THEY WERE out there, all right. Though we hide in our inmost rooms, our heads under beds, our thoughts turned to trees popping up and tin robins singing and spring coming through the yard-holes, they were out there, all right. Maybe they had always been there. Times when we paused in our wars, we would see their airborne displays, see their threats shooting, the dazzling sky-borne crosses, the winged halos, and know they were massing their armor . . . under banners . . . oh, the soft-symbol banners. . . .
From the land of the threats into the Stronghold country an old man came back one spring day. Walking slowly he came, plop-plip-plap-plop over the homeless plastic, working his hinges and braces, for he was a Moderan man. The flesh-strips he had kept in his face had grown him a gray long beard and with his arms jerking in that hitch way of his walk I thought of a man scything; I thought of Father Time of the Old Days. But there is no Father Time in Moderan. We are timeless in Moderan, designed for forever!
It was in a period of truces that the man with the beard came back. He walked into April and no guns fired. The walking doll bombs rode lightly in their launch slings, the missiles poised on their pads, and the White Witch rockets, with no one handing the big orange switch in his War Room to ON, hung silent as painted death. Not many remembered him. He had once been a Stronghold master, long ago, but some minor difference or other with the Authorities had caused his Stronghold to be blasted down as a cleared place for trees, and he had been given the hard choice between banishment and what would have been, for him, essentially death—having his flesh-strips awarded to another. He, choosing banishment, had fled in the night under a small truce, and Moderan had all but forgotten him in the time that had passed.
We watched him go now while the days of our spring truce lasted. Up and down and across the lines of our fire he walked day and night, keeping our warners dinning, and it was an eerie thing, even for Moderan. Sometimes in the dead of night a small dull sound on the plastic or the sharp clink of a hinge joint working by would tell a late-up Stronghold man, perhaps looking to some better positioning of launchers or arming a doll bomb, that the silent one was near, having moved through the warner. No one offered him introven for his flesh-strips’ hunger. No one paid him mind. Once banished, for us, was banished; he was nowhere. Then, too, when the truce-time lifted and we were once again busily and happily at war we knew he would, at the first go of the launchers, be blasted without a trace. So what was to worry?
And yet, at high day, the vapor shield not too thick and he alongside a Stronghold, peering—something about him! Partly it was, of course, the mawkish fascination of seeing the dead come back, seeing the banished break banishment, knowing some strange deep kinship with the dead and the banished and yet not being able, or willing, even remotely to own that kinship. Not in Moderan!
Then one day, one vapor-purpled day, when the spring truce was near to lifting, with my steel hands trembling, my flesh-strips throbbing and the hate needs rising thick and good in my throat for getting on with the war, I heard him clinking near. My warner set up a close-din as he sought admittance through my Walls. Gaunt and wrecked and rusted he appeared in my viewer—a thing of no concern, banished and nowhere. And yet—and yet—who can say no when the dead come back with a message, or even with a look? I directed Decontamination and Weapons Search to give him the usual, and when he proved clean I thumbed the gates back in eleven steel Walls for his entrance.
He stood before me, his beard looped around his waist. His face pieces went into chaos and at last his mouth came open for speech. “I come to you,” he said, “completely without motive of gain. I have been back to the old place where my Stronghold was once. I have lain among the tin trees that ‘grow’ there now in a little park for birds and plastic dogs. How much better, I think, were it still a thriving Stronghold, and I in it, to take part in the great spring wars due soon to commence. But that is merely, and of no moment, what I think. Once banished is once banished, and as you know there is no road back.” He dropped his head for a little and I said, “There, there,” or whatever it is one says when there is really nothing to say and everyone knows it. I thought of offering him introven for his flesh-strips’ hunger. I thought of saying sorry, sorry. Really I did almost nothing, said almost nothing, and at last his head swayed up and the face pieces went into storm again.
“I come with hands that seek no gain,” he cried. “At first I thought only to find the old haunts again, before it is too late, enjoy my heart’s lacerations for the time of the truce and then pass slowly southward, south into the Wanderers’ Country ahead of your heavy barrage. But seeing again this pleasant gray domain of such well-ordered hate and firm-planned war I was seized with an old allegiance. I chose your Stronghold to plead in because you have one of the best, if not the best, records of any Stronghold. If I can warn you in time, perhaps we may just save a heritage, by an example.”
I thanked him for the kind words about my Stronghold, told him modestly that perhaps other Strongholds were nearly as good, and he continued, almost screaming now. “Have you not seen those displays in the north, the south, the east, the west? The wings, the dancing sickening grimness of their grinners, the deadly cherub smiles, the sunshine men and never a vapor shield on their halos? Do you not know what’s massing over the hills? Are the threats not plain, bold-plain?”
“Rumors have flown,” I said, “word has spread, alerts have come down and we have seen. And yet, what can we do? We live our life out here, the Stronghold life, proving the workability of hate and the efficacy of good clean blasting when everyone knows what to expect from a neighbor and a friend—a missile in the back unless you’re shooting first or guarding. And yet there are always some—some forces—that would beguile reality, transform the proved and proving into something guesslike and dreamlike. They’d put a flower on cleanest clearest Truth, a cross, a haloed star—and call it Love. Whatever that could mean. But we’ll keep sharp watch here, blast always at one another and when the big need comes be ready to turn our kill know-how on the invading hordes.”
“My friend,” he said, “my friend, you do not know what they can do, to what great lengths they’ll go. Sickening! Terrible! I’ve lived among them, on the edges of their country. Having no country, after my banishment, I went up there. I’ve learned.” For a moment his eyes were dreadful in a face gone ghastly-gaunt; the flexi-holes opened big and the steel balls of his wide-range Moderan vision swished and clinked. In the Old Days that look was perhaps approximated in the face of one who had just seen all his children done and down in an especially dramatic street wreck. “They’ll stop short of no lengths!” he cried. “They’ll move in at some truce time with their slogans. They’ll come cantering, chantering over the hills through a Max Fire. They’ll move down in the night, or at high vapor-shield noon, swiftly. You’ll see. They’ll spread a deadly, planned disorder when they come. They’ll engage you in innumerable head-on slow-down encounters and set up disorganization and diversionary sideshows behind your back. They’ll clap a needle to you when you’re not watching and shoot you with metal softener. And where will you be then? Your fine steel heart that is so hate-sure now will become a soft debater. Not knowing where to stand you’ll stand nowhere, and yet everywhere; jumping and jiggling from stance to stance you’ll be a waverer then, you hypocrite, then!”
His face became a horror-mask, his beard shook and something he was flunking caused him to be seized with a bad case of honest metal-trembles. His fine steel mouth was a gray opening where shiny new-metal saber-teeth danced and gleamed when he shrieked, “They’ll even stoop to putting truth serum in the introven—their truth. Give me, rather, the blasting—honest, honest blasting.”
He calmed, the billowing beard lay quiet upon his chest, and somehow, looking at his still face—the calm that had recently been so choppy—I thought of a sea, or a sky perhaps that had in the Old Times just shaken out all its storm. “And now I go,” he said, “through here to my way south, south to the Wanderers’ Country, ahead of your wonderful barrage. An old old man am I who was, when young, perhaps not worthy of your great hate leagues and so was banished. But I would save Moderan as a place to come back to, to hurt in, for the pleasant heart lacerations. I hope I do not hope unfounded. I trust I’ve warned you well, and in time. And now I think I’ll go. Some trigger-happy Stronghold might lift the truce up early and catch me in a crossfire.”
He stood looking a little moment directly into my eyes with his face now unstormed completely, and for a heartbeat instant I was tempted to offer him a place as one of my weapons men, thinking perhaps we could coat his flesh-strips with plate and make him nearly all-metal new-metal alloy, at least acceptable to the Authorities at the next year’s screening of weapons men. But I didn’t seize the moment, and perhaps it was just as well. He probably wouldn’t have accepted.
Soon after he left, out through the eleven steel Walls and over the homeless plastic, plop-plip-plap-plop, working his hinges and braces slowly southward to the Wanderers’ Country, some trigger-happy Stronghold did lift the truce up early. But I hoped, and believed, he had got clear. Most of us in the interests of last-minute preparations and a better Open-Fire! held up until next day when the truce officially lifted, and with the blasting sharper than I had ever remembered it I thought perhaps his fears were all unfounded. So what if they were massing heart symbols and togetherness displays and smile battalions over the hills and preparing for a great Crusade and a Friendship League? We are pretty solid behind our hates here in Moderan. We know how to live. And unless they have something more awesome to wage with than their weak-valentine philosophies and white-grin slogans, they don’t stand a chance, these hymn chanters and smile-league battlers. We’ll blast them on the perimeters; we’ll cut their infiltrators to thinnest flesh-strip ribbons; we’ll execute their spies, without a thought. We’ll stand them off, so help us, until Time itself grows old!