by Brian Aldiss
He was a certain colonel whose barracks during this war year were below ground. In the mess the Special Wing was making merry. The place was overcrowded, with long trestle tables full of food and wine and with soldiers and the women who had been invited to attend. Despite the Spartan aspect of the mess, the atmosphere was one of festival – that especially hectic kind of festival held by men whose motto is the old one: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
The colonel was eating and drinking, but he was not yet merry. Although it pleased him to see his men carousing, he was cut off from their merriment. He still knew what they had forgotten, that at any moment the summons might come. And then they would leave, collect their equipment, and go above to face whatever dark things had to be faced.
All this was a part of the colonel’s profession, his life. He did not resent it, nor did he fear it; he felt only a mild attack of something like stage fright.
The faces around him had receded into a general blur. Now he focused on them, wondering idly who and how many would accompany him on the mission. He also glanced at the women.
Under duress of war, all the military had retreated underground. Conditions below were harsh, mitigated, however, by generous supplies of the new synthetic foods and drinks. After a decade of war, plankton brandy tastes as good as the real thing – when the real thing has ceased to exist. The women were not synthetic. They had forsaken the ruined towns above for the comparative safety of the subterranean garrison towns. In so doing, most of them had saved their lives only to lose their humanity. Now they fought and screamed over their men, caring little for what they won.
The colonel looked at them with both compassion and contempt. Whichever side won the war, the women had already lost it.
Then he saw a face that was neither laughing nor shouting.
It belonged to a woman sitting almost opposite him at the table. She was listening to a blurry-eyed, red-faced corporal, whose heavy arm lay over her shoulder as he spun a rambling tale of woe. Mary, the colonel thought; she must be called something simple and sweet like Mary.
Her face was ordinary enough, except that it bore none of the marks of viciousness and vulgarity so common in this age. Her hair was light brown, her eyes an enormous blue-grey. Her lips were not thin, though her face was.
Mary turned and saw the colonel regarding her. She smiled at him.
Moments of revelation in a man’s life always come unexpectedly. The colonel had been an ordinary soldier; when Mary smiled, he became something more complex. He saw himself as he was – an old man in his middle twenties who had surrendered everything personal to a military machine. This sad, beautiful, ordinary face spoke of all he had missed, of all the richer side of life known only to a man and woman who experience each other through love.
It told him more. It told him that even now it was not too late for him. The face was a promise as well as a reproach.
All this and more ran through the colonel’s mind, and some of it was reflected in his eyes. Mary, it was clear, understood something of his expression.
‘Can you get away from him?’ the colonel said, with a note of pleading in his voice.
Without looking at the soldier whose arm lay so heavily over her shoulders, Mary answered something. What she said was impossible to hear in the general hubbub. Seeing her pale lips move, in an agony at not hearing, the colonel called to her to repeat her sentence.
At that moment the duty siren sounded.
The uproar redoubled. Military police came pouring into the mess, pushing and kicking the drunks onto their feet and marching them out of the door.
The colonel rose to his feet. Leaning across the table and touching Mary’s hand, he said, ‘I must see you again and speak to you. If I survive this mission, I will be here tomorrow night. Will you meet me?’
A fleeting smile. ‘I’ll be here,’ she said.
Hope flooded into him. Love, gratitude, all the secret springs of his nature poured forth into his veins. Then he marched towards the doors.
Beyond the doors, a tube truck waited. The Special Wing staggered or was pushed into it. When all were accounted for, the doors closed and the tube moved off, roaring into the tunnel on an upward gradient.
It stopped at Medical Bay, where orderlies with alcoholometers awaited them. Anyone who flipped the needle was instantly given an antitoxic drug. The colonel, though he had drunk little, had to submit to an injection. The alcohol in his blood was neutralised almost at once. Within five minutes everyone in the room was stone cold sober again. To wage war in its present form would not have been possible without drugs.
The party, quieter now and with set faces, climbed back into the tube. It rose on an ascending spiral of tunnel, depositing them next at Briefing. They were now on the surface. The air smelled less stale.
Accompanied by five under-officers and NCOs, the colonel entered Information Briefing. The rest of his men – or those picked for this particular mission – went to Morale Briefing. Here, animations would prepare them by direct and subliminal means for the hazards to come.
The colonel and his party faced a brigadier who began speaking as soon as they sat down.
‘We have something fresh for you today. The enemy is trying a new move, and we have a new move to counteract it. The six of you will take only eighteen men with you on this mission. You will be lightly armed, and your safety will depend entirely on the element of surprise. When I tell you that if all goes well we expect to have you back here in ten hours, I do not want you to forget that those ten hours may vitally affect the whole outcome of the war.’
He went on to describe their objective. The picture was simple and clear as it built up in the colonel’s mind. He discarded all details but the key ones. Where the forty-eighth parallel crossed the sea, the enemy was gathered in some strength in a stegor forest. Beyond the forest stood unscalable cliffs. On the clifftop, surrounded by the forest, was an old circular wooden building, five storeys high. On the top storey of this building, looking over the treetops, was a weather station. It commanded the narrow strait of sea that separated enemy from enemy.
The weather station watched for favourable winds. When they came, the signal would be given to gliders along the coast. The gliders would be launched and flown over enemy territory. They contained bacteria.
‘We stand to have a major plague on our hands if this setup is not put out of action at once,’ the brigadier said. ‘Another force has been given the task of wiping out the gliders. We must also put the weather station out of action, and that is your job.
‘A high-pressure area is building up over us now. Reports show that conditions should be ideal for an enemy launching in ten to twelve hours. We have to kill them before that.’
He then described the forces to be met with in the forest through which the attackers must go. The defences were heavy, but badly deployed. Only the paths through the forest were defended, since vehicular attack through the trees was impossible.
‘This is where you and your men come in, Colonel. Our laboratories have just developed a new drug. As far as I can understand, it’s the old hyperactivity pill carried to the ultimate. Unfortunately it’s still rather in the experimental stage, but desperate situations call for desperate remedies …’
With the briefing finished, the officers were joined by the men selected to accompany them. The twenty-four of them marched to the armoury, where they were equipped with weapons and combat suits.
Outside, in the open air, it was still night. In a land vehicle they rode over to an air strip, the ruins of an old surface town making no more than vague smudges in the darkness. They passed piles of defused enemy grenades. A vane awaited them. In ten minutes they were all aboard and strapped into position.
A medical man entered. He would administer the new drug when they reached the enemy forest; now he administered a preparatory tranquilliser orally, like a sacrament.
The vane climbed upward with a bound. Twenty-four men subsided into a
drugged coma as they hurtled high into the stratosphere. Below, out of the bowl of night, the enemy forest swam.
Descending vertically, they landed in an acre of bracken beneath the shadow of the first trees. The sedation period ended as the hatch swung open.
‘Let’s keep it quiet, men,’ the colonel said.
He checked his chronometer with the pilot’s before leaving. It was dawn, and a chill breeze blew. The great cluster that contained Starswarm Central wheeled low in the sky.
The medico came around handing out boomerang-shaped capsules that fitted against the bottom teeth under the tongue.
‘Don’t bite on ’em until the colonel gives the word,’ he said. ‘And remember, don’t worry about yourselves. Get back to your vane and we’ll take care of the rest.’
‘Famous last words,’ someone muttered.
The medico hurried back to the vane. It would be off as soon as they were gone; the Special Wing had to rendezvous with another elsewhere when the mission was over. The party set off for the trees in single file; almost at once a heavy bore opened fire.
‘Keep your heads down. It’s after the vane, not us,’ the colonel said.
Worries came sooner than expected. A strobolight came on, its nervous blink fluttering across the clearing, washing everything in its path with white. At the same time the colonel’s helmet beeped, telling him a radio eye had spotted him.
‘Down!’ he roared.
The air crackled as they crawled into a hollow.
‘We’ll split into our five groups now,’ the colonel said. ‘One and Two to my left, Four and Five to my right. Seventy seconds from now, I’ll blow my whistle; eat your pills and be off. Move!’
Twenty men moved. Four stayed with the colonel. Ignoring the racket in the clearing, he watched the smallest hand on his chronometer, his whistle in his left fist. As he expected, the fusillade had died as he blew his blast. He crunched his capsule and rose, the four men beside him.
They ran for the wood.
They were among the trees. The other four groups of five were also among the trees. Three of them were decoy groups. Only one of the other groups, Number Four, was actually due to reach the round building, approaching it by a different route from the colonel’s.
As they entered the forest, the drug took effect. A slight dizziness seized the colonel, a singing started in his ears. Against this minor irritation, a vast comfort swept through his limbs. He began to breathe more rapidly, and then to think and move more rapidly. His rate of metabolism was accelerating.
Alarm filled him momentarily, although he had been briefed on what to expect. The alarm came from a deep and unplumbed part of him, a core that resented tampering with its personal rhythm. Coupled with it came a vivid picture of Mary’s face, as if the colonel by submitting to this drug was somehow defiling her. Then the image and the alarm vanished.
Now he was sprinting, his men beside him. They flicked around dense bush, leaving a clearing behind. A searchlight burst into life, sweeping its beam among the tree trunks in a confusing pattern of light and shade. As it caught Group Three, the colonel opened fire.
He had acted fast, hardly realising he was firing. The guns they carried had special light-touch trigger actions to respond to their new tempo.
A burst of firing answered his shot, but it fell behind them. They were moving faster. They wove rapidly among the stegor trees. Dawn gave them light to see by. Opposition, as Briefing had forecast, was scattered. They ran without stopping. They passed camouflaged vehicles, tanks, tents, some containing sleeping men. All these they skirted. They shot anything that moved. A fifty per cent acceleration of perception and motion turned them into supermen.
Absolute calm ruled in the colonel’s mind. He moved like a deadly machine. Sight and sound came through with ultra-clarity. He seemed to observe movement before it began. A world of noise surrounded him.
He heard the rapid hammer of his heart, his breathing, the breathing of his fellows, the rustle of their limbs inside their clothes. He heard the crackle of twigs beneath their feet, faint shouts in the forest, distant shots – presumably marking the whereabouts of another group. He seemed to hear everything.
They covered the first mile in five minutes, the second in under four. Occasionally the colonel glanced at his wrist compass, but a mystic sense seemed to keep him on course.
When an unexpected burst of firing from a flank killed one of the group, the other four raced on without pause. It was as if they could never stop running. The second mile was easy, and most of the third. Normally, the enemy was prepared for any eventuality: but that did not include a handful of men running. The idea was too laughable to be entertained. The colonel’s group got through only because it was impossible.
Now they were almost at destination. Some sort of warning of their approach had been given. The trees were spaced more widely, kirry-mashies were being lined up, gun posts manned. As the light strengthened, it began to favour the enemy.
‘Scatter!’ the colonel shouted, as a gun barked ahead. His voice sounded curiously high in his own ears.
His men swerved apart, keeping each other in sight. They were moving like shadows now, limbs flickering, brains alight. They ran. They did not fire.
The gun posts opened up. Missing four phantoms, they kept up their chatter in preparation for the main body of men who never arrived. The phantoms plunged on, tormented most by the noise, which bit like acid into their eardrums.
Again the phantoms grouped in a last dash. Through the trees loomed a round wooden building. They were there!
The four fired together as a section of the enemy burst from a nearby hut. They shot a gunner dead as he swung his barrel at them. They hurled explosives into a sandbagged strongpoint. Then they were in the weather station.
It was as Briefing had described it. The colonel leading, they bounded up the creaking spiral stair. Doors burst open as they mounted. But the enemy moved with a curious sloth and died without firing a shot. In seconds they were at the top of the building.
His lungs pounding like pistons, the colonel flung open a door, the only door on this storey.
This was the weather room.
Apparatus had been piled up in disorderly fashion, bearing witness to the fact that the enemy had only recently moved in. But there was no mistaking the big weather charts on the walls, each showing its quota of isobar flags.
Several of the enemy were in the room. The firing nearby had alarmed them. Beyond them was a glimpse of cliff and grey sea. One man spoke into a phone; the others, except for a man sitting at the central coordinating desk, stared out of the windows anxiously. The desk man saw the colonel first.
Astonishment and fear came onto his face, slackening the muscles there, dropping his mouth open. He slid around in his seat, lifting his hand at the same time to reach out for a gas gun on the desk. To the colonel, he appeared to be moving in ultra slow motion, just as in ultra slow motion the other occupants of the room were turning to face their enemy.
Emitting a high squeal like a bat’s, the colonel twitched his right index finger slightly. He saw the bullet speed home to its mark. Raising both hands to his chest, the man at the desk toppled off his stool and fell beside it.
One of the colonel’s men tossed an incendiary explosive into the room. They were running back down the spiral stairs as it exploded. Again doors burst open on them, again they fired without thought. There was answering fire. One man squealed and plunged headfirst down the stairs. His three companions ran past him out into the wood.
Setting his new course, the colonel led his two surviving men towards their rendezvous. This was the easiest part of their mission; they came to the scattered enemy from an unexpected quarter and were gone before he realized it. Behind them, the weather station blazed, sending its flames high into the new day.
They had four miles to go this way. After the second mile, the maximum effect of the drug began to wear off. The colonel was aware that the abnormal clarity of hi
s brain was changing into deadness. He ran on.
Sunshine broke through in splinters onto the floor of the forest. Each fragment was incredibly sharp and memorable. Each noise underfoot was unforgettable. A slight breeze in the treetops was a protracted bellow as of an ocean breaking on rock. His own breathing was an adamantine clamour for air. He heard his bones grind in their sockets, his muscles and sinews swishing in their blood.
At the end of the third mile, one of the colonel’s two men collapsed without warning. His face was black, and he hit the ground with the sound of a felled tree, utterly burned out. The others never paused.
The colonel and his fellow reached the rendezvous. They lay twitching until the vane came for them. By then there were twelve twitching men to carry away, all that was left of the original party. Two medical orderlies hustled them rapidly into bunks, sinking needles into their arms.
Seemingly without interval, it was twelve hours later.
Again the colonel sat in the mess. Despite the fatigue in his limbs, he had willed himself to come here. He had a date with Mary.
The junketing was getting into full swing about him, as the nightly tide of debauchery and drunkenness rose. Many of these men, like the colonel himself, had faced death during the day; many more would be facing it tomorrow on one minor mission or another. Their duty was to survive; their health was kept in capsules.
The colonel sat at the end of one long table, close to the wall, keeping a chair empty next to him as the room filled. His ears echoed and ached with the noise about him. Wearily he looked round for Mary.
After half an hour had passed, he felt the first twinge of apprehension. He did not know her real name. The events of the day, the rigours of the mission, had obliterated the memory of her face. She had smiled, yes. She had looked ordinary enough, yes. But he knew not a thing about her except the hope she had stirred in him.
