Twilight Eyes (37 page)

Still sitting in her armchair, shoulders slumped, head low, eyes downcast, Rya said, “This warrior . . . goblin was specifically designed to be incapable of pity, guilt, shame, love, mercy, and most other human emotions, though it could imitate them well enough when it wished to pass as a man or woman. It had no compunctions about committing acts of extreme violence. In fact . . . if I’ve understood the information I’ve accumulated over the years . . . if I’ve properly interpreted the things I’ve seen . . . the goblin was even engineered to experience pleasure when it killed. Hell, its only three emotions were a limited capacity for fear (which was included by the geneticists and psychogeneticists as a survival mechanism), hatred, and blood lust. So . . . condemned to that limited range of experience, the beast naturally tried to milk the most out of each emotion it’d been permitted.”

No human killer in either their civilization or ours, in all the thousands of years of lost or recorded history, possibly could have exhibited obsessive, compulsive, psychopathic, homicidal behavior even one-hundredth as intense as that of these laboratory soldiers. No religious fanatic, guaranteed a place in Heaven for taking up a gun in God’s name, ever slaughtered with such zeal.

My muddy, bloody hands were so tightly curled into fists that my fingernails pressed painfully into my palms, yet I could not relax them. It was as if I were a determined penitent, seeking absolution through the endurance of pain. But absolution for whom? Whose sins did I feel it was necessary to atone for?

I said, “But, Jesus, the creation of this warrior . . . it was . . . it was
madness
! A thing like that never could be controlled!”

“Apparently they thought it could,” she said. “As I understand it, each goblin that went out of those labs had a control mechanism implanted in its brain, which was intended to deliver temporarily crippling jolts of pain and trigger the creature’s fear. Through this device a disobedient warrior could be punished in any corner of the world, regardless of where it hid.”

“But something went wrong,” I said.

“Something always goes wrong,” she said.

Again I asked, “How do you know these things?”

“Give me time. In time I’ll explain everything.”

“I’ll insist on it.”

Her voice was bleak and gray, and it became grayer by the moment as she spoke of other safeguards that had been built into the goblins to prevent rebellion and unwanted bloodshed. Of course, they were created sterile. They could not breed; only the labs could produce more of them. And each goblin underwent intense conditioning that directed its hatred and murderous urges toward a narrowly defined ethnic or racial group, so it could be targeted on a very specific enemy, without fear that it might recklessly kill its master’s allies.

“Then what went wrong?” I asked.

“I need more Scotch,” she said.

She got up and went into the kitchen.

“Pour me some,” I said.

I ached all over, and my hands burned and itched because I had not yet extracted all the splinters from them. The Scotch would have an anesthetizing effect.

But it could not anesthetize me against the feeling of impending danger. That presentiment was growing stronger, and I knew it would persist regardless of the quantities of liquor that I consumed.

I glanced at the door.

I had not locked it when I had come in. No one locks his doors in Gibtown, Florida, or in Gibtown-on-Wheels, because carnies never—or seldom ever—steal from one another.

I got up, went to the door, thumbed in the lock button on the knob, and slid the bolt latch in place.

I should have felt better then. I did not.

Rya came back from the kitchen and handed me a glass of Scotch on the rocks.

I resisted the urge to touch her because I sensed that she still did not want me close. Not until she had told me everything.

I returned to my chair, sat down, and gulped half the Scotch in one swallow.

She continued, but a replenishment of her whiskey did not improve the bleak tone of her voice. I sensed that her state of mind was induced not only by the horrible tale she had to tell but also by some personal turmoil. Whatever else was eating at her, I could not get a clear perception of it.

Proceeding with the story, she told me that the secret knowledge of the goblins’ creation soon spread, as knowledge always will, and half a dozen countries quickly had their own laboratory-made soldiers, similar to the first goblins but with modifications, refined and improved. They grew the creatures in vats, by the thousands, and the impact of this brand of warfare proved to be almost as terrible as a full-scale nuclear exchange.

“Remember,” Rya said, “the goblins were supposedly an
alternative
to nuclear combat, a much less destructive means of attaining world domination.”

“Some alternative!”

“Well, if the nation that originated them could’ve maintained exclusivity of its technology, it
would
have conquered the world in a few years, without resort to atomic weapons. However, when
everyone
had goblin soldiers, when the terror was answered with counterterror, all sides quickly realized that mutual destruction was as certain through the surrogate soldiers as through nuclear holocaust. So they reached an agreement to recall and destroy their goblin armies.”

“But someone reneged,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I may be wrong about this, I may have misunderstood . . . but I think some of the soldiers successfully
refused
to be recalled.”

“Jesus.”

“For reasons never discovered, or at least for reasons I don’t grasp, some of the goblins had undergone fundamental changes once out of the laboratory.”

Having been a science buff through most of my childhood and adolescence, I had a thought or two about the subject. I said, “Perhaps they changed because their chains of artificial chromosomes and edited genes were too fragilely constructed.”

She shrugged. “Anyway, it appears that one result of this mutation was the development of an ego, a sense of independence.”

“Which is a damned dangerous thing in a biologically engineered psychopathic killer,” I said with a shiver.

“An attempt was made to bring them to heel by activating the pain-producing devices implanted in their brains. Some gave themselves up. Others were found writhing and squealing in an unexplainable agony that effectively unmasked them. But some apparently mutated in still another way—either developed an incredible tolerance for pain . . . or learned to like it, even
thrive
on it.”

I could imagine how things had progressed from that point. I said, “In their perfect human disguises, with intelligence equal to ours, driven by only hatred and fear and blood lust, they couldn’t ever be found . . . except maybe by subjecting every man and woman in the world to a brain scan in search of the goblins’ defused control mechanisms. But there’d be a thousand dodges the creatures could use to avoid going under the scanners. Some would probably produce counterfeit clearance cards attesting to brain scans they’d never undergone. Others would simply flee to wilderness areas and hide out, running forays into towns and villages only when they needed to steal supplies . . . or when the lust to kill became an intolerable pressure in them. In the end most would escape detection. Right? Is that how it was?”

“I don’t know. I think so. Something like that. And at some point after the . . . the worldwide brain-scan program was under way . . . the authorities discovered that some of the rebel goblins had undergone one other fundamental mutation—”

“They were no longer sterile.”

Rya blinked. “How did you know?”

I told her about the pregnant goblin in Yontsdown.

She said, “If I’ve not misunderstood, most remained sterile, but a lot became fertile. The legend is—”

“What legend?” I asked, finding it increasingly difficult to contain my curiosity. “Where did you hear these things? What legends are you talking about?”

Ignoring the question, still not ready to divulge her sources, she said, “According to the legends, a woman was caught in the brain-scan program, and when revealed as a goblin, she was goaded into transforming into her true shape. When they shot her, as she died, she ejected a litter of squirming goblin babies. In death she reverted to the human form, as she had been genetically programed to do (for the purpose of foiling autopsies and pathologists). And when her offspring were executed, they metamorphosed into human babies during their death throes.”

“And then mankind knew it had lost the war with the goblins.”

Rya nodded.

They had lost the war because goblin children, formed in the alien womb instead of in the laboratory, had no control mechanisms to show up on brain scans; there was no method whatsoever by which their disguises could be penetrated. From that point on, man shared the earth with a species that was his intellectual equal and that had no purpose but to destroy him and all his works.

Rya finished her Scotch.

I badly wanted a second drink, but I was afraid to get it, for in my current state of mind a second would surely lead to a third, a third to a fourth, and I would not stop until I passed out drunk. I could not afford to indulge myself, for the dark premonition of pending disaster hung over me more oppressively than ever, the psychic equivalent of a massive black formation of churning thunderheads settling down over a summer day.

I looked at the door.

Still locked.

I looked at the windows.

They were open.

But they were jalousies, and no goblin could force its way through one of them without considerable effort.

“So,” Rya said softly, “we weren’t happy with the earth God gave us. Evidently we had heard about Hell in that lost age, and we found the concept interesting. We found it
so
interesting, so
appealing
, that we brought forth demons of our own design and re-created Hell on earth.”

If there
was
a God, I could almost understand (as never before) why He would visit pain and suffering upon us. Looking down in disgust at our use of the world and the life He gave us, He might very well say, “All right, you ungrateful wretches, all right! You like to screw up everything? You like to hurt one another? You like it so much, you make your own devils and turn them loose on yourselves? All right! So be it! Stand back and let the Master please you! Watch my smoke, little ones. Here! Take these gifts. Let there be brain cancer and polio and multiple sclerosis! Let there be earthquakes and tidal waves! Let there be—bad glands! You like? Hmmm?”

I said, “Somehow the goblins destroyed that earlier civilization, wiped it off the face of the earth.”

She nodded. “It took time. A couple of decades. But according to legend . . . eventually a few of their kind, passing as human, rose into the upper social strata and finally attained sufficiently high political office that they were in a position to wage a nuclear war.”

Which, according to the mysterious and unspecified “legends” that she quoted, they had done. They did not care that most of them would be wiped out along with our kind; their entire reason for existing was to harry and destroy us, and if the ultimate fulfillment of their purpose led to their own swift demise, they were nevertheless powerless to change their destiny. The missiles flew. Cities were vaporized. No missile was withheld, no bomber restricted from taking flight. So many thousands of enormously powerful nuclear devices were detonated that something happened in the earth’s crust, or perhaps there was a change in the magnetic field and a subsequent shifting of the poles, but for some reason fault lines responded worldwide, shifted, and produced quakes of unimaginable magnitude. Thousand-mile stretches of low-lying land collapsed into the seas, and tidal waves washed halfway across continents, and volcanoes erupted everywhere. That holocaust, the subsequent ice age, and thousands of years of time had ground away every trace of the civilization that had once lit the many continents as brightly as our carnival lit the midway every night. More goblins than humans survived, for they were hardier, born fighters. The few surviving human beings returned to caves, reverted to savagery, and with the passing of many cruel seasons their heritage was forgotten. Although the goblins did not forget and never would,
we
forgot the goblins, along with everything else, and in ages to come, our rare encounters with them in their demon form were the source for many superstitions—and countless cheap horror films—involving shape-changing, supernatural entities.

“Now, we’ve climbed up out of the muck again,” Rya said dismally, “and we’ve rebuilt civilization, and we’ve begun to acquire the means to destroy the world again—”

“—and the goblins will one day push the Button if they get the chance,” I finished for her.

“I believe they will,” she said. “It
is
true that they’re less capable fighters than they were in the previous civilization . . . more easily beaten in hand-to-hand combat . . . more easily deceived. They’ve changed, evolved somewhat, due to the passage of so much time and because of all that nuclear fallout. The radiation sterilized many, stole the fertility that the original mutations had given them, which is why they haven’t completely overrun the earth and outnumbered us. And there’s been a . . . a slight mitigation of their mania for destruction. As I understand it, many of them abhor the thought of another nuclear war . . . at least on a worldwide scale. You see, they’re long-lived; some of them are as much as fifteen hundred years old, so they aren’t
that
many generations removed from the previous holocaust. Their stories of the world’s end, passed down by their ancestors, are still fresh and immediate to them. But though most of them might be satisfied with the current arrangement, stalking and killing us as if we were nothing more than animals in their private game preserve, there are a few . . . a few who long to induce human agony on a nuclear scale again . . . who believe it’s their destiny to wipe us from the face of the earth forever. In ten years or twenty or forty, one of
those
is sure to get its chance, don’t you think?”