by Dean Koontz
He went through the doorway of a large, marble and concrete structure. The door had been of glass, shattered during the final battles. Inside, he crossed the littered floor and went down the dark stairs, feeling a delicious thrill at entering the catacombs of the mysterious creatures whose planet this had once been. At the bottom of the steps, he flicked on the lights he had rigged three days ago.
Light sprung up for a great distance. Today, he would extend the bulbs another few blocks. The cellars and the sub-cellars of this entire section of the city had been connected and turned into a repository for what the human's considered precious. Hulann meant to open all of it and see everything first-hand before pulling the other members of the team from their present tasks to sift through what he had found.
He walked to the end of the lights and took his camera and recorder off his shoulders, piled them next to the cases of tools left since yesterday. Taking a handlamp, he went to the wall of rubble, where a ceiling had partially caved in. There was a gap between the ruins and the walls that he just might be able to push through to reach the cellars beyond and string his lights.
He clambered up the stones, sliding back a bit for, every piece of progress he made. Dust rose around him.
At the top, he stretched on his belly and went through the gap into darkness. He turned up the power of his lamp and illuminated most of the chamber in which he found himself. The place was a library of sorts, full of booktapes. For the humans to have buried it this deep must mean that the tomes here contained were considered by them as most valuable.
He advanced to a rack of spools and began to read the titles. He did, not recognize most of them. What ones he knew were fiction. This, of course, was quite a surprise. The humans he had met—that his race had met—in the stars some hundred and seventy years ago had not been the type to enjoy fiction. They had been cold, precise men with little time to smile and only a slight imagination.
Yet here, apparently, was a room full of novels.
And they had thought highly enough of them to bury them against destruction.
He was still fumbling through the racks, amazed, when the light, airy voice called to him in pure, unaccented Terran: "Above you! A rat!"
He whirled, looked up.
The rat hung almost upside down from a beam. It's red eyes glared with reflected light.
Foolishly, he had come without a weapon.
He held the beam of the handlamp on it, paralyzing it, blinding it. He could see it plainly, and he was not happy with what he could see. It weighed a good twenty pounds; it had the wide mouth of a mutant, and the extra long teeth. He could hear them gnashing. Its claws, now hooked around the overhead beam, were more wicked than those of a normal rat
It was ironic that one of the naoli's own weapons might kill a naoli. Ironic, not amusing.
The naoli had introduced mutated rats into the humans' home planet some sixty years ago, one of the preliminary weapons for the five-plus decades of the final assault. They had bred true in the sewers and cellars and had done their damage.
Bright teeth: gnashing.
Hulann held the light on the rat, keeping it hypnotized. He looked around for a weapon, something, anything. It was not his time to be particular. To his right was a length of steel pipe that had twisted loose, fallen to the floor. The end had twisted away in some bomb blast and was pointed, deadly. He inched to it, stooped, and picked it up with his free hand.
The rat hissed at him.
He advanced on it, clutching the pipe so firmly that the muscles of his six-fingered hand ached.
Perhaps the growing brightness of the light warned the rat. It stiffened, then scurried along the beam, almost escaping the blinding radiance.
Hulann shifted the lamp, leaped, jabbed the sharp end of the pipe up at the low beam, caught the mutant on its flank. Blood appeared.
The rat screeched, scurried further along, confused and angry. Froth tipped its brown lips and flecked its dung-colored fur. When he followed it with the light, it scrambled about on its perch and tried to go back the way it had come.
He jabbed at it again.
It fell onto the floor, momentarily escaping his light. When it came to its feet, almost instantly, it saw him and came for him, chittering insanely. It was more than likely rabid; the mutated rats had been built with a low tolerance for diseases which they might catch and later transfer to humans.
He stepped back. But that was not a good move, and he knew it.
The rat's feet chattered on the cement floor. Pieces of cement, shards of glass, and other small debris rattled out from under it.
There was no time to open a link with the Phasersystem and send for help. He would be dead by the time they got there. He had to rely on his own agility. He side-stepped, swung out at the beast with the pipe and connected, locking it end for end.
The rat's squeal echoed from wall to wall. For a moment, there were a hundred rats in the room. It came up, staggering, and scampered back at him, completely mad now.
He swung again, missed the rat, and slammed the pipe into a steel support beam. There was an explosion of sound in the room, and the concussion surged back into his arm, making it numb. The pipe fell out of his fingers, clattered on the floor.
The noise made the rat leap aside and fall back. But now that the echo had died, it came at him once more.
His hand was still too weak to grasp anything.
The rat was close enough to leap. It had almost launched itself—when a chunk of concrete smashed into it, crushing its hindquarters. Another chunk rained down, missing it. A third connected. And a fourth. It stopped squirming then—absolutely dead.
In his excitement, Hulann had all but forgotten the voice that had first called out a warning to him. The warning that had been in pure Terran.——Unaccented Terran. Massaging his numbed arm, he looked around until he saw the human.
It was a young one, about eleven years old, crouched on a shelf of rubble to his left. It looked down on him with a curious expression, then eyed the rat.
"Is it dead?"
"Yes," Hulann said.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes."
"It was a mutant."
"I know. Yes. A mutant."
The boy looked at the naoli, then back the way the alien had come. "You're alone?"
Hulann nodded.
"I guess you'll turn me over to the rest of them."
Hulann's chest was afire. He was waging a constant battle between his mind and overmind, trying desperately to stifle at least a little of the fear his organic brain was feeding the higher levels of his thinking apparatus. He had seen humans before. But never when he was alone. And never when they would have so much to hate him for.
"Will you turn me in?" the boy asked.
Hulann was afraid. Desperately. Painfully. But there was something else stirring in him as well. It took some moments before he realized that this other thing was guilt.
Though surely there must have been things the boy wished to say to Hulann (curses and damnations should fill at least an hour; a naoli rarely engaged in physical violence with one of his own kind, resorting to sustained verbal denunciations to work off accumulated frustrations), he merely sat upon the rubble, the concrete, wood and steel, the plastic and aluminum, watching the alien. He did not seem frightened nor particularly angry. Curious, more than anything else.
It was quite an uncomfortable situation as far as Hulann was concerned. To be spat upon and reviled would have raised his own hatred. Hating the boy, he could have acted. But the lengthening silence was a wall he could not breach.
Hulann went to the rat, kicked the chunks of stone away and looked at the corpse. He prodded it with a tentative foot. The fleshy body quivered with a post mortem muscle spasm and was still again. He walked back to the boy and looked up at him where he sat just slightly above eye level.
The boy looked back, his head tilted to one side. He was, Hulann supposed, a pretty specimen by human standards. His hea
d seemed somewhat too large, but its features were well placed for his species. He had a thick mass of golden hair. Hair alone astounded the scaled naoli; golden hair was nearly too much to comprehend. Blue eyes beneath yellow brows, a small nose, and thin lips. His smooth skin was dotted here and there with what the humans called "freckles" and strangely considered an attribute—but which the naoli chose to regard as imperfections in coloration and possibly the marks of disease (although they never had been able to study a freckled human at close quarters).
"What are you doing here?" Hulann asked.
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
Hulann interpreted this as indecision, though he was not certain that some more subtle, complex answer was being given.
"You must have some reason for being down here in the cellars!"
"Hiding," the boy said simply.
Hulann felt the guilt again. He was doubly frightened. To be in the presence of a human after all that had happened was terrifying enough. But he was also afraid of his own guilt—and his lack of concern for that guilt. A good naoli would immediately call for help on the Phasersystem, then turn himself into the traumatist and get himself sent home for therapy. Somehow, though, the guilt feeling seemed fitting. Deep in his overmind, he had a desire to know penance.
He repeated the arguments fed to all the naoli by the Phasersystem during the psychological conditioning periods every morning. He attempted to recall that cold, eerie forest where the plants had been sentient and monsters had lurked in the trees. But that seemed silly now.
"Are you turning me in?" the boy asked.
"That is my duty."
"Of course. Your duty." It was said without malice.
"I would be severely punished."
The boy said nothing.
"Unless, of course, you were to escape before I could apprehend you," Hulann said.
Even as he spoke, he could not believe his vocal apparatus had formed the words. He had always been an individual of great common sense, of cool thought and reasoned action. Now, he was engaging in sheer madness.
"That's no good," the boy said, shaking his head so his yellow hair bounced and sprayed about. To Hulann, the sight was breathtaking. "I can't get away. I crawled in here because I thought it was safe. I thought I'd come out when you'd all gone."
"Ten years," Hulann said. "That would be ten years." The boy looked surprised. "That's how long our researches will take—the reconstruction of daily human life alone."
"Anyway," the boy interrupted, "I'm stuck here. There's food and water. I thought I could hole up. Then you came along. See, it's my leg."
Hulann moved closer, raising the double lids completely free of his huge, oval eyes. "What's wrong with it?"
"I was hurt," the boy said, "in the final stand."
"You participated in the battle?"
"I was on a grenade lobbing station. Loader, not marksman. We were struck with something. Don't know what. See? Here. It's kind of dirty, but you can see."
Hulann was within a foot of the boy now. He saw a tear in the lad's thigh, perhaps five inches in length. It was crusted with dirt and blood, very ugly looking. His trouser leg had been torn off, and there was nothing to protect the wound from all the filth it had come into contact with. Hulann could see a giant bruise spreading out in all directions from the gash.
"You'll poison from that," he said.
The boy shrugged.
"Oh, certainly you will." He turned and started back toward the other cellar, beyond the caved-in ceiling.
"What are you doing?" the human asked.
"I've got a kit in the next room. I'll bring it back and do something for your leg."
When he returned with the medicines, the boy had come down from the rubble and was sitting on the floor. Hulann could see that he was in pain. But the moment the boy realized the naoli had returned, he erased the grimace from his features.
"Some of the medicines would endanger you," he said, talking as much for his own gratification as for the human's. "But I think I can remember which ones will do some good." He fumbled through the kit, brought out a hypodermic needle designed for naoli skin. He would have to remember to be gentle; human skin was fragile. He filled it with green liquid from a green bottle. When he turned to inject it into the boy's thigh, he stopped. "It should be cleaned," he said.
"It won't clot," the boy advised. "It stopped bleeding a lot faster when I let the dirt collect."
Hulann dampened a sterile sponge and bent to the muddied wound. Abruptly, he recoiled, realizing he was going to have to touch the human.
"Could you clean it?" he asked of the boy.
The human took the sponge, smelled it for some reason or other, then began swabbing the wound. It was soon apparent that three hands were required to do a proper job, two to hold away the ragged edges of the flesh and the third to daub at the crushed slash.
"Here," Hulann said at last, taking the sponge. "Hold your hand here."
And he touched the human. He held one side of the wound while the boy held the other, and he worked the antiseptic into the flesh until he had sponged away the last of the dirt. New blood slowly welled, ran down the leg.
Hulann injected the green fluid into several points about the wound, then bound the thigh in a pressure bandage of light, two-molecule cloth that had almost no bulk. The bleeding stopped.
"It will be healed in three to four days," he said.
"We had these bandages too. But they were pretty scarce for civilians during the last ten years of the war."
As Hulann repacked the kit, he asked, "Why didn't you just let the rat kill me?"
"They're ugly. No one should die under one."
Hulann winced. His double stomach burned on both levels with acidic agitation. Surely his guilt index must have risen higher than eighteen points. Or was it merely that his guilt was now a conscious thing?
"But I am a naoli," he argued. "We're at war."
The boy did not answer. When Hulann clamped down the top of the medical kit, the boy said, "My name's Leo. Do you have one? A name?"
"Hulann."
He thought it over, nodded his yellow head with approval. "I'm eleven. How old are you?"
"Two hundred and eighty-four of your years."
"You're lying!" To lie seemed a greater crime than all the acts of war.
"No, no. We have a long life span. Your kind dies at a hundred and fifty. We live for five or six hundred years."
They sat in silence a time, listening to the rustle of things in the rubble, to the moaning wind that had picked up above and somehow found its way down into this dungeon. At last, the boy said, "Are you turning me in?"
"I guess so," Hulann said.
"I don't think you will."
"What?"
The boy indicated the leg dressing. "After healing me, why take me in to be killed?"
Hulann watched his enemy," his friend. His overmind was overtaxed trying to analyze his own behavior. He was obviously quite a sick creature. It would be a crime against his race to release this beast. It would have bordered on sin, except that his people had no such concept. Whatever this boy did from now until his death would be Hulann's fault. He might murder other naoli. And if Hulann's crime were discovered he would either be tried as a traitor or sent home for total washing and restructuring.
The organic brain specialists had developed startling techniques during the war. They had learned how to totally erase a captured human's mind and refill it with false identity and purpose. It had been these unknowing traitors among the human fleets who had signaled the turning of the war tide against mankind. The naoli doctors had now learned to use the same procedures on their own kind in the treatment of the most mentally deranged.
Once washed, he would never remember his first two hundred and eighty-seven years of life. The centuries to come would be nothing more than a farce without history—and therefore without purpose. Such a thing should be avoided at all cost.
Yet now he was cons
idering letting the human escape, thereby risking all of these things. It had to do with the boy's saving him from the rat. But there was also that great pool of misery lying on his soul bottom: the knowledge that he had assisted in the extermination of an entire race.
"No," he said. "I am not taking you in to be killed. But I want you to be gone from here as fast as possible. I will be back tomorrow to continue my work. You will be gone?"
"Of course," Leo said. Hulann thought of him as Leo now, not just as a human or a boy. He wondered if Leo also thought of him by his naoli name.
"I'll go now," Hulann said.
He went. He took with him the knowledge that he was now a criminal against all others of his race, against the naoli treasures and traditions, against the beloved home worlds and the powerful central committee. Against Fiala—and maybe against himself as well.
Banalog, the chief traumatist of the occupation forces' Second Divison, leaned his head into the scope of the tapeviewer and watched the life history of Hulann Po'-naga flit before his weary eyes. The film moved at a rate four times faster than he could consciously comprehend.
The end of the film passed, then only whiteness. Banalog pushed the viewer away and settled back in his chair, crossing his hands on the slight rise of his primary stomach. When his overmind had mulled the data, he punched a desk stud and spoke to the air in a gruff, commanding tone—his natural voice.
"Tentative recommendation based on files. Hulann should be returned to home world for therapy. Otherwise, he will become a hopeless neurotic. He is a fine and gentle person; the war has affected him more than most. Too, he has a history of mild obsessions. Therapy will be to his advantage. Naturally, final recommendation will be deferred until I've seen the patient first-hand as per the Phasersystem's advice. Perhaps it is relevant to note that, although he was told to contact me as soon as possible, Hulann has thus far not come to schedule an interview. This may be an indication he is suffering and subconsciously nursing his guilt. The Phasersystem should remind him of the necessity of making an appointment during the condition period in the morning."
