Infinity One (9 page)

“She’s called too many!” Pete cried. “She’ll get hurt!”

As one, Pete and Joe started across the street, stepping on and over dog bodies. Pete caught a glimpse of a protective ring of dogs forming around Maria’s man-abandoned stretcher.

“Maria, Maria!” he shouted over the tumult. “Call off the dogs. Call them off! ”

The sheer press of numbers would overrun her. Kicking, flailing, Pete waded on. A cat, leaping from a stopped car roof, raked him with her claws. Joe reached the other curb and fell, momentarily lost under the bounding bodies.

Suddenly, as though cut off from an invisible conductor, all sound ceased. The silence was as terrifying as the noise but now the momentum of the charging animals faltered. Pete made it to the sidewalk in that pause. Neither Maria, stretcher nor sidewalk was visible under the smooth and brindled, spotted, mottled, rough and shaggy blanket of dogs and occasional cats.

Cursing wildly, both he and Joe labored, throwing the stunned animals out of the way until a space was cleared around the overturned stretcher. The upset bird cage rolled down to the sidewalk, coming to rest with the bent door uppermost. In a flurry of orange and yellow feathers, frightened canaries flew hysterically aloft, their frantic chirps ominous and shrill.

Unable to move, Pete watched as Joe carefully turned the stretcher over. The two men stood looking down at Maria’s crushed and bloodied body, trampled by the zeal of her would-be protectors. Then Pete joined her hands, moved by some obscure impulse.

At this point the dogs, released from the weird control that had summoned them and immobilized them at the moment of its passing, remembered ancient enmities. The abortive rescue mission turned into a thousand private battles.

Out of the corner of his eye, Pete saw Wizard coming hell-for-leather down the street. Finch staggered to his feet, clawing his way up, using the birdcage as a support. With a howl, Wizard knocked him down again. Pete grabbed the man and arrested him for disturbing the peace. Wizard stood guard, in much better shape than any others of Maria’s protectors, thanks to his late arrival.

The news story never mentioned that a human had been killed in the great dog riot. But it was noted that the unearthly canine choruses that had been plaguing Wilmington ended with that unscheduled concert.

But sometimes now when Pete Roberts is walking the beat with his K-9 partner, Wizard will suddenly start acting itchy and nervous. He whines and pulls, straining against the leash.

“Heel,” says Pete stolidly, pretending nothing’s happened.

One of these days I’ll really put on the pressure.

Kris Neville and K. M. O'Donnell represent two faces of the same coin—each brings an incisive and satiric wit to science fiction. Neville became instantly famous with the appearance of
Cold War
twenty years ago; O'Donnell wth the appearance of
Final War
in 1968. That each should have chosen to attack the same theme in their springboards to acclaim is another similarity in their character; hopefully, the collaboration begun with the following story will be repeated many times in the future.

God, in his heavens, was lonely.

For four days the dead nun lay under the barbed wire in a cold luminescence that seemed to be candlelight. In a stricken way, she seemed at peace; she seemed to have located an answer.

Hawkins was himself obsessed with answers at that period and he passed her twice each day, admiring the way she had taken to death: the cold frieze of her features under the stars, the slight, stony chasms of her cheek coming out against the wide brown eyes. Someone, probably a detail sergeant, had clasped hands over the chest after she died and so there was a curious air of grace and receptivity to her aspect; almost, Hawkins thought, as if she were clutching the lover, Death, to herself past that abandoned moment when he had slammed into her. His reactions to the nun comprised the most profound religious experience of his life.

She lay there for four days and might have been there a week if Hawkins had not taken up the issue himself with the company chaplain, insisting that something be done because such superstitious and unsettling events could turn the platoon under his command into demoralized savages.

The chaplain, head of the corpse detail, carried a large cane and believed in the power of the cane to raise the dead and create spells.

The next morning, when Hawkins took his men out on a patrol, the nun was gone and the barbed wire with her; in her place they had put a small block of wood on the fields; it gave her name and dates of birth and death and said something in Latin about being
in memoriam.
Hawkins felt much better, but later, implications of the bizarre four-day diorama exfoliated in his thoughts, and he decided that he didn’t feel so good after all.

SISTER ALICE ROSEMARIE, etc, etc, the wood said. GONE TO HER REST, 2196. BORN SOMETIME, AROUND 2160, WE THINK.

IN QUONIBUS EST HONORARVM DE PLUMUS AU CEROTORIUM MORATORIUM.

Caveat emptor.

The nuns were always there, administering comfort to the men and helping the chaplain out at services and even occasionally pitching in on the messline, although the men could have done without that part of it nicely. Someone in the company who was Catholic said that it was one of the most astonishing displays of solidarity with battle the Church had ever given anyone. Hawkins imagined, like himself, that the nuns were simply moving around on assignments. When the next one came through, they would get out.

The nun who had been killed had, apparently, wandered out for some private religious ritual and met stray silver wisps of the enemy gas which traveled from the alveoli of the lungs to become exploding emboli in the roiling blood of the ventricle, leaving her outward appearance unchanged. The other nuns, Hawkins supposed had wanted to pick her up but feared to defy the hastily erected signs saying AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY PERMITTED INTO THE KILLING AREA and that had led to the whole complication of getting rid of the body. All of it still would not have been so particularly distressing to him if these events had not come in his period of religious revival.

He had never been much for religion: men who become captains of reconnaissance patrols in major wars were not, after all, profoundly religious types. They accept what they are told, and seldom, if ever, think beyond the conventional wisdom of their
millieux.

But Hawkins had begun to feel twinges of remorse and fear from the moment he landed on the planet—probably helped along by his first view of the caged alien at the entry port. Just as indoctrination had warned, the aliens looked exactly like our own troops.

Then, too, the more he became aware of the death rate, to say nothing of the fact that the aliens were out to kill all of mankind, the more he began to feel convulsions, succumb to dim, vague fits of gloom in which he visualized himself taking complicated vows of withdrawal. It had some subtly demoralizing effect upon his work. Still, he might have reached some fragile accommodation if it had not been for the business of the dead nun which coalesced all his thinking and began to lead him to the distinct feeling that he was going insane.

On the sixth night after the removal of the body and the erection of the wooden block, Hawkins cleaned up after he had returned to the area and, in what was the best approximation of dress uniform he could make in the terrain, wandered to the rear where the nuns were; stood idly outside the huts for a time, holding his helmet in one hand; and wondering exactly what he was going to do.

Remember,
they had been instructed;
the fate of mankind depends upon your showing here, but do not feel in any way that you are under pressure.

The old nun’s face seemed strangely dull and full. It passed from one of the huts toward another and then, for some reason, stopped and asked him what he wanted.

“I want to pay my respects to the dead one. To the dead . . In his embarrassment, Hawkins was unable to think of the word. “To the dead female priest,” he said, finally.

“That would be Teresa,” said the nun. “She never understood what was happening—she always talked of flowers and trees; but she had wanted to come so badly because it was the decision of the order that all of us were to come, without, exception. She said she was afraid, but all things could be part of heaven if they were observed so; and then, of course, she died. You were the one who arranged for her removal?”

Hawkins nodded dumbly.

The old nun touched him lightly, two fingers spread to accommodate his wrist, and then led him toward the hut. “It was quite kind of you,” she said. “We wanted to send for Teresa, but they wouldn’t let us. They said it wasn’t permitted. We had to think of how she lay there in indignity—and then you returned her to us.”

“Well, I tried,” Hawkins said.

“We couldn’t manage stone, so we used wood. We had to sneak the marker in. She was very unlucky, Teresa. No luck at all.”

“Unlucky?” Hawkins said. He had always believed that religious people made their own luck, uneven but connected.

They were at the door of the hut now, that door being comprised of a series of burlap sacks which had been strung together, and she pushed them aside to lead him in.

“Sit down,” she said, pointing at some spot in the flickering darkness where he could sense a low slung chair. “You’ll want to talk to the Mother Superior.”

“That wouldn’t be necessary.”

“It’s the way we do things. But she isn’t prepared yet.”

“Do you think I could pray here?” Hawkins asked pointlessly. “Would you mind?”

“If you want to. It doesn’t do much good, though. But we can give you a book.”

“No books,” Hawkins said. “No
books.
I want to make up the words all by myself.”

“Of course,” the nun said, and went away. Hawkins clasped his hands and began to mumble words like FATHER and KYRIE ELEISON and HOLY MARY, which were about all he could remember of the things he had picked up about it; but even in the murmuring stillness, with the effect given by the one candle on the shelves above him, it wouldn’t quite take.

It occurred to Hawkins for the first time that he had absolutely nothing to say to God, and for some reason this cheered him; if that were the case, then God probably had nothing to say to him in return. And he would undoubtedly not be in the kind of trouble he had been fearing. There was no question of interference from forces or people with whom you had no communication.

He thought about the dead nun then, and for the moment it was without horror; perhaps the calm of her features had been an utter resignation rather than a lapsed attention caught by the fumes. It was possible, in fact, that she had died in knowledge, and if that were so it made this more the bearable—although not entirely so, of course.

After a while the curtains parted again and the old nun came out. She was dressed in what Hawkins took to be a Mother Superior’s outfit and she looked very well indeed. He was not surprised in the least; he had expected it from the start.

“So, then,” she said. “Now I am Mother Florence and I am prepared to properly sit by you. That was a very fine thing you did for us, and you are blessed for it.”

“But why did you come out here?” Hawkins said. He was being matter-of-fact about the identity question because it was, of course, the Mother Superior’s business, and not his.

“We in this order believe that the revelations of St. John are most fully realized, or to be realized in the events of these particular days. We wish to hold out, for you, against the Apocalypse.”

“There are no revelations of St. John,” said Hawkins, the refutation holding only a private meaning for himself. “There is no Apocalypse, either.”

“We feel otherwise,” she stated, calmly.

“What about your Teresa? Does she choose to believe? Dead nuns are deader than dead men. I’m sorry; there was no need for that.”

The nun touched his shoulder. “We have borne worse. We come, and we observe; we hold, and we pray. And we give what comfort we are able.”

Later, away from the hut, Hawkins wandered toward the center of the encampment. Drifting around him were strange night odors and within him his rage, and he guessed, as he picked up his pace, that when the two of them combined—the outside and the inside—they might make a kind of sense; there might be something to his feelings, his being. And in that hope he burst free, still moving, through the area itself and out to the other end, to the fields. Unswerving, poised with the grace of insistence, he plunged toward the wooden block in the distance. When he got there he caved it over with a sigh, feeling its edges rolling against him; he pivoted on his back to look at the sky, wondering from where and from when his brothers the aliens would place their special silver stake in his heart.

To combat his loneliness, God invented religion.

Rumor has it that 1.1 out of every 256 individuals in this country cannot appreciate a Ron Goulart story. These hapless souls are to be pitied
...

The small blond man looked across the desk at him and said,
"The Shadow Bride of Ledgemere
.”

Barry Rhymer poured himself more coffee from the gourd shaped karafe his wife had given him and said, “What?”

Shrugging with one shoulder, Bernard Hunzler repeated,
"The Shadow Bride of Ledgemere
.”

Barry turned to watch the smudged brick walls outside his office window. “Excuse me, Bernard, I was thinking about something else. Yes, I like the title. Did I mention Flash Books has a new policy about our gothics? Now all we editors have to have an outline before we can request an advance. Just a couple of pages I can show to our business people here.”

Hunzler asked, “Why? Look, I’m Bernadette Austen, the queen of gothic terror. I told you the title. Now give me the $1500 advance and I’ll go home and write the thing.”