Survivor, page 14
He was totally inaudible. I waved back.
He said something else. He made gestures. They were very expressive gestures, but I didn’t know what they were trying to express.
I made some gestures, too. Hands spread wide. Wrinkled puzzlement on noble brow. Appeal for help in raised eyebrows.
He got the idea. I could see him get it; he mouthed: “Oh,” which I could lip-read without trouble, and raised one finger.
Wait one something, obviously. Hour? Minute? Second?
Less than a minute, more than a second. His voice came booming out into my small room with the effect of God handing down the rulebook for mankind.
“Sorry about that,” God said. “Forgot we were switched off up here.”
Engineers do have a tendency that way—the royal “we,” I mean. Most control-room engineers have the strong belief that they run the lives of the people out in the studio. The trouble with that belief is that it is, to a certain small extent, true.
And Harry was being a control-room engineer. In his element.
“Now we’re switched on,” I said, into the mike. “What do I—”
“You don’t have to talk into that,” Harry said. “Not to me. That’s just the loudspeaker hookup. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll cut you in.”
“Okay,” I said, in Harry’s general direction. “I’m going to want this to go out on loudspeaker and phone both, so I’ll make the general phone-link call and then talk into my phone and the speaker, both. All right?”
“What about feedback?” Harry said.
“I don’t know,” I said patiently. “What about it?” He thought for a second. Anyhow, he pursed his lips and wrinkled his forehead. “I know how we can work it,” he said. “Can you detach your phone?”
“Sure.”
“Then detach it and give it to me. I’ll take it up here.” Now and then he was just Harry, for brief seconds; then he became We again. “We’ll hook it up to a control-room auxiliary speaker—so the phone will be picking up just what goes out over the speakers. No double-miking, no feedback; we can manage it.”
“Great,” I said.
For one second I stood, frozen.
Tom had been acting, and had fooled me.
If Harry were acting, too…
No. If Harry had been acting, or Liz, or Raythorne, they’d never have helped me rig the phone link, or got us all out of the burning house, or…
They were safe; they were human. The Vesci had needed only one spy.
Harry had disappeared again. The door of the closet opened and he came toward me with his hand out.
I fiddled with the connections and unclipped my phone and handed the thing to him. “Take good care of it,” I said. “It’s the only one I have left.”
“You know,” Harry said casually, “a heli could probably lay a bomb right on top of this building, and wipe us all out.”
“If he had a big enough bomb. Which he doesn’t—whoever’s in that heli—because big, dependable bombs take time to build, and there weren’t any ready-made. Not on Cub IV, not after twenty years of peace and quiet.”
“Still…” Harry sighed.
I waved him back. “Okay, it’s possible,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, we could all be dead in the next ten seconds. Now get back to home base.”
He went into the closet.
I’d been accurate: the thing I’d given Harry was my only phone. But it was not my only communicator.
A space-four channel straight back to the Comity worlds, ready to be piped into any handy starship, was what I’d been holding back. As I say, I do draw some weight. Not enough to call for a fleet to evacuate all of humanity from the planet. Enough, I was fairly sure, for one ship, and one specified duty.
And one carefully chosen crew and captain, too.
I cupped my mouth with my hand, and I talked straight into the communicator; it doesn’t even look like a phone, it’s a flat plate maybe three inches square, and I usually wear it along one hip, far enough forward so it doesn’t stab me when I sit down, far enough back so it doesn’t stab me when I walk either.
Harry was waiting, up there. I had to take a few minutes—and it had to be in as solitary a spot as I could get. That room looked like my best chance.
I got through fairly fast—individual space-four communicators are by no means standard-issue equipment for civilians, and when a civilian suddenly starts a call on one he is likely to get a great deal of instant attention—and I made my requests. I had to go over the whole thing a couple of times, in varying degrees of detail.
People kept saying: “But that’s impossible!” when I told them about the Vesci.
Very well, it was impossible. But it was happening. And the actual things that happen don’t care in the slightest what you call them, impossible or weird oi green cheese—I finally made that point. From there on it was fairly simple.
And it didn’t really take too long; three minutes, maybe. At most, four. Harry kept looking up, apparently waiting for the bomb that wasn’t going to happen.
We were all through with bombs—mostly.
I cut out of circuit and tucked the flat plate away, and took a deep breath. Harry was still staring straight up.
“Harry.”
“What?” he said. His head came back to normal position. “Oh. You’re ready now?”
“I’m ready now,” I said.
“I’ll make the call. I think everybody within reach ol a phone will pick up on us.”
“They ought to; I’ve been the main broadcast link since all this started.” I waited while Harry punched ir his code, and phones all over Cub IV’s city and country human habitations began to ring and buzz and flash.
Another minute, maybe. Then he looked at me. “Okay, Knave,” he said. “You’re on.”
I took another deep breath.
“This is a final notice, not a drill,” I said. “I’m talking to everybody I can reach—every human being every alien. I want you all to hear this one.
“Many of you know me, or know my reputation. You know I can get things done—some very big things done, when they’re needed. And they’re needed now. We’ve been in a war, and there’s been a lot of bloodshed. That war has to be stopped.
“All right: it’s stopped.
“I have notified Comity starships that the entire .human population of this planet is to be picked up and resettled elsewhere. There are other new worlds open; you won’t be going to any world already settled.” That was to remove temptation from the imitation-humans in the listening crowd. “Besides, no alien would be able to stand a long space trip; the distance would cut him off from the network here. I don’t think that’s a pleasant prospect.
“Nor is it a necessary one. The human beings will be leaving this planet. At 1300 hours tomorrow, every human being within sound of my voice—and every other one you can find and inform—should be at the landing-field—the original colonist’s landing field.
“Arrangements have been made to pick you up there. Humanity will stop this war—by leaving Cub IV alone.
“I am authorized to make my statement an instruction, with the full power of the Comity backing it.
“Every human being is to be at the landing field at 1300 hours tomorrow. There are no exceptions. There should be no delays.
“And you others—you non-human beings within sound of my voice—know now that further fighting is unnecessary. All you have to do is to wait until 1300 hours tomorrow afternoon. At that time we will all be at the field, and you will be—on this planet, alone.
“I suggest that you return any human beings under your control, if you can. I can’t give you orders. But any human being not at that field at that time will be presumed to be taken over by aliens—no matter whether or not he acts like it. Some of them, as you may have found out, don’t.
“I can’t instruct the aliens. I am not trying. But I am instructing the human beings.
“Be at the field. Be there on time. All of you. This is an order—direct from the Comity.”
I switched off.
I signalled Harry to cut the loudspeaker link. He did something in the control room, and nodded back at me. I was off the air.
It would work: I had a reputation to trade on, and orders from the Comity were not to be fooled with. The human beings would be at the field, as specified.
Most of them, anyhow.
I waited for Harry, and took my phone back. I made a couple of fast, individual calls to places I knew were safe.
Then I went down to the courtroom again.
Tom and Doris were still tied. It was Tom who opened his eyes and looked at me.
“There will be no more fighting,” he said.
I looked back. “Somehow,” I said, “I don’t want to hear it from you. I don’t want to hear anything from you. I know you’re all the same, with the same message—”
“There will be no more fighting,” Doris chipped in. Natural voice, no trace of the alien monotone.
The masquerade, as far as these two were concerned, was over. I had a few minutes to indulge curiosity in: “Tell me something,” I said to her. “How is it that some of you can retain human characteristics—or fake them—and most can’t?”
“We do not know,” Doris said. “Some few—those whose minds are most resistant, among the many we have added to our network; the few we very nearly could not touch at all—retain individual habit patterns of speech and motion. As we learned this, we were able to use it, or suppress it—whichever seemed best tactically at the time.”
My eyebrows went up. “What do you people—you things—know about tactics? What you’ve picked up from us?”
“You are not the first race we have met,” Doris said. As I listened, I thought I could catch a faint alien undertone in her voice, a sort of accent.
Maybe it had been in Tom’s voice, too, right along. I didn’t know, or want to know.
“What happened to the others?”
“They were not resistant,” Doris said. “We have never found a resistant race before.”
I got quite a lecture on Vesci history. What I learned, I used to start this report with.
After a while, I wasn’t interested any more. I was just—sick.
Human beings have a bloodier history. But there is something about the idea of mental control…
Maybe it’s just me. Anyhow, I said: “All right. Let’s go home.”
Raythorne looked up from tending Jimmy. “We can move him just like Tom, now,” she said calmly. “He doesn’t need special support. He’ll be conscious in an hour, perhaps less.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s get going.”
Somehow, we spent the time until 1300 hours the next afternoon. There wasn’t much to do, but we ate and slept—crowded into Liz’s small box of a house, which hadn’t been burned out. I did my best with the materials at hand, but I doubt I turned out anything fit for writing down or remembering; Liz was, and is, beautiful, sane and competent, but she’s not much of a cook and she doesn’t keep much in store.
Well, it was something to do. I did it.
XXVI
I also found opportunities to talk to Liz, to Raythorne and even to Jimmy. Hell, I even talked to Harry.
One at a time, casual, private. Doris and Tom were still with us, which was the way I wanted it; they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Naturally, they wouldn’t be going to the field, unless the Vesci dropped control—and I didn’t really think they would. I thought, without too much data, that any mind the Vesci had once owned was theirs for keeps, spoiled for any other use.
As it turned out, I was right. We’d had to be cautious; we’d had to hope for the return of so many human beings…
Hope again. They tell me it’s a virtue. God knows it makes enough trouble to be a virtue.
And by 1300 hours, the next afternoon, the entire human population of Cub IV was at that field.
The most common single sentence I heard was: “We’ll be back.”
I’d told the Vesci: we were human beings. We didn’t like being kicked off real estate we’d settled.
And we weren’t about to be.
I mingled with the field crowds for a bit; they started assembling before noon and I had some time to walk back and forth and eavesdrop. I kept hearing that same thing:
“We’ll be back.”
And at 1300 hours, they were all at the field—every last one—waiting.
All, of course, except for us.
Liz, Raythorne, Harry, about half of the hospital’s human staff, a few others I’d handpicked…
Jimmy had wanted to come along. Raythorne had to tell him very authoritatively that he was in no condition to move around. He said he felt fine. She said she was sure he would feel fine, if he stayed flat on his back fora few days.
I sided with Raythorne.
And at about 1301, we started out.
Large bombs are difficult and time-consuming to make, not to mention tricky; most of the stuff you can make large-scale explosives out of has the interesting habit of going off in your hands if you cough the wrong way, or something of the sort.
But great stores of simple gases can be made in almost no time at all. And we’d had the perfect headquarters for that: we’d had the hospital, where only human staff was allowed to move freely. Such aliens as there were inside the hospital were tied down the way Jimmy had been—tubing and all the rest; they were injuries the staff had been trying to treat.
I wondered about imitation-humans, but Raythorne and one of the staff doctors had shelved that question.
“We don’t need a large crew for this work,” the staff doctor had said. “And we can pick just the ones we do need—the ones we have absolutely no doubts about.”
Since I knew what made for immunity—and what, in smaller quantities, made for resistance—I could see how the picking was going to be done. And it did look all right.
Unless some imitation stumbled into the working labs…
“Nobody will stumble into the working labs,” Raythorne told me. “We’ve fixed that up nicely. It seems one of the staff members has come down with a very painful and highly communicable disease. He’s in a whole wing by himself, sealed off—in fact, a small department at the hospital is drawing up special plans to get him off-planet with the rest of us, without risking contagion, when the starships arrive.”
Very neat: I wished I’d thought of it myself.
By 1300, we had our materials, and by 1301 we were on the way to the hospital to collect them—by car, heli, anything that moved.
It was a lovely gas, a descendant of the preSpace anaesthetics like cyclopropane. Its aftereffects were mild—a few people would throw up, a few feel dizzy for a while—an hour or so, not more. And it acted a good deal faster than cyclopropane did, and over a much wider area; you could drop it like tear gas, and watch it spread for almost a mile in any direction.
We had the attack planned: we made a lot of overlapping circles of one-mile radius (a little under a mile, actually; we played it as safe as possible, all the way), and we covered the whole of the city and country, anywhere Cub IV colonists had lived, and anywhere they might have got to.
We didn’t cover the swamps. Nobody had the slightest idea what the gas would do to Vesci metabolisms; and it wasn’t really important, in any case.
Without humans to do their work, the Vesci were out of the running.
And the humans had human metabolisms. They were dropping like flies, all over the inhabited area of the planet.
We didn’t run into any opposition at all for the first half-hour. Then, as the aliens began to collect their wits, a few humans we hadn’t reached got to helis of their own and set out to try to do something about us.
Helis don’t come equipped with weapons—not on Cub IV. But a pilot can carry a beamer, or a slug gun—and it’s a fairly stable platform to shoot from.
But we knew which planes were ours, and where each one was supposed to be at a given time.
Strangers blundering into our areas never got a chance to fire. We fired first.
A crashlanded heli may not kill, or even seriously damage, its pilot. We were aiming for the rotors wherever possible.
Damn it, we did not want to kill anybody. Where was the sense in that?
But I think three imitation-humans, three who’d been taken over and were flying helis to stop us, did die before we were through. There was no way in the world to avoid that.
I wish there had been. I kept remembering Rame Janssen, the only one I’d killed personally. Maybe one of the few aliens who had died in our small war.
I didn’t like to think about him. Or the three in the helis. Or the others I’d had no hand in at all, the ones who had died in one fight or another as humans and aliens chose sides and began to slug it out…
By 1350, thereabouts, we had the situation nicely in command.
Harry went into operation then—Harry and, because it was a job he could do, Jimmy.
Harry had a hand speaker rig—a sort of extra-superpower loud-hailer—which he’d put together out of God knows what in the Government Building—old bits of string and spit, for all I knew. He’d been riding as passenger in one plane, and when that plane was finished its assigned path, it swung away and headed for the field.
I wasn’t in it. I was busy in another plane.
But I kept wondering. If, for some mad reason, imitation humans had decided to go along to the field, come with the ordinary humans and wait there to be taken off the planet…
By the time Harry got there, they’d know what had happened; they’d know that all their fellows were unconscious.
And they’d try fighting back. There was no other move for them to make, hopeless or not. If they went offworld, they were out of the net—so going with the human beings on the starships made no sense. If they stayed on, they had to do battle with us, at terrific odds; and in order to get any chance at all, they had to start fast. They had to get away from the field crowd, get back to where they could find weapons, where they could oppose us, before our job was done—they had to get the jump on us, if they could.
