Battle on Mercury

by Lester del Rey (as Erik van Lhin)

  “My people,” the robot said. “All of them—and with all the electricity they can find for now. Which batteries do you want charged, Dick?”

  Dick looked along the lines of wispies. A sudden picture came to him. Eighty of them, heading back from here with only enough energy to get home. And a horde of the demons coming down on them…

  He choked on his decision. Sigma dome was all he had ever had. Yet there were only seven hundred people there out of the millions and billions of men left in the solar system. And Johnny, who had only eighty left in a hostile world being stolen by demons and another race, had brought out his entire race to save a few of the men who had learned to kill them.

  “Go on back, Johnny,” he said. “Get out of here, and take them with you. Go out and sock some demons around with all your energy. Gang up on them. Only let me alone, will you? Let me at least have a little peace before things go the way they’ve gotta. Scram!”

  “Dick,” the robot insisted. “Dick!”

  “Get out! I wouldn’t even ask the demons to kill themselves off! Not even the silicone monsters! I don’t want any blood sacrifices, Johnny Quicksilver!” For a second the robot stood irresolute. Then it turned slowly. “Sometimes we can learn new things from thinking of the ways of another race. You have learned, Dick. Perhaps I have learned. We shall see.” The flickering came again, then the wispies were gone. Dick turned his back to Charlie, and stood looking out of the window toward the sun that was low on the horizon, and still was leaping with great gouts of flame.

  “You can go, too, Charlie,” he said slowly. The false anger was gone from his voice, leaving it a faint wash of sound in his suit. “I’m sorry you had to hear me do that. I. .. oh, dam the whole mess …” Charlie sat quietly for a minute. Then he stood up. “Guess I know how you feel. But, well, I’m kinda glad I did hear that, Dick. And I’m just sorry your Dad couldn’t have heard it and known what it meant. I got a feeling he’d have been right pleased. He ain’t any less of a man than you are, Dick. Just remember that. And remember I’m a-thinking that’s quite a compliment to him, too. You sweat it out of your system, and when you get done saying all the things you don’t mean, you come down and I’ll tell you why your grandfather went back to Earth … and why I never did.”

  Dick moved back to the empty batteries that would never be filled, and to the automatic tape machine. He cut a message on it, pushing the keys down by hand—the message he had wanted to send to East Twilight, to tell them that Sigma dome would die without another rocket and to add that Hotside Charlie would die here in six hours without air. It was a useless message, but it wasted time.

  Then he turned to leave the room and find Charlie.

  But something was coming through the dome. He stopped and stared at the sight. There were eighty tiny blue balls of fury chasing about half of their own number of the larger spheres that must be demons. They weren’t merely chasing them; they were herding them.

  He heard steps running, and Charlie broke into the room, just as the first demon was driven forward. And now it was forced down with a furious exchange of tiny little bolts of electricity that came at it from both sides. It darted downward against one of the batteries.

  There was a flash of fire, and the demon was gone. But more of the wispies were waiting with another. One at a time, they drove in the demons, and one at a time, the demons died. By the time the first lot was finished, others were being herded in.

  “Seems like our friends learned something,” Charlie said. “Seems like Johnny took you seriously when you told him to gang up on them. And you know, I’ll bet that’s the first time the wispies ever really thought about going out with blood in their eyes.”

  “You’re right, Charlie,” Pete said quietly. “We ran, but we never chased. We thought violence was abhorrent. We were polite to each other, and we each fought our battles alone. But today I have discovered something—more than the trick of ganging up on the demons. Much more. And I think my people have at last found it, too.”

  The automatic relay tape began to tap through the machine, and the big tubes were lighted. Dick jumped to it, and then saw that it was his message going over. The power of eighty or more demons was behind it; it was their first repayment for all the power they had stolen. It was enough for the moment.

  “Violence,” Johnny said through Pete’s voice. “We hated violence because it was evil. But today I heard Dick cry out in violence, because his wish to be good was violent. And I knew that was why you are a great people. You are violent when you are wrong, and you do wrong things a great deal. But you are violent when you are right, and then you do great things. You deny blood sacrifice, Dick, but you give it with no politeness. Only with a violent rage that we dare question your right to give it.”

  He paused. Then he pointed outward. “Long ago, Dick, the silicone beasts tried to enslave this world. We were quiet and not too unkind. We removed the strength in certain cells of their body, until they were not quite intelligent. And we left them to menace others with the evil that remained in them, as they endangered you today. Less long ago, but too long, we refused to hurt a very dangerous, very stupid, and completely insane group of our children—children who were mutated into something strange. And you have been threatened by these demons, as we have been nearly killed off by them. We were never violent; we did the least we could. We came to give you half of our energies, because it might be enough. And you tried to give us all you had, because you could never do less than enough. You’re a very violent race, you men. But if we can find peace with you, and work with you, perhaps we can learn to be violent when right, also.”

  He snapped out of the robot, and out through the dome, and his people began to form up around him.

  “Quite a talker,” Charlie said, when Dick sat without speaking. “Yep. Almost gets violent about his eloquence, don’t he? Dick, you’d better answer the message that’s coming in, before they get violent over there at East Twilight.”

  An hour later the big rocket began dropping down to a landing in front of Sigma dome. The lights were low in the dome, but the air-cooling pumps were still working, burning up the last dregs of fuel, but still bravely fighting the storm.

  Dick slipped out with Charlie and Pete, just before the new supply of fuel was being received. East Twilight had promised not to tell the whole story until he had seen his family, and they kept their word, more or less. There were only a few of the people of Sigma who had heard it before he started down the street.

  But he knew it would have to be told, and that it would be rough, being a hero, for a while, until new things came up to fill their minds. Besides, according to the letter he was carrying from the governor of Mercury, he’d be going back to Earth soon, to the university where his father had graduated … and both his grandfathers … and where he could find himself just a man who had to bone up to pass his tests.

  It was enough to know that the wispies and men would be working together from now on, without his having to stand around being a hero to both of them.

  By the time he got back, he’d be just another engineer, if he was lucky. And that was all he’d ever wanted to be.