Hour of the Horde

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He was suddenly face to face with a strong sense of guilt and loss. No matter how wrong Marie had been last evening, two things remained unchanged. It was her concern for him that had made her say what she had and also, he had no one else in the world that was close to him.

  He sat down heavily on the edge of his bed, newly made by Mrs. Arndahl. The strap springs creaked dolefully under his weight. He had been looking forward to the release and freedom of his year in Europe. The thought of loneliness had never occurred to him until now. But now he felt it come to him powerfully at the thought that he might easily lose Marie for good.

  He got abruptly to his feet. He had been wrong in walking out like that. It had not been fair to expect her to understand what moved him in his wholehearted search without ever a word of explanation of that search. At least he could find her and make that explanation now. He owed her that much.

  He got up, went over to open the top drawer of his dresser to take out a brown manila envelope. He put it into the inside pocket of his jacket and headed back out of the rooming house.

  At this hour Marie was usually in the second-floor study room of the university library. But when he got there, he found the room deserted except for three or four stray figures looking dwarfed and foolish among the long tables and empty chairs. Marie was not one of them. He turned and left the library.

  The most logical place to look next was the girls’ dormitory, in which Marie was a counselor.

  He went there. It was on the other side of the campus, a tall red-brick building with a row of glass doors across the front of it. He went through one of the doors into the lobby and asked for Marie at the desk. The clerk buzzed Marie’s room, and less than a minute later Marie herself called down on the house phone. Miles heard her voice with a sense of relief.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Can you come down?”

  “I’ll be right there,” her voice answered. His heart moved in him. It was the same soft, calm voice as ever. He had expected any reaction but this, after he had walked out on her the way he had the night before.

  “You can wait in the lounge,” the pointed-faced little clerk said to him.

  He had waited in that lounge many times before, but when he went in now, like everything else, it was different. Usually there were only four or five vaguely impatient or irritated males seated in the heavy armchairs and couches scattered decorously about the room. Now nearly all the farther seats were empty. The nearer ones had been drawn in around the television set and were occupied by a small crowd of girls. These listened to the omnipresent television announcer in such uniform silence that Miles had no difficulty overhearing what the announcer was saying.

  “Word has been received from reliable sources here at the UN,” the announcer was saying, “that the message was not sent by any mechanical means from the ship now in orbit about our world but was delivered in person by two of the passengers or crew from the ship. The same source also provides the information that the two beings in question appear to be two men with somewhat swarthy features, in every respect, including the suits they wear, as human as we are. Further word is expected shortly.

  “Now some details about the ship, as the details have been gleaned by telescope from the surface of our world. The ship itself appears to be at least as large as was originally estimated. There seems to be no evidence of windows or entrances in its outer surface. Moreover, no sign has been seen of a small ship leaving it or of any means by which the two from the ship could have made the trip down to the UN buildings here in New York. No landing of any type of alien craft has been reported and no unusual visitors have been escorted to the building…”

  His voice droned on. Miles went to the opposite end of the room and sat down on a heavy green sofa pushed back against the wall. It was only a few minutes before Marie appeared in the entrance to the lounge. He got up swiftly and went to meet her.

  “Miles—” she said as he came up to her.

  “Can we get out of here?” he said. “Somewhere away from television sets and radios?”

  “I’m on duty here at the dorm starting at one o’clock,” she answered. “But we could go someplace and have an early lunch until then.”

  “Good,” he said. “Let’s go to someplace downtown that isn’t overrun by people from the U.”

  They took the bus toward downtown Minneapolis. As the bus rolled across the freeway bridge, Miles gestured toward the window beside which Marie was sitting.

  “Look,” he said, indicating the rock wall below which he had stood painting the afternoon before. “You see the bluff there? Do you think you could climb it?”

  Marie stared at the steep rise of rock.

  “I guess so—if I had to,” she said. She turned, frowning in puzzlement at him. “I don’t think I’d like to. Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later, while we’re having lunch,” said Miles. “But look at it now—will you?—and just imagine yourself climbing it.”

  Marie looked back out of the window and kept her eyes on the bluff until the bus passed the point where that side of the river could be seen. Then she looked questioningly at Miles.

  When he said nothing, however, she looked away, and neither of them said anything more until they left the bus downtown.

  Miles, in fact, waited until they were actually inside the restaurant they had picked—a small, medium-priced eating place with no television set.

  “About last night—” he began, after the waitress had given them menus and left.

  Marie laid down her menu. She reached out across the table to put her hand on his.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does matter,” he answered. He withdrew his hand, took the manila envelope out from the inside pocket of his jacket, and handed it to her. “There’s something I want you to understand. That’s why I had you look at that bluff on the way here. I should have told you about it a long time ago; but when I first met you, well, I just wasn’t used to telling anyone about it, and later I liked to think you understood without being told. Then, when I found you didn’t last night—that’s why I blew up. Take a look in that envelope.”

  Looking strangely at him, Marie opened the envelope and poured out the sheaf of yellowing newspaper clippings on the white place mat. She looked through them while he waited. Then she looked back up at him, frowning.

  “I guess I don’t understand,” she said.

  “They’re all instances of hysterical strength,” Miles said. “Have you ever heard of that?”

  “I think so,” she said, still frowning. “But what’s it all got to do with you?”

  “It ties in with what I believe,” he said. “A theory of mine about painting. About anything creative, actually…” And he told her about it. But when he was done, she still shook her head.

  “I didn’t know,” she said. She shuffled the clippings with her fingers. “But, Miles, isn’t it a pretty big guess on your part? These”—she shuffled the clippings, again looking down at them—“are hard enough to believe—”

  “Will you believe me if I tell you something?” he interrupted.

  “Of course!” Her head came up.

  “All right then. Listen,” he said, “before I met you, when I first had polio, I took up painting mainly to give myself an excuse to hide from people.” He took a deep breath. “I couldn’t get over the fact I was crippled, you see. I had a knack for art, but the painting and drawing were just an excuse that first year, after I’d been sick.”

  “Miles,” she said gently, reaching out to put her hand on his again.

  “But then, one day, something happened,” he said. “I was outside painting—at the foot of the bluff I pointed out to you. And something clicked. Suddenly I was in it— inside the painting. I can’t describe it. And I forgot everything around me.”

  He stopped and drew a deep breath.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Because it just happened I was attracting a gallery
. Some kids had come up to watch me painting. Kids not much younger than I was—and I guess after a while they must have started asking me questions. But I didn’t even hear them. I was all wrapped up in what I was painting, for the first time—and it was like a miracle, like coming alive for the first time since I’d been sick.”

  In spite of himself, remembering, his hand curled into a fist under her fingers. She held tightly to the fist.

  “When I didn’t answer,” he went on after a second, “they evidently began to think that I was embarrassed by being caught painting, and they began to jostle me and move my brushes. But I was still just barely conscious of them, and I was scared stiff at the thought of quitting work on that painting, even for a second. I had a feeling that if I quit, even for that long, I’d lose it—this in -ness I’d discovered. But finally, one of them grabbed up my paint box and ran off with it, and I had to come out of it.”

  “Oh, Miles!” said Marie, softly. Her fingertips soothed his hard-clenched fist.

  “So I chased him—the one who’d taken it. And when I was just about to grab him, he dropped it. So I brought it back—and then I found out something. My canvas was gone.”

  “They took it?” said Marie. “Miles, they didn’t!”

  “I looked around,” he went on, seeing not her across the table as much as the much-remembered scene in his mind’s eye, “and finally, I spotted the one who’d taken it. He’d run off the other way from the one who took my paints and up around the road leading to the top of the bluff, and now he was running along the bluff overhead.”

  Miles stopped speaking. With an effort he pulled his inner gaze from the four-year-old memory and looked again at Marie.

  “Marie,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking of anything but that painting. It seemed like life itself to me, just then, life I’d found again after thinking I’d lost it for good with polio. It seemed to me that I had to have that painting, no matter what happened. And I went and got it.”

  He hesitated.

  “Marie,” he said, “I climbed up that bluff and got in front of the kid who’d taken it. When he saw me coming, he threw it facedown on the grass and ran. When I picked it up, it was nothing but smears and streaks of paint with grass sticking all over it.”

  “Miles!” said Marie, her fingers tightening on his fist. “How terrible!”

  “No,” said Miles, “not terrible.” He looked deeply into her brown eyes. “Wonderful. Marie, don’t you understand! I climbed up that cliff!”

  She stared back at him, baffled.

  “I know, you said that,” she said. “And you must have climbed awfully fast—”

  “Yes, but that’s not it!” said Miles. “Listen! I climbed up that cliff—and I had only one arm. Only one arm and one hand to climb with!”

  She still stared, without understanding.

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s right, you only had one arm—” She broke off suddenly, on a quick intake of breath.

  “Yes. You see?” Miles heard his own voice, sounding almost triumphant. “Marie, a cliff like that can’t be climbed by a one-handed man. You need to hold with one hand while you move the other to a fresh handhold, and so on. I came back there the next day and tried to see if I could climb it again. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t even get started. The only way I could possibly have done it would have been to balance on my feet alone while I changed handholds.”

  He nodded at the clippings on the place mat before her.

  “To climb like that,” he said, “I’d have needed the strength and speed written about in those news clippings.”

  She gazed at him, her face a little pale.

  “You don’t remember how you did it?” she asked at last.

  He shook his head.

  “It’s all sort of a blur,” he said. “I remember wanting to go up the cliff, and I remember climbing up it, somehow, very quickly and easily, and the next thing I knew, I was facing the kid with my painting.” He stopped, but she said nothing. “You see why I lost my head with you last night? I thought you understood that what I was after was something that didn’t leave any strength or time left over for the rest of the world. I thought you understood it without being told. It wasn’t until after that I began to see how unfair I was being in expecting you to understand something like this without knowing what I’d been through and what I was after.”

  He pulled his hand out from under her now-quiet fingers and took her hand instead in his own grasp.

  “But you understand now, don’t you?” he asked. “You do, don’t you?”

  To his surprise she shivered suddenly, and her face grew even more pale.

  “Marie!” he said. “Don’t you understand—”

  “Oh, I do. I understand. Of course, Miles.” Her hand turned so that her fingers grasped his. “It’s not that. It’s just that knowing this now somehow makes it all that much worse.”

  “Worse?” He stared at her.

  “I mean”—her voice trembled—“all this business about the sun and the ship and the two men, or whatever they are. I’ve had a feeling from the beginning that it all meant something terrible for us—for you and me. And now, somehow, your telling me this makes me even more afraid.”

  “What of?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” He could feel her shiver again, just barely feel it, but the shiver was there. “Something… something that’s going to come between us—”

  From across the room a sudden, measured voice interrupted her. Looking in that direction, Miles saw that two men had just entered the restaurant and sat down at a table against the farther wall. On the table one of them placed a portable radio, and even with the volume turned down, its voice carried across to the table where he sat with Marie. Anger exploded in him.

  “I’ll make them turn that thing down!” he said, starting to get to his feet. But Marie caught hold of his arm.

  “No,” she said. “Sit down. Please, sit down, Miles. Listen—”

  “By television and radio,” the radio was saying. “We now bring you the President of the United States, speaking to you directly from the East Room of the White House…” The musical strains of “Hail to the Chief” followed closely upon the announcer’s words. Marie got quickly to her feet.

  “Miles, quickly,” she said. “Let’s find a television set.”

  “Marie—” he began harshly, with the backwash of his anger at the two men and the radio across the room in his voice. Then he saw the peculiar rigidity of her face, and a feeling of uneasiness washed in to drown the fury.

  “All right,” he said, getting to his feet in turn, “if you want to.”

  She hurried out of the restaurant, and he had to stretch his legs to keep up with her. Outside, in the sudden glare of red sunlight, she paused and looked, almost frantically, right and left.

  “Where?” she asked. “Oh, where, Miles?”

  “The nearest bar, I suppose,” he said. Looking about himself, he spotted the neon sign of one, palely lit and violet-colored in the red sunlight, half a block down the street from them. “This way.”

  They went quickly down the half block and into the bar. Within, no one was moving—neither bartenders nor customers. They all were sitting or standing still as carvings, staring at the large television set set up high on a dark wooden shelf at the inner end of the bar. From that ledge, the lined, rectangular face of the President of the United States looked out. Miles heard the tail end of his sentence as they entered.

  “For simultaneous announcement to all countries of the world,” said the slow, pausing voice in the same heavy tones they had heard a dozen times before, speaking on smaller issues of the country and the world. “These two visitors also supplied us with a film strip to be used in conjunction with the announcement. First, here is a picture of our two friends from the civilization of worlds at the center of our galaxy.”

  The rectangular face disappeared, to be replaced by the still image of two men in what seemed to be gray business suits, s
tanding before a window in some sort of lounge or reception room—probably a room in one of the UN buildings, Miles thought.

  It was as the radio announcer had said earlier. There was nothing about the two to distinguish them from any other humans. Their noses were a little long, the skin of their faces a little dark, and there was a suspicion of a mongoloid fold above the eyes. Otherwise, they might have been encountered on the streets of any large city in the world, east or west, without the slightest suspicion that they had come from anywhere off the planet.

  “These gentlemen,” the Presidential voice went on slowly, “have explained to the representatives of the nations of our world that our galaxy, that galaxy of millions upon millions of stars, of which our sun is a minor star out near the edge”—the figures of the two men disappeared and were replaced by what looked like a glowing spiral of dust floating against a black background—“will shortly be facing attack by a roving intergalactic race which periodically preys upon those island universes like our galaxy which dot that intergalactic space.

  “Their civilization, which represents many worlds in many solar systems in toward the center of the galaxy, has taken the lead in forming a defensive military force which will attempt to meet these predators at the edge of our galaxy and turn them aside from their purpose. They inform us that if the predators are not turned aside, over ninety percent of the life on the inhabited worlds of our galaxy will be captured and literally processed for food to feed this nomadic and rapacious civilization. Indeed, it is the constant need to search for sustenance for their overwhelming numbers that keeps them always on the move between and through the galaxies, generation succeeding generation in rapacious conquest.”

  Suddenly the image of something like a white-furred weasel, with hands on its two upper limbs and standing erect on its two hind limbs, filled the television screen. Beside it was the gray outline of a man, and it could be seen that the creature came about shoulder-high on the outline.