“You’re doing fine,” I encouraged him.
He gave me a haughtily defensive look, if I could read the limited range of expression on his snouted face. “We erred,” he intoned, “in not more thoroughly examining our target plane. But you must recalclass="underline" we were―and are―in a desperate situation, and time was of the essence. A less sensitive people, such as yourselves, would have simply thrown in an overwhelming force, without consideration of possible consequences for the indignies.”
“Gosh,” I said. “Maybe we all ought to just whisk ourselves off into the Blight.”
“Nothing so drastic,” he corrected. “A mass evacuation to one of the Blight Insulars would be quite adequate. We will permit and even expedite such an accommodation. I can go so far as to say that we will place at your disposal our method of mass-transfer.”
“I was kidding,” I explained. Then I had to explain what “kidding” was. “We have no intention of abandoning our homeland,” I summed up.
“In that case,” he said in a tone of forced patience, “I can see no prospect of any peaceful accommodation between our two species. Pity. Together we might have accomplished much.”
“We still have a lot of talking to do, General,” I told him. “I’d better go now. You get some rest; I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Speaking with you, Colonel,” he answered, “I had for a moment almost forgotten the desperate plight of the Folk. Fare well.”
On that note, I left him and his lingering odor of rotten oranges. For a moment there it had seemed possible that we could somehow reconcile our disparate interests, something that would be of great benefit to both species: the Ylokk had some techniques the NSS would find very useful, and again there was a lot we could teach them, too; but now I was feeling very low. I wanted to talk to Barbro: just the sound of her voice would cheer me up, but what I had to tell her―that I had to make a dash for Headquarters to report what I’d learned about the invaders (and I’d learned more than Swft knew he’d told me)―wouldn’t cheer her up.
I found her, as usual, in the thick of the hottest crisis we had going: a breakthrough had penetrated our improvised defenses on the river side of town. She was at Field HQ, monitoring the situation map with its cheery (if you didn’t know what they meant) colored lights indicating the position of the enemy, unit-by-unit; as they advanced raggedly out of the forest, and of our inadequate forces as they held and held―and fell back. In a few minutes, it appeared, the hospital would be surrounded and isolated.
“Fortunately, Brion,” she reported to me, “we are perhaps saved by the fact that they are making even more and worse mistakes than we.”
I was giving her a fast briefing when Dr. Smovia came hurrying up to me, trailed by a sheepish female MP. I waved her off, and asked Barbro to carry on. Then I kissed her good-bye for now. Smovia was hovering, looking worried.
“Look here, Colonel,” he carped, “my patient is hardly ready to leave the hospital. In addition, he’s a carrier―”
“No danger to humans, though?” I said hopefully.
“Of course not,” he brushed that aside. “But it is rather high-handed of you to release him without so much as notifying me―”
“Hold it,” I cut in. “I haven’t released him! I left him in bed ten minutes ago! Do you mean―?”
“He’s gone,” Smovia grumped. “Not in the hospital. I’ve checked. I assumed that you―”
I cut him off. “He’s on his own, I’m afraid.” I went to the window and looked down the street. As I’d feared, the alien traveler wasn’t where I’d left it, unguarded. Barbro patted my arm encouragingly. She knew I was mentally kicking myself.
“Get on the hot line, Barb,” I told her. “Tip off our perimeter stations to be on the lookout―but don’t try to stop him. They can’t; it would just give us needless casualties.”
“What does this mean?” Smovia demanded. “Where would he go, still weak as he is?”
“Home,” I told him curtly. “He’s gone now; it can’t be helped.” I turned to Barbro. “This makes my dash for the city more necessary than ever,” I told her. She understood that, and nodded. I took off. I couldn’t find my sergeant; I left word for him and went out into the street, where I flagged down Lieutenant Helm and told him I was going to break out. He naturally wanted more details, and I told him to round up the best of our three half-tracks and meet me on Kungsgatan in half an hour. He left at a run.
I went back inside and found Smovia and asked him to come along, and to bring his alien virus cultures. He didn’t understand why, but didn’t give me an argument. I got our HQ crew busy digging defensive works, and briefed them.
“I’ll be back in forty-eight hours,” I told them. “Hold your position until then.” They said they could, and would. I hoped so. Lieutenant Helm returned with the tracks gassed, provisioned, and ready. We didn’t bother with subtleties; we went out the gate past where I’d carelessly left Swft’s displacer unguarded, and saw the same disorganized skirmishers with their short-range weapons. I could almost believe Swft’s contention that the Ylokk weren’t warlike. They made no attempt to interfere; then we came to the roadblock. It was a forbidding-looking barrier at first glance: felled trees, interlaced, with the interstices stacked full of rubble. I took to the shoulder and went across some bumpy ground and back onto the undamaged road. A few Ylokk ran in toward us, but halted at a distance. For invaders, they didn’t seem to have much idea what they were doing.
“Don’t underrate them,” I advised Helm. “They have some technology and ought to be capable of waging effective warfare even without military science. But as individuals they seem to have no imagination or initiative. If we do anything unexpected, they’re at a loss.”
“Suppose it occurs to one of them to get in our path and fire a disruptor at close range?” he mused aloud.
“In that case, we shoot him, proving it was a bad idea,” I replied. But I was worried. We kept on, and they let us through. After a few miles we didn’t see any more of the skulking rat-men. It was an hour’s run to the suburbs. We came to the first bridge into Stockholm and it was intact. Five minutes later we were moving along Drottninsgatan unimpeded. There were heaps of dead aliens in the streets, along with a few human bodies, attended only by scavenging Ylokk. The air filters kept the worst of the stink out of the truck’s cab.
In spite of their massive casualties, there were still plenty of the rat-men abroad, marching in ragged columns, mostly along narrow back streets, sometimes herding human captives. There was no visible damage to the city. The lone shot I’d seen fired in Strandvagen was unique. We came to the high wrought-iron fence in front of Headquarters and were met and escorted inside by two snappy officers in Swedish field-gray.
Chapter 7
Manfred von Richtofen leaned across his big desk to shake my hand warmly, after he’d returned Helm’s salute. I introduced Dr. Smovia, who gave Manfred a terse briefing on his findings, then went off to cook up more viral culture.