“Here they come,” Glenna informed them, shading her eyes from re-emergent sun. She started tuning up the observing gear aboard the station.
Glaus counted brown saucer-shapes dropping into the pond. Only nineteen, after all.
“Again, I can’t find them with the sonar,” Glenna muttered. “We’ll try the television — there.”
A berserker unit — for all the watching humans could tell, it was the same one that the shark had swallowed — was centimetering its tireless way toward them, walking the bottom in shallow, sunlit water. Death was walking. A living thing might run more quickly, for a time, but life would tire. Or let life oppose it, if life would. Already it had walked through a shark, as easily as traversing a mass of seaweed.
“There,” Glenna breathed again. The advancing enemy had detoured slightly around a rock, and a moment later a dancing ripple of movement had emerged from hiding somewhere to follow in its path. The pursuer’s score or so of tiny legs supported in flowing motion a soft-looking, roughly segmented tubular body. Its sinuous length was about the same as the enemy machine’s diameter, but in contrast the follower was aglow with life, gold marked in detail with red and green and brown, like banners carried forward above an advancing column. Long antennae waved as if for balance above bulbous, short-stalked eyes. And underneath the eyes a coil of heavy forelimbs rested, not used for locomotion.
“Odonodactylus syllarus,” Glenna murmured. “Not the biggest species—but maybe big enough.”
“What are they?” Jen’s voice was a prayerful whisper.
“Well, predators …”
The berserker, intent on its own prey, ignored the animate ripple that was overtaking it, until the smasher had closed almost to contact range. The machine paused then, and started to turn.
Before it had rotated itself more than halfway its brown body was visibly jerked forward, under some striking impetus from the smasher too fast for human eyes to follow. The krakf of it came clearly through the audio pickup. Even before the berserker had regained its balance, it put forth a tearing-claw like that which had opened the shark’s gut from inside.
Again the invisible impact flicked from a finger-length away. At each spot where one of the berserker’s feet touched bottom, a tiny spurt of sand jumped up with the transmitted shock. Its tearing claw now dangled uselessly, hard ceramic cracked clean across.
“I’ve never measured a faster movement by anything that lives. They strike with special dactyls—well, with their elbows, you might say. They feed primarily on hard-shelled crabs and clams and snails. That was just a little one, that Ino gave you as a joke. One as long as my hand can hit something like a four-millimeter bullet—and some of these are longer.”
Another hungry smasher was now coming swift upon the track of the brown, shelled thing that looked so like a crab. The second smasher’s eyes moved on their stalks, calculating distance. It was evidently of a different species than the first, being somewhat larger and of a variant coloration. Even as the berserker, which had just put out another tool, sharp and wiry, and cut its first assailant neatly in half, turned back, Glaus saw—or almost saw or imagined that he saw—the newcomer’s longest pair of forelimbs unfold and return. Again grains of sand beneath the two bodies, living and unliving, jumped from the bottom. With the concussion white radii of fracture sprang out across a hard, brown surface …
Four minutes later the three humans were still watching, in near-perfect silence. A steady barrage of kraks, from every region of the pond, were echoing through the audio pickups. The video screen still showed the progress of the first individual combat.
“People sometimes talk about sharks as being aggressive, as terrible killing machines. Gram for gram, I don’t think they’re at all in the same class.”
The smashing stomatopod, incongruously shrimplike, gripping with its six barb-studded smaller forelimbs the ruined casing of its victim—from which a single ceramic walking-limb still thrashed—began to drag it back to the rock from which its ambush had been launched. Once there, it propped the interstellar terror in place, a Lilliputian monster blacksmith arranging metal against anvil. At the next strike, imaginable if not visible as a double backhand snap from the fists of a karate master, fragments of tough casing literally flew through the water, mixed now with a spill of delicate components. What, no soft, delicious meat in sight as yet? Then smash again …
An hour after the audio pickups had reported their last krak, the three humans walked toward home, unmolested through the shallows and along a shore where no brown saucers moved.
When Ino had been brought home, and Claus’s hand seen to, the house was searched for enemy survivors. Guns were got out, and the great gates in the sand-walls closed to be on the safe side. Then the two young people sent Glenna to a sedated rest.
Her voice was dazed, and softly, infinitely tired. “Tomorrow we’ll feed them, something real.”
“This afternoon,” said Glaus. “When you wake up. Show me what to do.”
“Look at this,” called Jen a minute later, from the common room-.
One wall of the smallest aquarium had been shattered outward. Its tough glass lay sharded on the carpet, along with a large stain of water and the soft body of a small creature, escaped and dead.
Jen picked it up. It was much smaller than its cousins out in the pond, but now she could not mistake the shape, even curled loosely in her palm.
Her husband came in and looked over her shoulder. “Glenna’s still muttering. She just told me they can stab, too, if they sense soft meat in contact. Spear-tips on their smashers when they unfold them all the way. So you couldn’t hold him like that if he was still alive.” Claus’s voice broke suddenly, in a delayed reaction.
“Oh, yes I could.” Jen’s voice too. “Oh, yes I could indeed.”
As I said before, most intelligent creatures avoid war, shun violence. Yet eternal must our gratitude be, to those whose very games are bitter conflict. Grateful, even as we wonder at their hardness—and at the tenderness that may dwell at the same time in the same heart.
The Game
Khees rarely looked at the overseers’ towers without seeing in them a fanciful resemblance to chess rooks. Instead of four, there were six great rooks here, each one standing on its own corner of a vast patchwork territory of lifeless land; and the patched land, busy with friendly machines, still obscured here and there by blotches of poison mist borne in the thinned and ruined air, was not divided into regular squares; some kind of fairy chess instead of the regular variety. His imaginative thoughts about the towers had not, in the six months he had been on planet Maximus, ever got much farther than this point. Chess was not Khees’ great game, and he knew little of its history.
Today he was conducting an informal tour of the rehabilitation project for Adrienne, who had just arrived on-world, and whom he had not seen in over two standard years. At the moment they were outside, wearing dust-repellent jackets and special breathing masks.
“Actually the capital stood more than a thousand kilometers from here, before the attack. But this will be a finer site in several ways for the new city, so we decided to put the monument here as well.”
“That was a good idea. Yours?” It was marvelously flattering, and more than that, the attention that Adrienne was giving him today.
He chuckled. “I’m not sure. We talk things over a great deal.” Khees and twenty other people had been here for half a year, overseeing an army of machines employed in starting to undo the devastation wrought by the raiding-berserker fleet in an hour or so, a little more than a standard year ago. “Let’s go inside again. In here we have the first of our new atmosphere.”
They passed through an airlock into a great, inflated, transparent structure, where they could remove the masks that had protected them against the poison residues of the attack, which still maintained an uncanny lifelessness across the open atmosphere. It was not only human life against which the berserkers fought; the commands built into thos
e unliving killers by their ancient and unknown programmers decreed that all life must be destroyed. For many thousands of years the berserkers had ranged the galaxy, replicating themselves, designing new machines as needed, always methodically killing. And now, for a thousand years and more, Earth-descended humanity, dispersed on more than a hundred worlds, had fought against them.
Inside, Adrienne tossed her mask into a rack and looked about, shaking out long hair of fiery red with a brisk twisting of her slender neck. “Enormous,” she remarked. The inflated dome of clear plastic, that from outside had seemed so tall, looked flat when seen from inside, so long and broad was it in relation to its height. Almost a kilometer away, beyond a pleasant view of green-
fringed paths and ponds, the half-finished monument rose, remaining truncated at the top until the atmosphere had been restored and the confining plastic dome could be removed. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF, words said across the monument’s front, and then a blankness. Khees, whose job mostly involved other matters, didn’t know just how it was going to look when finished. Half a million dead, all the citizens of Maximus who had stayed behind to fight, would provide an impressive number of names to fit in, even if not all of them were known.
“And beautiful,” Adrienne concluded, completing her first look round the place. “You’re doing a fine job here, Khees.”
“This will be the central park of the new capital someday. It isn’t my project, though. The machines I oversee are working thirty and forty kilometers away.”
“I meant all of you who work here,” said Adrienne quickly. Was there just a little regret in her voice, as if she wished she could credit him with the park?
She took his arm and they walked along a path. A few Earthbirds, singing, flew overhead. In the distance a pair of Space Marine officers were approaching from the direction of the monument, uniforms immaculate, weapons slung on shoulders as required for full-dress ceremonies.
Adrienne said: “So, down there at the other end is obviously where the Chief is going to lay the wreath. Where will he enter the dome, though? From here it would be too long a walk. We want to control the time factor as much as possible.” She was thinking aloud, asking herself the question; it was one of the problems that she, as a member of the advance landing party charged with seeing that the planned ceremony ran smoothly, was going to have to answer.
Khees ran a nervous hand through his own curly black hair. “So, how is it working for the great man?”
“The Chief? He really is, you know.”
“I don’t suppose you can be elected to lead the Ten Planets without some ability. The war has certainly gone better since he’s been in office.”
“Oh, he has leadership ability, of course. But I meant humanly great. I suppose the two often go together. He really does care about people. These wreath-laying trips of his to all the battle sites are not just for show. He had tears in his eyes at the last ceremony; I saw them. But how is it with your job, Khees?”
“All right.” He shrugged. “A lot of people are a lot worse off. I’m not out in the front line fighting berserkers.”
“Still, I don’t suppose you get much chance to do what you like best.”
Now he looked at her carefully. “No. Actually, no chance at all.”
“One of the Marine officers who came in the advance party with me has a minor master’s rating. When he found out that I knew you—he already knew you were here—he begged me to see if I could get you to play a game.”
“A minor master? Who?”
Adrienne sighed faintly. “I thought that’d catch your interest. His name’s Barkro. I didn’t ask his numerical rating—I suppose I should have realized you’d want to take that into consideration.”
He had—as so often in the past—the feeling that the more he talked with Adrienne, the farther apart the two of them got. “Oh, I’ll give him a game. That is, if we can come up with six players—I doubt he’d be interested in any lesser variations. Are you going to play, too?”
She smiled and took his hand. “Why not? I won’t have much work to do. And an old boyfriend of mine once taught me how. He even claimed that I had the potential to be pretty good at it someday.”
“If you practiced enough, I said. And if you could eliminate a little psychological block or two.” Now he was holding both her hands and smiling back at her. On first seeing her an hour ago it had hit him, how much he’d really missed her. And now minute by minute the feeling was growing stronger.
“Well sir, I didn’t think my psychological block was all that terrible.”
“There was something about it rather nice, from my own point of view.”
And shortly they were walking on again. She said: “I haven’t had the time for any practice at The Game … speaking of time, though, are we even going to have enough of it to play? I mean, all of us in the Chiefs party are going to be lifting off again just about twelve hours from now.”
He calculated. “Let’s see—LeBon and Narret will play, I’m sure. One more—Jon Via, probably. Trouble is, most of us who will want to play are going to be at least nominally on duty much of the time. We do six hour shifts, alone in the towers, as a rule … what time will the Chiefs shuttle land?”
“About ten hours from now.”
“Once he lands we’ll all be busy—no way out of that.”
“Can’t you trade shifts with non-players?”
Khees grimaced mildly. “I don’t think so. We’re short-handed right now, with a bunch of people out on the frontier with our boss, and they won’t be back until just about the time the Chief comes down. No real reason we can’t play while we’re on duty in the towers, though. It’s not that demanding a job most of the time. Only reason the towers have to be manned at all is that early on here we had a couple of accidents, and now the Boss insists on having permanent observation posts where human eyes can get a direct overall view of the project, at least a good part of the time.”
“What do you do on the night shift?”
He grinned. “The best we can.”
“Your machines are not as self-sufficient as they could be, I gather.”
“It’s the old problem.” With the example of the berserkers constantly in mind, human beings on all worlds were afraid to give their own machines, however benignly programmed, nearly as much in the way of general intelligence and self-sufficiency as technology allowed.
“In the Game, will we use the honor system as regards computer help?”
“Of course.” Khees felt a little disappointed, almost injured, by the question. If you were serious enough about the Game to play it well, you weren’t going to cheat, certainly not in that crude a sense. Would an athlete tie servolifters to his wrists, and then take pride in winning a weight contest?
“Silly of me to ask …”
“It’s all right. Look, Ade, I’ve got to get back up in my tower. The Boss just might call in checking up; he takes his overseers’ duties rather seriously.”
“Then he Won’t approve of a Game during duty hours.”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“What if he tunes in his radio later and hears us playing?”
“We’ll use light-beam communication, tower to tower. I’ll start getting things set up for play. Want to come along? That’ll be against regulations also, but …”
“Love to, but I have a thing or two I must get done myself before we start frittering our time. Where am I going to be when we play?”
“Best thing will be to put you in an unused tower … we can manage that. Be talking to you soon.”
The Game had different names in different human languages. To Khees, in his innermost thoughts, it often had no name at all. Do fish have names for water? Anyway, very few people on his home world had been game-minded, and there it had a name that translated into English bluntly as War-Without-Blood. Since he had come to know The Game, Khees had always preferred it to the “real” world, in which the elder members of his family (he
had grown up in that kind of reality) assigned jobs to the younger, himself included.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of work, Uncle. And I can see it’s my duty as a citizen and all that to help out. But I really don’t want ten million people looking to me for answers every day.”
“You could have even more people than that looking up to you.” (Which perhaps Khees had already, counting all the Game fans across the Earth-colonized corner of the Galaxy. But on his homeworld, none of that was ever completely real.) “You have a brilliant mind, my boy, and it beats me how you can be content to use it for nothing more than … than …”
“Well sir, how can you be content to use your own intelligence at nothing more than shuffling matter around? Who cares if the population of Toxx can build their houses fifteen meters tall next year or only ten?”
That earned Khees a stern avuncular glare. “Well, the population of Toxx might care! In fact, most of them do. Housing construction is something … something very worthwhile. Rewarding.”
“For you. Not me. I just don’t care. I couldn’t.”
And this was after they had sent him to a fine engineering school. The old man glared harder. Then he found a stronger move to make. “Maybe you can find it in you to care how deep people are able to dig their shelters, against the day when the berserkers come again. Now there’s a real problem for you. Hey?”
“Other people are just as smart as I am about that kind of problem, and a lot more anxious to tackle it. Putting someone like me in charge of any military matters would not be a wise move.”
“If only it were part of some game, Khees, you’d solve it brilliantly.” His uncle coughed morosely. As long as, his unstated theory ran, real people’s lives were not involved.
The Ultimate Enemy Page 16
