SPOCK AND THE others had gained easy entry to the heart of the Defense Center, the control room. The blastproof door, like all other such doors they'd come across, had been wide open. Spock felt sure that there had been some fundamental breakdown here, that the untried protective systems in the center had failed when they were needed the most.
They had found no one alive. Spock had held some faint hope that, if anyone had been left, they would have gathered here, in the control room, the most protected area in the whole Defense Center—but no one had. There hadn't been enough time.
There were bodies sprawled here and there. It was apparent that death had come swiftly and nearly painlessly from an overwhelming wave of radiation. Heat and blast hadn't reached down this far; there hadn't been much, if any, overt physical damage, and ground shock from the spaceport disaster hadn't touched the control room. Spock imagined the whole place had been built on springs; such a technique was standard practice and was used to combat abrupt ground movement from blast concussion. The control room was dark and without power, but intact.
Now they were in the central pit of the cavernous control room, surrounded by disabled consoles, readout screens, and dead men and women slumped at their stations. Spock aimed his DayBrite up into the catwalks and galleries surrounding the pit. The light faded into the darkness high above.
Nothing. No one.
"Gives me the creeps," Rawlings said. "No place should be this dead." He set his equipment down; Hudson did the same. Connie Iziharry bent to inspect the body nearest her; Chekov, feeling useless here, stood nearby. "This one's a general," Iziharry announced. "Perhaps he was the commander." She conducted a quick, efficient search. "No papers on him, Mr. Spock."
"Can you determine the exact cause of death, Miss Iziharry?" Spock asked.
She considered it. "Not without a lab to work in, but I can make a good guess. Radiation. See—there's not a mark on him. He wasn't burned or blasted. By elimination, that leaves radiation. I'd need to do some tests to be sure, though."
"Thank you." Iziharry's independent diagnosis agreed with Spock's own, so he treated the question as tentatively settled and turned his full attention to other matters. He aimed his tricorder around the room. He got a fairly constant radiation reading at level twelve—certainly enough to kill an unprotected human, or Vulcan, in moments.
"No one could live more than a minute or two without protective gear," Spock announced. "The readings in this area are nearly as bad as those we found above. We will not be able to take off our pressure suits." The science officer paused. "Our first priority is to re-establish power in this room. Mr. Rawlings, if you'll be so kind as to give me that portapack, I believe we can couple it to the circuits servicing the standby generator over there." He pointed to a large gray cube in a corner of the room. Thick wiring led to and from it.
Spock brought the portapack—a small, heavy and efficient short-term power producer—over to the generator. Sure enough, there was a specialized socket for backup. The portapack lead wouldn't fit into it, but it was the work of a moment for Spock to clip the portapack plug off and fashion a new one from spare parts. He threw a switch on the portapack, and the room lights came on to the glad cries of the four humans.
The center's consoles came alive; data began reading onto screens all over the room. Rawlings and Hudson seated themselves at stations marked NUMBER TWO and AUXILIARY COMMAND; Spock came over and sat at one marked WATCH COMMANDER. The computer consoles were old-fashioned typewriter keyboards, the kind humans had been using for hundreds of years; Spock was thoroughly familiar with such, having built several in his younger days, before he'd been directed toward more practical pursuits.
The Vulcan began to type and caused several errors. Oh, of course, he realized. How stupid of me. His gloved fingers were too big to fit the keys. "Miss Iziharry," he asked, "will you give me a medical probe of some sort? A tongue depressor, perhaps?"
She did, and Spock used it to hit the keys one by one. A bit of reasoned mathematical analysis quickly gave Spock the passwords he needed to get into the center's computers and talk to them; it was actually quite simple, much more so than Spock had anticipated. Spock then activated the keyboards on Rawlings's and Hudson's stations, so that they might be free to pursue the problem in their own ways. I will not dismiss human intuition on this occasion, Spock thought. It is not logical to give intuition free rein, unbound by logic—but it is more illogical to deny intuition its chance to deal with this problem. Humans designed this system; perhaps humans will be able to sense its makers' intent more easily than I. Spock typed, and the computers replied.
Stand down.
NEGATIVE FUNCTION.
Priority command. Stand down.
NEGATIVE FUNCTION.
Deactivate defenses.
NEGATIVE FUNCTION.
Peacetime condition. Stand down. Go to inactive status. Priority command.
NEGATIVE FUNCTION.
Spock thought for a moment. Through the baffles in his pressure suit helmet, he could hear the tapping of keys to his left and right: Rawlings and Hudson, trying their own approaches. Rawlings would groan occasionally; Hudson seemed silently intent. Spock began typing again.
Define mission. Short form.
DEFEND PLANETARY NEIGHBORHOOD FROM APPROACH BY INVADING FORCES. NEIGHBORHOOD DEFINED AS ARBITRARY LINE DRAWN AT STANDARD ORBIT ALTITUDE TO AIR TRAFFIC CEILING.
Stop. Define defense policy. Short form.
DETECT INVADER. TARGET INVADER. COMMAND AND CONTROL GROUND-TO-SPACE MISSILES TO DETER INVASION. MAXIMUM EFFORT INDICATED.
Define maximum effort.
DESTRUCTION OF INVADING FORCES.
Define possibility of missing target on first launch.
ZERO. DESTRUCTION ASSURED.
State policy regarding friendly forces during invasion.
NO DATA.
List catalog of friendly forces.
NO DATA.
List current status.
WAR. INVASION IN PROGRESS.
Give nature of enemy.
NO DATA.
Give catalog of enemy forces.
ENEMY FORCES ARE DEFINED AS SPACECRAFT MEASURING ABOVE FIVE POINT SIX THREE CENTIMETERS FROM BOW TO STERN AND/OR EQUIPPED WITH WARP AND/OR IMPULSE DRIVE APPEARING IN NEIGHBORHOOD OF CENTAURUS AS PREVIOUSLY DEFINED.
List targets destroyed in current invasion. Short form.
LIST INCLUDES 39 CAPITAL SHIPS, 621 LANDING CRAFT, 157 CLOSE-ORBIT SATELLITES LAUNCHED BY ENEMY. MINOR OBJECTS NOT INCLUDED.
Stand by.
WAITING.
"I know what is wrong now," Spock announced. "Some of my preliminary suppositions were correct. Mr. Rawlings, Mr. Hudson, how far have you gotten?"
Rawlings sighed heavily. "Nowhere, Mr. Spock. I can't even get the computers to admit there's any such thing as a friendly ship."
"Same here," Hudson said. "The computers assume everything and everybody is an enemy, and they go after it. They also won't react to stand-down codes. I've even tried to tell them Centaurus lost the war and surrendered. Nothing works."
Spock's eyebrow went up; a fake surrender was something he hadn't thought of, yet there would have to be provision for something like that so enemy forces could land on and occupy the planet in relative safety. Otherwise, an enemy might exact bloody reprisals against the conquered civilian populace.
"What happens when you enter the surrender codes, Mr. Hudson?"
"I get a 'no data' readback, sir."
"Interesting." Spock thought for a moment. "My own investigations show the following: The system is active and alert in many ways, most notably in its detection of so-called 'enemy' ships. It will conduct an initial attack, but refuses to believe that such an initial attack will not result in the destruction of the ship. As we already know, gentlemen—and Miss Iziharry—a properly shielded ship can withstand at least one, and perhaps two, large nuclear detonations close aboard.
"The computers define an enemy craft as any craft of a length greater than about six centimeters." Spock heard Rawlings and Hudson grunt; they'd missed that. "That is, of course, an absurd definition; one of our communicators is larger than that. Further, the computers believe that Centaurus is at war. They will not recognize any order to stop attacking, which is in fact the easiest order to give, since no one desires to carry out or continue an attack by mistake.
"These and other factors tell me that the problem with the computers lies in their logic centers. The computers have forgotten large blocks of data—such as listing of friendly ships, configurations of possible enemy ships, and so forth—and have joined unrelated blocks of data together to form new, and dangerous, standing orders."
"Excuse me, Mr. Spock," Chekov broke in. "Vhy do ve not simply destroy the control room?"
"I would, if it would do any good, Ensign," Spock replied. "However, the errant logic centers are not located here, but in a vault several kilometers below us. They are deeply seated in rock and are unreachable by human agency, not even for repair; they are serviced by robots on permanent station. We could not even beam down there, were the transporters aboard the Enterprise working; the vault is too deep. Several annihilation devices, exploded in series just over the vault, might do the trick—but that, of course, is not desirable."
"So vhat do ve do?" asked Chekov.
"I have to think about that, Ensign."
They all waited while he did.