XVI

 

 

“There’s no doubt that the tide is beginning to turn, Mr. President,” Barghin told the telephone. “We’ve brought down all the four missiles that have been launched from Jacksonville since that salvo yesterday, and Operation Mechanical Shovel was a pretty fair success.” He listened. “Yes, I still want UN permission to build that nuclear missile. The risk is that so far the monster may merely have been underestimating us, and has tricks he hasn’t used yet. I don’t know about the biological warfare proposal. I’m expecting a report in a short while and a summary of the progress to date will come to you anyway.”

He said goodbye and hung up. Then he sat back in his chair. They’d taken the command headquarters out from under canvas and put it in one of the vehicles that had come back from Mechanical Shovel. The trick wouldn’t work twice. It was a decided improvement not to be squelching in wet earth.

“Dr. Gordon and Mrs. Trant, sir,” said an orderly, poking his head around the door. The general nodded and got up to receive his visitors.

Mary was looking curiously pale but almost luminous. She was more beautiful than ever, but her beauty seemed to have retreated inside and to be lighting the skin drawn over her facial bones as a lightbulb illuminates a globe surrounding it. Gordon was puffy with tiredness, but he at least managed a smile.

“You’ve been round?” Barghin ventured, after offering cigarets.

“Yes,” said Mary despondently. “After we went through the live casualties, we inspected the dead ones. No sign of Peter.”

“I’m sorry,” said Barghin inadequately.

“I’m getting used to the idea of not seeing him again,” Mary said. “Making myself get used to it. In a way I’m not sorry he wasn’t one of those people picked up by your operation. I don’t think if he’d lived through that horror he would ever again be the same man I used to know.”

“They’re in a pretty bad state,” confirmed Gordon.

“I know,” sighed Barghin. “It looks as if the monster made them go mad when the nets closed over them. They lashed out at each other with their knives, fired their guns … But we have amazingly good medical facilities here, you know.”

“It’s not their physical injuries,” said Mary. “It’s the damage to their minds. The apathy! The delirious ravings!”

“They can’t all be like that,” Barghin said. “They'd be useless to the monster if they were.”

It was a crumb of hope, all he could in honesty offer. Mary acknowledged it with a miserable nod, and Gordon coughed and shuffled papers out of his pockets.

“We have some progress to report,” he said. “I’ve been commuting between Atlantica, where they’re digging out what’s left of the monster’s refuge, and John Hopkins.

“Assuming that the dried substance they found in the hollow needles attached to the oxygen bottles—you remember Dr. Sun reporting that at the White House?” Barghin nodded.

“Well, it was contaminated with sea water, of course, but they got rid of that, and they’ve identified the substance which acts as a hemoglobin equivalent. It behaves in the same manner—gives up oxygen in exchange for CO₂—which is very unfortunate.”

“Why?”

“Because this means that human poisons which act like, say, potassium cyanide, by interfering with the supply of oxygen to the tissues, will also be fatal to the monster. By extension, anything which kills the monster will probably kill human beings.”

“Bad. Go on.”

Gordon shrugged. “Well, this opens a whole possible range of poisons, and then shuts it up again if we still intend to try and spare the lives of as many people as possible. I don’t see what else we can do. What we must do, they suggest, is prepare missiles loaded with poisons of various sorts, including potassium cyanide although that’s so volatile we’d have to score a direct hit, and attempt to establish where the monster moved his headquarters to after we wrecked City Hall.”

“And how do they propose we do that?” Barghin’s tone was heavy with irony. “We haven’t had a picture of Jacksonville since the monster figured out how to bring down our fastest scanner missiles. We have faster ones, of course, but they won’t give us pictures we can use.”

“That’s up to you, general, I’m afraid. Or rather, to the technical experts. By the way, I told Vassiliev about this, out at the Atlantica site, and from what he said I think we can expect something rather special in the way of Soviet electron-amplifiers shortly. That might be the answer to getting usable pictures from a super-fast missile.”

“Could be.”

“It had better be! Everything we’ve come up with depends on knowing the monster’s whereabouts. For example, we deduce that the monster’s oxygen requirements are higher than those of human beings, because of his far greater bulk. Consequently he probably suffocates more quickly, so if he could be trapped in a sea of liquid fire that would finish him. Unfortunately, we know he can exist at a hibernation level for a hundred thousand years. He might just possibly be able to retreat into hibernation before the lack of oxygen actually killed him.” Gordon spread his hands.

“And in any case,” said Barghin, “he’s intelligent enough to realize that if he hadn’t shown himself at City Hall in front of that crowd of admirers we wouldn’t have brought it down about his ears so rapidly. He’s probably not taking any more risks of that kind.”

“We should have put twenty missiles into that city hall instead of just one,” Gordon mourned. “Or followed it up with napalm, to seal him from his oxygen supply.”

“I was speaking to the President just now,” Barghin said, after a pause. “He’s applying to an emergency session of the UN today for permission to assemble a one-kiloton warhead.”

“I heard. At least, I heard rumors. The lunatic fringe is saying it should have been done long ago, and I suppose in a way they’re right. Vassiliev said so, when the monster was still only in control of the Queen Axexandra. And I think you said so when it first moved into Jacksonville.”

“I had hopes. So I didn’t press the point.” Barghin lit a cigaret and leaned back in his chair.

“What’s it like outside?” he said. “I’m concentrating so damned much on Jacksonville I don’t know what’s happened.”

Mary broke her long silence. “It’s terrible,” she said.

“It could be a lot worse,” Gordon objected. “The refugee movements have slowed to a trickle, as you probably know. The Navy got back the freighter that was kidnapped. Aside from that, there’s just a sort of general insanity in the air. Old women seeing alien monsters in every street corner shadow; people playing the game of ‘What I’d do if I were running this thing’; news commentators clamoring for use of a nuclear missile and others pleading for the lives of the poor trapped citizens.”

“News commentators,” said Barghin. “I had to have one brought down by the Air Force yesterday. He was determined to parachute into Jacksonville and radio back an on-the-spot story. But in general I must say the press has been wonderfully co-operative. If they’d lost their heads the country would have been in an insane panic by now.”

“Maybe not. Since that program about Martian invaders they broadcast back before World War II, people have been very skeptical about alien monsters. I wish this one was a script writer’s nightmare and not ours.”

“General, I’ve been wondering,” said Mary suddenly. “If this monster is so powerful, why does he make people act out these phony ceremonies?”

“These bowing and scraping and praising affairs? The psychologists have been at that one, and given me a workable theory for once. They assume that because this race is very long-lived, the reproductive urge is negligible. But any theory of an intelligent life-form demands some central pivot on which the personality turns. They propose that this power to inflict pain on other creatures and the urge to dominate them corresponds to our sex-urge in the place it occupies in the monster’s mind. That’s roughly it. They gave it to me loaded with technical jargon. So the monster probably gratifies itself with this lip-service.

“Alternatively, it may be even simpler. It may just be that it’s hard work for him to keep watch on thousands of people continually, and he finds it—or used to find it—worth conditioning his slaves into accepting that he was a superior being by the laws of nature, and so to lessen the chance of their rebelling against him.”

“The second one sounds more probable,” Mary said judiciously. “After all, if it wasn’t hard work for him to control large numbers of people, he’d have conquered the country and perhaps the world by now.” Her lower lip trembled, and suddenly her self-possession fell in fragments. Startled, her companions tried to comfort her, but she began to sob, deep painful surges of frightened misery.

“I hope Peter’s dead!” she choked out at last. “It would be better to die than live the way he wants us to!”

 

It was beginning to appear that he had made a mistake.

Accustomed to instant service from a race of primitives, and under the continued illusion that the catastrophe which had overwhelmed the world he knew had taken place barely a few days ago, he had assumed that he could tackle the teeming millions of human beings without help. But the human beings he had to contend with now were a very long way from being primitive. They were even able to outwit him sometimes.

For instance, the way they had located his headquarters and brought it down with an accurately aimed missile. He had retaliated, of course, but he lacked the resources to wreak significant damage. And they had found an answer to all the improvements he had ordered effected in the stock of missiles he had captured. Again, he lacked the resources to do more. They had brilliantly thwarted his attempt to use his subjects as an army, by sending robot devices out instead of living creatures that he could control. And the effort of hammering the fact of his superiority into the thick heads of his subjects was steadily draining his own strength again.

Their strength was diminishing, too. Their food was running short, and although he had sent out scavenging parties to collect bodies from the streets and the surrounding country, he had to compel them to eat the proceeds of these expeditions, which hardly seemed worth the trouble.

He would have to resign himself to the fact that these people were intractable and unteachable. He could not find sufficient suitable deputies to replace those who had been killed in the wreck of the city hall, and thus lighten the task of driving the mob. He would simply have to use brute force, discarding the exhausted ones and replacing them. If only he had not decided to proceed alone!

But almost certainly he was alone in any case. Most others of his fellows had been so corrupted by the ease and comfort of Earth that they would have waited till it was too late to prepare themselves secure retreats. Like that stupid one, Ruagh, who had come begging for aid.

To tackle the problem of resources he needed more strength. Therefore he must be fed. It was hard to make do with what he could find in the city, but it would be long before he could train biochemists to synthesize his preferred nutriment in the quantities he would require. He must take what he could get.

Some days passed in the provision of his wants. Certain essential elements had to be hunted down carefully. And the human material he had to work with was diminishing rapidly.

He was still completing his extended meal when the new missile cut the sky over the city. It went so fast he could barely sense it; no human eye could have noticed it. He gave pain to the humans at the nearby missile station, but despite all the improvements to them the Thunderhorses missed the new intruder by thousands of feet.

Still, he was not visible, he consoled himself. The only risk of revealing his whereabouts lay in the stocks of nutriment heaped up before the door of the church where he hid.

That was one reason why the missile that crashed through the roof an hour later came as such a tremendous shock. Another followed it, and then a third. The other reason was that these were not loaded with explosive, but with a poison that would infallibly have killed him if he had not been alert and watchful.

He saved himself by retreating into temporary catatonia, to let the potassium cyanide vapor dilute and disperse. When he resumed full metabolic activity, his mind was made up.

The reconquest of Earth must be a long-term project.