The reporter hesitated; he was well aware of the Admiral’s reputation for near-absolute silence on the subject of his already legendary cruise, the fabulous voyage of the Galahad. He couldn’t just barge in on the Admiral and demand answers, as was usual with publicity-hungry politicians and show people. He could score the biggest story of the century today; but he had to hit him right.
You couldn’t hope to snow a man like the Admiral; he wasn’t somebody you could push around. You could sense the solid iron of him from here.
Nobody else had noticed the solitary diner. The Era man drifted closer, moving unhurriedly, thinking furiously. It was no good trying some tricky approach; his best bet was the straight-from-the-shoulder bit. No point in hesitating. He stopped beside the table.
The Admiral was looking out across the Gulf. He turned and glanced up at the reporter.
The news man looked him squarely in the eye. “I’m a reporter, Admiral,” he said. “Will you talk to me?”
The Admiral nodded to the seat across from him. “Sit down,” he said. He glanced around the room.
The reporter caught the look. “I’ll keep it light, sir,” he said. “I don’t want company either.” That was being frank.
* * * *
“You want the answers to some questions, don’t you?” the Admiral said.
“Why, yes, sir,” the reporter said. He started to inconspicuously key his pocket recorder, but caught himself. “May I record your remarks, Admiral?” he said. Frankness all the way.
“Go ahead,” said the Admiral.
“Now, Admiral,” the reporter began, “the Terran public has of course…”
“Never mind the patter, son,” the Admiral said mildly. “I know what the questions are. I’ve read all the memoirs of the crew. They’ve been coming out at the rate of about two a year for some time now. I had my own reasons for not wanting to add anything to my official statement.”
The Admiral poured wine into his glass. “Excuse me,” he said. “Will you join me?” He signalled the waiter.
“Another wine glass, please,” he said. He looked at the golden wine in the glass, held it up to the light. “You know, the Florida wines are as good as any in the world,” he said. “That’s not to say the California and Ohio wines aren’t good. But this Flora Pinellas is a genuine original, not an imitation Rhine; and it compares favorably with the best of the old vintages, particularly the ’87.”
The glass arrived and the waiter poured. The reporter had the wit to remain silent.
* * * *
“The first question is usually, how did I know I could take the Mancji ship. After all, it was big, vast. It loomed over us like a mountain. The Mancji themselves weighed almost two tons each; they liked six gee gravity. They blasted our communication off the air, just for practice. They talked big, too. We were invaders in their territory. They were amused by us. So where did I get the notion that our attack would be anything more than a joke to them? That’s the big question.” The Admiral shook his head.
“The answer is quite simple. In the first place, they were pulling six gees by using a primitive dumbbell configuration. The only reason for that type of layout, as students of early space vessel design can tell you, is to simplify setting up a gee field effect using centrifugal force. So they obviously had no gravity field generators.
“Then their transmission was crude. All they had was simple old-fashioned short-range radio, and even that was noisy and erratic. And their reception was as bad. We had to use a kilowatt before they could pick it up at 200 miles. We didn’t know then it was all organically generated; that they had no equipment.”
The Admiral sipped his wine, frowning at the recollection. “I was pretty sure they were bluffing when I changed course and started after them. I had to hold our acceleration down to two and a half gees because I had to be able to move around the ship. And at that acceleration we gained on them. They couldn’t beat us. And it wasn’t because they couldn’t take high gees; they liked six for comfort, you remember. No, they just didn’t have the power.”
* * * *
The Admiral looked out the window.
“Add to that the fact that they apparently couldn’t generate ordinary electric current. I admit that none of this was conclusive, but after all, if I was wrong we were sunk anyway. When Thomas told me the nature of the damage to our radar and communications systems, that was another hint. Their big display of Mancji power was just a blast of radiation right across the communication spectrum; it burned tubes and blew fuses; nothing else. We were back in operation an hour after our attack.
“The evidence was there to see, but there’s something about giant size that gets people rattled. Size alone doesn’t mean a thing. It’s rather like the bluff the Soviets ran on the rest of the world for a couple of decades back in the war era, just because they sprawled across half the globe. They were a giant, though it was mostly frozen desert. When the showdown came they didn’t have it. They were a pushover.
“All right, the next question is why did I choose H. E. instead of going in with everything I had? That’s easy, too. What I wanted was information, not revenge. I still had the heavy stuff in reserve and ready to go if I needed it, but first I had to try to take them alive. Vaporizing them wouldn’t have helped our position. And I was lucky; it worked.
“The, ah, confusion below evaporated as soon as the Section chiefs got a look at the screens and realized that we had actually knocked out the Mancji. We matched speeds with the wreckage and the patrols went out to look for a piece of ship with a survivor in it. If we’d had no luck we would have tackled the other half of the ship, which was still intact and moving off fast. But we got quite a shock when we found the nature of the wreckage.” The Admiral grinned.
“Of course today everybody knows all about the Mancji hive intelligence, and their evolutionary history. But we were pretty startled to find that the only wreckage consisted of the Mancji themselves, each two-ton slug in his own hard chitin shell. Of course, a lot of the cells were ruptured by the explosions, but most of them had simply disassociated from the hive mass as it broke up. So there was no ship; just a cluster of cells like a giant bee hive, and mixed up among the slugs, the damnedest collection of loot you can imagine. The odds and ends they’d stolen and tucked away in the hive during a couple hundred years of camp-following.
“The patrols brought a couple of cells alongside, and Mannion went out to try to establish contact. Sure enough, he got a very faint transmission, on the same bands as before. The cells were talking to each other in their own language. They ignored Mannion even though his transmission must have blanketed everything within several hundred miles. We eventually brought one of them into the cargo lock and started trying different wave-lengths on it. Then Kramer had the idea of planting a couple of electrodes and shooting a little juice to it. Of course, it loved the DC, but as soon as we tried AC, it gave up. So we had a long talk with it and found out everything we needed to know.
* * * *
“It was a four-week run to the nearest outpost planet of the New Terran Federation, and they took me on to New Terra aboard one of their fast liaison vessels. The rest you know. We, the home planet, were as lost to the New Terrans as they were to us. They greeted us as though we were their own ancestors come back to visit them.
“Most of my crew, for personal reasons, were released from duty there, and settled down to stay.
“The clean-up job here on Earth was a minor operation to their Navy. As I recall, the trip back was made in a little over five months, and the Red Tide was killed within four weeks of the day the task force arrived. I don’t think they wasted a motion. One explosive charge per cell, of just sufficient size to disrupt the nucleus. When the critical number of cells had been killed, the rest died overnight.
“It was quite a different Earth that emerged from under the plague, though. You know it had taken over all of the land area except North America and a strip of Western Europe, and all of the
sea it wanted. It was particularly concentrated over what had been the jungle areas of South America, Africa, and Asia. You must realize that in the days before the Tide, those areas were almost completely uninhabitable. You have no idea what the term Jungle really implied. When the Tide died, it disintegrated into its component molecules; and the result was that all those vast fertile Jungle lands were now beautifully levelled and completely cleared areas covered with up to twenty feet of the richest topsoil imaginable. That was what made it possible for old Terra to become what she is today; the Federation’s truck farm, and the sole source of those genuine original Terran foods that all the rest of the worlds pay such fabulous prices for.
“Strange how quickly we forget. Few people today remember how we loathed and feared the Tide when we were fighting it. Now it’s dismissed as a blessing in disguise.”
The Admiral paused. “Well,” he said, “I think that answers the questions and gives you a bit of homespun philosophy to go with it.”
* * * *
“Admiral,” said the reporter, “you’ve given the public some facts it’s waited a long time to hear. Coming from you, sir, this is the greatest story that could have come out of this Reunion Day celebration. But there is one question more, if I may ask it. Can you tell me, Admiral, just how it was that you rejected what seemed to be prima facie proof of the story the Mancji told; that they were the lords of creation out there, and that humanity was nothing but a tame food animal to them?”
The Admiral sighed. “I guess it’s a good question,” he said. “But there was nothing supernatural about my figuring that one. I didn’t suspect the full truth, of course. It never occurred to me that we were the victims of the now well-known but still inexplicable sense of humor of the Mancji, or that they were nothing but scavengers around the edges of the Federation. The original Omega ship had met them and seen right through them.
* * * *
“Well, when this hive spotted us coming in, they knew enough about New Terra to realize at once that we were strangers, coming from outside the area. It appealed to their sense of humor to have the gall to strut right out in front of us and try to put over a swindle. What a laugh for the oyster kingdom if they could sell Terrans on the idea that they were the master race. It never occurred to them that we might be anything but Terrans; Terrans who didn’t know the Mancji. And they were canny enough to use an old form of Interlingua; somewhere they’d met men before.
“Then we needed food. They knew what we ate, and that was where they went too far. They had, among the flotsam in their hive, a few human bodies they had picked up from some wreck they’d come across in their travels. They had them stashed away like everything else they could lay a pseudopod on. So they stacked them the way they’d seen Terran frozen foods shipped in the past, and sent them over. Another of their little jokes.
“I suppose if you’re already overwrought and eager to quit, and you’ve been badly scared by the size of an alien ship, it’s pretty understandable that the sight of human bodies, along with the story that they’re just a convenient food supply, might seem pretty convincing. But I was already pretty dubious about the genuineness of our pals, and when I saw those bodies it was pretty plain that we were hot on the trail of Omega Colony. There was no other place humans could have come from out there. We had to find out the location from the Mancji.”
“But, Admiral,” said the reporter, “true enough they were humans, and presumably had some connection with the colony, but they were naked corpses stacked like cordwood. The Mancji had stated that these were slaves, or rather domesticated animals; they wouldn’t have done you any good.”
“Well, you see, I didn’t believe that,” the Admiral said. “Because it was an obvious lie. I tried to show some of the officers, but I’m afraid they weren’t being too rational just then.
“I went into the locker and examined those bodies; if Kramer had looked closely, he would have seen what I did. These were no tame animals. They were civilized men.”
“How could you be sure, Admiral? They had no clothing, no identifying marks, nothing. Why didn’t you believe they were cattle?”
“Because,” said the Admiral, “all the men had nice neat haircuts.”
JUMPING THE LINE, by Grania Davis
There was a sub audible rumbling far up ahead. It acted like a trigger to Bi, even in sound sleep. He had been sleeping, hadn’t he? Yes, the night was still deep, and he had been dreaming. He hadn’t been dreaming about anything. That was funny, lately he had been dreaming a lot, but the dreams didn’t have any content.
Others had also sensed the rumble of motion far up ahead and were awakening. Nothing would happen for a while yet, probably not until after dawn. But everyone wanted to be ready. Babies cried. Some cook fires were lit to boil tea. Others lay tense in their bedrolls, not wanting to face a long wait in the predawn chill, but not wanting to fall back to sleep, either.
Bi sat up. He didn’t want to leave his warm, cozy roll, but he had to relieve himself. “Hold my spot,” he muttered to nobody in particular.
It was just a pro forma request. Nobody jumped at night. He moved a little ways out, but not too far. You didn’t want to be out in the bush at night, big critters might come around.
Bi found his way back to his roll and crawled inside. He was too sleepy to light a cookfire, and he really wasn’t hungry or thirsty. Still, some hot bush tea would be warming. Maybe the family group up ahead would offer him some. But they never did, so why should they now? “Take care of your own.”
Bi had been solo for a while now. He’d left his own family group because he couldn’t stand the constant squabbles and fighting over ration. The family was too big, anyway, they didn’t mind if a few dependents drifted off. So Bi drifted, enjoying the silence and solitude, not enjoying the hunger and big critters, until he had a chance to jump. And here he was, among strangers, but still waiting for that same rumble up ahead.
It was getting pinkish in the east, now, and folks were getting ready. Bi lit a very small fire and heated up some tea and a little ration. He felt slightly queasy, not really awake. He ate, wrapped up his mess kit and tied up his roll and sat down upon it. There was a definite feeling of movement up ahead, but it would still be a while.
The sun had risen through the morning mists, illuminating the low rolling hills and the grey-green grasslands. There was a steady drone of critters.
Bi sat on his roll with his head in his hands. He looked up ahead. There was that Pretty again, part of the big family group. She always seemed to be laughing, with high pink cheeks and dark tangly hair. If there had been some pretties like that in his family group, he might have stuck around. But they were all double-uglies. The laughing girl became aware of Bi’s eyes upon her and pulled her faded quilted robe more tightly around her body. She was busy minding a baby, laughing and playing with it while its mother packed the kits and rolls.
But Bi had no more time to eyeball pretties. The feeling of motion was growing in the misty morning sun. The rumble became the sounds of individuals strapping up their belongings. It was happening just up ahead. Bi was ready to go when, like a single organism, a vast centipede, the long line began to move steadily forward.
How far would they move this time? No one could ever say. Sometimes they only moved a few yards, or a few feet, and then they came to a halt again. All the excitement and preparations for nothing. Sometimes they wound slowly ahead for half a day, through trampled grasslands and over the low rolling hills, until their seldom-used legs grew tired and their foreheads were covered with sweat.
But it didn’t matter whether the line moved just a little or a great long distance. You had to be ready to move with it, or you would lose your place.
* * * *
The afternoon fogs came up thick in the great, flat grasslands, muffling even the hum of critters. Bi was shaky with hunger and thirst by the time they stopped. This had been one of the longest moves he could remember, from dawn until the late afternoon. Slo
w, steady movement all day long. No chance to stop and rest, to cook tea and ration. Nothing but a few bites of gummy, raw ration and sips of tinny cold water to keep him going. Bi hated that. You were supposed to cook the ration to make it congeal into an edible form. And the tinned water was foul tasting unless strong bush was steeped in it to make tea. But now they were stopping at last. Like a long audible sigh, people settled down on the damp, flat ground, spread their bedrolls, and began to light cookfires.
Then came another, welcome sound from way up ahead, the rumble of the carts. Bi waited listlessly, staring at nothing in the mist. The sun was just setting over a low rise of ground. You could see it illuminating a patch of swirling fog. For a moment the fog parted and a shaft of sun shone through, making Bi’s eyes water. He rubbed them and looked again. He thought he could just make it out in the distance. Sometimes you could see it when the fog parted, though many folks said it was just a mirage. The Other Line, way off against the horizon. Another line, just like his own. Sometimes moving, mostly standing still. Another long line of people, briefly glimpsed against the horizon when the fog parted. Some people thought it was a curve or extension of their own line; other people thought it wasn’t real at all, just a trick of the eyes, a reflection against the fog. But Bi figured it was just another line. If there was one line, there could be two. Why not?
When Bi drifted, he thought of going across the plain to check out the other line. But check it out for what? Why? And what about the critters? They get real big, way out in the bush, he’d heard. So he didn’t bother. He just drifted, hungry and silent until he could jump a spot in the line. But he sometimes wondered why were there two lines? Why was there any line at all?
The sound of the carts was quite loud now. Bi’s stomach grumbled eagerly. He could see them, just up ahead. Big yellow carts of glimmery metal, stopping to service every family group or solo. They rumbled up to the family group just ahead. That Pretty with the tangly hair held a big tin under the long tube that dispensed water, while a triple-ugly held another tin under the ration spout. The carts were pulled by drifters who couldn’t manage to jump and by misfits, troublemakers and ultra-uglies who couldn’t get along in their family group. They were pushed out of the line, and when they got lonely and hungry enough, they strapped themselves to the carts and helped to pull, in return for their share of ration. But they lost their place in line, forever.
The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack Page 37