3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  The contempt behind the colorless words made Jennifer realize she really had been dealing with what passed for interspecies diplomats among the Foitani. If Enfram Enfram Marf thought like the average Foitan in the street, no wonder the Great Ones hadn't worried about genocide.

  She smiled sweetly at the ordnance officer—she knew the smile was wasted on him, but used it for her own satisfaction—and said, "I'm female, too. How do you like that?"

  Had Enfram Enfram Marf been human, he would have turned purple. He drew back a leg, as if to kick Jennifer across the room. "Wait," Aissur Aissur Rus said before the leg could shoot forward. "The human is still of use to us."

  "Why?" Enfram Enfram Marf retorted. "Now that we have Pawasar Pawasar Ras's permission to open up the Great Unknown, we don't need this thing to gather data for us. We can go back to using machines; they'll be able to bring artifacts out past the radius of doom so we can properly study them."

  "If all goes well, yes," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "But all may not go well. Machines are less flexible than intelligent beings, even now. Moreover, we acquired the human Jennifer not so much to gather data as to interpret it. She is expert in a peculiar form of extrapolation by storytelling that humans developed long ago, which may give her unusual insight into the reasons the Great Ones created the Great Unknown as they did."

  "How could this creature understand the Great Ones when we, their descendants, do not?" Enfram Enfram Marf demanded. But his leg returned to the floor. He bared his teeth, then went on, "Oh, very well, Aissur Aissur Rus, let it be as you say. I shall begin calculating the proper weight, shape, and composition of the charge, based on what we know of the thickness and material of the tower's outer wall."

  "Excellent, Enfram Enfram Marf. That is what we require of you."

  "Nice to know that I'm useful," Jennifer remarked as Aissur Aissur Rus led her down the corridor. "Otherwise you would have let him kick me into the middle of next week."

  Aissur Aissur Rus paused and looked down at Jennifer. After a moment, he said, "I will assume my translator should not have rendered that idiom so literally."

  "Well, no," Jennifer admitted.

  "Good. We did not believe humans capable of time travel. We are not able to travel in time ourselves, either, though there are some poorly understood indications that the Great Ones had that ability."

  It was Jennifer's turn to stare. She had thought about pulling Aissur Aissur Rus's leg over what was indeed merely an idiom the translator program had missed—there wasn't a program around that didn't have a few of those annoying blank spots in it. Now she wondered if he wasn't telling her a tall tale to get even. The only trouble was, she didn't think Foitani minds—even that of Aissur Aissur Rus, who was the loosest, most freewheeling thinker she'd met among the aliens—worked that way.

  She called him on it. "Time travel is as impossible—"

  "As a hyperdrive trap?" he interrupted. She opened her mouth, then closed it again as she realized she had no good comeback to make. She thought of herself as quicker-witted than the Foitani, but this time Aissur Aissur Rus unquestionably got the last word.

  The tracked sledge delivered the explosive charge against the side of the polished white stone, then rolled off. The charge clung to the stone. The sledge stopped a couple of hundred meters away. Jennifer and Greenberg crouched behind it, on the side facing away from the stone. Greenberg spoke into his communicator. "We're under cover, Enfram Enfram Marf."

  The Foitani ordnance office did not waste time replying. An instant later, a sharp, flat craaack rang out. It was much less dramatic than Jennifer had expected. She lifted her head. The stone panel had a neat, almost perfectly round hole in it, about a meter and a half across.

  "He knows his stuff," she said, less than delighted about giving Enfram Enfram Marf any credit whatever.

  "Explosives people tend to, at least the ones who live long enough to get a handle on what they're doing," Greenberg said. He spoke into the communicator again. "This was a good test, Enfram Enfram Marf. If your figures for the column are accurate, we won't have any trouble getting inside when we try this on the Great Unknown."

  Again Enfram Enfram Marf did not reply. Jennifer said, "He doesn't think anyone who's not a Foitan is worth talking to."

  "That's his problem. His bosses think I'm worth talking to, and they thought you were worth kidnapping so they could talk to you. I'm not going to lose a minute of sleep worrying about what the high-and-mighty Enfram Enfram Marf thinks of me."

  Jennifer was sure he meant it. She admired his detachment and wished she could share it. She asked, "How do you keep from taking what aliens say personally?"

  "The same way I do with humans: I try to gauge whether the person who's talking has any idea of what he's talking about. A lot of humans are damn fools, and so are a lot of aliens, Enfram Enfram Marf included. Just because he knows his explosives, he thinks he knows everything. I don't know much, but I know he's wrong."

  Jennifer grinned and clapped her hands. Greenberg gave her a curious look. She wondered how she was supposed to explain to him that his line of reasoning went back thirty-five hundred years to the Apology of Socrates.

  Before she had a chance to try, the sledge speaker spoke up again. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Thegun Thegun Nug speaking. We shall have a charge ready for placement tomorrow. You will then proceed to begin exploration of the tower of the Great Unknown, relaying to us such data as you uncover."

  To Jennifer's way of thinking, Thegun Thegun Nug had an unpleasant habit of assuming that everything would be exactly as he wished just because he said so. Greenberg did not let that bother him. He said, "Yes, we'll start exploring for you, Thegun Thegun Nug. We'll all learn something."

  "That is the desired outcome," Thegun Thegun Nug agreed.

  "What I want to learn is how to get out of here," Jennifer said. For all she knew, the mike was still open. Thegun Thegun Nug didn't answer her. She hadn't expected him to. He'd known all along how she felt.

  * * *

  The two sledges purred away from the Foitani research base toward the Great Unknown. Enfram Enfram Marf's new shaped-charge device sat behind Bernard Greenberg. Jennifer was glad it didn't rest on her sledge. She didn't quite trust Enfram Enfram Marf not to touch a button and say it was an accident. A meter-and-a-half hole out of her middle wouldn't leave much. . . .

  They'd only gone a couple of kilometers, barely even to the edge of the radius of doom, when a loud, warbling whistle began behind them. "What the devil is that?"

  "It's a Foitani alarm," Greenberg answered.

  "It sure alarms me."

  Greenberg spoke into the communicator on the sledge. "Human Bernard to Foitani base: Why have you switched on your alarms?" He repeated himself several times.

  For a long time—more than a minute—no answer came. Jennifer began to wonder if the Foitani had forgotten about them. Then the cool tones of the translator came over the speaker. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Pawasar Pawasar Ras. I suggest you take cover as expeditiously as possible. Gilver is once more under attack from the savages of Rof Golan. Vectors of incoming ships indicate that they may attempt to land ground forces on Gilver, most probably with a view to assaulting or capturing the Great Unknown."

  "We'd better head back," Jennifer said. Fliers sprang into the sky from the Foitani base. Cloven air shouted far behind them. Missiles leaped off launchers.

  Then, from nowhere, a flier shrieked overhead at treetop height. A string of what might have been finned eggs fell from its belly. Had it sought the two sledges, it would have blasted them to bits. But its target was a hardpoint a few hundred meters to the west, between the humans and the base. Explosions smote Jennifer's ears. With an instinct she didn't know she owned, she threw herself off her sledge and onto the roadway, flat on her belly.

  More explosions came, some distant, some close enough to lift her off the ground and slam her back down. During one brief lull, she looked over and saw Greenberg besi
de her. She had no idea how or when he'd got there. Then more bombs fell. Shrapnel whispered overhead.

  Greenberg put his mouth next to her ear. "We can't go back," he screamed through the din.

  "We can't stay here, either," she screamed back. As if to underscore her words, a fragment of bomb casing went spaang! off the side of a sledge.

  "Then we head for the Great Unknown," Greenberg said, still at the top of his lungs.

  Jennifer thought it over, as well as she could think in the midst of chaos and terror. "Sounds good," she said. "Let's do it, if the bombing ever moves away from us. It's the one place on the planet where the Foitani can't come after us."

  "The ones from Odern can't, anyhow," Greenberg said. "We just have to hope that holds for the ones from Rof Golan, too."

  "I wish you hadn't said that," Jennifer told him. She glanced up at her sledge. "I also wish we had more kibbles and water along." They'd planned on staying at the Great Unknown for a couple of days if they succeeded in getting into the tower, so they weren't without supplies. She looked up at the plastic bag of kibbles again and fought back a laugh. She'd never imagined a day would come when she wanted more of them than she had. She'd never imagined most of the things that had happened to her since the day the Foitani walked into her class at Saugus Central University.

  More bombs struck, so close that she felt the impact with her whole body much more than she heard it. She and Greenberg clutched each other, life clinging to life in the middle of mechanized death. He shouted something at her. She knew that, but she was too stunned and deafened to tell what it was. She looked at him and shook her head.

  "I love you," he said again. She still could not hear him, but his lips were easy to read.

  "Why are you telling me now?" she said, slowly and with exaggerated movements of her own lips so he could follow. "We're liable to get blown to bits any minute."

  He nodded vehemently. "That's just why. I didn't want to die without letting you know."

  "Oh." She supposed it was terribly romantic, but she needed to be able to think about it. Thought was impossible here; she was battered and deafened and more frightened than she'd ever been in her life. Holding on to him still seemed like a good idea, so she kept on doing it.

  The explosions grew more distant. Jennifer detached herself from Greenberg, far enough to peer past the front of the sledge. Dirt rose in graceful fountains all around the research base. The base fought back; close-in guns chattered maniacally, blasting bombs and incoming missiles before they struck home.

  "If we're ever going to move, this is probably the time to do it," she told Greenberg. "Nobody seems to be paying attention to us."

  "Let's go, then," he said. "The farther inside the radius of insanity we are, the better I'll like it." They scrambled onto their sledges and sent them dashing ahead at their best—and only—forward speed. No healthy Foitan would have had the least trouble running them down.

  Greenberg looked over his shoulder. "Good thing we didn't head back to the base," he said. Jennifer looked back, too. A troop-carrier had landed right about where they would have been if they'd tried to reverse their course. Foitani—presumably Foitani from Rof Golan—leaped out of it and scrambled for cover. They started firing with automatic weapons heavier than anything a human could have carried.

  "I wouldn't have wanted to meet them up close, no," Jennifer admitted. Meet wasn't quite the right word, she thought. The Foitani didn't look like the sort who would have waited for formal introductions before they started shooting.

  The sledges crawled along. The invaders seemed too busy trying to blast the research base off the face of Gilver to bother doing anything about them. Jennifer wondered if that was too good to last. A moment later, she wished she hadn't, because it was. Something cracked past her ear. Then another something smacked off the rear facing of the sledge, hard enough to make it shudder under her. It kept running, though.

  She turned around again. A couple of big aliens were bounding after her and Greenberg. As she'd feared, they ran faster than the sledges. Nothing grew in the area of the Great Unknown. There was no place to hide, save possibly behind the massive columns of the colonnade. The only weapon she had was her stunner, which might make a Foitan scratch but assuredly would not stop him. In any case, the soldiers' hand weapons far outranged the feeble thing.

  Greenberg had seen the Foitani, too. If he felt the same choking despair that cast its pall over her, he did not show it. In fact, he stood up on his sledge—it was slow enough and smooth enough to make that safe—and jumped up and down thumbing his nose at them. That only made them run harder—and all at once, Jennifer realized he wanted exactly that. "You're a genius, Bernard!" she shouted. She stood up on her sledge, too.

  The Foitani from Rof Golan kept coming. All too soon, they were only a couple of hundred meters behind the sledges. The closer they drew, the more easily Jennifer could see they were not the same as Foitani from Odern. They were taller and leaner and nearer gray than blue. Their ears were larger. So were their muzzles—and their teeth. They had red marbles for eyes, not black ones. That made them seem all the fiercer as they bore down on the humans.

  Their clawed feet slapped on the smooth stone of the pro-cessionway. Jennifer heard their harsh breathing closer, ever closer. She reached into her beltpouch for her stunner, though she knew a steak knife would have done more good. She put away the stunner. If these Foitani had decided to take them prisoner instead of slaying them out of hand, she would not try to change their minds.

  The Foitani caught up with the sledges. They even smelled different from the Foitani of Odern—sharper, like ripe cheese, Jennifer thought as she waited to be seized. The Rof Golani Foitani ran past her and Greenberg, on either side of their sledges. They paid no attention whatever to the humans. Their red eyes were only on the tower ahead. Like two big machines, they pounded toward it.

  Jennifer watched their backs recede ahead. "I think we may take it as proved that the Great Unknown affects more than one type of Foitani descendant," she said. She was proud of herself. The sentence came out as cleanly as if she were dictating an academic paper into the Middle English Scholars Association data net.

  Greenberg gave her an odd look. "Yes, I think we may," he answered, half a beat late. "I think it's a good thing, too."

  "So do I." Jennifer steered her sledge up next to his. She reached across and took his hand. Her own palm was cold and trembling. The vibration of the two sledges didn't let her tell if he also had the shakes, but he felt no warmer. After a moment, she added, "That was good thinking, luring them on into the zone of insanity. Now all they care about is the Great Unknown. Right now, they can keep it, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I was made to be a soldier."

  "Neither was I," Greenberg said. "I kept thinking about getting behind you and setting off Enfram Enfram Marf's shaped charge at the Foitani. By the time I decided it wasn't a good idea, they'd already gone by us."

  "You still did better than I did," she said. "I forgot all about the stupid thing."

  "That's not so good, Jennifer," he said seriously. "You should never forget about anything."

  The sledges ground on toward the central tower. Jennifer kept looking back at the research base of the Foitani from Odern. The one good thing about the fighting that continued all around it was that the Foitani from Rof Golan weren't using nuclear weapons, as they had when they attacked from space. Maybe now, she thought, they were more interested in conquest than in annihilation. She hoped they would go on thinking that way; she had no confidence in the Great Unknown's ability to keep fallout from the local atmosphere.

  Several other Foitani from Rof Golan strode the procession-way behind the first two. None passed the sledges, which by then were more than halfway from the outer edge of the radius of doom to the central tower. None shot at the sledges, either, for which Jennifer was duly grateful. A couple of kilometers from the tower, the sledges, slow but mechanically steady, repassed the first two Foitani
soldiers. Their gray-blue fur was damp with sweat; their tongues lolled from their mouths. They did not glance at the machines or the humans aboard them, but kept trudging toward the tower at the best speed they could muster.

  The tower grew closer and closer. The two sledges stopped a couple of meters away. Greenberg climbed down from his sledge, lifted the shaped charge Enfram Enfram Marf had given him, and carried it to the side of the immense white structure. He pressed it against the stone. Jennifer wondered if it would stick, as it had against the practice slab of stone. The material of the Great Unknown seemed much more than simple white marble. But stick the charge did.

  Greenberg went back to the sledge and called the research base. "We have the entry charge in place. Please advise if we should proceed, under the circumstances." Only static came from the speaker. Either no one at the base was listening, or the Rof Golani were jamming the channel. Greenberg looked at Jennifer. "What do you think we ought to do?"

  "I think we ought to blow it," she said without hesitation. "We're never going to have a better chance than this. I just hope it's not all for nothing anyway—if the Foitani from Rof Golan win, what's going to happen to the Harold Meeker?"

  "That's such a good question, I've done my best not to think about it." Greenberg made a sour face. He ran wire from the charge back to the detonator. "We have a couple of hundred meters to retreat. Let's use them." The sledges went into reverse until the wire began to grow taut.

  Greenberg dismounted again and got behind his sledge. Jennifer took cover, too. She said, "I'm just glad this thing doesn't have to be set off by radio from the base, the way the practice charge did."

  He let out a wry chuckle. "That would rather ruin our day's work, wouldn't it?"

  "You might say so, yes," she answered, trying to match him dry for dry. She heard the slap-slap-slap of Foitani feet on the processionway. The first two soldiers from Rof Golan were getting close again. "If you're going to do it, you'd better do it now."