The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (24 page)

“But we've got to do something!” I said. “The world'll just go to pot!”

“We
are
doing something,” he said. “Right here and on eight other preserves scattered around the world. We're reviving the mechanical and tool skills which supported the pretalent civilization and we're storing the instruments which will make a rebirth of that civilization possible.”

He raised a warning hand. “But we must move in secrecy. The world's not yet ready for this information. It would cause a most terrible panic if this were to become known.”

“Well, you're prescient. What does happen?” I asked him.

“Unfortunately, none of us are able to determine that,” he said. “Either it's an unfixed line or there's some interference which we can't surmount.” He shook his head and the goatee wiggled. “There's a cloudy area in the near future beyond which we can't see. None of us.”

That scared me. A prescient may give you the creeps, but it's nice to know there's a future into which someone can see. It was as if there suddenly wasn't any future—period. I began to cry a little.

“And our children will be
Nothings,
” I said.

“Well, not exactly,” said Williams. “Some of them, maybe, but we've taken the trouble of comparing your gene lines—yours and Claude's. You've a good chance of having offspring who will be prescient or telepathic or both. A better than seventy percent chance.” His voice got pleading. “The world's going to need that chance.”

Claude came over and put a hand on my shoulder. It sent a delicious tingle up my spine. Suddenly, I got a little flash of his thoughts—a picture of us kissing. I'm not really a tele, but like I said, sometimes I get glimmers.

Claude said, “Okay. I guess there's no sense fighting the inevitable. We'll get married.”

No more argument. We all traipsed into another room and there was a preacher with everything ready for us, even the ring. Another prescient. He'd come more than a hundred miles to perform the ceremony, he said.

*   *   *

Afterward, I let Claude kiss me once. I was having trouble realizing that I was married. Mrs. Claude Williams. But that's the way it is with the inevitable, I guess.

The old man took my arm then and said there was one small precaution. I'd be going off the grounds from time to time and there'd always be the chance of some unethical tele picking my brains.

They put me under an anesthetube and when I came out of it I had a silver grid in my skull. It itched some, but they said that it would go away. I'd heard of this thing. They called it a blanket.

Mensor Williams said, “Now go home and get your things. You won't need to tell your parents any more than that you have a government job. Come back as soon as you're able.”

“Get me a 'porter,” I said.

“The grounds are gridded against teleporters,” he said. “I'll have to send you in a jet buggy.”

And so he did.

I was home in ten minutes.

I went up the stairs to my house. It was after nine o'clock by then. My father was waiting inside the door.

“A fine time for an eighteen-year-old girl to be coming home!” he shouted and he made a tele stab at my mind to see what I'd been up to. These teles and their ethics! Well, he ran smack dab into the blanket and maybe you think that didn't set him back on his heels. He got all quiet suddenly.

I said, “I have a government job. I just came back for my things.” Time enough to tell them about the marriage later. They'd have kicked up a fine rumpus if I'd said anything then.

Mama came in and said, “My little baby with a government job! How much does it pay?”

I said, “Let's not be vulgar.”

Papa sided with me. “Of course not, Hazel,” he said. “Leave the kid alone. A government job! What do you know! Those things pay plenty. Where is it, baby?”

I could see him wondering how much he could tap me for to pay his bills and I began to wonder if I'd have any money at all to keep up the pretense. I said, “The job's at Sonoma Preserve.”

Papa said, “What they need with a pyro up there?”

I got a brilliant inspiration. I said, “To keep the
Nothings
in line. A little burn here, a little burn there. You know.”

That struck my father funny. When he could stop laughing he said, “I know you, honey. I've watched your think tank pretty close. You'll take care of yourself and no funny business. Do they have nice safe quarters for you up there?”

“The safest,” I said.

I felt him take another prod at my blanket and withdraw. “Government work is top secret,” I said.

“Sure. I understand,” he said.

So I went to my room and got my things packed. The folks made some more fuss about my going away so sudden, but they quieted down when I told them I had to go at once, or lose the chance at the job.

Papa finally said, “Well, if the government isn't safe, then nothing is.”

They kissed me goodbye and I promised to write and to visit home on my first free weekend.

“Don't worry, Papa,” I said.

The jet buggy took me back to the preserve. When I went into the office, Claude, my husband, was sitting across the desk from his father.

The old man had his hands to his forehead and there were beads of perspiration showing where the fingers didn't cover. Presently, he lowered his hands and shook his head.

“Well?” asked Claude.

“Not a thing,” said the old man.

I moved a little bit into the room but they didn't notice me.

“Tell me the truth, Dad,” said Claude. “How far ahead did you see us?”

Old Mensor Williams lowered his head and sighed. “All right, son,” he said. “You deserve the truth. I saw you meet Miss Carlysle at the Tavern and not another thing. We had to trace her by old-fashioned methods and compare your gene lines like I said. The rest is truth. You know I wouldn't lie to you.”

I cleared my throat and they both looked at me.

Claude jumped out of his chair and faced me. “We can get an annulment,” he said. “No one has the right to play with other peoples' lives like that.”

He looked so sweet and little-boy-like standing there. I knew suddenly I didn't want an annulment. I said, “The younger generation has to accept its responsibilities sometime.”

Mensor Williams got an eager look in his eyes. I turned to the old man, said, “Was that seventy percent figure correct?”

“Absolutely correct, my dear,” he said. “We've checked every marriageable female he's met because he carries my family's dominant line. Your combination was the best. Far higher than we'd hoped for.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us about our future?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It's all cloudy,” he said. “You're on your own.”

I got that creepy feeling again and looked up at my husband. Little laugh wrinkles creased at the corners of Claude's eyes and he smiled. Then another thought struck me. If we were on our own, that meant we were shaping our own future. It wasn't fixed. And no nosey prescient could come prying in on us, either. A woman kind of likes that idea. Especially on her wedding night.

 

CEASE FIRE

Snow slanted across the frozen marshland, driven in fitful gusts. It drifted in a low mound against the wooden Observation Post. The antennae of the Life Detector atop the OP swept back and forth in a rhythmic halfcircle like so many frozen sticks brittle with rime ice.

The snow hid all distance, distorted substance into gray shadows without definition. A suggestion of brightness to the north indicated the sun that hung low on the horizon even at midnight in this season.

Out of possible choices of a place for a world-shattering invention to be born, this did not appear in the running.

A rifle bullet spanged against an abandoned tank northeast of the OP, moaned away into the distance. The bullet only emphasized the loneliness, the isolation of the OP set far out ahead of the front lines of the Arctic battlefields of 1972. Behind the post to the south stretched the long reaches of the Canadian barren lands. An arm of the Arctic Ocean below Banks Island lay hidden in the early snow storm to the north.

One operator—drugged to shivering wakefulness—stood watch in the OP. The space around him was barely six feet in diameter, crammed with equipment, gridded screens glowing a pale green with spots that indicated living flesh: a covey of ptarmigan, a possible Arctic fox. Every grid point on the screens held an aiming code for mortar fire.

This site was designated “OP 114” by the Allied command. It was no place for the sensitive man who had found himself pushed, shunted and shamed into this position of terror. The fact that he did occupy OP 114 only testified to the terrible urgencies that governed this war.

Again a rifle bullet probed the abandoned tank. Corporal Larry Hulser—crouched over the OP's screens—tried to get a track on the bullet. It had seemed to come from the life-glow spot he had identified as probably an Arctic fox.

Much too small for a human,
he thought.
Or is it?

The green glow of the screens underlighted Hulser's dark face, swept shadows upward where they merged with his black hair. He chewed his lips, his eyes darting nervously with the fear he could never hide, the fear that made him the butt of every joke back at the barracks.

Hulser did not look like a man who could completely transform his society. He looked merely like an indefinite lump of humanity encased in a Life Detector shield, crouching in weird green shadows.

In the distant days of his youth, one of Hulser's chemistry professors had labeled him during a faculty tea:
“A mystic—sure to fail in the modern world.”

The glow spot Hulser had identified as a fox shifted its position.

Should I call out the artillery?
Hulser wondered.
No. This could be the one they'd choose to investigate with a flying detector. And if the pilot identified the glow as a fox
—Hulser cringed with the memory of the hazing he had taken on the wolf he'd reported two months earlier.

“Wolfie Hulser!”

I'm too old for this game,
he thought.
Thirty-eight is too old. If there were only some way to end
—

Another rifle bullet spanged against the shattered tank. Hulser tried to crouch lower in the tiny wooden OP. The bullets were like questing fingers reaching out for unrecognized metal—to identify an OP. When the bullets found their mark, a single 200 mm. mortar shell followed, pinpointed by echophones. Or it could be as it had been with Breck Wingate, another observer.

Hulser shivered at the memory.

They had found Wingate hunched forward across his instruments, a neat hole through his chest from side to side just below the armpits. Wind had whistled through the wall of the OP from a single bullet hole beside Wingate. The enemy had found him and never known.

Hulser glanced up nervously at the plywood walls: all that shielded him from the searching bullets—a wood shell designed to absorb the metal seekers and send back the sound of a bullet hitting a snowdrift. A rolled wad of plot paper filled a bullet hole made on some other watch near the top of the dome.

Again Hulser shivered.

And again a bullet spanged against the broken tank. Then the ground rumbled and shook as a mortar shell zeroed the tank.

Discouraging us from using it as an OP,
thought Hulser.

He punched the
backtrack
relay to give the mortar's position to his own artillery, but without much hope. The enemy was beginning to use the new “shift” shells that confused
backtrack.

*   *   *

The phone beside his L-D screens glowed red. Hulser leaned into the cone of silence, answered: “OP 114. Hulser.”

The voice was Sergeant Chamberlain's. “What was that mortar shooting at, Wolfie?”

Hulser gritted his teeth, explained about the tank.

Chamberlain's voice barked through the phone: “We shouldn't have to call for an explanation of these things! Are you sure you're awake and alert?”

“Yeah, Sarg.”

“Okay. Keep your eyes open, Wolfie.”

The red glow of the phone died.

Hulser trembled with rage.
Wolfie!

He thought of Sergeant Mike Chamberlain: tall, overbearing, the irritating nasal twang in his voice. And he thought of what he'd like to do to Chamberlain's narrow, small-eyed face and its big nose. He considered calling back and asking for “Schnozzle” Chamberlain.

Hulser grinned tightly.
That'd get him! And he'd have to wait another four hours before he could do anything about it.

But the thought of the certain consequences in arousing Chamberlain's anger wiped the grin from Hulser's face.

Something moved on his central screen. The fox. Or was it a fox? It moved across the frozen terrain toward the shattered tank, stopped halfway.

A fox investigating the strange odors of cordite and burned gas?
he wondered.
Or is it the enemy?

With this thought came near panic. If any living flesh above a certain minimum size—roughly fifty kilos—moved too close to an OP without the proper IFF, the hut and all in it exploded in a blinding flash of thermite: everything incinerated to prevent the enemy from capturing the observer's Life Detector shield.

Hulser studied the grid of his central screen. It reminded him of a game he'd played as a boy: two children across a room from one another, ruled graph paper hidden behind books in their laps. Each player's paper contained secretly marked squares: four in a row—a battleship, three in a row—a destroyer, two in a …

Again the glow on his screen moved toward the tank crater.

He stared at the grid intersection above the glowing spot, and far away in his mind a thought giggled at him:
Call and tell 'em you have a battleship on your screen at O-6-C. That'd get you a Section Eight right out of this man's army!