Burton shouted. "You can't do anything to it! Get off before it kills you!"

"Where it goes, I go!" de Marbot yelled.

He lost his bravado then, because the machine, having halted, suddenly sped forward, its tires screaming as they burned on the floor. All the beams had been turned off, but now one sprang from the nose. The violet lance struck the brick wall and pierced it, and then the beam widened into a cone, the base of which melted the bricks within its area and made an opening just large enough for the machine to pass through.

De Marbot, screaming, had, however, loosed his grip before he was hit by the bricks at the edge of the breach. He lay face down, silent.

"That crazy frog!" Burton said. The machine was whipping around a distant corner, revealing that it was not solid but had articulations that permitted it to turn corners, though just barely. De Marbot was sitting up by then and was holding his head.

Burton ran to him, beating Aphra by a few steps.

"Are you hurt?"

De Marbot sat up, grimaced, then smiled.

"Only my pride. I became frightened. I screamed with fear."

Assisted by Burton, he got to his feet. "I do have a few scratches, bruises, and contusions. I have taken worse spills many times from a horse while fighting for my glorious emperor. But never, never, have I had such a short ride!"

Aphra wrapped her arms around him and snuggled her face into his chest. "You stupid son of a bitch! You scared me to death!"

"You are most lively and reproachful for a corpse," he said, hugging her. "Oh, my poor arm and shoulder! I ca

She freed herself and wiped her tears away with her fingers.

"Your little cabbage, hell! I am not a vegetable, I'm a woman! A woman who's very angry with you and your heroics!"

"A rose with thorns, perhaps, is it not?"

Burton looked up and down the corridor. No one in sight.

"Why did you jump on it?" he said. "What did you expect to accomplish?"

"I was going to ride it to its lair, where I might find its master, the Snark, awaiting it. And then I would surprise him and take him prisoner or kill him if I had to. But I forgot, in the heat of combat, that the thing would only make a hole large enough for it to pass through."

"You were lucky that your brains, such as they are, weren't dashed out," Burton said. He shared some of Aphra's anger; he was very fond of the Frenchman. "It was magnificent, but it was not good soldiership."

"Ah, you are just jealous because you did not think of doing it."

Burton laughed and said, "Perhaps you're right."

He indicated the areas where the paint had been burned off.

"The Snark now sees and hears us."

"Odsblood!" Aphra said. "He just showed us how weak and helpless we are. We can't even hide from him!"

"But we did force him to act," Burton said. "He had to find out what we were doing here. He did not disdain us enough to ignore us."

"And so I have worked like a helot with spraying paint, sweated like a slave for nothing," de Marbot said.

"You did get an unusual ride out of it."

De Marbot's teeth shone.