What if the military effort to overthrow a single alien ship should completely obsess what remains of civilization on Earth, giving a new twist to “total war”?
Algirdas Jonas Budrys was son of the representative in the USA of the Lithuanian government-in-exile, a strange political limbo which perhaps reflects in his second novel Who?, filmed eighteen years later, about whether a prosthetically rebuilt, and necessarily masked, man is the person whom he claims to be. Also outstanding as a novel of identity and obsession is his classic Rogue Moon, about successive attempts by identical teleported suicide volunteers to penetrate a lethal alien labyrinth, learning just a little more each time. “All For Love” is one of the most mordant and memorable of all his stories.
I
MALACHI RUNNER DIDN’T like to look at General Compton. Compton the lean, keen, slash-gesturing semi-demagogue of a few years ago had been much easier to live with than Compton as he was now, and Runner had never had much stomach for him even then. So Runner kept his eyes firmly fixed on the device he was showing.
Keeping his eyes where they were was not as easy as it might have been. The speckled, bulbous distortion in front of him was what Headquarters, several hundred miles away under The Great Salt Lake, was pleased to refer to as an Invisible Weapons Carrier. It was hard to see because it was designed to be hard to see.
But Malachi Runner was going to have to take this thing up across several hundred miles of terrain, and he was standing too close to it not to see it. The Invisible Weapons Carrier was, in fact, a half-tone of reality. It was large enough to contain a man and a fusion bomb, together with the power for its engine and its light amplifiers. It bristled with a stiff mat of flexible-plastic light-conducing rods, whose stub ends, clustered together in a tight mosaic pointing outward in every conceivable direction, contrived to bend light around its bulk. It was presently conducting, towards Runner, a picture of the carved rock directly behind it.
The rock, here in this chamber cut under the eastern face of the Medicine Bow Mountains, was reasonable featureless; and the light-amplifiers carefully controlled the intensity of the picture. So the illusion was marred by only two things: the improbable angle of the pictured floor it was also showing him, and the fact that for every rod conducting light from the wall, another rod was conducting light from Runner’s direction, so that to his eyes the ends of half the rods were dead black.
“Invisibility,” Compton said scornfully from behind and to one side of Runner. Or, rather, he whispered and an amplifier took up the strain in raising his voice to a normal level. “But it’s not bad camouflage. You might make it, Colonel.”
“I have orders to try.” Runner would not give Compton the satisfaction of knowing that his impatience was with the means provided, not with the opportunity. The war could not possibly be permitted to continue the thirty years more given to it by Compton’s schedule. Compton himself was proof of that.
Not that proof required Compton. He was only one. There were many.
Runner glanced aside at the cadet officer who had guided him from the tramway stop to this chamber here, in one of the side passages of the siege bore that was being driven under the Medicine Bows in the direction of the alien spaceship that had dominated the world for fifty years. The boy – none of these underofficers were older than seventeen – had a face that looked as if it had been made from wet paper and then baked dry. His eyesockets were black pits from which his red eyes stared, and his hands were like chickens’ feet. His bloated stomach pushed against the wide white plastic of his sidearm belt.
He looked, in short, like most of the other people Runner had seen here since getting off the tram. As he was only seventeen, he had probably been born underground, somewhere along the advancing bore, and had never so much as seen sunlight, much less eaten anything grown under it. He had been bred and educated – or mis-educated; show him something not printed in Military Alphabet and you showed him the Mayan Codex – trained and assigned to duty in a tunnel in the rock; and never in his life had he been away from the sound of the biting drills.
“You’re not eager to go, Colonel?” Compton’s amplified whisper said. “You’re Special Division, so of course this isn’t quite your line of work. I know your ideas, you Special Division men. Find some way to keep the race from dehumanizing itself.” And now he chose to make a laugh, remembering to whisper it. “One way to do that would be to end the war before another generation goes by.”
Runner wondered, not for the first time, if Compton would find some way to stop him without actually disobeying the Headquarters directive ordering him to cooperate. Runner wondered, too, what Compton would say if he knew just how eager he was for the mission – and why. Runner could answer the questions for himself by getting to know Compton better, or course. There was the rub.
Runner did not think he could ever have felt particularly civilized towards anyone who had married his fiancée. That was understandable. It was even welcome. Runner perversely cherished his failings. Not too perversely, at that – Runner consciously cherished every human thing remaining to the race.
Runner could understand why a woman would choose to marry the famous Corps of Engineers general who had already chivvied and bullied the Army – the organizing force of the world – into devoting its major resources to this project he had fostered. There was no difficulty in seeing why Norma Brand might turn away from Malachi Runner in favour of a man who was not only the picture of efficiency and successful intellect but also was thought likely to be the saviour of Humanity.
But Compton several years later was—
Runner turned and looked; he couldn’t spend the rest of the day avoiding it. Compton, several years later, was precisely what a man of his time could become if he was engaged in pushing a three hundred mile tunnel through the rock of a mountain chain, never knowing how much his enemy might know about it, and if he proposed to continue that excavation to its end, thirty years from now, whether the flesh was willing to meet his schedules or not.
Compton’s leonine head protruded from what was very like a steam cabinet on wheels. In that cabinet were devices to assist his silicotic lungs, his sclerotic blood vessels, and a nervous system so badly deranged that even several years ago Runner had detected the great man in fits of spastic trembling. And God knew what else might be going wrong with Compton’s body that Compton’s will would not admit.
Compton grinned at him. Almost simultaneously, a bell chimed softly in the control panel on the back of the cabinet. The cadet aide sprang forward, read the warning in some dial or other and made an adjustment in the settings of the control knobs. Compton craned his neck in its collar of loose grey plastic sheeting and extended his grin to the boy. “Thank you, Cadet. I thought I was starting to feel a little dizzy.”
“Yes, sir.” The aide went back to his rest position.
“All right, Colonel,” Compton said to Runner as though nothing had happened. “I’ve been curious to see this gimmick of yours in operation ever since it was delivered here. Thank you. You can turn it off now. And after that, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen.”
Runner frowned for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. He crawled under the weapons carrier. From that close it was no longer “invisible”, only vaguely dizzying to the eye. He opened the hatch and turned off the main switch.
Compton could only have meant he was going to show him the ship.
Of course, he had seen films of it often enough. Who had not? The Army had managed to keep spy-drones flying above the Mississippi plain. The ship ignored them unless they took on aggressive trajectories.
Presumably there was some limit to the power the ship felt able to expend. Or perhaps the ship simply did not care what Earthmen might learn from watching it; perhaps it underestimated them.
This latest in the long chain of Compton’s command bunkers, creeping mole-like towards the ship, was lighted a sickly orange-yellow. Runner seemed to recall a minor scandal in the Quarter-master Corps. Something about a contractor who had bribed or cozened a Corps officer into believing that yellow light duplicated natural sunlight. Contractor and misled officer were no doubt long dead in one of the labour battalions at the bore face, but some use for the useless lights had had to be found. And so here they were, casting their pall, just as if two lives and two careers had not already gone towards settling the account.
But, of course, nothing settles an account as derelict as Earth’s was.
In that light, Compton’s cabinet rolled forward to the bank of hooded television screens jury-rigged against a somewhat water-proofed wall. A row of technicians perched on stools watched what the drones were showing them.
“Lights,” Compton said, and the aide made the room dark. “Here, Colonel – try this one.” He pointed his chin towards a particular screen, and Runner stepped closer. For the first time in his life, he saw something only a few hundred people of his time had seen in an undelayed picture; he saw the ship. It was two hundred miles away from his present location, and two hundred and fifty miles high.
II
Fifty years ago, the alien ship landed butt-down in the northwest quadrant of the central plain of the United States. Stern-first, she had put one of her four landing jacks straight down to bedrock through the town of Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, and the diagonally opposite leg seventy-five miles away near Julesburg, Colorado. Her shadow swept fifty thousand square miles.
A tower of pitted dull green and brown-gold metal, her forepeak narrowing in perspective into a needle raking unseen through the thinnest last margins of the atmosphere, she had neither parleyed nor even communicated with anything on or of Earth. No one had ever seen anything of what her crew might look like. To this day, she still neither spoke to Earth nor listened to whatever Terrestrials might want to say to her. She was neither an embassy nor an invader.
For fifty years she had been broadcasting the same code group into space, hour after hour, but she had neither made nor received any beam transmissions along any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The presumption was she had a distress beacon out on general principles, but had no hope of communicating with a particular source of rescue.
She had come down a little erratically; there was some suggestion of jury-rigging in the plates over an apparently buckled section of the hull shrouding her stern tubes; there seemed to be some abnormal erosion at one segment of the lip around the main jet. Over the years, Headquarters Intelligence had reached the decision that she was down on Earth for a self-refit.
Landing, she had immediately put out surface parties and air patrols – there were turret-mounted weapons all along her flanks; she was clearly a warship of some kind – in a display of resources that badly upset the Terrestrial military forces observing her. The surface parties were squat-profiled, tracked, armoured amphibious machines with sixteen-foot bogeys and a track-to-turtledeck height of seventy-five feet. They had fanned out over the surrounding states and, without regard to road, river, fence or farmhouse, had foraged for minerals. It had finally been concluded that the vehicles, equipped with power shovels, claws, drills, ore buckets and whatever other mining tools were necessary, were remote-controlled from the ship on the basis of local topography but not with any reference to the works of Man. Or to the presence of Man. The undeviating tracks made as much of a hayrick as they did of a company of anti-tank infantry or a battalion of what the Army in those days was pleased to call “armour”.
Whatever had hurt her, there was no point in Earthmen speculating on it. No missile could reach her. She had antimissile missiles and barrage patterns that, in operation, had made the Mississippi plain uninhabitable. An attempt was made to strike her foraging parties, with some immediate success. She then extended her air cover to the entire civilized world, and began methodically smashing down every military installation and every industrial complex capable of supporting one.
It was a tribute to the energy and perseverance of Twentieth Century Man. And it was the cause of Twenty-First Century man’s finding himself broken into isolated enclaves, almost all of them either underground or so geographically remote as to be valueless, and each also nearly incapable of physical communication with any other.
It did not take a great deal of Terrestrial surface activity to attract one of the ship’s nearly invulnerable aircraft. Runner’s journey between Salt Lake and the tunnel pit head had been long, complicated by the need to establish no beaten path, and anxious. Only the broken terrain, full of hiding places, had made it possible at all.
But the balance between birth and death rates was once more favourable, and things were no longer going all the ship’s way – whether the ship knew it or not. Still, it would be another thirty years before this siege bore Compton was driving could reach, undermine and finally topple the ship.
Thirty years from now, Runner and the other members of Special Division knew, the biped, spindling, red-eyed creatures emerging from the ground to loot that broken ship and repay themselves for this nightmare campaign would be only externally human – some of them. Some would be far less. Special Division’s hope – its prospects were not good enough to call it a task – was to attempt to shorten that time while Humanity was still human.
And if the human race did not topple the ship, or if the ship completed its refit and left before they could reach it, then all this fifty years of incalculable material and psychic expenditure was irretrievably lost. Humanity would be bankrupt. They were all living now on the physical and emotional credit embodied in that tower of alien resources. From it, they could strip a technology to make the world new again – nothing less could accomplish that; in its conquest, there was a triumph to renew the most exhausted heart. Or almost any such heart. Runner could only speculate on how many of the victors would be, like Compton, unable to dance upon the broken corpse.
If anyone on Earth doubted, no one dared to dwell aloud on the enfeebling thought.
They had to have the ship.
“She’s got some kind of force field running over her structure,” Compton remarked, looking at the image on the screen. “We know that much. Something that keeps the crystals in her metal from deforming and sliding. She’d collapse. If we had something like that field, we could build to her size, too.”
“Is there that much metal in the world?”
Compton looked sideward at Runner. “A damned sight more. But if we had her, we wouldn’t need it.”
Yes, Runner thought, keeping himself from looking at the screen now as faithfully as he had prevented himself from looking at Compton earlier. Yes, if we had the ship we wouldn’t need this, and we wouldn’t need that, or the other thing. We could even engineer such wonderful cabinets like the one in which Compton dwells that none of us would have to fear a stop to our ambitions, and we could roll along in glory on the wonderfully smooth corridor floors we could carve, away from the places where storms and lightning strike.
For how could you live, Compton, out there where I have to go tomorrow?
Compton, looking up at him, shrewdly said: “Do you know I approve of the Special Division? I think you people serve a very necessary function. I need the pressure of rivals.”
Runner thought: You are ugly.
“I have to go to sleep,” he had said and left Compton to his screens and schedules. But he did not take the lift down to the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters where had been given an accommodation – a two-man cubicle for himself alone; the aide, never having experienced solitude, as Runner had, had been envious. Instead, he puzzled his way through another of the branching temporary passageways that were crudely chopped out for living space near the advancing bore.
He searched until he found the proper door. The letter Norma had sent him did not contain the most exact directions. It had spoken in local terms: “Follow the first parallel until you reach the fourth gallery,” and so forth.
He knocked, and the gas-tight door opened.
“I heard you would be here today,” Norma said in a choked voice, and there was much for him to read in the waxiness of her skin and the deep wrinkles that ran from the corners of her nose to the corners of her bloodless mouth.
He took the hands she offered, and stepped inside.
There was one large room; that is, a room large enough for a free-standing single cot, rather than a bunk, and a cleared area, faintly marked by black rubber wheelmarks, large enough for a cabinet to turn around in.
“How are you, Norma?” he said as if he could not guess, and she did not trouble to answer him. She shut the door and leaned against it as if they had both just fled in here.
“Are you going out in the morning?”
Runner nodded. It seemed to him he had time at least to say a few conventional things to the girl who had been his fiancée, and then Compton’s wife. But she apparently thought otherwise.
“Are you going to make it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a gamble.”
“Do you think you’ll make it?”
“No.”
It had never seemed reasonable that he would. In the Technical Section of the Special Division there were men – fully his equals – who were convinced he could succeed. They said they had calculated the ship’s weaknesses, and he believed they had figures and evaluations, right enough. He in his own turn believed there were things a man had to be willing to do whether they seemed reasonable or not, simply because they seemed necessary. So neither fact nor opinion could modify his taking the weapons carrier out against the ship tomorrow. “But I hope I’ll make it,” he said.
“You hope you’ll make it,” Norma said tonelessly. She reached quickly and took his hands again. “What a forlorn thing to tell me! You know I won’t be able to stand it down here much longer. How do we know the ship doesn’t have seismic detectors? How do we know it isn’t just letting us concentrate ourselves here so it can smash us before we become dangerous?”
“Well, we don’t know, but it seems unlikely. They have geological probes, of course. The gamble is that they’re only probes and not detectors.”
“If they don’t smash us, there’s only one reason – they know they’ll be finished and gone before we can reach them!”
This was all wrong; he could not talk to her about anything important before he had calmed her. He said, searching for some way to reach her: “But we have to go on as if they won’t. Nothing else we’ve tried has worked. At least Compton’s project hasn’t failed.”
“Now you’re on his side! You!”
She was nothing like the way she had been with him. She would never have been like this. The way she was now, she and Malachi Runner could not meet. He understood, now, that in the years since she had left Headquarters with Compton she had come to think back on Malachi Runner not as a man but as an embodiment of that safe life. It was not him she was shouting out to. It was to all those days gone for ever.
And so I must be those days of life in a place where shafts lead to the wine-rich air of the surface, and there is no sound of metal twisting in the rock. I am not Malachi Runner now. I hoped I could be. I should have read that letter as it was, not as I hoped it was. Goodbye, Runner, you aren’t needed here.
“No, I’m not on his side. But I wouldn’t dare stop him if I could. I wouldn’t dare shut off any hope that things will end and the world can go back to living.”
“End? Where can they end? He goes on; he can’t move an arm or a finger, but he goes on. He doesn’t need anything but that box that keeps him alive and this tunnel and that ship. Where can I touch him?”
They stood separated by their outstretched hands, and Runner watched her as intently as though he had been ordered to make a report on her.
“I thought I could help him, but now he’s in that box!”
Yes, Runner thought, now he’s in that box. He will not let death rob him of seeing the end of his plans. And you love him, but he’s gone where you can’t follow. Can you?
He considered what he saw in her now, and he knew she was lost. But he thought that if the war would only end, there would be ways to reach her. He could not reach her now; nothing could reach her. He knew insanity was incurable, but he thought that perhaps she was not yet insane; if he could at least keep her within this world’s bounds, there might be time, and ways, to bring her back. If not to him, then at least to the remembered days of Headquarters.
“Norma!” he said, driven by what he foresaw and feared. He pulled her close and caught her eyes in his own. “Norma, you have got to promise me that no matter what happens, you won’t get into another one of those boxes so you can be with him.”
The thought was entirely new to her. Her voice was much lower. She frowned as if to see him better and said: “Get into one of those boxes? Oh, no – no, I’m not sick, yet. I only have to have shots for my nerves. A corpsman comes and gives them to me. He’ll be here soon. It’s only if you can’t not-care; I mean, if you have to stay involved, like he does, that you need the interrupter circuits instead of the tranquilizer shots. You don’t get into one of those boxes just for fear,” she said.
He had forgotten that; he had more than forgotten it – there were apparently things in the world that had made him be sure, for a moment, that it really was fear.
He did not like hallucinating. He did not have any way of depending on himself if he had lapses like that.
“Norma, how do I look to you?” he said rapidly.
She was still frowning at him in that way. “You look about the same as always,” she said.
He left her quickly – he had never thought, in conniving for this assignment with the letter crackling in his pocket, that he would leave her so quickly. And he went to his accommodation, crossing the raw, still untracked and unsheathed echoing shaft of the tunnel this near the face, with the labour battalion squads filing back and forth and the rubble carts rumbling. And in the morning he set out. He crawled into the weapons carrier, and was lifted up to a hidden opening that had been made for it during the night. He started the engine and, lying flat on his stomach in the tiny cockpit, peering through the cat’s-eye viewports, he slid out onto the surface of the mountain and so became the first of his generation to advance into this territory that did not any more belong to Man.
When he was three days out, he passed within a hundred yards of a cluster of mining-machines. They paid him no attention, and he laughed, cackling inside his egg. He knew that if he had safely come so close to an extension of the ship – an extension that could have stepped over and crushed him with almost no extra expenditure – then his chances were very good. He knew he cackled. But he knew the Army’s drones were watching, unobtrusively, for signs of his extinction or breakdown. Not finding them, they were therefore giving Compton and Headquarters the negative good news that he had not yet failed. At Headquarters, other Special Division personnel would be beginning to hope. They had been the minority party in the conflicts there for as long as they had been in existence at all.
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.
Runner comforted himself with the thought that the aliens in the ship had also gone mad. And he thought it was a very human thing to do – he thought, with some pride, that it was perhaps the last human thing – for him to refuse the doctors who offered to give him artificial replacements for the hopelessly twisted legs he had come back with.
“You will not!” he snapped, while up in the bunker, all unimaginable to him, Norma kissed Compton’s face and said: “You will get her – you will!”