He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his command - an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the incomparable communications net, both open and secret, reinforced by thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged from the Ancient Wars.
Overriding, overridden!
These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before recorded time began. Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of weapons, most often by cutting in on other peoples’ mechanical and social controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as they had taken them.
But not Crudelta’s hastily called troops.
The war broke out with a change of pace.
Two squads of men were moving into that part of the hospital where Elizabeth lay, waiting the endless returns to the jelly baths which would rebuild her poor ruined body.
The squads changed pace.
The survivors could not account for what happened.
They all admitted to great mental confusion - afterward.
At the time it seemed that they had received a clear, logical command to turn and to defend the women’s section by counterattacking their own main battalion right in their rear.
The hospital was a very strong building. Otherwise it would have melted to the ground or shot up in flame.
The leading soldiers suddenly turned around, dropped for cover and blazed their wirepoints at the comrades who followed them. The wirepoints were cued to organic material, though fairly harmless to inorganic. They were powered by the power relays which every soldier wore on his back.
In the first ten seconds of the turnaround, twenty-seven soldiers, two nurses, three patients and one orderly were killed. One hundred and nine other people were wounded in that first exchange of fire.
The troop commander had never seen battle, but he had been well trained. He immediately deployed his reserves around the external exits of the building and sent his favorite squad, commanded by a Sergeant Lansdale whom he trusted well, down into the basement, so that it could rise vertically from the basement into the women’s quarters and find out who the enemy was.
As yet, he had no idea that it was his own leading troops turning and fighting their comrades.
He testified later, at the trial, that he personally had no sensations of eerie interference with his own mind. He merely knew that his men had unexpectedly come upon armed resistance from antagonists - identity unknown! - who had weapons identical with theirs. Since the Lord Crudelta had brought them along in case there might be a fight with unspecified antagonists, he felt right in assuming that a Lord of the Instrumentality knew what he was doing. This was the enemy all right.
In less than a minute, the two sides had balanced out. The line of fire had moved right into his own force. The lead men, some of whom were wounded, simply turned around and began defending themselves against the men immediately behind them. It was as though an invisible line, moving rapidly, had parted the two sections of the military force.
The oily black smoke of dissolving bodies began to glut the ventilators.
Patients were screaming, doctors cursing, robots stamping around and nurses trying to call each other.
The war ended when the troop commander saw Sergeant Lansdale, whom he himself had sent upstairs, leading a charge out of the women’s quarters - directly at his own commander!
The officer kept his head.
He dropped to the floor and rolled sidewise as the air chittered at him, the emanations of Lansdale’s wirepoint killing all the tiny bacteria in the air. On his helmet phone he pushed the manual controls to TOP VOLUME and to NONCOMS ONLY, and he commanded, with a sudden flash of brilliant mother-wit, “Good job, Lansdale!”
Lansdale’s voice came back as weak as if it had been off-planet, “We’ll keep them out of this section yet, sir!”
The troop commander called back very loudly but calmly, not letting on that he thought his sergeant was psychotic.
“Easy now. Hold on. I’ll be with you.”
He changed to the other channel and said to his nearby men, “Cease fire. Take cover and wait.”
A wild scream came to him from the phones.
It was Lansdale. “Sir! Sir! I’m fighting you, sir. I just caught on. It’s getting me again. Watch out.”
The buzz and burr of the weapons suddenly stopped.
The wild human uproar of the hospital continued.
A tall doctor, with the insignia of high seniority, came gently to the troop commander and said, “You can stand up and take your soldiers out now, young fellow. The fight was a mistake.”
“I’m not under your orders,” snapped the young officer. “I’m under the Lord Crudelta. He requisitioned this force from the Manhome Government. Who are you?”
“You may salute me, captain,” said the doctor, “I am Colonel General Vomact of the Earth Medical Reserve. But you had better not wait for the Lord Crudelta.”
“But where is he?”
“In my bed,” said Vomact.
“Your bed?” cried the young officer in complete amazement.
“In bed. Doped to the teeth. I fixed him up. He was excited. Take your men out. We’ll treat the wounded on the lawn. You can see the dead in the refrigerators downstairs in a few minutes, except for the ones that went smoky from direct hits.”
“But the fight… ?”
“A mistake, young man, or else - ”
“Or else what?” shouted the young officer, horrified at the utter mess of his own combat experience.
“Or else a weapon no man has ever seen before. Your troops fought each other. Your command was intercepted.”
“I could see that,” snapped the officer, “as soon as I saw Lansdale coming at me.”
“But do you know what took him over?” said Vomact gently, while taking the officer by the arm and beginning to lead him out of the hospital. The captain went willingly, not noticing where he was going, so eagerly did he watch for the other man’s words.
“I think I know,” said Vomact. “Another man’s dreams. Dreams which have learned how to turn themselves into electricity or plastic or stone. Or anything else. Dreams coming to us out of space3.”
The young officer nodded dumbly. This was too much. “Space3?” he murmured. It was like being told that the really alien invaders, whom men had been expecting for thirteen thousand years and had never met. were waiting for him on the grass. Until now space3 had been a mathematical idea, a romancer’s daydream, but not a fact.
The sir and doctor Vomact did not even ask the young officer. He brushed the young man gently at the nape of the neck and shot him through with tranquilizer. Vomact then led him out to the grass. The young captain stood alone and whistled happily at the stars in the sky. Behind him, his sergeants and corporals were sorting out the survivors and getting treatment for the wounded.
The Two Minutes’ War was over.
Rambo had stopped dreaming that his Elizabeth was in danger. He had recognized, even in his deep sick sleep, that the tramping in the corridor was the movement of armed men. His mind had set up defenses to protect Elizabeth. He took over command of the forward troops and set them to stopping the main body. The powers which space5 had worked into him made this easy for him to do, even though he did not know that he was doing it.
“How many dead?” said Vomact to Grosbeck and Timofeyev.