Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Bleys Ahrens—” Carl began, with a note of protest in his voice.

  “That’s it,” Bleys said. “Now tell me a few things.”

  “Yes,” Carl said.

  “How long will one of the smoke cans keep putting out smoke, if you pump it up, hard as you can, then tie the handle down so it keeps spouting?”

  “Oh”—Carl hesitated—“at best guess—two, three minutes.”

  “And how much smoke would it put out in that time?”

  “Oh, a lot,” Carl said. “Several times the smoke we’ve got here—no, more than that. Maybe enough—yes, added on to the smoke here now, it could cover all the distance between us and Favored—”

  “All right,” said Bleys. “How much of that smoke would hide the side of Favored with its entry port? Its full length? Half its length? How much?”

  “Full length,” said Carl.

  “Fine,” said Bleys. “Get me two more canisters. Do we have any line?”

  “Line?”

  “Yes!” said Bleys. “Line—rope or the next best thing to it. I want to measure the distance to the edge of the smoke. And get an eye-estimate of the distance from the edge of our cloud to Favored.”

  “No, no rope, or anything like that,” said Carl. “But I can have a Soldier crawl out through this smoke, staying well down on pavement to the smoke edge; and he can see under it to Favored. We’ve got several people pretty good at estimating distance.”

  He turned away from Bleys and raised his voice slightly.

  “Merivane!”

  A thin young Soldier with black hair looked up and scrambled to his feet at the edge of the smoke cloud where he had been lying, peering out at the pad.

  “Merivane, we need to know how far to Favored. Use your own body length to measure. Have you got a way of marking one body length at a time, as you go—or something you can put down so that you can look back and see where your head was when your feet are level with where your head was before you moved?”

  Merivane stared for a moment, then plunged his hands into a trouser pocket and came out with perhaps twelve miniature white cubes with black specks on them.

  “Dice!” Carl stared at them. “Where—”

  He checked himself. Merivane grinned, closing his hand around the cubes.

  “Remember, Carl?” he said. “I’m not a Friendly.”

  “That’s right.” Carl looked at Bleys. “He’s from Ceta. Merivane, have you got enough of those—thingsl”

  “A dozen, anyway,” Merivane said. “It can’t be that much a distance to the edge of the smoke.”

  “Crawl out at an angle,” Bleys said to him, “and come back straight. That way you leave the cubes where they are and you can count them—don’t pick them up on your way back—don’t expose yourself, just get close enough to see, take a good look at our own ship, and give me your best estimate of distance to it—wait a minute.”

  He turned again to Carl.

  “How good is he at judging distance?”

  “He’s one of the very good ones,” Carl said.

  “Good. Go, Merivane,” Bleys said.

  Merivane stepped to the nearest edge of the cleared area in the smoke, dropped to the surface of the pad, left a die and crawled out of sight in the smoke. Bleys watched his feet disappear and looked back at Carl. “There’ll be enough clear space down there for him to look back and see the die he left?” he asked Carl.

  “Yes, Bleys Ahrens. But you asked about line. We haven’t got any, as I said. No rope or anything like that. I can’t think of anything we could use, either.”

  “Then tear up clothing. Make strips; tie them together. Tear up underwear, if you’ve got nothing else. I don’t imagine anyone here is wearing single-molecule underwear?”

  “No.” Carl brightened. He turned to two Soldiers who had been standing by through the last few exchanges of words, took the smoke canisters they were holding out, passed them to Bleys.

  “Are these pumped up? Come to think of it,” said Bleys, “is there some way to pump them up and tie the handle down, without having them spew smoke right away—some sort of shutoff?”

  “There’s a safety,” Carl said. He took back the canisters, turned to the two men and handed the canisters to them. “Tear up your undershirts. Make a rope or string of them by tying them together. Then put the safety on, pump the canisters up as far as you can, tie the handles down—and bring them back to us, to Bleys Ahrens.”

  The two took the canisters, turned away and took off their shirts.

  And Bleys turned again to Carl. “Soon as Merivane is back, get everybody ready to make a run for Favored. If he can give us a good idea of the distance, you can probably tell me how much time you think it’ll take us to get there, carrying Henry—”

  Bleys broke off and looked around for Henry, finding him lying on the ground, with a couple of Soldiers kneeling beside him. Henry’s head was propped up on his own rolled-up jacket. Bleys forced himself to look away again. He turned to Carl. “How badly is he hurt?”

  “Needles in his left leg. Can’t walk,” Carl said. “Also, he’s been hit low, right side—the opposite side from where you’ve been hit, Bleys Ahrens. By the way, you’ve lost blood. How are you?”

  “Forget me!” Bleys had no time for the wound. So far he felt nothing where the needles had entered. “It’s unimportant.”

  Carl said, “The only trouble is, about that hit on the side that Henry took—with these ricochets, we’re not sure it didn’t come in on an upward angle, and maybe into a lung. He’s not coughing blood, but he’s not able to move, and it’s just as well he doesn’t try.”

  “All right,” Bleys said. “Now, remember, carry all wounded with you when you go. It’ll be slow, but take them.”

  “We’d do that anyway, Bleys Ahrens,” Carl said.

  “Fine.” Bleys turned away from him suddenly. “Merivane! You’re back. How far to the edge of the smoke cloud?”

  “Nearly eight of my body lengths,” said the young Soldier. “I’d guess fifteen meters. Carl, the power cannon’s just inside the smoke. Old Jeller and Murgatroyd are lying by it, just in the smoke, but they’ve both been done.”

  “I’d figured that,” said Carl. He turned to Bleys. “Now what?”

  Bleys hesitated. But Merivane had gone out and back successfully; and his doing it again would save Bleys time if he lost his way in the smoke.

  “Thanks, Merivane,” he said. “Do you think you can get me the power cannon? Have somebody help you.”

  “I can bring it myself,” Merivane said stiffly. He turned and went. Bleys stood, thinking. Carl waited.

  “All right,” Bleys said. “Carl, get everyone together and ready to move. I’ll tell you when, and you start out with everyone else, together, wounded and all, spraying a smoke cloud around you as you go. Meanwhile, I’ll have already started a diversion. Thanks, Merivane.”

  “What kind of a diversion, Bleys Ahrens—and can’t a Soldier do it?” Carl was frowning. “And shouldn’t I be told what you’re planning?”

  “No. The hell with that! You just get everybody together, go to the smoke’s outside edge, and when you’re due to move, get going! Fast as you can—don’t pay any attention to me. Just get everybody to the ship, quick as you can.”

  “I think I’ve got a right to know—” Carl was beginning.

  “No, and keep your voice down. I don’t want Henry to know I’m going until I’m gone. You’ve got just one job: to get everybody to the ship. How long to get ready to go? Because I’ll start as soon as you’re ready.”

  Bleys looked down at his belt. The two canisters, their handles bound down by strips of white undershirt, were already hooked to the belt supporting the holster of his power pistol. He had forgotten all about that pistol. It was rather foolish to weigh himself down with it, if he had the power cannon, but a waste of time to take it off now. He heard Carl’s voice answering.

  “I’ve already signaled. We’ll be ready to move in thirt
y seconds.”

  “Then I’m ready, too—wait,” said Bleys. “I was about to go off half-cocked. Get me a good three meters of underwear strips. I want to make a sling.”

  “A sling?”

  “Never mind. Just get me the strips,” Bleys said.

  With the strips in hand, and with the help of a knife borrowed from Carl, Bleys doubled two meters of the underwear strips to make the sling’s ends, cut off the remaining length of cloth, double-folded the leftover end to make a socket pad in the middle of the strip, and used the sling strip to tie each end of the pocket pad to it. He took one of the smoke canisters from his belt to fit it into the pocket of the sling.

  The canister was small enough to be hidden in the closed hand of an average man. It fitted the pocket well enough—and, even if it had not, Bleys remembered that on Old Earth, in Europe, they had used slings as late as the seventeenth century to throw hand grenades.

  The sling had not been easy to master. In Bleys’s first attempts, the missile had gone in all directions of the compass; but he had finally become a marksman with it—mainly out of his irritation that he had not been able to learn its use more quickly.

  It flung its missile after whirling it in a vertical circle, with the two ends in one fist, and the missile in the pocket, until speed was built up. Then one of the ends would be released just at the time when the missile would fly in the direction it was aimed. That took practice—but Bleys had learned.

  He tucked the ends into his belt and nodded at Carl.

  “Good,” he said. “Give me a minute to reach the smoke’s edge—then the rest of you go.”

  He left without waiting, plunging into the smoke with the heavy hand cannon balanced in his left hand, then dropping to the ground, and starting to crawl forward along the line of dice that Merivane had left.

  Bleys found that it was easier to drag the hand cannon by its muzzle end. Even so, there were problems. The pistol at his waist dug into him; and his cape—he was so used to wearing his cape, he had forgotten he had it on, but it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to take it off now—entangled his elbows as he crawled.

  But he found he could see better than he had expected, though the smoke hovered less than a hand-span above the surface of the pad. Just back from the outer edge of the smoke cloud he stopped; and lay, listening to Carl’s group move out through the smoke cloud.

  Bleys watched in the direction of the sounds they made. A moment later, he saw smoke blossom to his right from the outward face of the cloud, expanding across the open

  area of the pad toward Favored of God. From where he lay, he could see the bottom of the ship resting on the pad and the lower half of its open entry port, with someone standing in it who, from the size of his legs, was Dahno. There was also someone else, whom he hoped was Toni, and two other people.

  Carl would be bringing his group along well behind the front point of the growing smoke cloud that was being sprayed. He saw sparks coming up from the pad beside the cloud, the sparks of needles from Newtonian needle guns being bounced in off the pad.

  Bleys closed his mind to the images, the thought of whom the needles might be hitting—Henry among them.

  Already, he could no longer see Favored’s entry port. The new smoke, still settling, barred his view. But he had a momentary glimpse before it also hid the two disabled power-cannon vehicles to his right, opposite the needle riflemen. The vehicles were silent and one listed a little to one side.

  The two original carriers of the hand cannon had given their lives to take the vehicles out; but there was no firing coming from that angle. Maybe they had been intended merely to block any view of the gunfight from that side. Now, even if the vehicles fired, their bolts could go beyond the smoke cloud, into their comrades on Bleys’s left.

  The enlarged smoke cloud already covered half the distance between Bleys and Favored. It was time for him to move. As the smoke got closer to the ship, the attackers would concentrate on an area just before the entry port, to take out anyone trying to reach it.

  Bleys looked left, for the source of the needles, and saw two orderly ranks of white-uniformed figures some thirty meters off, wearing space soldiers’ cap-helmets and lying prone, legs spread open on the pad, firing needle guns. Long guns—rifles.

  Leaving the hand cannon lying at his feet, he fixed the image of the Newtonian riflemen clearly in his mind’s eye, then stood up in the smoke. Keeping the vision sharp in his mind, he put one of the smoke canisters into the pocket of his sling, thumbed off its safety, and whirled the sling in a vertical circle beside his body before letting it go— not toward the Newtonians, but toward the visible, forward part of Favored.

  The underside of the ship’s hull curved in toward the pad below it, and the canister, he hoped, would land, bounce, or roll beneath it; hopefully ending up where needle fire could not destroy it.

  Bleys dropped flat again.

  The canister had not quite reached Favored of God, but the safety he had thumbed off before putting it in the pocket had already set the canister to pouring out a thick cloud of smoke that was rapidly swelling outward now in all directions—including up along the ship’s side, forward beyond the entry port.

  As soon as the new cloud reached halfway to the bow, Bleys rose. He ran forward, carrying the hand cannon and with the sling once more tucked in his belt, moving in Carl’s smoke cloud until he could duck across to his own out of the needle gunners’ sight.

  Bleys was alone now, with no slower runners to hold him back. He ran as he had been trained, a “floating” run, the weight of his upper body leaning forward slightly and the thrust coming down his back through thighs and calves directly to the balls of his feet.

  He was conscious now only of the smoke around him, that he must stay within for his own safety—the need to travel in a straight line and the utmost exertion of his energy—his heaving lungs, his pounding feet. Instinct, plus practice of running in total darkness in some of his training sessions, warned him of the loom of the spaceship not far in front of him, and he checked his speed just in time to keep from running full tilt into the side of Favored.

  Even as it was, Bleys’s body struck the side hard enough to send a hollow booming through the ship; and Dahno’s strong voice immediately called from his right—he had deliberately veered left toward Favored’s bow in the smoke, which had spread while he was running through it and was now well forward of the entry port.

  “Hello? Whoever you are—the entry port’s back here. This way!”

  Bleys would have liked to have called back to ask if they had Carl with the rest of the Soldiers and Henry, safe; but he had neither breath nor time to spare. He knew he was ahead of Carl’s group. They would need protection. At all costs, he must stop the storm of needles when all the riflemen would concentrate on the area of the entry port.

  He stumbled along the side of the ship, away from the port, toward the riflemen and Favored’s bow, breathing the smoke in deep gasps and feeling grateful that it did not interfere with the oxygen his hungry lungs wanted. He was dragging the hand cannon now and brushing one hand along the hull of the ship to keep himself beside it as he moved.

  Bleys came to a little clear space, like a small room in the smoke, and saw that beyond it the smoke was thicker. He must be at a point where a bubble of clear air from the entry port had been pushed toward the bow by the spreading smoke of the canister he had flung with the sling.

  He had gambled on this as a possibility; but it had been a gamble, only. He felt a brief surge of hope, which vanished at the thought of what was still to be done.

  Bleys dropped and began to crawl, dragging the hand cannon. Shortly, the small aperture of clear air between the bottom of the smoke and the pad gave him a clear view of the needle gunners.

  There were anywhere from twenty to thirty of them, all still lying with military exactness, their legs spread, each needle gun firm on a swing-down support under its barrel, firing steadily into the smoke behind
him.

  He counted. There were thirty-two, more than he had guessed. But he had them all firmly in a mental image as he rose to his feet, lifted the heavy cannon to his shoulder, and leaned both his body and the butt of the weapon against Favored’s hull to steady his aim.

  For a moment, something in him almost refused what his will ordered. He thought of Henry and closed his eyes to picture exactly the remembered positions of the needle gunners.

  His forefinger came down on the firing stud of the power cannon, his hands aiming the cannon through the smoke, starting at the closest end of the line, pressing the button again and again, going to the one end of the visualized gunners’ line, then back again. Down and back once more, and again—until the explosions of his cannon ceased, leaving him half-deafened, with a depowered weapon.

  Bleys forced his finger to release the firing button. His throat was raw. He had been screaming something at the gunners as he fired—what, he could not remember now. He got down once more to look below the smoke cloud. He saw piled rubble that had been spaceport pad where the gunners had been. Nothing else was to be seen; but there was no more sound from that location, no more needles coming toward the space through which Carl would be bringing—or had already brought—his people.

  Slowly, he stood up again.

  He felt something like a cramp in his groin, and his trousers hung with an odd heaviness from their waistband. Looking down, he saw the fabric darkened from the crotch down the inner side of each trouser leg—and for the first time he felt the dampness of the cloth.

  He could not go back to the entry port like this. The image of the Bleys Ahrens he had worked years to build could not go back looking so. He dropped the hand cannon, stripped off his trousers and his shorts; and flung them under the curve of the hull. The lower-hull blasts of the ship’s atmospheric drive would destroy them on takeoff.

  Suddenly aware of his extreme weariness, Bleys picked up the hand cannon once more by the end of its heated muzzle and wrapped his cloak closely around his lower body and legs. Feeling his way blindly along the hull with his left hand, he fumbled back along the side of the Favored until he almost fell into the entry port.