The Best of Lester del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

  The effort of walking made speech difficult. Amos shrugged, and let the conversation die. But his own mind ground on.

  If God was all-powerful and all-knowing, why had He let them spy upon Him? Or was He still all-powerful over a race He had dismissed? Could it make any difference to God what man might try to do, now that He had condemned him? Was the Presence they had seen the whole of God—or only one manifestation of Him?

  His legs moved on woodenly, numbed to fatigue and slow from hunger, while his head churned with his basic problem. Where was his duty now? With God or against Him?

  They found food in a deserted house, and began preparing it by the hooded light of a lantern while they listened to the news from a small battery radio that had been left behind. It was a hopeless account of alien landings and human retreats, yet given without the tone of despair they should have expected. They were halfway through the meal before they discovered the reason.

  “Flash!” the radio announced. “Word has just come through from the Denver area. Our second atomic missile has exploded successfully! The alien base has been wiped out, and every alien ship is ruined. It is now clear that the trouble with the earlier bombs we assembled lay in the detonating mechanism. This is being investigated, while more volunteers are being trained to replace this undependable part of the bomb. Both missiles carrying suicide bombers have succeeded. Captive aliens of both races are being questioned in Denver now, but the same religious fanaticism found in Portland seems to make communication difficult.”

  It went back to reporting alien landings, while Doc and Amos stared at each other. It was too much to absorb at once—the official admission of two races, the fact that bombs had been assembled and tried, and the casual acceptance of suicide missions. It was as if God could control weather and machines, but not the will of determined men. Free will or…

  Amos groped in his mind, trying to dig out something that might tie in the success of human suicide bombers, where automatic machinery was miraculously stalled, together with the reaction of God to his own thoughts of the glow he had felt in his early days. Something about men…

  “They can be beaten!” Doc said in a harsh whisper.

  Amos sighed as they began to get up to continue the impossible trek. “Maybe. We know God was at Clyde. Can we be sure He was at the other places to stop the bombs by His miracles?”

  They slogged on through the night, cutting across country in the dim moonlight, where every footstep was twice as hard. Amos turned it over, trying to use the new information for whatever decision he must reach. If men could overcome those opposed to them, even for a time…

  It brought him no closer to an answer.

  The beginnings of dawn found them in a woods. Doc managed to heave Amos up a tree, where he could survey the surrounding terrain. There was a house beyond the edge of the woods, but it would take dangerous minutes to reach it. They debated, and then headed on.

  They were just emerging from the woods when the sound of an alien plane began its stuttering shriek. Doc turned and headed back to where Amos was, behind him. Then he stopped. “Too late! He’s seen something. Gotta have a target!”

  His arms swept out, shoving Amos violently back under the nearest tree. He swung and began racing across the clearing, his fat legs pumping furiously as he covered the ground in straining leaps. Amos tried to lift himself from where he had fallen, but it was too late.

  There was the drumming of gunfire and the earth erupted around Doc. He lurched and dropped, to twitch and lie still.

  The plane swept over, while Amos disentangled himself from a root. It was gone as he broke free. Doc had given it a target, and the pilot was satisfied, apparently.

  He was still alive as Amos dropped beside him. Two of the shots had hit, but he managed to grin as he lifted himself on one elbow. It was only a matter of minutes, however, and there was no help possible. Amos found one of Doc’s cigarettes and lighted it with fumbling hands.

  “Thanks,” Doc wheezed after taking a heavy drag on it. He started to cough, but suppressed it, his face twisting in agony. His words came in an irregular rhythm, but he held his voice level. “I guess I’m going to hell, Amos, since I never did repent—if there is a hell! And I hope there is! I hope it’s filled with the soul of every poor damned human being who died in less than perfect grace. Because I’m going to find some way—”

  He straightened suddenly, coughing and fighting for breath. Then he found one final source of strength and met Amos’ eyes, a trace of his old cynical smile on his face.

  “—some way to urge Lucifer to join us!” he finished. He dropped back, letting all the fight go out of his body. A few seconds later, he was dead.

  6

  …Thou shalt have no other peoples before me…. Thou shalt make unto them no covenant against me…. Thou shalt not foreswear thyself to them, nor serve them… for I am a jealous people…

  Exultations 12:2-4

  THE BOOK OF MAN

  Amos lay through the day in the house to which he had dragged Doc’s body. He did not even look for food. For the first time in his life since his mother had died when he was five, he had no shield against his grief. There was no hard core of acceptance that it was God’s_. will to hide his loss at Doc’s death. And with the realization of that, all the other losses hit at him as if they had been no older than the death of Doc.

  He sat with his grief and his newly sharpened hatred, staring toward Clyde. Once, during the day, he slept. He awakened to a sense of a tremendous sound and shaking of the earth, but all was quiet when he finally became conscious. It was nearly night, and time to leave.

  For a moment, he hesitated. It would be easier to huddle here, beside his dead, and let whatever would happen come to him. But within him was a sense of duty that drove him on. In the back of his mind something stirred, telling him he still had work to do.

  He found part of a stale loaf of bread and some hard cheese and started out, munching on them. It was still too light to move safely, but he was going through woods again, and he heard no alien planes. When it grew darker, he turned to the side roads that led in the direction of Wesley.

  In his mind was the knowledge that he had to return there. His church lay there; if the human fighters had pushed the aliens back, his people might be there. If not, it was from there that he would have to follow them.

  His thoughts were too deep for conscious expression, and too numbed with exhaustion. His legs moved on steadily. One of his shoes had begun to wear through, and his feet were covered with blisters, but he went grimly on. It was his duty to lead his people, now that the aliens were here, as he had led them in easier times. His thinking had progressed no further.

  He holed up in a barn that morning, avoiding the house because of the mutilated things that lay on the doorstep where the aliens had apparently left them. And this time he slept with the soundness of complete fatigue, but he awoke to find one fist clenched and extended toward Clyde. He had been dreaming that he was Job, and that God had left him sitting unanswered on his boils until he died, while mutilated corpses moaned around him, asking for leadership he would not give.

  It was nearly dawn before he realized that he should have found himself some kind of a car. He had seen none, but there might have been one abandoned somewhere. Doc could probably have found one. But it was too late to bother, now. He had come to the outskirts of a tiny town, and started to head beyond it, before realizing that all the towns must have been well searched by now. He turned down the small street, looking for a store where he could find food.

  There was a small grocery with a door partly ajar. Amos pushed it open, to the clanging of a bell. Almost immediately a dog began barking, and a human voice came sharply from the back.

  “Down, Shep! Just a minute, I’m acoming.” A door to the rear opened, and a bent old man emerged, carrying a kerosene lamp. “Darned electric’s off again! Good thing I stayed. Told them I had to mind my store, but they wanted to take me with them. Had to hid
e out in the old well. Darned nonsense about…”

  He stopped, his eyes blinking behind thick lenses, and his mouth dropped open. He swallowed, and his voice was startled and shrill. “Mister, who are you?”

  “A man who just escaped from the aliens,” Amos told him. He hadn’t realized the shocking appearance he must present $y” now. “One in need of food and a chance to rest until night. But I’m afraid I have no money on me.”

  The old man tore his eyes away slowly, seeming to shiver. Then he nodded, and pointed to the back. “Never turned nobody away hungry yet,” he said, but the words seemed automatic.

  An old dog backed slowly under a couch as Amos entered. The man put the lamp down and headed into a tiny kitchen to begin preparing food. Amos reached for the lamp and blew it out. “There really are aliens—worse than you heard,” he said.

  The old man bristled, met his eyes, and then nodded slowly. “If you say so. Only it don’t seem logical God would let things like that run around in a decent state like Kansas.”

  He shoved a plate of eggs onto the table, and Amos pulled it to him, swallowing a mouthful eagerly. He reached for a second, and stopped. Something was violently wrong, suddenly. His stomach heaved, the room began to spin, and his forehead was cold and wet with sweat. He gripped the edge of the table, trying to keep from falling. Then he felt himself being dragged to a cot. He tried to protest, but his body was shaking with ague, and the words that spilled out were senseless. He felt the cot under him, and waves of sick blackness spilled over him.

  It was the smell of cooking food that awakened him finally, and he sat up with a feeling that too much time had passed. The old man came from the kitchen, studying him. “You sure were sick, Mister. Guess you ain’t used to going without decent food and rest. Feeling okay?”

  Amos nodded. He felt a little unsteady, but it was passing. He pulled on the clothes that had been somewhat cleaned for him, and found his way to the table. “What day is it?”

  “Saturday, evening,” the other answered. “At least the way I figure. Here, eat that and get some coffee in you.” He watched until Amos began on the food, and then dropped to a stool to begin cleaning an old rifle and loading it. “You said a lot of things. They true?”

  For a second, Amos hesitated. Then he nodded, unable to lie to his benefactor. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Yeah, I figured so, somehow, looking at you.” The old man sighed. “Well, I hope you make wherever you’re going.”

  “What about you?” Amos asked.

  The old man sighed, running his hands along the rifle. “I ain’t leaving my store for any bunch of aliens. And if the Lord I been doing my duty by all my life decides to put Himself on the wrong side, well, maybe He’ll win. But it’ll be over my dead body!”

  Nothing Amos could say would change his mind. The old man sat on the front step of the store, the rifle on his lap and the dog at his side, as Amos headed down the street in the starlight.

  Amos felt surprisingly better after the first half-mile. Rest and food, combined with some treatment of his sores and blisters, had helped. But the voice inside him was driving him harder now, and the picture of the old man seemed to lend it added strength. He struck out at the fastest pace he could hope to maintain, leaving the town behind and heading down the road that the old man had said led to Wesley.

  It was just after midnight when he saw the lights of a group of cars or trucks moving along another road. He had no idea whether they were driven by men or aliens, but he kept steadily on. There were sounds of traffic another time, on a road that crossed the small one he followed. But he knew now that he was approaching Wesley, and he speeded up his pace.

  When the first dawn light came, he made no effort to seek shelter. He stared at the land around him, stripped by grasshoppers that could have been killed off if men had worked as hard at ending the insects as they had at their bickerings and wars. He saw the dry, arid land, drifting into dust and turning a fertile country into a nightmare. Men could put a stop to that.

  It had been no act of God that had caused this ruin, but man’s own follies. And without help from God, man might set it right in time.

  God had deserted men. But mankind hadn’t halted. On his own, he’d made a path to the moon and had unlocked the atom. He’d found a means, out of his raw courage, to use hydrogen bombs against the aliens when miracles were used against him. He had done everything but conquer himself—and he could do that, if he were given time.

  Amos saw a truck stop at the crossroads ahead and halted, but the driver was human. He saw the open door and quickened his step toward it. “I’m bound for Wes-ley!”

  “Sure.” The driver helped him into the seat. “I’m going back for more supplies myself. You sure look as if you need treatment at the aid station there. I thought we’d rounded up all you strays. Most of them came in right after we sent out the word on Clyde.”

  “You’ve taken it?” Amos asked.

  The other nodded wearily. “We took it. Got ‘em with a bomb, like sitting ducks; we’ve been mopping up since. Not many aliens left.”

  They were nearing the outskirts of Wesley, and Amos pointed to his own house. “If you’ll let me off there…”

  “Look, I got orders to bring all strays to the aid station,” the driver began firmly. Then he swung and faced Amos. For a second, he hesitated. Finally he nodded quietly. “Sure, Glad to help you.”

  Amos found the water still running. He bathed slowly. Somewhere, he felt his decision had been made, though he was still unsure of what it was. He climbed from the tub at last and began dressing. There was no suit that was proper, but he found clean clothes. His face in the mirror looked back at him, haggard and bearded as he reached for the razor.

  Then he stopped as he encountered the reflection of his eyes. A shock ran over him, and he backed away a step. They were eyes foreign to everything in him. He had seen a shadow of what lay in them only once before, in the eyes of a great evangelist; and this was a hundred times stronger. He tore his glance away to find himself shivering, and he avoided them all through the shaving. Oddly, though, there was a strange satisfaction in what he had seen. He was beginning to understand why the old man had believed him, and why the truck driver had obeyed.

  Most of Wesley had returned, and there were soldiers on the streets. As he approached the church, he saw -the first-aid station, hectic with business. And a camera crew was near it, taking shots for television of those who had managed to escape from alien territory after the bombing.

  A few people called to him, but he went on until he reached the church steps. The door was still in ruins and the bell was gone. Amos stood quietly waiting, his mind focusing slowly as he stared at the people, who were just beginning to recognize him and to spread hasty words from mouth to mouth. Then he saw little Angela Anduccini, and motioned for her to come to him. She hesitated briefly, before following him inside and to the organ.

  The little Hammond still functioned. Amos climbed to the pulpit, hearing the old familiar creak of the boards. He put his hands on the lectern, seeing the heavy knuckles and blue veins of age as he opened the Bible and made ready for his Sunday morning congregation. He straightened his shoulders and turned to face the pews, waiting as they came in.

  There were only a few at first. Then more and more came, some from old habit, some from curiosity, and many only because they had heard that he had been captured in person, probably. The camera crew came to the back and set up their machines, flooding him with bright lights and adjusting their telelens. He smiled on them, nodding.

  He knew his decision now. It had been made in pieces and tatters. It had come from Kant, who had spent his life looking for a basic ethical principle, and had boiled it down in his statement that men must be treated as ends, not as means. It had come from Rover’s passive acceptance of the decision of a god who could do nothing for him, and from the one rebellious act that had won Anne his respect. It had been distilled from Doc’s final challenge, and from
the old man sitting in his doorway, ready to face any challenger.

  There could be no words with which to give his message to those who waited. No orator had ever possessed such a command of language. But men with rude speech, and limited use of what they had, had fired the world before. Moses had come down from a mountain with a face that shone, and had overcome the objections of a stiff-necked people. Peter the Hermit had preached a thankless crusade to all of Europe, without radio or television. It was more than words or voice.

  He looked down at them when the church was filled and the organ hushed.

  “My text for today,” he announced, and the murmurs below him hushed as his voice reached out to the pews. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make men free!”

  He stopped for a moment, studying them, feeling the decision in his mind, and knowing he could make no other. The need of him lay here, among those he had always tried to serve while believing he was serving God through them. He was facing them as an end, not as a means, and he found it good.

  Nor could he lie to them now, or deceive them with false hopes. They would need all the facts if they were to make an end to their bickerings and to unite themselves in the final struggle for the fullness of their potential glory.

  “I have come back from captivity among the aliens,” he began. “I have seen the hordes who have no desire but to erase the memory of man from the dust of the earth that bore him. I have stood at the altar of their God. I have heard the voice of God proclaim that He is also our God, and that He has cast us out. I have believed Him, as I believe Him now.”

  He felt the strange, intangible something that was greater than words or oratory flow out of him as it had never flowed in his envied younger days. He watched the shock and the doubt arise and disappear slowly as he went on, giving them the story and the honest doubts