Dare - rtf

by Farmer, Phillip Jose

  "Thank you, sir. I'd like that. However, there are some Dyonisans I wouldn't mind seeing down the barrel of my gun."

  "I know, but we can't afford bitterness, my boy. The Dyonisans left alive will be potential Socinians, we hope."

  Jack said, "You've risen high since I last saw you, sir. Weren't you only a captain then?"

  Chuckswilly smiled strangely, and he colored a little.

  "It's obvious you haven't heard about my marriage. I took that beautiful witch -- maybe I should say bitch -- to wife. Polly is very ambitious and aggressive, as you know. She contrived, by means I'd rather not inquire into, to bring me to the notice of the marshall of our armies. Old Ananias Croatan has always had an eye, among other things, for beautiful young women. I advanced rather rapidly but not to my surprise. I feel that I am very capable."

  Jack felt his face flushing. Chuckswilly laughed and slapped him on his shoulder. "Don't be so em­barrassed, son! I knew what I was doing when I married her."

  At dawn, the army began to roll. Small compared to the forces it would soon face, it was well armored, swift, almost self-sufficient, and had tremendous firepower. It had a detailed and carefully considered plan of campaign. It had made no attempt to conceal itself, indeed, had tried to advertise. Now its 20,000 men, of whom only 8,000 were front-line fighters, faced at least 50,000. The soldiers of the Queen of Dyonisa had had plenty of time to marshall before the town of Slashlark.

  It took an hour to reach the Cage farm. Jack, standing in the open turret on top of the steamer, gazed stonily at the devastation. The horns of the cadmi were blackened with fire and tilted at various angles. Craters were huge wounds in the sides of the meadow. They were the witnesses of the mines planted in holes dug beneath the cadmi and then ex­ploded. Skeletons stuck out here and there from the snow.

  Beyond, the house in which he had been born and lived all his life was a heap beneath the snow with some charred timbers sticking from the white. The barns were snowy hillocks; an overturned wagon, wheels missing, lay on its side.

  Jack shut his eyes and did not open them for a long time. He could not shut out the thought that cried at him. Where was R'li? What had happened to her?

  At noon, the main battle began. The armored cars and halftracks drove forward and mowed down those facing them. A half hour later, the Socinian fleet sailed into the harbor of Slashlark and began a bombardment. Thirty dirigibles, propelled by the new oil-burning motors, dropped huge bombs.

  Two hours later, the remnants of the Dyonisans had fled, and the town was taken. A mop-up force was left behind, while the rest of the army rolled on. When it came to barricades across the road, it went around. The over-all plan was to break through any sizable military organization that dared to stand up to them and to continue onward. They were traveling as swiftly as possible, their goal, the capital city. It did not matter that the countryside was alive with enemy soldiers and civilians or that they left no lines of communications or supply behind them. Before they would run out of food and ammunition, the dirigibles would drop more. And another fleet of ar­mored steamers and wagons of infantry would follow in a few days to create more slaughter and to seize and hold some of the larger towns.

  Jack had heard of the sieges of the cadmi by the Dyonisans and of the retaliatory guerrilla warfare of the horstels. Farmhouses burned to the ground were on every side. There were many cadmi that had died when the humans had dug holes under the hard shells and set off gigantic charges of powder. The horstels had fought hard, even bringing in dragons to aid them. Before the dragons had finally been killed to the last one, they had taken a high toll. And many cadmi still held out.

  Now Jack rode in an enclosure, almost as big as a small house, on the back of a huge steamer. He sat at the table and received and dispatched messages over the far-speaker, the device that enabled him to talk to men as far as two thousand miles away. Occasionally he accompanied Chuckswilly to the front of the battle. Once, he had to engage in hand-to-hand fighting.

  The "punch," as the force was unofficially called, had run low on ammunition. A storm had kept the dirigibles from approaching above the town occupied by the force and dropping supplies. An unexpectedly large number of Dyonisans had charged and forced the Socinians to expend their bullets. Finally the Dyonisans broke through.

  But the wind and clouds had cleared away, and the dirigibles had been able to parachute in the needed ammunition. Within an hour, the new Dyonisan army was broken. Next day, the "punch" steamed on down the highway. Thereafter, until after it had reached the city of Whittorn, it encountered little resistance. Apparently the Dyonisans were calling in all of their armies to defend the last remaining large city untaken. This was the seaport of Merrimoth, the capital after the city of Dyonis had burned down.

  At Whittorn, Jack's force rendezvoused with three other task forces that had invaded Dyonisa at widely separated points along the borders. The assembled army waited for five days while supplies were brought in by dirigibles and also by heavily armored caravans. The latter had followed the same route as Jack's punch, after deciding that not enough resistance could be mustered by the enemy to stop them.

  Two weeks later, Merrimoth was taken. Under the combined attack of the Socinian navy, air force, and ground forces, it crumbled. But it did not surrender. The Dyonisan soldiers fought bravely almost to a man. When their powder and bullets were spent, they used bows and arrows and spears.

  Afterward, Jack stood on a hill with Chuckswilly and some high officers and watched the captured Queen being driven off to a tent reserved for her in the middle of the camp. Elizabeth III was a large but well-built woman of thirty-five with flaming red hair, straggled now, and with dirt on her aristocratic and aquiline face. She was pale but haughty, stiff-backed and resolute.

  "We'll talk her into ordering her subjects to surrender," Chuckswilly said. "When enough of our men have followed to hold down key garrisons, we can move on to the other nations."

  Jack had automatically removed his helmet as the Queen passed him; he had been taught from childhood to do so even when her name was men­tioned at public meetings. He put it back on and resumed his inspection of the burning city. The day was fair. The sun shone brightly, and it was warm for winter. The wind blew gently but steadily and carried the smoke eastward in a great layer blanketing the land and the sky above. But he was northwestward and could see everything from the height of the very high hill.

  He was wondering when he would be able to find out about the fate of his mother and his brothers and sisters. Now would be a good time to approach Chuckswilly on the subject. Before, it had been im­possible to make an attempt, for they had been too occupied.

  He took several steps toward his commander, then stopped. He gasped.

  Chuckswilly, hearing him, said, "What's the mat­ter? You're as white as. . ."

  He gasped, too, a long, indrawn, shuddering breath. He paled under his heavy pigment. His helmet flew through the air. He cursed until he sobbed, and the tears ran down his cheeks. "Too late! Too late! Fifty years too late!"

  An object had appeared out of the blue above. It glittered and grew larger as it descended. Presently it stopped to hover a hundred feet above the burning city. A globe of some shining stuff, it must have had a diameter of at least two hundred feet. Shouts arose from the camp below the hill. Men appearing to be the size of ants swarmed about the camp grounds. Some vehicles raced off as if to escape.

  Chuckswilly groaned and said, "God! Complete victory in our grasp! And now this! On the day of our greatest triumph!"

  "What do you think the Arra will do?" Jack said.

  "Whatever they wish! We can't stand up to them!"

  Jack felt panic rising in him. He had seen too many statues and portraits of them, heard too many tales. He said, "Hadn't we better get out of here, sir? We can go to the Thrruk."

  Chuckswilly became calmer. "No, we don't have to run yet. They won't start enslaving us yet, and I doubt they'll land on this hill to pick up specimens.
"

  There was some hope in his voice. "Perhaps this is just a scouting expedition. If they return to their home planet to report on us, they might be gone fifty years. Maybe a hundred! Hell! There's a chance for us yet! Maybe we can make it! By God, if they do wait too long, we'll be ready for them!"

  The ship slid forward, its great bulk moving swiftly and without any noise, until it came to a treeless plain on the other side of the hill. Swiftly it settled onto the plain, and the gigantic sphere sank several feet into the frozen ground.

  Minutes passed. Jack and Chuckswilly and the others were silent as they waited. Presently a section of the globe swung out and one end rested on the ground. Jack sucked in a breath of fear; he was aware that his knees were shaking. When those mon­strous four-footed beings shambled out onto the ramp, what would they do? Just look around and then return to the vessel or seize the nearest human beings?

  Out of the darkness of the entrance of the sphere a being walked. It was a man.

  "They're not Arra!" Chuckswilly said. "Not unless they have sent some slaves out to reassure us! And they're not Egzwi either. They're not big enough!"

  Then several Socinians who had been hiding in a gully at the edge of the plain slowly approached the aliens. Chuckswilly said, "Get in the steamer, Jack. We're going down there."

  Numbly Jack obeyed. He drove the vehicle down the winding road to the bottom of the hill, then cut straight across the plain to the sphere. He halted the steamer a few yards from the opening in the ship and followed Chuckswilly. The aliens were men, no doubt of that. Most were white-skinned and had features like any Dyonisan except for a man with black skin and woolly hair and two men with eyes that had a curious fold in the corners. They all wore garments that seemed to be of one piece. These were of various colors and had emblems on them. Each man carried a small machine in one hand. Though unfamiliar-looking, they were undoubtedly weapons.

  Their chief was talking, or, rather, trying to talk to a sergeant of the Socinians. Chuckswilly took over and attempted to communicate but with no more success.

  The chief turned to a man who must have been a linguist. This fellow tried several sentences in ob­viously different tongues. The black man and one of the slant-eyed men spoke.

  Then Jack saw the crucifix hanging from the neck of one of the men, a crucifix half hidden in the opening of the clothing at his chest. Jack did not believe that the cross could be anything but a coin­cidence, for the symbol was so simple and so obvious that it must be universal. But he spoke the opening phrase of the Pater Nostrum, and several of the aliens started. The man wearing the crucifix recovered first. He rattled at Jack in Latin, com­pleting the prayer. Afterward, he continued in Latin, although it was pronounced somewhat differently than the Dyonisan priests spoke it. Jack looked helpless, for he knew very little Latin beyond that spoken in the Mass.

  He explained to Chuckswilly, who sent a soldier off posthaste to find a priest. Within an hour, the soldier returned with a very scared priest, Bishop Passes, who had been captured with the Queen. But the bishop recovered swiftly enough when he began to understand the alien with the crucifix. Thereafter the bishop became attached, willy nilly, as Chuckswilly's official interpreter.

  Bishop Passes said, "They come from Earth! Glory to God, they are Earthmen! And he" -- indicating the speaker of Latin -- "is a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church; he has spoken to the Pope on Earth!"

  Chuckswilly, as always, was quick to adapt. In an aside to Jack, he said, "I wonder if he'll be so joyous when he finds out that the Earth priest will regard him as a heretic. He has no idea of how greatly Dyonisan Catholicism has deviated from the original religion. Or, if he does, he's forgotten."

  The bishop then said, "Father Goodrich says we must be mistaken. We don't speak English! They do!"

  "Two different brands," Chuckswilly said. "The languages have deviated. Ask them if they would like to visit our general. Or, if they don't trust us, and I don't blame them, if we could see their ship."

  Via the two interpreters, the captain of the Earthmen replied that he would visit their general in his tent. This fearlessness indicated that the Earthmen felt secure; Jack guessed that they must have very powerful weapons. He lost his joy and began wondering if they might be as much a menace as the Arra. Looking at Chuckswilly's expression, he knew that his commander was thinking the same.

  In the tent of General Florz, the Darians and the Terrestrials talked until late at night. Jack was allowed to attend Chuckswilly, so he heard every word of the conversation. When the Earthmen discovered that the Darians were descendants of the lost colony of Roanoke and others who had been ab­ducted, it was their turn to be amazed. But the news of the Arra and the Egzwi alarmed them. They questioned the bishop in detail. Jack, knowing that they used a variety of English, listened carefully. After a half hour, he was able to understand a few words.

  In turn, Chuckswilly and the general questioned the aliens. How had they managed to cross space? What kind of power did they use? What was Earth like?

  The aliens seemed to reply frankly. Many of their answers were disquieting. Jack wondered if the whole planet had gone crazy. Could sane human beings really live like that and remain sane? Yet they claimed to be happy and prosperous.

  Through the interpreters, Captain Swanson of the interstellar vessel United explained that his craft was the first to land on an inhabited planet -- as far as he knew. Two other survey vessels were to leave Earth, shortly after his departure, for different destinations. The personnel of the United had gone into deep freeze for the thirty Earth years it had taken for the vessel to arrive in the neighborhood of Dare's sun. After automatic equipment had thawed them out, they had examined the likely planets for life. For some days, they had been circling this planet. Looking through instruments capable of very power­ful magnification, they had been astonished to find beings that exactly resembled their own species, a highly improbable event. They had also seen the horstels in detail and knew that they were of a different species or subspecies.

  Chuckswilly told them that the horstels had also been brought to this planet by the Arra.

  Captain Swanson replied that the report of the Arra and the Egzwi disturbed him very much. They represented a possible danger to Earth.

  Chuckswilly said, "To take word of them to Earth, you would have to go back in the ship, wouldn't you? Or do you have a means of com­municating across space?"

  Swanson smiled. He must have guessed that Chuckswilly had another reason besides the surface reason for asking. But he answered frankly. They had means of communicating, but they couldn't wait sixty years for an answer from Earth.

  Chuckswilly said, "You'll be wanting to inform Earth as soon as possible of the Arra. After all, the Arra have been to Earth at least twice that we know of. The next time, they might come to conquer. And the next time might be soon. Too soon."

  Swanson replied, "You're a very shrewd man. I won't lie to you. We are alarmed. Originally, we'd intended to stay here several years before leaving. Now we have no choice but to take off in a very short time."

  "I would like to know, I must know," Chuckswilly said, "if you Earthmen consider the planet of Dare to be your property?''

  Swanson was silent for a moment before speaking.

  "No," he said slowly. "The government for­mulated a hands-off policy for any planet that might be inhabited. Planets that are unpopulated by sentients but are livable are to be claimed in the name of Earth, provided there's no prior claim by ex­traterrestrials.

  "No, we make no claims. But we would like to make a treaty establishing our right to build a base here. After all, that would be to your benefit even more than to ours. In your present state of technology, you need Earth's help. And the next ship will undoubtedly contain many scientists whose knowledge will further yours."

  "I doubt," Chuckswilly said drily, "that we could do much to stop you -- if we so felt inclined."

  "We're not to use force," Swanson replied.

&nbs
p; "But the news of the Arra might change your government's mind," Chuckswilly said.

  Swanson shrugged and said that he wished to return to the United. His face was impassive, but there was something about him that suggested that he would not be surprised by a refusal by the Socinians. Chuckswilly and the general, however, were certain that Swanson would not have accepted their invitation if he had thought they could enforce any aggression. Moreover, they suspected that all that had been said had been monitored by those in the ship.

  After the aliens had left, Chuckswilly spoke to Jack. "I don't like this. When they return and build a base -- all for our protection, of course -- we'll inevitably be dominated. Their culture is too superior. Dare will become the Earth's appendage; Darian ways will become Earth ways."

  "We'll have at least sixty years to catch up," Jack said.

  "Don't be dense! They will have progressed by sixty years, too. And we lack the mineral resources of Earth."

  "Some Darians ought to go back with them," Jack said. "Then they could learn about Earth and its knowledge. They might be able to help us enor­mously when they returned."

  "By the Great Dragon, boy! You may have something there!"

  They returned to the tent. Jack heated some totum water, and he sat down to drink with his superior. In private, Chuckswilly was very democratic.

  "We're in a pickle, Jack. We can't get along without Earth's help. But if we accept it, we lose as Darians."

  He struck his fist on the tabletop. "Damn! Just on the verge of triumph, too!"

  "You've told me more than once that I should ac­cept the 'inevitable course of history,' " Jack said. "You were talking about Socinia's course then, which seemed destined to conquer. Now history is on the side of the Earthmen. Why can't you accept the 'inevitable destiny'?"

  Chuckswilly glared. But in a few seconds his brow cleared, and he laughed. "Hoist with his own petard! Well, not necessarily."

  He was silent for a while. Jack refilled their cups. Chuckswilly said, "If we could seize the crew and then the ship, the knowledge we'd gain thereby would give our science an enormous impetus. It's possible that, by the time another Earth ship came along, we might be able to meet them on more than equal terms."