Survivor, page 7
Raythorne checked me and Tom, made a few adjustments in bandaging, and went off to bed—first upstairs guest-room. Jimmy and Tom had a brief argument with me about setting a watch, which I won, and they went off—second guest-room. Liz was bedded down with Raythorne, no argument at all. Sex, or love, or the Life Force, or whatever it is you happen to call it, just had not had time to raise its teeny head.
I sat in the living room, instructed the Totum to spread its eyes and ears to its under-slavies, my two Robbies, and tell me instantly of anything unusual—and had to spend ten minutes defining “unusual”: have you ever tried it, even with a good Totum?
I also asked him to bring me coffee, if there was any left.
Compliment to my householder’s abilities: I had to go and make a fresh pot.
Well, it took up some time.
And when I had the coffee and a cigarette to hand, I took one deep breath and did the only sensible thing. I got on the phone.
When Harry was finished, and we’d gotten his gimmick attached to the main exchange, we’d know it all; we’d be in contact with everybody. But that was going to take time, and it was full of ifs; meanwhile, I could tap a few people, here and there, and find out just what sort of thing was actually happening.
I spent five hours on the phone. I woke some people, not many; a lot seemed to be keeping an all-night watch, splitting time with their wives or husbands or children. (Totums are not very good at that sort of thing. For one thing, you have to define “unusual”: for another, they will not harm human beings. And a Something would be a human being, to a Totum. Waking a human to take care of the unusual event would be time-consuming; and time, everybody did seem to realize, we didn’t have. No: watches were kept by humans. Or what I was fairly sure were humans.)
And I suppose I could give you the word-for-word data on every damn call. I’m a basically nice guy; I’ll do it the way the Comity news people do it when they beam their dailies out this way in space-four. Like so:
Item: of the four Reagans, three had got home, and none without injury; they were on pain pills and home bandages and such. Seems Carlion Lindorenyko had not been immune.
The Lindorenykos were noted for their size and strength. Carlion—or what had been Carlion—had just picked up the car the Reagans were driving home in and flipped it straight backward. They’d stopped at his signal, thinking maybe he’d been stranded and needed help.
The car had actually turned over twice, by some freak, and landed right-side-up; and before Carlion could get to it the Reagans were away. But they’d been thoroughly shaken up, and there seemed to be a broken bone or two in among the list of casualties.
Item: Carol Dennis wasn’t answering the phone. Her sister Freida was; but Freida had been taken over. The voice wasn’t one I was likely to mistake. I asked her where Carol was. She only said that we all were going to leave, and they could not be resisted. I thought I heard some sounds deep in the background, but I couldn’t be sure; and after the third go-round on the Somethings not being resisted I hung up. Note the Dennis household for action, as soon as possible.
Item: some damn fool—human or otherwise—had set fire to the Graumann house. I got the details from the Fredericks family, who worked the next farm; the Graumann place was burning merrily as they watched. Two of the Fredericks boys had gone out to see if they could be any help—commendable reflexes, but not showing a great deal of sense, under the circumstances. Mrs. Fredericks was beginning to break under the strain; the boys had gone two hours before and she’d had no word. Gene Fredericks said they’d be back, sure, trying to sound as confident as all blazes. I remembered they had a daughter, Dorene. I asked about her. Gene said: “Forget it. We’re not—worrying about Dorene any more.” So I knew what had happened there.
Item…but a few samples are enough. I got five hours of it, and the net totals looked pretty clear. The human race was losing. My original guess figures seemed to be about right: nearly half of the population had been taken over, and the other half seemed to be wholly immune. (Was there something in that to work on? I filed it. What did we have in common, the ones who were still human?) It should have been an even battle—maybe. Hell, we seemed to have a slight edge in the numbers: why weren’t we ahead?
Trouble is, most human beings are like me in one very important respect.
They don’t like to kill.
Oh, they will, given enough reason for it, and given enough training—and there are always the maniacs, the ones who’ve got too damned much reason-for-killing filling their heads (the little green men told them to; that sort of thing) or the ones who don’t need any reason at all, the ones who kill because it’s convenient. And there are the very, very few who really like it.
It’s a bell curve, more or less—talk to an analytic psychologist for the figures, if there are any, and I’m sure there are; those people have figures for everything—with the total pacifists at one end, the ones who simply will not kill under any circumstances whatever, and the ones who find killing fun at the other end, both terribly small minorities.
In between is the human race.
And the human race needs a fairly strong reason for killing. Just like me; I think in that area I’m somewhere near average.
God knows the aliens were reason enough, when you saw one coming at you, when you heard one telling you he couldn’t be stopped and he was going to stop you.…
But reasons take time to be believed, thought out, and acted on. That alien looks exactly like your Aunt Winifred, which adds to the delay. A human being needs time to decide to kill; he needs a little more time to decide to kill something he knows is an alien, but sees as a human being he’s grown up with.
And the aliens needed no time at all.
They knew what they were doing: they were ridding the planet of its pests.
They had the jump on us from the start, and they weren’t about to lose that advantage.
The Reagans stopped for Carlion Lindorenyko. Two Fredericks boys—with an example in their own family!—had gone out to help the Graumanns.
That sort of thing was their advantage.
Five hours of phoning told me they were making the best possible use of it.
We were behind. And unless I could find a whole lot of rabbits to pull out of some hats I was going to have to find somewhere, we were going to stay behind.
Until, of course, we just weren’t around any more.
XI
I slept some. So did everybody else except Harry. He didn’t seem bothered by staying awake for sixteen hours or so—a lot more, come to think of it; I never did ask him when he’d slept last. He looked a little more mournful, maybe, but that was about it.
Apparently, with a nice problem to work on, he didn’t need sleep. But the rest of us did.
And the night went by, and the morning. Early afternoon, we were all awake, and milling around the house. I’d filled the rest in on my phone checks, and nobody was anxious to do many more. Raythorne had to call the hospital—Tom had to call Tobor Raisford—Jimmy had to call his folks (1 told him I’d already done that, which was true, and that they were all okay—which might have been true. The parents sounded human, but Jimmy had a two-year-old sister. Would the aliens take over a two-year-old child? And how would you tell, for sure, if they did?)…only Liz had no calls to make.
They used the phone. Raythorne got a progress report, which was good news, for a change—apparently that first battle had tipped the balance out there, and human beings were still in control. The emergency wards were full-staffed with every available attendant as well as the doctors and mechs, and all armed with needles full of sleepy stuff. That situation sounded as if it would stay solid: doctors have a faster reaction time than the general populace anyhow, and a lot less resistance to overcome when they know they’re just putting somebody harmlessly to sleep, not killing him.
The hospital was human-controlled. It was busy; Raythorne quite obviously thought about going back there, and decided the team needed her more where she was. But it was, more or less, running.
Tobor Raisford’s phone didn’t answer.
We knew Tobor was immune (or we thought we did). I didn’t have any soothing words to offer. Tom looked a little blank, and then settled down to wait. He kept rubbing the stock of the rifle I’d given him.
Jimmy did call his folks; well, you couldn’t really expect second-hand reassurance to satisfy him. Apparently the call went off peacefully. He came back looking almost relaxed, until he got a glance at Tom’s face.
Early afternoon: Harry came up out of the garage and tramped into the living-room. He looked around at us. “Got it,” he said. “If you think it’s going to do any good, it’s all ready.”
“Now, all we have to do is hook it in,” I said. “Right?”
“If you think we can get into the Exchange,” Harry said. “But they must be guarding—”
“Leave that to me,” I said. Harry was off on a flight of depression; I didn’t need him spreading the gloom around.
Tom’s face was doing enough of that. Liz had gone over to his chair to talk to him, but there had been no result. Whatever he was feeling wouldn’t dent or melt; and that’s the way his face looked.
More than that, we distinctly did not need.
Reasons for working alone…you know how long a list that is, when you sit down and think about it?
But for the moment…
Harry was looking at me with his eyebrows raised a little.
“I have a plan,” I said.
Well, Hell. I had, if you want to know.
Maybe it would even work.
The Central Exchange was a building by itself, on a block by itself, three stories high (with no divisions between the stories—no real floors except at ground level, just walkways), without windows. There were four ground-level doors, one per side of this box, all of them leading to walkways inside that made the place a giant maze. There were elevators at every intersection and more walkways strung here and there from various units at what might have been second-floor level or third-floor level. It was like a three-dimensional chess setup, with every square filled with machinery: the walkways and elevators were the lines between the squares.
Harry’s gimmick had to go up near the top, at a location he described as C3AA45. He said he could point it out to me.
If anybody was waiting for us—and I had to agree, it sounded like a sensible thing to do, guarding the Exchange, just on general principles—they had to be at the four doors.
So we weren’t going in any of them.
We were going to make our own door.
There were four of us—the four men. Harry because somebody had to do the pointing, and if possible the attaching (he’d drilled Jimmy in the job as well as possible, just in case). Me because I was the local expert, and, such as it was, it was my plan. Jimmy because we needed a backup for Harry, and Jimmy was our fastest volunteer. And Tom because nobody could have left Tom sitting home staring at nothing with that face.
We took the Hell of a lot of equipment.
And we parked one block away from the Exchange building. That block had a two-story-high building on a comer near the Exchange. We got out of the car and walked around to the building, keeping it between us and any possible Exchange guards. We climbed a flight of stairs with all the damn equipment split up among the four of us, and got out onto the roof.
The building was a lumber-supply company, or what passed for it: not actual lumber, but plastic imitations, strong enough to use for building small additions to your house or farm. The company was closed down, but I know a little about locks, here and there. In a way, I was vaguely surprised the company even had locks; most private houses didn’t.
What we needed was a good long slab of imitation wood, as strong and as light as possible.
It wasn’t on the second floor.
Sure: it was on the ground floor. The staircase was a straight slope—if it had been a curve, I suppose we would have figured out something else, but that much luck we did have—and we snaked it up the slope, returning to the second floor to see it lying there with its end at the far wall. The thing was better than sixteen feet—long enough, figuring a seven-foot rise between buildings and a thirteen-foot (by local statute) space for the street. Pythagoras gives you the answer: the seven-foot rise and the distance between buildings were the sides of a right-angle triangle; we were going traveling on the hypotenuse.
The lumber-supply building had an access door to the roof. I went up the ladder and propped it open and stood there, letting Tom and Jimmy do the heavy work of snaking the board around so it stuck up along the ladder and up past me into midair.
We snaked it out onto the roof. Harry came along last with the bag of equipment on a long rope.
And then we swung it around until it touched the Exchange building roof, one story higher up. Pythagoras had not let us down: it fit.
We were making very little noise.
I sent Tom and Jimmy down the ladder to get more plastic imitation stuff and they came back and weighted down our end of the bridge with it.
The other end just sat there, on the Exchange roof. Maybe it would shift, maybe not.
I took most of the equipment with me as a weight—strung out in a sling on that long rope straight behind me.
I went across. On my hands and knees.
The board seemed to have a tendency to sideslip. I kept feeling that the string of stuff behind me was going to catch on something, though there was nothing for it to catch on: that board was smooth.
I took it an inch at a time, feeling like the center ring at one of your better circuses.
Halfway across, a beam put a nice smoking hole in my board, six inches in front of my nose. Somebody back on the two-story let out a yell.
A guy on the ground, firing straight up. I didn’t move; where the Hell was there to go? Another hole appeared, smoking, a foot ahead of me; the guy was shooting by guess, calculating where I had to be from the way the board bellied down. He was close—maybe he’d figured me to keep going, and was leading me—but he wasn’t going to get any closer.
I hoped.
I swear I did the single slowest draw in the history of the human race.
He had time for a nice, careful third shot before I had my gun out. I should have had it in my hand right along—but that character was the one I never expected.
They do say it’s the surprises that kill you.
His third shot nicked the edge of the board, still six inches off. At the rate he was going, two more shots would be enough even if he missed me: he’d have put enough holes in the board to snap it, and a two-and-a-half-story drop didn’t sound healthy. Not that the drop mattered: there he’d be at the bottom, waiting to finish me off with one more little beam.
It seemed as if my luck had run out.
Maybe it took me thirty seconds to draw. I was trying to stay balanced all this time. I leaned slightly out toward my right and the damn board leaned with me. I heard the equipment string begin to slide, and stop as I pushed back.
The guy underneath was waiting. Somebody was still yelling over on the two-story, but I couldn’t distinguish words.
Advice, maybe.
The street guy had all the time in the world. He had to see me shift and then pull back; now he was waiting for a good clear shot. I confused him a little, moving from side to side.
Good for me. As I got back to dead center, I leaned out again—damn quick. My gun was out further than my head. I pushed the gun arm down as I fired, to minimize recoil—with that job, it’s considerable, and if I hadn’t compensated it could have blown me backward right off the board.
I had to be a good shot.
Surprise: I am a good shot.
I’d caught him the first time I leaned over. The second time I didn’t have to locate him; all I had to do was shoot where I’d already seen him. He wasn’t going any more places than I was.
And I hit his right knee, believe it or not. He had one leg stuck out in front of him. I’d aimed for the shoulder or the head. I was off just enough to blow his knee to little pebbles.
He was lucky: he wasn’t conscious long. There is no worse pain in the world, they tell me—ancient duellists used to try to kill most of their targets, but the ones they really hated got “starred” kneecaps. It may not kill you (though in the duelling days the state of medicine was such that I would not bet on it); but you wish it had.
Plain simple luck, his and mine.
Ant time running out. I took one deep breath and went on across the bridge. I made it to the other side without incident, and weighted it down with the equipment I pulled in behind me. Now it was more or less safe (though I would never have recommended it to your average pedestrian); it was anchored at both ends.
I was making hurry-up signs. The others made it one by one, just fast enough; a shot burned the board behind Harry as he stepped off onto the roof. We were standing on more of the same imitation stuff: it’s not only strong; it’s also nonconductive.
Down below, of course, there were now three guards, minimum, all waiting for us to get inside the building. My gun is noisy, but they hadn’t needed that. Telepathic, remember?
I didn’t envy the three conscious ones the memory of that knee.
What we had to begin with was a very tight beam and a set of metal prongs. I beamed two tiny holes in the roof—bursts fast enough so they just barely went through, and didn’t damage God knows what equipment underneath—and stuck in the prongs. Then I beamed a large circle around the holes.
I was waiting for them to blow up the building.
Damn it, they were telepaths. What did they need Central Exchange for?
I filed the question. Tom had hold of the prongs. We all stood clear. He jerked the circle straight out.
All we had to do was drop down to a walkway maybe eight feet below us.
These walkways are fairly wide—made for man or Robbie, or even Totum. An eight-foot drop is perfectly reasonable.
