War and Peace

by Stanley Schmidt (ed)

  The shop was the same, but the hard, metal padlock yielded before the tiny, blazing, supernal power of the revolver. One flick of fire; the metal dissolved—and he was inside.

  It was dark, too dark to see, but Fara did not turn on the lights immediately. He fumbled across to the window control, turned the windows to darkness vibration, and then clicked on the lights.

  He gulped with awful relief. For the machines, his precious tools that he had seen carted away within hours after the bailiff’s arrival, were here again, ready for use.

  Shaky from the pressure of his emotion, Fara called Creel on the telestat. It took a little while for her to appear; and she was in her dressing robe. When she saw who it was she turned a dead white.

  “Fara, oh, Fara, I thought—”

  He cut her off grimly: “Creel, I’ve been to the weapon shop. I want you to do this: go straight to your mother. I’m here at my shop. I’m going to stay here day and night until it’s settled that I stay. … I shall go home later for some food and clothing, but I want you to be gone by then. Is that clear?”

  Color was coming back into her lean, handsome face. She said: “Don’t you bother coming home, Fara. I’ll do everything necessary. I’ll pack all that’s needed into the carplane, including a folding bed. We’ll sleep in the back room at the shop.”

  Morning came palely, but it was ten o’clock before a shadow darkened the open door; and Constable Jor came in. He looked shamefaced.

  “I’ve got an order here for your arrest,” he said.

  “Tell those who sent you,” Fara replied deliberately, “that I resisted arrest—with a gun.”

  The deed followed the words with such rapidity that Jor blinked. He stood like that for a moment, a big, sleepy-looking man, staring at that gleaming, magical revolver; then:

  “I have a summons here ordering you to appear at the great court of Ferd this afternoon. Will you accept it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then you will be there?”

  “I’ll send my lawyer,” said Fara. “Just drop the summons on the floor there. Tell them I took it.”

  The weapon shop man had said: “Do not ridicule by word any legal measure of the Imperial authorities. Simply disobey them.”

  Jor went out, and seemed relieved. It took an hour before Mayor Mel Dale came pompously through the door.

  “See here, Fara Clark,” he bellowed from the doorway. “You can’t get away with this. This is defiance of the law.”

  Fara was silent as his honor waddled farther into the building. It was puzzling, almost amazing, that Mayor Dale would risk his plump, treasured body. Puzzlement ended as the mayor said in a low voice:

  “Good work, Fara; I knew you had it in you. There’s dozens of us in Glay behind you, so stick it out. I had to yell at you just now, because there’s a crowd outside. Yell back at me, will you? Let’s have a real name-calling. But, first, a word of warning: the manager of the Automatic Repair Shop is on his way here with his bodyguards, two of them—”

  Shakily, Fara watched the mayor go out. The crisis was at hand. He braced himself, thought: “Let them come, let them—”

  It was easier than he had thought—for the men who entered the shop turned pale when they saw the holstered revolver. There was a violence of blustering, nevertheless, that narrowed finally down to:

  “Look here,” the man said, “we’ve got your note for twelve thousand one hundred credits. You’re not going to deny you owe that money.”

  “I’ll buy it back,” said Fara in a stony voice, “for exactly half, not a cent more.” The strong-jawed young man looked at him for a long time. “We’ll take it,” he said finally, curtly.

  Fara said: “I’ve got the agreement here—”

  His first customer was old man Miser Lan Harris. Fara stared at the long-faced oldster with a vast surmise, and his first, amazed comprehension came of how the weapon shop must have settled on Harris’s lot—by arrangement.

  It was an hour after Harris had gone that Creel’s mother stamped into the shop. She closed the door.

  “Well,” she said, “you did it, eh? Good work. I’m sorry if I seemed rough with you when you came to my place, but we weapon-shop supporters can’t afford to take risks for those who are not on our side.

  “But never mind that. I’ve come to take Creel home. The important thing is to return everything to normal as quickly as possible.”

  It was over; incredibly it was over. Twice, as he walked home that night, Fara stopped in mid-stride, and wondered if it had not all been a dream. The air was like wine. The little world of Glay spread before him, green and gracious, a peaceful paradise where time had stood still.

  The stories of war are, by usual popular assumption, the stories of warriors, warmongers, and victims. Not so long ago, the idea that the weapon itself might be a character—a being that perceives and acts and is acted upon—seemed wildly fantastic. It seems much less so now.

  THE WABBLER went westward, with a dozen of its fellows, by night and in the belly of a sleek, swift-flying thing. There were no lights anywhere save the stars overhead. There was a sustained, furious roaring noise, which was the sound the sleek thing made in flying. The Wabbler lay in its place, with its ten-foot tail coiled neatly about its lower end, and waited with a sort of deadly patience for the accomplishment of its destiny. It and all its brothers were pear-shaped, with absurdly huge and blunt-ended horns, and with small round holes where eyes might have been, and shielded vents where they might have had mouths. They looked chinless, somehow. They also looked alive, and inhuman, and filled with a sort of passionless hate. They seemed like bodiless demons out of some metallic hell. It was not possible to feel any affection for them. Even the men who handled them felt only a sort of vengeful hope in their capacities.

  The Wabblers squatted in their racks for long hours. It was very cold, but they gave no sign. The sleek, swift-flying thing roared on and roared on. The Wabblers waited. Men moved somewhere in the flying thing, but they did not come where the Wabblers were until the very end. But somehow, when a man came and inspected each one of them very carefully and poked experimentally about the bottoms of the racks in which the Wabblers lay, they knew that the time had come.

  The man went away. The sleek thing tilted a little. It seemed to climb. The air grew colder, but the Wabblers—all of them—were indifferent. Air was not their element. Then, when it was very, very cold indeed, the roaring noise of the flying thing ceased abruptly. The cessation of the noise was startling. Presently little whistling, whispering noises took the place of the roar, as hearing adjusted to a new level of sound. That whistling and whining noise was wind, flowing past the wings of the flying thing. Presently the air was a little warmer—but still very cold. The flying thing was gliding, motors off, and descending at a very gradual slant.

  The Wabbler was the fourth in the row of its brothers on the port side of the flying thing. It did not stir, of course, but it felt an atmosphere of grim and savage anticipation. It seemed that all the brothers coldly exchanged greetings and farewell. The time had definitely come.

  The flying thing leveled out. Levers and rods moved in the darkness of its belly. The feeling of anticipation increased. Then, suddenly, there were only eleven of the Wabblers. Wind roared where the twelfth had been. There were ten. There were nine, eight, seven, six—

  The Wabbler hurtled downward through blackness. There were clouds overhead, now. In all the world there was no speck of actual light. But below there was a faint luminosity. The Wabbler’s tail uncurled and writhed flexibly behind it. Wind screamed past its ungainly form. It went plunging down and down and down, its round holes—which looked so much like eyes—seeming incurious and utterly impassive. The luminosity underneath separated into streaks of bluish glow, which were phosphorescences given off by the curling tips of waves. Off to westward there was a brighter streak of such luminosity. It was surf.

  Splash! The Wabbler plunged into the water with a flare of lumin
escence and a thirty-foot spout of spume and spray rising where it struck. But then that spouting ceased, and the Wabbler was safely under water. It dived swiftly for twenty feet. Perhaps thirty. Then its falling checked. It swung about, and its writhing tail settled down below it. For a little while it seemed almost to intend to swim back to the surface. But bubbles came from the shielded opening which seemed to be a mouth. It hung there in the darkness of the sea—but now and then there were little fiery streaks of light as natives of the ocean swam about it—and then slowly, slowly, slowly it settled downward. Its ten-foot tail seemed to waver a little, as if groping.

  Presently it touched. Ooze. Black ooze. Sea bottom. Sixty feet overhead the waves marched to and fro in darkness. Somehow, through the still silence, there came a muffled vibration. That was the distant surf, beating upon a shore. The Wabbler hung for an instant with the very tip of its tail barely touching the bottom. Then it made small sounds inside itself. More bubbles came from the round place like a mouth. It settled one foot; two feet; three. Three feet of its tail rested on the soft ooze. It hung, pear-shaped, some seven feet above the ocean bottom, with the very tip of its horns no more than four feet higher yet. There was fifty feet of empty sea above it. This was not its destiny. It waited passionlessly for what was to happen.

  There was silence save for the faint vibration from the distant surf. But there was an infinitesimal noise, also, within the Wabbler’s bulk. A rhythmic, insistent, hurried tick-tick-tick-tick— It was the Wabbler’s brain in action.

  Time passed. Above the sea the sleek, swift-flying thing bellowed suddenly, far away. It swerved, and went roaring back in the direction from which it had come. Its belly was empty, now, and somewhere in the heaving sea there were other Wabblers, each one now waiting as the fourth Wabbler did, for the thing that its brain expected. Minutes and minutes passed. The seas marched to and fro. The faraway surf rumbled and roared against the shore. And higher yet, above the clouds, a low-hanging and invisible moon dipped down toward a horizon which did not show anywhere. But the Wabbler waited.

  The tide came. Here, so far from the pounding surf, the stirring of the lower levels of the sea was slight indeed. But the tide moved in toward the land. Slowly, the pressure of water against one of the Wabbler’s sides became evident. The Wabbler leaned infinitesimally toward the shore. Presently its flexible tail ceased to be curved where it lay upon the ooze. It straightened out. There were little bluish glows where it stirred the phosphorescent mud. Then the Wabbler moved. Shoreward. It trailed its tail behind it and left a little glowing track of ghostly light.

  Fish swam about it. Once there was a furry purring sound, and propellers pushed an invisible floating thing across the surface of the sea. But it was far away and the Wabbler was impassive. The tide flowed. The Wabbler moved in little jerks. Sometimes three feet or four, and sometimes eight or ten. Once, where the sea bottom slanted downward for a space, it moved steadily for almost a hundred yards. It came to rest, then, swaying a little. Presently it jerked onward once more. Somewhere an indefinite distance away were its brothers, moving in the same fashion. The Wabbler went on and on, purposefully, moved by the tide.

  Before the tide turned, the Wabbler had moved two miles nearer to the land. But it did not move in a straight line. Its trailing, flexible tail kept it in the deepest water and the strongest current. It moved very deliberately and almost always in small jerks, and it followed the current. The current was strongest where it moved toward a harbor entrance. In moving two miles shoreward, the Wabbler also moved more than two miles nearer to a harbor.

  There came a time, though, when the tide slackened. The Wabbler ceased to move. For half an hour it hung quite still, swaying a little and progressing not at all, while the tick-tick-tick-tick of its brain measured patience against intent. At the end of the half-hour there were small clanking noises within its body. Its shielded mouth emitted bubbles. It sank, and checked, and gave off more bubbles, and sank again. It eased itself very cautiously and very gently into the ooze. Then it gave off more bubbles and lay at rest.

  It waited there, its brain ticking restlessly within it, but with its appearance of eyes impassive. It lay in the darkness like some creature from another world, awaiting a foreordained event.

  For hours it lay still with no sign of any activity at all. Toward the end of those hours, a very faint graying of the upper sea became manifest. It was very dim indeed. It was not enough, in all likelihood, for even the Wabbler to detect the slight movement of semifloating objects along the sea floor, moved by the ebb tide. But there came a time when even such movements ceased. Again the sea was still. It was full ebb. And now the Wabbler stirred.

  It clanked gently, and wavered where it lay in the ooze. There was a cloud of stirred-up mud, as if it had emitted jets of water from its under parts. It wabbled to one side and the other, straining, and presently its body was free, and a foot or two and then four or five feet of its tail—but it still writhed and wabbled spasmodically—and then suddenly it left the sea floor and floated free.

  But only for a moment. Almost immediately its tail swung free, the Wabbler spat out bubbles and descended gently to the bottom again. It rested upon the tip of its tail. It spat more bubbles. One—two—three feet of its tail rested on the mud. It waited. Presently the flood tide moved it again.

  It floated always with the current. Once it came to a curve in the deeper channel to which it had found its way, and the tide tended to sweep it up and out beyond the channel. But its tail resisted the attempt. In the end, the Wabbler swam grandly back to the deeper water. The current was stronger there. It went on and on at a magnificent two knots.

  But when the current slowed again as the time of tide-change neared, the Wabbler stopped again. It swung above the yard-length of its tail upon the mud. Its brain went tick-tick-tick-tick and it made noises. It dribbled bubbles. It sank, and checked, and dribbled more bubbles, and sank cautiously again— It came cautiously to rest in the mud.

  During this time of waiting, the Wabbler heard many sounds. Many times during slack tide, and during ebb tide, too, the water brought humming, purring noises of engines. Once a boat came very near. There was a curious hissing sound in the water. Something—a long line—passed very close overhead. A mine-sweeper and a mine-sweep patrolled the sea, striving to detect and uproot submarine mines. But the Wabbler had no anchor cable for the sweep to catch. It lay impassively upon the bottom. But its eyes stared upward with a deadly calm until the mine-sweeper passed on its way.

  Once more during the light hours the Wabbler shook itself free of the bottom ooze and swam on with the tide. And once more—with another wait on the mud while the tide flowed out—at night. But day and night meant little to the Wabbler. Its ticking brain went on tirelessly. It rested, and swam, and swam, and rested, with a machinelike and impassive pertinacity, and always it moved toward places where the tide moved faster and with channels more distinct.

  At last it came to a place where the water was no more than forty feet deep, and a distinct, greenish-blue light came down from the surface sunshine. In that light the Wabbler was plainly visible. It had acquired a coating of seaweed and slime which seemed to form a sort of aura of wavering greenish tentacles. Its seeming of eyes appeared now to be small and snakelike and very wise and venomous. It was still chinless, and its trailing tail made it seem more than ever like some bodiless demon out of a metallic hell. And now it came to a place where for a moment its tail caught in some minor obstruction, and as it tugged at the catch, one of its brothers floated by. It passed within twenty feet of the fourth Wabbler, and they could see each other clearly. But the fourth Wabbler was trapped. It wavered back and forth in the flood tide, trying to pull free, as its fellow swam silently and implacably onward.

  Some twenty minutes after that passage there was a colossal explosion somewhere, and after that very many fuzzy, purring noises in the sea. The Wabbler may have known what had happened, or it may not. A submarine net across a harbor
entrance is not a thing of which most creatures have knowledge, but it was a part of the Wabbler’s environment. Its tick-tick-ticking brain may have interpreted the explosion quite correctly as the destiny of its brother encountering that barrier. It is more likely that the brain only noted with relief that the concussion had broken the grip of the obstruction in the mud. The Wabbler went onward in the wake of its fellow. It went sedately, and solemnly, and with a sort of unholy purposefulness, following the tidal current. Presently there was a great net that stretched across the channel, far beyond any distance that the Wabbler could be expected to see. But right where the Wabbler would pass, there was a monstrous gaping hole in that net. Off to one side there was the tail of another Wabbler, shattered away from that other Wabbler’s bulk.

  The fourth Wabbler went through the hole. It was very simple indeed. Its tail scraped for a moment, and then it was inside the harbor. And then the tick-tick-ticking of the Wabbler’s brain was very crisp and incisive indeed, because this was its chance for the accomplishment of its destiny. It listened for sounds of engines, estimating their loudness with an uncanny precision, and within its rounded brainpan it measured things as abstract as variations in the vertical component of terrestrial magnetism. There were many sounds and many variations to note, too, because surface craft swarmed about the scene of a recent violent explosion. Their engines purred and rumbled, and their steel hulks made marked local changes in magnetic force. But none of them came quite close enough to the Wabbler to constitute its destiny.

  It went on and on as the flood tide swept in. The harbor was a busy one, with many small craft moving about, and more than once in these daylight hours flying things alighted upon the water and took off again. But it happened that none came sufficiently near. An hour after its entrance into the harbor the Wabbler was in a sort of eddy, in a basin, and it made four slow, hitching circuits about the same spot—during one of which it came near to serried ranks of piling—before the time of slack water. But even here the Wabbler, after swaying a little without making progress for perhaps twenty minutes, made little clanking noises inside itself and dribbled out bubbles and eased itself down in the mud to wait.