Collected Short Fiction, page 673
“Un hormiga!” whispered Harry Horse. “Un hormiga de maquinaria!”
A mechanical ant! Moving now, it lifted and turned its blank metal head as if watching us. A single delicate bright antenna uncoiled above its middle section, curving alertly toward us. After a moment it darted back to the bit of cable, caught it with clustered limbs, dragged it off the road. Its tail segment turned white as it disappeared into the weeds.
“Did you see that?” McAble glanced at me and watched the weeds again. “The way it moved? And that white flash?”
“I saw it,” Gort snapped. “So what?”
“It doesn’t run,” McAble said. “It flies—even on the ground. The limbs aren’t legs. They’re manipulators. The wings don’t beat. They’re probably just for balance and control.”
“So what?” Gort repeated.
“Did you see. the frost on its tail?” McAble asked. “I think it’s kin to the space snakes. I think it flies with something like Nick’s beer-can drive.”
“I don’ give a nit how it flies.” Gort’s hea y-lidded eyes glared accusingly at me, as if he thought I had invited these invaders. “Hodian, what are the things? What are they up to here?”
“How—” My dry throat made only a croak. Then I managed: “How could I know, Major?”
ALL the reports of that ominous fog and the invading snakes had been disturbing enough, but they were still remote. This ant-shaped thing was here, as strange as they and probably still watching us blindly out of the weeds. A sense of creeping terror numbed me.
“Drive on,” Gort told the Navajo.
“Nick and Kyrie were in the building.” That recollection struck me like a club. “Yuri and Carolina, too. What’s become of them?”
“Dead,” Harry Horse muttered solemnly. “Killed when house fall in. Duckworth and Wiezell, tambien. Six people eaten por las hormigas metálica.”
“Maybe they got away,” McAble said. “The things don’t seem vicious.”
Harry Horse doubted that. He and Miraflores had come back in another car to scout the perimeter and military aircraft had been overflown and photographed the whole area. They had found only weeds and desert brush and el hormiguero de acero. The steel ant hill.
“I hope to God the kids are dead!” Gort grated suddenly. “If they’re alive it means they’ve been dealing with these invaders.”
“Huh?” McAble frowned at him. “How do you figure that?”
“In the first place, Nick and Kyrie aren’t exactly human.” Gort spoke with a whispery vehemence. “The general says they’ve never cared for anything except getting in touch with their own space kin. Hodian’s brother was showing them how to use that tetrahedron for a signal device. Who were they trying to signal?” His swollen eyes glared at me. “Maybe these mechanical ants—if that’s what you call ’em!”
Harry Horse was stopping the car near the end of the asterite strip. A weathered sign read QUARANTINE STATION and a side road ran two hundred yards toward a mound of brown earth where the building had stood.
“Let’s have a look.” With a nod at me McAble glanced at Gort. “You’ll wait, Major?”
“Don’t count on us,” Gort growled. “If anything happens—you asked for it.”
Not very eagerly, I climbed out after McAble. Harry Horse turned the car around, ready for a fast getaway. McAble was walking toward that new mound, not looking back. I followed him, breathing hard.
The pavement was empty. Our feet seemed too loud on it. We passed a clump of tall dead weeds grown where rain had stood in the ditch beside the road. I jumped and stopped when something rattled them, but McAble said it was the wind or maybe just a rat.
I felt sweat trickling down my ribs, though the day was not yet hot. McAble stopped ahead of me to kick at the mounded earth. Still dark with dampness, it was packed smooth and firm.
“Three hundred cubic yards of excavation.” He swept the mound with a calculating eye. “Maybe four. Plenty of room for Mr. Marko and the others, if they’re alive.”
I followed him up the smooth brown slope to a bright flat dome that crowned the hill. He made me hold a tape while he surveyed it. Twenty feet across, with a two-foot rise at the center. Six circular holes around the rim—the doorways—were sealed with metal plugs. He tried the metal with the point of a pocket knife and kneeled to put his ear against it.
“Listen!”
I caught a faint sharp odor like hot sulphur when I bent. The metal felt slick and warm. With my ear against it, I heard a murmuring hum, fainter and pitched higher than the sound of bees. When McAble tapped one of the plugs with the handle of his knife that busy whisper ceased for seconds. It came back slowly and didn’t stop when he tapped again.
“Nick would know every sort of code,” McAble said. “If he’s alive, we ought to get an answer.”
He kept rattling his knife against the metal and listening hopefully, but all we heard was that faint shrill drone, until Gort began honking impatiently for us and a military helicopter clattered overhead. McAble came reluctantly away.
“Move,” Gort barked as we came near the car. “The general called. He’s setting up a demolition raid on the anthill. He wants us out of the area.”
“Demolition?” McAble protested. “Is that necessary?”
“Get in,” Gort rapped. “Quick!” At his impatient nod Harry Horse pulled away before we had time to close the doors.
“Shouldn’t we wait?” I asked. “Suppose our friends are alive in that dome? Captives, maybe?”
“Their tough luck,” Gort growled. “The general’s afraid to wait.”
XV
HE FOLLOWED Gort through the barbed wire and sandbags into the headquarters building. Thorsen’s appearance shocked me. Wasted and shaking, he was a walking skeleton, animated now with terror. He clutched at McAble’s sleeve and asked a few hoarse questions about the steel anthill.
“I’ll give you another look,” he promised us, “after we’ve blown it out of the ground.” He shuffled toward the staff officers waiting. “The target area is now clear.” His quavery voice turned violent. “Attack!” he gasped. “We don’t know what the invaders are up to—but they’ve got to be exterminated.”
“Erik,” I tried to protest. “General Thorsen, your own daughter is probably in that dome. Along with Nick and the Markos and those security men. Captives, maybe. If they’re alive you’ll kill them all—”
“Hold it, Hodian.” He cut me sharply off. “The invaders have ignored our signals. They are a clear threat to the whole Skygate facility—perhaps to the human race. I refuse to be diverted by anybody. Our operation will proceed as planned.”
We watched from the headquarters roof. Heavy mortars chuffed behind us. Shells rained on the mesa, raising geysers of yellow dust. A spotter craft wheeled over the target.
“Fire ineffectual.” A laserman relayed the message to Thorsen. “Shells falling on target aren’t exploding, sir. We’ve had direct hits and near misses. But there is not a dent in that dome.”
Thorsen scowled at McAble and me.
“You surveyed the target,” his brittle voice crackled. “Can you account for this?”
“Maybe.” McAble shrugged. “We saw frost on one ant’s tail. Apparently they soak up energy like the space snakes do. Probably they’re de-energizing the fuses of shells that come within their range.”
“Then I’ll call in an air strike.”
“I wouldn’t advise it, sir.” McAble squinted shrewdly at the wheeling spotter plane. “I see no advantage—”
Shrill with frustration and fear, Thorsen ordered the air strike. The aircraft were invisible against the dazzle of the sun, their black bombs tumbling out of a serene and empty-seeming sky. Explosions winked and dust rose in yellow mushrooms and the mesa rumbled with dull thunder.
“Bombs not effectual, sir,” the laserman reported. “Visible explosions come from wide misses. No apparent damage to target.”
Thorsen called for napalm. Three flights of supersonic fighter-bombers crashed out of that smiling sky. Their bombs smeared the mesa with long streaks of yellow fire—which suddenly turned into drifting smoke.
“Spotter going down!” the laserman shouted. “Contact cut off—I don’t know how, sir. But his last call indicates napalm not effective. Target still intact. Something snuffed out the fire, sir.”
Shaking, Thorsen glared at McAble.
“I think it was that entropy-reversing field,” McAble told him. “I believe its range has been increased. I think it put out the fire—and caught the spotter, too. I think you’re beaten, sir.”
“You keep thinking,” Thorsen snapped. “I’m sending in the tanks.”
The tanks went in, converging from three directions. The air quivered with their engines. Tracer fire streaked out of the golden dust that thickened over them. Under the rolling dust cloud, their thunder-voices stuttered and died. The noise stopped; the dust cleared. The tanks stood frozen in a milewide circle around their goal.
“Have a look, Hodian.”
The desert danced and blurred in McAble’s binoculars, but at last I found the anthill. Dead missiles had furrowed the mound of earth, but that metal dome showed no scar. I found a green-and-gray splotched tank tipped into a missile crater, dead. Something crawled along its level gun. A silver-headed insect.
“Watch out, Hodian!”
McABLE caught my arm and hauled. The binoculars flew out of my hand. Men around me gasped and cursed and ran. A typewriter dropped out of the air, crashing into the roof where I had been standing. It rocked and clattered as a bright-headed ant squirmed from beneath it.
I heard a fine mosquito whine. The metal ant climbed over the smashed typewriter and darted at my knees, flying a foot off the roof.
Numb with terror, I couldn’t move. It stopped six feet away, hovering over the binoculars I had dropped. Its eyeless head rose and turned alertly. I smelled its hot brimstone reek.
“Back!” Dimly, I heard Gort’s whispery shout. “Stand back, you fool—”
Stumbling back, I saw men drawing guns.
“All together,” Gort called. “Aim for the head. Fire!”
The sun dimmed and lost its heat. A deep unpleasant chill sank into my bones. Bitterness coated my tongue. Shuddering and ill, I waited for the shots, but all I heard was an empty clacking.
“Watch its tail!” McAble sounded far away. “Hot with sucked-up energy. That’s why we feel so cold. And why gun-powder fails to burn.”
Its orange-sized tail segment was no longer black, but glowing dimly red. It settled toward the binoculars. Its bright snaky limbs explored them, wrapped them, clung. Its fine high whine grew louder as it rose—and that sulfur scent took my breath.
“Grab it!” Gort shouted. “For a specimen.”
I took one unwilling half-step. McAble came plunging past me. He crouched, reached—and crumpled like an unstrung puppet. The ant shot upward with the binoculars to vanish over the mesa.
Behind it the sun shone bright and hot. The roof-top crowd stood quiet for an instant. A sparrow was fluttering overhead, carrying a grass blade for its nest. I breathed again, gratefully—and saw Gort reloading and lifting his gun. Shattering that brief peace, his test shot exploded the sparrow.
Hysterical voices babbled. Thorsen hobbled into the elevator, half-carried by his shouting aides. McAble twitched and groaned where he had fallen. I helped him stand and he stumbled clumsily away, rubbing his icy hands together.
“Hodian.” Gort jogged my arm as we waited for the elevator. “We’ve got a rush job for you. The general wants a news release on the ants. Make ’em look harmless. Emphasize the fact that they aren’t known to have injured anybody. Play down our failure to damage them. Don’t connect them with the moon children—or the snakes or the fog. We’re taking adequate action to cope with them and the general says they’re under control.”
I WAS sweating at my desk that afternoon, still struggling to give the story some hint of conviction, when Suzie Thorsen knocked and slipped timidly into the room. “May I please speak to you?” Though she had always kept me at a certain distance, I still admired her dainty charm and her cleareyed joy in the comedy of life and even her patient fidelity to Thorsen. She wanted to talk about him now.
“Erik’s sick, Kim—and I don’t know what to do.” She looked pinched with worry, her eyes dark-rimmed. “The doctors think he has some unidentified exoform virus in his blood. He can’t sleep and he can’t eat and he has such dreadful headaches. I sometimes think he’s not quite sane. He ought to be hospitalized, but he won’t give up his job.”
I could say nothing useful. Though Thorsen’s sickness had been evident to me, he wasn’t likely to take my advice. All I actually did was take Suzie over to the nursery for a cup of coffee.
Military cargo craft were rumbling across the sky. Down the street, men in battle dress were loading trucks with files and boxes from the exobiology lab. Two sentries at the nursery door scrutinized our badges.
The kitchen inside was quiet, however—too quiet, with the children gone. Suzie made coffee. I poured a big slug of Mexican rum into mine, but she waved the bottle away. We sat a long time at the table, talking over her problems and my own.
The children had become the center of our lives. Involved in their long search for themselves, suffering with Kyrie in the conflict between Nick and Guy, excited by their splendid dream of the transgalactic terminal, we had been content to forget ourselves. Without them now, without Marko and Carolina, we both felt lost.
We needed each other. What we said was commonplace. I don’t recall many of the words, but I do remember the comfort of her smile and the candor of her voice and the delightful conviction that she was really fond of me.
We didn’t talk much about the ants. Their arrival was a final, unbelievable blow, so completely devastating that I had scarcely felt it yet. Trying not to think about them, I was pouring myself a second slug of rum when all three doors of the kitchen splintered inward.
“Hands up, Mr. Hodian!”
Men stormed in, guns pointing. Most of them were Space Force regulars, but the leader was one of Gort’s lieutenants. He looked sweaty and jittery but also somehow startled and apologetic.
“You’re under arrest, sir. Verbal orders from General Thorsen. No charges specified. We’re taking you to the security center. You aren’t allowed to communicate with anybody.”
Suzie begged them to wait while she called her husband, but they marched me out while she was on the phone. At the security center they took me to Gort. He was rummaging his office in a harried way, dumping drawers on his desk.
“Okay, Hodian.” His swollen eyes glanced once at me. “Here’s the situation. Ants are reported in the spaceplane hangars. Thorsen is calling in a nuclear strike. We’re evacuating Skygate ahead of the missiles. I’m escorting you to another post. Our plane should be ready now. The guards will see that you don’t talk to anybody.”
“What—what do you think I’ve done?”
“I don’t know, Hodian.” His savage eyes flashed back to me. “Whatever you’ve been up to, I intend to find it out. We’ve no time for any formal charges now. But you’re Tom Hood’s brother. You’ve been involved in space research and you’ve been close to all the children. You’re our best link to the ants.”
“Believe me, Major. I don’t know anything—”
He turned his back on me to dump another drawer. Our plane took off half an hour later. It was a big military transport, loaded with records from headquarters and the exobiology lab. The other passengers included McAble, Gort and a dozen of his men.
McAble was beside me in a window seat, still shaken and subdued from his skirmish with the ants. As we climbed I caught one glimpse of the mesa below a tipping wing—the zone of black craters and the circle of dead tanks around the untouched dome of the ant hill, which glinted in the sun like a lost coin.
“So Thorsen’s going to throw in the nukes.” McAble made a grim brown face. “He might as well throw in napalm to put out a fire. His missiles will be bread-and-butter for the ants.”
Nobody had announced our destination, but the wheeling plane turned east. Trying to avoid the snakes, we flew cautiously low through the mountain passes and on across the square-patterned brown and green of the plains. Occasional turbulence began to rock us and presently I saw the dark cloud towers of a weather front standing all along the east horizon.
The turbulence increased. Rags of cloud whipped by. We bored into a blue wall of storm. The plane pitched and shivered. Rain streaked the window. We turned and climbed and burst out at last. Above the dazzling pillars of white, the sky was darkly blue.
“Uh-oh!” McAble frowned. “We’re too high.”
Not much later, everything grew darker. The cloud summits lost their dazzle. Fangs of cold sank into me. My tongue turned bitter. I heard the engines cough and die and knew a snake was diving on us.
XVI
I WAS numb and shuddering from loss of body heat, nearly as dead as the plane. Wrapped in its eerie quiet, I was barely aware of the rushing speed, of Gort’s whispery curse, of McAble’s sudden nudge. Turning painfully, stiff as if my tingling skin were already ice, I saw the snake.
A long serpentine shadow, transparent as black-veined glass. Its heart was a jagged crystal mass, smoldering with dull inner fire like an uncut diamond. Two plumes of blue light spread out of the crystal, wings of cold fire. Powered with our own stolen heat, it swept in fast.
A bright pulse beat in the wide blue sprays. Perhaps the creature was sending some signal of friendship or warning. Perhaps it felt companionable. Perhaps it simply needed our heat. Its alien grace was as meaningless to me as the bitterness lingering in my mouth.
The plane nosed down and the snake was gone. The snowy clouds were dazzling again. I gulped, shuddered and got my breath. Gort lurched past us toward the cockpit, shouting orders at the crew, but the engines failed to start.
We spun down through a storm, through boiling clouds and battering winds, through darkness and lightning and jarring thunder, through rain and savage hail to a rough belly landing.
