The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (7 page)

But, of course, nothing settles an account as derelict as Earth’s was.

In that light, Compton’s cabinet rolled forward to the bank of hooded television screens jury-rigged against a somewhat water-proofed wall. A row of technicians perched on stools watched what the drones were showing them.

“Lights,” Compton said, and the aide made the room dark. “Here, Colonel – try this one.” He pointed his chin towards a particular screen, and Runner stepped closer. For the first time in his life, he saw something only a few hundred people of his time had seen in an undelayed picture; he saw the ship. It was two hundred miles away from his present location, and two hundred and fifty miles high.

II

Fifty years ago, the alien ship landed butt-down in the northwest quadrant of the central plain of the United States. Stern-first, she had put one of her four landing jacks straight down to bedrock through the town of Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, and the diagonally opposite leg seventy-five miles away near Julesburg, Colorado. Her shadow swept fifty thousand square miles.

A tower of pitted dull green and brown-gold metal, her forepeak narrowing in perspective into a needle raking unseen through the thinnest last margins of the atmosphere, she had neither parleyed nor even communicated with anything on or of Earth. No one had ever seen anything of what her crew might look like. To this day, she still neither spoke to Earth nor listened to whatever Terrestrials might want to say to her. She was neither an embassy nor an invader.

For fifty years she had been broadcasting the same code group into space, hour after hour, but she had neither made nor received any beam transmissions along any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The presumption was she had a distress beacon out on general principles, but had no hope of communicating with a particular source of rescue.

She had come down a little erratically; there was some suggestion of jury-rigging in the plates over an apparently buckled section of the hull shrouding her stern tubes; there seemed to be some abnormal erosion at one segment of the lip around the main jet. Over the years, Headquarters Intelligence had reached the decision that she was down on Earth for a self-refit.

Landing, she had immediately put out surface parties and air patrols – there were turret-mounted weapons all along her flanks; she was clearly a warship of some kind – in a display of resources that badly upset the Terrestrial military forces observing her. The surface parties were squat-profiled, tracked, armoured amphibious machines with sixteen-foot bogeys and a track-to-turtledeck height of seventy-five feet. They had fanned out over the surrounding states and, without regard to road, river, fence or farmhouse, had foraged for minerals. It had finally been concluded that the vehicles, equipped with power shovels, claws, drills, ore buckets and whatever other mining tools were necessary, were remote-controlled from the ship on the basis of local topography but not with any reference to the works of Man. Or to the presence of Man. The undeviating tracks made as much of a hayrick as they did of a company of anti-tank infantry or a battalion of what the Army in those days was pleased to call “armour”.

Whatever had hurt her, there was no point in Earthmen speculating on it. No missile could reach her. She had antimissile missiles and barrage patterns that, in operation, had made the Mississippi plain uninhabitable. An attempt was made to strike her foraging parties, with some immediate success. She then extended her air cover to the entire civilized world, and began methodically smashing down every military installation and every industrial complex capable of supporting one.

It was a tribute to the energy and perseverance of Twentieth Century Man. And it was the cause of Twenty-First Century man’s finding himself broken into isolated enclaves, almost all of them either underground or so geographically remote as to be valueless, and each also nearly incapable of physical communication with any other.

It did not take a great deal of Terrestrial surface activity to attract one of the ship’s nearly invulnerable aircraft. Runner’s journey between Salt Lake and the tunnel pit head had been long, complicated by the need to establish no beaten path, and anxious. Only the broken terrain, full of hiding places, had made it possible at all.

But the balance between birth and death rates was once more favourable, and things were no longer going all the ship’s way – whether the ship knew it or not. Still, it would be another thirty years before this siege bore Compton was driving could reach, undermine and finally topple the ship.

Thirty years from now, Runner and the other members of Special Division knew, the biped, spindling, red-eyed creatures emerging from the ground to loot that broken ship and repay themselves for this nightmare campaign would be only externally human – some of them. Some would be far less. Special Division’s hope – its prospects were not good enough to call it a task – was to attempt to shorten that time while Humanity was still human.

And if the human race did not topple the ship, or if the ship completed its refit and left before they could reach it, then all this fifty years of incalculable material and psychic expenditure was irretrievably lost. Humanity would be bankrupt. They were all living now on the physical and emotional credit embodied in that tower of alien resources. From it, they could strip a technology to make the world new again – nothing less could accomplish that; in its conquest, there was a triumph to renew the most exhausted heart. Or almost any such heart. Runner could only speculate on how many of the victors would be, like Compton, unable to dance upon the broken corpse.

If anyone on Earth doubted, no one dared to dwell aloud on the enfeebling thought.

They had to have the ship.

“She’s got some kind of force field running over her structure,” Compton remarked, looking at the image on the screen. “We know that much. Something that keeps the crystals in her metal from deforming and sliding. She’d collapse. If we had something like that field, we could build to her size, too.”

“Is there that much metal in the world?”

Compton looked sideward at Runner. “A damned sight more. But if we had her, we wouldn’t need it.”

Yes, Runner thought, keeping himself from looking at the screen now as faithfully as he had prevented himself from looking at Compton earlier. Yes, if we had the ship we wouldn’t need this, and we wouldn’t need that, or the other thing. We could even engineer such wonderful cabinets like the one in which Compton dwells that none of us would have to fear a stop to our ambitions, and we could roll along in glory on the wonderfully smooth corridor floors we could carve, away from the places where storms and lightning strike.

For how could you live, Compton, out there where I have to go tomorrow?

Compton, looking up at him, shrewdly said: “Do you know I approve of the Special Division? I think you people serve a very necessary function. I need the pressure of rivals.”

Runner thought: You are ugly.

“I have to go to sleep,” he had said and left Compton to his screens and schedules. But he did not take the lift down to the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters where had been given an accommodation – a two-man cubicle for himself alone; the aide, never having experienced solitude, as Runner had, had been envious. Instead, he puzzled his way through another of the branching temporary passageways that were crudely chopped out for living space near the advancing bore.

He searched until he found the proper door. The letter Norma had sent him did not contain the most exact directions. It had spoken in local terms: “Follow the first parallel until you reach the fourth gallery,” and so forth.

He knocked, and the gas-tight door opened.

“I heard you would be here today,” Norma said in a choked voice, and there was much for him to read in the waxiness of her skin and the deep wrinkles that ran from the corners of her nose to the corners of her bloodless mouth.

He took the hands she offered, and stepped inside.

There was one large room; that is, a room large enough for a free-standing single cot, rather than a bunk, and a cleared area, faintly marked by black rubber wheelmarks, large enough for a cabinet to turn around in.

“How are you, Norma?” he said as if he could not guess, and she did not trouble to answer him. She shut the door and leaned against it as if they had both just fled in here.

“Are you going out in the morning?”

Runner nodded. It seemed to him he had time at least to say a few conventional things to the girl who had been his fiancée, and then Compton’s wife. But she apparently thought otherwise.

“Are you going to make it?”

“I don’t know. It’s a gamble.”

“Do you think you’ll make it?”

“No.”

It had never seemed reasonable that he would. In the Technical Section of the Special Division there were men – fully his equals – who were convinced he could succeed. They said they had calculated the ship’s weaknesses, and he believed they had figures and evaluations, right enough. He in his own turn believed there were things a man had to be willing to do whether they seemed reasonable or not, simply because they seemed necessary. So neither fact nor opinion could modify his taking the weapons carrier out against the ship tomorrow. “But I
hope
I’ll make it,” he said.

“You hope you’ll make it,” Norma said tonelessly. She reached quickly and took his hands again. “What a forlorn thing to tell me! You know I won’t be able to stand it down here much longer. How do we know the ship doesn’t have seismic detectors? How do we know it isn’t just letting us concentrate ourselves here so it can smash us before we become dangerous?”

“Well, we don’t know, but it seems unlikely. They have geological probes, of course. The gamble is that they’re only probes and not detectors.”

“If they don’t smash us, there’s only one reason – they know they’ll be finished and gone before we can reach them!”

This was all wrong; he could not talk to her about anything important before he had calmed her. He said, searching for some way to reach her: “But we have to go on as if they won’t. Nothing else we’ve tried has worked. At least Compton’s project hasn’t failed.”

“Now you’re on his side! You!”

She was nothing like the way she had been with him. She would never have been like this. The way she was now, she and Malachi Runner could not meet. He understood, now, that in the years since she had left Headquarters with Compton she had come to think back on Malachi Runner not as a man but as an embodiment of that safe life. It was not him she was shouting out to. It was to all those days gone for ever.

And so I must be those days of life in a place where shafts lead to the wine-rich air of the surface, and there is no sound of metal twisting in the rock. I am not Malachi Runner now. I hoped I could be. I should have read that letter as it was, not as I hoped it was. Goodbye, Runner, you aren’t needed here.

“No, I’m not on his side. But I wouldn’t dare stop him if I could. I wouldn’t dare shut off any hope that things will end and the world can go back to living.”

“End? Where can they end? He goes on; he can’t move an arm or a finger, but he goes on. He doesn’t need anything but that box that keeps him alive and this tunnel and that ship. Where can I touch him?”

They stood separated by their outstretched hands, and Runner watched her as intently as though he had been ordered to make a report on her.

“I thought I could help him, but now he’s in that box!”

Yes, Runner thought, now he’s in that box. He will not let death rob him of seeing the end of his plans. And you love him, but he’s gone where you can’t follow. Can you?

He considered what he saw in her now, and he knew she was lost. But he thought that if the war would only end, there would be ways to reach her. He could not reach her now; nothing could reach her. He knew insanity was incurable, but he thought that perhaps she was not yet insane; if he could at least keep her within this world’s bounds, there might be time, and ways, to bring her back. If not to him, then at least to the remembered days of Headquarters.

“Norma!” he said, driven by what he foresaw and feared. He pulled her close and caught her eyes in his own. “Norma, you have got to promise me that no matter what happens, you won’t get into another one of those boxes so you can be with him.”

The thought was entirely new to her. Her voice was much lower. She frowned as if to see him better and said: “Get into one of those boxes? Oh, no – no, I’m not sick, yet. I only have to have shots for my nerves. A corpsman comes and gives them to me. He’ll be here soon. It’s only if you can’t not-care; I mean, if you have to stay involved, like he does, that you need the interrupter circuits instead of the tranquilizer shots. You don’t get into one of those boxes just for fear,” she said.

He had forgotten that; he had more than forgotten it – there were apparently things in the world that had made him be sure, for a moment, that it really was fear.

He did not like hallucinating. He did not have any way of depending on himself if he had lapses like that.

“Norma, how do I look to you?” he said rapidly.

She was still frowning at him in that way. “You look about the same as always,” she said.

He left her quickly – he had never thought, in conniving for this assignment with the letter crackling in his pocket, that he would leave her so quickly. And he went to his accommodation, crossing the raw, still untracked and unsheathed echoing shaft of the tunnel this near the face, with the labour battalion squads filing back and forth and the rubble carts rumbling. And in the morning he set out. He crawled into the weapons carrier, and was lifted up to a hidden opening that had been made for it during the night. He started the engine and, lying flat on his stomach in the tiny cockpit, peering through the cat’s-eye viewports, he slid out onto the surface of the mountain and so became the first of his generation to advance into this territory that did not any more belong to Man.

When he was three days out, he passed within a hundred yards of a cluster of mining-machines. They paid him no attention, and he laughed, cackling inside his egg. He knew that if he had safely come so close to an extension of the ship – an extension that could have stepped over and crushed him with almost no extra expenditure – then his chances were very good. He knew he cackled. But he knew the Army’s drones were watching, unobtrusively, for signs of his extinction or breakdown. Not finding them, they were therefore giving Compton and Headquarters the negative good news that he had not yet failed. At Headquarters, other Special Division personnel would be beginning to hope. They had been the minority party in the conflicts there for as long as they had been in existence at all.