by David Drake
“And,” he said carefully, “the pilot, whatever he is, is still alive—and thinking about home, wherever that is.”
Though the Air Force had been duly notified by the radio net of McDonough's preposterous discovery, it took its own time about getting a technical crew over to Otisville. It had to, regardless of how much stock it took in the theory. The nearest source of advanced Air Force EEG equipment was just outside Newburgh, at Stewart Field, and it would have to be driven to Otisville by truck; no AF plane slow enough to duplicate Martinson's landing on the road could have handled the necessary payload.
For several hours, therefore, McDonough could do pretty much as he liked with his prize. After only a little urging, Martinson got the Erie dispatcher to send an oxyacetylene torch to the Port Jervis side of the tunnel, on board a Diesel camelback. Persons, who had subsequently arrived in the Aeronca, was all for trying it immediately in the tunnel, but McDonough was restrained by some dim memory of high school experiments with magnesium, a metal which looked very much like this. He persuaded the C.O. to try the torch on the smeared wings first.
The wings didn't burn. They carried the torch into the tunnel, and Persons got to work with it, enlarging the flak hole.
“Is that what-is-it still alive?” Persons asked, cutting steadily.
“I think so,” McDonough said, his eyes averted from the tiny sun of the torch. “I've been sticking the electrodes in there about once every five minutes. I get essentially the same picture. But it's getting steadily weaker.”
“D'you think we'll reach it before it dies?”
“I don't know. I'm not even sure I want to.”
Persons thought that over, lifting the torch from the metal. Then he said, “You've got something there. Maybe I better try that gadget and see what I think.”
“No,” McDonough said. “It isn't tuned to you.”
“Orders, Mac. Let me give it a try. Hand it over.”
“It isn't that, Andy. I wouldn't buck you, you know that; you made this squadron. But it's dangerous. Do you want to have an epileptic fit? The chances are nine to five that you would.”
“Oh,” Persons said. “All right. It's your show.” He resumed cutting.
After a while McDonough said, in a remote, emotionless voice: “That's enough. I think I can get through there now, as soon as it cools.”
“Suppose there's no passage between the tail and the nose?” Martinson said. “More likely there's a firewall, and we'd never be able to cut through that.”
“Probably,” McDonough agreed. “We couldn't run the torch near the fuel tanks, anyhow, that's for sure.”
“Then what good—”
“If these people think anything like we do, there's bound to be some kind of escape mechanism—something that blows the pilot's capsule free of the ship. I ought to be able to reach it.”
“And fire it in here?” Persons said. “You'll smash the cabin against the tunnel roof. That'll kill the pilot for sure.”
“Not if I disarm it. If I can get the charge out of it, all firing it will do is open the locking devices; then we can take the windshield off and get in. I'll pass the charge out back to you; handle it gently. Let me have your flashlight, Marty, mine's almost dead.”
Silently, Martinson handed him the light. He hesitated a moment, listening to the water dripping in the background. Then, with a deep breath, he said, “Well. Here goes nothin’.”
He clambered into the narrow opening.
The jungle of pipes, wires and pumps before him was utterly unfamiliar in detail, but familiar in principle. Human beings, given the job of setting up a rocket motor, set it up in this general way. McDonough probed with the light beam, looking for a passage large enough for him to wiggle through.
There didn't seem to be any such passage, but he squirmed his way forward regardless, forcing himself into any opening that presented itself, no matter how small and contorted it seemed. The feeling of entrapment was terrible. If he were to wind up in a cul-de-sac, he would never be able to worm himself backwards out of this jungle of piping…
He hit his head a sharp crack on a metal roof, and the metal resounded hollowly. A tank of some kind, empty, or nearly empty. Oxygen? No, unless the stuff had evaporated long ago; the skin of the tank was no colder than any of the other surfaces he had encountered. Propellant, perhaps, or compressed nitrogen—something like that.
Between the tank and what he took to be the inside of the hull, there was a low freeway, just high enough for him to squeeze through if he turned his head sideways. There were occasional supports and ganglions of wiring to be writhed around, but the going was a little better than it had been, back in the engine compartment. Then his head lifted into a slightly larger space, made of walls that curved gently against each other: the front of the tank, he guessed, opposed to the floor of the pilot's capsule and the belly of the hull. Between the capsule and the hull, up rather high, was the outside curve of a tube, large in diameter but very short; it was encrusted with motors, small pumps, and wiring.
An air lock? It certainly looked like one. If so, the trick with the escape mechanism might not have to be worked at all—if indeed the escape device existed.
Finding that he could raise his shoulders enough to rest on his elbows, he studied the wiring. The thickest of the cables emerged from the pilot's capsule; that should be the power line, ready to activate the whole business when the pilot hit the switch. If so, it could be shorted out—provided that there was still any juice in the batteries.
He managed to get the big nippers free of his belt, and dragged forward into a position where he could use them, with considerable straining. He closed their needlelike teeth around the cable and squeezed with all his might. The jaws closed slowly, and the cusps bit in.
There was a deep, surging hum, and all the pumps and motors began to whirr and throb. From back the way he had come, he heard a very muffled distant shout of astonishment.
He hooked the nippers back into his belt and inched forward, raising his back until he was almost curled into a ball. By careful, small movements, as though he were being born, he managed to somersault painfully in the cramped, curved space, and get his head and shoulders back under the tank again, face up this time. He had to trail the flashlight, so that his progress backwards through the utter darkness was as blind as a mole's; but he made it, at long last.
The tunnel, once he had tumbled out into it again, seemed miraculously spacious—almost like flying.
“The damn door opened right up, all by itself,” Martinson was chattering. “Scared me green. What'd you do—say ‘Open sesame’ or something?”
“Yeah,” McDonough said. He rescued his electrode net from the hand truck and went forward to the gaping air lock. The door had blocked most of the rest of the tunnel, but it was open wide enough.
It wasn't much of an air lock. As he had seen from inside, it was too short to hold a man; probably it had only been intended to moderate the pressure drop between inside and outside, not prevent such a drop absolutely. Only the outer door had the proper bank-vault heaviness of a true air lock. The inner one, open, was now nothing but a narrow ring of serrated blades, machined to a Johannson-block finish so fine that they were airtight by virtue of molecular cohesion alone—a highly perfected iris diaphragm. McDonough wondered vaguely how the pinpoint hole in the center of the diaphragm was plugged when the iris was fully closed, but his layman's knowledge of engineering failed him entirely there; he could come up with nothing better than a vision of the pilot plugging that hole with a wad of well-chewed bubble gum.
He sniffed the damp, cold, still air. Nothing. If the pilot had breathed anything alien to Earth-normal air, it had already dissipated without trace in the organ pipe of the tunnel. He flashed his light inside the cabin.
The instruments were smashed beyond hope, except for a few at the sides of the capsule. The pilot has smashed them—or rather, his environment had.
Before him in the light of the tor
ch was a heavy, transparent tank of iridescent greenish-brown fluid, with a small figure floating inside it. It had been the tank, which had broken free of its moorings, which had smashed up the rest of the compartment. The pilot was completely enclosed in what looked like an ordinary G-suit, inside the oil; flexible hoses connected to bottles on the ceiling fed him his atmosphere, whatever it was. The hoses hadn't broken, but something inside the G-suit had; a line of tiny bubbles was rising from somewhere near the pilot's neck.
He pressed the EEG electrode net against the tank and looked into the Walter goggles. The sheep with the kittens’ faces were still there, somewhat changed in position; but almost all of the color had washed out of the scene. McDonough grunted involuntarily. There was now an atmosphere about the picture which hit him like a blow, a feeling of intense oppression, of intense distress…
“Marty,” he said hoarsely. “Let's see if we can't cut into that tank from the bottom somehow.” He backed down into the tunnel.
“Why? If he's got internal injuries—”
“The suit's been breached. It's filling with that oil from the bottom. If we don't drain the tank, he'll drown first.”
“All right. Still think he's a man-from-Mars, Mac?”
“I don't know. It's too small to be a man, you can see that. And the memories aren't like human memories. That's all I know. Can we drill the tank some place?”
“Don't need to,” Persons’ echo-distorted voice said from inside the air lock. The reflections of his flashlight shifted in the opening like ghosts. “I just found a drain petcock. Roll up your trouser cuffs, gents.”
But the oil didn't drain out of the ship. Evidently it went into storage somewhere inside the hull, to be pumped back into the pilot's cocoon when it was needed again.
It took a long time. The silence came flooding back into the tunnel.
“That oil-suspension trick is neat,” Martinson whispered edgily. “Cushions him like a fish. He's got inertia still, but no mass—like a man in free fall.”
McDonough fidgeted, but said nothing. He was trying to imagine what the multicolored vision of the pilot could mean. Something about it was nagging at him. It was wrong. Why would a still-conscious and gravely injured pilot be solely preoccupied with remembering the fields of home? Why wasn't he trying to save himself instead—as ingeniously as he had tried to save the ship? He still had electrical power, and in that litter of smashed apparatus which he alone could recognize, there must surely be expedients which still awaited his trial. But he had already given up, though he knew he was dying.
Or did he? The emotional aura suggested a knowledge of things desperately wrong, yet there was no real desperation, no frenzy, hardly any fear—almost as though the pilot did not know what death was, or, knowing it, was confident that it could not happen to him. The immensely powerful, dying mind inside the G-suit seemed curiously uncaring and passive, as though it awaited rescue with supreme confidence—so supreme that it could afford to drift, in an oil-suspended floating dream of home, nostalgic and unhappy, but not really afraid.
And yet it was dying!
“Almost empty,” Andy Persons’ quiet, garbled voice said into the tunnel.
Clenching his teeth, McDonough hitched himself into the air lock again and tried to tap the fading thoughts on a higher frequency. But there was simply nothing to hear or see, though with a brain so strong, there should have been, at as short a range as this. And it was peculiar, too, that the visual dream never changed. The flow of thoughts in a powerful human mind is bewilderingly rapid; it takes weeks of analysis by specialists before its essential pattern emerges. This mind, on the other hand, had been holding tenaciously to this one thought—complicated though it was—for a minimum of two hours. A truly subidiot performance—being broadcast with all the drive of a super genius.
Nothing in the cookbook provided McDonough with any precedent for it.
The suited figure was now slumped against the side of the empty tank, and the shades inside the toposcope goggles suddenly began to be distorted with regular, wrenching blurs: pain waves. A test at the level of the theta waves confirmed it; the unknown brain was responding to the pain with terrible knots of rage, real blasts of it, so strong and uncontrolled that McDonough could not endure them for more than a second. His hand was shaking so hard that he could hardly tune back to the gamma level again.
“We should have left the oil there,” he whispered. “We've moved him too much. The internal injuries are going to kill him in a few minutes.”
“We couldn't let him drown, you said so yourself,” Persons said practically. “Look, there's a seam on this tank that looks like a torsion seal. If we break it, it ought to open up like a tired clam. Then we can get him out of here.”
As he spoke, the empty tank parted into two shell-like halves. The pilot lay slumped and twisted at the bottom, like a doll, his suit glistening in the light of the C.O.’s torch.
“Help me. By the shoulders, real easy. That's it; lift. Easy, now.”
Numbly, McDonough helped. It was true that the oil would have drowned the fragile, pitiful figure, but this was no help, either. The thing came up out of the cabin like a marionette with all its strings cut. Martinson cut the last of them: the flexible tubes which kept it connected to the ship. The three of them put it down, sprawling bonelessly.
…AND STILL THE DAZZLING SKY-BLUE SHEEP ARE GRAZING IN THE RED FIELD…
Just like that, McDonough saw it.
A coloring book!
That was what the scene was. That was why the colors were wrong, and the size referents. Of course the sheeplike animals did not look much like sheep, which the pilot could never have seen except in pictures. Of course the sheep's heads looked like the heads of kittens; everyone has seen kittens. Of course the brain was powerful out of all proportion to its survival drive and its knowledge of death; it was the brain of a genius, but a genius without experience. And of course, this way, the USSR could get a rocket fighter to the United States on a one-way trip.
The helmet fell off the body, and rolled off into the gutter which carried away the water condensing on the wall of the tunnel. Martinson gasped, and then began to swear in a low, grinding monotone. Andy Persons said nothing, but his light, as he played it on the pilot's head, shook with fury.
McDonough, his fantasy of space ships exploded, went back to the hand truck and kicked his tomb-tapping apparatus into small shards and bent pieces. His whole heart was a fuming caldron of pity and grief. He would never knock upon another tomb again.
The blond head on the floor of the tunnel, dreaming its waning dream of a colored paper field, was that of a little girl, barely eight years old.
Most military SF is about commanding officers, fighter pilots, or grunts. That's understandable: these are characters whose jobs lend themselves to dramatic scenes.
Most soldiers are none of those things: they're part of what's called the logistics tail, the nine or more people who are necessary to keep one combat soldier fed, armed, returned to health (or shipped home dead; that too), and thousands of other necessary supporting services.
Interrogators are a not-insignificant part of this huge service industry, but this is one of only two stories I know focusing on an interrogator's job. I wrote the other one: My Military Occupation Specialty was Enlisted Interrogator.
thought about Tomb Tapper the afternoon my job was to interrogate a gutshot teenage girl as she died. I've thought about the story often since then.
And I've often thought of the girl as well.
—DAD
A Relic of War
Keith Laumer
The old war machine sat in the village square, its impotent guns pointing aimlessly along the dusty street. Shoulder-high weeds grew rankly about it, poking up through the gaps in the two-yard-wide treads; vines crawled over the high, rust- and guano-streaked flanks. A row of tarnished enameled battle honors gleamed dully across the prow, reflecting the late sun.
A group of men loung
ed near the machine; they were dressed in heavy work clothes and boots; their hands were large and calloused, their faces weatherburned. They passed a jug from hand to hand, drinking deep. It was the end of a long workday and they were relaxed, good-humored.
“Hey, we're forgetting old Bobby,” one said. He strolled over and sloshed a little of the raw whiskey over the soot-blackened muzzle of the blast cannon slanting sharply down from the forward turret. The outer men laughed.
“How's it going, Bobby?” the man called.
Deep inside the machine there was a soft chirring sound.
“Very well, thank you,” a faint, whispery voice scraped from a grill below the turret.
“You keeping an eye on things, Bobby?” another man called.
“All clear,” the answer came: a bird-chirp from a dinosaur.
“Bobby, you ever get tired just setting here?”
“Hell, Bobby don't get tired,” the man with the jug said. “He's got a job to do, old Bobby has.”
“Hey, Bobby, what kind o'boy are you?” a plump, lazy-eyed man called.
“I am a good boy,” Bobby replied obediently.
“Sure Bobby's a good boy.” The man with the jug reached up to pat the age-darkened curve of chromalloy above him. “Bobby's looking out for us.”
Heads turned at a sound from across the square: the distant whine of a turbocar, approaching along the forest road.
“Huh! Ain't the day for the mail,” a man said. They stood in silence, watching as a small, dusty cushion-car emerged from deep shadow into the yellow light of the street. It came slowly along to the plaza, swung left, pulled to a stop beside the boardwalk before a corrugated metal store front lettered BLAUVELT PROVISION COMPANY. The canopy popped open and a man stepped down. He was of medium height, dressed in a plain city-type black coverall. He studied the store front the street, then turned to look across at the men. He came across toward them.
“Which of you men is Blauvelt?” he asked as he came up. His voice was unhurried, cool. His eyes flicked over the men.
