He decreed that no gal could join his company unless she proved herself by letting him shoot an apple off her head! And Arlene did it! She stood there and let him take it off with a clean shot from a .30-99 bolt-action sniper piece. With iron sights, yet.
Then, with a little malicious sneer on her lips, she calmly tossed a second apple to Goforth and made him wear the fruit while she did the William Tell bit. We all loved it; to his credit, the gunny stood tall and didn’t flinch and let her pop it off his dome at fifty meters. After that, what could the Grand Old Man do but welcome her to Fox, however reluctantly?
Back in the Freds’ mess hall, Arlene continued, nibbling at her own blue square. “You’re still my best and first, Fly. But Albert was the first man I really loved. Wilhelm Dodd was the first guy to care about me that way; but I didn’t know what love meant until . . . oh Jesus, that sounds really stupid, doesn’t it?”
I climbed onto the table myself, and we sat back to back. I liked feeling her warmth against me. It was like keeping double-watch, looking both ways at once. “No. It would have sounded dumb, except I know exactly what you mean. I felt that once, too: young girl in high school, before I joined the Corps.”
“You never told me, Sergeant—Fly.”
“We got as close as you could in a motor vehicle not built for the purpose. She swore she was being religious about the pill, but she got pregnant anyway. I offered to pay either way, and she chose the abortion. After that, well, it just wasn’t there anymore; I think they sucked more than the fetus out, to be perfectly grotesque about it. . . . We stopped pretending to be boyfriend-girlfriend when it just got too painful; and then she and her parents moved away. She just waved goodbye, and I nodded.”
Arlene snorted. “That’s the longest rap you’ve ever given me, Fly. Where’d you read it?”
“God’s own truth, A.S. Really happened just that way.”
Arlene leaned back against me, while I stared out the aft port at the redshifted starblob; the mess hall was at the south end of a north-going ship, 1.9 kilometers from the bridge, which was located amidships, surrounded by a hundred meters of some weird steel-titanium alloy, and 3.7 kilometers from the engines, all the way for’ard. Sitting in the mess hall, we could look directly backward out a huge, thick, plexiglass window while traveling very near the speed of light relative to the stars behind us.
It was a fascinating view; according to astronomical theory—which I’d had plenty of time to read about since we’d been burning from star to star—at relativistic speeds, the light actually bends: all the stars forward press together into a blue blob at the front, all the ones aft press into a red lump at the stern. I wasn’t sure how fast we were going, but the formula was easy enough to use if I really got interested.
“I just had a horrible thought,” I said. “We only brought along enough Fredpills to last a few days. We didn’t plan on spending weeks here.” Arlene didn’t say anything, so I continued. “We’ll have to find the Fred recombinant machine and figure out how to use it; maybe Sears and Roebuck know.” Fredpills supplied the amino acids and vitamins essential to humans that Freds lacked in their diet; without them, we would starve to death, no matter how much Fred food we ate.
“Fly,” she said, off in another world, “I’m starting not to care about the Freds anymore. I know why they attacked us: they were terrified of what we represented, death and an honest-to-God soul, and maybe the god of the Israelites is right, huh? Maybe we’re the immortal ones . . . not the rest of them, the ones who can’t die.”
“So are you thinking that Albert still exists somewhere, maybe in heaven?” I was trying to wrap myself around her problem, not having much luck.
She shrugged; I felt it roughly. “So he himself believed; I would never contradict an article of my honey’s faith, especially when I don’t have any contrary evidence.”
“Translation into English?”
“I’ve just stopped caring about the Fred aliens, Fly. They’re frightened, desperate, and pretty pathetic. And they’re soulless. I mean, two humans against how many of them? Even when Albert and Jill joined us, we were still four against a planetful! And we kicked ass. Maybe it’s just the Marine in me, but I’m starting to wonder why we’re bothering with these dweebs.”
“Well, we’ve got about forty-five days left to get our heads straight for what’s probably going to be the final curtain for Fly and Arlene, not to mention poor old Sears and Roebuck. They may be soulless and lousy soldiers, but put enough of them in a room shooting at us and we’re going down, babe.”
Arlene reached into her breast pocket and pulled out two twelve-gauge shells, which she tossed over her shoulder to land perfectly in my lap. “I’ve saved the last two for us, Sarge; just let me know when you’re ready to Hemingway.”
2
Forty-five days is a hell of a long time when we knew we were dropping into a dead zone, even for the Light Drop. Then again, it’s not really that long at all . . . when that’s probably our entire life expectancy.
Arlene snapped out of her despair because she didn’t want to spend her last few weeks in a self-imposed hell, I guess. She had me, I had her; that’s how it was in the beginning, that looked to be how it would end. Except we both had Sears and Roebuck, and that’s where everything started to break down.
We’re Marines above all, and we’re programmed like computers to protect and serve, you understand. That means we couldn’t just lock and load, stand back to back, and prepare to go down in a hail of Fred-fire when the ship cracked down and the cargo doors opened on Fredworld. We had this crazy idea that we had to protect those two—that one?—Alley Oop, Magilla Gorilla look-alike Klave, or at least try.
Step one was to coax it, her, him, or them out of the damned stateroom. We tried the direct approach first: Arlene and I climbed “up” toward the central axis of the ship. The acceleration decreased to 0.2 g at the level of Sears and Roebuck’s quarters, barely enough to avoid my old problems with vertigo. I sure didn’t want to go any farther inboard, that was for damned sure.
Arlene didn’t look bothered, though; various parts of her anatomy floated pretty free under her uniform, and she looked like she was loving it. I tried not to look at such temptations—fifty-eight days left; I wanted to spend it with my buddy, not trying to force a relationship that had never existed and never ought to exist.
The “upper” corridors were like sewer pipes, corrugated and smelly. The Freds breathed slightly different air than we, but it didn’t seem poisonous (Sears and Roebuck swore we could breathe the Fred air). Very tall corridors, to accommodate the Freds when they were in their seed-depositing stage, like gigantic praying mantises . . . I couldn’t reach the roof even by jumping.
Arlene and I slipped and slid down the hot slimy passageway; it took me a few moments to realize that the slime was decomposing leaves from their artichoke-heads.
“You know,” said my lance, when I told her my insight, “we don’t even know whether these are discarded leaves, or whether it’s the decomposed bodies of the Freds themselves. What happens to their bodies when they die? Do they have to put some preservative on them, like Egyptian mummies, to prevent this from happening?” She kicked a pile of glop in which were still visible the ragged framelines of Fred head-leaves.
I shook my head. “I suppose we can keep an eye on the captain and see if he begins to deteriorate.”
We figured out that slithering was the easiest way to move along the passageway without falling; it was like ice-skating through an oil slick, but we finally made it to the Sears and Roebuck stateroom.
“Stateroom” was an apt description; it was pretty stately. Because they had to accommodate the constantly changing size of the Freds, the rooms were built to monstrous scale, but with a nice mix of furniture styles. My own, next to Arlene’s down toward the hull in heavier acceleration, had a couple of sit-kneels, a table I could only reach by standing and stretching, and a doughnut-shaped bed-couch.
I had no
idea what was inside Sears and Roebuck’s quarters because they had not allowed Arlene or me even to sneak a peek. I stood outside the door and pounded the pine, as we used to say at Parris Island, then I thought better of it—Sears and Roebuck had been acting awfully weird lately. I stepped off to one side in case they decided to burn right through the door with a weapon.
Silence. After the second pounding, their shared voice came back with a carefully enunciated “go to away!”
“Open up, Sears and Roebuck!” shouted Arlene, exasperated after just ten seconds of dealing with their intransigence.
“Jeez, you’d never make it as a therapist, A.S.”
“I follow the flashlight-pounded-into-the-head school of psychiatry,” she said, and for the first time, it almost sounded as if her heart were in the joke.
“Go to elsewhere!”
“What are you?” I demanded. “Afraid of dying? Why? You can’t die!”
During a long pause, I heard furniture being shoved around. Then the door slid open a crack and two heads, one atop the other, pressed two eyes to the crack. “We once had our spine broken,” they said. They didn’t have spines, exactly; their central nervous system ran right down the center, from what I had seen in their medical records. But it was actually more easily severed than ours because it wasn’t protected by a bone sheath.
“You recovered as soon as someone found you,” Arlene pointed out. “Right?”
“We lay for eleven days into the jungle on [unintelligible planet name]. The Freds slay us will kill us and display-put us on for eternity and throw head-leaves at us.” Sears and Roebuck still had a hard time with English, despite ambassadorial status.
“Come on, S and R,” I tried. “Get a grip. You don’t see me and Arlene cringing—and if we die, we’re gone forever!”
They said something too quietly to catch; it sounded like “we wish we could,” but it could have been “the less you could.”
“S and R, Arlene and I need your help. We need to make a plan for when we hit dirtside on Fredworld.”
“Fredpills,” added Arlene in my ear.
“And we need you to show us how to synthesize enough Fredpills to keep us alive to Fredworld . . . we need about, oh, two hundred and seventy.”
Sears and Roebuck did a fast calculation—forty-five days times two people times three meals per day. “You admit we have no plan for to live past landing time!”
“Touché,” admitted Arlene, under her breath.
Crap! “For now we need four hundred! We’ll need more—lots, lots more—for surviving on Fredworld until we can figure out how to work one of these damned ships and hop it back home. And you need pills, too, Sears and Roebuck.”
The two Alley Oop faces stared at us a moment, then the Klaves slid open the door with their long limbs, which grew like Popeye arms from below their necks. “We are doomed inside the cabin as out the side the cabin.”
“So you may as well enjoy your last days of life with freedom to move around,” I urged. “After you die, you’ll see and hear only what they choose to show you . . . if anything.”
“Yes, you are the right about that. You must enter.”
They stepped out of the way like Siamese twins, and I entered their quarters for the first time, followed by Arlene. The cabin was so amazingly bizarre that I could barely recognize it as being essentially the same (in structure) as mine! All the furniture was pushed into a huge snarl in the middle of the room, and every square centimeter of wall space was covered by something, whether it was an abstract artwork with real 3-D effects or a mop head nailed to the wall. It looked like a homicidal maniac’s idea of interior design: making the room look like the inside of their disordered minds.
“What the hell?” asked Arlene, staring around at the walls. Sears and Roebuck stood in the center of the room next to the pile of junk, watching us narrowly. The weird part wasn’t that they put stuff up on their walls—I confess to the nasty habit of putting the occasional girly pic or Franks tank action shot on my own walls, when I had something to put. But Sears and Roebuck covered literally every smidgen of bulkhead, as if their terror at the pending landing on Fredworld somehow transferred itself to a fear of battleship gray, the color of the metal behind the pictures. They figured out how to work the printer in the room and dumped every image they could find to plaster on the bulkheads. Then, when they ran out of paper, they started attaching domestic Fred appliances with StiKro. They even turned a table on its side and pressed it against one wall.
The overhead was the color of cooling lava, black with red crack highlights, and it didn’t seem to bother them. I rather liked it myself, and I wasn’t a fan of the wall color—but still!
I looked around. “Do you, ah, you-all want to talk about this?” I tried to sound casual.
“No,” said Sears and Roebuck, without a trace of emotion. And that was that. They never again referred to the wallpapering, they never explained it, and we never found out what the hell they thought they were doing. I think Arlene and I learned something very interesting about alien psychology on Day Thirteen of our trip into Fredland; now if only we knew what we found out!
Sears and Roebuck came out of their hole without looking back, took a new stateroom, and made no effort to cover the walls. We began rehearsing for our last stand, when we would hit dirtside and the doors would slide open.
We even knew what doors would open first. Sears and Roebuck went to work on the Fred computer and cracked it, or part of it, at least. The sequence display of the mission was unclassified, and they displayed it on the 3-D projector in the room we had decided to call the bridge, where the captain’s body still sat in the co-pilot’s chair without decomposing, although his head-leaves had ceased to grow, leaving in place the atrocious orange and black Halloween combination that he wore when I killed him . . . probably a sign of the emotion of desperate terror.
The timeline was precisely detailed: we knew the very moment we would touch dirt—three days earlier than I guessed—and which systems would operate at what moment. The door-open sequence began about seventy-five minutes after touchdown, and the first door to open after safety checks and powerdown was the aft, ventral cargo bay; it would take eleven minutes to grind backward out of the way. Over the next fifty minutes or so, eleven other doors and access portals would release, and all but two of them would open automatically. We would be boarded by an unholy army of monsters.
The only question was whether the Fred captain had gotten a damned message off before we overwhelmed his defenses. Probably. The final combat took nearly an hour. Would it have done the Fred any good?
At first, I thought that would give them two hundred years’ advance notice that we were coming, but Arlene hooted with laughter when I mentioned it. “What, you think their message travels at infinite speed? What do you think this is, science fiction?”
I wracked my neurons for several minutes—physics was never my strong suit, especially not special relativity. Then I suddenly realized my stupidity: any message sent by the Fred captain could travel only at the speed of light. . . . It would take it two hundred years to reach Fredworld!
So how much of a head start did it have over us? “Um . . . twenty years?” I guessed.
Arlene shook her head emphatically. “If our time dilation factor is eight and a half weeks, or, say, sixty days, to two hundred years passing on Earth and Fredworld—the planets are barely moving relative to each other, compared to lightspeed—then we have to be moving at virtually lightspeed ourselves, relative to both planets. Hang on . . .” She poked at her watch calculator. “Fly, we’re making about 99.99996 percent of lightspeed relative to Earth or Fredworld. At that clip, we would travel two hundred light-years and arrive only thirty-five minutes after the message.”
I jumped to my feet. “Arlene, that’s fantastic! They won’t have any time at all to prepare, barely half an hour! Maybe they can mobilize a few security forces, but nothing like a—”
“Whoa, whoa, loverbo
y, slow down!” Arlene settled back, putting her feet up on the table, narrowly missing her half-eaten plate of blue squares. “If it’s actually sixty-one days subjective time instead of fifty-eight, or the planets are really two hundred and nine light-years apart instead of two hundred, that half-an-hour figure is completely inaccurate. And much more important, that was assuming we achieved our speed instantly. But we didn’t. . . . It took us about three days to ramp up, and it’ll take another three days to decelerate; during most of that time, we’re going slow enough that there’s hardly any time dilation effect at all.”
“So you’re saying . . . so the Fred should have what, six days’ advance notice we’re on our way?”
“Hm, basically, yeah. The biggest factor is the acceleration-deceleration time, when we’re not moving at relativistic speeds.”
“So let’s assume they have six days to prepare,” I said. “That’s a hard figure?”
“Hard enough, Fly. I mean, Sergeant. Best we can do, in any event. I’m not entirely sure Sears and Roebuck is giving us good intel on the Fred units of measurement.”
Six days for the enemy to mobilize wasn’t good, but I could live with it. It was sure a hell of a lot better than two centuries.
I devised a plan, as the senior man present, though Arlene had a few good ideas for booby traps. If the Fred had six days to prepare for our arrival, we had eight weeks! We made good use of the time, practicing a slow, steady retreat down the ship, sealing off segments behind us and activating homemade bombs to wreck the thing. We couldn’t win, of course, not in the long run, but then, as someone once said, the trouble with the long run is that in the long run everybody’s dead!
Well, the bastards would pay for every meter. That was my only goal, and at the staff meeting, Arlene and even Sears and Roebuck regularly agreed with me. I kept us hyped by unexpected alarm drills; Sears and Roebuck figured out how to rig the ship’s computer to ring various emergency sirens and kill power in different parts of the ship. I did the timing myself, keeping the others on their toesies.
Endgame Page 2