Three hundred distinct beams latticed down, joined in a coruscating rainbow, threw negatively charged particles five hundred feet in the air, shorted out...and warped the soldier off the battlefield.
Nathan Schwachter had his heart attack right there on the subway platform.
The soldier materialized in front of him, from nowhere, filthy and ferocious-looking, a strange weapon cradled to his body...just as the old man was about to put a penny in the candy machine.
Qarlo"s long cape was still, the dematerialization and subsequent reappearance having left him untouched. He stared in confusion at the sallow face before him, and started violently at the face"s piercing shriek.
Qarlo watched with growing bewilderment and terror as the sallow face contorted and sank to the littered floor of the platform. The old man clutched his chest, twitched and gasped several times. His legs jerked spasmodically, and his mouth opened wildly again and again. He died with mouth open, eyes staring at the ceiling.
Qarlo looked at the body disinterestedly for a moment; death...what did one death matter...every day during the War, ten thousand died...more horribly than this... this was as nothing to him.
The sudden universe-filling scream of an incoming express train broke his attention. The black tunnel that his War-filled world had become, was filled with the rusty wail of an unseen monster, bearing down on him out of the darkness.
The fighting man in him made his body arch, sent it into a crouch. He poised on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, his rifle levering horizontal instantly, pointed at the sound.
From the crowds packed on the platform, a voice rose over the thunder of the incoming train: "Him! It was him! He shot that old man...he"s crazy!" Heads turned; eyes stared; a little man with a dirty vest, his bald head reflecting the glow of the overhead lights, was pointing a shaking finger at Qarlo.
It was as if two currents had been set up simultaneously. The crowd both drew away and advanced on him. Then the train barreled around the curve, drove past, blasting sound into the very fibers of the soldier"s body. Qarlo"s mouth opened wide in a soundless scream, and more from reflex than intent, the Brandelmeier erupted in his hands.
A triple-thread of cold blue beams sizzled from the small bell mouth of the weapon, streaked across the tunnel, and blasted full into the front of the train.
The front of the train melted down quickly, and the vehicle ground to a stop. The metal had been melted like a coa.r.s.e grade of plastic on a burner. Where it had fused into a soggy lump, the metal was bright and smeary-more like the gleam of oxidized silver than anything else.
Qarlo regretted having fired the moment he felt the Brandelmeier buck. He was not where he should be-where he was, that was still another, more pressing problem-and he knew he was in danger. Every movement had to be watched as carefully as possible...and perhaps he had gotten off to a bad start already. But that noise...
He had suffered the screams of the battlefield, but the reverberations of the train, thundering back and forth in that enclosed s.p.a.ce, were a nightmare of indescribable horror.
As he stared dumbly at his handiwork, from behind him, the crowd made a concerted rush.
Three burly, charcoal-suited executives-each carrying an attache case which he dropped as he made the lunge, looking like unhealthy carbon-copies of each other-grabbed Qarlo above the elbows, around the waist, about the neck.
The soldier roared something unintelligible and flung them from him. One slid across the platform on the seat of his pants, bringing up short, his stomach and face smashing into a tiled wall. The second spun away, arms flailing, into the crowd. The third tried to hang onto Qarlo"s neck. The soldier lifted him bodily, arched him over his head-breaking the man"s insecure grip-and pitched him against a stanchion. The executive hit the girder, slid down, and lay quite still, his back oddly twisted.
The crowd emitted scream after scream, drew away once more. Terror rippled back through its ranks. Several women, near the front, suddenly became aware of the blood pouring from the face of one of the executives, and keeled onto the dirty platform unnoticed. The screams continued, seeming echoes of the now-dead express train"s squealing.
But as an ent.i.ty, the crowd backed the soldier down the platform. For a moment Qarlo forgot he still held the Brandelmeier. He lifted the gun to a threatening position, and the ent.i.ty that was the crowd pulsed back.
Nightmare! It was all some sort of vague, formless nightmare to Qarlo. This was not the War, where anyone he saw, he blasted. This was something else, some other situation, in which he was lost, disoriented. What was happening?
Qarlo moved toward the wall, his back p.r.i.c.kly with fear sweat. He had expected to die in the War, but something as simple and direct and expected as that had not happened. He was here, not there- wherever here was, and wherever there had gone-and these people were unarmed, obviously civilians. Which would not have kept him from murdering them...but what was happening? Where was the battlefield?
His progress toward the wall was halted momentarily as he backed cautiously around a stanchion. He knew there were people behind him, as well as the white-faced knots before him, and he was beginning to suspect there was no way out. Such confusion boiled up in his thoughts, so close to hysteria was he-plain soldier of the fields-that his mind forcibly rejected the impossibility of being somehow transported from the War into this new-and in many ways more terrifying-situation. He concentrated on one thing only, as a good soldier should: Out!
He slid along the wall, the crowd flowing before him, opening at his approach, closing in behind. He whirled once, driving them back farther with the black hole of the Brandelmeier"s bell mouth. Again he hesitated (not knowing why) to fire upon them.
He sensed they were enemies. But still they were unarmed. And yet, that had never stopped him before. The village in Tetra Omsk Territory, beyond the Volga somewhere. They had been unarmed there, too, but the square had been filled with civilians he had not hesitated to b.u.m. Why was he hesitating now?
The Brandelmeier continued in its silence.
Qarlo detected a commotion behind the crowd, above the crowd"s inherent commotion. And a movement. Something was happening there. He backed tightly against the wall as a blue-suited, bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned man broke through the crowd.
The man took one look, caught the unwinking black eye of the Brandelmeier, and threw his arms back, indicating to the crowd to clear away. He began screaming at the top of his lungs, veins standing out in his temples, "Geddoudahere! The guy"s a cuckaboo! Somebody"ll get kilt! Beat it, run!"
The crowd needed no further impetus. It broke in the center and streamed toward the stairs.
Qarlo swung around, looking for another way out, but both accessible stairways were clogged by fighting commuters, shoving each other mercilessly to get out. He was effectively trapped.
The cop fumbled at his holster. Qarlo caught a glimpse of the movement from the corner of his eye. Instinctively he knew the movement for what it was; a weapon was about to be brought into use. He swung about, leveling the Brandelmeier. The cop jumped behind a stanchion just as the soldier pressed the firing stud.
A triple-thread of bright blue energy leaped from the weapon"s bell mouth. The beam went over the heads of the crowd, neatly melting away a five foot segment of wall supporting one of the stairways. The stairs creaked, and the sound of tortured metal adjusting to poor support and aIi overcrowding of people rang through the tunnel. The cop looked fearfully above himself, saw the beams curve, then settle under the weight, and turned a wide-eyed stare back at the soldier.
The cop fired twice, from behind the stanchion, the booming of the explosions catapulting back and forth in the enclosed s.p.a.ce.
The second bullet took the soldier above the wrist in his left arm. The Brandelmeier slipped uselessly from his good hand, as blood stained the garment he wore. He stared at his shattered lower arm in amazement. Doubled amazement.
What manner of weapon was this the blue-coated man had used? No beam, that. Nothing like anything he had ever seen before. No beam to fry him in his tracks. It was some sort of power that hurled a projectile...that had ripped his body. He stared stupidly as blood continued to flow out of his arm.
The cop, less anxious now to attack this man with the weird costume and unbelievable rifle, edged cautiously from behind his cover, skirting the edge of the platform, trying to get near enough to Qarlo to put another bullet into him, should he offer further resistance. But the soldier continued to stand, spraddle-legged, staring at his wound, confused at where he was, what had happened to him, the screams of the trains as they bulleted past, and the barbarian tactics of his blue-coated adversary.
The cop moved slowly, steadily, expecting the soldier to break and run at any moment. The wounded man stood rooted, however. The cop bunched his muscles and leaped the few feet intervening.
Savagely, he brought the barrel of his pistol down on the side of Qarlo"s neck, near the ear. The soldier turned slowly, anch.o.r.ed in his tracks, and stared unbelievingly at the policeman for an instant.
Then his eyes glazed, and he collapsed to the platform.
As a gray swelling mist bobbed up around his mind, one final thought impinged incongruously: he struck me... physical contact? I don"t believe it! What have I gotten into?
Light filtered through vaguely. Shadows slithered and wavered, sullenly formed into solids.
"Hey, Mac. Got a light?"
Shadows blocked Qarlo"s vision, but he knew he was lying on his back, staring up. He turned his head, and a wall oozed into focus, almost at his nose tip. He turned his head the other way. Another wall, about three feet away, blending in his sight into a shapeless gray blotch. He abruptly realized the back of his head hurt. He moved slowly, swiveling his head, but the soreness remained. Then he realized he was lying on some hard metal surface, and he tried to sit up. The pains throbbed higher, making him feel nauseated, and for an instant his vision receded again.
Then it steadied, and he sat up slowly. He swung his legs over the sharp edge of what appeared to be a shallow, sloping metal trough. It was a mattressless bunk, curved in its bottom, from hundreds of men who had lain there before him.
He was in a cell.
"Hey! I said you got a match there?"
Qarlo turned from the empty rear wall of the cell and looked through the bars. A bulb-nosed face was thrust up close to the metal barrier. The man was short, in filthy rags whose "odor reached Qarlo with tremendous offensiveness. The man"s eyes were bloodshot, and his nose was crisscrossed with blue and red veins. Acute alcoholism, reeking from every pore; acne rosacea that had turned his nose into a hideous cracked and pocked blob.
Qarlo knew he was in detention, and from the very look, the very smell of this other, he knew he was not in a military prison. The man was staring in at him, oddly.
"Match, Charlie? You got a match?" He puffed his fat, wet lips at Qarlo, forcing the bit of cigarette stub forward with his mouth. Qarlo stared back; he could not understand the man"s words. They were so slowly spoken, so sharp and yet unintelligible. But he knew what to answer.
"Marnames Qarlo Clobregnny, pryt, sizflfwunohtootoonyn," the soldier muttered by rote, surly tones running together.
"Whaddaya mad at me for, buddy? I didn"t putcha in here," argued the match-seeker. "All I wanted was a light for this here b.u.t.t." He held up two inches of smoked stub. "How come they gotcha inna cell, and not runnin" around loose inna bull pen like us?" He c.o.c.ked a thumb over his shoulder, and for the first time Qarlo realized others were in this jail.
"Ah, to h.e.l.l wit ya," the drunk muttered. He cursed again, softly under his breath, turning away. He walked across the bull pen and sat down with the four other men-all vaguely similar in facial content-who lounged around a rough-hewn table-bench combination. The table and benches, all one piece, like a picnic table, were bolted to the floor.
"A screwloose," the drunk said to the others, nodding his balding head at the soldier in his long cape and metallic skintight suit. He picked up the crumpled remnants of an ancient magazine and leafed through it as though he knew every line of type, every girlie ill.u.s.tration, by heart.
Qarlo looked over the cell. It was about ten feet high by eight across, a sink with one thumb-push spigot running cold water, a commode without seat or paper, and metal trough, roughly the dimensions of an average-sized man, fastened to one wall. One enclosed bulb burned feebly in the ceiling. Three walls of solid steel. Ceiling and floor of the same, riveted together at the seams. The fourth wall was the barred door.
The firmer might be able to wilt that steel, he realized, and instinctively reached for his pouch. It was the first moment he had had a chance to think of it, and even as he reached, knew the satisfying weight of it was gone. His bandoliers also. His Brandelmeier, of course. His boots, too, and there seemed to have been some attempt to get his cape off, but it was all part of the skintight suit of metallic-mesh cloth.
The loss of the pouch was too much. Everything that had happened, had happened so quickly, so blurry, meshed, and the soldier was abruptly overcome by confusion and a deep feeling of hopelessness. He sat down on the bunk, the ledge of metal biting into his thighs. His head still ached from a combination of the blow dealt him by the cop, and the metal bunk where he had lain. He ran a shaking hand over his head, feeling the fractional inch of his brown hair, cut battle-style. Then he noticed that his left hand had been bandaged quite expertly. There was hardly any throbbing from his wound.
That brought back to sharp awareness all that had transpired, and the War leaped into his thoughts. The telepathic command, the rising from the firmhole, the rifle at the ready...
...then a sizzling shussssss, and the universe had exploded around him in a billion tiny flickering novas of color and color and color. Then suddenly, just as suddenly as he had been standing on the battlefield of Great War VII, advancing on the enemy forces of Ruskie-c.h.i.n.k, he was not there.
He was here.
He was in some dark, hard tunnel, with a great beast roaring out of the blackness onto him, and a man in a blue coat had shot him, and clubbed him. Actually touched him! Without radiation gloves! How had the man known Qarlo was not b.o.o.by-trapped with radiates? He could have died in an instant.
Where was he? What war was this he was engaged in? Were these Ruskie-c.h.i.n.k or his own Tri-Continenters? He did not know, and there was no sign of an explanation.
Then he thought of something more important. If he had been captured, then they must want to question him. There was a way to combat that, too. He felt around in the hollow tooth toward the back of his mouth. His tongue touched each tooth till it hit the right lower bicuspid. It was empty. The poison glob was gone, he realized in dismay. It must have dropped out when the blue-coat clubbed me, he thought.
He realized he was at their mercy; who they might be was another thing to worry about. And with the glob gone, he had no way to stop their extracting information. It was bad. Very bad, according to the warning conditioning he had received. They could use Probers, or dyoxl-scopalite, or hypno-scourge, or anyone of a hundred different methods, anyone of which would reveal to them the strength of numbers in his company, the battery placements, the gun ranges, the ident.i.ty and thought wave band of every officer...in fact, a good deal. More than he had thought he knew.
He had become a very important prisoner of War. He had to hold out, he realized!
Why?
The thought popped up, and was gone. All it left in its wake was the intense feeling: I despise War, all war and the War! Then, even that was gone, and he was alone with the situation once more, to try and decide what had happened to him...what secret weapon had been used to capture him...and if these unintelligible barbarians with the projectile weapons could, indeed, extract his knowledge from him.
I swear they won"t get anything out of me but my name, rank, and serial number, he thought desperately.
He mumbled those particulars aloud, as rea.s.surance: "Marnames Qarlo Clobregnny, pryt, sizflfwunohtootoonyn."
The drunks looked up from their table and their shakes, at the sound of his voice. The man with the rosedrop nose rubbed a dirty hand across fleshy chin folds, repeated his philosophy of the strange man in the locked cell.
"Screwloose!"
He might have remained in jail indefinitely, considered a madman or a mad rifleman. But the desk sergeant who had booked him, after the soldier had received medical attention, grew curious about the strangely shaped weapon.
As he put the things into security, he tested the Brandelmeier-hardly realizing what k.n.o.b or stud controlled its power, never realizing what it could do-and melted away one wall of the safe room. Three inch plate steel, and it melted bluely, fused solidly.
He called the Captain, and the Captain called the F.B.I., and the F.B.I. called Internal Security, and Internal Security said, "Preposterous!" and checked back. When the Brandelmeier had been thoroughly tested-as much as could be tested, since the rifle had no seams, no apparent power source, and fantastic range-they were willing to believe. They had the soldier removed from his cell, transported along with the pouch, and a philologist named Soames, to the I.S. general headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Brandelmeier came by jet courier, and the soldier was flown in by helicopter, under sedation. The philologist named Soames, whose hair was long and rusty, whose face was that of a starving artist, whose temperament was that of a saint, came in by specially chartered lane from Columbia University. The pouch was sent by sealed Brinks truck to the airport, where it was delivered under heaviest guard to a mail plane. They all arrived in Washington within ten minutes of one another and, without seeing anything of the surrounding countryside, were whisked away to the subsurface levels of the I.S. Buildings.
When Qarlo came back to consciousness, he found himself again in a cell, this time quite unlike the first. No bars, but just as solid to hold him in, with padded walls. Qarlo paced around the cell a few times, seeking breaks in the walls, and found what was obviously a door, in one corner. But he could not work his fingers between the pads, to try and open it.
He sat down on the padded floor, and rubbed the bristled top of his head in wonder. Was he never to find out what had happened to himself? And when was he going to shake this strange feeling that he was being watched?
Overhead, through a pane of one-way gla.s.s that looked like a ventilator grille, the soldier was being watched.
Lyle Sims and his secretary knelt before the window in the floor, along with the philologist named Soames. Where Soames was s.h.a.ggy, ill-kept, hungry-looking and placid... Lyle Sims was lean, collegiate-seeming, brusque and brisk. He had been special advisor to an unnamed branch office of Internal Security, for five years, dealing with every strange or offbeat problem too outre for regulation inquiry. Those years had hardened him in an odd way: he was quick to recognize authenticity, even quicker to recognize fakery.
As he watched, his trained instincts took over completely, and he knew in a moment of spying, that the man in the cell below was out of the ordinary. Not so in any fashion that could be labeled- "drunkard," "foreigner," "psychotic"-but so markedly different, so other, he was taken aback.
"Six feet three inches," he recited to the girl kneeling beside him. She made the notation on her pad, and he went on calling out characteristics of the soldier below. "Brown hair, clipped so short you can see the scalp. Brown...no, black eyes. Scars. Above the left eye, running down to center of left cheek; bridge of nose; three parallel scars on the right side of chin; tiny one over right eyebrow; last one I can see, runs from back of left ear, into hairline.
"He seems to be wearing an all-over, skintight suit something like, oh, I suppose it"s like a pair of what do you call those pajamas kids wear...the kind with the back door, the kind that enclosed the feet?"
The girl inserted softly, "You mean snuggies?"
The man nodded, slightly embarra.s.sed for no good reason, continued, "Mmm. Yes, that"s right. Like those. The suit encloses his feet, seems to be joined to the cape, and comes up to his neck. Seems to be some sort of metallic cloth.
"Something else...may mean nothing at all, or on the other hand..." He pursed his lips for a moment, then described his observation carefully. "His head seems to be oddly shaped. The forehead is larger than most, seems to be pressing forward in front, as though he had been smacked hard and it was swelling. That seems to be everything."
Sims settled back on his haunches, fished in his side pocket, and came up with a small pipe, which he cold-puffed in thought for a second. He rose slowly, still staring down through the floor window. He murmured something to himself, and when Soames asked what he had said, the special advisor repeated, "I think we"ve got something almost too hot to handle."
Soames clucked knowingly, and gestured toward the window. "Have you been able to make out anything he"s said yet?"
Sills shook his head. "No. That"s why you"re here. It seems he"s saying the same thing, over and over, but it"s completely unintelligible. Doesn"t seem to be any recognizable language, or any dialect we"ve been able to pin down."
"I"d like to take a try at him," Soames said, smiling gently. It was the man"s nature that challenge brought satisfaction; solution brought unrest, eagerness for a new, more rugged problem.
Sills nodded agreement, but there was a tense, strained film over his eyes, in the set of his mouth. "Take it easy with him, Soames. I have a strong hunch this is something completely new, something we haven"t even begun to understand."
Soames smiled again, this time indulgently. "Come, come, Mr. Sills. After all...he is only an alien of some sort...all we have to do is find out what country he"s from."
"Have you heard him talk yet?"
Soames shook his head.
"Then don"t be too quick to think he"s just a foreigner. The word alien may be more correct than you think-only not in the way you think."
A confused look spread across Soames"s face. He gave a slight shrug, as though he could not fathom what Lyle Sills meant...and was not particularly interested. He patted Sims rea.s.suringly, which brought an expression of annoyance to the advisor"s face, and he clamped down on the pipestem harder.
They walked downstairs together; the secretary left them, to type her notes, and Sims let the philologist into the padded room, cautioning him to deal gently with the man. "Don"t forget," Sims warned, "we"re not sure where he comes from, and sudden movements may make him jumpy. There"s a guard overhead, and there"ll be a man with me behind this door, but you never know."
Soames looked startled. "You sound as though he"s an aborigine or something. With a suit like that, he must be very intelligent. You suspect something, don"t you?"
Sims made a neutral motion with his hands. "What I suspect is too nebulous to worry about now. Just take it easy...and above all, figure out what he"s saying, where he"s from."
Sims had decided, long before, that it would be wisest to keep the power of the Brandelmeier to himself. But he was fairly certain it was not the work of a foreign power. The trial run on the test range had left him gasping, confused.
He opened the door, and Soames pa.s.sed through, uneasily.
Sims caught a glimpse of the expression on the stranger"s face as the philologist entered. It was even more uneasy than Soames"s had been.
It looked to be a long wait.
Soames was white as paste. His face was drawn, and the complacent att.i.tude he had shown since his arrival in Washington was shattered. He sat across from Sims, and asked him in a quavering voice for a cigarette. Sims fished around in his desk, came up with a crumpled pack and idly slid them across to Soames. The philologist took one, put it in his mouth, then, as though it had been totally forgotten in the s.p.a.ce of a second, he removed it, held it while he spoke.