The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (8 page)

But it did not matter, he thought as he lay up that night and sipped warm water from the carrier’s tank. It didn’t matter what party was winning. Surely even Compton would not be infuriated by a premature end to the war. And there were plenty of people at Headquarters who had fought for Compton not because they were convinced his was the only way, but only because his was a way that seemed sure. If slow. Or as sure as any way could be.

It came to Runner, for the first time in his life, that any race, in whatever straits, willing to expend so much of its resources on what was really not a surety at all, must be desperate beyond all reason.

He cackled again. He knew he cackled. He smiled at himself for it.

III

The interior of the weapons carrier was padded to protect him from the inevitable jounces and collisions. So it was hot. And the controls were crude; the carrier moved from one foot to another, like a turtle, and there were levers for each of his hands and feet to control. He sweated and panted for breath.

No other machine could possibly have climbed down the face of that mountain and then begun its heaving, staggering progress towards the spaceship’s nearest leg. It could not afford to leave tracks. And it would, when it had covered the long miles of open country that separated it from its first destination, have to begin another inching, creeping journey of fifty-five miles, diagonally up the broadening, extensible pillar of the leg.

It stumbled forward on pseudopods – enormous hollow pads of tough, transparent plastic, moulded full of stress-channels that curled them to fit the terrain, when they were stiffened in turn by compressed colourless fluid. Shifting its weight from one of the these to another, the carrier duck-walked from one shadow to another as Runner, writhing with muscle cramps, guided it at approximately the pace of a drunken man.

But it moved forward.

After the first day Runner was ready to believe that the ship’s radar systems were not designed to track something that moved so close to the ground and so slowly. The optical detection system – which Intelligence respected far more than it did radar; there were dozens of countered radar-proof missiles to confirm them – also did not seem to have picked him up.

He began to feel he might see Norma again. Thinking of that babbling stranger in Compton’s accommodation, he began to feel he might someday see
Norma
again. The ship’s leg was sunken through the ground down to its anchorage among the deep rock layers sloping away from the mountains. It was, at ground level, so far across that he could not see past it. It was a wall of streaked and overgrown metal curving away from him, and only by shifting to one of the side viewports could he make out its apparent limits from where he now was.

Looking overhead, he saw it rise away from him, an inverted pylon thrust into the ground at an angle, and far, far above him, in the air towards which that angle pointed, something large and vague rested on that pylon. Obscured by mist and cloud, distorted by the curvature of the tiny lens though which he was forced to look at it, it was nothing meaningful. He reasoned the pylon led up to the ship. He could not see the ship; he concentrated on the pylon.

Gingerly, he extended a pseudopod. It touched the metal of the ship, through which the stabilizing field ran. There was an unknown danger here, but it hadn’t seemed likely to Intelligence that the field would affect non-metallic substances.

It didn’t. The pseudopod touched the metal of the ship, and nothing untoward happened. He drew it back, and cycled an entirely new fluid through the pseudopods. Hairline excretory channels opened on their soles, blown clean by the pressure. The pads flattened and increased in area. He moved forward towards the pylon again, and this time he began to climb it, held by air pressure on the pads and the surface tension on their wet soles. He began, then, at the end of a week’s journey, to climb upon the ship no other aggression of Man’s had ever reached. By the time he was a thousand feet up, he dared look only through the fore ports.

Now he moved in a universe of sound. The leg thrummed and quivered, so gently that he doubted anyone in the ship could feel it. But he was not in the ship; he was where the thrumming was. It invaded his gritted teeth and put an intolerable itching deep into his ears. This fifty-five miles had to be made without stop for rest; he could not, in fact, take his hands from the controls. He was not sure that he shouldn’t be grateful – he would have gouged his ears with his nails, surely, if he had been free to work at them.

He was past laughter of any kind now – but exultation sustained him even when, near the very peak of his climb, he came to the rat guard.

He had studied this problem with a model. No one had tried to tell him what it might be like to solve it at this altitude, with the wind and mist upon him.

The rat guard was a collar of metal, cone-shaped and inverted downward, circling the leg. The leg here was several miles in diameter; the rat guard was a canopy several yards thick and several hundred feet wide from its joining at the leg to its lip. It was designed to prevent exactly what was happening – the attempted entry of a pest.

Runner extended the carrier’s pseudopods as far and wide as they would go. He pumped more coagulant into the fluid that leaked almost imperceptibly out of their soles, and began to make his way, head downward, along the descending slope of the rat guard’s outer face. The carrier swayed and stretched at the plastic membranes. He neutralized the coagulant in each foot in turn, slid it forward, fastened it again, and proceeded. After three hours he was at the lip, and dangling by the carrier’s forelegs until he had succeeded in billowing one of the rear pads onto the lip as well.

And when he had, by this patient trial and error, scrambled successfully onto the rat guard’s welcome upward face, he found that he was not past laughing after all. He shouted it; the carrier’s interior frothed with it, and even the itching in his ears was lost. Then he began to move upward again.

Not too far away, the leg entered the ship’s hull. There was an opening at least as large as the carrier needed. It was only a well; up here, the gleaming pistons that controlled the extension of the leg hung burnished in the gloom, but there was no entry to the ship itself. Nor did he need or want it.

He had reasoned long ago that whatever inhabited this ship must be as tired, as anxious, as beset any human being. He needed no new miseries to borrow. He wanted only to find a good place to attach his bomb, set the fuse and go. Before the leg, its muscles cut, collapsed upon the aliens’ hope of ever returning to whatever peace they dreamed of.

When he climbed out of the carrier, as he had to, to attach the bomb, he heard one noise that was not wind-thrum or the throb of internal machinery. It was a persistent, nerve-torn ululation, faint but clear, deep inside the ship and with a chilling quality of endurance.

He hurried back down the leg; he had only four days to get clear – that is, to have a hope of getting clear – and he hurried too much. At the rat guard’s lip, he had to hang on by his heels and cast the fore pads under. He though he had a grip, but he had only half a one. The carrier slipped, jerked and hung dangling by the pad. It began to slide back down the short distance to the lip of the guard, rippling and twisting as parts of its sole lost contact and other parts had to take up the sudden drag.

He poured coagulant into the pad, and stopped the awful series of sticks and slips. He slapped the other pads up into place and levered forward, forgetting how firmly that one pad had been set in his panic. He felt resistance, and then remembered, but by then the pull of the other three pads had torn the carrier forward and there was a long rip through which stress fluid and coagulant dripped in a turgid stream.

He came down the last ten miles of the leg like a runaway toboggan on a poorly surfaced slide, the almost flaccid pads turning brown and burnt, their plastic soft as jelly. He left behind him a long, slowly evaporating smear of fluid and, since no one had thought to put individual shut-offs in the cross-valving system between the pads, he came down with no hope of ever using the carrier to get back to the mountains.

It was worse than that. In the end, he crashed into the indented ground at the base of the leg, and, for all the interior padding, the drive levers bludgeoned him and broke bones for him. He lay in the wreck with only a faint awareness of anything but his pain. He could not even know whether the carrier, with its silent power supply, still as much as half hid him or whether that had broken, too.

It hadn’t broken, but he was still there when the bomb exploded; it was only a few hours afterward that he came out of his latest delirium and found that the ground had been stirred and the carrier was lying in a new position.

He pried open the hatch – not easily or painlessly – and looked out.

The ship hadn’t fallen. The leg had twitched in the ground – it was displaced by several thousand yards, and raw earth clung to it far overhead. It had changed its angle several degrees towards vertical and was much less deeply sunken into the ground. But the ship had not fallen.

He fell back into the carrier and cried because the ship hadn’t come down and crushed him.

IV

The carrier had to be abandoned. Even if the pads had been usable, it was three-quarters buried in the upheaval the leg had made when it stirred. The machine, Runner thought contemptuously, had failed, while a man could be holed and broken and heal himself nevertheless.

He had very good proof of that, creeping back towards the mountains. Broken badly enough, a man might not heal himself into what he had been. But he would heal into something.

For a time he had to be very wary of the mining machines, for there had been a frenzied increase in their activity. And there was the problem of food and water. But he was in well-watered country. The comings and goings of the machines had churned the banks of the Platte River into a series of sinks and swamps without making it impossible for a thirsty, crawling man to drink. And he had his rations from the carrier while the worst of the healing took place. After that, when he could already scuttle on his hands and one knee, he was able to range about. In crawling, he had discovered the great variety of burrowing animals that lived beneath the eye of ordinary man; once he had learned which one made bolt-holes and which could be scooped out of the traps of their own burrows he began to supply himself with a fair amount of protein.

The ship, and its extensions, did him no harm. Some of this was luck, when he was in the zones traversed by the machines as they went to and from the ship. But after he had taken up a systematic trek back along the North Platte, and presumably ought to have stopped being registered in the ship’s detectors as an aimless animal, he was apparently protected by his colouration, which was that of the ground, and again by his slow speed and ability to hug the terrain. Even without pseudopods and a fusion bomb to carry, his speed was no better than that.

When several months had passed he was able to move in a half-upright walk that was an unrelenting parody of a skip and a jump, and he was making fair time. But by then he was well up into the beginnings of the Medicine Bows.

He thought that even though the ship still stood, if he could reach Norma soon enough she might still not be too lost.

Not only the ship but the Army drones had missed him, until he was almost back to the now refilled exit from which he and the carrier had launched themselves. The passages were hurriedly unblocked – every cubic yard of rubble that did not have to be dispersed and camouflaged at the pithead represented an enormous saving of expenditure – and he was hauled back into the company of his fellow creatures.

His rescue was nearly unendurable. He lay on a bed in the Aid Station and listened to Compton’s delight.

“They went wild when I told them at Headquarters, Colonel. You’d already been given a posthumous Medal of Honour. I don’t know what they’ll do now you’re available for parades. And you certainly deserve them. I had never had such a moment in my life as when I saw what you’d done to the ship.”

And while Compton talked, Norma – Norma with no attention to spare for Runner; a Norma bent forward, peering at the dials of Compton’s cabinet, one hand continually twitching towards the controls – that Norma reached with her free hand, took a photograph out of a file folder clipped to the side of the cabinet and held the picture, unseeing, for Runner to look at while she continued her stewardship of Compton’s dials. The cadet had been replaced. The wife was homemaking in the only way she could.

The ship no longer pointed directly away from the ground, nor was she equally balanced on the quadruped of her landing jacks. The bombed leg dangled useless, its end trailing in the ground, and the ship leaned away from it.

“When the bomb went off,” Compton was explaining, “she did the only thing she could to save herself for the time being. She partially retracted the opposite leg to balance herself.”

Norma reached out and adjusted one of the controls. The flush paled out of Compton’s face, and his voice sank towards the toneless whisper Runner remembered.

“I was always afraid she would do that. But the way she is now, I know – I
know
that when I undermine another leg, she’ll fall! And she can’t get away from me. She’ll never take off with the leg dragging. I never had a moment in my life like the moment I had when I saw her tilt. Now I know there’s an end in sight. All of us here know there’s an end in sight, don’t you, Norma? The ship’ll puzzle out how you did it, Runner, and she’ll defend against another such attempt, but she can’t defend against the ground opening up under. We’ll run the tunnel right through the rock layers she rests on, get underneath, mine out a pit for the leg to stumble into and blow the rock – she’ll go down like a tree in the wind, Runner. Thirty years – well, possibly forty, now that we’ve got to reach a further leg – and we’ll have her! We’ll swallow her up, Runner!”

Runner was watching Norma. Her eyes darted over the dials and not once, though most of the gestures were abortive, did her hands stop their twitching towards the controls. When she did touch them, her hands were sure; she seemed quite practised; Runner could calculate that she had probably displaced the cadet very soon after he had bombed the ship.