by Jerry
I grinned and pounded Hamiel on the back as darts of crimson fire searched the air over our heads.
“Captain, the apologies are on me! Walt, it’ll work, if we can get close enough to drop this bundle within a hundred yards of the ship. There’s cover at the base of the hill, and they’re not likely to have troops out now. They’re too damn busy trying to get one of those beams through the field!” Walt managed a tired grin, but it was the old Walt again. He glanced at me, then at Hamiel.
“Okay, Captain—let’s get ourselves a spaceship!”
V
It was there, less than a hundred yards away, squatting like a black bug on the crest of the hill. We came up from behind, away from the scathing red beams, but a terrible crimson aura in the ship to tell us of the awful firepower pouring over the Starpath dome below.
I glanced up the full, then at Commander Martin. Walt’s face was grim in the fading light. He slid back around the dark slab of rock to my side and shook his head.
I understood. It wasn’t going to be a pushover, if it was possible at all. The first 75 yards weren’t too bad; scattered outcroppings offered cover, particularly after Corphyrion’s sun dropped lower behind the hills. That was the beginning—75 yards of possible protection. After that came 25 long yards of red death.
That last stretch of ground was completely bare. There wasn’t a loose pebble for cover. AH we could do was count on the increasing darkness—and hope that aliens had naturally poor night vision. There was some consolation in the fact that they were likely to be concentrating most of their attention on the dome in the opposite direction, but—I wasn’t personally counting a hell of a lot on that. I’d seen them fight.
We had to lay those disruptor missiles right on the enemy’s doorstep. It was obvious, now, from this distance. The alien ship glowed with a faint, blue-green aura—they had a screen of their own. There was no way to tell how strong it might be, but We couldn’t afford to guess. There was too much to lose if we happened to guess wrong. For all we knew, they had already alerted their home world through some means of communication we knew nothing about. We had instant transmission—but only through Starpath. Another race could have already solved the problems of hyperspeed radio in a totally different manner. It might be too late already. . . .
We couldn’t dwell too long on that. The job now was to get those missiles up the hill, as close to the ship as possible. It was enough for the moment.
It happened—and none of us saw it. Hamiel was with us, right behind me, then he was gone. Then Walt cursed and stiffened beside me. I turned to see a dim figure disappear in the rocks to the right of the ship. Commander Martin stared for a quick second, then jerked around and plunged after his aide. I jumped up and wrapped my arms around his combat suit in a tight grip.
Walt tried to shake me off, and we both went down to the hard ground.
“Damn it, Major,” he raged, “get—your—hands—!”
I shook my head and held fast. “No, sir. It’s done. Someone was going to have to do it. He just decided first.”
Walt relaxed slightly, but his eyes still blazed into mine. “That wasn’t his decision, Keith. It was mine.”
I nodded. “That’s why he didn’t wait, Walt. He got the job he wanted before you decided to volunteer. He was right about that—wasn’t he?”
Walt didn’t answer. He walked slowly over to the cannissters and hooked them over his shoulder. He looked hack and smiled distantly.
“Everyone else is disobeying orders today, Major. Guess I better take a crack at it myself.” He turned and motioned to the nearest trooper. “Come on, son, let’s get our luggage up the hill.”
“Walt,” I said tightly, “just a damn minute! That doesn’t happen to be your job either!”
He turned to answer, but his words died as a spark of blue fire flashed in the darkening hills.
I looked up. Captain Hamiel was framed against the sky, perched high atop a scarred boulder on our right. He was yelling at the top of his lungs emptying his sidearm at the great black egg. The bolts splashed harmlessly off the screened shell, and a dark muzzle shifted in the middle of the alien hull and seared Hamid’s boulder with red flame.
Hamiel dropped. For a second I thought he was hit; then I caught him again as he crabbed his way to another position. He fired again, then jerked away as another red beam split the landscape.
I turned to catch Walt and his trooper melt into the darkness. DeLuso stood beside me, unmoving. I cursed myself silently. Three Starpathers were out there now, moving up on an alien ship, while I stood behind a damn boulder with DeLuso and two troopers, waiting to offer history’s most helpless covering fire.
I had known it the minute we reached the hill. Walt had known it, and so had the Captain. It was perfectly clear.
Whoever moved up that hill could forget about coining back.
I was looking right at Hamiel when he died. A red beam simply sliced him in half as he changed boulders. It was all over. The captain had finished his job.
And it worked. Wait and the trooper reached the last bit of cover without trouble. I glanced at the dark muzzle in the alien hull. It still swept the boulder’s around Hamiel’s body, searching the shadows for more of the enemy.
All Wait and his trooper had to do was stay in the darkness—and wait for that one, perfect heartbeat when something tells you NOW!
I strained against the growing night, gripping the barrel of my gun until steel burned into my glove. I guess the distance Walt and the Starpather must have covered, then silently signaled DeLuso. We moved off up the hill, hugging the dark side of the stony ridge. I stopped once, searching for movement ahead.
Nothing. Only the red aura of deadly fire pouring into Starpath’s dome, and the faint blue shimmer of the alien screen. Then—
—two shadows, silent, close to the ground. I strained against the darkness. For a quick second, I saw them—Walt and the trooper, outlined before a patch of white, only a few yards from the black hull, a few steps away.
DeLuso shouted beside me and the two dazzling white flares exploded overhead like small suns. The two bright figures in combat gear paused for a split second against the blinding light, then raced for the alien ship.
The trooper was ahead, Walt a few steps behind. The deadly muzzle above them cut a swift, angry arc out of the sky. A thin tongue of red fire licked across the hill and burned the trooper to his knees. His quick, short cry echoed through my receiver; then he was quiet. Walt ran on another ten feet before a beam of crimson winked against his helmet.
He kept moving—a weird, aimless dance before the beam found him again and slammed him hard against the ground. The thin pencil of energy stayed there, searching him out with murderous vengeance, probing, cutting, slashing away until a billion fiery segments of Walt Martin blazed against the night.
DeLuso and I moved as one man, dodging the bright lances, sprinting for the silver bundle of missiles ahead. Red fire dug at my heels, turning cold rock into molten pools. We spread, Matt to the left, me to the right. For a brief second, we were free of the deadly fire as alien guns shifted to cover their splitting targets.
I saw it coming as if I had all the time in the world. A thin lance of fire hissing across the hill in a precise, slow, agonizingly perfect arc. I even knew exactly where and when my legs would intersect that blazing circle. I was down, clutching dumbly at a raw, charged grove of black where a portion of thigh had been a moment before.
There was no time for pain. I crabbed awkwardly along the ground, ahead of the hungry lances that probed the landscape for the rest of me.
DeLuso dodged past, and I fired a short and ineffectual burst over his head toward the dark ship. The two troopers behind us joined in.
Matt grabbed the cannister without stopping and bolted for the ship. A bright beam clipped his shoulder, and he staggered briefly, then went on. I fired another burst and got a splash of hot liquid rook for an answer. It burned through a soft spot in my armor and lay
like a small sun on my spine. I screamed until the noise hurt my ears, then—
“Major! Over here!”
I turned, caught the two troopers a few yards to my left, behind a low ridge of rook. For a second I just stared at them, wondering how the hell they had made it through that forest of red fire. Then I got a good leg under me and moved.
I glanced up the hill once and froze. My throat went suddenly dry. Matt was down! Gone. An ugly circle of fire churned the ground where he had been a second before. I cursed something to myself, turned away from the troopers, and started up the long hill.
A trooper yelled, leaped out after me. I aimed a savage kick at his head with a leg that wasn’t fit for kicking. He shoved me behind cover as the ground turned to flame behind me. Pain hit my leg in a pulse of agony. I lashed out, slamming a weak fist at an anonymous faceplate. The trooper pulled back, startled, his mouth moving frantically. I was in no mood for listening.
“Damn it!” I screamed. “A soldier’s down out there, trooper!”
“Major, he’s safe! He made it!”
“He—what?” I sat up, pushing the trooper off, and raised my head over the ridge. An alien flame brightened the sky, hut I saw him.
Red lances probed and screamed around our own cover, but no beam could reach Cadet Matt DeLuso. He was Hat beneath the curve of the alien ship, face pale in the bright light, the silver cannisters safe beside him.
“Come on, Matt; Get those fuses set!”
I gripped the barrel of my weapon, wondering what was holding the boy up. All he had to do now was—
Then I saw it, and my body went suddenly limp with defeat. Even from here you could tell that the fusing elements were nothing but masses of useless metal. Somewhere on the long trip up the hill they had been hit.
I cursed and pounded my fist against cold stone. Men had died to get those missiles up there, in the shadow of the alien ship. And now they were nothing. Useless.
“Oh, my God, sir. Look!”
I caught the trooper’s tone and jerked around. For a moment there was nothing. Then I saw, and a pulse of grim pleasure shot a burst of laughter from my lips. The two troopers heard and returned black grins.
We were licked, sure. But now we had something to shoot at, something with a blue aura of protection. The aliens knew Matt was under there, and they knew whatever he had with him meant trouble. So they made the big mistake. They sent their own troopers out to get him.
Fire pinned us to the ground, but we poured in a wave of death at the enemy soldiers. Faceplates burst; and parrot beaks screamed for homeworld air. We piled them up in chaired heaps as fast as they came around the black ship. The trooper beside me dropped as a red beam neatly sliced the left side of his body from the right. Through a storm of crimson death I saw Matt DeLuso, far away, crouched beneath the enemy ship. I saw him calmly snap the safety keys from his disruptor missiles, and I realized coldly—and proudly—what he was going to do. I added another trio of aliens to the burning pyre beside the ship, and then red fire crawled along the barrel of my weapon and plunged a million hot needles through my eyes. . . .
VI
They bought us time on Corphyrion—Matt DeLuso, Hamiel, and 17 other Starpathers who died there. Only one—Walt Martin—knew just how much we needed that time.
I wish Matt DeLuso could have known what he was doing when he pulled the keys and set off his missiles by hand against the cold bull of an alien ship. He would have done it anyway, certainly. He didn’t need any big reasons. It was a job that had to be done—and that was enough.
But there’s so much Matt didn’t know—Matt, the troopers behind our field at the dome, the young soldier who carried me through red hell just before Matt’s disruptors did their job. There are some things we can’t talk about, even to that most exclusive group of men who make up Starpath.
You can’t tell a man he’s a Starpath trooper because he’s one out of a billion—because his brain contains some rare quality that enables him to withstand that terrible twist through whatever strange dimensions Starpath passes. You can’t tell a Starpath cadet he has one slim chance in hell of making it through his initial flight—of waking up to stand on a new world and gaze at unknown stars.
Oh, we try. We try to weed them out before it’s time for that deadly voyage through wrenching darkness. But—we need them—we need them so badly!
And if we think they can make it—if we think they might make it we put them into a Starpath capsule and shut out the thoughts that come.
When we get a Matt DeLuso, a man who can ride the Starpath lanes, we give him hell and tell him he’s a foul-up Cadet who’ll probably never make the grade. What can you tell him? That you lost a thousand others in another dimension, hoping for one DeLuso?
You see, there isn’t any vast, Starpath army out there. It doesn’t exist. We don’t have a cop on every beat to guard the alien stars. We don’t have anything like that at all.
We have half a thousand troopers—five hundred men—and 3,000 lonely worlds spread across the great spiral arm. Three thousand tiny, vulnerable worlds, and only five hundred men who can span the depths between them. That’s it. That’s the Starpath secret:
We spread out from Earth too fast. We weren’t ready to fling colonies across the great gulfs between the stars. We weren’t ready because our ships were too slow to spread a network of impregnable defenses over a thousand light-years.
We weren’t ready because there was always the chance of Priority Red.
And now it’s happened. A nonhuman intelligence. An alien intelligence that wiped out the colony on Corphyrion without a second thought.
Starpath has warned the other worlds, and the ships are sweeping out to the far reaches with men and weapons. But starships take too long—much, much too long to save a world. Only Starpath can be there instantaneously—when it happens. It’s up to Starpath to hold them back until we can build new, faster ships—ships with Starpath drives that can wrench an armada through the dark dimensions to any point in the galaxy.
It’ll take time, but we can do it.
We must do it!
END
1967
APPLE
John Baxter
Scientists consider that Man’s size is between the macrocosm and the microcosm. John Baxter takes an apple and an insect out of context with their normal size to produce a horribly fascinating story of what might happen if the balance of Nature is disturbed.
THE apple was red, smooth, coldly perfect. One patch, almost obscured by the shadow it cast in the soft light, was green, a blemish that served only to show up the flawless purity of the remaining colour. It lay on its side, letting light spill into the recesses of its hollow, from which the stalk jutted inconclusively, terminating in a small leaf, greenly transparent.
Low down, near the ground, a crater had been gouged out, exposing the white flesh. The hollow was an irregular one and already the air had turned most of the higher points to a rusty brown. Much of the rest was creamy with incipient decay.
A town lay just under this crater, half its three hundred houses in morning sunlight, the others obscured by the dark terminator of the apple’s vast shadow.
To Billings, standing three miles away, it looked as if the apple itself were getting ready to snap up the rabble of houses over which it hovered, but when he looked up at the mass of the fruit looming solid and red in the strengthening light, its colour accentuated by the climbing sun, the sensation passed. It was as solid and immovable as the others. Faced finally with the thing he had travelled fifty miles to find, he dropped the long case of tools, hitched up his leather apron and reflectively massaged away some of the aches that had plagued him this last half day of hill climbing.
The valley before him, Billings thought, looked like a mouth, the apple lying on a broad and smooth tongue of brown earth surrounded on three sides by a gap-toothed mountain range that grinned obscenely at him. His climb had brought him out of the throat, a narrow gully of dry eart
h rippled with erosion scars like a tumbled cloth. Standing now at the root of the tongue, he luxuriously scratched away a recalcitrant colony of itches on his neck, picked up once again the clanking bag of tools and moved reluctantly on.
Going down the slope was work almost as hard as his earlier climb. The ground was metal-hard, bleached by the rain to a sterile and jagged mass from which grains of mica and quartz glinted back the yellow sunlight. All atomic grounds had the same look; riven, like scraps of another world. No man, and especially not one of his trade, had to have one pointed out to him. The dead earth and the weird giant fruits it spawned were indication enough, just two of the jokes war had played on the human race. Like the Moths.
Head down, his eyes on the fissured ground, Billings tramped the long road to the town, thinking only of sitting down, loosening his tight apron and belt, discussing his fee with the town Boss. Mild pleasures, but the only one most Moth Killers knew. Staining the air he could smell the rotting juice of the apple, sweet and diseased, matching the bilious glow of the sun. He ignored the stink and soon it faded from his sensations.
He placed the Boss as soon as he saw him, then forgot his existence. He was young, ugly, tough—his town was the same. A ragged puddle of gimcrack shacks latticed with crooked muddy streets, its weak hold on reality was accentuated by the bulk of the apple looming above it, needing only a touch to roll down on it like a red moon, crushing the miners and their houses into the earth. But nobody cared. Women stood gossiping at their doors while children paddled around in the mudholes. There was an endless traffic of handcarts along the street carrying sawn slabs of apple flesh to the presses or returning empty to pick up a fresh load. As the two men, Boss and Moth Killer, went by, the people bent their heads but said nothing.
Close to the mine, traffic was thicker and more hurried, the miners’ movements more antlike than ever. The apple loomed over them, cutting off the light, and in the mire of mud and juice that surrounded the entrance to the mine, the men moved like naked spectres, shiny with the apple’s blood.