Futures Past

by James White

  MacFall saw the lion rear up, saw its forepaw lash out and rip the face armor—and almost the head—from a man trying to empty his gun into its face, and saw another man yelp and clutch at his knee as one of the bullets found the wrong mark. The lion rolled onto its side, leaped again and crashed into a thick tree. It began ripping frenziedly at the bark with pumping hind claws, making strangely pitiful sounds.

  Of the four still on their feet, or knees rather, only one had retained his Deedee gun—and he was holding it, not using it, being temporarily in shock. The high-pitched, background whine of Bugs mounted suddenly in intensity and tiny flashes of light crackled on the man's plastic armor, like sequins winking on a dark dress. He came alive suddenly, turning the sprayer on himself in an effort to clear the area of his face armor. But the winking explosions moved immediately to the seals of his gauntlets. He dropped the Deedee gun. The lights crackled along the seam beside his ear seal. There was a sudden blotch of red under the transparent plastic and he went down beating at the side of his head with his fists.

  MacFall had never seen such a concentrated, vicious attack. The Bugs were a solid grey cloud around the man's head, those who had been caught in the Deedee drifting heavily to the ground. Similar clouds encircled the heads of the other men. Quickly MacFall brought his own weapon to bear, twisted the nozzle to the long range jet position and let fly. Calling over his shoulder for the lieutenant to follow he played the jet on each of his men in turn. A fine mist of spray blew back onto his face armor so that he could hardly see.

  He heard Nolan shout warningly, then there was a shot. Something that felt like a charging tank hit him low in the side. MacFall saw the jungle spin crazily around him. For an instant he was looking down through treetops at the deep blue sky, then something hard hit the back of his head and the jungle grew suddenly dim and out of focus. But before he blacked out completely MacFall was aware that the lion was straddling him and that it was being shot at. He could hear the shots faintly and felt the sharp tug as a bullet passed through his sleeve. But everything was going really black and he didn't seem to care anymore. ...

  It was very quiet when MacFall came to. When he sat up he thought that the back of his head had cracked open, and when he wiped at the red streaking his face armor the hand holding the bunch of grass he used to do it was so awkward that he wondered if it was really his own. He felt horribly weak. Going back to sleep seemed like a good idea except that the pain in his head would not let him. MacFall rolled over and pulled himself up the tree trunk which his head had hit until he was standing on his feet. About four yards away he saw part of the lieutenant. He went over to him.

  You would start shooting at it, MacFall thought, a peculiar pain growing in his chest. So it left me and jumped you instead. Aloud, he said, "Thank you."

  From the waist down the lieutenant's legs were protruding from underneath a very dead lion, everything else being covered by the carcass. MacFall did not particularly want to see the rest of the officer, but he couldn't leave him like that. He gripped Nolan's ankles and began to pull. The legs came suddenly to life.

  "The blasted thing just flopped on top of me and died," the lieutenant explained a few minutes later. "Before I got my breath back the Bugs arrived over us and I thought it better to pretend to be dead. They went away a few minutes ago."

  MacFall said, "But why didn't they attack me when I saw them giving the other wounded a working over."

  Nolan's lips twitched. "They thought you were dead, too. Man, you're covered in blood! It does all belong to the lion, I hope?" he said, showing concern. MacFall nodded.

  Nolan looked relieved. "I'll need you to carry some of my equipment. But first, we'd better see if there are any other survivors and get some medics out here. If the walkie-talkie isn't smashed, that is."

  Of the ten men in the patrol six were still alive—one who had been mauled as well as Bug-shot, just barely. All were badly holed and bleeding about the face and neck— the Bugs having early learned that the eyes and jugular vein were vital spots in human beings. MacFall smeared the areas with coagulant cream and did his best to cover them with handkerchiefs against the swarms of flies that had begun to gather again. One man he found sitting up, swaying backward and forward slowly and moaning to himself. His gauntleted hands were pressed tightly against his face, which was otherwise uncovered, and MacFall could not move them to see who the man was. He did what he could, shook the man's shoulder reassuringly and turned to rejoin the lieutenant.

  ". . . And if you are coming on foot," Nolan was saying into the transmitter, "carry at least one heavy rifle or Sten. The Bugs have started using lions against us— or at least, if one is anywhere near they may madden it with those explosive particles they use and stampede it into your party as they did to ours. You'll have to watch out for that." He looked up, saw that MacFall had finished and said quickly, "We've been held up here too long. Sergeant MacFall and I are pushing on to the Bug ship. Over and out."

  The habit of obedience was strong in MacFall, but he knew that his attitude as he followed Nolan around as the lieutenant hunted among the scattered and trampled packs was protest enough. He did not see what could be accomplished by two men armed with one Deedee gun, a magnifying glass and a box of square, plastic counters with peculiar smudge patterns on one face of them.

  "Probably nothing, now," Nolan said shortly. MacFall had not realized that he had been thinking aloud.

  The lieutenant went on, "Whatever chance we had of pulling this off has gone, I expect. The men were not to use their anti-Bug sprays, for one thing. But dammit, I wasn't expecting that trick with the lion. I shouldn't have made the men crowd together like that. . . ." He shook his head and swore.

  "It was the right thing to do," MacFall said gently, "if it had been an ordinary cat."

  The lieutenant's face was white—almost green—and drawn. The casualties had not been a pretty sight, and in the manner of all young officers he was obviously blaming himself largely for causing them. But there was a look in Nolan's eyes that made MacFall uneasy. The lieutenant had not hesitated in continuing with his scheduled operation though the patrol had been practically wiped out. It struck MacFall that Nolan was a bit of a fanatic, and fanatics were not careful about their own or anyone else's lives.

  "What are we hoping to do?" MacFall asked some time later. They had climbed almost to the summit of the hill behind which lay the Bug ship. The vegetation had thinned out and they could now walk comfortably abreast. Mosquitoes hung in a cloud about their heads showing that they were in no immediate danger from the Bugs with a capital B.

  Nolan sighed. "Nothing elaborate, with most of my gear ruined or left behind because of its weight, but—" He broke off suddenly, then said, "Before I tell you I want to ask you a question. Do you know that we are losing the war?"

  MacFall stopped in his tracks. "But we've been given the figures," he protested. "Even now they say there are eight or nine times more humans on Earth than there are Bugs. The Bugs are just insects, and we're slowly wiping them out..."

  "They are intelligent insects, Sergeant. There's a difference." After a moment he asked, "What happens when a new landing occurs, or when some district reports what seems to be a fair concentration of Bugs?"

  It seemed like a silly question for an officer to ask, but MacFall answered it anyway. When a landing or concentration of Bugs was discovered, planes were immediately rushed to the spot and proceeded to blanket-spray a wide area all around it. A piece of ground nearby was burned sterile and protective sprays set up around it, and from this temporary base the Mark Eights operated to deal with any Bugs still left alive, after which the units involved held themselves ready for notification of the next Bug landing.

  "Fair enough," Nolan said. "Now, do you remember the Sahara landing a few months ago? That seemed like a fatal mistake they made, coming down on ground with no vegetation to hide in. There were over seventy ships, each of which contained upwards of one thousand Bugs, and we were onto
them in no time.

  "Later, because of the bare ground we were able to see the exact extent of our success, to count their dead, in other words. Well, we got less than one shipload altogether. The others escaped." Nolan breathed heavily. "And in wooded areas a much higher percentage must get away. We aren't winning, believe me. Of course, neither are the Bugs___"

  The lieutenant paused then, obviously expecting the sergeant to make some comment. But MacFall kept his mouth shut and saved his breath for the hill, silently observing to himself that Nolan was certainly taking a long time to answer a simple question.

  Nolan continued, "The best brains have arrived at the same conclusion. Our offensive weapons are ineffective and our defensive measures impractical; we can't go through life choking on Deedee or in scaled plastic coveralls, or even in undersea buildings like the Bug research labs— which aren't, by the way, Bug-proof. One was killed while leaving the Bermuda lab. Nobody knows how it got in, but it was found by a technician going on leave—while she was combing her hair."

  MacFall shuddered in spite of himself. He wondered what the poor girl's face looked like now.

  Nolan went on, "We've reached about the limit of efficiency with anti-Bug weapons, while they are just beginning to learn ways to harry us. We're terribly vulnerable, you know. I expect you read of that disaster when two three-hundred-seater jetliners collided over London Airport killing the occupants, and thirty-eight officers with falling wreckage. You didn't read that it was caused by three Bugs loose in the control tower. And there are many similar incidents, all hushed up because they show how dangerous the Bugs really are.

  "Of course, I don't believe that they could wipe us out completely," Nolan said reassuringly, "but they can certainly make it impossible for us to maintain our present level of civilization."

  MacFall had the shocked, angry and embarrassed feeling of one who overhears someone preaching sedition and who is not in a position to do anything about it. But then he began to wonder, Nolan was only a lieutenant, but these professors had ways of knowing things, and could sometimes bypass even a full general if they needed men or equipment for a job. Suppose Nolan was telling the truth?

  The thought that the Bug war was really a life or death struggle for his race, but played down for propaganda purposes, made MacFall feel angry, uncomfortable and just a little sick. He forced it grimly from his mind, then stolidly repeated his earlier question.

  "What are you going to do when we find the Bug ship?"

  "I thought you might have guessed by now," Nolan said impatiently. His eyes said that MacFall was not a very bright specimen.

  If it wasn't for the business with the lion, and the fact that you're an officer, MacFall thought angrily, I'd put my boot in your skinny—

  "I'm going to examine the ship," Nolan went on suddenly. "We are hoping that it is damaged in some way and may not be able either to discharge all its occupants or destroy itself. If my main job turns out to be a flop then maybe we can learn something from the ship.

  "But the chief purpose of this operation is to try to make peace with the Bugs."

  MacFall knew that his face was not pretty. Too many Bugs had left their marks on it. But his expression when the lieutenant's words registered could not have helped it any. Nolan moved away from him in involuntary self-defense.

  "Be realistic, Sergeant," he said hastily. "Neither side can win, most of the big brass admit that now, and approve of this. And remember, we killed a lot of Bugs before they started attacking us. And they very seldom molest civilians unless there is a lot of anti-Bug activity in the neighborhood. I think we started off on the wrong foot from the beginning—"

  "Are you forgetting my men back there?" MacFall burst out despite himself; he did not normally interrupt officers, but this crazy specimen . . . "Look what the Bugs did to them. Look what they did even after the big cat had finished with them—"

  "Unpleasant things happen in war," Nolan put in quickly. "On both sides."

  MacFall ignored that; he found it impossible to feel that objective about the Bugs. He said, "Look at me, then! Nice, aren't I? I'll have this bogey-man kisser for the rest of my life—the Bug-shots are too deep for plastic surgery. But that doesn't matter so much, there are plenty of others the same. It's what it feels like.

  "You've never been attacked by a swarm of Bugs, have you, Lieutenant? You don't know what it feels like when they come at you and their little bullets are exploding on your face armor half an inch away from your eyes, wearing it through. Maybe you're lucky and they get through somewhere else. They start blasting little pieces out of your cheek, neck or ear opening. It hurts, Lieutenant. It hurts horribly."

  MacFall knew that his voice was rising in pitch, becoming strident with the intensity of his emotions, but he could not control it. He was not so much describing an incident as being forced to live through it again.

  "It's worse in the nose. It hurts and you feel you can't breathe. When you do you bubble blood over the inside of your face armor and then you can't see, or it goes down your throat and you think you're drowning in it. What the head-shrinkers call panic reaction takes over then. You want to quit, you want to run away, you can't stand it anymore. So you start tearing off your face armor."

  MacFall shut his eyes and clenched his jaws tight. A few seconds later, in a more normal voice he added, "That's when the Bugs really go to work on you." "I have my orders, Sergeant," Nolan said. The lieutenant's face through his armor looked a peculiar gray color, MacFall thought, suddenly ashamed of himself. Scaring Nolan half to death would help nobody. He fell slightly behind the lieutenant and kept silent, thinking about the unpleasant implications of the news that the big brass were so worried that they were suing the Bugs—mere insects!—for peace!

  They found the Bug ship half an hour later. It was a stubby, ten-foot, gray torpedo, not the mass of fluffy rust which the Bugs usually left for human investigators.

  But close inspection—it seemed empty of life—revealed a hole which went in about eighteen inches back of its rounded nose and came out amidships on the other side. The lieutenant muttered something about a meteoric collision, and the mass of the Bug ship being so small that it had offered no more resistance to the body than a cobweb, so that it had merely suffered a simple puncture without attendant damage from heat transference. Mac-Fall who had no idea what the lieutenant was talking about, said that he supposed that was so.

  Nolan bent closer to study the hole which had been ripped in the ship. It was about six inches in diameter, MacFall saw when Nolan motioned him forward to look at it, and it gave a clear but bewildering view of the construction of the ship. Everything was too small to mean anything.

  "Spider webs covered in tinsel paper," MacFall said, feeling disappointed. He did not see how anything could be learned from this ship, and said so.

  "I suppose you're right," Nolan said. "But the strength of those spider webs . . . !" He straightened up, sighed, then went on. "Let's not be defeatist about this. I'm an entomologist, not an engineer or physicist. We've got to have experts examine this, and with greater magnification than that of my pocket lens."

  MacFall hefted the walkie-talkie transmitter in his hand and looked a question.

  "No," the lieutenant said quickly. "We won't send for them yet. First we've got to move this ship as far away from here as possible, then camouflage it with branches. This is the first time one of these has remained whole after landing, probably because its self-destructive mechanism suffered in the collision. But I'm afraid that the Bug swarm which attacked us was not merely abandoning it, they may have been on the way to get help to destroy it and will return. If we hide it they might not be able to find and destroy it before our technicians arrive to do their stuff."

  MacFall had not been thinking that far ahead; it sounded like a sensible idea. But as they lifted the large torpedo shape between them—it was incredibly light in weight—MacFall couldn't resist another dig at the lieutenant.

  "How about the
peace talks?" he said.

  A mixture of emotions pulled at the lieutenant's face, but the strongest of them seemed to be disappointment. He really wanted to try that suicidal stunt, MacFall saw with amazement. Nolan was silent for several minutes while they settled the ship onto their shoulders, then he said shortly, "There isn't anyone to talk to."

  But he was wrong, very wrong.

  On the surface of the torpedo between them a small dark opening had appeared no larger than a postage stamp. From it crawled a Bug at least two inches long.

  Nolan gave a warning hiss. "Let it down," he whispered. "Slowly."

  They eased the ship gently to the ground. MacFall hastily checked his armor fastenings, then looked up to find Nolan bent over with his face not more than six inches from the still slowly moving Bug.

  His face armor was open.

  "What a really handsome insect," the lieutenant said in a tone of pleased wonder. It had a shiny brown back with pink spots on it and a yellow underbelly—MacFall thought it loathsome. He tried to tell the lieutenant to cover his face, but he could only mouth silently.

  "A species similar to the Hymenoptera, you notice," Nolan went on excitedly, "and like the other Bugs we know." He paused thoughtfully, then went on, "Although the dead Bug specimens which I've examined were badly damaged by the effects of Deedee, I think I can state definitely that this one is a female of the species."

  MacFall croaked, "Lieutenant, your face arm—"

  "It's all right, Sergeant. It isn't wearing the gray protective membrane used by the males, and I'm positive that it isn't armed, either. We're in luck, Sergeant! Reach me the packet of plastic counters marked 'A' and a roll of tape."