Hour of the Horde

by Gordon R. Dickson

  His time was up. He looked away from Marie and, lifting his head, looked in his mind’s eye out to the alien spaceship.

  In that moment, he was there.

  He stood in the living room of the suite that he had first entered in the Pentagon. The two aliens stood facing him.

  “I’m ready now,” he told them.

  “That’s good,” answered the shorter one. “Because time is short.”

  He waved a hand at one wall of the room. Miles looked at it or through it—he was not sure which—and saw the sun, changing back as he watched from its red to a normal yellow color, and below it the Earth, blue under that yellow light. As he watched, the blue globe that was the Earth began to shrink. It shrank rapidly, dwindling into the blackness of star-filled space around it.

  Abruptly, all space began to move. The lights of the stars lengthened and became streaks. They became fine bars of light extending in both directions.

  “Where to now?” asked Miles.

  “To our defense line, beyond the spiral arm of the galaxy,” answered the shorter alien.

  Even as he spoke, Miles felt a sudden sense of disorientation—a strange feeling as if, in less than no time at all, he had suddenly been wrenched apart, down to the component parts of his very atoms, and spread out over inconceivable distances, before being, in the same infinitesimal moment, reassembled at some far distant place.

  “First shift,” commented the taller alien. “At the best we can do there will be five more like that, with necessary time for calculation between.”

  It did indeed require five more such moments of disorientation called shifts to complete their journey. Miles came to understand that in that moment of disorientation the ship and all within it changed position across many light-years of distance. But having jumped suddenly in this manner from one point to another, it was forced to stop and recalculate, even though its calculators were awesome by human standards, for a matter of hours or days before it could establish its due position and figure the position toward which it would next shift. All in all, it took what Miles estimated to be something like a week and a half of interior time aboard the ship before they finally reached the defense line toward which they were heading.

  They came out not at the line itself but some hours of cruising time away. This, Miles was given to understand by the shorter alien, was because of the safety factor required in the calculation of a shift. For a shift brought them only approximately to the destination they had figured, and to calculate without a margin of safety might mean coming out in the space occupied by some other solid body—with a resultant explosion that would have been to a nuclear explosion as a nuclear explosion is to that of a firecracker.

  As it was, it took several hours of driving through curiously starless space before Miles began to pick out what seemed to be a star, a single star, far ahead of them.

  As they grew close to this, however, it began to take on the disk shape and yellow color of a sun, like the sun of Earth.

  “No,” said the shorter alien, standing beside Miles in the large, almost featureless room with the large screen which seemed to be the pilot room of the aliens’ ship. Miles looked at him. Miles was becoming used to having his thoughts answered as if he had spoken them aloud.

  “It’s not a real star,” went on the smaller alien. “It’s an artificial sun—a lamp we’ve set up here to light our Battle Line for us when we meet the Horde.”

  “Where’s the defense line?” Miles asked.

  “It ought to be in view in a few minutes,” answered the shorter alien.

  Miles turned to look at the other. In spite of the change that had taken place in him, and in spite of the fact they had been together aboard the ship now for some days, he had gotten no feeling of response from the two aliens. It was as if they were wrapped around, not merely with human appearances, but with some sort of emotional and mental protective device that kept him from feeling them the way he had felt the people of his own world, as individuals. It struck Miles now that from the first he had had no names for the two of them. They had simply been the taller and the shorter, in his mind, and whenever he had spoken to one, the one at whom he directed his words seemed instinctively to know he had the responsibility to answer.

  “What are you people like, in there toward the center of the galaxy?” Miles asked now, looking down at the other. “I don’t think I ever asked you.” The alien did not turn his head but kept gazing into the screen as he answered.

  “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he said. “You are, as I said, a barbarian by our standards. Even if I could explain us to you, you wouldn’t understand. Even if you could understand what we’re like, knowing it would only frighten and disturb you.”

  A little anger stirred in Miles at this answer. But he held it down.

  “Don’t tell me you know everything, you people?” he asked.

  “Not everything,” answered the alien. “No. Of course not.”

  “Then there’s always the chance that you might be mistaken about me, isn’t there?” said Miles.

  “No,” said the alien flatly.

  He did not offer any further explanation. Miles, to keep his anger under control, made himself drop the subject. He turned back to watching the screen. After some minutes, during which the orb of the distant sunlike lamp continued to swell until it was very nearly the size of the sun as seen from Earth, he began to catch sights of glints of reflected light forming a rough bar across the lower part of the screen.

  “Yes,” said the alien beside him, once more answering his unspoken question. “You’re beginning to see part of the ships, the supply depots, and all else that make up our defense line.”

  As they got even closer, the line began to reveal itself as visible structures. But even then, Miles discovered, the screen could not hold any large part of it in one picture. With a perception he suddenly discovered he now possessed, Miles estimated the line to stretch at least as far as the distance from the solar system’s sun to its outermost planet.

  They seemed to be moving in toward the thickest part of the line, and as they got close, Miles saw round ships very much like the one he was on. These floated in space, usually with a raftlike structure nearby, and were spaced at regular intervals across the screen.

  Miles had assumed that they were fairly close by this time. But to his intense surprise they continued to drive onward at a good speed, and the ships continued to swell on the screen before him. It was some seconds before he realized that the ships they were approaching were truly titanic in size, as large in proportion to the ship he was on as the ship he was on would have been to a four-engine commercial jet of Miles’ native Earth. These great ships were certainly no less than several thousand miles in diameter.

  “If you want a word for them,” the alien beside Miles answered his unspoken thought, “you might call them our dreadnought class of fighting vessels. Actually, they’re not fighting vessels the way you’d think of them at all. They’re only vehicles to carry a certain critical number of our own people, who will use their personal weapons on the Horde when the Horde gets within range. Without our people inside it, that ship you see is a simple shell of metal and not much more.”

  It was becoming clear to Miles that they were headed for one monster of a ship in particular. He assumed they would be transferring him into the larger ship and wondered what it would be like inside that enormous shell of metal. But instead of coming right up to the dreadnought, they slowed and stopped in space perhaps four or five miles from its surface. At first Miles did not understand this. Then, turning around, he discovered he was alone in the room. His wide-ranging awareness, developed during those last days on Earth, echoed back the information to him that he was now alone on this ship. Plainly, the two aliens had gone to the larger vessel to report or whatever their duty required them to do.

  It was some minutes before either returned, and then only one came back. It was the taller of the two who finally materialized alone i
n the pilot room of the ship, where Miles was waiting, and Miles’ awareness told him that the two of them were alone in the ship.

  “I’ll take you now to your position on the line,” said the taller alien. As usual, he did nothing that Miles could see with his hands; but the unbroken surface of the dreadnought filling most of the screen began to slide off it at one side, and Miles knew that they were moving away from it and down the Battle Line toward its left end.

  If the dreadnought had proved to be larger than Miles had ever imagined, the distance to the left end of the line from its middle turned out to be even longer than he had estimated. For several hours they slid at high speed past globe-shaped vessels of varying size, from the enormous bulk of the dreadnought down to the ships smaller than the one Miles was on. As they approached the far end of the line, the ships grew progressively smaller. Also, their shape changed. No longer were they all globular. Many of them were rod- or cigar-shaped.

  “These are the ships,” the taller alien explained to Miles, without being asked, “of those outlying races that prefer to fight in their own way and with the ships they have built themselves and with which they are familiar. Because they’re effective, we let them do this. You, and those you’ll be joining, will fight in ships and weapons we supply.”

  There was something chilling about this pronouncement. Miles had not grown close to either of the two Center Aliens, but if he had felt closer to one than another, it had been the shorter instead of the taller. The taller one had always seemed more remote and less approachable than the smaller alien. Now that remoteness came through to Miles with extra force. Miles felt as a speck of dust might feel, lectured by a mountain. He was not being given a choice—he was only being given orders.

  In silence they moved on, until the ships dwindled to the point of being very small indeed, until, finally, the point was reached at which the ships, instead of hanging in space beside the raftlike structures which evidently held their supplies and material, were small enough to lie on those rafts. Still they went on, until they came at last to what seemed to be the end of the line.

  Here, on a raft several times the size of a football field, lay a ship hardly bigger than a nuclear submarine of Earth. The larger ship holding Miles and the taller alien stopped perhaps half a mile from it.

  “Now,” said the taller alien—and without warning he and Miles were transported to the raft.

  Miles found himself standing on a metal surface at the foot of a metal ladder leading up to an open doorway in the side of the ship. There was no visible shell about the raft to enclose a breathable atmosphere, yet he breathed. The doorway was dark, in contrast with the light outside from the distant sunlamp. Miles could not see what might be inside.

  “This ship,” said the taller alien quietly, “is the smallest of our scout ships. It is staffed by thirty individuals, each a representative of a world like your own. You will become the thirty-first—and last—individual to make up its crew. In the weeks to come, you, with the others, will learn to maneuver it and together use its weapon. Now follow me. I’ll take you to join the rest of the crew.”

  The taller alien floated up the ladder. Miles, starting to float behind him, felt an unexpected spasm of stubbornness. Instead of levitating, he seized hold of the ladder and climbed it like an ordinary mortal.

  As his head drew level with the entrance, he could see inside. The taller alien was waiting for him in what seemed to be a small room or hatchway with a further entrance beyond. Miles joined him, and the alien turned without a word to lead him through the interior hatchway into a large room furnished with chairs and tables of various sizes and dimensions. Miles walked after him into the light of the room—and stopped abruptly.

  The room was full. On its furniture and around its walls stood and sat a variety of different-appearing beings. All were four-limbed, standing upright on the lower two and with handlike appendages at the end of their upper pair. They all were of roughly the same size and proportions and general shape. But there was tremendous variety.

  No two had the same skin color. No two had the same facial appearance. All had roughly similar features, as far as possessing two eyes and a single nose and mouth was concerned. But from there on everything was different. Their appearance ranged from that of the completely innocuous to the completely ferocious—from one being who seemed as round and inoffensive as a toy bear to one who seemed a walking tiger, equipped with a pair of ripping teeth projecting from the upper jaw over his lower lip.

  “Members of this ship,” said the alien, stepping aside to let them all see Miles, “let me introduce you to your new fellow crew member, who on his own world is known as Miles Vander.”

  He spoke in a tongue which Miles had never heard before but which Miles found he understood, as he had earlier understood all the various languages of Earth.

  He turned back to face Miles.

  “I’ll leave you in their hands,” he said in English. And disappeared.

  Miles looked around him.

  Those of his new fellow crew members who had been seated about the room were now getting to their feet and moving forward. Those who had been on their feet were also moving forward.

  “Well,” said Miles, speaking in the language he had just heard, “I’m glad to meet you all.”

  There was no response. They continued to close in on him, making a tight circle with no space between any of them. Now he sensed it—with all his new sensitivity. There was an atmosphere in the room of savagery and bloodlust, of anticipation and fury. They closed in silently like wolves about a stranger wolf, the one with the tiger-like features moving in directly before Miles and directly toward him.

  The tigerlike being came on. Even when the others stopped, now locked in a tight ring around Miles, he came on until he stood only at arm’s length from Miles. And then he stopped.

  “My name is Chak’ha!” he said. He spoke the common language in a growling, throaty combination of sounds that no human vocal apparatus could have originated or imitated, but Miles understood him perfectly.

  And even as he said it, Chak’ha launched himself, clawlike nails outstretched, tusks gleaming, at Miles’ throat, and Miles went down under the attack.

  6

  As he fell backward with the being called Chak’ha on top of him, Miles felt panic, like a cold jagged knife, ripping upward through his belly toward his throat.

  For a moment he froze, staring up at the toothed face snarling down into his own. Then, out of something deep within him came a counteracting mingled fear and fury, as primitive and brutal as the attack on him. Suddenly he was fighting back.

  It was a simple, instinctive, animallike battle. They rolled on the metal deck together, fighting, scratching, biting, and digging at each other with every nail, tooth, or bony extremity that could be used as a weapon. For some seconds, for Miles, there was nothing but this. He had awakened into an instinctive rage out of simple fear for his life. But just as the rage had followed fear, now something beyond rage followed again.

  It came over him like drunkenness. Suddenly he found that he did not care what Chak’ha was doing to him as long as he was able to continue what he was doing to Chak’ha. The adrenalized passion of destruction filled and intoxicated him.

  In a second all those meanings which the activities of his upper mind had given his life until now were washed away in the brutal impulses from the older centers of his brain. His response to the light and shape and beauty that was art left him. His deep bond with the rest of the human race, which he had forged before being brought to this place, was forgotten. So was Marie. All that was left was the deep, primeval urge to tear and kill.

  He had his hands now around the thick-skinned, leathery throat of Chak’ha, his thumbs digging in. Chak’ha’s saber teeth and claws were slashing him wildly, but he felt no pain—he was only dimly aware of the blood running from his many wounds. Die! Die! his mind shouted at the alien as he tried to tighten his grip on the other’s windpipe, wher
ever in that thick neck it might be…

  But Chak’ha was not dying. He was continuing to slash at Miles—and gradually Miles began to realize that his own grip was weakening. All at once he became aware that he was losing blood too fast. He was failing.

  A cold inner wind blew suddenly across his hot passion for killing. It was not the alien who was in danger of dying—it was himself. Something deeper than panic moved in him, and suddenly he remembered all that, for a moment, he had forgotten: Marie, the paintings he had yet to do, the people of his Earth. His grip was slipping weakly from Chak’ha’s neck now— but he could not afford to die!

  Without warning, for the second time in his life, he went into a state of hysterical strength.

  Suddenly the tiger-faced alien was a toy in his hands. Chak’ha had already pulled loose from Miles’ grip on his throat and half turned away. But Miles caught him again now easily. Miles turned him, slid one arm under Chak’ha’s right armpit and the other under the alien’s left armpit, then clasped his hands together behind the other’s neck and pressed. Chak’ha’s neck bent like a straw-filled tube of leather, and there came from it a creaking sound.

  Abruptly, a strange gray fog seemed to fold itself about the mind and body of Miles. Dimly, he was aware that it was nothing his opponent had done. Nor was it anything that had been done by any of those standing in a tight circle around him and his enemy. It was something that seemed to come from the ship itself or from something beyond the ship.

  Unexpectedly, the fires of his hysteria were smothered. His muscles lost their strength. He was aware of his arms falling limply away, his fingers loosening and losing their grasp together behind Chak’ha’s neck. Like a man under heavy sedation, he rolled off the back of his opponent and lay lost in the gray fog.

  He was vaguely aware of the fact that Chak’ha, beside him, was also lying limply, wrapped in the same helpless condition. Above and around him, Miles was vaguely conscious of the circle of onlookers breaking up and drifting away. He saw a couple of them pick up the lax form of Chak’ha and carry it off. Alien hands also grasped him by the shoulders and legs and lifted him.