Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines Page 3

  The doctor had overheard part of the conversation. He was human, a dark little man with a dark little mustache. “I give you one piece of advice,” he said grimly, “stay away from Billings.”

  “What?”

  “Billings—him; the man you were talking to. He’s been working for the bugs since they landed in Australia.”

  Pinky said, “But aren’t you working for them?” The doctor did not answer, unless the extra, unnecessary twist of the blood-sampling needle was an answer. There were a lot like the doctor in the bubbles—policemen, doctors, a few elected officials of towns, who saw only one duty and that was to continue at their jobs. They worked for the bugs, but not as Billings did.

  Twenty minutes later the doctor had completed his blood tests. “Do I pass? Pinky demanded eagerly. “You know, do I get to breed?”

  The doctor looked at him thoughtfully. Abruptly, he laughed. He erased a little mark on the paper and substituted another. “I think you do,” he said.

  Pinky didn’t understand the doctor’s laughter for several hours.

  Then the five of the lot who had been selected were led into a long, narrow, white room with a bank of refrigerators against one wall and a remarkable quantity of test tubes, flasks, glass tubing and other chemical-looking instruments on benches against the other. The five potent studs stared at each other, until a sour-faced human male, wearing a laboratory smock, came reluctantly in to start them on their duties.

  There was a storm of questions; the man said, “Oh, shut up, all of you. I hate this job.”

  Meanwhile there was a war on, and we were losing it.

  I don’t know all the battles that were fought, I only know we didn’t win them. I saw the atomic cannon on Cape Cod, I heard about the George Washington’s attempt to penetrate the Atlantic Coast bubble, which resulted in its flooding and sinking in a hundred fathoms of water. We heard that the Russians had managed to penetrate with a plywood missile, built with a ceramic skin and guided by a human kamikaze volunteer. There was a latrine rumor that the Canadians got through with a whole squadron of gliders. But whatever results were achieved were invisible from outside the bubbles.

  The one small victory that went to the human race came through Lt. Lauchheimer and myself. We buried ourselves in a little cave off a railroad tunnel, just outside Worcester, Massachusetts. We were there four weeks before the Sirians got around to expanding the bubble to include us. They finally did; and the gamble paid off.

  We were inside the bubble with a live bomb.

  According to Intelligence, its information derived from correlating the accounts of returned missionaries, our target was a Sirian scout vessel in the mathematical center of the sphere; blow that up, and the bubble would burst. We did. It did. We traveled at night and never saw a Sirian. At night the bubble was a wet-looking, faintly luminous lavender shroud. Lauchheimer had a portable electronic gizmo which triangulated the center for us. We found the center, located the ship, fused the bomb, had an hour to get away, did . . . and saw, in the first rays of the morning sun, a great mushrooming cloud that rose into a blue, bubble-free sky.

  Paratroopers captured four live Sirians; eight others were found dead from the blast.

  That was what gave Lauchheimer and me our Congressional Medals.

  The hostages didn’t stay with us very long. They were brought to Washington too, for study. Ten minutes after we got our medals—flicker, whine—there was a sudden surge of color and a distant sound; the sun outside the White House window went purple and we were all caught.

  Some months after that I found myself sharing a kennel with Pinky Postal.

  III

  I had not expected to see him there, though I suppose I could have guessed it. I knew more than he, though. I knew that the Sirians’ idea of breeding was by no means the joyous sport that had inspired troubadours and axe-killings for thousands of years. After all, we use artificial insemination on our domestic animals, why should the Sirians be less efficient?

  I knew enough, in fact, to have tried to avoid the breeding farm, for more reasons than one. Destiny makes games of our intentions; I was selected out of a thousand casual laborers in the work camp near Bethesda, and trucked to the farm overnight.

  Pinky was thin, pale, trembling. He recognized me at once. “Help me, Harry! I got to get out of this place.”

  I looked around the place. It had been the Bethesda Naval Hospital at one time, with changes made by the bugs. It was now one enormous lying-in home, with beds for eighteen hundred women, dormitories for thousands more in the grounds around, and a special small detention home for we fortunate donors.

  “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” I said.

  Pinky had lost forty pounds, and there was no more flesh on his arms than on a spider crab’s, but he surprised me. Without a word he jumped at my throat.

  I beat him off with difficulty. “All right! It was a joke.”

  He slumped in a heap, whining, “Oh, Harry! I been here fourteen months and one of the bug boys tells me I have a hundred and twenty-three kids already, and more on the way, and—And, I swear, the closest I’ve been to a woman is looking at them out the window. You know what? They’ve got some of my—they’ve got samples, you know, in the deep freeze. They could kill me tomorrow and I’d go right on having kids for maybe twenty years. Harry! I didn’t know it would be like this at all.”

  I left him and looked out the window. There was an exercise yard, a mess hall, a community shower—and a wall. Donors were not allowed outside of it.

  I said, “You ought to feel honored. There are only ten of these stud farms in the world.”

  “And they’re all the same—all this artificial insemination?”

  “All exactly the same, Pinky. I’m sorry.” That was a lie, of course—about being sorry; why would anyone waste compassion on Pinky Postal? But I was committed to telling lies. I could not trust him with the truth.

  “Maybe it will work out all right,” I said vaguely, reassuring not him but myself.

  It had to. Something had to. Of the twenty-five of us who were abruptly sworn in as intelligence officers when the bubble closed in over Washington—the last real hope of any organized effort against the bugs—I was pretty sure that I was the only survivor.

  The only hope of accomplishing anything against the Sirians lay in the possibility of destroying their central high command which was not a Sirian, or at any rate not an organic Sirian, but a machine. A computer. It did not rule them, but it detailed their plans.

  There was a chance, said the general who swore us in, that if we destroyed the computer they would be confused and weakened, then we might get at them with conventional arms.

  I followed Pinky’s example and made friends with the man in the green brassard, Billings. I had no cigars. “I want to help you,” I told him.

  “My oath.” He sat down with contempt and lit a cigarette with loathing. “You chaps get queerer every day.”

  I wheedled, “You never know, Billings. They might put you on stud any day.”

  “Too true.” But it had shaken him. “And what can you do to stop them?”

  I built a dream castle for him. “I have something they want, Billings. I can tell you about something the bugs will want to know.”

  Scornfully: “Hell! There isn’t anything they want to know. They’ve a shootin’ big machine that tells them everything they need.”

  “But the machine only knows what it’s told. There’s something the bugs have never known to tell it.”

  He looked impressed for a moment. “Dinkum? But—”

  Then he shook his head. Casually he flicked ashes on my shoe. “I know what you’re up to. You fellows are always coming to me with crook stories about how this is going to help me and that’s going to save my life. It’s no good. You can’t fool me, cobber. And if you could, I can’t fool them.”

  I said persuasively, “Let me try, won’t you? It’s a matter of human nature.”

  “Wha
t is?”

  “What information they’ve given the computer. You were caught in the first landing, weren’t you? Don’t you remember what happened? They took a hundred men and women and subjected them to tests; the results made up a profile of human psychology for their computer.” He nodded, watching me. “But they didn’t have a Pinky Postal.”

  Billings said positively, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  But gradually I worked him over. I had to. Pinky was my ticket to the Sirian central headquarters. What I could accomplish there I did not know, but I knew that nothing at all could be accomplished on the stud farm. Besides, the argument was plausible—if not to Billings, then it would be to a Sirian. For what I had said was true. Their data was biased in favor of decent human beings, for their first captives were those who stood and fought. “Sure you know what you’re talking about, pal?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You’re not just sore because they wouldn’t let you in with the sheilas?”

  “I’m looking for a way out of here, Billings. That’s all. Think it over. You’ll see I’m right. They’ll reward you.”

  He looked at me with contemptuous eyes. “You don’t know much about them, do you? But probably they won’t hurt me. Worth a try, no doubt. . . .” He said thoughtfully: “They’ll be wild as cut snakes if this isn’t right. And I’ll be wild at you.” But he finally gave in.

  Pinky was pathetic in his gratitude. I was his only friend. He would never forget me; and, say, come to think of it, I was getting a break out of this too, wasn’t I? How about giving him first pick of the food, for instance, or would I rather that he told the Sirians he couldn’t react properly to their tests with me along?

  He was reacting exactly properly, of course. But the trouble was the Sirians had their own ideas. Billings brought us down to the big barn where the only Sirian for miles around sometimes stopped by to check performance at the stud farm and, after waiting for some hours, the Sirian appeared. Billings, trembling, tried to explain what it was I had said. The Sirian grasped the idea very quickly; my promise was kept; the Sirian took the bait. He said something into a small spherical contraption he wore dangling from one middle leg and in a moment there was a Sirian plane, and Pinky and Billings were herded into it.

  Just them. Not me.

  For me it was back to the stud farm. Pinky had been my ticket to the headquarters and the ticket had just been punched.

  The main Sirian headquarters on North America was in Maryland, on the site of what had once been the Bowie race track. Off to the south lay the horse barns. Where the grandstand and track itself had been, now tracelessly slagged over, stood the Sirian construction that they had flung up around their ship.

  The building looked like a castle, worked like a palace. A palace is more than a home; it is workshop and office, an administrative center; so was this. But it did have a resemblance to a medieval castle, at least from a great enough distance in the air. There were things like towers and things like battlements. Closer up the resemblance was gone. The lobed wall that surrounded it was not for defense, as in a castle; it was the Sirian equivalent of a garage, where their ground and air vehicles were kept. The towers were viewless, except at the very top, where sweeping silvery needles performed a function like radar’s.

  Pinky and the Aussie came to it with suspicion and delight. Anything was better than the stud farm.

  Or almost anything. But undeniably this was queer. They were sent to a hexagonal green-on-green room, small, bedless. Billings spat on the floor when he saw it. But even that satisfaction was denied him. The floor shimmered, the saliva collected in quick-silvery beads and trembled toward an almost invisible slit, where it vanished. Pinky said, “You don’t like the accommodations?”

  “It ain’t Darling Point,” said Billings. “You know what I wish? I wish that pal of yours was here. I’ve a notion of something I want to say to him.”

  But Billings had only been a straw-boss at the stud farm, Pinky had actually been one of the studs. “It’s not so bad,” he said with cheerful confidence, “and anyway we’ll make out. Or I will.” He hesitated and said: “You won’t believe this, but I wish there were some women here.”

  The Sirians wasted no time. Considering the limitations placed on their researches by the lack of unimpeded communication (no human ever learned the Sirian speech, and they could manage human tongues only through a sort of vodor), they were thorough and complete. None of it made much sense to Pinky, of course. All he knew was that he and Billings were bored, annoyed and persecuted for twelve hours at a time with endless nibbling nuisances. Word associations, reflex tests, interpretive depth studies much like a Rorschach—the works. “There’s not much in being a guinea pig,” sighed Billings, exhausted and angry.

  “Would you rather be a stud?” asked Pinky, very cheerfully. He was quite happy. He had discovered an angle to shoot.

  IV

  The heart of the Sirian headquarters was a room thirty feet tall, a hundred feet square, lighted with a sourceless green glow and inhabited at all times by several dozen of the bugs.

  Pinky had seen the room from a gallery above it. The results of his tests and Billings’ were fed into receptors in a little room just off the great one. It was there, banked like a horseshoe along three walls, that the central computer whispered and glowed.

  The Sirians did not trouble with electricity in its grosser forms. The computers operated on what seemed to be neural impulses, projecting their data on soft green-ivory breast-shaped bosses in letters of light. There is very much about those computers which is mysterious, but some things are sure: For one, at least a hundred problems could be worked and answered simultaneously, so that the feat of juggling Pinky’s personality quirks into the standard human profile could go on whenever convenient to the bugs, without interrupting the calculation of Hohmann trajectories for the remainder of their fleet (then approaching Orbit Pluto), the logistics of their Canadian enterprise, the setting of breeding quotas and the computation of field strengths for each bubble in their chain.

  Not all of the answers were expressed numerically; some were translated directly into action in their factories; some were expressed visually. In the center of the room, for instance, was what (although Pinky could not have recognized it) was a situation map. The chart was of North America, but as the human convention of portraying bodies of water as featureless plains was not followed by the Sirians, Pinky could make of it nothing but a scramble of topography, as meaningless to him as the chart of the back side of the Moon.

  If Pinky had had the wit to understand what he saw even he might have been shocked. The circles of Sirian bubbles were etched in fire. They had grown—how they had grown! All the Eastern seaboard was a string of fat Sirian beads now, and a beaded limb swung west as far as the featureless plain of Ohio. The last quick sproutings of bubbles had taken in and neutralized four Army Corps areas, eight SAC bases, the manufacturing centers of most of the eastern half of the continent and every center of population of importance north of Savannah and east of the Great Lakes. There was very little left.

  Pinky Postal saw all that without comprehending. Or caring.

  What he comprehended very clearly was that in the hours when he was not under scrutiny he was allowed to do as he liked.

  The Sirians were not careless, they were merely confident. They had every reason to be. The few hundred humans at liberty within the headquarters had no weapons. All of them combined were no match for a single bug, who could effortlessly destroy them one after another at will. There was little prospect of effective sabotage in the areas available to the captives. Most rooms were featureless dormitories, halls, exercise areas, yards. The workshops and armories were closed to humans. The few chambers which had any strategic importance—principally the computer room—were never left untended.

  Pinky restlessly prowled the headquarters and the abandoned human buildings surrounding it. He found treasures—in the old jock
ey’s quarters, a wicker basket of champagne; in the Steward’s office, a tin box full of money.

  He waved the hundred-dollar bills in Billings’ face, but the Aussie only snarled, “What’s the use of that?”

  “Oh, cheer up,” said Pinky dispassionately. “What’s the use of anything? But money’s always good. You’ll see.”

  “I’ll see we’ll spend the rest of our lives whingeing about here,” groaned Billings. He had become very morose. He almost stopped eating and, as days passed, stopped speaking. In the tests he failed to cooperate.

  Not Pinky. Pinky was a model of cooperation. He had learned that the way to get along with the bugs was to do what they wanted, and he was not surprised when one night as the tests were concluded Billings was detained. Pinky walked slowly toward their room, and did not even look back when from behind him he caught a flash of silent green light and heard a sharp, panicky sound from Billings, then silence. Too bad. But Pinky had his plans.

  By then I was in the hills around Frederick, Maryland, with the freedom forces.

  Well, we called ourselves that, for morale mostly; but actually my work lay mostly in nurse-maiding chitinous young Waldo, our ace of trumps.

  I had not escaped from the breeding farm, I had been liberated. A fire and noise woke us donors one night; we saw human figures dancing around the flame of burning buildings, and in the confusion the raiders broke into our close-penned corral and led us away. It was none too soon for me, and I was not only grateful, I was astonished. For these were free men and women living under the bubbles!

  It was inconceivable, but there they were.

  Undoubtedly the Sirians could have hunted us down, but they didn’t bother. Probably there were too many humans loose under their screens, like silverfish in an old house. They had ways of locating weapons as long as there was a metallic component like the barrel of a gun or shaft of a knife—magnetic or electronic detectors, no doubt—but while we kept free of metal they never troubled us.