by Ian Whates
I
MALACHI RUNNER DIDN’T like to look at General Compton. Compton the lean, keen, slash-gesturing semi-demagogue of a few years ago had been much easier to live with than Compton as he was now, and Runner had never had much stomach for him even then. So Runner kept his eyes firmly fixed on the device he was showing.
Keeping his eyes where they were was not as easy as it might have been. The speckled, bulbous distortion in front of him was what Headquarters, several hundred miles away under The Great Salt Lake, was pleased to refer to as an Invisible Weapons Carrier. It was hard to see because it was designed to be hard to see.
But Malachi Runner was going to have to take this thing up across several hundred miles of terrain, and he was standing too close to it not to see it. The Invisible Weapons Carrier was, in fact, a half-tone of reality. It was large enough to contain a man and a fusion bomb, together with the power for its engine and its light amplifiers. It bristled with a stiff mat of flexible-plastic light-conducing rods, whose stub ends, clustered together in a tight mosaic pointing outward in every conceivable direction, contrived to bend light around its bulk. It was presently conducting, towards Runner, a picture of the carved rock directly behind it.
The rock, here in this chamber cut under the eastern face of the Medicine Bow Mountains, was reasonable featureless; and the light-amplifiers carefully controlled the intensity of the picture. So the illusion was marred by only two things: the improbable angle of the pictured floor it was also showing him, and the fact that for every rod conducting light from the wall, another rod was conducting light from Runner’s direction, so that to his eyes the ends of half the rods were dead black.
“Invisibility,” Compton said scornfully from behind and to one side of Runner. Or, rather, he whispered and an amplifier took up the strain in raising his voice to a normal level. “But it’s not bad camouflage. You might make it, Colonel.”
“I have orders to try.” Runner would not give Compton the satisfaction of knowing that his impatience was with the means provided, not with the opportunity. The war could not possibly be permitted to continue the thirty years more given to it by Compton’s schedule. Compton himself was proof of that.
Not that proof required Compton. He was only one. There were many.
Runner glanced aside at the cadet officer who had guided him from the tramway stop to this chamber here, in one of the side passages of the siege bore that was being driven under the Medicine Bows in the direction of the alien spaceship that had dominated the world for fifty years. The boy – none of these underofficers were older than seventeen – had a face that looked as if it had been made from wet paper and then baked dry. His eyesockets were black pits from which his red eyes stared, and his hands were like chickens’ feet. His bloated stomach pushed against the wide white plastic of his sidearm belt.
He looked, in short, like most of the other people Runner had seen here since getting off the tram. As he was only seventeen, he had probably been born underground, somewhere along the advancing bore, and had never so much as seen sunlight, much less eaten anything grown under it. He had been bred and educated – or mis-educated; show him something not printed in Military Alphabet and you showed him the Mayan Codex – trained and assigned to duty in a tunnel in the rock; and never in his life had he been away from the sound of the biting drills.
“You’re not eager to go, Colonel?” Compton’s amplified whisper said. “You’re Special Division, so of course this isn’t quite your line of work. I know your ideas, you Special Division men. Find some way to keep the race from dehumanizing itself.” And now he chose to make a laugh, remembering to whisper it. “One way to do that would be to end the war before another generation goes by.”
Runner wondered, not for the first time, if Compton would find some way to stop him without actually disobeying the Headquarters directive ordering him to cooperate. Runner wondered, too, what Compton would say if he knew just how eager he was for the mission – and why. Runner could answer the questions for himself by getting to know Compton better, or course. There was the rub.
Runner did not think he could ever have felt particularly civilized towards anyone who had married his fiancée. That was understandable. It was even welcome. Runner perversely cherished his failings. Not too perversely, at that – Runner consciously cherished every human thing remaining to the race.
Runner could understand why a woman would choose to marry the famous Corps of Engineers general who had already chivvied and bullied the Army – the organizing force of the world – into devoting its major resources to this project he had fostered. There was no difficulty in seeing why Norma Brand might turn away from Malachi Runner in favour of a man who was not only the picture of efficiency and successful intellect but also was thought likely to be the saviour of Humanity.
But Compton several years later was—
Runner turned and looked; he couldn’t spend the rest of the day avoiding it. Compton, several years later, was precisely what a man of his time could become if he was engaged in pushing a three hundred mile tunnel through the rock of a mountain chain, never knowing how much his enemy might know about it, and if he proposed to continue that excavation to its end, thirty years from now, whether the flesh was willing to meet his schedules or not.
Compton’s leonine head protruded from what was very like a steam cabinet on wheels. In that cabinet were devices to assist his silicotic lungs, his sclerotic blood vessels, and a nervous system so badly deranged that even several years ago Runner had detected the great man in fits of spastic trembling. And God knew what else might be going wrong with Compton’s body that Compton’s will would not admit.
Compton grinned at him. Almost simultaneously, a bell chimed softly in the control panel on the back of the cabinet. The cadet aide sprang forward, read the warning in some dial or other and made an adjustment in the settings of the control knobs. Compton craned his neck in its collar of loose grey plastic sheeting and extended his grin to the boy. “Thank you, Cadet. I thought I was starting to feel a little dizzy.”
“Yes, sir.” The aide went back to his rest position.
“All right, Colonel,” Compton said to Runner as though nothing had happened. “I’ve been curious to see this gimmick of yours in operation ever since it was delivered here. Thank you. You can turn it off now. And after that, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen.”
Runner frowned for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. He crawled under the weapons carrier. From that close it was no longer “invisible”, only vaguely dizzying to the eye. He opened the hatch and turned off the main switch.
Compton could only have meant he was going to show him the ship.
Of course, he had seen films of it often enough. Who had not? The Army had managed to keep spy-drones flying above the Mississippi plain. The ship ignored them unless they took on aggressive trajectories.
Presumably there was some limit to the power the ship felt able to expend. Or perhaps the ship simply did not care what Earthmen might learn from watching it; perhaps it underestimated them.
This latest in the long chain of Compton’s command bunkers, creeping mole-like towards the ship, was lighted a sickly orange-yellow. Runner seemed to recall a minor scandal in the Quarter-master Corps. Something about a contractor who had bribed or cozened a Corps officer into believing that yellow light duplicated natural sunlight. Contractor and misled officer were no doubt long dead in one of the labour battalions at the bore face, but some use for the useless lights had had to be found. And so here they were, casting their pall, just as if two lives and two careers had not already gone towards settling the account.
But, of course, nothing settles an account as derelict as Earth’s was.
In that light, Compton’s cabinet rolled forward to the bank of hooded television screens jury-rigged against a somewhat water-proofed wall. A row of technicians perched on stools watched what the drones were showing them.
“Lights,” Compton said, and th
e aide made the room dark. “Here, Colonel – try this one.” He pointed his chin towards a particular screen, and Runner stepped closer. For the first time in his life, he saw something only a few hundred people of his time had seen in an undelayed picture; he saw the ship. It was two hundred miles away from his present location, and two hundred and fifty miles high.
II
Fifty years ago, the alien ship landed butt-down in the northwest quadrant of the central plain of the United States. Stern-first, she had put one of her four landing jacks straight down to bedrock through the town of Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, and the diagonally opposite leg seventy-five miles away near Julesburg, Colorado. Her shadow swept fifty thousand square miles.
A tower of pitted dull green and brown-gold metal, her forepeak narrowing in perspective into a needle raking unseen through the thinnest last margins of the atmosphere, she had neither parleyed nor even communicated with anything on or of Earth. No one had ever seen anything of what her crew might look like. To this day, she still neither spoke to Earth nor listened to whatever Terrestrials might want to say to her. She was neither an embassy nor an invader.
For fifty years she had been broadcasting the same code group into space, hour after hour, but she had neither made nor received any beam transmissions along any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The presumption was she had a distress beacon out on general principles, but had no hope of communicating with a particular source of rescue.
She had come down a little erratically; there was some suggestion of jury-rigging in the plates over an apparently buckled section of the hull shrouding her stern tubes; there seemed to be some abnormal erosion at one segment of the lip around the main jet. Over the years, Headquarters Intelligence had reached the decision that she was down on Earth for a self-refit.
Landing, she had immediately put out surface parties and air patrols – there were turret-mounted weapons all along her flanks; she was clearly a warship of some kind – in a display of resources that badly upset the Terrestrial military forces observing her. The surface parties were squat-profiled, tracked, armoured amphibious machines with sixteen-foot bogeys and a track-to-turtledeck height of seventy-five feet. They had fanned out over the surrounding states and, without regard to road, river, fence or farmhouse, had foraged for minerals. It had finally been concluded that the vehicles, equipped with power shovels, claws, drills, ore buckets and whatever other mining tools were necessary, were remote-controlled from the ship on the basis of local topography but not with any reference to the works of Man. Or to the presence of Man. The undeviating tracks made as much of a hayrick as they did of a company of anti-tank infantry or a battalion of what the Army in those days was pleased to call “armour”.
Whatever had hurt her, there was no point in Earthmen speculating on it. No missile could reach her. She had antimissile missiles and barrage patterns that, in operation, had made the Mississippi plain uninhabitable. An attempt was made to strike her foraging parties, with some immediate success. She then extended her air cover to the entire civilized world, and began methodically smashing down every military installation and every industrial complex capable of supporting one.
It was a tribute to the energy and perseverance of Twentieth Century Man. And it was the cause of Twenty-First Century man’s finding himself broken into isolated enclaves, almost all of them either underground or so geographically remote as to be valueless, and each also nearly incapable of physical communication with any other.
It did not take a great deal of Terrestrial surface activity to attract one of the ship’s nearly invulnerable aircraft. Runner’s journey between Salt Lake and the tunnel pit head had been long, complicated by the need to establish no beaten path, and anxious. Only the broken terrain, full of hiding places, had made it possible at all.
But the balance between birth and death rates was once more favourable, and things were no longer going all the ship’s way – whether the ship knew it or not. Still, it would be another thirty years before this siege bore Compton was driving could reach, undermine and finally topple the ship.
Thirty years from now, Runner and the other members of Special Division knew, the biped, spindling, red-eyed creatures emerging from the ground to loot that broken ship and repay themselves for this nightmare campaign would be only externally human – some of them. Some would be far less. Special Division’s hope – its prospects were not good enough to call it a task – was to attempt to shorten that time while Humanity was still human.
And if the human race did not topple the ship, or if the ship completed its refit and left before they could reach it, then all this fifty years of incalculable material and psychic expenditure was irretrievably lost. Humanity would be bankrupt. They were all living now on the physical and emotional credit embodied in that tower of alien resources. From it, they could strip a technology to make the world new again – nothing less could accomplish that; in its conquest, there was a triumph to renew the most exhausted heart. Or almost any such heart. Runner could only speculate on how many of the victors would be, like Compton, unable to dance upon the broken corpse.
If anyone on Earth doubted, no one dared to dwell aloud on the enfeebling thought.
They had to have the ship.
“She’s got some kind of force field running over her structure,” Compton remarked, looking at the image on the screen. “We know that much. Something that keeps the crystals in her metal from deforming and sliding. She’d collapse. If we had something like that field, we could build to her size, too.”
“Is there that much metal in the world?”
Compton looked sideward at Runner. “A damned sight more. But if we had her, we wouldn’t need it.”
Yes, Runner thought, keeping himself from looking at the screen now as faithfully as he had prevented himself from looking at Compton earlier. Yes, if we had the ship we wouldn’t need this, and we wouldn’t need that, or the other thing. We could even engineer such wonderful cabinets like the one in which Compton dwells that none of us would have to fear a stop to our ambitions, and we could roll along in glory on the wonderfully smooth corridor floors we could carve, away from the places where storms and lightning strike.
For how could you live, Compton, out there where I have to go tomorrow?
Compton, looking up at him, shrewdly said: “Do you know I approve of the Special Division? I think you people serve a very necessary function. I need the pressure of rivals.”
Runner thought: You are ugly.
“I have to go to sleep,” he had said and left Compton to his screens and schedules. But he did not take the lift down to the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters where had been given an accommodation – a two-man cubicle for himself alone; the aide, never having experienced solitude, as Runner had, had been envious. Instead, he puzzled his way through another of the branching temporary passageways that were crudely chopped out for living space near the advancing bore.
He searched until he found the proper door. The letter Norma had sent him did not contain the most exact directions. It had spoken in local terms: “Follow the first parallel until you reach the fourth gallery,” and so forth.
He knocked, and the gas-tight door opened.
“I heard you would be here today,” Norma said in a choked voice, and there was much for him to read in the waxiness of her skin and the deep wrinkles that ran from the corners of her nose to the corners of her bloodless mouth.
He took the hands she offered, and stepped inside.
There was one large room; that is, a room large enough for a free-standing single cot, rather than a bunk, and a cleared area, faintly marked by black rubber wheelmarks, large enough for a cabinet to turn around in.
“How are you, Norma?” he said as if he could not guess, and she did not trouble to answer him. She shut the door and leaned against it as if they had both just fled in here.
“Are you going out in the morning?”
Runner nodded. It seemed to him he had time at least to sa
y a few conventional things to the girl who had been his fiancée, and then Compton’s wife. But she apparently thought otherwise.
“Are you going to make it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a gamble.”
“Do you think you’ll make it?”
“No.”
It had never seemed reasonable that he would. In the Technical Section of the Special Division there were men – fully his equals – who were convinced he could succeed. They said they had calculated the ship’s weaknesses, and he believed they had figures and evaluations, right enough. He in his own turn believed there were things a man had to be willing to do whether they seemed reasonable or not, simply because they seemed necessary. So neither fact nor opinion could modify his taking the weapons carrier out against the ship tomorrow. “But I hope I’ll make it,” he said.
“You hope you’ll make it,” Norma said tonelessly. She reached quickly and took his hands again. “What a forlorn thing to tell me! You know I won’t be able to stand it down here much longer. How do we know the ship doesn’t have seismic detectors? How do we know it isn’t just letting us concentrate ourselves here so it can smash us before we become dangerous?”
“Well, we don’t know, but it seems unlikely. They have geological probes, of course. The gamble is that they’re only probes and not detectors.”
“If they don’t smash us, there’s only one reason – they know they’ll be finished and gone before we can reach them!”
This was all wrong; he could not talk to her about anything important before he had calmed her. He said, searching for some way to reach her: “But we have to go on as if they won’t. Nothing else we’ve tried has worked. At least Compton’s project hasn’t failed.”
“Now you’re on his side! You!”
She was nothing like the way she had been with him. She would never have been like this. The way she was now, she and Malachi Runner could not meet. He understood, now, that in the years since she had left Headquarters with Compton she had come to think back on Malachi Runner not as a man but as an embodiment of that safe life. It was not him she was shouting out to. It was to all those days gone for ever.