Earthbound

by Joe Haldeman

  The Others didn’t destroy us all, though that would’ve been simple, but just pulverized the moon, scattering its material more or less evenly inside the former satellite’s orbit, which destroyed the fleet and sent an unambiguous message: stay on Earth. Our glorious leaders opted to ignore that, or defy it, which triggered another pre-ordained response, taking away not only their gift of free energy, but somehow all electrical power as well. Suddenly marooning us in the nineteenth century, surrounded by useless sophisticated hardware. Like flashlights.

  “Someone’s coming,” Snowbird whispered. I couldn’t see anyone.

  “Halt!” Paul shouted from the roof. “Put your hands up.” The binoculars would help him see.

  “I’m not armed,” a scared voice said. A young woman or younger boy.

  “I see her,” Namir said. “Carmen, she’s directly in front of you, maybe thirty feet away. Please leave your weapon and go search her. I have you covered.”

  That does a lot of good, I thought. If something goes wrong, you can shoot in our general direction.

  “I’m over here,” she said. “Over here, over here, over here. I don’t mean anybody any harm.” About halfway there, I could see her, a dark ghost in the dim sky light, dressed in black, her hands pale smudges over her head.

  “Excuse me,” I said idiotically, and patted her the way they did in cop shows fifty and a hundred years ago. She was about my size, but muscular. If she had a weapon on her, it was stuck in a place I was reluctant to touch.

  Her clothing was like satin, and it was a strangely strong erotic experience, caressing a person I’d never seen. Maybe with proper study I could become a lesbian.

  “Okay. So who are you, and what are you doing here? All dressed in black.” Her skin was evidently dark, except for her palms.

  “I’m Alba Larimer. Security officer here at Armstrong. I came to warn you—some people plan to ambush you and take the Martian.”

  “What do they plan to do with her?” Namir asked. He was still behind the truck.

  “They think the Other must be watching us, the one that was on the cube?” The one we knew as Spy. “They think if they threaten to kill her, the Other will show up and make a deal.”

  “That is stupid on so many levels,” Namir said. “But thank you. My name is Namir. Do you know where the ambush would be?”

  “Somewhere between here and the turnoff to Route 17. Probably a building. There are a couple of dozen, unfortunately. You’d probably be better off staying here, if you have guns. Let them approach a defended position.”

  She was talking his language.

  “Hm. How many of them?”

  “Only two were talking. There might have been more outside.”

  “And what is your stake in this?”

  “My job,” she said, her voice shaking. “No one has relieved me of my responsibilities.”

  I could almost see him nodding, assessing her. “Security. Do you have access to weapons and ammunition?”

  “An assault rifle, a shotgun, and riot gear. In my car’s trunk, I’m afraid. Electronic lock.”

  “We have an electronic crowbar,” Paul said from above. “How far away?”

  “Less than a half mile; I was watching the launch.”

  “What do you think?” Paul said.

  I was not sure what to say, and then Namir answered. “I’ll go with her. Alba, can you find your car in this darkness?”

  “Yes; it’s white. It’s exposed, though, by the side of the road.”

  “Let’s move quickly, then. I’ll get the crowbar.”

  Paul offered to come along as backup, and Namir said no, period. He didn’t have to explain. If she turned out to be a bad guy, we were only risking one man and one weapon. And she didn’t yet know how few people and weapons we had.

  “Is there a central security building,” I asked, “where they keep all the guns and all?”

  “I walked there first. It was a mess. At least three officers dead inside. I let myself in through the kitchen, and nobody saw me. That’s when I overheard the plot to kidnap the Martian.”

  “So they’re armed to the teeth.”

  “I don’t think so. The armory went into automatic lockdown when the power went off. I don’t think you can get in there without a heavy-duty laser or a cutting torch.”

  “The lock would be mechanical,” Paul said, “I wonder if there’s a mechanical way around it . . . probably not. It wouldn’t have been designed with the idea that the power would go off forever.”

  “Do you think it really is forever? I didn’t see the broadcast.”

  “I don’t remember the exact wording,” I said. “It sounded pretty final.”

  “They said we were to become a ‘donor planet,’ ” Paul said. “So some other world would be getting free power at the expense of our own potential for generating electricity. Or that’s how I interpret it.”

  “Are you a scientist?”

  “No. Used to be a rocket jock. Currently unemployed.”

  I could feel her smile. “Aren’t we all, now.”

  I heard a loud clank and muttered curse from inside. Namir had found the crowbar by knocking it over.

  He was just visible, coming through the door. Rifle slung over his shoulder, crowbar held like a weapon in his right hand.

  “Carmen, you move up to the edge of the wall. Take the safety off. If we draw any fire, shoot high in our direction. We’ll run back as fast as we can.”

  “We’ll probably be okay,” Alba said. “I haven’t seen or heard anyone nearby.” She laughed. “Though I didn’t see or hear you, Namir, when I walked in.”

  “Good. I’ve been trying to stay invisible. Let’s go.”

  I followed them as far as the entrance, then settled in, leaning against the sandbags. Which smelled like the beach, plastic and hot sand.

  Alba disappeared immediately into the murk, but I could still see Namir for a minute. Then he was gone.

  I was straining to hear, and so jumped at the first loud noise. A good thing I didn’t have my finger on the trigger. It was just Namir attacking the car trunk with the crowbar. Then a loud pop, and a vague sound of metal things clicking against metal in the distance. Then several dull thuds, which I supposed were Namir trying to break into an unbreakable window.

  This would be the dangerous time. People would be attracted by the noise and follow the sound.

  It stopped, and I watched and listened anxiously for several minutes.

  Then something moved on the road in front of me. “Namir?” I whispered.

  “It’s me.”

  “And Alba.” I couldn’t see her until they passed directly in front of me. An advantage to being black.

  “Paul,” Namir stopped, and said to the roof, “is it two hours yet?”

  “Just about.”

  “I’ll send Elza up to relieve you.” He reached out and touched my arm. “You can get some rest now, Carmen. Give Dustin your rifle and send him back. I’ll bring Alba up to speed.”

  I felt a momentary irrational twinge of jealousy. The black widow comes out of the night and claims our protector. But I really could use some sleep.

  4

  I woke to pale light and quiet conversation. Got up stiffly from the pile of laundered uniforms I’d used as bedding. Rubbed my face and dragged fingers through my hair and realized I would kill for a toothbrush. Found the rear sink and rinsed my mouth and splashed my face, and went toward the sound.

  Alba was talking to Paul. Please let her be ugly.

  Of course she was not. Regular features, intelligence in her eyes. A nice figure that I’d gotten to paw before Paul could even fantasize about it.

  “You must be Carmen.”

  “I don’t know. It’s early yet.” I took her hand. Able was I ere I saw Alba. “This is the stuff from your car?”

  “Combined with your pistol, yes. Wish we had more ammunition. At least all the rifles use the same kind.” Two pistols and a new-looking rifle—our two mu
st have been in use—and a mean-looking thing that I guessed was the “riot gun.” I picked it up carefully.

  “Ten gauge,” she said. “It makes a hell of a noise, but we only have one box of shells for it. Can’t get them at Kmart.”

  “Must kick like a mule.”

  “No, it’s recoilless. The rounds are like little rockets. And nobody but me can fire it; it’s keyed to my thumbprint.”

  “What will they think of next?”

  “I’d like to ask Alba to join us,” Paul said. “She brings expertise and local knowledge as well as weapons.”

  We looked at each other, and a certain understanding passed. She wasn’t a danger where Paul was concerned, at least not yet. “And a knapsack,” I said, looking down at the gear. “Tear gas grenades, two canteens. What are these?” I gingerly touched one of four things that looked like rubber balls painted green.

  “Flash-bangs. You can temporarily blind and deafen an adversary without hurting him.” She pointed at one. “You click the red dot twice and throw; it’ll go off when it hits the ground.”

  “Do they come with earplugs and dark glasses?”

  She laughed. “Long gone. We have to improvise.”

  There were four boxes of rifle ammunition, smaller than the box for the riot gun. Nothing that I could see for the pistol. “We’re not exactly ready for a war, are we?”

  “In more ways than one, no.” She glanced at Paul. “Paul told me what happened to you both yesterday. I’ve never gone through anything like that. I mean, I trained for the eventuality, and thought it through, but I’ve never shot anybody or been shot at.”

  “Does the prospect bother you?”

  “It makes me sick. Ten percent excited and ninety percent sick.”

  “Here comes the expert,” Paul said. Namir came in shirtless, rubbing his face with a towel. His muscles weren’t as well defined as they had been on the starship. No real exercise for a week.

  “There’s a story that’s reinvented every war,” he said, “that goes back at least to the nineteenth century . . . someone asks a sniper what he feels when he takes aim and squeezes, and a man falls dead. He says ‘Recoil.’

  “I did that when I was a boy, eighteen or nineteen. We had smart bullets; you kept them on target with a joystick. And there was a kind of joy when you hit the target, hand-slapping and thumbs-up—it was a group effort, and the guy you killed was just a grainy black-and-white image, like a pocket video game.

  “But I’ve done the opposite extreme, too. After Gehenna, I killed a man with my bare hands. Tried to strangle him, but he resisted hard. Finally beat his head against the concrete floor until . . . until he died. I felt a different kind of joy then, fierce. But horror, too, like I could never get my hands clean again.”

  “Gehenna,” she said quietly. “We studied it.”

  “The bastards killed my mother. And almost everyone I worked with, in Mossad. Tel Aviv, what, seventy years ago?”

  “Seventy-one,” she said, good student.

  “And you’ve been shot, too,” I said.

  He nodded. “New York City. I stepped off a slidewalk and a woman was waiting for me. One shot, point-blank in the chest.”

  “Killed you?”

  “Yeah, but I was back in a couple of minutes. A pro would’ve gone for the head.”

  “Was she a spy like you?”

  “Just a hire, we think. My bodyguard did go for the head—‘two in the chest, one in the head,’ as we were taught. So we couldn’t find out from her who she was, who she worked for. He got hell for that, demoted. Unfair.”

  He picked up the new rifle and removed the magazine and the bolt, the way he’d showed us, and inspected the bolt minutely. “I’d thought that part of my life was long over.” He slid the top two rounds out of the magazine and put them back, testing the spring with his thumb, and then removed the top round again and set it on the table. “Better to have one less round than jam. Spring is old.”

  He looked up. “Your name is Alba?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Scotland?”

  “No, it means ‘dawn’ in Spanish.”

  “Your father was . . .”

  “Five cc’s of thawed-out Harvard sperm. Never met the guy.”

  He nodded, looking off in the distance. “That must feel strange. Your father might have been dead when you were conceived.”

  “I’ve thought about that myself. I was never curious enough to check.”

  “Understandable.” He looked around. “Did we all lose fathers and mothers on this trip?”

  Fifty years evaporated by relativity. “Meryl talked to her parents,” I said, “both of them. Don’t know whether they’d survive the power going off.”

  He looked at the cartridge in his hand. “These aren’t smart rounds. Tracers?”

  “Every fourth.”

  “Mixed blessing.” I supposed because they made a line that pointed back to your own position.

  “Are we going to stay here or leave?” I said.

  “They know we’re here?” Namir asked Alba.

  “Motor pool, yes.”

  “I think we should wait for them. They’ll get impatient, today or tomorrow. How many?”

  “Three I know of. The ones I overheard at HQ.”

  Namir stood and stretched. “If I were them, I’d find sniper positions, separate ones, and wait. Pick us off one at a time. Who’s on the roof?”

  “Dustin,” Paul said.

  “I’ll go up and make sure he’s keeping his head down. Roof’s the obvious first target for a sniper.” He checked his wrist for the nonexistent watch, made a face, and went toward the stairs.

  “Is he hard to live with?” Alba asked, after Namir had left.

  “No. He’s very considerate and calm.”

  “Controlled,” Paul said. “He’s been through enough to send anybody right ’round the bend. That one he talked about wasn’t the only person he’s killed.” He shook his head hard. “God. Now I’m one, too, a killer.”

  “You had to do it, Paul.”

  “So did he. So did he.”

  “He’s stable, though,” Alba said. “Seems about as solid as anyone I’ve ever met.”

  Paul laughed. “That’s what they always say in the newsie interviews. ‘Who would ever have thought a man that stable would kill his mother and eat her?’ But yeah. We lived together for years in that crowded starship, and I never saw him lose his temper.”

  “Which is unnatural,” I had to point out. “The rest of us had our little moments.”

  “Like Moonboy. A little assault and battery.”

  “I heard about him, on the cube show about you. He went crazy, and the Others killed him?”

  “Not really,” I said. “They took him, but he’s not dead, if they’re to be believed.”

  “Not alive, either. A kind of suspended animation, which he’ll never leave. Close enough to being dead.”

  Something I hadn’t thought of in a while. “Alive or dead or in between, he’s the only human they have in their possession, to study. The only one of us who cracked under the strain.”

  “Of course they knew that,” Paul said. “And we were all glad. He was a real pain in the butt, as well as a lunatic.”

  “Talking about my Moonboy?” Meryl said as she walked into the room, brushing her hair.

  “Sorry,” we both said.

  “Don’t be. He was a lunatic and a pain in the ass. Ask Elza.” He’d been in bed with Elza when he had his breakdown, and punched her hard enough to break her nose. Meryl was not surprised by the infidelity then, but she had been by the violence.

  “We were all supposedly chosen because we could get along with others in close quarters,” I said.

  “Some things you just can’t test for.” There was real pain behind her brusqueness. “So are we moving out now?” We told her about the new plan, or non-plan. She went into the kitchen to hard-boil all the eggs, for portability.

  Namir came down and
went around checking doors and windows. He came back with Snowbird. “Snowbird, this is Alba.”

  She made a little curtsy, like a horse in dressage. “You are black.”

  “Yeah, and you smell funny.”

  “I apologize for catabolism. I have no food to metabolize.” In fact, she was starting to smell like marigolds. “I’ve not seen a black person since I left Mars, many years ago.”

  “You’ve been stuck here since you got back?”

  “Here on the base, yes, in protective custody.”

  “Serious threats on her life,” I said. “Even before the shit hit the fan.”

  “The what?”

  “Old expression. One of my father’s favorites.”

  “How much longer can you live,” Namir asked, “without new food?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never been hungry before.”

  “You can’t eat any human food?” Alba asked.

  “No. I can consume pure carbohydrates but get no nutrition from them. And the smallest amount of protein contamination would kill me.”

  “They didn’t have food for you anywhere on this base?” I said.

  “A few days’ worth, which I’ve eaten. More was coming, from Russia. Actually, if the power hadn’t gone out, I might have joined the other Martians there by now, or at least tomorrow—”

  There was a sudden gunshot. Namir snatched the rifle off the table and hit the floor, hard. “Get away from the window!” Snowbird half galloped into the next room. I slumped myself down behind the table. They couldn’t see in, I thought irrelevantly. They could shoot in.

  Elza came staggering into the room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “What was—”

  Paul grabbed her, and Namir shouted, “Down, Elza! Get down!” She did, and scuttled over to take one of the pistols.

  A single answering bang came from the roof.

  “Dustin’s a good shot,” Namir said. After a minute he stole up the stairs and cracked open the door to the roof. “Any luck?”

  Dustin’s response was inaudible, where we were. Namir came back down, still keeping low. “Target’s not moving,” he relayed. “Dead or wounded or playing possum. I guess Dustin doesn’t want to use up a round, checking.”

  “Might be good strategy to shoot a couple,” Paul said. “Make it look like we have ammo to spare.”