by Joe Haldeman
The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth’s. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both …?
‘This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.’ He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air. They wouldn’t offer much in the way of cover.
‘We’ll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right. Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?’ Sure, we could do that ‘arrowhead’ maneuver in our sleep. ‘OK, let’s move out.’
I was in Platoon Seven, the ‘command group.’ Captain Stott put me there not because I was expected to give any commands, but because of my training in physics.
The command group was supposedly the safest place, buffered by six platoons: people were assigned to it because there was some tactical reason for them to survive at least a little longer than the rest. Cortez was there to give orders. Chavez was there to correct suit malfunctions. The senior medic, Doc Wilson (the only medic who actually had an M.D.), was there, and so was Theodopolis, the radio engineer, our link with the captain, who had elected to stay in orbit.
The rest of us were assigned to the command group by dint of special training or aptitude that wouldn’t normally be considered of a ‘tactical’ nature. Facing a totally unknown enemy, there was no way of telling what might prove important. Thus I was there because I was the closest the company had to a physicist. Rogers was biology. Tate was chemistry. Ho could crank out a perfect score on the Rhine extrasensory perception test, every time. Bohrs was a polyglot, able to speak twenty-one languages fluently, idiomatically. Petrov’s talent was that he had tested out to have not one molecule of xenophobia in his psyche. Keating was a skilled acrobat. Debby Hollister — ‘Lucky’ Hollister — showed a remarkable aptitude for making money, and also had a consistently high Rhine potential.
12
When we first set out, we were using the ‘jungle’ camouflage combination on our suits. But what passed for jungle in these anemic tropics was too sparse; we looked like a band of conspicuous harlequins trooping through the woods. Cortez had us switch to black, but that was just as bad, as the light of Epsilon came evenly from all parts of the sky, and there were no shadows except ours. We finally settled on the dun-colored desert camouflage.
The nature of the countryside changed slowly as we walked north, away from the sea. The thorned stalks — I guess you could call them trees — came in fewer numbers but were bigger around and less brittle; at the base of each was a tangled mass of vine with the same bluegreen color, which spread out in a flattened cone some ten meters in diameter. There was a delicate green flower the size of a man’s head near the top of each tree.
Grass began to grow some five klicks from the sea. It seemed to respect the trees’ ‘property rights,’ leaving a strip of bare earth around each cone of vine. At the edge of such a clearing, it would grow as timid bluegreen stubble, then, moving away from the tree, would get thicker and taller until it reached shoulderhigh in some places, where the separation between two trees was unusually large. The grass was a lighter, greener shade than the trees and vines. We changed the color of our suits to the bright green we had used for maximum visibility on Charon. Keeping to the thickest part of the grass, we were fairly inconspicuous.
We covered over twenty klicks each day, buoyant after months under two gees. Until the second day, the only form of animal life we saw was a kind of black worm, finger-sized, with hundreds of cilium legs like the bristles of a brush. Rogers said that there obviously had to be some larger creature around, or there would be no reason for the trees to have thorns. So we were doubly on guard, expecting trouble both from the Taurans and the unidentified ‘large creature.’
Potter’s second platoon was on point; the general freak was reserved for her, since her platoon would likely be the first to spot any trouble.
‘Sarge, this is Potter,’ we all heard. ‘Movement ahead.’
‘Get down, then!’
‘We are. Don’t think they see us.’
‘First platoon, go up to the right of point. Keep down. Fourth, get up to the left. Tell me when you get in position. Sixth platoon, stay back and guard the rear. Fifth and third, close with the command group.’
Two dozen people whispered out of the grass to join us. Cortez must have heard from the fourth platoon.
‘Good. How about you, first? … OK, fine. How many are there?’
‘Eight we can see.’ Potter’s voice.
‘Good. When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.’
‘Sarge … they’re just animals.’
‘Potter — if you’ve known all this time what a Tauran looks like, you should’ve told us. Shoot to kill.’
‘But we need …’
‘We need a prisoner, but we don’t need to escort him forty klicks to his home base and keep an eye on him while we fight. Clear?’
‘Yes. Sergeant.’
‘OK. Seventh, all you brains and weirds, we’re going up and watch. Fifth and third, come along to guard.’
We crawled through the meter-high grass to where the second platoon had stretched out in a firing line.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Cortez said.
‘Ahead and just to the left. Dark green.’
They were only a shade darker than the grass. But after you saw the first one, you could see them all, moving slowly around some thirty meters ahead.
‘Fire!’ Cortez fired first; then twelve streaks of crimson leaped out and the grass wilted black, disappeared, and the creatures convulsed and died trying to scatter.
‘Hold fire, hold it!’ Cortez stood up. ‘We want to have something left — second platoon, follow me.’ He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage … I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality … that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want—
‘OK, seventh, come on up.’ While we were walking toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature’s middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.
They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur — white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity … Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.
‘Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?’
Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. ‘One way we might be able to find out.’ Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.
‘Here.’ She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.
/> ‘So?’
‘It’s grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.’ She tossed it away. ‘They’re animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.’
‘I don’t know,’ Doc Wilson said. ‘Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass …’
‘Well, let’s check out the brain.’ She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. ‘Look at that.’
It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. ‘What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or …’ She stood up.
‘Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.’
‘If I could shrug, I’d shrug,’ the doctor said. ‘It doesn’t prove anything — a brain doesn’t have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn’t have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn’t bone, maybe that’s the brain, some crystal lattice …’
‘Yeah, but the fucken stomach’s in the right place, and if those aren’t intestines I’ll eat—’
‘Look,’ Cortez said, ‘this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all—’
‘They aren’t dangerous,’ Rogers began. ‘They don’t—’
‘Medic! DOC!’ Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Doc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.
‘What’s wrong?’ He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run.
‘It’s Ho. She’s out.’
Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ Cortez said. ‘What the hell—’
‘Just a minute.’ Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. ‘Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to — there!’
‘What?’
‘Four and a half minutes ago — must have been when you opened fire — Jesus!’
‘Well?’
‘Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No …’ He watched the dials. ‘No … warning, no indication of anything out of the ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances … nothing to … indicate—’ He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.’
‘Oh fuck,’ Rogers said, ‘she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.’
‘That’s right,’ Cortez sounded thoughtful. ‘All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?’
‘I … I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,’ Lucky said.
Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine-sensitive. The others didn’t know.
‘Cortez, I think it’s obvious,’ Doc Wilson said, ‘that we should give these … monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.’
‘Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.
‘Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.’
‘What about Ho?’ Lucky asked.
‘She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.’
After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
13
We stopped for the ‘night’ — actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours — atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself — we were.
Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.
Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.
‘Hi, Marygay.’
‘Oh, William,’ her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. ‘God, it’s so horrible.’
‘It’s over now—’
‘I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the …’
I put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. ‘Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is … belongs evenly to all of us … but a triple portion for Cor—’
‘You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.’
‘OK, Sarge.’ Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each trapped in our own plastic world—
‘G’night, William.’
‘Night.’ It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try … lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day—
‘Mandella — wake up, goddammit, your shift!’
I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what … but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.
For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.
‘Movement!’
‘Movement!’
‘Jesus Chri—there’s one right—’
‘HOLD YOUR FIRE! F’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!’
‘Movement.’
‘Movement.’ I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.
‘All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don’t make any quick gestures … Anybody got a headache or anything?’
‘Sergeant, this is Hollister.’ Lucky.
‘They’re trying to say something … I can almost … no, just …’
‘All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re … well, funny. They’re not afraid.’
‘You mean the one in fron
t of you isn’t—’
‘No, the feeling comes from all of them, they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.’
‘Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.’
‘Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.’
‘Sergeant, this is Bohrs.’
‘Yeah.’
‘The Taurans’ve been here at least a year — maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these … overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back—’
‘I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,’ Lucky said. ‘They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to.’
‘Anyhow,’ Cortez said, ‘if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be careful.’
I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
‘OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.’
I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.
We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.