Gedso wondered if the commandant knew of his coming and looked nearsightedly toward the faraway PC where floated the tricolored banner of the Empire. Guards and hard-stamped officers passed him by without speaking. Gedso felt even more alone and unwelcome.
He was not a prepossessing figure, Gedso Ion Brown. He was a full two meters tall and he weighed two and one-half times as much as another the same size, for he had been born on Centaur One of Vega to pioneer Earth parents, and Vega’s Centaur One has a gravity two and one-half times that of Earth. A shuffling gait, a forward cant to his disproportioned head and thick, round shoulders minimized his appearance.
Life to him had always been a travail. At his Earth engineering school he had been dubbed a “provincial lout” and he had earned it, for he crushed whatever chair he sat upon, and in an unthinking moment might pull a door off its hinges if the catch held a second too long—and then stand looking stupidly and embarrassedly at the thing he held by the knob. Awkward and ungainly and shy, Gedso Ion Brown had never made much way in the Extra-Territorial Scienticorps, getting his promotion by number and so progressing alone and ignored in a service vast enough to swallow even his unhandsome bulk.
People generally thought him stupid, basing their conclusions upon his social disgraces, but this was not fair. In his line Gedso was alert enough and it is doubtful if more than two or three men knew of that trick of his of glancing at a page and mentally photographing the whole of it. In such a way Gedso studied. In such a way did he hide his only shining light. He had two vices—apples and puzzles—and the only baggage he had placed in the freight room contained nothing else.
The arc cannon crackled with renewed ferocity and he looked away from the things he could see lumbering beyond the far wall. Convinced at last that his arrival was going unremarked, he tucked the heavy trunk under his arm and shuffled toward the PC. Jostled by guards hurrying in and out of the place, he put down his burden and sat on it.
A trusty orderly jabbed his back with a juice wand. “You’re blocking the way.”
Gedso looked at the narrow, evil face and shifted his trunk farther off the walk and sat down again with an embarrassed apology.
“What do you want?” said the trusty. “You can’t hang around here all day.”
“I’d like to see the commanding officer,” said Gedso.
“He’s busy.”
“I’ll wait,” said Gedso uncomfortably. He took an apple out of his pocket and shined it on his tunic sleeve.
The breeze which blew up from the wall two kilometers away was acrid with brimstone and hot with the stench of death. Officers and runners came and went, a two-way stream of weary, sick men. Gedso noticed, after a while, that they were all of one expression on leaving the squat building no matter their expressions when they arrived. When they came out they looked scared and whipped, and Gedso began to form an idea of the character of the commander within.
“You still around here?” said the orderly. “You can’t throw garbage in this yard!”
Gedso picked up the apple core he had dropped and put its dusty brownness in his pocket. Time slogged slowly onward. The crackling along the wall eased and the shapes were no longer visible beyond. Gedso tugged at the orderly’s sleeve, carefully, lest he break the man’s arm.
“Would you please tell the commander that I would like to see him?”
“What’s your name? What do you want to see him about?”
“My name is Brown. Gedso Ion Brown. I’m a technician in the E-TS. I’ve been ordered here.”
The orderly looked startled and then weak. He nearly dropped his juice wand as he whipped to attention. “I . . . I am s-s-s-sorry, sir. The c-c-commander will be informed immediately, s-s-s-sir.” He dived into the post and came skidding back to attention. “The commander will see you immediately, sir. I . . . I did not have any idea you were a technician, sir. I did not see your insignia, sir.”
Gedso said mildly, “Will you watch my trunk?” and went on inside.
The secretary, a convict soldier with the chevrons of master sergeant on his blouse, opened the door into an inner room. Gedso ambled through.
Jules Drummond, captain general of the Administrative Department’s Extra-Territorial Command Corps, looked sourly up from the manifests of the newly arrived space vessel. He was a thin, dark gentleman, very tall and very military. His face had never known a smile and his eyes nothing but disdain. He was half ill with the vapors of this gigantic pest hole and, at intervals, mechanically dosed himself from a rack of bottles in the arm of his chair. There was a look of hawk cruelty about him, a look so common to E-TCC commanders and intensified in General Drummond.
He looked for a full minute at Gedso and then said, “So you are a technician, are you?” With intentional rudeness he looked back at the manifest and left Gedso standing there. After a while he snapped, “Sit down.”
Gedso squirmed in discomfort and looked at the frail chairs. He pretended to ease into one, but held himself up from it.
“Where are your orders?” said Drummond.
Gedso fumbled through the baggy pockets of his tunic, found three apples and a core, but, much to his embarrassment, no orders. Faltering he said, “I guess—I must have packed them.”
“Humph!” said Drummond. “The next time you report to me at least wear insignia.”
“I’ll get the orders,” said Gedso. He went out and got them from his trunk and brought them back.
Drummond again ordered him to sit down. It did not occur to Gedso to resent such treatment. He was only nominally under orders from General Drummond, for the Scienticorps was too important and too powerful to be ordered about by E-TCC officers.
Acidly, Drummond threw the orders on the desk before him. “Two months ago I phoned for a technician. The fools! They know what the catalyzer from these mines is worth. They know how important it is that we work unhampered. And if they don’t know that we expend more men in fighting than we do in mining, they are stupid! Political fools, bungling the affairs of the Empire! They send me prisoners on their last leg with disease instead of workmen and artisans! They send me drunkards and worse for officers. By the look of it they want us to be driven from here, want the mines to close! I beg for a technician. A real technician to do something about this continual warfare. I tell them that day by day it grows worse and that it is only a question of time before all of us will be devoured alive!”
“I am a technician, sir,” ventured Gedso timidly. “I’d like to do what I can to help.”
Drummond seared him with a glare which took in the soiled and wrinkled slacks, the oversized tunic with its too-short sleeves, the eyes peering nearsightedly from behind thick spectacles and the unkempt mass of tow hair which further impeded vision.
“The final decadence of Empire,” said Drummond nastily.
Gedso seemed to miss the insult. “If you could get somebody to tell me what is wrong—”
“What would you do about it?” said Drummond. “I’ll send an engineer. Now get out of here!”
Gedso slipped as he rose from the chair and sat back with his full weight. It splintered to atoms under him and the whole post shook. Scarlet and confused, Gedso backed up through the door.
From the office soared Drummond’s voice as the general looked tragically up toward an unheeding deity. “The Crystal Mines, the most vital and important post in all space, the most valuable command any man can be given! And they send me fools, fools, fools!” He threw himself dramatically upon his desk with a despairing sob.
The orderly was a mental chameleon. When he dropped Gedso out of the passenger truck before the isolated little hut reserved for Extra-Territorial Scienticorps men in case they might come to inspect, the orderly did not offer to help Gedso with his trunk or even go so far as to hope that Gedso was comfortable. The orderly who, after the fashion of orderlies, had had an ear glued to the wall of
Drummond’s office, hurried away to spread, after the fashion of orderlies, his commander’s opinion of the latest addition to the staff of the Crystal Mines.
That this was true was indicated by the attitude of the third-rank combat engineer who slouched up to the hut two hours later and found Gedso lying on the hard bunk eating an apple.
All his life, Blufore, the third-rank engineer, had heard tales of the technicians of the E-TS, but only twice before today had he seen a technician first class in the flesh and not until today had he spoken to one of the “miracle men.” Glorified in song and story, in spacecast and rumor, E-TS technicians, “troubleshooters of our far-flung lifelines,” “magicians in khaki,” “test-tube godlings,” seemed to have a right to awe. There were twenty-seven thousand of them spread out amid a hundred and eighty-five trillion beings, things and men who held down the habitable spots of space, and a technician first class was, reputedly, never sent to duty unless everything was gone awry. Blufore had come ready to discard the flying rumors and bad opinions of this technician, for he knew that the technician’s presence was the Grand Council’s most scathing criticism of a military administrator.
Blufore saw the ungainly hulk of Gedso Ion Brown sprawled upon the bed. Blufore saw the apple and a core upon the floor. Blufore saw no test tubes or servant monsters. And when Blufore heard the mild, almost stuttering voice bid him “Come in,” Blufore reacted as would any man experiencing the downfall of a god. He was ready to kick the chunks around.
Gedso looked nearsightedly at Blufore as the man sat down. Gedso did not like the swaggering, boasting expression on Blufore’s face or the precision of Blufore’s fancifully cut uniform. Blufore made him most uneasy.
“I came to give you the data on this mess,” said Blufore. “But there’s nothing anybody can do which hasn’t already been done. I know because I’ve been here for eighteen months. I know because as a combat engineer I’ve tried every form of repelling force known without result on the ‘things.’ Now what do you want to know?”
Gedso was not offended. He swung down his feet and cupped his chin and looked at Blufore. “Just what are these ‘things’?”
“Monsters, maybe. Living tanks. Some of them weigh a hundred and fifty tons, some three hundred. Some have a front that is all bone mouth. Some have eighty to a hundred and twenty legs. Some are transparent. Some are armor plated. There have been as many as five thousand dead before the wall, making a wall of their own, and the others have kept right on coming. I suppose half a million of them have been killed by arc cannon in the past five or six years. Sometimes the push is so bad from the back that the dead are shoved like a shield right up to and through the wall and the ‘things’ behind start grabbing soldiers. We lose about two hundred men a week.”
“How long has this present battle lasted?” said Gedso.
“Seventy-five years. Since the day the Terrestrial Exploration Command moved in here and found the crystals. First we fought them with ranked space tanks. Then with a force field. Then with fire guns. And now with arc cannon. They can be killed, yes. But that never stops them. Their attacks are in greater or lesser ferocity, but are spaced evenly over a period of time. Intense for an Earth week. Slack for an Earth week. Intense for an Earth week. Over and over. This is a slack period. They have broken through the wall just once, yesterday. They’ve been at this attack for seventy-five years.”
“You don’t know what they are, then?”
“Nobody knows and nobody ever will,” said Blufore.
“Have to ask,” apologized Gedso. “Ask a question, get an answer. Have to ask. Is there anything else peculiar about this place?”
“Peculiar! You must have seen it from the outside. You come through a wall of ink a thousand light-years long and high and three light-years thick. And inside the Black Nebula there are no stars or space as we know it, but gigantic shapes, dark and vague. And the space has force in it which heats a ship scorching hot and knocks it around like a cork in a dynamo. And you come in here through a tunnel to get to a chamber which is light but has no sun, where the most valuable catalyst ever found lies all over and even sticks from the ceiling. Peculiar! The mystery of this continued, seventy-five-year attack is nothing compared to the bigger mystery.”
Gedso said, “Are there any other tunnels leading out from this chamber?”
“I suppose there may be. It is too dangerous to scout. And there is no need to go beyond.”
“I see,” said Gedso.
“And within another month we will probably have to abandon this place,” said Blufore, in a lower tone. “The wall out there was high enough once. Now it isn’t. The arc cannon have less and less effect upon the ‘things.’ Each weapon has at first been adequate and then has become useless. And now there is no weapon to replace the arc cannon. We’ll have to abandon the Crystal Mines and the Empire can go to hell for its catalysts. And, between us, I can’t say as I particularly care.”
“I see,” said Gedso, blinking his eyes like a sleepy pelican grown elephant size.
“You can’t do anything about it,” said Blufore.
“Maybe not,” said Gedso.
“That’s all I can tell you,” said Blufore.
“Thank you,” said Gedso.
Blufore left without the courtesy of awaiting a dismissal.
Gedso put a couple of apples in his pocket and shuffled out into the gaseous light. He stood for a little while listening to the arc cannon crackle and blast and then moved slowly toward the wall, stepping off the road when cars and line trucks dashed by.
He climbed a stairway up to an observation post and hesitated near the top when he saw an army lieutenant and a signalman there.
“No visitors allowed,” snapped the lieutenant.
“Excuse me,” said Gedso and backed down.
He went to the outer wall and climbed to a command post there which he made certain was empty. He wiped his glasses and gazed through the dome out across the broken plain.
Somehow he could not get the “things” in focus at all and, for him, they moved as gigantic blurs, agleam with the savage light of exploding electricity from the arc cannon. The horde reached far, a moving, seemingly insensate sea, pushing forward into the glare of battle.
A convict private scuttled into the dome from the turret, beating out the flame which charred his tunic. He saw Gedso and started, but then saw no insignia and relaxed.
“Damn fuses. Six billion kilovolts,” volunteered the private, gazing ruefully at his burned hands. He was a snub-nosed little fellow, slight of build, hard-boiled in a go-to-hell sort of way. He fixed a curious eye on Gedso. “What are you doin’ around here? You ain’t a tourist, are you?”
“Well—” hesitated Gedso.
“Heard a party of tourists came here once. Thought it’d be fun. Two died of shock and the rest took the same ship back. Friend of somebody?”
“No,” said Gedso. “I guess not. You must have been around this place for a long while.”
“Four solar years and a butt,” he pointed with a grin at his black collar. “Stripe soldier ever since I put ten passengers and an officer into Uranus on the Jupiter shuttle. They got wings. I got a dog collar. I gotta be gettin’ back to the gun before some sergeant spots me and hands out some black-and-blue drill. There’s worse things than fightin’ them ‘things.’ You got a gun when you’re up here.”
“Don’t you ever get—upset up here?”
“Upset? Hell, pal, I had to either get over that or go nutty. I’m so varnished with inhuman feelings that I take one look at them ‘things’ and give ’em the works.” But there was a sudden change of expression in his eyes which belied his bold words. “I gotta get back to that gun.”
“Have you any ideas on how to stop them?” said Gedso.
“Me? Hell, if I had any ideas it would be on the subject of desertion or mayhem to non-coms. Look at th
em ‘things,’ would you? By the bats of Belerion, I killed a hundred today if I killed one and there they are gone and live ones in their places.”
“You mean they eat their own dead?”
“Naw. The dead ones sink into the ground in two or three hours and disappear. Look, I’ll blast a couple.”
The private went back into his turret and Gedso ambled along at his heels. Gedso made the small room somewhat crowded, but the private could have jumped through knotholes and so was not much inconvenienced.
The arc cannon’s twin electrodes thrust outward, weighty because of the repelling magnet, between which kicked the center of the arc half a kilometer in a broadening egg-shaped line. Stewie, or so read the letters on his back below the number, fitted a big fuse into the clips and sat down on the cannon ledge, hands grasping levers. His bright brown eyes peered through the reducing glass which served as a sight and Gedso, behind him, found that he also could see through it.
The attack was developing out front as the “things” lumbered forward, breasting a force field and treading shakingly upon the flaming ground. Turrets to the right and left were blasting away. Stewie put his weapon into operation by the flip of a switch.
An arc made a loop about a meter in diameter and then, as it heated up, began to leap outward like a stretched band. The noise grew and grew and the brilliance of the arc, though cut by the glare shield, became hurtful to the eyes.
The “things” had pushed in a salient before this turret, but now into either side of that one in advance the arc began to play. Seen in the reduction glass, its outlines were almost clear. A great blob. No legs. A mouth with horizontal bone lining which now ground together, opened and shut. The “thing” came on, flanked on either side by a different sort.
Gedso blinked when he saw that the arc, gauged around six billion kilovolts and five thousand amperes, had no perceptible effect upon the gigantic target. As the “things” came on there were fourteen of them linked abreast by the arc. Force field. Flaming earth white-tongued with heat. Six billion—
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 5
