Futures Past

by James White

  The ship had been detected over the Indian Ocean by Cape Town radar, and finding it there had been sheer luck because all attention had been centered on the Central American area where unprecedented numbers of Bug ships had appeared. But the University observers had seen it and reported its unusually slow rate of descent—no evasive action being attempted at all—together with their deductions regarding its behavior. Colonel Dawson's group had been dispatched immediately from their home base in Rhodesia, and Lieutenant Nolan came from the University complete with special instructions.

  MacFall's job was to get Nolan to the grounded Bug ship. He was to obey the lieutenant implicitly in everything. The colonel stressed the importance of this point so much that MacFall felt slightly angry about it—he had not been made a sergeant for insubordination, had he? The colonel ended by stating that if this operation was a success it might very well mean the end of the war.

  MacFall thought sourly that he had heard that one before. He saluted and left to form the search party, trying to think of men who were both dependable and who had a spot of dirty work coming because of some recent misdemeanor. MacFall liked to think that he was a fair man.

  Not quite fifteen minutes later the party passed through the evil-smelling drizzle of the perimeter sprays and into the jungle. Ten men in extended single file, clad from head to toes in tough plastic and hung with machetes, Deedee guns and the special equipment required by Lieutenant Nolan. Corporal Calleria was on point with strict orders to walk silently around rather than hack noisily through obstacles whenever possible, and MacFall and the lieutenant brought up the rear.

  MacFall was pondering ways and means of using his superior officer with the greatest efficiency, so that the persons of his men and himself would not be endangered by the ignorance—whether of greater or lesser degree—of their commander. They would run enough risks without adding to them unnecessarily.

  The lieutenant was eyeing the two men ahead of them, MacFall saw. Nolan had noticed that their head and face armor was hanging backward over their shoulders instead of being in position, and his mouth was opening to order them sharply to replace it.

  MacFall said hastily, "Is this your first time on a jungle patrol, sir?" Tactfully he had refrained from asking was it his, first time out of school, but implied that the lieutenant no doubt had field experience in other theatres.

  "Uh? Oh, yes," Nolan said, taking his attention off the offending soldiers. "I've been mainly on lab work."

  "There may be a few tips we could give you, then," MacFall said easily. "Stuff not covered in temperate zone training. For instance, sir, take those two men ahead of us . . ." He went on to explain why they and the others who were out of sight at the moment were not wearing head protection, foolhardy as this seemed.

  Two minutes later the lieutenant and himself were peeling off their head armor. Free of the sweltering hot, suffocating plastic, Nolan gave a great sigh of relief and knuckled sweat out of his eyes. He looked steadily at MacFall for several seconds, then said, "Thank you, Sergeant."

  The lieutenant, MacFall realized, might not have much experience, but he was no fool.

  They trudged on toward the rising ground to the west, Nolan slapping at the mosquitoes which hung in a buzzing cloud around his head. MacFall waved his away rather than trying to kill any of them—he was almost kindly disposed toward the little brutes. As he had just explained to the lieutenant, they made it possible for the men to dispense with some of the smothering, heat-retaining armor —and in the tropics that meant an awful lot—by their mere presence.

  In some obscure way the teeming insect life of the jungle could sense the approach or presence of the Bugs, that had been proved many times. MacFall thought that a few mosquito bites was a small enough price to pay for the warning system which the vicious little insects furnished.

  MacFall said in disgusted tones, "This is a lousy war!"

  It was a stock observation demanding a rejoinder which varied only in the degree of profanity qualifying it. Mac-Fall made it only to start the lieutenant talking so that he could find out what the other had in mind when they found the fallen Bug ship.

  Nolan slapped himself on the cheek viciously—completely missing the insect which had just bitten him—and winced. He said pedantically "Not lousy, exactly, Sergeant. The species is greatly dissimilar in physical structure and habits—the little we know of them—from the common . . ." He broke off, then ended in more normal tones, "But it's a ... a frustrating war, I agree."

  MacFall nodded silently, thinking of the ten men ahead of them. Men with the horribly disfigured visages which marked them as veterans of this war, men who had no hope of winning it quickly because their enemy would not stand still and fight, and men who—unlike the warriors of previous conflicts—were hated rather than hero-worshipped by the civilians. Oh yes, a most frustrating war.

  It was only a year ago that the first Bug ships had landed. They had come down practically everywhere, but seemed to concentrate in tropical and semi-tropical areas. Experts had witnessed many of these landings so that the world knew exactly what was happening to it without the delays which would have caused rumors to grow. MacFall remembered the headlines: WORLD INVADED FROM SPACE! INSECT RACE DESCENDS ON EARTH! they had screamed, playing it up big for laughs. It had been a great joke—at first.

  Dealing with this "alien threat" would be no trouble at all, it had been thought. But for the little matter of the Bug ability to cross space the Earth technology was vastly superior. It only remained for the secret of the Bug space drive to be learned and the medical people, who had been uneasy about the danger of possible new infections, could have their way and the aliens be destroyed. The procedure was to have been investigate, learn and destroy, but it had not worked out that way. Before anything of importance had been learned—the investigators in ever-increasing numbers became casualties. Some were killed; others blinded and all were horribly mutilated about the hands and face. Very quickly the order of the day became destroy, and hang the investigation!

  But what was thought at first to be a fairly easy mopping-up operation soon turned out to be a long, frustrating and well nigh impossible task. The superb mass destruction weapons of Earth were completely ineffective against an enemy so small, highly mobile and evenly distributed as the Bugs. Quite literally, a fly swatter was of more use than a hydrogen bomb—more effective even than the hotted-up DDT sprayers which had been developed recently.

  Taken singly the enemy was not a very terrifying entity. Here in Madagascar he was a silvery-gray, winged insect just under one inch in length. This was not his true coloring, MacFall knew, but that of the protective sheath which the Bugs had developed against the early and milder DDT guns. Nowadays those shells merely slowed the speed with which the Bugs died, because the present Deeded gun shot a spray of insecticide so concentrated that a misdirected burst could blister the skin of the man using it. The Bugs just shriveled up and died. But for the three or four seconds they took to die, they fought.

  It was hard to believe that mere insects could evolve firearms, but it was so, and in relation to their size those weapons were very powerful indeed. They shot a tiny projectile which, under favorable circumstances, could penetrate human flesh to a depth of half an inch and there explode. The charge they contained equaled that of only a few grains of gunpowder, but exploding as they did inside solid flesh and muscle a few such projectiles could disable or demoralize any man. Placed right—and the Bugs had quickly learned where to place them—they could kill.

  Forcefully MacFall pushed the memory of what those microscopic bullets could do out of his mind. He ducked to avoid a thorny outgrowth that writhed across their path just at shoulder level, and tried to wipe sweat from his face with a hand that was equally sweaty; in the jungle these plastic coveralls were murder. His fingers ran over the ridges, craters and puckers of scar tissue covering his cheek and jaw and the bristles growing through them. Smooth, he thought sourly, remembering razor blade and shav
ing soap ads he had read in the days when he could use such things; smooth, like a rocky beach! He increased pace to draw abreast of the lieutenant.

  Nolan's face was smooth, but not entirely unmarked. There was that technicolored mouse under the lieutenant's eye—a temporary, but still honorable scar of battle.

  MacFall felt better with a bit of conversation going on, and anyway it was time the lieutenant began telling them what he intended doing. More to start the other talking than anything else, MacFall said, "I see you ran into a door, sir. A civilian door, I suppose?"

  "One of the students," Nolan said shortly. His lips tightened and he did not appear disposed to elucidate.

  "But why do they do it?" MacFall asked angrily, ignoring the officer's expression. He felt very strongly on the subject. "Haven't we enough on our hands without civilians picking fights with us, or beating up men on leave, or even throwing rocks at us? Damn it, they're nothing but a pack of lousy quislings who—"

  "Keep your voice down, Sergeant."

  "Sorry, sir," MacFall said. They were a good mile away from the spot where the Bug ship was thought to have landed, and his voice had not been raised all that much.

  "You must understand, Sergeant," Nolan said after they had struggled through some more undergrowth, "that the Bug population on Earth is spread pretty thin. It is only when the army makes an effort to clear a certain sector that their activity increases therein—this is natural, they fight back as much as possible before withdrawing to settle somewhere else. It is also natural that civilians in this sector suffer more than usual because of this, and are inclined to blame the army for bringing on this suffering rather than the Bugs. They dislike anybody who is trying to take warlike action against the Bugs."

  "But don't they realize that the Bugs are still coming?" MacFall said in an angry whisper. "Don't they know that they can probably breed like flies, and they'll have to start killing them soon if they don't want to be eating the things with every breath they take?"

  Nolan mashed a large green insect on the back of his neck with his palm, studied the remains briefly then wiped his hand on the coveralls. He said, "We know nothing of their mating or breeding habits, Sergeant, and the number of ships arriving seems to have fallen off during the past few months. So it may take several centuries for the situation which you envisage to come about—that is, the Earth completely swamped in Bugs." He paused then, and went on hesitantly, "There is a lot to be said for the civilian point of view."

  MacFall looked steadily at the lieutenant, making no attempt to hide his feelings. If Nolan should be that lowest of all forms of life in the army, a civvy sympathizer ...

  "I disagree with their idea of just ignoring the Bugs in the hope that they'll go away," MacFall said doggedly. "Or of hoping that the Bugs will ignore us. Somebody has got to wipe somebody else out."

  Nolan made a noncommittal noise and looked away.

  MacFall went on, "I'm a pretty down-to-earth type, but I know what that space station we put up three years ago means—we're going to look silly doing that when we * can't even handle a lot of insects on our own planet, plenty silly—"

  "Just suppose,'8 Nolan interrupted, "we push out into space and run against somebody who thinks of us as Bugs. They are intelligent, civilized, clean insects. We don't know what made them come here, what drove them to invade . . ." He shook his head and fell silent, his mind obviously miles away.

  MacFall was glad because he did not seem to have an answer to the other's question. How would he feel if somebody looked on him and treated him like an insect? But humans were not insects, they had civilization, aircraft, atomic bombs. And what had the Bugs got? Answer: gauzy wings and weapons so puny that they should have only been an irritation. There was no comparison, surely.

  But the Bugs had arrived in spaceships, ten-foot-long torpedoes that corroded away to nothing on being vacated by their crews, thus making it impossible for the humans to get even an inkling of their method of propulsion. The small size made it impossible for the Bugs to know anything of atomic energy, which required massive shielding and cumbersome remote control machinery—if they did know of it they probably considered it too crude to be worth bothering about. MacFall began to feel vaguely uncomfortable. For the very first time he was looking at the war from the enemy's point of view.

  He grew aware that the lieutenant was watching him closely, with a calculating expression that was tinged with uneasiness, as if unsure of the reception his words would get.

  Nolan said, "I have been trying to make this investigation, in this way, for a long time now. Finally I've been allowed to try it." He sounded apologetic but determined. "You won't like this Sergeant, but I mean to—"

  He broke off as a sudden commotion sounded from up ahead, noises of rustling and low, excited voices. A message of some sort was coming down the line. MacFall moved forward to get it, then turned back to the lieutenant.

  "There's a lion pacing us," he reported. "About twenty yards to the right." He had good control over his voice. It didn't shake a bit.

  They were in a really dangerous position. The chief weapons carried by the patrol were the high-pressure insecticide sprayers, and Deedee guns were useless against the big cat. Not much better were the light revolvers which most of the men carried for use against snakes and such. A revolver bullet would simply madden the lion, and would certainly not stop it from mauling somebody to death before it died itself. MacFall swore under his breath. A lion, yet!

  "Remember, no noise," Nolan said sharply.

  Oh sure, MacFall said witheringly under his breath. I'll strangle it to death with my bare hands, just like the Commandos used to do to people.

  But the lieutenant showed suddenly that he could keep cool, and think. He said quickly, "Close the men up, Sergeant. Hurry! It is more likely to attack us strung out like this than if we are in a small, compact group. If it should attack then ten revolvers used together might kill it before it could do any damage. But the guns won't be necessary.

  I've read that the bravery of the lion is greatly overrated."

  MacFall said, "Yes, sir," and passed the order up for Calleria to halt so that the rest could catch up with him. He was beginning to feel respect for this Lieutenant Nolan.

  As they hurried forward to join the group forming at the head of the line, Nolan said warningly, "We must be quiet. Very quiet, so as to get as close to the Bug ship as possible without detection. As well as this . . ." His tone took on a hard edge ". . . the men must not in any circumstances use their Deedee guns should the Bugs attack us. Repeat, they must take no offensive measures whatsoever. Their protective clothing must be their only means of defense until I've found that ship and done what I have to do. Tell them that, Sergeant, and make sure they understand it."

  MacFall knew that his jaw was hanging foolishly open, and that his countenance registered shocked protest together with signs of imminent mutiny. "But they won't, I mean, you can't ask them to do that," he burst out. "Listen ..."

  The tough, plastic coveralls worn by the men were designed to withstand penetration by the microscopic projectiles of the Bugs. But the Bugs had a habit of concentrating their fire on one point of the transparent—and somewhat weaker—plastic of the face section until it was worn through or placing them with deadly accuracy into the hair-thin joins in the armor.

  There was also a tendency toward claustrophobia when inside the broiling hot, tightly-sealed armor. Men panicked easily unless they had the knowledge that the Bugs trying to get at them—through encountering the Deedee curtain —had only seconds to live. MacFall tried to explain all this.

  "I didn't say it would be easy, Sergeant," Nolan cut in sharply. "But it has to be done. If any man shoots off his sprayer, even by accident. I will personally—"

  From the jungle on their right came a low, vicious growl which rose abruptly into a full-throated roar of anger. Something strong and heavy made thrashing sounds in the undergrowth. The rustling, snapping, snarling noise came sudde
nly closer ...

  "Sarge!" a man ahead of them shouted. "My mosquitoes have left me!" He was already sealing his face armor.

  MacFall had not noticed, the sound of an angry lion at close range having temporarily paralyzed his faculties. But it was true. The insects native to the jungle which had been plaguing them were gone, and that meant just one thing. Even above the racket coming from the nearby brush he could hear a high, shrill angry whining. Bugs!

  Nolan shouted, "Listen men! Don't use your Deedee—"

  But he was too late. Where the column had bunched together about thirty yards ahead the prescribed drill for this situation was already in operation. Seven men occupied an area roughly four yards square. Two of them were on their backs spraying the air and foliage above them in a tight circle. Three others swung their weapons through an arc of 120 degrees, bathing the upper branches of the surrounding trees while the remainder, in a half-kneeling position, soaked everything at ground level and a little above. In effect the men were protected by a dome-shaped curtain of spray which was lethal to attacking Bugs. The stragglers were hurrying to join them, unlimbering their Deedee sprayers as they went.

  MacFall was pleased at the speed with which his men had set up the defensive curtain, but very obviously the lieutenant was not. He stood with his legs apart, slapping his clenched fist into an open palm, and his face was more despairing than angry. He still had not put on his face armor. MacFall grabbed his arm and give it a most disrespectful tug.

  "We've got to join the others," he said, pointing into the protective drizzle falling ahead of them. "Quickly!"

  Nolan shook his head, pulling backward. Then suddenly he shrugged and allowed MacFall to half push half drag him along.

  They had gone barely three yards when there was an outbreak of shouts from up ahead, climaxed by one particularly horrible scream. MacFall swung around. A great cold hand seemed to reach in and twist his insides. The lion had charged from the undergrowth straight into the group putting up the defensive curtain, scattering them like ninepins. The Deedee curtain had abruptly ceased to exist, two men were lying on the ground—one of them not moving—and the others, their sprayers forgotten at their feet, were shouting and floundering about in an effort to both get away from the maddened beast and to bring their revolvers to bear on it without endangering one of themselves. A sharp crack cut through the snarling, shouting bedlam, followed by three more in quick succession.