Free Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition by CD Moulton Page A

anywhere.
    I met with Gorg
and Hedda, who said they'd found one more robot, then I went back
to TR for the night.
    "TR, there's
something very strange about this brain," I said.
    "You're telling
me?!"
    "No, I'm
serious, TR. That thing was destroyed three times we know of, but
it's here. I'm getting a very sick feeling we aren't seeing
something, and it's in something Z or Thing said back on Old Home.
There's that nagging thing somewhere in my mind that says ...
something is very, very wrong!
    "That first –
no second! That's it! It was the second time the brain was
destroyed! It wasn't a servo on that asteroid a century ago!
    "Okay, see what
this does for you: The second time the brain was destroyed was in
the gas giant, and it was shown it deployed a parachute and
survived. It couldn't have survived any other time. It simply
couldn't.
    "One of the
Tlessarians asked why the brain didn't make a lot of exact copies
of itself so it couldn't be killed, and Thing said it would then
have to share power with itself and it simply would never do
that.
    "That was why
the servos were so good – they were the brain, or a copy of its
program with the free will part erased. That brain actually was
destroyed several times, but it DID make exact copies, and it DID
NOT have to worry about any sharing of power, because it sent those
copies off to conquer the universe! One of the copies is on Nestar,
but where are the others? How many are there?
    "We have one
important thing in our favor at the moment, and that's that it
doesn't have TTH drive, so they'll be very little farther from Old
Home than where we are right here and now.
    "Call Maita.
Get the entire fleet out with scanners of every kind and locate
those others. Warn every world in the empire and check satellites
above any emerging worlds for intrusion in STL ships. The brain
would be able to direct each ship to a specific star, so there will
be straight line vectors to figure. We should find them all.
    "We've got to
hope so!"
    I felt the
fastcom going. This was turning into the thing I most feared and
dreaded all along. We had one enemy, true, but that enemy could be
in any number of places at one time. It was literally spreading
itself for.... There was some kind of master plan.
    I agreed the
thing would never fully relinquish control. The brain may be dead
in the old system, but all these parts were designed and programmed
to get together again at some date far in the future. I had a
strange feeling the program was complete in a combination, but not
in any one unit. They were designed to...?
    If each one
carried a part of the master brain, they could all be put together
again to remake the original program. It would take one small chip
of special material from each of them or from any two or from any
number of combinations – and the old brain would live again!
     
    Another Big Mess
    "How do we get
rid of that thing?" TR asked. "We have to get out of here. If we
can find the others of those things before they reach their
destinations it'll save us one hell of a lot of trouble and worry.
We can't chance leaving and hope it stays there and we can't really
expect the Flimts to be able to handle it. That thing has a lot of
experience already, and the Flimts have almost none. They aren't
warlike and never were to much of an extent.
    "This is
turning into another big mess!"
    "It'll get into
the lower currents and try to leave the planet from somewhere else,
but we have all of that covered with the satellites. It's mostly a
matter of when it makes its try. I think it'll time it in between
immediately and when it figures we'll expect it to try. I have no
idea when it would be, logically."
    "We still can't
wait. We don't have any idea how many of them are out there
somewhere.
    "This is gonna
be a humongus mess! I know it!"
    "We don't know
there are ANY more. It's much too likely there are, based on the
psychology of that thing.
    "We have one
advantage that's overwhelming, though. They were