Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines Page 4

  So our weapon was the torch.

  We killed bugs, too. We fried a dozen one night in firing a stand of yellow pine where they were—I don’t know; perhaps camping. We clubbed a few, killed some from a distance with bow and arrow. Strike and run, we must have destroyed fifty of them in six months. That was not a small number. It was more than one per cent of all the Sirians on Earth.

  It was relatively easy for us to move about because the expanding bubbles had swept so much of the human race ahead of them. The towns were deserted. The bug centers were easy to avoid. All of North America was now under the green umbrella; a mauve sun sailed over all of Europe and most of Asia. We learned, through such sparse communications facilities as were left to us, that Africa and South America were largely bug-free. Evidently the warmer parts of the Earth were not attractive to the Sirians. They were now a sort of game preserve, nearly all that survived of humanity packed into those two continents, almost two billion people crowded into the malarial Amazon basin and the hot savannahs of the Congo.

  So we crept about under their feet and stung them when we could. We became ingenious in setting snares. With the high-octane gasoline from an abandoned storage tank we washed one of their landing strips one night, and set it ablaze just as one of their gull-winged flyers came in. The intention was to incinerate them all, and then for us to vanish tracelessly; but the Sirian pilot saw danger at the last moment and almost soared free. The flames caught him, and the ship pinwheeled into the side of a hill. And that was very fortunate for us, because that was how we captured Waldo.

  Waldo was a small, dark-green creature the size of a puppy, newly hatched and not very dangerous.

  He was our first living Sirian captive. We dared take time to poke about in the wreck of the plane, knowing that there would be investigation, and we found that only two of its crew were adult Sirians; the others were eggs or hatchlings. The crash had killed them handsomely. All but one. John Gaffney found the one; rummaging through the dark he suddenly screamed: “The little louse! He bit me!” But it wasn’t a bite, it was a neural shock. It was Waldo. He was alive. As he was only a newborn, his shock was painful but not deadly.

  We roped him and dragged him out onto the side of the hill. In the light of a quarter-million burning gallons of gasoline, pinned on his back with ten legs waving, he did not seem dangerous, only comic. “Kill him,” said Gaffney, rubbing his leg.

  “No.” I had a better idea. “They’ll never miss him. Why don’t we keep him? He can be—We can use him for—”

  “What?” demanded Gaffney. “No, kill him!” But I had my way finally. We had no plan for a captive Sirian, because it had never occurred to us we might catch one. But surely something would turn up!

  So we swung him in a hammock and lashed him tight, and we got out of there minutes before the Sirian rescue parties were circling the sea of flame.

  It was months before we had any idea of what to do with him. As I had insisted on kidnapping him, he was given me to raise. This was not pleasant. He was a painful pet, and difficult to handle.

  I mention only the difficulty of feeding him. Infant Sirians were nurtured on a sort of nectar, probably once secreted by Sirian adults but now, in their dwellings, synthesized in quantity. We had none. We tried everything. Honey was good but hard to come by. Molasses made him drunk. Simple sugar solution he refused to touch. We finally settled on maple syrup with, after experimenting, a few drops of whiskey.

  On this he thrived. I determined to try to teach him English.

  I could not hope that he would ever speak it, but neither can a dog. He was much brighter than a dog. “Walk,” “sit,” “come”—he learned those before he was a month old. He showed that he could learn much more.

  In the winter evenings he would cuddle in my lap and we would look at the pictures in magazines together, I pointing out “car” and “house” and “washing machine” and Waldo reaching out with a jointed, taloned leg to scratch at the picture on the page. He made a faint humming sound, and his hardening chiton was rather warm. I grew almost fond of him, he was so eager to learn. Yet I was kept from oversentimentality by the potent sting he carried with him always. He would fall asleep in my lap. Just as a human child will restlessly turn over a time or two before drifting off, so Waldo would emit one sleepy shock before the black, hard eyes unfocused and he went into the catalepsy that was their sleep.

  As he grew larger (and he grew astonishing fast), those light love-pats in good night became more and more agonizing. Twice I was knocked unconscious.

  We tried insulation. We wrapped him in rubber sheets, shrouded him in layer on layer of quilts. We tried keeping him off my lap, merely close by on a couch. Nothing worked. Always he drowsily reached out with one leg or an eyestalk or the corner of his backplate, just before he drifted off. And I leaped half out of my skin.

  On Christmas day of the second year of the Sirian conquest, Gaffney brought us a new recruit.

  I was not present when she arrived—I was out exercising Waldo, under the shelter of an overgrown old apple orchard—and I missed the questioning. By the time I got back to our camp she was asleep, worn out, but Gaffney was bubbling with news.

  “She was actually in their headquarters! She drew us a plan of the whole thing, Harry—look!” It was crude, but if the girl was reliable it was all the information we had hoped for. We located the computer room, the Sirian sleeping quarters, the defensive installations, the shops, the laboratories. Slave quarters ringed one floor. Surveillance of half a continent was carried on in an observatory near the top. “And look here,” said Gaffney in excitement, “see this line? The inner part of the headquarters is almost independent of the rest. Double walls, limited access, construction heavier, stronger inside. What does that suggest?” I opened my mouth. “A ship!” he cried, not giving me a chance. “The central part of the building is a ship!”

  More than that, the girl had told him that that ship housed all the brains of the Sirian expedition. They had but one computer; it had landed with the first touchdown on Australia, but had been moved to the United States. If we could destroy that ship. . . .

  “But that’s the part that worries me,” admitted Gaffney, downcast. “How do we get in? They let her wander about pretty much as she wanted, see—all the humans do. Fact, the humans are pretty much independent, long as they do what the bugs want. Even have their own, well, boss, a fellow who—Never mind. What I started out to say, the bugs can afford to let the humans roam around, because the corridors are booby-trapped. It’s something like Waldo’s shock. There are places where this girl couldn’t go, because she would die, unless a Sirian was with her. It didn’t bother Sirians.”

  We puzzled that over for a while. Waldo, beside me, rested one talon gently in my hand—he was very well-behaved and quite trustworthy except, as I said, just as he was drifting off to sleep. He loomed over us (being now more than nine feet tall), staring at the scribbled map with polite curiosity.

  I turned and stared at him abruptly. “Waldo! He could help us!” Quickly I explained. If Sirians could pass the booby-traps, why, we had our own Sirian!

  I said, “We’ll have to ask the girl. Did they carry anything special? But she would have said so, and I think not. I think probably their own neural shock emanations screened off the radiations from the booby-traps, and if that’s the case—”

  “Don’t guess,” said Gaffney. “We’ve woke her up with all our noise. Here she comes now.”

  And there was the girl, coming drowsily into the room. She glanced toward me, stopped stark, her hand flew to her mouth, she screamed.

  I threw a look at Waldo beside me.

  “Oh, you saw him? Don’t worry about him, young lady! He’s perfectly tame. But no doubt he reminded you of the horrors you suffered while the captive of the Sirians.

  She simmered down slowly, shaking her head. “No—no. I’m sorry to be such a fool. It isn’t the bug I was worried about. It’s just that seeing you standing there that
way, so close to him—well. You scared me half to death. For a minute,” she said with apologetic embarrassment, “for a minute I thought you were the boss. Mr. Postal.”

  V

  Earth had now been conquered in all of its important parts. We knew that the great colonizing fleet that would follow the first wave had long been orbiting the sun, reducing its velocity, knocking off miles-per-second to match speed with the Earth and to land.

  What we did not know was how tedious life had become for the conquerors.

  Pinky Postal, however, had them right under his eye. He saw how little there was for them to do. These were soldiers, not intellectuals, not artists, not even home-builders; their work was to fight, and they were fought out. They had won.

  Two days before Billings was killed, Pinky caught a glimpse of what might be. He found five quarts of champagne and got quite drunk. In his intoxication he blundered where he knew he should not go—into Sirian quarters—and it was only the providence of drunks that kept him from a booby-trap, but somehow he found himself in a small room where something heaved under a tarpaulin.

  It was a queer sight, and he kicked it.

  The tarpaulin flung free. There was a high-pitched Sirian chirp, and three great insect bodies bounded up from the floor, where they had been huddled. Gravely, drunkenly, Pinky realized that he was about to die. He had caught them at something, heaven knew what. And they would surely smite him low.

  As he was drunk, he merely stood there, weaving slightly, breathing calm alcoholic defiance at the Sirian who bent dangerously toward him.

  —But he did not die.

  He did not die, and the next morning, through the pounding haze of his hangover, he wondered why. There were blanks in his recollection. But he remembered standing there, and he remembered that the killing bolt from the Sirian had never come.

  He puzzled over it for a whole day.

  Then, that evening, a Sirian came toward him and bent low.

  Pinky was not drunk this time, and he was terrified. He tried to run, fell, squirmed and lay flat on his back while the great flat June-bug face swooped down at him.

  Again the bolt did not strike.

  The face hung there, for seconds and then for minutes. And by and by Pinky saw that the Sirian was twitching. It twitched and stirred. Then it definitely staggered. It stumbled, caught itself, almost fell athwart him, caught itself again. The faint cricket-chirp sounded, ragged and . . . and . . . drunken.

  Drunken!

  And Pinky, sleepless that night, staring at the black ceiling of his green-on-green cubicle, realized that he had found what he wanted.

  He became a pusher. Of himself.

  Of course the Sirians had their vices. What creature does not?

  Carbon dioxide was their liquor. Their respiratory systems being what they were, it was only infrequently that their own waste gases reached their intake orifices; but the concentrated breath of a mammal could send them reeling; a few minutes inhaling a man’s direct breath would stiffen them in a giggling paralysis.

  But on their planet of Sirius, they had no mammals.

  They did what they could with what they had to work with. Their most secret vice was bundling—two (or, rarely and most despicably, three or more) of the Sirians furtively huddled under an airtight sheet, exuding CO2 and intoxicating one another. It was a fearful vice. It was also a dangerous one. It could not be practiced openly. And when done in secret there was always the risk that the drunks would pass out and ultimately die of hyperintoxication.

  They were not merely drunks, they were alcoholics, a racial characteristic; for once they had tasted the happy gas exuded by gross mammalian chemistry they were addicts. Pinky collected his first addict by chance, but he was courageous enough and thoughtful enough to make more. It took courage. It took exposing himself to a chance bolt from a new contact, but once the first few moments were past, so was the danger. A new habit had been formed; the pusher had hooked a new customer. It was the sort of industrious empire-building to which Pinky was best fitted, for he was perceptive to all weaknesses of the flesh—even chitinous flesh hatched under alien, blue-white stars.

  Pinky was supply enough for whole roomfuls of Sirians, such clouds of intoxicant wafted from him. As days and weeks passed, more and more the work of the Sirian headquarters came to revolve around him. The business of occupying Earth tended itself well enough. The quasi-radars kept their vigil and marked their targets, the computers never stopped monitoring the approach of the fleet and correcting its course. They gave him a vodor, so that he could talk to them direct; he talked in commands. They obeyed his commands, for he was intelligent enough to bait them. He sent them on scrounging expeditions to find choice food—a good bargain for them for, as with Earthly topers, it was not the simple chemical paralysis that pleased them best but the subtle bouquet and tang of contaminants. What bliss in the reek of green onions on his breath! What tingling thrill in the stale scent of tobacco! They sent parties rummaging through the nearby abandoned towns, for canned cheese and garlic, for spearmint chewing gum and cinnamon drops.

  Food and drink supplied, he next demanded control over the other humans in the Sirian headquarters. This too they gave him—why not? It was Pinky, after all, who knew how to brew those rare blends of flavor that made all the difference. If Pinky chose to exercise the human crew in ways of his own, he never failed to share their breath with his employers. For this reason the other humans grew to hate, fear and despise him, but they feared the Sirians even more. Pinky was perfectly happy for the first time in his life. He was not a king, he was more.

  The Sirians ruled the world. And, in all but name, he ruled the Sirians.

  It was into this earthly paradise of Pinky’s that we snakes wriggled, bringing destruction.

  The rest is history: how, emboldened by the increasing laxity of the Sirians, we attacked their headquarters; how Waldo, a happy child with no consciousness that he was betraying his race, led us through the trapped corridors into the Sirian fortress; how we were found out by that most Sirian of tyrants, Pinky Postal. For it was he who spotted us. He and his humans had ministered to the whole headquarters detachment, leaving them in a happy stupor, when the alarm bells rang, and though Pinky roused one of the bugs enough to locate us, the creature was far too tipsy to do anything about it.

  It was the end of the world for Pinky Postal. His paradise was over.

  He confronted us at the entrance passage, wild with fear and hate.

  “Harry!” he brawled, screeching with rage. “You louse! You rat! You human!”

  “Shut up,” said I, and in truth I paid him little attention. I was wondering where the Sirians were. We didn’t then know that they were all dead drunk, or almost all; we thought they might come ravening down among us with murderous shocks blazing left and right. Pinky danced before us, almost weeping; but when we deployed left and right, as we had rehearsed it so many times, he bolted away and, crash, a steel door slammed behind him.

  We invested the outer shell of the Sirian structure with no trouble at all. It was all too easy, in fact. It turned out to be costly. Fifteen of us died in the Sirian takeoff.

  Yes, the Sirian takeoff—which so many have wondered at—now the truth can be told. Two of Pinky Postal’s retinue at the last, when they saw what was happening, fled with only seconds to spare back to the Earth Pinky was spurning. They told us how Pinky, raving, strove to arouse the bugs to destroy us; failing, tried to get them to lock us out; failing even in that, managed at the last only to sober one Sirian just enough to pull the master switches that blasted their ship loose from its shell, sending it screaming up, out and away, Sirians, computer, Pinky and all.

  Fifteen of our raiding party died in its rocket-flames. It was a cheap price, of course.

  But how are we to explain to history that the Sirian conquest of humanity was defeated not by our strength but by our vices?

  And when it comes to that, what can I say to the President?

 
He is very sunburned and healthy looking from his summer on the Orinoco. He is a titan at the tasks of reconstruction. Life is almost normal again; and he assures me that, with what we have learned from the works the Sirians left behind, we shall have no trouble in fighting off their invasion if they dared to attempt it again. They left a hundred bubble generators, and now we know how to pierce any bubble. We have already mopped up their survivors. Young Waldo is busy every day, trying to learn to talk to his own kind and tell them that they have lost a war.

  Naturally, the President wants to reward the man who made all this possible—at, says the President with sorrow and pride, the cost of his own dear life.

  I wish I could stop it, but I don’t know how. I don’t mind, really, that mine should not be the last Congressional Medal of Honor after all.

  But I resent it most keenly that the next should go in absentia to Pinky Postal!

  HONORABLE OPPONENT

  by Clifford D. Simak

  The way the aliens fought a war made absolutely no sense—but that was because the humans hadn’t been given an instruction manual yet.

  Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) published his first SF story, “The World of the Red Sun” in 1931, and went on to become one of the star writers during John W. Campbell’s Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s, notably in the series of stories which he eventually combined into his classic novel, City. Other standout novels include Time and Again, Ring Around the Sun, Time is the Simplest Thing, and the Hugo-winning Way Station. Altogether, Simak won three Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and was the third recipient of the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America for lifetime achievement. He also received the Bram Stoker Award for lifetime achievement from the Horror Writers Association. He was noted for stories written with a pastoral feeling, though he could also turn out a chilling horror story, such as “Good Night, Mr. James,” which was made into an episode of the original Outer Limits. His day job was newspaperman, joining the staff of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune in 1939, becoming its news editor in 1949, and retiring in 1976. He once wrote that “My favorite recreation is fishing (the lazy way, lying in a boat and letting them come to me).”