“And I’ll wager it wasn’t long after. Red, have you got any hard liquor about you? Because if you have, I want you to chuck it away. That stuff is okay in the cities until something better comes along, but in active service you need a clear head and body ready for action. I can cut it out clean when I want to, and I did. You ought to—hell! The big oaf’s asleep.” The wind cried over the walls, and the night was bitter. Sleepers turned restlessly in their tents, and the sentries paced up and down, drawing their hoods and heavy coats close about themselves.
CHAPTER FOUR
Madness and Death
THE next morning there were eye-opening calisthenics in lieu of marching. Suchminski believed in racing his men through a joint-cracking series of gymnastics. Breakfast was then rationed out; they ate, and talked of many things. Fawnes began to sing one of the lilting songs of the Tellies:
“We’re the scum of every spacehole
from Antares to the Sun,
We’re the toughest eggs that ever
cracked a crown;
When they say we’re through the
jobs we do are only just begun
While we’re fighting for the Tellus
green and brown!”
The knot of men around him joined in the chorus,
“All comrades together, we are fight-
ing for the victory of man!
United, march onward—we’re the
boys who build the roads and
clear the land!”
Suchminski walked by. “May I request,” he said bitingly, “that you refrain from this needless noise?”
He stalked away, and as the men sank back to their comfortable seats around the fire, Red looked wonderingly after him. “What’s biting him? What’s wrong with a little singing?”
Sloane laughed. “Maybe if it was singing he wouldn’t mind, but that fruity basso of yours is enough to make a mule sick. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised at all if poor Sam had died of that, what with you crooning love-songs every night.”
“Aw, cut it out, Mart!” begged Red. “I ain’t got a bad voice. Besides, Suchminski wouldn’t care if I had the best voice in the Three Planets—it’s just that the big bum is down on us as heavy as lead on Jupiter. He’s a scut, that guy is.” Sloane considered. “Red,” he said, “you have the wrong idea. Such’ is an officer, and he didn’t get those pips on his shoulder straps by good luck. He knows how to handle the run-of-the-mill, and I hear he’s a pretty able tactician. It’s no joke to have a bad man down on you; but it’s worse to have a good man on the other side of the fence. Maybe, Red, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to watch out for that officer-laddy. It’s not childish spite that made him shut us up—look through that loophole. See the sentries? It’s hard on them, I suppose, when we sing. You wouldn’t like to be out there under that sun, and hear the Happy Home Quintet” singing from peace and security; neither would I. The skipper’s a shrewd guy; he knows that our chief weapon right now is morale, when we have nothing else to work with. How do the greenies attack—we don’t know. Well, a sentry keeps thinking about that, and finally works up to a point where he’ll break and run from his own shadow. That means one man lost in the desert, and twenty men whose strength and psychological resistance have been cut in half.”
“Game o’ cards, fellas?” a man interposed. It was Bristol, a pimply-chinned young private with a thin, whining voice. His deck was always at his side; he was suspected of card-stacking, but the others gladly asked to be dealt in, to break the nerve-wracking monotony.
THE dealer was winning heavily, by the standards of the Tellies, though Sloane had won and lost a thousand times the pot on the turn of a single card. Then, to Bristol’s obvious discomfiture, the pasteboards began to run against him, and the stakes gradually flowed back to the pockets of the bettors. The game broke up from sheer inertia, without winners or losers.
Red and Sloane drew apart. Sloane grasped his friend by the front of his blouse, and poising a hard fist, demanded, “Where’s your deck, my little one?”
Red flushed, and produced from some hiding place a pack of cards identical with the unfortunate Bristol’s. “I can’t stand that little worm. Mart,” he said. “There he was sitting, raking in the other boys’ pennies—I hadda do something.”
Sloane staggered him with a mighty buffet on his broad back.
“Stout fella, Red. You sure did, and maybe it was the right thing. You know, you’ve changed since you yanked me out of that dive in Tunis . . . for the better, I guess. You were pretty near to getting your back ventilated for the way the cards sat up and said uncle every time you whistled. You’ve got a heck of a funny way of doing things, though—your sense of justice wouldn’t stand for a cheat, so you go right ahead and cheat hell out of him and right one wrong with another . . . oh, boy!”
Red scratched his head. “It wasn’t that,” he said uneasily. “It was the way he handled those cards. Crude, Mart—crude, I call it! I just wanted to show him what a real manipulator could do with a pack. I’m not saved from sin yet, fellow—not by a devil of a long way!”
Sloane smiled, and said, “Let’s go find out how Bristol’s taking it.”
They strolled over and hailed the sharper. He slouched up to them with a snarl on his ratty face. “Keating,” he intoned, “I think I’m going to teach you gambling manners.” Red knew what that meant; he’d often said it himself. The two of them charged, head down, like a pair of bulls.
It didn’t last long, though; there was that faint bell-sound which some had come to know, and a furiously spinning shard of metal whanged into the hard-packed ground of the enclosure, seemingly from nowhere, tearing a great gash in the surface. All scattered to cover, huddling against the meagre protection of the walls. Suchminski shouted, “Five men to go outside!” Sloane and Red leaped to him, and with them Corporal Medonia and two French Tellies. Tersely the captain ordered a sally-port opened, as a pair of the terrible darts threw a shower of dirt over him. The door swung open, and the little band ran through and spread out.
“God!” screamed one of the men, and he began to fire wildly into the mass of monsters some distance away. They were huge, green things, grotesquely reminiscent of the Terrestrial prickly-pear cactus, studded with cold spines upon which the sun was reflected, lending them a hazy, indefinite outline. They did have legs—two short, stumpy legs upon which they hopped with an agility surprising for creatures of their size. A third member, rooted at the base of the spine, might have been a third foot or a tail, and gave them leverage and mobility. And their faces—their faces were hidden in the haze that surrounded them, but the ghost that was seen was enough to set the Terrestrials’ teeth on edge. There was something alien about them that set up a definite reaction of horror in Earthly nervous systems.
THEIR weapons were not entirely strange, resembling somewhat the ancient Roman ballista. Several of the machines were set up on tripods and directed, on the principle of the mortar, that their bolts might fall in the fort of the Tellies.
Some of the things fell under the juice-bolts of the frenzied man’s rifle; with disconcerting speed they slid away from the spot under fire and retreated a little. The five volunteers advanced one at a time, the other four lying back and maintaining a covering fire while one man wiggled forward. The lamiae continued to fall back in their bewildering, kangaroo-like fashion, firing bolts from their crossbows as they went. The men ducked into a fortuitous depression in the hot sand, and fired over the crest, ignoring the deadly bolts that whizzed above them. One hurtling shaft tore off the flexol cape of one of the Frenchmen, and carried it on. The fellow, a Parisian named Antoine and said to be an ex-Apache, shot a hurried glance at the coppery sky, and scrambled frantically after the cape, some hundred yards away. He had covered perhaps half the distance, crouching and zig-zagging like a frightened rabbit, when he suddenly straightened up with a piercing scream, and clawed at his chin and eyes.
Medonia, who knew what was happening, looked away. Under Antoin
e’s blue chin were appearing the terrible burns caused by the malignant radiations of the sands. The sun’s direct rays were ripping into his eyes; pain would soon send him mad. Insanely he staggered back to them, staring sightlessly, his hands piteously outstretched before him. Deaf to their cries he passed by and reeled on toward the Martians, unprotected, his rifle discarded.
Red vaulted over the little parapet and dashed after the Frenchman.
“Come back, you fool!” shouted Medonia. “He’s past help!”
But Red did not listen. Antoine, unseeing, would have blundered into a lamia, had it not hopped aside. But another of the monsters grabbed him about the waist, tearing his belly open with the sharp points of one spiney arm, and dashed him to the ground with a murderous impact, where he lay still.
Keating miraculously escaped the whizzing javelins that flew thick about him and was right in the thick of the Martians, firing wildly into the green of them and doing terrible damage at that short range. The monster that had killed Antoine crept up behind the Earthman, who was unable to hear his companions’ warning shouts. As the remaining three skirmishers raced toward him, Red was hoisted high into the air, kicking and struggling, and flung through space like a stone from a boy’s slingshot. He landed in soft sand, shaken but unhurt, as the others reached him. The lamia hopped grotesquely over a rise in the sand.
Sloane helped Red to his feet, brushed the sand from him, and adjusted his flexol shield. “You okay?” he asked anxiously.
“Sure,” said Red, gazing uncomprehendingly at the rifle he had kept unreasoningly clutched in his fist all through his lightning-like flight. “What happened to the dingbats?”
Sloane cuffed him on the side of the head. “Y’big bum,” he said. “The dingbats? Oh, they skedaddled. Couldn’t stomach your furious assault. You’ll be mentioned in dispatches now; isn’t that nice?”
“Oh, go to Hell!” Red growled.
The Frenchman touched Sloane’s sleeve. “Please,” he said softly, “would you help me bring Antoine back to the city? He can—have a decent burial—at least.”
“Of course,” soothed Corporal Medonia, who had overheard. “Land a hand, Sloane, will you?”
ANTOINE and six other Tellies from the city who had been killed by the shafts of the Martians were given simple burials that afternoon as the first dark winds of evening whispered among the dunes. There was nothing to mark the graves, nor would there be any. No services in honor of the fallen, no fanfare or glory. Some clerk, rummaging in Headquarters files, would some day find brief reports, colorless, thankless precis of the deaths of men who died to save their world.
That would be all . . .
A rough hospital was set up in one of the deserted buildings to accommodate future wounded. The wounds inflicted by the Greenies’ weapons were terrible indeed. A hit at any place in the body was fatal, and unless immediate attention was given those men stricken in the arms or legs, these wounds also led to death.
Morale was low. Those who had actually seen the monsters, through the eyes of fear, spoke to those who had seen nothing but mysterious, spinning lances that ripped and tore and brought agonizing death. There were mutterings against Suchminski, talk of mutiny. The men were laboring under terrific tension, and something was sure to break soon.
There was a gathering by one of the towers, three days after the attack of the lamiae. The men talked for a while—the usual conversation of the trooper, dealing with women, drinking bouts, Tellus and home, bits of small gossip about their officers—and then some bright lad produced a pair of dice. The close-clustered group was instantly transformed to an irregular circle; ennui and fear were temporarily forgotten or relegated to the background as the men focussed their attention on the game. There were little cries of eagerness, shouted invocations to “Baby”, soft curses when luck ran against the player of the moment. Coins jingled or shushed into soft sand, the ivory cubes clicked against each other, and the shuffle of many feet and bodies wrapped all these lesser sounds into one bulging parcel of sonancy.
The clown of the company, a quick little ex-jockey riding under the name of Kenmore, had the dice. “Come on, luck,” he was saying. “Stand aside, you mugs, and watch a guy that knows how.
Ha! Match that, Panicola, and I’ll buy you a drink when we get back to Iopa—if you don’t get a spear through that fat belly of yours!”
Panicola growled a profane reply, expressing a desire for certain indignities upon Kenmore’s carcass. Kenmore grinned.
“My, my!” he said. “Wash your mouth out with soap, Pan. You know what soap is—or do you?”
There was a stir in the crowd, and Caarlsen, a newly-made non-com with a distorted sense of his own importance, pushed his way through.
“Okay, break it up!” he growled, although there had been no orders prohibiting gambling. “On your feet, goddam it!”
Cries of distressed protest rose in answer. Caarlsen was this, he was that; surely he’d let them have a little fun . . . he wasn’t the kind of dirty son of a gun that would break up an innocent little crap game.
“Hey, look, Corporal,” Kenmore begged, serio-comic. “Just one more throw, huh? I’m hot now—you wouldn’t wanna spoil a run of good luck, would you? I’ll make faces at you, nice nasty faces . . . waggle my fingers at you and say ‘boo!’ in dark corners . . .”
For answer the corporal strode to the center of the ring and swung one booted foot, scattering the dice and the little heap of coins beyond all possibility of recovery.
The soldiers drew together in a compact bunch, muttering ominously. They had changed in a minute from a happy, good-natured crowd back to a collection of murderous, mutiny-minded malcontents with swift and sudden mayhem in their hearts. Caarlsen stood before them, hands hooked lightly in his belt; whatever his other faults he was, at least, no coward—or was it simple stupidity? In any case, he was in grave danger of a severe mauling, at best, and the gates of the military prison at Osteo were swinging wide for the infuriated soldiers when—
THE rapid notes of a resonator sounding “Alarm!” clicked loudly in the tiny headsets worn by each man. The men forgot their grievances, and discontent shoved aside by the prospect of a tangible enemy, grabbed their stacked rifles and ran to their posts. Suchminski stepped from the house he’d made his headquarters and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“What’s up?” he cried to the sentry in the lookout tower.
“The Greenies, sir! They’re comin’ back—hundreds of ’em!”
“Where from, you fool? The south? Okay, Bradbury—Jones: take your sections to the south towers and walls. Larsen—Richer—Cadoux: distribute your men around the east and west walls. Wylie, take three men; place yourselves under Lieutenant Lowndes’ orders in the hospital. Speir, your section to the north wall. Okay, let’s go!”
The small force was quickly redistributed. For a minute or so they waited, tense and expectant. Keating peered over the crudely crenellated wall to watch the bounding approach of the lamiae, a much larger band than the one of the previous attack. The hot morning sun glinted harshly on the weapons they carried, ready for immediate action. Red, at his side as usual, spat, and grimaced at the thought of what these same cross-bows might very shortly be doing to him.
When the Martians were five hundred yards distant they raised their bows and loosed a rain of spinning spears that sped surely toward the walls behind which the Earthlings crouched. The deadly hail fell inside the fort with a series of loud thuds. The man next to Keating was impaled where he stood, a lance going entirely through his body and smashing against the pavement. A scream died in his throat as he fell to the stone sidewalk below, his blood spattering those about him.
“Fire!” screamed Suchminski into his phone.
The shots from one hundred-odd positron rifles hissed out, wreaking fearful damage in the close-packed ranks of the attackers.
“Fire!” cried Suchminski again, and again.
The Greenies, closer this time, suffered even gr
eater damage. Scores went down with each volley.
“Fire at will, section chiefs take charge!” Suchminski shouted, aiming his own weapon at a green haze that had raised its bow, and blowing it to fragments.
The firing increased in volume as the Martians rushed the outpost. At this close range the carnage was terrific; the advantage was all with the Tellies, as any half-baked strategist could see. Only a few Greenies reached the walls and began to scale them, but the defenders, undesirous of coming too close to these spiny beasts, made short work of them. Only a handful were left, running as fast as their stumpy legs could hop over the sand dunes, when “Cease Firing!” sounded.
The hot, tired men recharged their hand-searing rifles and cleared away the dead for the struggle to come. Sentries were posted again and, for half the afternoon, paced the ramparts, eyes sharp on the horizon. One swore suddenly. He called:
“Captain! They’re back—and with something big!”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Problem Solved
“WHAT the “something big” was, they soon found out. Sloane glued his eyes to a loophole, Red inevitably beside him.
“It’s a . . . it seems to be a . . . Lord knows what!” Then, suddenly, he cursed. “We might have known! The things that built these towers have what we don’t want. It’s a gynne—a siege engine.” He yielded to Red, who looked curiously.
“What do you make of it?” Mart asked.
“Just another one of those tin slingshots they’ve got, only—gosh—it’s big! What’ll they do with it?”
“Knock down our walls and carve us up for dinner,” said Sloane quietly. “They can do it with that thing; I’m not kidding. They were used in the Middle Ages, back on Earth, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t work here. Seems to be the same design as their smaller projectors. That means that the bolts they toss would be the same as the ones that caused all our casualties, only scaled up perhaps fifteen times . . . what one of those twisters does to a man, the big ones will do to the fort. Somehow, Red, I ain’t happy no more . . . Look, I think they’re aiming it—yep, right at us. They must have our range, too, for the job. Pity, after the swell showing we were making—we haven’t got a chance against a thing like that. Why the hell don’t they fire?”
Collected Short Fiction Page 6
