The Overlords of War

by Gerard Klein

  Corson drew a deep breath.

  “But where the hell are we?” he shouted.

  Touray gave him a steady stare. “I could say we’re in a balloon above a calm ocean. But that might be a delusion. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I can only offer three possible explanations. See which you prefer, or come up with another.”

  “What are they?”

  “First off, then: we’re good and dead and we’ve arrived in some kind of hell or purgatory, and we’re stuck here for goodness knows how long, maybe for all eternity, with no hope of escape even by getting killed. The Breathers take care of that.”

  “The Breathers?”

  “You haven’t been through one of those yet? No, of course you haven’t—you only just got here. I’ll tell you about those later, then. My second theory is that we don’t actually exist. We just have the illusion of existence. We may be nothing more than data, tape perforations or punched cards or electrons whizzing around in some gigantic machine, and someone’s playing a war game with us, or a Kriegsspiel, or whatever they call it where you come from, trying to find out what went on in such-and-such a battle. Or maybe what would happen if all the wars in the universe took place at once. In that case we’d simply be tin soldiers, if you get me.”

  “I get you,” Corson said from a dry mouth.

  “A variant of that notion would be that we do exist, but not in this world. Maybe we’re all stacked up in a vault somewhere, wired into a machine, and just imagine that we’re alive here. It could be a sort of therapy, to make us sick of the very idea of war, or it could be a show put on for somebody, or it could be an experiment.”

  “How about your third theory?”

  “That this universe is in fact real. Weird, by our standards, but genuine enough. And built by someone, possibly by humans—though I doubt it—to serve some purpose I daren’t even guess at. That’s the theory I prefer. Because if it’s correct, there might be a way of escaping and still being yourself.”

  “There’s one thing in common between your three theories,” Corson said. “They could equally well apply to the worlds we’ve left behind.”

  “The ones we remember,” Touray corrected. “Not necessarily the same thing. Are you sure we both come from the same universe? Besides, something else holds good for this world as well as the others. We have the same feeling of free will, and we’re just as incapable as we were back there of running our lives the way we’d like to.”

  There was a short silence.

  “How did you get here?” Corson asked at length.

  “I’d rather ask you the same question. Don’t you think I’ve been talking too much?”

  “Well, I don’t know whether you’d believe me.”

  The black man said wryly, “Oh, I’ve learned to believe six impossible things before breakfast.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  So Corson briefly recounted their wanderings since leaving Veran’s camp, although he offered no details of the mausoleum world.

  “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring you here,” Touray decided. “One of them, probably. It fits my third theory best, doesn’t it?”

  And he added, “This is the first I’ve heard about—did you call them pegasones? The animals that can move through time, I mean. But I’d certainly begun to suspect that there must be a means of jumping from one century to another.”

  “What about you?”

  The black man leaned over the gondola and spat into the sea. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t recall very clearly. I’ve been through four, five, maybe ten Breathers since.” The capital letter could be heard in his voice. “I was gunning down everything I could see from my old Gadfly Five, when I felt a blast of heat and blacked out. And here I was, still in the copter, over what looked like the same sort of country. I didn’t notice the differences until I landed and realized I didn’t know anybody at the base. I said so. They took me to the M.O., and he said something about shock and gave me a needle and sent me back into action. After a while I gave up trying to be certain about anything. I simply decided to stay alive.”

  “One thing puzzles the hell out of me,” Corson said. “The body count must be terrible in these wars. Why don’t they stop because they’ve run out of manpower? Or does a fresh supply of soldiers keep pouring in non-stop from all time and all space?”

  Touray shook his head. “I told you. There are Breathers. The dead come back.”

  “Somebody revives them?”

  “No. But when a Breather is in the offing, the sky goes dark. Everything becomes sort of numb, time runs slower and slower, any kind of light burns dim—flames, electric lamps, anything. You feel as though you’re turning to stone. For a second or two you find yourself in an awful silence. Then everything starts over. Sometimes you’re still where you were before the Breather, but that’s not common. Usually you’re in another army doing another job. You don’t recall very clearly what was happening before the Breather; it’s as though someone started telling another story, or—or changed the record! That’s what led me to my second theory. And the dead come back and take on new roles. But they never remember having been killed. As far as they’re concerned the Breather began just before

  they died. So maybe the Breathers are purely individual events. But I don’t really believe that. You get the impression that they involve the entire universe. I’m sure that the people who run this place, or manage it, must know how to travel in time and simply go back and collect the people who are about to die. Nothing supernatural about it.”

  “No, of course not,” Corson said.

  His beard had begun to grow out. Tugging at it, he reflected on the amazing fact that this man, this primitive soldier from the very dawn of the space age, was quite prepared to accept the idea of time travel. Still, he himself had made a pretty quick adjustment to Dyoto. And what would you expect of a soldier who was accustomed to being tossed from one theater of war to another for reasons the high brass didn’t condescend to explain? If you didn’t adapt, you didn’t last.

  He was about to ask for more information about the Breathers when a vast explosion slammed at his eardrums, fiercer than any thunderclap, like two dagger points driven into his head. It was as though the universe were breaking apart.

  On unseen rails the balloon swerved across the mirror-smooth sea beneath that improbable but unchanging sky. The breeze was at most fresh. But the explosion went on, grew louder, evolved through a dull rumbling into a vibration which made the suspension ropes twang, and then seemed to divide into two pure notes like a tree trunk being split by lightning: one climbed into the treble, racing up the octaves—a thousand hertz, two thousand, five, ten, and at last into the ultrasonic, still so loud it seemed to be drilling into their skulls—while another deepened, as though a giant had clutched at them, and became a hammering, then a panting noise, like the breathing of a tortured god.

  The ocean . . . wrinkled. Touray shouted something, but the desperate movements of his lips were like the mouthings of someone struck deaf and dumb. Antonella clapped her hands over her ears, frightened and in pain. Corson felt tears start to his eyes, as though pressed from his very brain by the vise of the twin vibrations.

  A squall grabbed at the balloon. It climbed several hundred meters and the ambient pressure diminished cruelly. The gondola tossed like a cork. Corson caught hold of Antonella and pressed her against the suspension ropes, which he clung to with both hands. The wicker creaked. The wind was so fierce now, it flattened one side of the balloon as though a giant hand were pushing it along.

  Touray caught the end of a rope and lashed himself as firmly as he could. Bending double, he managed to pass the other end to Corson, who secured Antonella and himself as best he could. This was worse than riding a pegasone, he thought, fumbling to tie the knots.

  Above the roar of the storm he screamed, “Is this the beginning of a Breather?”

  Touray shook his head. Ashen-faced, he
called back, “I—never— saw—anything like it!”

  The squalls gave over, but the wind blew on. Now it was steadier, but it grew stronger by the minute, pressing Corson against Antonella; he heard—or felt—her panting. He himself was breathing quicker and deeper than usual. It was owing to lack of air. The atmospheric pressure had dropped still further.

  He signaled to Touray, pointing first at the balloon, then at the ocean. The black man understood and turned his valves. The balloon dropped several hundred meters, but without the air becoming perceptibly more dense. Below, long white crests embroidered the tops of waves laden with wrecked ships. A halo of oil spread on the sea created an unlikely oasis of calm.

  Hours went by. The balloon sped onward. Corson and Touray agreed that they must be traveling at a good thousand k.p.h. if the latter had correctly estimated the height of the pulsating veins that served not so much as landmarks but as skymarks. Tumbled together in the bottom of the gondola, all three of them drowsed, half suffocated.

  Corson was vaguely aware that if they had been on Earth they would already have been blown a quarter of the way around it. Still the wind was not dropping. Now, it was pushing before it mountains of water so high and so solid that they might have been carved out of glass. It was insane, as crazy as everything that had gone before. They might sail on forever above this boundless ocean. They might starve to death, die of thirst or exhaustion in the gondola, but their bodies would continue on their mad career unless the suspension ropes broke and ditched them in the sea, or the balloon, leaking its hydrogen—helium—whatever—lost so much height that it stuck like a wart to the side of a rolling dune of water . . .

  The gondola leaped wildly: a cable giving way. It almost pitched Corson overside, but the rope he had lashed around him saved his life. He caught a glimpse of the horizon, and uttered such a tremendous cry that for a brief moment it outdid the roaring of the wind.

  There was a horizon on this planet after all. But not a mere skyline. A black streak, swiftly widening, into a band, into a wall! Its darkness was absolute, the darkness of empty space. And, incredibly, the parallel edges of this wall of shadow, instead of being curved to follow a planetary surface, were—for all any human eye could tell —perfect and unqualified straight lines.

  CHAPTER 19

  That was where the universe came to an end.

  This universe, at any rate.

  And they were being hurled toward that black gulf. . .

  The wind had lost a little of its violence, but the waves grew higher and ever higher as though, somewhere ahead, they were breaking against an unseen obstacle. They hollowed now into glaucous valleys hundreds of meters deep.

  At the horizon the ocean stopped dead, like the edge of a table. Beyond lay the. abyss, filling the space between the sky and the sea.

  “There’s only one chance left,” Touray said. “And that’s a slim one! If a Breather comes along before . . ."

  There was no need for him to finish. They stared, fascinated, at the edge of the world.

  “Unless the wind drops,” Corson said.

  Touray shrugged. “It won’t. That’s vacuum pulling us along. This whole world is going to go the same way.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh, something must have broken in the big machine!”

  As they drew closer, the black space became populated with lights, shining motionless points which, from time to time, winked out and reappeared as though some dark object had passed in front of them. The balloon seemed to be heading toward a patch of black even more total, even more absolute, than the rest of the wall. It was haloed by bright lines that spread in all directions like forked lightning.

  What it reminded Corson of was a broken window.

  And that, he realized a second later, was exactly what he was looking at. A window, shattered by something dashed against it. The moveless lights were stars. That patch of blacker-than-black was a hole through which Aergistal—or at least that section of Aergistal that included the balloon—was being sucked into the void.

  A colossal whirlpool bit into the surface of the sea, near the interface. The water likewise was being emptied out into nowhere.

  Corson wondered whether this space was infinite, whether the whole of Aergistal with its lunatic wars, its legions and fleets and pitiable heroes, its generals and its nuclear mushrooms, would all find peace at last among those stars. Were not the creators, or the operators, of Aergistal going to step in? Was this accident beyond their powers to cope with? Or . . . were they simply emptying a test tube? Had Touray been right to talk about model soldiers? Could it be that after all Aergistal was nothing but an artificial world, huge but not boundless, floating in space and in the course of being drained owing to damage or by deliberate decision? What would happen if, along the fissures he could see, the “glass” shattered all of a sudden? Would the sky and the land join up again? Or would the structure of this senseless world—senseless in human terms, at least —survive forever, preserved in uncorrupting vacuum?

  As the balloon approached the hole, the temperature dropped and the air grew ever thinner. Oddly, however, the gap seemed to grow narrower. A moment ago it had yawned kilometer-wide. Now, at its broadest, it was only a few hundred meters across. It was repairing itself, and swiftly at that. The balloon was so close that Corson could see circular ripples cross the interface, dying at the edges of the hole.

  The sea was disappearing under an icepack which drew a white line along the straight underside of that wall of space. Not a window, then! Not a wall, even—but a force screen capable of mending itself, overloaded by an inconceivable shock.

  “We’re going throughl” Touray gasped. “If it doesn’t close up too fast!”

  Antonella hid her face against Corson’s shoulder. He himself, panting for breath, found energy to point toward the hole. The wreck of a vast spaceship floated in the void, a little below the level of the ocean. It might have been spindle-shaped; at any rate that was the form suggested by the stem section, which seemed to be stuck to the transparent wall. In repairing itself, the force field had trapped it.

  What amazed Corson was the biological slowness of the repair process. One might better term it “healing.” He only recalled force fields which, as far as human perceptions were concerned, propagated instantly over short distances. Then he reminded himself that here the energies involved were so immense that time itself could be deformed by them. The mass equivalent of that barrier must be fantastic. Long before his own day, relativity theory had shown that time at the surface of a giant star would pass more slowly than in free space.

  Even more surprising was that this time-dilation effect did not apparently extend into the space surrounding the barrier. If this was indeed a field in which time was slowed, it must have immense gravitational potential. One would have expected the balloon to be hurled toward the screen so fast that it would have burned up from friction even before it crashed.

  Corson found himself able to hope again. There were only a few hundred meters to go. The healing was becoming more rapid, the fissures were vanishing. The blank black patch was shrinking. All around space seemed to glisten as though newly varnished, no doubt from a side effect of the field.

  Any second now! Corson reached out to protect Antonella. Crash. Bounce! The universe spun giddily. The rope he had tied around him sawed into his ribs. He rocked, fell forward. His head struck the rim of the gondola. A steep angle. He could still hear a soft noise. The balloon smashed against the barrier, the gondola rocked. Crash. Bounce. Not so fiercely now. Something resilient in the way.

  Fainted.

  Coolness on his forehead. He awoke. Almost at once—maybe. His head was resting on Antonella’s knees and she was wiping his face with a rag dipped in wine. He brought his hand up to his right eyebrow, which was painful, and saw blood when he withdrew it. Then he met the worried gaze of Touray.

  Giddy, he sat up, and with a great effort managed to stand.

  “The balloon
has plugged the hole,” Touray explained.

  Indeed, the gasbag was half sunk in the barrier, a good kilometer above the water, which had ceased to seethe. The underwater breach must have healed as well. The air pressure was returning rapidly to normal. Corson’s ears hurt; he pinched his nose and blew hard.

  Then he leaned over the side of the gondola and stared, fascinated, into the void. Above them the sky, below them the ocean, stopped as cleanly as though they had been cut with a knife. The barrier was almost within arm’s reach. Leaning dangerously outboard, he stretched his hand toward it, but without managing to make contact. All he felt was a slight tingling which could simply have been imaginary.

  Beyond was free space. But not empty space. There were stars, thousands and thousands of them in unfamiliar constellations, the sort of multicolored stars you only saw in vacuum, through a ship’s

  viewport or a space-suit helmet. A red splotch shone out which might be a whole galaxy very far away. And there were not only stars and galaxies to be seen.

  Among and sometimes in front of them colossal battle cruisers prowled. Naturally, in spite of their size, Corson could not perceive them directly, but they made the stars twinkle, or rather distorted the path of their light. Mass and energy, he thought. A photon being such a tiny thing, so easily turned aside . . . Under his trained eyes the mad dance of the stars took on a pattern that made sense. Out there two fleets were engaged in desperate combat. In the course of a skirmish one of the cruisers had been disabled and slammed into the barrier so violently that it caused major damage. Doubtless unaware of this cosmic accident, the others kept on with the fight, all-important to them, but reduced on this side of the barrier to a mere abstract weaving back and forth, a shaking of space that made the stars waver like reflections on a rough sea.

  Vast greenish lumps were drifting on the other side of the force field. It took Corson a while to identify them. Ice! Bergs of space, the remains of however many millions of tons of water had poured through the breach.