This time his base was a sunken area of a thousand yards long and nearly that wide. The heavy stones formed towers and stilleto-like peaks that surrounded the valley in an irregular circle, with steep drop-offs and vertical approaches. The inside walls were very smooth. Trace landed the dinghy on the sheltered side of a pale grey granite boulder that was egg-shaped, with gleaming bands of white quartzite ringing it. It looked like the spring eggs some of the colonists decorated before the growing season of each year. For a moment the vision of fields clad in greenery swam before his eyes, but it was gone quickly.
Resting for a few moments before going outside to inspect his newest base, he remembered the cultivated lands of Mellic. The gentle land, Lar had called it. Her people loved the land and its yield, and they treated it with tenderness and understanding. It had been the burning of the land itself that made them give in to the invaders, not their own deaths, or the thought of continuing the war into an indefinite future, but the spoliation of the land itself. Lar had tried to explain it to him that first time when he had been recuperating:
“We are part of the land, we belong to it, not it to us. The demonstration area, twenty-five miles square, all burned down to the bedrock, mortally wounded by your beams, it will never live again. If we choose to die defending ourselves, that is our right, but the land? It is not ours to decide. The land is God’s, and we must not let that which is His be killed.”
“This god of yours, why doesn’t he intervene in your behalf?”
“The affairs of man are not His affairs. Why should they be? Man must find his own way on the lands he is given. When we pray for help, it is not to our God that we address such prayers.”
“Who else will answer them?”
“There are those who answer such prayers. You will meet them…”
He had called her superstitious and ignorant, and she had smiled at his words. In the end, he knew that she had been neither. The Outsiders had answered the prayers of her people.
Another time she had said of them, “Some say they were the original settlers of the whole galaxy, that they left colonies on each world where no intelligent race dwelled. I don’t know if that is true.”
Trace stirred after several minutes of quiet rest. The fever would return, he knew, and with it the hours of apathy. He had too much to do to give in to apathy when he was able to be up getting things done. He had too much to do to waste precious hours thinking of a girl he had seen only for three brief periods in his life, a girl who was alien, moreover, with alien ways and alien gods.
You think of them as animals, humanoid sometimes, but not like us! They are not like us, not people at all. Never forget that.
Yes, sir, Captain Tracy.
You can’t afford to hate them, or like them, or even think of them at all. You think of the land and the mines and the minerals and drugs, and whatever else is there that the World Group needs. If they cooperate, fine, no one gets hurt. If they don’t… We take the honey from the bees, and the wool from sheep, and the silk from spiders. We take the things we need from the animals that make those things possible.
Yes, sir, Captain Tracy!
He found the key to the food and water storage unit, and brought out the tubes of food, and the water bag. He didn’t want to eat. The food was repulsive, hated by all the fleet. He ate only half a tube of a mixture of meat and vegetable concentrate, and then took his time over the small allowance of water. The sun was rising higher, a white glare of sky that marched over the still land. He thought about the robot on its way south, rolling under the white sky, and he wondered where it had been since he had seen it in Dr. Vianti’s laboratory. Five years ago the war with Mellic had started and ended; five years ago he had seen the robot on Ramses, and since then he had seen other battles, other places. Where had it been? Who had perfected it after the army took it away from the crazy little Dr. Vianti?
Seven
“I don’t give a goddam how sophisticated it is! You can’t fight a war with robots! It’s been tried. Read your military history books!” General Leroy Mulligan chewed his cigar angrily, stamping up and down the cramped room in the military planning headquarters office. Several other men were seated in the room. The building was grey, inside as well as outside, the domed roof curving to make the sides, from which windows had been cut out. He paused before one of the windows and stared at the dismal scene beyond it. Swamps, as far as he could see, here at the edge of the compound. In the opposite direction was a forest of domed buildings, each on piles sunken deep into the mire to rest on the bedrock. The hot air stank of decay and endless death and uncontrollable growth. He hated Venus! God, how he hated Venus! He was a tall, powerfully built man, not yet fifty, with hair the colour and sheen of coal, and eyes like obsidian drops.
“General, the committee doesn’t insist that we adopt this machine to use in combat, merely that we put it through a battery of tests… ” Ching Li Sung sat quietly, his pale hands in a nigh steeple before his face. He had sat thus without moving for the past hour. His ivory-skinned face was un-lined, untroubled, contrasting cruelly with the florid, contorted features of the general.
“Tests be damned! I know what they want! It’s that Outsider nonsense, that’s what it is. Rumours, nothing but rumours. By God, we’ve had rumours ever since man picked up a club and started to swing it. Now suddenly the galaxy’s getting in a panic because of rumours.” General Mulligan whirled and strode back, stopping in front of the Armaments Committee member. “Why did the government send you? Why not the routine request for information they usually send along?”
Ching Li Sung shrugged delicately, didn’t answer. A second officer stood up, a colonel. He was with WGI, the intelligence arm of the World Group government. “General when you ordered the pickup on the robot, what did you plan to do with it?”
General Mulligan glared at the colonel. As much as he detested the WG committees and sub-committees, and sub-sub-committees, he detested the intelligence branches even more. He knew how to appease committee members for the appropriations he needed to run the army, but the intelligence was never appeased; every question answered for them led them to ten more. There wasn’t a man in Intelligence who knew anything about army protocol. He said, “We have lost over a thousand men in this mud bath of a planet, a thousand men, millions of dollars worth of equipment from diving gear to boats, to subs, to bathyspheres, to pumps. You name it, we’ve tried it and lost it. You ever try to drill down through two miles of gook? Not water, not good solid earth, but filthy, stinking, rotting gook? Year after year we plead for relocation of the Fleet base, and every year they turn us down. Mars’ atmosphere too thin; Earth too crowded; everything else too far away. So we are stuck here. Every year we try to get the job of drying up this hellhole turned over to civilian authorities, and they turn that down. So I want a machine that will get the goddam job done.”