The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

by Harry Turtledove

  Bones of cattle in the fields, though. I been seeing them so much now I hardly take notice anymore.

  There’s a silence here so deep that the wind streaming through the pines seems loud. I don’t like it, to come so far and see nobody. I keep my paper bag close.

  Fairhope’s a pretty town, big oaks leaning out over the streets and a long pier down at the bay with a park where you can go cast fishing. I’ve always liked it here, intended to move down until the prices shot up so much.

  We went by some stores with windows smashed in, and that’s when we saw the man.

  ANGEL

  He was waiting for us. Standing beside the street, in jeans and a floppy yellow shirt all grimy and not tucked in. I waved at him the instant I saw him, and he waved back. I yelled, excited, but he didn’t say anything.

  Bud screeched on the brakes. I jumped down and went around the tail of the truck. Johnny followed me.

  The man was skinny as a rail and leaning against a telephone pole. A long, scraggly beard hid his face, but the eyes beamed out at us, seeming to pick up the sunlight.

  “Hello!” I said again.

  “Kiss.” That was all.

  “We came from…” and my voice trailed off because the man pointed at me.

  “Kiss.”

  MR. ACKERMAN

  I followed Angel and could tell right away the man was suffering from malnutrition. The clothes hung off him.

  “Can you give us information?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, why not, friend? We’ve come looking for the parents of—”

  “Kiss first.”

  I stepped back. “Well, now, you have no right to demand—”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bud had gotten out of the cab and stopped and was going back in now, probably for his gun. I decided to save the situation before somebody got hurt.

  “Angel, go over to him and speak nicely to him. We need—”

  “Kiss now.”

  The man pointed again with a bony finger.

  Angel said, “I’m not going to go—” and stopped because the man’s hand went down to his belt. He pulled up the filthy yellow shirt to reveal a pistol tucked in his belt.

  “Kiss.”

  “Now friend, we can—”

  The man’s hand came up with the pistol and reached level, pointing at us.

  “Pussy.”

  Then his head blew into a halo of blood.

  BUD

  Damn if the one time I needed it, I left it in the cab.

  I was still fetching it out when the shot went off.

  Then another.

  TURKEY

  A man shows you his weapon in his hand, he’s a fool if he doesn’t mean to use it.

  I drew out the pistol I’d been carrying in my pocket all this time, wrapped in plastic. I got it out of the damned bag pretty quick while the man was looking crazy-eyed at Angel and bringing his piece up.

  It was no trouble at all to fix him in the notch. Couldn’t have been more than thirty feet.

  But going down he gets one off, and I feel like somebody pushed at my left calf. Then I’m rolling. Drop my pistol, too. I end up smack facedown on the hardtop, not feeling anything yet.

  ANGEL

  I like to died when the man flopped down, so sudden I thought he’d slipped, until then the bang registered.

  I rushed over, but Turkey shouted, “Don’t touch him.”

  Mr. Ackerman said, “You idiot! That man could’ve told us—”

  “Told nothing,” Turkey said. “He’s crazy.”

  Then I notice Turkey’s down, too. Susan is working on him, rolling up his jeans. It’s gone clean through his big muscle there.

  Bud went to get a stick. Poked the man from a safe distance. Managed to pull his shirt aside. We could see the sores all over his chest. Something terrible it looked.

  Mr. Ackerman was swearing and calling us idiots until we saw that. Then he shut up.

  TURKEY

  Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right.

  Paid back for the pain. Dull, heavy ache it was, spreading. Susan gives me a shot and a pill and has me bandaged up tight. Blood stopped easy, she says. I clot good.

  We decided to get out of there, not stopping to look for Johnny’s parents.

  We got three blocks before the way was blocked.

  It was a big metal cylinder, fractured on all sides. Glass glittering around it.

  Right in the street. You can see where it hit the roof of a clothing store, Bedsole’s, caved in the front of it and rolled into the street.

  They all get out and have a look, me sitting in the cab. I see the Russian writing again on the end of it.

  I don’t know much, but I can make out at the top CeKPeT and a lot of words that look like warning, including σO’πeH, which is sick, and some more I didn’t know, and then II O OΓO’H, which is weather.

  “What’s it say?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

  “That word at the top there’s secret, and then something about biology and sickness and rain and weather.”

  “I thought you knew this writing,” he says.

  I shook my head. “I know enough.”

  “Enough to what?”

  “To know this was some kind of targeted capsule. It fell right smack in the middle of Fairhope, biggest town this side of the bay.”

  “Like the other one?” Johnny says, which surprised me. The boy is smart.

  “The one hit the causeway? Right.”

  “One what?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

  I don’t want to say it with the boy there and all, but it has to come out sometime. “Some disease. Biological warfare.”

  They stand there in the middle of Prospect Avenue with open, silent nothingness around us, and nobody says anything for the longest time. There won’t be any prospects here for a long time. Johnny’s parents we aren’t going to find, nobody we’ll find, because whatever came spurting out of this capsule when it busted open—up high, no doubt, so the wind could take it—had done its work.

  Angel sees it right off. “Must’ve been time for them to get inside,” is all she says, but she’s thinking the same as me.

  It got them into such a state that they went home and holed up to die, like an animal will. Maybe it would be different in the North or the West—people are funny out there, they might just as soon sprawl across the sidewalk—but down here people’s first thought is home, the family, the only thing that might pull them through. So they went there and they didn’t come out again.

  Mr. Ackerman says, “But there’s no smell,” which was stupid because that made it all real to the boy, and he starts to cry. I pick him up.

  JOHNNY

  ’Cause that means they’re all gone, what I been fearing ever since we crossed the causeway, and nobody’s there, it’s true, Mom Dad nobody at all anywhere just emptiness all gone.

  MC 355

  The success of the portable unit makes MC355 bold.

  It extrudes more sensors and finds not the racing blizzard winds of months before but rather warming breezes, the soft sigh of pines, a low drone of reawakening insects.

  There was no nuclear winter.

  Instead, a kind of nuclear autumn.

  The swirling jet streams have damped, the stinging ultraviolet gone. The storms retreat, the cold surge has passed. But the electromagnetic spectrum lies bare, a muted hiss. The EMP silenced man’s signals, yes.

  Opticals, fitted with new lenses, scan the night sky. Twinkling dots scoot across the blackness, scurrying on their Newtonian rounds.

  The Arcapel Colony.

  Russphere.

  US1.

  All intact. So they at least have survived.

  Unless they were riddled by buckshot-slinging antisatellite devices. But, no—the inflated storage sphere hinged beside the US1 is undeflated, unbreached.

  So man still lives in space, at least.

  MR. ACKERMAN

  Cr
azy, I thought, to go out looking for this DataComm when everybody’s dead. Just the merest step inside one of the houses proved that.

  But they wouldn’t listen to me. Those who would respectfully fall silent when I spoke now ride over my words as if I weren’t there.

  All because of that stupid incident with the sick one. He must have taken longer to die. I couldn’t have anticipated that. He just seemed hungry to me.

  It’s enough to gall a man.

  ANGEL

  The boy is calm now, just kind of tucked into himself. He knows what’s happened to his mom and dad. Takes his mind off his hurt, anyway. He bows his head down, his long dirty-blond hair hiding his expression. He leans against Turkey and they talk. I can see them through the back cab window.

  In amongst all we’ve seen, I suspect it doesn’t come through to him full yet. It will take a while. We’ll all take a while.

  We head out from Fairhope quick as we can. Not that anyplace else is different. The germs must’ve spread twenty, thirty mile inland from here. Which is why we seen nobody before who’d heard of it. Anybody close enough to know is gone.

  Susan’s the only one it doesn’t seem to bother. She keeps crooning to that box.

  Through Silverhill and on to Robertsdale. Same everywhere—no dogs bark, cattle bones drying in the fields.

  We don’t go into the houses.

  Turn south toward Foley. They put this DataComm in the most inconspicuous place, I guess because secrets are hard to keep in cities. Anyway, it’s in a pine grove south of Foley land good for soybeans and potatoes.

  SUSAN

  I went up to the little steel door they showed me once and I take a little signet thing and press it into the slot.

  Then the codes. They change them every month, but this one’s still good, ’cause the door pops open.

  Two feet thick it is. And so much under there you could spend a week finding your way.

  Bud unloads the T-Isolate, and we push it through the mud and down the ramp.

  BUD

  Susan’s better now, but I watch her careful.

  We go down into this pale white light everywhere. All neat and trim.

  Pushing that big Isolate thing, it takes a lot out of you. ’Specially when you don’t know where to.

  But the signs light up when we pass by. Somebody’s expecting.

  To the hospital is where.

  There are places to hook up this Isolate thing, and Susan does it. She is O.K. when she has something to do.

  MC 355

  The men have returned.

  Asked for shelter.

  And now, plugged in, MC355 reads the sluggish, silky, grieving mind.

  GENE

  At last…someone has found the tap-in…. I can feel the images flitlike shiny blue fish through the warm slush I float in…. Someone…asking…so I take the hard metallic ball of facts and I break it open so the someone can see…. So slowly I do it…things hard to remember…steely-bright…. I saw it all in one instant…. I was the only one on duty then with Top Secret, Weapons Grade Clearance, so it all came to me…attacks on both U.S. and USSR…some third party…only plausible scenario…a maniac…and all the counter-force and MAD and strategies options…a big joke…irrelevant…compared to the risk of accident or third parties…that was the first point, and we all realized it when the thing was only an hour old, but then it was too…

  TURKEY

  It’s creepy in here, everybody gone. I’d hoped somebody’s hid out and would be waiting, but when Bud wheels the casket thing through these halls, there’s nothing—your own voice coming back thin and empty, reflected from rooms beyond rooms beyond rooms, all waiting under here. Wobbling along on the crutches, Johnny fetched me, I get lost in this electronic city clean and hard. We are like something that washed up on the beach here. God, it must’ve cost more than all Fairhope itself, and who knew it was here? Not me.

  GENE

  A plot it was, just a goddamn plot with nothing but pure blind rage and greed behind it…and the hell of it is, we’re never going to know who did it precisely…’cause in the backwash whole governments will fall, people stab each other in the back…no way to tell who paid the fishing boat captains offshore to let the cruise missiles aboard…bet those captains were surprised when the damn things launched from the deck…bet they were told it was some kind of stunt…and then the boats all evaporated into steam when the fighters got them…no hope of getting a story out of that…all so comic when you think how easy it was…and the same for the Russians, I’m sure…dumbfounded confusion…and nowhere to turn…nobody to hit back at…so they hit us…been primed for it so long that’s the only way they could think…and even then there was hope…because the defenses worked…people got to the shelters…the satellite rockets knocked out hordes of Soviet warheads…we surely lessened the damage, with the defenses and shelters, too…but we hadn’t allowed for the essential final fact that all the science and strategy pointed to…

  BUD

  Computer asked us to put up new antennas.

  A week’s work, easy, I said.

  It took two.

  It fell to me, most of it. Be weeks before Turkey can walk. But we got it done.

  First signal comes in, it’s like we’re Columbus. Susan finds some wine and we have it all ’round.

  We get US1. The first to call them from the whole South.

  ’Cause there isn’t much South left.

  GENE

  But the history books will have to write themselves on this one…. I don’t know who it was and now don’t care…because one other point all we strategic planners and analysts missed was that nuclear winter didn’t mean the end of anything…anything at all…just that you’d be careful to not use nukes anymore…. Used to say that love would find away…but one thing I know…war will find a way, too…and this time the Soviets loaded lots of their warheads with biowar stuff, canisters fixed to blow high above cities…stuff your satellite defenses could at best riddle with shot but not destroy utterly, as they could the high explosive in nuke warheads…. All so simple…if you know there’s a nuke winter limit on the megatonnage you can deliver…you use the nukes on C31 targets and silos…and then biowar the rest of your way…. A joke, really…I even laughed over it a few times myself…we’d placed so much hope in ol’ nuke winter holding the line…rational as all hell…the scenarios all so clean…easy to calculate…we built our careers on them…. But this other way…so simple…and no end to it…and all I hope’s…hope’s…the bastard started this…some Third World general…caught some of the damned stuff, too….

  BUD

  The germs got us. Cut big stretches through the U.S. We were just lucky. The germs played out in a couple of months, while we were holed up. Soviets said they’d used the bio stuff in amongst the nukes to show us what they could do, long term. Unless the war stopped right there. Which it did.

  But enough nukes blew off here and in Russia to freeze up everybody for July and August, set off those storms.

  Germs did the most damage, though—plagues.

  It was a plague canister that hit the Slocum building. That did in Mobile.

  The war was all over in a couple of hours. The satellite people, they saw it all.

  Now they’re settling the peace.

  MR. ACKERMAN

  “We been sitting waiting on this corpse long enough,” I said, and got up.

  We got food from the commissary here. Fine, I don’t say I’m anything but grateful for that. And we rested in the bunks, got recuperated. But enough’s enough. The computer tells us it wants to talk to the man Gene some more. Fine, I say.

  Turkey stood up. “Not easy, the computer says, this talking to a man’s near dead. Slow work.”

  Looking around, I tried to take control, assume leadership again. Jutted out my chin. “Time to get back.”

  But their eyes are funny. Somehow I’d lost my real power over them. It’s not anymore like I’m the one who led them when the bombs st
arted.

  Which means, I suppose, that this thing isn’t going to be a new beginning for me. It’s going to be the same life. People aren’t going to pay me any more real respect than they ever did.

  MC 355

  So the simulations had proved right. But as ever, incomplete.

  MC355 peered at the shambling, adamant band assembled in the hospital bay, and pondered how many of them might be elsewhere.

  Perhaps many. Perhaps few.

  It all depended on data MC355 did not have, could not easily find. The satellite worlds swinging above could get no accurate count in the U.S. or the USSR.

  Still—looking at them, MC355 could not doubt that there were many. They were simply too brimming with life, too hard to kill. All the calculations in the world could not stop these creatures.

  The humans shuffled out, leaving the T-Isolate with the woman who had never left its side. They were going.

  MC355 called after them. They nodded, understanding, but did not stop.

  MC355 let them go.

  There was much to do.

  New antennas, new sensors, new worlds.

  TURKEY

  Belly full and eye quick, we came out into the pines. Wind blowed through with a scent of the Gulf on it, fresh and salty with rich moistness.

  The dark clouds are gone. I think maybe I’ll get Bud to drive south some more. I’d like to go swimming one more time in those breakers that come booming in, taller than I am, down near Fort Morgan. Man never knows when he’ll get to do it again.

  Bud’s ready to travel. He’s taking a radio so’s we can talk to MC, find out about the help that’s coming. For now, we got to get back and look after our own.

  Same as we’ll see to the boy. He’s ours now.

  Susan says she’ll stay with Gene till he’s ready, till some surgeons turn up can work on him. That’ll be a long time, say I. But she can stay if she wants. Plenty food and such down there for her.

  A lot of trouble we got, coming a mere hundred mile. Not much to show for it when we get back. A bumper crop of bad news, some would say. Not me. It’s better to know than to not, better to go on than to look back.

  So we go out into dawn, and there are the same colored dots riding in the high, hard blue. Like camp fires.

  The crickets are chirruping, and in the scrub there’s a rustle of things moving about their own business, a clean scent of things starting up. The rest of us, we mount the truck and it surges forward with a muddy growl, Ackerman slumped over, Angel in the cab beside Bud, the boy already asleep on some blankets; and the forlorn sound of us moving among the windswept trees is a long and echoing note of mutual and shared desolation, powerful and pitched forward into whatever must come now, a muted note persisting and undeniable in the soft, sweet air.