“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.”
“Oh fuck,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”
“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”
“I … I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.
Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine-sensitive. The others didn’t know.
“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these … monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”
“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.
“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”
“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.
“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”
After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder: Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
13
We stopped for the “night” — actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours — atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself — we were.
Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.
Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.
“Hi, Marygay.”
“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”
“It’s over now—”
“I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the…”
I put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is … belongs evenly to all of us, … but a triple portion for Cortez”
“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.”
“OK, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each trapped in our own plastic world -
“G’night, William.”
“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the, silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try … lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day
“Mandella — wake up, goddammit, your shift!”
I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what … but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.
For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.
Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.
“Movement!”
“Movement!”
“Jesus Chri — there’s one right—”
“HOLD YOUR FIRE! For shit’s sake don’t shoot!”
“Movement.”
“Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.
Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.
The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.
“All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. Don’t make any quick gestures … Anybody got a headache or anything?”
“Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.
“They’re trying to say something … I can almost … no, just…”
“All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re … well, funny. They’re not afraid. ”
“You mean the one in front of you isn’t—”
“No, the feeling comes from all of them, they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”
“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.”
“Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.”
“Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”
“Yeah.”
“The Taurans’ve been here at least a year — maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these … overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back—”
“I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they want to.”
“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be careful.
I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.
“OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”
I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us surrounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.
We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.
Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.