Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Not all our Carmpan psychology, our logic and vision and subtlety, would have availed us anything. The skills of peace and tolerance were useless, for our enemy was not alive.

  What is thought, that mechanism seems to bring it forth?

  STONE MAN

  Sirgol was a battleground—for a war fought thousands of years in its past!

  I

  Derron Odegard took a moment to wipe his sweaty palms on the legs of his easy-fitting duty uniform, and to minutely shift the position of his headset on his skull. Then he leaned forward in his contor-chair, hunting the enemy again.

  After just half an hour on watch he was bone-tired. The weight of his planet and its forty million surviving inhabitants rested crushingly on the back of his neck. He didn’t want to bear the weight of forty million lives, but at the moment there was nowhere to set them down.

  The responsibility was very real. One gross error by Derron, or anyone else in Time Operations, could be enough to tumble the people who still survived on the planet Sirgol into nothingness, to knock them out of real-time and end them for good, end them so completely that they would never have existed at all.

  Derron’s hunter’s hands settled easily to rest on the molded controls of his console. Like those of a trained musician, his fingers followed his thought. The pattern on the curved viewscreen before him, a complex weaving of green cathode-traces, dissolved at his touch on the controls, then steadied, then shifted again—grass put carefully aside by the touch of a cautious stalker. In the screen pattern, Derron’s educated eye saw represented the lifelines of animals and plants, a tangle which made up his assigned small segment of his planet’s prehistorical ecology.

  Surrounding Derron Odegard’s chair and console were those of other sentries, all aligned in long, subtly curving rows. This arrangement pleased and rested the momentarily lifted eye—and then led the eye back to the job, where it belonged. The same effect resulted from the gentle modulations that sometimes passed cloudlike across the artificial light flowing from the strongly vaulted ceiling; and from the insistent psych-music, a murmur of melody that now and then shifted into a primitive heavy beat.

  A thousand men stood guard with Derron in his buried chamber while the music murmured and the fake cloud-shadows passed, and through the huge room there wafted freshsmelling air; breezes scented convincingly with green fields, sometimes with the tang of the sea, with all the varieties of living soil and water that no longer existed up above the miles of rock, on the surface of the planet.

  Again the cathode traces symbolizing interconnected life rippled past Derron on his screen.

  Like a good soldier he avoided predictability in his own moves while patrolling his post. He sent his recondevice a decade further into the past, then five miles north, then two years presentward, and a dozen miles southwest. At every pause he watched and listened, so far in vain. No predator’s passage had yet disturbed this green symbolic grass.

  “Nothing yet,” he said aloud, feeling his supervisor’s presence at his elbow. When the presence stayed put, Derron glanced back for a moment at Captain—?

  It irritated him that he could not think of the captain’s name, though perhaps it was understandable. Time Operations had only been in business for about a month and during all that period had been in a state of organizational flux.

  Whoever he was, the captain had his eyes fixed fiercely on Derron’s screen. “Your section right here,” the captain said, showing his nervousness, “this is the hot spot.” The captain’s only reassuring aspect was that his dark jowly face seemed set like a bulldog’s, to bite and hold on. Derron turned back to work.

  His assigned segment of spacetime was set about twenty thousand years in the past, near the time of the First Men’s coming to Sirgol. Its duration was about a century, and in space it comprised a square of land roughly a hundred miles on a side, including the lower atmosphere above the square. On the screen every part of it appeared as an enormously complex thicket of events.

  Derron had not yet found a human lifeline woven into this thicket of the past, but 416 was not looking for humans especially. What mattered was that he had not yet discovered the splash of disruptive change that would have signaled the presence of an invading berserker machine.

  The infraelectronic recon-device which served as Derron’s sense-extension into the past did not stir the branches of forests, or startled animals. Rather it hovered just outside reality, seeing real-time through the fringe of things that almost were, dipping into real-time for an anosecond and then dropping back again to peer at it from just around the local curves of probability.

  The first intimation that battle had been joined came to Derron not through his screen or even his earphones, but through the sound of his captain moving away in softfooted haste, to whisper excitedly with the supervisor of the next rank.

  If the fight was really on in Time Operations at last, a man might well feel frightened. Derron did, in a remote and withdrawn sort of way. He was not badly frightened as yet, and did not expect to be. He thought he would stay on his job and do it well.

  There were advantages in not caring very much.

  A few seconds later the start of an action was confirmed by a calm girl’s voice that came into his earphones. She also told him in which dimensions and by how much to shift his pattern of search. All the sentries would be shifting now, as those nearest the enemy penetration closed in and the rest spread their zones to maintain coverage. The first attack might be only a diversion.

  Present-time passed slowly. Derron’s orders were changed and changed again, by the unshakeable girl-voice that might be only a recording. For a while he could only guess at how things were going. Men had never tried to fight in the past before, but all the men of Sirgol who were still alive were used to war in one form or another. And this game of Time Operations would also be new to the enemy—though of course he had no emotions to get in his way.

  “Attention, all sentries,” said a new, drawling, male voice in Derron’s headset. “This is Time Ops Command, to let you all know what’s going on. First, the enemy’s sunk a beachhead down about twenty-one thousand years in probability-time. Looks like they’re going to take things down there and then launch ’em up into history.”

  A few seconds later, the voice added: “We got our first penetration already spotted, somewhere around twenty-and-a-half down. Keep your eyes sharp and find us the keyhole.”

  At some time more than twenty thousand years in the past, at some spot not yet determined high in Sirgol’s atmosphere, six berserker devices the size of aircraft had come bursting into reality. If men’s eyes had been able to watch the event directly, they would have seen the six missile-shaped killing machines materialize out of nothing and then explode from their compact formation like precision flyers. Like an aerobatic team they scattered at multisonic speed away from their “keyhole”—the point of spacetime through which they had entered reality, and where one perfect counterblow could still destroy them all.

  As the six enemy machines flew at great speed away from one another, they seeded the helpless world below them with poison. Radioactives, antibiotic chemicals—it was hard from a distance of twenty thousand years to say just what they were using. Derron Odegard, patrolling like the other sentries, saw the attack only in its effects. He perceived it as a diminishing in probability of the existence of life in his own sector, a morbid change following certain well defined directions that would in time reduce the probability of any life at all in the sector to zero.

  If the planet was dead and poisoned when the First Men arrived, groping and wandering as helpless as babies, why then there could be no human civilization on Sirgol, no one in Modern times to resist the dead today. Derron knew that the berserkers. The planet would still be dark tide of nonexistence was rising in each cell of his own body, in each cell of every living creature.

  Derron’s findings with those of every other sentry were fed to Time Ope Command. Men and computers worked
together, tracing back the vectors along which the deadly changes in probability advanced.

  The system worked to Command’s satisfaction, this time. The computers announced that the keyholes of the six flying machines had been pinpointed.

  In the catacomb of Operations’ Stage Two, the missiles waited, blunt simple shapes surrounded by complexities of control and launching mechanism. As Command’s drawling voice announced: “Firing one for the keyhole,” massive steel arms extended the missile sideways from its rack, while on the dark stone floor beneath it there appeared a silvery circle, shimmering like troubled liquid.

  The arms dropped the missile, and in the first instant of its fall it disappeared. Even as it fell into the past it was propelled as a wave of probability through the miles of rock to the surface. The guidance computers made constant corrections, steering their burden of fusible hydrogen through the mazes of the half-real, toward the right point on the edge of normal existence . . . .

  Derron saw the malignant changes that had been creeping ominously across his screen begin suddenly to reverse themselves. It looked like a trick, like running the projector backward, like some stunt with no relevance to the real world.

  “Right in the keyhole!” yelped Command’s voice in his ear, drawling no longer. The six berserker flyers now shared their point of entry into real-time with an atomic explosion, neatly tailored to fit.

  As the waves of death were seen to recede on every screen, jubilation spread in murmurous waves of its own up and down the curved rows of sentry-positions. But experience, not to mention discipline, kept the rejoicing muted.

  The rest of the six-hour watch passed like a routine training exercise in the techniques of moppingup. All the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed, the tactical success tied down and made certain by observations and tests. Men were relieved on schedule for their customary breaks, and passed one another smiling and winking. Derron went along and smiled when someone met his eye; it was the easiest thing to do.

  When the shift ended and there was still no sign of any further enemy action, there was no doubt left that the berserkers’ first attempt to get at the Modems through their past had been beaten back into nonexistence.

  But the damned machine would be back, as always. Stiff and sweaty and tired, and not conscious of any particular elation, Derron rose from his chair to make room for the sentry on the next shift.

  “I guess you guys did all right today,” the replacement said, a touch of envy in his voice.

  Derron made himself smile again. “You can have the next chance for glory.” He pressed his thumbprint on the console’s scanner as the other man did the same. Then, his responsibility officially over, he walked at a dragging pace out of the sentry room. Other members of his shift were moving in the same direction; once outside the area of enforced quiet they formed excited groups and started to whoop it up a little.

  Nodding cheerfully to the others, and replying appropriately to their jokes, Derron stood in line to hand in the recording cartridge with its record of his shift activity. Then he waited in another short line, to make a final oral report to a debriefing officer. After that he was free; as free as any citizen of Sirgol could be, these days.

  II

  When the huge passenger elevator lifted Derron and a crowd of others out of the deeper caves of Time Operations to the housing level, there were still ten miles of rock overhead.

  The pampered conditions of the sentry room were not to be found here, or anywhere where a maximum-efficiency environment was not absolutely necessary. Here the air smelled stale and the lighting was just tolerable. The corridor in which Derron had his bachelor-cubicle was one of the main streets of the buried world-city, the fortress in which the surviving population of Sirgol was armed and maintained and housed and fed. Given the practically limitless power of hydrogen fusion to labor for them, and the mineral wealth of the surrounding rock, the besieged planet-garrison at least had no fear of starvation.

  The corridor was two stories high and as wide as a main street in one of the cities of the old surface-world. People who traveled this corridor for any considerable distance rode upon the moving belts laid down in its center. On the moving belt now rushing past Derron a pair of blackuniformed police were checking the identity cards of travelers. Planetary Command must be cracking down again on work-evaders.

  As usual, the belts and the broad statwalk strips on either side were moderately crowded. Men and women were going to their jobs or leaving them, at a pace neither hurried nor slow, wearing work uniforms that were mostly monotonously alike. A few other people, wearing lighter and gayer off-duty clothes, were strolling or standing in line before stores or places of amusement.

  One of the shorter lines was that in front of the local branch of the Homestead Office. Derron paused on the statwalk there, looking at the curling posters and the shabby models on display. All depicted various plans for the rehabilitation of the surface of the planet after the war. Apply now for the land you want . . . they said there would be new land, then, nourished and protected by new oceans of air and water, which were to be somehow squeezed out of the planet’s deep rocks.

  The people standing in line looked at the models with wistful, halfhopeful eyes, and most of those passing glanced in with something more than indifference. They were all of them able to forget, if they had ever really understood it, the fact that the world was dead. The real world was dead and cremated, along with nine out of ten of the people who had made it live . . . .

  To control his thoughts Derron had to turn away from the dusty models and the people waiting in line to believe. He started toward his cubicle but then on impulse turned aside, down a narrow branching passage.

  He knew where he was going. Likely there would be only a few people there at this time of day. A hundred paces ahead of him, the end of the passage framed in its arch the living green of real treetops—

  The tremor of a heavy explosion raced through the living rock from which this passage had been carved.

  Ahead, Derron saw two small red birds streak in alarm across the greenery of the trees. Now the sound came, dull and muffled, but heavy. It had been a small missile penetration, then, one hitting fairly close by. The enemy threw down through the shielding rock probability-waves that turned into missiles, even as men fired them upward at the enemy fleet in space.

  Without hesitating or breaking stride Derron paced on to the end of the passage. There he halted, leaning his hands heavily on a protective railing of natural logs, while he looked out over the park from two levels above the grass. From six levels higher yet, an artificial sun shone down almost convincingly on three or four acres of real trees and real grass, on varicolored birds that were held inside the park by curtain-jets of air. Across the scene there passed a gurgling brook of real water. Today its level had fallen so that the concrete sides of its bed were revealed halfway down.

  A year ago—a lifetime ago, that is, in the real world—Derron Odegard had been no nature-lover. Then he had been thinking of finishing his schooling and settling down to the labors of a professional historian. Even on holidays he had gone to historic places . . . he thrust out of his memory now certain thoughts, and a certain face, as he habitually did. Yes, a year ago he had spent most of his days with history texts and films and tapes, and in the usual academic schemes for academic advancement. In those days the first hints of the possibility that historians might be allowed to take a firsthand look at the past had been promises of pure joy. The warnings of Earthmen were decades old, and the defenses of Sirgol had been decades in the building, all part of the background of life. The Berserker War itself was other planets’ business.

  In the past year, Derron thought, he had learned more about history than in all the years of study that had gone before. Now when the last moment of history came on Sirgol, if he could know it was the last, he would get away if he could come to one of these parks with a little bottle of wine he had been keeping stowed under his cot. He would finish
history by drinking whatever number of toasts circumstances allowed, to whatever dead and dying things seemed to him then the most worthy.

  The tension was just beginning to drain from his fingers into the handworn bark of the railing, and he had actually forgotten the recent explosion, when the first of the wounded came into die park below him.

  The first was a man with his uniform jacket gone and the remains of his clothing all torn and blackened. One of his arms was burnt and raw and swelling. He tottered forward half-blindly among the trees, and then like an actor in some wilderness drama he fell full length at the edge of the brook and began to drink from it ravenously.

  Next came another man, older, this one probably some kind of clerk or administrator, though he was too far away for Derron to make out his insignia. This man stood in the park as if lost, seemingly unwounded but more dazed than the burned man. Now and then the second man raised his hands to his ears; there was something wrong with his hearing.

  A pudgy woman entered, moaning in bewilderment as she held the flap of her tom scalp in place. Two more women came in; a trickle of injured people began to spill steadily from a small park entrance at grass level. They flowed in and defiled the false peace of the park. Their voices, growing in number, built a steadily rising murmur of complaint against the injustice of the universe. Everyone knew it was a rare event for a berserker missile to get past all the defenses and penetrate to the depth of an inhabited level.

  Why did it have to happen today, and to them?

  There were a couple of dozen people in the park now, walking wounded from what must have been a relatively harmless explosion, Down the nearby passages there echoed authoritarian yells, and the whine and rumble of heavy machines. Damage Control was on the job; the walking wounded were being sent here to get them out from under foot while more urgent matters were being taken care of.