A few of the buildings were roofed or doored with sheets of metal, some of which were oddly curved. Acting as a garden fence were enormous blades like those of the rotor of a troop-carrying helicopter.
“Hey, Colonel. Look here!”
A man was pointing at a thin metal door. Peeling paint revealed part of a vast yellow star—the Asiatics’ aircraft insignia.
“The damn gooks!” Men looked about them with the alert anger of those who meet respected rivals in new territory.
“It don’t figure. Colonel. Our ‘copter guys said the people they saw here were white and a few black.”
“Maybe the gooks keep’em as slaves.”
“Them Asiatics wouldn’t build a place like this!”
That last argument, Hobson thought, was convincing. He had seen an Asiatic settlement or two, and they had looked like concentration camps. The huts and gardens of this village showed too much individuality to be under Asiatic authority. But why were they undefended?
LaPorte, with a look of growing concern, was counting helicopter blades. There were enough of them to have carried in a considerable number of the Asiatics. LaPorte looked closely at Hobson, who shrugged and shook his head. The people he could sense hiding confidently in the woods seemed not at all like yellow troops.
The colonel set most of his men in a defensive perimeter around the village, then ordered a small crew into the huts to check for booby traps.
The doors were standing open. Inside the huts there were some evidences of hasty departure but little of value had been left in sight. LaPorte temporarily forbade looting; it could be done in an organized way after the locals were definitely taken care of.
“Hey, Colonel, we caught one of ’em! Says he wants to talk to you.”
Hobson focused on the thin little man being led into the village between two New Americans. The captive’s fear was obvious even to normal senses.
“Wants to talk, does he?” LaPorte looked the prisoner up and down. “Well, I won’t mind if he talks.”
LaPorte led the way into a hut already searched for booby traps. He relaxed in a chair, his boots among the dishes on a table. Hobson entered reluctantly and took a stand at one side of the single room, hoping desperately that this would be a short and mild interrogation. The heavy window shutters were open, letting in spring air and sunshine.
The prisoner pushed stumbling into the hut by the soldiers was about forty years old, not starved-looking but naturally scrawny. His clothes were not worth stealing. His gaze slid away from Hobson’s, fell to the floor before LaPorte’s. One big New American, a dedicated sadist, waited in the doorway behind the man.
LaPorte pretended to yawn and stretch. “Where are your people?”
“Off—off there in the woods. H-hiding. They’ll come back p-pretty soon. I—I have to talk to you first.”
The prisoner was all swamping waves of fear, which was natural enough—or was it? It did not feel to Hobson quite like fear of physical pain. Hobson kept alert for any mass change in the emotional climate outside the hut.
LaPorte made the noise he used fora laugh. “You have to talk? Are you the leader, then?”
“No, no.” The little man radiated positive disgust at the suggestion, a negation of ambition as strong as any Hobson had ever detected. “No, they just—sent me to talk. My name’s Joe Norwood.”
“Well, I’m just delighted, Joe Norwood. Did they send you to talk to the Asiatics when they came here?”
“Yes.”
“When you scared off those gooks, which way did they go?” And LaPorte guffawed.
NORWOOD sneaked a look over his shoulder at the bulky, grinning guard. “Please—look—let me tell what they said to tell, first. Then I’ll answer anything I can.”
“Who’s they?”
A nod over a thin shoulder. “Some—some of the folks back there. They’re smarter about things than I am.”
“All right. What’s this great message?”
“I’m supposed to tell you about—life.” Norwood made the word important.
LaPorte’s eyes flicked over to Hobson, who made the agreed-upon signal that everything was as it seemed, so far as he could tell. Hobson could nearly always detect the emotional traces of a lie, or the odd and unnamed things that accompanied the use of a psi power.
Norwood spoke quickly, trying to get out his message. “Life as a whole—it spreads out, you know. It tries to fill every bit of space everywhere on Earth. Some—some guys think one reason men have brains is so they can spread life further some day, out to other planets and—and stars and places.”
The message had been memorized—in essence, not word for word—and delivery of it was a labor of love. Norwood stood taller as he spoke it.
“Once—let me see—once in England a long time back there was a kind of beetle. Birds were its natural enemy, but it was just the same color as the bark of the trees it lived on. The birds had a hard time seeing it; they couldn’t kill off all the beetles, or even most of them.”
The colonel was receiving philosophy and beetles with mounting irritation. But with a certain satisfaction, too. Probably he was now convinced that he faced a community of sweet talking religious nuts who had sent this fanatic to convert him.
“But then the factories came,” said the fanatic. “And the smoke darkened the trees, and the birds could see the beetles and eat them.”
LaPorte said: “So the beetles sent one fruity beetle to talk to the birds. Get to the point, hey?” The guard behind Norwood laughed obsequiously.
Norwood was fearfully determined. “No, no. Some of the beetles, maybe one in a thousand, had always been darker than the others. Now the dark ones matched the bark and the light ones didn’t and finally the—uh—the whole species of beetle was dark. Only one in a thousand was light. I’m not telling this right!” Norwood looked around as if for help, clenching his thin hands. “I’ve got to convince you. They said I might be able to!”
LaPorte now looked like an actor in a comedy doing the slow-bum bit, sitting there with a pasted-on smile. But he was not acting and none of it was comedy to Hobson. He had the sickening thought that this was going to be a bad interrogation. Hobson doubted that he could stand to watch it. Soon it would begin, the real questioning: How many men have you? How many guns? Gasoline? Ammunition? Food? Where? And the beating would start, to make sure the answers were right, and just on general principles. What can I do about it, Hobson moaned to himself. Nothing, his rising anger answered; you have no guts to do anything, you miserable, crawling . . .
“What happened to the Asiatics, you obscenity?” LaPorte was smiling. Hobson could smell the cesspool boiling up behind that happy face.
Norwood closed his eyes for a moment, radiating fear to Hobson, but also determination and a tremulous anger. “The yellow soldiers came here and said we’d have to obey them. Right at the start they hurt some of us, for no reason at all . . . Let me try to say it this way. Life defends itself, see? Every way it can. Every kind of animal has some defense against its natural enemies. A man has no natural enemy except other men, the brains of other men. But now some men are a danger to all of life!”
Sudden suspicion flared in the colonel’s mind; his boots thumped to the floor. “Can you read emotions?” he barked. “Predict reactions? Raise fires?” He ran quickly through the short list of known psi talents. “Can anybody here do these things?”
“No, no.” Norwood shook his head. He glanced over at Hobson and seemed about to smile, as if finally guessing Hobson’s function. Now Hobson, in his increasing shame and self-disgust, would have I dared to lie to LaPorte. But he could think of no lie that would help Norwood or his people. Hobson signaled honestly that the prisoner was telling the truth.
LaPorte leaned forward in his chair. “Now this is your last chance to stay in one piece, mister. Talk straight and tell me where the gooks went. We know they were here.”
Tell him, tell him, pleaded Hobson in his own mind. If this turns in
to a bad interrogation, I won’t be able to stand by. I’ll go wild and get myself killed.
NORWOOD, cringing but still determined, recited memorized words like a last desperate incantation against evil. “You have to listen! Life defends itself against the power of one human brain by using another human brain. Life doesn’t care about individuals—it feeds on itself all the time anyway. Uh—a feedback set-up—”
La Porte’s anger passed critical mass. But as he opened his mouth to speak there came a cry from outside the hut. The cry of a woman in pain or trouble: “Joe, Joe!”
The dominant emotions out there were not those of an attacking force, which Hobson would have noticed sooner, but an intense interlocked web of fear and lust, hate and guilt, emanating from a handful of people.
Norwood spun around to face the open doorway of the hut. The massive guard blocked his way like a stone column, grinning, pushing a pistol barrel up under Norwood’s chin. But the little man, and Hobson, could see past the guard to the outside. There a young woman struggled in the grip of two soldiers who were dragging her into the village. Again she cried out: “Joe!”
“My wife,” whispered Norwood. He broadcast despair, and rising fury.
“Watch what comes next,” grunted LaPorte, his good cheer returning.
Hobson knew suddenly, with a detached wonder at his own final courage, that he had had it, that he was casting his own small vote here and now against the New Third Reich. His fingers closed on his pistol. His gaze was on the middle button of Colonel LaPorte’s jacket.
But from the corner of his eye, Hobson saw Norwood reaching up for the guard’s gun. Hobson hesitated, thinking: shoot the guard first, he has his gun drawn . . . then shoot LaPorte . . . then remember to save one bullet.
Norwood hardly looked capable of making a quick forceful grab and he was not attempting one, just reaching up his hand . . .
. . . and time stood still for Hobson as something new to him came in a great wave against his extra sense, something he could compare to the psi he knew only as the ocean tide might be compared to the wake of a motorboat. Hobson stood frozen, his gun half drawn, watching the brawny guard topple stiffly backward, relaxing his grip on his weapon as Norwood’s fingers closed on it.
Hobson thought the fabric of the universe was tearing apart. He could only wait like an awed child, vaguely aware of Norwood ignoring him, ignoring LaPorte, Norwood fumbling inexpertly with the gun and stalked out of the hut, his small chin jutting in anger. Men’s voices began to yell outside the hut, first near, then far away. There were no shots, no sounds of fighting.
The tide of—something—receded slowly from Hobson’s perception. The fabric of the universe was stable and familiar once more. The sun shone brightly through the open windows of the hut. A fly cruised in, then unconcernedly left through the doorway.
Everything was quiet. Even LaPorte. Any awareness of the colonel had been blasted from Hobson’s consciousness by the awesome feat he had witnessed, but now he forced himself to turn.
LaPorte lay back dead in his chair, apparently unwounded, eyes wide, mouth slack, the pasted smile gone with everything that had been behind it. His right hand was clutching at his gun holster.
The quiet was profound. Staring at the dead figure, Hobson tried to comprehend. His extra sense was still numbed by whatever had happened, as his eyes might have been dazzled by glaring light. He could not tell what was going on outside.
He found that, for the moment at least, he did not much care. He finally finished drawing his pistol, looked at it, then dropped it back into the holster. He walked out slowly into the sun, stepping over the motionless legs of the fallen guard.
There were dead New Americans scattered everywhere, quite a number of them. Joe Norwood stood a few yards from the hut, his arms around his wife, his face on her shoulder, the gun hanging in his hand as if forgotten.
“Joe, it was my fault, not yours,” the woman was saying in low, comforting tones. “I wanted to stay near you. But I wasn’t careful enough, and they found me . . . it’s all right, Joe. It was their own fault.” She noticed Hobson as he walked slowly toward them. She fell silent a moment, then went on consoling. “A lot of them ran away, Joe. And here’s one who didn’t mean you any harm. He can join us now.”
Norwood looked around and Hobson saw tears in his eyes. Hobson stood there waiting, not really expecting to go on living from one moment to the next.
“I wanted to explain things,” said Norwood, staring Into space. “I just came right out and told the yellow soldiers, but they didn’t believe me. This time I tried to go slow, give the whole picture, but it didn’t help. If only I could talk better. If only I could explain!”
“Explain about—you?” Hobson asked. Suddenly it came to him that he was beginning to understand. He felt tired and shaky, now that it seemed he might be going on living.
Norwood spoke in a dry whisper. “Anyone who decides to do something that will hurt me, dies. Dies right there and then.” He looked at Hobson. “When I was a boy, I saw another kid draw back his arm to throw an icy snowball.” He screamed at Hobson suddenly, “When I was five, my father tried to spank me!”
“Hush, Joe. Hush. It’s all right now.”
Norwood’s eyes wandered again. “I would have killed myself before now, I think. But the war came. A lot of people have died, trying to hurt me . . . so now I think I do some good. I hope to God I do some good.”
The woman stroked him. “You do, Joe. You keep us all safe.”
Hobson looked up at the bright blue sky of Earth, and saw in it a kind of hope.
INHUMAN ERROR
Can a perfect imitation of a human be done by a perfect machine?
When the dreadnought Hamilcar Barca came out of the inhuman world of plus-space into the blue-white glare of Meitner’s sun, the forty men and women of the dreadnought’s crew were taut at their battle stations, not knowing whether or not the whole berserker fleet would be around them as they emerged. But then they were in normal space, seconds of time were ticking calmly by, and there were only the stars and galaxies to be seen—no implacable, inanimate killers coming to the attack. The tautness eased a little.
Captain Liao, strapped firmly into his combat chair in the center of the dreadnought’s bridge, had brought his ship back into normal space as close to Meitner’s sun as he dared—operating on interstellar, faster-than-light, c-plus drive in a gravitational field this strong was dangerous, to put it mildly—but the orbit of the one planet of the system worth being concerned about was still tens of millions of kilometers closer to the central sun. It was known simply as Meitner’s planet, and was the one rock in the system habitable in terms of gravity and temperature.
Before his ship had been ten standard seconds in normal space, Liao had begun to focus a remotely controlled telescope to bring the planet into close view on a screen that hung before him on the bridge. Luck had brought him to the same side of the sun that the planet happened to be on; it showed under magnification on the screen as a thin, illuminated crescent, covered with fluffy-looking perpetual clouds. Somewhere beneath those clouds a human colony of about ten thousand people dwelt, for the most part under the shelter of one huge ceramic dome. The colonists had begun work on the titanic project of converting the planet’s ammonia atmosphere to a breathable one of nitrogen and oxygen. Meanwhile, they held the planet as an outpost of some importance for the interstellar community of all Earth-descended men.
There were no flares of battle visible in space around the planet, but still, Liao lost no time in transmitting a message on the standard radio and laser communications frequencies. “Meitner’s planet, calling Meitner’s. This is the dreadnought Hamilcar Barca. Are you under attack? Do you need immediate assistance?”
There came no immediate answer, nor could one be expected for several minutes, the time required for signals traveling at the speed of light to reach the planet, and for an answer to be returned.
Into Liao’s earphones now came
the voice of his detection and ranging officer, “Captain, we have three ships in view.” On the bridge there now sprang to life a three-dimensional holographic presentation, showing Liao the situation as accurately as the dreadnought’s far-ranging detection systems and elaborate combat computers could diagram it.
One ship, appearing as a small bright dot with attached numerical coordinates, was hanging relatively motionless in space, nearly on a line between Hamilcar Barca and Meitner’s planet. The symbol chosen for it indicated that this was probably a sizable craft, though not nearly as massive as the dreadnought. The other two ships visible in the presentation were much smaller, according to the mass-detector readings on them. They were also both considerably closer to the planet, and moving toward it at velocities that would let them land on it, if that was their intention, in less than an hour.
What these three ships were up to, and whether they were controlled by human beings or berserker machines, was not immediately apparent. After sizing up the situation for a few seconds, Liao ordered fall speed toward the planet—fall speed, of course, in the sense of remaining in normal space and thus traveling much slower than light—and to each of the three ships in view he ordered the same message beamed: “Identify yourself, or be destroyed.”
The threat was no bluff. No one took chances where berserker machines were concerned. They were an armada of robot spaceships and supporting devices built by some unknown and long-vanished race to fight in some interstellar war that had reached its forgotten conclusion while men on Earth were wielding spears against the saber-toothed tiger. Though the war for which the berserker machines had been made was long since over, still they fought on across the galaxy, replicating and repairing themselves endlessly, learning new strategies and tactics, refining their weapons to cope with their chief new enemy, Earth-descended man. The sole known basic in their fundamental programming was the destruction of all life, wherever and whenever they could find it.
Waiting for replies from the planet and the three ships, hoping fervently that the berserker fleet that was known to be on its way here had not already come and gone, leaving the helpless colony destroyed, Liao meanwhile studied his instruments critically. “Drive, this is captain. Can’t you get a little more speed on?”
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