The Human Front, page 6
I was looking that way, peering and listening intently through the dark to the east, when I felt a prickle in the back of my neck and smelled something electric.
I turned with a sort of reluctance, as though expecting to see a ghost. What I saw was a bomber, haloed in blue, descending between me and the house. There might have been a fizzing sound, or that may be just a memory of the hissing rain. For a moment I stood as still as the bomber, which floated preternaturally above the ground. Then I raised the rifle. Something flashed out from the bomber, and I was knocked backwards, and senseless.
I woke to voices, and pain. My skin smarted all over; my eyelids hurt to open. I was lying on my side on a slightly yielding smooth grey floor. The light was pearly and sourceless. Moving slightly, I found I had some bruises and what felt like scrapes on my back, but apart from that and the burning feeling everything seemed to be fine. My oilskins were gone, as were my weapons and, curiously enough, my watch. I raised my head, propped myself on one elbow and looked around. The room I lay in was circular, about fifteen metres across. My comrades were lying beside me, unconscious, looking sunburned, but breathing normally and apparently uninjured. There was a sort of bench or shelf around the room, which in one section looped away from the wall to form a seat, at which a tall person with long fair hair sat with their back to me, hands on a pair of knobbed levers. Other parts of the shelf were not padded seating but tables and odd panels. Above the bench was a black screen or window which likewise encircled the room.
Sitting on the bench, on either side of the person I guessed was the pilot, were three similar people--one of them, just then noticing that I was stirring, being the woman we'd captured--and a small creature with a large head, slit mouth, tiny nostrils and enormous black eyes. Its skin was grey, but somehow not an unhealthy grey--it had a glow to it, a visible warmth underneath; though hairless it reminded me of the skin of a seal. Its legs were short, its arms long, and its hands--I recalled my father's words, and felt a slight thrill at their confirmation--bore four long digits.
It too noticed me, and it looked directly at me and--it didn't blink, something flicked sideways across its eyes, like an eagle's. The woman stood up and stepped over and stood looking down at me.
"There's no need to be afraid of the Martian," she said.
"I'm not afraid," I said, then caught myself. "John Matheson, unit commander, MB 246."
She reached down, took my hand and hauled me to my feet, without effort. There was something wrong about my weight. I felt curiously light.
"Your friends will wake up shortly," she said. "OK, consider yourself a prisoner of war if you like, but there's no need to not be civil. We have nothing to hide from you anymore, and we really don't have anything we want to find out from you."
I said nothing. She pointed to the bench.
"Relax," she said, "sit down, have a coffee." Then she giggled, in a very disarming way. "'For you, Johnny, the vor iss over.'"
Her fake, Ealing-studio German accent was as perfect as her genuine-sounding American one. I couldn't forbear to smile back, and walked over to the seat. On the way I stumbled a little. It was like the top step that isn't there.
"Martian gravity," Jodelle said, steadying me. The Martian bowed his big head slightly, as though in apology. I sat down beside one of the other people, the "Venusians" as I perforce mentally labelled them. All except Jodelle were evidently male, though their hair was as long and fair as hers. One of them passed me a mug of coffee; out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a coffee pot and electric kettle on one of the table sections, and some mugs and, banally enough, a kilogramme packet of Tate & Lyle sugar.
"My name is Soren," the man said. He waved towards the others. "The pilot is Olaf, and the man next to him is Harold."
"And my name is Chuck," said the Martian. His small shoulders shrugged. "That's what I'm called around here, anyway." His voice was like that of a tough wee boy, his accent American, but he sounded like he was speaking a learned second language.
I nodded at them all and said nothing, gratefully sipping the coffee. Outside, the view was completely black, though the movements of the pilot's eyes, head, and hands appeared to be responding to some visible exterior environment.
One by one, Neil, Donald, Murdo and Andy came round, and went through the same process of disorientation, astonishment, reassurance and suspicion as I had. We ended up sitting together, not speaking to each other or to our captors, perhaps silently mourning the loss of our comrades and friends in the other tank. The bomber's crew talked among themselves in a language I did not recognise, and attended to instruments. None of us was in anything but a hostile mood, and if the aliens had been less unknown in their intentions and capabilities we might have regarded their evident unconcern as an opportunity to try to overwhelm them, rather than--as we tacitly acknowledged--evidence that they had no reason to fear us.
After about half an hour, they relaxed, and all sat down on the long seat.
"Almost there," Jodelle Smith said.
Before any of us could respond, one side of the encircling window filled with the glare of the sun, instantly dimmed by some property of the display; the other with the light of that same sun reflected on white clouds, of which I glimpsed a dazzling, visibly curved expanse a second before we plunged into them. Moments later we were underneath them, and a green surface spread below us. Looking up, I could see the silvery underside of the clouds. Our rapid descent soon brought the green surface into focus as an apparently endless forest, broken by lakes and rivers, and by plateaus or gentler rises covered with grass. After a few seconds we were low enough for the shadow of the bomber to be visible, skimming across the treetops. The circle of shade enlarged, and then disappeared. I blinked, and saw that we were now stationary above a broad valley bounded by high sandstone cliffs and divided by a wide, meandering river.
Then, with a yawing motion which we could see but not feel--so it seemed that the landscape swayed, and not the ship--we descended, and settled on a grassy plain. Around us, in the middle distance, were rows of Nissen huts; in the farther distance, watchtowers and barbed wire.
"Welcome to Venus," said the pilot.
The camp held about a thousand people, from all over the world. Most of them were Front soldiers or cadre. There were as many women as there were men, and there were some children. The Front basically ran the camp, through committees of the various national sections, and an international committee for which the main qualification seemed to be fluency in Russian. The only rule that the Venusians enforced was a curfew and blackout between sunset and sunrise. They didn't bother about which hut you spent the night in, so long as you were in a hut.
They gave us no work to do, and watched unconcerned as we practised drill and unarmed combat, sweltering in the heat and humidity. Food and drink were adequate, and in fact more varied and nutritious than the fare to which most of the inmates, including myself, had become accustomed. This is not to say that our confinement was pleasant. The continuous cloud cover felt like a great shining lid pressing down on us, day after day. Every day it seemed to, or perhaps actually did, descend a little lower. The nightly lock-downs were hellish, even though the huts did in fact cool down somewhat. The wire around the camp was almost equally suffocating, one we'd realised that it wasn't so much there to keep us in as to keep the dinosaurs out. The same was true of the guards' strange weapons, which could--if turned to a much higher setting than was ever used against prisoners--fire bolts of electricity or plasma sufficient to turn back even the biggest of the great blundering beasts which flocked to the river every couple of days, their feet making the plain shake. We called them dinosaurs, because they resembled the reconstructions of dinosaurs which most of us had seen in books, but I knew from my scientific education that they could not be dinosaurs--they were too vigorous, too obviously hot-blooded, to be the sluggish reptilian giants of the Triassic and Jurassic eras. Whatever they may have been, their presence certainly discouraged attempts to escape.
The British contingent was in two Nissen huts: twenty men in one, twenty women in the other. They had a committee of three men, three women, and a chairman, and they spent a lot of time trying to regulate sexual relations. It was all very British and messy, uncomfortably between the strict puritanism of the Chinese comrades and the easygoing, if occasionally violent, mores of the Latin Americans and Africans. My unit decided to ignore all that and do what we considered the proper British thing.
We set up an escape committee.
"What the hell are you doing, Matheson?"
I waved my free hand. "Just a minute--"
It didn't interrupt my counting. When I'd finished, I put the one-metre line and the 250-gramme tin of peas on the table and glanced over my calculations before looking up at Purdie. The young Englishman was on our hut committee and the camp committee, but not the escape committee, which he regarded as a diversion in both senses of the word.
"We're not on Venus," I said.
He glanced over his shoulder, as if to confirm that we were still alone in the hut, then sat on a corner of the table.
"How d'you figure that out?"
"Pendulum swing," I said. "Galileo's experiment. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Earth. Venus has about eighty percent of the mass of Earth."
"Hmm," he said. "Well done. Most people begin by wondering why nothing feels lighter, and then put it down to our muscles adapting to the supposed lower gravity. Still, can't say it's a surprise, old chap. Some of us reckon they keep us in at night because if we went outside we could see the moon through the cloud cover, and even the least educated of us is aware that Venus doesn't have a bloody moon."
"So where are we?" I waved a hand. "It seems a wee bit out of the way, if this is Earth."
He crooked one leg over the other and lit a cigarette.
"Well, the camp committee has considered that. The usual explanation is that we're in some unexplored region of a South American jungle, something like what's-his-name's The Lost World."
"Conan Doyle," I said automatically. I screwed up my eyes against the smoke and the glaring light from the open door of the hut. "Doesn't seem likely to me."
"Me neither," said Purdie cheerfully. "For one thing, the midday sun isn't high enough in the sky for this to be a tropical latitude, but it's bloody hot. Any other ideas?"
"What if instead we're in somewhere out of The Time Machine? Well, you know ... dinosaurs?"
Purdie frowned and probed in his ear with a finger.
"That has come up. Our Russian comrades shot it down in flames. Time travel is ruled out by dialectical materialism, I gather. But I must say, this place does strike me as frightfully Cretaceous, the anomaly of hot-blooded dinosaurs aside. My personal theory is that we're on a planet around another star, which resembles Earth in the Cretaceous period."
He cracked a smile. "That, however, implies a vastly more advanced civilization which either isn't communist or is communist and fights on the side of the imperialists. Neither of which are acceptable speculations to the, ah, leading comrades here, who thus stick with the line that the self-styled Venusians and Martians are the spawn of Nazi medical experiments, or some such."
"Bollocks," I said.
Purdie shrugged. "You may well say that, but I wouldn't. I myself am troubled by the thought that my own theory at least strongly suggests--even if it doesn't, strictly speaking, require--faster-than-light travel, which is ruled out by Einstein--an authority who to me carries more weight on matters of physics than Engels or Lenin, I'm afraid."
"Relativity doesn't rule out time travel," I said. "Even if dialectical materialism does."
"And no science whatever rules out lost-world relict dinosaur populations," said Purdie. He shrugged. "Occam's razor and all that, keeps up morale, so lost-world is the official line."
"First I've heard of it," I said. "Nobody's even suggested we're not on Venus in the two weeks I've been here."
"Bit of a test, comrade," he said dryly. He stubbed out his cigarette, hopped off the table and stuck out his right hand for me to shake. "Congratulations on passing it. Now, how would you like to join the real escape committee?"
The official escape committee had long since worked through and discarded the laughable expedients--tunnels, gliders and so on--which I and my mates, perhaps overinfluenced by such tales of derring-do as The Colditz Story and The Wooden Horse, had earnestly evaluated. The only possibility was for a mass break-out, exploiting the only factor of vulnerability we could see in the camp's defences, and one which itself was implicitly part of them: the dinosaur herds. It would also exploit the fact that, as far as we knew, the guards were reluctant to use lethal force on prisoners. So far, at least, they'd only ever turned on us the kind of electrical shock which had knocked out me and my team, and indeed most people here at the time of their capture or subsequent resistance.
The tedious details of how a prison-camp escape attempt is prepared have been often enough recounted in the genre of POW memoirs referred to above, and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that about fifty days after my arrival, the preparations were complete. From then on, all those involved in the scheme waited hourly for the approach of a suitably large herd, and on the second day of our readiness, conveniently soon after breakfast, one arrived.
About a score of the great beasts: bulls, cows, and calves, their tree-trunk-thick legs striding across the plain, their tree-top-high heads swaying to sniff and stooping to browse, were marching straight towards the eastern fence of the camp, which lay athwart their route to the river. The guards were just bestirring themselves to rack up the setting on their plasma rifles when the riot started.
At the western end of the camp a couple of Chinese women started screaming, and on this cue scores of other prisoners rushed to surround them and pile in to a highly realistic and noisy fight. Guards from the perimeter patrol raced towards them, and were immediately turned on and overwhelmed by a further crowd that just kept on coming, leaping or stepping over those who'd fallen to the low-level electric blasts. At that the guards from the watchtowers on that side began to descend, some of them firing.
My team was set for the actual escape, not the diversion. I was crouched behind the door of our hut with Murdo, Andy, Neil, Donald and a dozen others, including Purdie. We'd grabbed our stashed supplies and our improvised tools, and now awaited our chance. Another human wave assault, this time a crowd of Russians heading for the fence where the guards were belatedly turning to face the oncoming dinosaurs, thundered past. We dashed out behind them and ran for an empty food-delivery truck, temporarily unguarded. It even had a plasma-rifle, which I instantly commandeered, racked inside.
The Russians swarmed up the wire, standing on each others shoulders like acrobats. The guards, trying to deal with them and the dinosaurs, failed to cope with both. A bull dinosaur brought down the fence and two watchtowers, and by the time he'd been himself laid low with concerted plasma fire, we'd driven over the remains of the fence and hordes of prisoners were fleeing in every direction.
Within minutes the first bombers arrived, skimming low, rounding up the escapees. They missed us, perhaps because they'd mistaken the truck--a very standard U.S. Army Dodge--for one of their own. We abandoned it at the foot of the cliffs, scaled them in half an hour of frantic scrambling up corries and chimneys, and by the time the bombers came looking for us we'd disappeared into the trees.
Heat, damp, thorns, and very large dragonflies. Apart from that last and the small dinosaur-like animals--some, to our astonishment, with feathers--scuttling through the undergrowth, the place didn't look like another planet, or even the remote past. Since my knowledge of what the remote past was supposed to look like was derived entirely from dim memories of Look and Learn and slightly fresher memories of a stroll through the geological wing of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, this wasn't saying much. I vaguely expected giant ferns and cycads and so forth, and found perfectly recognisable conifers, oaks and maples. The flowers were less instantly recognisable, but didn't look particularly primitive, or exotic.
I shared these thoughts with Purdie, who laughed.
"You're thinking of the Carboniferous, old chap," he said. "This is all solidly Cretaceous, so far."
"Could be modern," I said.
"Apart from the animals," he pointed out, as though this wasn't obvious. "And as I said, it's not tropical, but it's too bloody hot to be a temperate latitude."
I glanced back. Our little column was plodding along behind us. We were heading in an approximately upward direction, on a reasonably gentle slope.
"I've thought about this," I said. "What if this whole area is some kind of artificial reserve in North America? If it's possible to genetically ... engineer, I suppose would be the word ... different kinds of humans, why shouldn't it be possible to do the same with birds and lizards and so on, and make a sort of botched copy of dinosaurs?"
"And keep it all under some vast artificial cloud canopy?" He snorted. "You overestimate the imperialists, let alone the Nazi scientists, comrade."
"Maybe we're under a huge dome," I said, not entirely seriously. I looked up at the low sky, which seemed barely higher than the tree-tops. It really had become lower since we'd arrived. "Buckminster Fuller had plans that were less ambitious than that."
Purdie wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Now that," he said, "is quite a plausible suggestion. It sure feels like we're in a bloody greenhouse. Mind you, none of us saw anything like that, from the bomber."
"That was a screen, not a window."
"Hmm. A remarkably realistic screen, in that case. Back to implausibly advanced technology."
We wouldn't have to speculate for long, because our course was taking us directly up to the cloud level, which we reached within an hour or so. I assigned my lads the task of guiding the others, who were quite unfamiliar with the techniques of low-visibility walking, and we all headed on up. First wisps, then dense damp billows, of fog surrounded us. I led the way and moved forward cautiously, whistling signals back and forth. Behind me I could just see Purdie and two of the English women comrades. Underfoot the ground became grassier, and around us the trees became shorter and the bushes more sparse. The only way to follow a particular direction was to go upslope, and that--with a few inevitable wrong turnings that led us into declivities--we did.
