I slipped down the steep slope, grasping shrubs, crouching low to avoid becoming a target. I reached the edge of the field and stumbled over a body.
He lay dead on his face, both arms outflung; half his midsection was gone. The screen wasn’t entirely impervious, then. I turned the man over. It was Willie. A spasm of sorrow wrenched me.
The glare crackled and blinded. The defenders milled in the midst of lashing energy streaks, steadily losing ground. The installation was on fire. Flames towered from the machine shop, whipped in the wind and engulfed the living quarters. Sick, I thought of Gregor imprisoned there, perishing, another ape paying the price for having jousted with men.
The crackling hiss of a stray needle-bolt brought my senses back. A thought occurred to me. I bent low, groped at Willie’s ear. My fingers found the little button of the telepathor. I slipped it into my ear.
“Hold out a little longer…” I recognized Coleman’s…personality. There was no voice. A strong thought engulfed me, and it had meaning. I was unskillfully a part of the telepathor hookup.
I felt strange, big-headed, thinking with many minds at once. Alien thoughts crawled in my brain, sidled through my understanding. I couldn’t grasp them. I was still an ape, playing with a videophone, punching numbers at random.
What seemed like a voice said, “Is that you, Gil? What happened to Willie?”
I told him what had happened to Willie. I didn’t know how to direct the message to Coleman alone. Everybody on the ship and on the field got it. There was sadness in my being from Willie’s shipmates.
Coleman said, “Where is Cleo?”
“Coming down the tunnel. I sent her in.”
I felt a wave of what I can only call friendliness sweep over me.
“Get out, Gil! Climb up the mountain and wait for our takeoff. When the shield goes down, get over the ridge. You can’t help. Don’t try.”
Then a medley of alien thoughts replaced the clear-cut communication and I knew Coleman had turned his attention to more immediate problems.
The defenders were still pulling back on the field. They were fewer than they had been. Dark dots of the enemy moved at the far side.
I cuddled my useless pistol in a sweating palm and retreated.
“Gil!” Cleo ran toward me along the path. We collided. I gripped her, held her close. I was too winded to speak. Already, the defense had collapsed, and Coleman’s men were racing toward the tunnel.
I gripped Cleo’s arm, forced her with me, straight up the slope, through ripping underbrush.
“Gil!”
“Keep moving!”
“The ship, Gil! The ship…”
Suddenly, the electric tension was gone from the air. I looked back. Helmeted enemy troops were streaming after the retreating defenders. Needle-bolts crackled both ways and men dropped.
“Too late!” I wheezed.
The ship was ready, warming its generators. I got that through the telepathor. The dark pool of the enemy swirled, seemed to suck upward in response to some unheard command. Black dots shot into the air and disappeared against the spangled sky that was like sapphires in a sea of milk. And the moon shone with a bright, unwavering radiance.
I heard heavy movement in the underbrush. Cleo gasped. I crouched, pulling her down beside me. A voice carried clearly. “Step along, now!”
That was Johnson’s voice. I yelled, “Johnson! Keep back!”
The brush crashed in separate noises that converged on us. “You, there! Is that you, Bradley?”
I was shaking. Cleo trembled under my hand. The firs around us quivered from roots to tips. The whole ground shook with a deep, steady tremor.
A vast humming rose from the valley. Rock began to slip with thunderous crashings. The hum deepened. A slide started somewhere above us, above the timberline, and poured bellowing into the valley.
“My God!” said Johnson. “What’s happening?”
I yelled to be heard. “The takeoff!”
Tons of rock moved, grinding together. The talus at the foot of the mountain stirred. Spouts of rock lashed into the air, like spume from an angry sea. A ship I had known it to be, buried there in the rubble. But what a ship!
It was a quarter of a mile long. It seemed to thresh among the thundering boulders like a wounded whale. Dust rose to hang like an opalescent veil in the moonlight, dimming the view.
I shivered with excitement to see its shape flashing there, urged upward by an invisible power without parallel.
I heard from Coleman once more, as the ship floundered out of the restraining detritus. “Take care of Cleo, Gil!”
That was all.
The great ship shot into the air. Crumbled stone dripped from its shining flanks like Niagara. The air-tremoring hum swelled to a fantastic, ear-splitting shriek and diminished to silence in the sky.
There were muttered curses from Johnson’s men. The B.I.S. agent didn’t have anything to say.
The ship was gone. The sound of its passage had rumbled and screamed into nothing. I watched the sky, head tipped back, and Cleo gripped my arm.
“They’re in space,” I said quietly. “Roy is jockeying for position; Bilfax is closing in.”
I got that from the telepathor. There was nothing to be seen overhead but the milk and the sapphires, and the dead moon shining across the air. Inside my mind were confused glimpses of a complex control room, machines that whirred, throbbed, and glimmered in the shine of shielded lights, men weirdly strapped into bizarre…
Somewhere, thousands of miles distant in airless space, the two ships closed in combat. All was confusion in my mind, disjointed, nightmarish. I thought of lashing beams of energy, of self-guiding missiles of enormous power.
Then, suddenly, the confusion in my mind broke off. There was nothing. Simultaneously, among the stars, a nova flamed briefly, brilliantly, and went out.
Johnson was cursing now. I don’t think he knew why.
Cleo screamed. “I saw it! I saw it!” She fell against me, holding on hard.
“Gil, oh Gil! Which ship was it?”
“I know,” I said. I plucked the telepathor from my ear, held it out for her to see. She would recognize it, know that I knew. “Bilfax,” I lied.
“He’ll come back! Roy will come back to me, Gil!”
“Sure,” I said clumsily. I squeezed the telepathor between thumb and finger and felt it crumble. “He’ll come back, Cleo.”
I have always been proud of that lie. The lie made it easier for her to bear her loss; and it made me see something, too, that I had overlooked—that we are no more apes than Coleman was a superman. The spirit of man is measured, not in the works of his hands nor the thoughts of his brain, not in his success or failure to cope with environment, but in terms of the goal he dreams of, and the struggle he puts forth to gain it. Coleman taught me that.
We went back over the hump of the mountain, the way Johnson had brought his operatives in. He had come too late to prevent the takeoff, and chagrin kept him silent as we ’coptered back to town.
Cleo refused to go back on the stage. She couldn’t bear it, without him; all she lives for now is the day her husband returns, and she dreams of him wandering the silent space trails.
I got her a job writing copy for another agency in town. She’s good at it, and satisfied. Sometimes I drop by her apartment in the evening, and we drink a toast to the man I keep hoping she will forget.
After all, I can’t help remembering that Cleo didn’t go down that shaft and on to the ship when I pushed her away from me. For a crucial moment, she had let a spark of concern for me lead her away from the man she loved…to safety.
Someday, maybe, that spark will flare up again, grow big enough to engulf her, and she’ll return fully to her own.
LESSON IN SURVIVAL, by Frank Belknap Long
Originally published
in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1952.
School was out. The dismissal bell tolled, and the children rushed in delight from the classroom, and went careening and shouting down garden paths bright with blue and yellow flowers. Overhead a cheery noonday sun beamed down on the emerging schoolmaster, a tall, dark-haired young man whose eyes followed his retreating charges with a warm and eager gratefulness.
Brian Andrews enjoyed teaching, but not on such a day as this. It is a strain to change one’s occupation at a moment’s notice, but fishing was not an occupation to Brian. It was as natural as breathing.
There were red and yellow trout flies pinned to his hat, and a supple bamboo rod had come to life in his hand. He flicked it as he strode along, counting his blessings one by one. He was free, and independent, and young. He liked his job, and the quiet, dreamy little town with its cloistered air of belonging to an earlier, less mechanized age. He liked to cross the village green and slap the big antique fire-bell opposite the war monument, eliciting a hollow boom, and he liked to go padding along Main Street in his moccasin shoes.
“There’s the new young schoolmaster! A college man, but you’d never think it to look at him.”
Then there was Jenny Fleming. It hadn’t taken him long to get to know Jenny well enough to tease her about her freckles while she unwrapped sandwiches on a shady bank, and made light of his attempts to kiss her.
He supposed he’d soon have to write off “free” and be content to remain resolutely independent.
The best thing about the trout stream was its nearness. He had only to cross a deep-elbowed road and ascend a red clay bank to plunge into the leafy green solitude of a truly enchanted stretch of woodland. Enchanted in every way. Jenny would be waiting for him with a luncheon basket beside a willow-shadowed pool, and further down the stream the children would be fishing with worms.
He was quite sure the laughter of the children wouldn’t bring the schoolroom back. It would be the completely natural laughter of youngsters at play, freed for the moment from all adult stuffiness and tyranny.
He caught his breath when he actually saw her, waiting for him by the pool. She’d removed her stockings and gone wading in the cool, sparkling water, and now she was sitting on the bank drawing her stockings on again.
He went whistling up to her, picked up the lunch basket and looked inside.
“Ham sandwiches,” he said. “What could be nicer?”
She did not get up to snatch the basket from him and mingle her laughter with his. She simply leaned back against, a slanting willow tree, her eyes searching his face in troubled concern.
“Sit down, Brian,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
Surprised, he sat down beside her on the sloping bank. “Hungry men make poor listeners, honeybunch.” He smiled in mock distress. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She said without smiling: “Brian, the planes went over again yesterday.”
All of the levity went out of Brian Andrews’ eyes. He stared down at the shadowed pool, his mouth suddenly dry.
“I didn’t hear them,” he said, quickly. “I was busy all day.”
“Not too busy to know that every man, woman and child in Fairview is under sentence of death. How can you make yourself forget we’re living on borrowed time.”
“Just a minute now—”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” she persisted.
“True or false, you’ve got to shut your mind to it. If you don’t it will darken the sunlight for you.”
“Is that your secret, Brian? Have you shut your, mind?”
“I can avoid thinking about it for days at a stretch,” he told her. “I keep remembering I came to Fairview to take a teaching job, and go fishing, and fall in love with you. The simple truth keeps me sane.”
“How sane, Brian? Subconsciously you’re in bad shape, just us, the rest of us are. It doesn’t really help not to be honest about it.”
“You’re forgetting, what a big country this is,” he told her. “The planes can’t bomb every isolated village, every tiny cluster of houses. Even if they could, bombing on that scale would boomerang. They’d expose themselves to retaliation on a scale which would make interesting source material for future historians—of another intelligent species.”
She looked at him steadily for a moment, with understanding and a kind of pity, as if she herself had once clung as tenaciously to hope, and believed quite as firmly that the smaller villages would be spared.
“It may not come tomorrow,” she said. “It may not come for a year. Yes, we’ll have time to pretend. Tell, me—what in the future would you prize most highly? A single long month of waiting? Two?”
He said with stubborn pride: “Fairview itself. If we cling with courage to what we have here, we can face the future without fear. That in itself is a victory—perhaps the only true victory mankind can ever know.”
“We’ve lived in Fairviews too long!” she said. “We did not see the danger until it was too late.”
“What good would seeing the danger have done?” he asked. “We know now that man will never succeed in controlling his own destiny. What would you have had our best minds do?”
She laughed suddenly. Her laughter rang out defiant and challenging in the peaceful wood.
“Every age brings a new approach to reality, Brian,” she answered. “The Atomic Age brought tools so bright we should have found in them the answer to all of our problems. We should have used our genius to banish war forever.”
He looked at her, amazed by her vehemence, sensing for the first time a depth of eloquence in her thinking which challenged his own reasoned convictions at a vital point.
“You’ll have to admit we’ve tried,” he said. “We’ve tried desperately hard to—follow through.”
“Not hard enough,” she said. “A race can only be judged by its success.”
“Then our race has been judged,” he said. “It has failed, and the judgment is in, and nothing can be changed. I still say that Fairview can give us courage.”
Jenny shook her head. “Only because, when you walk in its quiet streets, you think of the men who once struggled to build ten thousand other Fairviews, each new and each different. If you go back and try to stand where your ancestors stood, your illusions will start to crumble.”
“I take it you don’t think Fairview is the answer.” He forced laughter into his voice. “I haven’t noticed any crumbling. Honestly I haven’t. If I dropped a trout fly lightly, on that pool, and caught a two-pounder, my happiness would be complete.”
“You only think it would. You can never shut out the roar of the planes going over, Brian. We had the tools, but we lacked the boldness really to try.”
Brian stood up suddenly, staring down at Jenny Fleming sitting on the bank, the sunlight bright on her berry-brown shoulders.
“I still say that Fairview is a positive good in itself. His voice had lost none of its confidence. “We’re lucky to be young, and in Fairview. Let the great bombers come. Their wings will cast no shadow for me while I can go on remembering there are speckled trout in that pool, and that you are very beautiful.”
“Brian—”
“I have my work, and it is good work. Teaching eager young minds to explore the buried past of the earth, to grasp the almost, miraculous beauty of its mountains, rivers and fossils. That’s what I like most about Fairview. We still have blackboards. We still have reading, writing and arithmetic. But you can also start early on the really important things.
“Every kid in Fairview with an eager, inquiring mind can use the classroom telescope, and look out across space at the tunneling stars and the Great Nebula in Andromeda.”
“It is good work, Brian. But if Fairview should be bombed—”
He bent suddenly, and helped her to her feet. “Fairview will not be bombed,” he said.
&n
bsp; She laid a finger on his lips. “We’ve argued enough,” she said.
He nodded in quick agreement. “Come on, let’s dance!”
“If we had some music—”
“We’ll dance anyway. Shall we make it a waltz?”
“All right, Brian.”
It was no more than a faint, distant humming—at first, like the drowsy murmur of bees in a noonday glade. Bees drowsy with nectar, too sluggish to be dangerous.
They danced on the cool bank, around and around in mock solemnity, hardly aware of the sound, never associating it with danger until it was suddenly thunderous in their ears.
They looked up then and saw the flight of jet bombers screaming across the sky, huge and vulture-black and wobbling a little with the weight of their bomb loads. They looked up and saw the bomb descending. Incredibly tiny it seemed, like a flickering dust mote that persisted in its dancing until the sun’s glare claimed it.
They flattened themselves just as the silence gave way to a rumbling and then to a roaring. There were flashes of light between the trees, a vast flickering, a reddening of the entire forest. Then silence again, complete, mind-numbing.
In stunned horror Brian raised himself, and saw Jenny Fleming’s limp body lying motionless at his feet. He was aware of pain, and a tumultuous stirring deep within his own body as if something imprisoned in his flesh were struggling furiously to free itself.
Shivering, he closed his eyes, then opened them quickly. The body of his companion had begun to shatter, to break into many gleaming pieces. Like a brittle mold of over-hardened clay it crumbled and flew apart, the arms splintering into fragments, the face separating itself from the rest of the head, and rolling down the bank into the pool. The face did not immediately sink, but continued to stare up masklike for an instant through a deepening film of water, as if puzzled by something it could not quite understand.
From the fragments on the bank a long, glistening shape crawled its bulging, many-faceted eyes probing the forest gloom. Had there been human eyes to watch, the shape would have seemed to move with a dignity and grace absurd in a creature so lowly.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 16
