Futures Past

by James White

  MacFall, still unconvinced that the Bug—the biggest he had yet seen—was harmless, moved to obey.

  "Hurry it up!" Nolan said. "And get base on the radio. Tell them to record everything I say, and to re-broadcast it if possible just in case I'm not able to finish this."

  It took a few minutes to get the CO. on the set, then Colonel Dawson barked that they would be ready to record and retransmit in ten minutes. Nolan filled the time by taping several of the plastic counters upright onto the hull surface, nudging the Bug in front of them with a gentle forefinger and talking, mostly to himself. MacFall did get some of it, however.

  It appeared that in certain species the female insect was little more than an egg-laying machine, and even among this intelligent insect race she would tend to be cowlike, stupid. But not too stupid, Nolan was hoping. He could not understand why the Bug swarm which had attacked them earlier had left her behind. She was equipped with wings and could have traveled with them, and a female would, he was sure, be a very important individual in their culture. Why had she stayed behind?

  "We'll be ready for you in three minutes," the base operator's voice said in MacFall's ear. He leaned forward and held the transmitter mouthpiece above the lieutenant's face, relayed the message to him, then asked quickly, "What are those plastic things?"

  "There are very small pictures and symbols on them," Nolan answered abstractedly. "I don't know what exactly they show." He grinned suddenly. "That's etymology, a somewhat different field. But if I present them in a certain sequence, and tap my fingers a certain way afterwards, I should get a reaction of some sort . . ." He trailed off into silence.

  In the phones a voice said, "We're ready now, Sergeant. But Colonel Dawson says that if this thing goes bad on you for any reason, you're to get a specimen of the unrusted metal of the Bug ship. We'll have that much, at least."

  MacFall moved the mike nearer to the lieutenant's mouth and nodded for him to go ahead.

  It seemed like a senseless game to MacFall, but despite that he felt the tension mounting within himself as the lieutenant coaxed and edged the Bug in front of one square of plastic after another, then minutely described each movement of its six hairy legs and every twitch of its near-invisible wings. Nolan went over the same sequence seven times, sighed, and began again.

  "If it understands the symbology printed on these counters," the lieutenant muttered aside to MacFall, "and if it understands from them that we want peace with the Bugs as a primary step before less simple concepts are attempted, and if the Bugs are peacefully inclined too . . ." He took a deep breath. ". . . then when I go tap, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap with my finger it should move a leg or wriggle quickly four times to show that it understands and is agreeable-—if it doesn't happen to be some Bug halfwit who doesn't know what's going on at all."

  MacFall found himself grinning. "Try it again," he said. "Dees dames is all stoopid . .."

  MacFall could have bitten his tongue out. Unthinkingly he had mimicked Calleria's Bowery accent—the one the corporal had used to tell his most outrageously funny jokes in, because Corporal Calleria had once been a radio actor. MacFall swore under his breath then, thinking of how the corporal had looked a little over half an hour ago after the lion and later the Bugs had finished with him. The two stripes on his arm had been MacFall's only means of identifying him. He felt a sudden surge of sheer hate. His fist clenched and he felt an uncontrollable urge to smash it down on the two-inch long horror crawling about among the bits of plastic, to mash out its stinking life. He didn't want to think of consequences, or weigh pros and cons like the lieutenant. He just wanted to . . .

  MacFall's arm moved out, fist upraised. Nolan looked up at him, startled. Then they both froze.

  A distant, high-pitched whine filtered through the trees toward them, barely perceptible as yet but growing in volume with every second which passed. Bugs!

  Nolan pointed suddenly through a break in the foliage where the curve of the hilltop showed. A dark gray patch of mist writhed in the air above it, and as MacFall watched, began curling down the slope toward them, expanding and already resolving itself into separate gray specks.

  "Look!" Nolan cried. "There's thousands of them!"

  "At least," MacFall said shakily. There must have been a secret Bug colony in Madagascar—one ship could not have contained one tenth of that sky-darkening swarm. Silently he went to work.

  "Quickly," Nolan said, his voice strained. "Get away from the ship. Get well back. They mustn't think that we intend harm to it—Sergeant! What are you doing?"

  MacFall had one gauntleted hand gripping the edge of the hole which the meteor had made and was tugging hard. The stuff was unbelievably tough for its weight. Panting slightly, he said, "Colonel Dawson wants a metal specimen before they get a chance to rust it...."

  At that moment a two-foot strip of the ship's skin came away with a sound like tearing canvas. Underneath was . . . "Ugh," MacFall said, hastily turning his head away.

  "What . . . ?" began Nolan, then, "Grubs! The Bug young! That explains . . ." He broke off again. "Why had you to do that, dammit? We're trying to make peace, and now they'll think we're wrecking the ship—a ship with their young in it. If you'd half the brains God gave a louse ..."

  The Bugs were almost on them, MacFall had never known them to sound so loud. He shouted angrily, "I was acting on orders, dammit. And cover your face!"

  "To blazes with my face!" Nolan swore. He reached up and tore his head and face armor off and flung it to the ground. "Orders," he spat out. "You stupid, senseless robot. Give me your Deedee gun! I don't trust you. Give it to me!"

  Mad, MacFall thought wildly. These professors were all the same. Cracked to begin with ...

  "I can handle it better than you," MacFall protested as Nolan literally tore the sprayer and its connected high-pressure tank off his back. It was no use talking. He groped in the long grass for the lieutenant's discarded face armor, found it, then the Bug swarm was all over them.

  He saw Nolan holding the Deedee gun high above his head. Heard him shout, "Look! You know what this is!" and hurl the sprayer away from him with all his strength. Then he saw a tiny spurt of red appear on the lieutenant's cheek, and another. Two little red explosions burst on his forehead and another on his ear. He saw Nolan shrug his shoulders desperately as high around his ears as he could, clap a hand to his eyes and try to wrap as much as possible of his other hand and arm around his head for protection. In that particularly contorted position the lieutenant rolled to the ground. He seemed to be trying to wriggle into it like a worm. Mac-Fall turned away quickly. He had troubles of his own.

  The Bugs hung so thickly around him that he could barely see the jungle, and the outer surface of his face armor was a continual sparkle as Bug explosive bullets wore at it, pitting it deeply and making it even harder to see. Where the plastic touched his skin, the shocks of the tiny explosions were transmitted through as a succession of tiny, stinging slaps. At this rate MacFall knew that he had about five minutes before he would be in the same position as the lieutenant.

  Desperately he lashed out at the almost solid swarm with Nolan's discarded helmet, which was still in his hand. Some of the Bugs dropped spiraling to the ground—but it was nothing, a cupful of water out of an ocean. Never had he known them to attack so viciously, so suicidally and in such numbers.

  He felt panic rising in him, and a feeling of choking —something had happened to his air filter. He was boiling in his own sweat and he couldn't breathe! Grimly Mac-Fall fought these feelings, knowing that they were in his mind only, lies. He had to think, keep his head. He was startled to find that he was repeating a phrase over and over to himself, sometimes whispering it, sometimes shouting it. "Don't take off your face armor. Don't take off your face armor. . . ."

  There was a burning stab in the back of his neck, they had broken through from the back. MacFall gritted his teeth as the stab was repeated. He fumbled out a field dressing, slapping it on the puncture, and press
ed down on the adhesive. It wouldn't stop the Bug weapons, but it would cut down the penetrative capacity of the bullets —for a while.

  But he had to do something. Nothing that MacFall might do would save him, he knew that now. But he did not want to curl up into a ball and let the Bugs blow little pieces out of him until there was nothing left. No matter how useless, he had to try something. But what?

  Hundreds of microscopic bullets were bursting on the armor now—with a sound like the crackling of dry burning twigs—and the plastic in front of his eyes was a deeply-pitted blur. Suddenly he saw the gray shine of metal in the underbrush ten yards away. The Deedee gun? He stumbled toward it.

  The Bugs were thick around his head and above the huddled, twitching form of the lieutenant but above the ship with its outsize Queen Bug they were a whining, seething, near-solid mass. Even if the sprayer was damaged, MacFall thought desperately, he could throw it against the ship and burst its pressure tank. That would certainly kill the insects crowding above the ship as well as the mass of pink, wriggling grubs packed inside it.

  But now he could not see at all. He felt with his feet for the Deedee gun, then cried out suddenly as his face armor was holed. He took it on the cheek, luckily. With his hand pressed tightly against his eyes—the plastic was worn paper thin in that area—he groped forward. Through the gauntlet protecting his face he felt the attackers concentrating on the back of his hand. There was another stab at his neck. Something tore at his ear. Then his gauntlet was holed and he could not keep his hand against his face anymore.

  Where was the Deedee gun? It was only a matter of time now, of seconds ...

  The lieutenant's eyes had escaped but the nerve controlling one of his eyelids had been damaged—he wore a perpetual, knowing wink that was almost a leer. That, together with his torn, cream-smeared face and his white, skinny body made MacFall think of an outrageous cross between Chevalier, Frankenstein and . . . well, he didn't know what.

  They had stripped to drill shorts and boots, and the breeze which had sprung up at dusk was sheer heaven. Nolan had left his heavy coveralls behind, but MacFall carried his over his arm—they were army issue and he just might be charged for them if they weren't handed in, despite their uselessness now.

  "That explains why the ship wasn't destroyed," Nolan said as they retraced their steps to base. "And why that first swarm of Bugs attacked so viciously—they were intent on protecting their young." He still sounded dazed by the whole business. "And Sergeant," he went on enthusiastically, "from close inspection I'm convinced that their first choice of food supply is other, smaller insects, though they can live on any warm-blooded creature as well. Think what this means! They could, for instance, exterminate the tsetse fly for us, and the other insects which keep us from developing large areas of the planet. You'll see, this is going to benefit both sides, eventually."

  MacFall grunted, then thinking that perhaps something more enthusiastic was called for, said, "Peace, ain't it wonderful!" Looking over his shoulder he wondered suddenly whether the Bugs engaged in escorting them back to base were naturally luminous or did they carry the Bug equivalent of a flashlight. The effect was pretty, anyway.

  "For a while it was touch and go," the lieutenant was babbling on. "After they stopped attacking me suddenly and I sat up, it still seemed to be in the balance. They were clustered around our plastic counters and that female, obviously interested but quite definitely hostile to us even then. What made them change their minds, decide on peace?"

  MacFall knew what, but he wasn't telling. He remembered that pause in the Bug attack all too clearly, and he had known somehow that the Bugs were undecided about them. MacFall had taken, off his now useless helmet to see better, and among other things he saw the dozen or so Bugs which he had flailed to the ground with Nolan's discarded helmet. They had been waving their legs weakly and only three of them looked dead. MacFall —call it hunch, intuition or whatever—had done exactly the right thing. He had taken off his coveralls, rolled up his sleeve, then carefully lifted each weakly struggling Bug between finger and thumb and placed it on his arm.

  The bites hadn't hurt at all, and a few drops of human blood had worked wonders for some of them.

  If the lieutenant ever discovered what he had done he would probably start agitating for a medal for the sergeant. But MacFall was not going to tell him. A medal was all right, of course, but MacFall did not think that he could ever face his men again if they were to find out that he was blood brother to a swarm of Bugs.

  FAST TRIP

  WITH the sounding of the five second warning the clicking, whining bedlam inside Ramsey built suddenly to a climax. The chemical boosters fired, their thunder so deep and vast that it was felt in the bones rather than heard with overloaded ears, and the ship began creeping into the sky. It picked up speed rapidly until airflow over its fins began to assist the gyros in maintaining vertical stability, until it began to outstrip its own thunder and until five gravities of acceleration and a surprisingly few minutes of time had combined to hurl it accurately into space. Then just before the booster stage was due to fall away the ship's reactor cut in smoothly, augmenting the enormous pre-burnout thrust with its modest half-G.

  That was when it happened.

  The radio unit which was attached to a bulkhead a few feet above the pilot's position tore loose and dropped onto the couch below, then rolled off and snapped through the open well of the passenger compartment as if pulled by a giant elastic band. The passenger lounge was twenty-five-feet long and with our five Gs acting on it the small, metal cabinet gained enough velocity to crash through the transparent panel which looked into the cargo space without even slowing down. Here it was deflected by cargo into the food storage compartment where it left the ship via a large, ragged hole it had torn in the hull plating.

  On time to the split second the booster stage dropped away and Ramsey, outwardly unaffected by these internal disturbances, continued along its precalculated flight path. After seventeen minutes at one-half G the reactor shut down and the ship was precisely on the course which would place it in orbit around Mars in a little over sixteen weeks. The fact that something had happened to the radio would not become apparent until the captain failed to make his post takeoff check report and, because it was the radio that had gone, the people on the ground would not know that anything else was amiss. So far as they were concerned, Ramsey was pointed in the right direction and everything was Go.

  For a time the ship's passengers had the same comforting idea. All except one....

  Herdman knew immediately that they had lost pressure by the change in the sounds which the ship was making— he was hearing them via the fabric of his couch and helmet rather than through the air of the passenger lounge—• and by the way his spacesuit creaked. A leak was not a very rare occurrence during the period of maximum stress that was takeoff and, provided it was not the product of some more serious malfunction, loss of pressure was nothing to worry about. The ship's air regeneration system would not be activated until after the captain had checked that everything was sealed tight, so that all they had lost was a few cubic meters of the dusty, peroxide-smelling air which had come aboard with the passengers before takeoff. Herdman waited tensely for something more calamitous to happen, and when it didn't he began to relax.

  The people on the ground were especially careful with ships making their first trip, he thought sourly, and with a vessel like Ramsey—the first spaceship designed primarily to carry passengers—the care with which they had checked everything must have been blood-curdling to watch. Herdman was reminded of the chilling little tale of the overanxious engineer who had tested the free working of an emergency-jettison control forty-seven times in order to make absolutely sure that it was functioning correctly, only to find on the forty-eighth time that he had tested the mechanism to destruction. ...

  As he lay staring at the underside of the acceleration bunk above his own, Herdman let his mental eye travel farther upward, past and
through the vertical tier of nine bunks above him—six of which were empty—to Control and to the man who occupied it.

  After the reactor shut down there would be a forty-five-minute instrument check, he knew, after which the captain would carry out a visual inspection of his ship to make doubly sure that everything was sealed and secure. During this inspection the captain would trace and seal the leak, and only when pressure was restored would he give permission for the passengers to get out of their tiny bunks and even more constricting spacesuits.

  Should anyone dare to leave his bunk before receiving permission to do so they would find themselves in trouble, because captains did not like people cluttering up their ships during that all-important first inspection. Herdman sighed, hoping that Captain Ramsey would not insist on treating him like a passenger, that the pilot might even ask him to help look for the leak. But very likely the hope was a forlorn one. From what he had heard of Ramsey, the captain was the type who leaned over backward and, perversely, Herdman did not want to claim any privileges which were not first offered.

  But half an hour later Ramsey still had not appeared, neither had there been any of the faint, irregular sounds and vibrations from the ship's metal which would have indicated the captain moving about. Herdman began to feel anxious, and within a minute his anxiety had grown to the point where he was willing to risk a rebuff for leaving his bunk without permission. The instant he realized that something might be wrong, Herdman slapped the quick-release plate on his harness, twisted out of the bunk and kicked himself toward the cone—all without coming to any conscious decision regarding his actions. It was a matter of conditioning—if there was trouble, Herdman had been trained to do the correct thing automatically, and such conditioning died hard.