The Atlantic Abomination

by John Brunner

  He saved himself by retreating into temporary catatonia, to let the potassium cyanide vapor dilute and disperse. When he resumed full metabolic activity, his mind was made up.

  The reconquest of Earth must be a long-term project.

  XVII

  THE CORDON was, on the landward side, a crescent about fifty miles in total length and disposed irregularly in depth. Its forward outposts were all remote-controlled. Most of them were fixed scanner stations. Some few were robot vehicles, light tanks and scout cars., but these were not much more useful than the fixed ones. Any attempt to drive them into the monster’s territory resulted in their path being blocked by groups of desperate slaves, and it was more than they could bring themselves to do to plough ahead through a wall of human bodies.

  On the seaward side, some twenty naval vessels patrolled, including submarines. Since the episode of the banana boat that had unaccountably sailed into the sea wall at Jacksonville, it had been imperative to keep all ships well clear of the area.

  Overhead, occasionally and for short periods only because of its immense fuel requirements, raced their one “eye.” It was a war rocket equipped with a crude scanner and capable of five thousand miles an hour in low-level flight. From the indistinct signals it picked up they could construct, using an adaptation of an electron-amplifier in use at Pulkovo Observatory for studying the spectra of faint stars, large still pictures of the city. It was a secondhand kind of process. They could never have an idea of the situation until it was already changed.

  By now, though, they were cautiously assuming that the outline would not alter significantly; that the monster already had as many people as he could conveniently control, and would not attempt to extend his dominion in the immediate future. The information they had received from the people retrieved by Operation Mechanical Shovel had enabled them to zero in the cyanide-laden rockets they had dumped into the church. But at any one time their missile resources were restricted. The disarmament agreements that had so painfully been put into force had had the result of replacing the bludgeon with the surgeon’s knife, and all the missiles they could call on from existing stocks were designed either for the purely defensive purpose of hitting incoming missiles at high altitude or for police work, excising carefully delineated local targets.

  The psychologists, digesting their data, were becoming more confident, and their confidence was contagious. Everything pointed to the monster having overreached himself; misjudged the power of human beings to oppose him without panicking. If this were true, then by striking with precision and at irregular intervals directly at the monster, they could compel him to lose himself in a neverending series of precautions for his own safety each of which would be frustrated by an attack from a different quarter.

  It looked as if it were beginning to work.

  Therefore, although the authority had been obtained to construct a one-kiloton nuclear warhead and a suitable missile to carry it, they remained determined to keep that as a last resort. Ideas for new local attacks kept pouring in as the information obtained from study of the monster’s undersea refuge and from the hide and skeleton of his dead companion was converted into principles of procedure.

  A picture received from the scanner rocket showed them that the monster had set eight hundred people to work on excavating an underground refuge for him. Apparently he had been sufficiently shaken by the near-miss with the cyanide to stop trusting himself to surface buildings. They allowed the work to progress almost to completion. Then they sent in a volley of four earth-movers; missiles designed to penetrate anything softer than concrete and explode at predetermined depths. The carefully burrowed-out refuge collapsed obediently, and the work had to begin again.

  And as often as they could they located his new hiding place and put ordinary flare-rockets into the locality, not with the intention of doing serious harm, merely to indicate that they knew where he was, and were holding their fire because of the human beings within range of anything big enough to do him permanent damage. They had discovered from the returned slaves that the monster was no longer quite so wasteful with his subjects. It seemed that he must have given up hope of bringing any significantly larger number of people under his orders, and was therefore conserving what he had.

  Sooner or later, they would wear him down, and whereas it was a certainty that the use of a nuclear missile to finish the job would kill ninety per cent of the survivors, it was only a risk that in the throes of ultimate despair the monster would drag them down with him. They resigned themselves accordingly to a war of attrition.

  And then …

  “What? All of them?” Barghin bellowed.

  “The reports say so, sir,” the radioman confirmed. “The entire population of Brunswick which hasn’t been evacuated, the whole of Savannah, and just about everywhere in between.”

  “Get me a ‘copter and alert every detachment we’ve got in the area,” Barghin ordered.

  “Won’t be a lot of help, sir,” the radioman ventured. “It says that there haven’t been any reports for nearly an hour from any of the troops we had on the fringe of the evacuated area between Jacksonville and Brunswick, and they’re afraid they were the first to get on the move.”

  “Close the gap by remote-controlled vehicles, everything we have. And get me the ’copter, fast!”

  In the whole history of the United States there had never been anything like this. But there had been in Europe, in wartime. A whole population on the move, by the thousands and then by tens of thousands. Some in cars, some on cars, some on foot. When they choked the roads, they overflowed across the country; puzzled, attempting to turn back sometimes, and learning very quickly that that was useless.

  Blackening the highway as far as the eye could reach. In the field of his binoculars, Barghin could pick out sudden individual tragedies. There was a mother whose young child could walk no longer, trying to stop and let it rest, being forbidden to by the awful pain and having to stumble on blindly weeping, while the child was left to sob alone. A cripple, one of whose crutches had splintered, trying vainly to get someone to stop and help him get to his feet, and in the end being compelled to crawl because so long as he kept moving the pain abated. And a thousand more.

  Barghin located the level at which the pain began to effect him and his pilot. Gasping, they let the automatic controls take them up until they were out of range again, and then Barghin began to marshal his forces.

  There was no question of halting this movement by conventional methods of roadblocks or by troops. Roadblocks were by passed, or desperately broken down with bleeding hands. Troops could bear the pain no better than anyone else and were among the first to turn aside and continue the trudge towards Jacksonville.

  The robot vehicles which had served in Operation Mechanical Shovel just reached the fringe of the evacuated area before the vanguard of the column. Slammed together, tires punctured and radiators ripped open, they expired in the path of the herded victims, forming a wall of metal. At first the oncomers were slowed. Then the inexorable pressure from behind crushed them forwards again, and some began to climb on the bodies of the weak. Those in cars had to abandon their vehicles and join the marchers. Like ants, the river of people flowed up and over the obstacle, and went on.

  Harshly, Barghin ordered the blowing-up of overpasses and bridges, but this hardly hindered at all. A man can go, if he is driven to it, where a mountain goat would lose its footing. Some fell by the way, but not enough to thin the ranks noticeably. Was there no stopping them?

  No, there was not. Even the last chance, the sowing of a curtain of blazing napalm across their path, brought such hideous results—when the head of the column was compelled to blanket the flames with their own bodies so that those behind could pass over—that they could not continue with it.

  All that day and night they went on, unstoppable, unheeding of anything but a respite from the awful pain that goaded them. And then, when just under a million survivors had vanished into the b
lank area around Jacksonville, they stopped.

  White-faced, the authorities realized that this new influx rendered it inconceivable that they should use their nuclear missile against the town. And white-faced, the population at large clamored for it to be used at once. …

  It had long ago become difficult for Peter to believe that the outside world still existed. His last link with it was gone. He no longer saw, as he trudged about the city, faces that he remembered as having been among the first of the master’s subjects.

  He had been very ill for a time. An epidemic of fever had run through the city, perhaps because of the rotting corpses which had never been buried. Dogs had kept the carrion under control for a short while, but one day the master had sent out a group with axes to hunt down and kill the animals that still ran through the streets, and that had become their last supply of fresh meat.

  While he was feverish, but still working, still slaving, he had seen Mary’s face in every woman’s features, and the effect of this had been far-reaching. When he looked the second time, of course, he saw the reality. Filth, running sores, bleared eyes and rotting teeth. And his delirious mind had equated the two. Mary was dead. That was a thing he had discovered at the peak of the fever, when he had gone around tugging at people’s arms and telling them, “My wife is dead!”

  Sometimes they answered, “I hope to God mine is!” Sometimes they said “Go to hell!” And most often, they did not even hear what he said to them.

  His arm had been broken some time during this period. The same blow had embedded dirt in his bruised skin, and by the time he began to think coherently again, and to remember that that had been when the earth-mover missiles brought down the roof of the underground refuge they had made for the master, it was vastly swollen with blue-green-yellow pus. It ached continually.

  Because of that, and because of the dullness of his mind, he did not realize for some time that the master was no longer whipping him on.

  It was like a blinding vision when he localized the pain into his arm. It seemed to trigger him out of his half-world of gray and into the real world again. He found he was sitting on a broken sidewalk. A gang was working in a building across the road, doing something with fire and hand tools. Making things. Why had he not been driven to work with them? Because of his helpless arm?

  He got up and began to hobble round the city, not yet daring to hope that he had been permanently dismissed from the monster’s plans. But the hope blossomed. These people were new here! They were still healthy looking and had been well fed until quite recently. Their clothes had been laundered within the past few days, and their shoes were shiny on their feet. The master must have recruited fresh forces, and left the sick, sorry wretches that had served him before to fend for themselves.

  He trudged on through the city, hoping to find someone else in the same situation as himself, released from bondage because they had become helpless. There was no one. There were many who were no longer strong enough to move, and he left those in peace. Once he discovered a loaf of fresh bread that must have been brought to the city by the new arrivals, and crammed it hungrily into his mouth before moving on.

  But the newcomers could not stop and speak to him. They were working frantically, wildly, at tasks whose complexity baffled his dull mind. They were making things, making individual objects, and he recognized that that was new. Once he found men and women picking metal parts out of the giant scrapheap where all the cars had been destroyed. Once he saw men salvaging plates from the banana boat in the harbor and hauling them ashore.

  He got as far as the missile station a mile beyond the town, with no one questioning him or stopping him, and there he saw that a structure was taking shape. Electricians were at work on it, and welders, and children laboring under heavy loads. He stared at it dully, making no sense out of its huge struts and plates. There were portable forges standing around. Men were hammering, sawing, shaping.

  Beyond, there were racks and racks of bulbous cylinders that struck a chord of memory. But he did not know what they were. He gave up trying to solve the relationship between all the things that were being done in the city, and moaned over his injured arm.

  Then an idea came to him. He had walked this far without being turned back or lashed by the master. Could he walk away?

  XVIII

  IT WAS like the endless arguments about euthanasia. Suppose a cure is found for a supposedly incurable disease one day after you have put a patient out of his misery? Suppose it is not!

  Directly and indirectly, perhaps three million people must by now be involved in the affair; from hospital staffs and police, directing the renewed streams of fugitives, to the scientists, psychologists, soldiers and airmen carrying on the battle. But what they did was directed by state governments, the federal government, Congress and the UN. And so in the ultimate resort, these few men in this room were doing the work.

  That was the way you had to look at it, Barghin reflected. It wasn’t a case of matching one alien against millions and millions of people. It was more like one against twenty. For once you decide to subdivide your effort, specialize, and depute, each individual counts for less than one as well as more than one.

  He said, “Mr. President! Let’s cut this knot right now. I don’t see we’re any of us going to give up our preconceived ideas on whether we should or should not use that nuclear missile now. I’ll make a suggestion which will save arguing any further, I think. We ready it for firing. We use it only if we see another big population movement starting, or this sudden rash of building in Jacksonville turns out to be the manufacture of missiles to hit us where it hurts.”

  The President ran his finger around the inside of his collar as though to loosen it. “A reasonable proposal, general,” he said with relief. “I agree. Gentlemen?”

  The conference delegates—cabinet members, armed forces staffs, two UN observers including Lampion from Atlantica, and those who had been on the inside from the beginning like Dr. Gordon and Mary Trant—nodded reluctantly or vigorously. The President managed a smile.

  “Good. General, what exactly is this building we hear so much about?”

  “Up until lately, we’ve seen nothing going on in Jacksonville except work we could identify as redesigning streets, making this abortive underground shelter for the monster, and so on. Since the new influx, the pattern has completely changed. We’ve identified manufactures. The industrial plants within the area, from the shops on the missile station to the harbor facilities, have suddenly been put back into use. When the monster first took over, he stopped everything of that kind. Factories went dead, power stations quit, phone exchanges and broadcasting stations went out. Now the factories have woken up again, and we found they were drawing on outside power supplies, so we cut the cables and they restarted the local power generators.

  “What’s more, they’ve been gutting the places they aren’t using. Banks of phone equipment have been carted to the missile station. I’m told you can use it for other kinds of information besides speech, and this looks suspicious. The wrecks in the harbor have been stripped of useful material. And it’s all going out to the missile base. It looks dangerous.”

  “There’s no chance of the monster making atomic missiles, is there?” the President queried.

  “Theoretically, I’m told, one might adapt the works of a fusion power station to use as a bomb. But there’s only one such in the Jacksonville area. And there are no ships in port with nuclear engines. They’re all merchant vessels. It seems highly improbable.”

  “That’s a relief to know, anyway.”

  “And in any case, we have every countermissile station on the eastern and southern seaboards on a clock-round alert.” Barghin shrugged. “That’s it.”

  A light was blinking on the phone before the President. He answered the call irritably. He listened, and a light seemed to come into his mind. “Yes! Wonderful! I’ll get Barghin over. Yes.” He covered the microphone with his hand and said, “Barghin, a man h
as walked out of Jacksonville without being stopped. He’s hurt and delirious, but he’s got out!”

  “Who?” Two voices put the question at once. Barghin glanced around the table and realized that the other one had been Mary’s. She was leaning forward with sudden bright hope dawning in her face.

  The President listened a little longer and cradled the phone. He said, “The name is Peter Trant.”

  A fast ’copter brought Barghin with Mary and Dr. Gordon to the field hospital behind the cordon where Peter had been brought. They were met by the local medical corps commander, a Major Lewicz, who heard their questions stony-faced.

  “He said his wife was dead,” he declared. “He was in a bad way, and it’s possible he was delirious from blood poisoning. If it is this lady’s husband, I’m afraid she’d better prepare herself for a shock.”

  “I’m already prepared,” Mary said softly.

  “No … There’s another shock, I’m afraid. When he came out of the evacuated area, his left arm was ruined. It had been broken, covered with infected dirt, and not dressed. It was gangrened past the elbow, and the fingers had already begun to slough off. I’m afraid we had to amputate, Mrs. Trant.”

  “Has he talked at all since you operated?” Mary asked.

  “Not yet. And he won’t be back in his right mind for at least a day or two. That’s assuming it’s only septicaemic poisons that are making him delirious, and not something more fundamental.”

  “Can I see him, anyway? I’d like to know.”

  “Of course.”

  It was Peter, behind that ragged beard and the paste of antibiotic ointments around his inflamed eyes. It was. Mary reached out to touch the remaining hand where it lay on the red blanket, and hesitated in horror to see the caluses and ragged nails.

  “Peter! Peter!” she whispered. But the unconscious man did not reply.