14.
"He"s backed against the wall," Reynolds said hoa.r.s.ely. "It"s still coming. A hundred feet to go-"
"You were a fool, Reynolds!" the mayor barked. "A fool to stake everything on that old dotard"s crazy ideas!"
"Hold it!" As Reynolds watched, the mighty machine slowed, halted, ten feet from the sheer wall before it. For a moment, it sat, as though puzzled. Then it backed, halted again, pivoted ponderously to the left, and came about.
On its side, a small figure crept up, fell across the lower gun deck. The Bolo surged into motion,retracing its route across the artillery-scarred gardens.
"He"s turned it." Reynolds let his breath out with a shuddering sigh. "It"s headed out for open desert. It might get twenty miles before it finally runs out of steam."
The strange voice that was the Bolo"s came from the big panel before Mayfield: "Command . . . Unit LNE reports main power cells drained, secondary cells drained; now operating at .037 per cent efficiency, using Final Emergency Power. Request advice as to range to be covered before relief maintenance available."
"It"s a long way, Lenny . . ." Sanders" voice was a bare whisper. "But I"m coming with you . . ."
Then there was only the crackle of static. Ponderously, like a great mortally stricken animal, the Bolo moved through the ruins of the fallen roadway, heading for the open desert.
"That d.a.m.ned machine," the mayor said in a hoa.r.s.e voice. "You"d almost think it was alive."
"You would at that," Pete Reynolds said.
Afterword by Eric Flint: In his preface, David refers to three of the Bolo stories "that really have an impact." The other two, for the record-at least so far as Dave and I are concerned-are "A Relic of War" and "Combat Unit" (aka "Dinochrome"). Among the three, it"s hard to pick and choose. As it happens, I chose "Dinochrome" to include in the first volume of Laumer"s writings which I edited for Baen Books" current reissue of many of Laumer"s writings, but I could just as easily have chosen this one.
My reasons are similar to David"s, but not exactly the same. I"m not a combat veteran, so on that level the story doesn"t have the same personal impact. The thing I"ve always liked so much about the three great Bolo stories is that they give you the best of Laumer"s ethos of duty without the veneer that I often find repellent in so many other stories Laumer wrote.
Laumer, like Van Vogt, was an author who naturally gravitated toward superman stories. Stories like that, no matter how well crafted and enjoyable-and on that level Laumer was a superb writer, one of the best ever in science fiction-just naturally tend to rub me the wrong way. It doesn"t matter how admirable and courageous the hero might be, or how worthy his cause, I soon get impatient with story after story where the fate of the world rests almost entirely on one person doing the right thing, and where the role of everyone else is pretty much reduced to one of three roles: a) Loyal sidekick; b) Enemy; c) Most people, who are irrelevant at best and sluggards as a rule.Oh, bah. The great divide in science fiction is not political, it"s the divide between those writers-Heinlein, Clarke and Andre Norton, to name three great figures-who generally tell stories about fairly ordinary people doing their best in difficult circ.u.mstances, and those writers-Van Vogt, "Doc" Smith and Laumer prominent among them, with George Lucas"Star Wars series the latest embodiment-for whom most stories are heroic epics centered around supermen.
There"s an attraction to such stories, of course, even for someone with my inclination. That"s because, in the hands of good writers, the theme of Duty rings so strongly. It"s a theme which is difficult not to like, because without a sense of duty no virtues of any kind are possible.
Andthat"s why the best of the Bolo stories always have such an impact on me-today just as much as they did when I first read them many decades ago. The theme comes without the dross, so to speak. The Bolos are not supermen, they are simply servants trying to follow their duty as best as they can manage.
In the end, for me at least, that makes these machines ultimately more human than many other of Laumer"s characters. Well . . . maybe not more human, but certainly a lot more sympathetic.
Who Goes There?
by John W. Campbell
Preface by Eric Flint This story has been anthologized so many times, that I suppose I should explain why we decided to do it again. Well . . . that"s sort of the reason, right there. It was something of a ubiquitous phenomenon, coming into science fiction in the late "50s and early "60s. Even in Hollywood: the 1951 movieThe Thing was made from it, and then remade in 1982. An anthology like this one just wouldn"t have felt quite right without it. To me, anyway.
Campbell is today much more often remembered as the editor ofASF than he is as a writer in his own right. But when I was a kid, a lot of his stories were still readily available. There was a time when I devoured his s.p.a.ce operas and swore that Doc Smith"s Lensmen couldn"t hold a candle to the intrepid crews of Campbell"s galactic-scale adventure novels.
Well . . . that was then and this is now, and the verdict of history is pretty much in. Campbell was in fact a central figure in SF, even a towering one, but it"s his influence as an editor that has lasted. His own fiction has pretty much vanished.
Except this story.
I.
The place stank. A queer, mingled stench that only the ice-buried cabins of an Antarctic camp know, compounded of reeking human sweat, and the heavy, fish-oil stench of melted seal blubber. An overtone of liniment combated the musty smell of sweat-and-snow-drenched furs. The acrid odor of burnt cooking fat, and the animal, not-unpleasant smell of dogs, diluted by time, hung in the air.
Lingering odors of machine oil contrasted sharply with the taint of harness dressing and leather. Yet, somehow, through all that reek of human beings and their a.s.sociates-dogs, machines, and cooking-came another taint. It was a queer, neck-ruffling thing, a faintest suggestion of an odor alien among the smells of industry and life. And it was a life-smell. But it came from the thing that lay bound with cord and tarpaulin on the table, dripping slowly, methodically onto the heavy planks, dank and gaunt under the unshielded glare of the electric light.
Blair, the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously at the wrappings, exposing clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the tarpaulin back into place restlessly. His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy gray underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial fringe of stiff, graying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow"s head.
Commander Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped toward the table.
Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into the Administration Building. His tall, stiff body straightened finally, and he nodded. "Thirty-seven. All here." His voice was low, yet carried the clear authority of the commander by nature, as well as by t.i.tle.
"You know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole Expedition. I have been conferring with Second-in-Command McReady, and Norris, as well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There is a difference of opinion, and because it involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire Expedition personnel act on it.
"I am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each of you has been too busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of the others. McReady?"
Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six feet four inches he stood as he halted beside the table, and with a characteristic glance upward to a.s.sure himself of room under the low ceiling beams, straightened. His rough, clashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet on his huge frame it did not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned across the Antarctic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent leaked in, and gave meaning to the harshness of the man. And he was bronze-his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing, gripping and relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.
Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his face, and the mellow tones of the heavy voice. "Norris and Blair agree on one thing; that animal we found was not-terrestrial in origin. Norris fears there may be danger in that; Blair says there is none.
"But I"ll go back to how, and why we found it. To all that was known before we came here, it appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic Pole of Earth. The compa.s.s does point straight down here, as you all know. The more delicate instruments of the physicists, instruments especially designed forthis expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a secondary effect, a secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about eighty miles southwest of here.
"The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so-and certain special steels even more magnetic. From the surface indications, the secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect. Soundings through the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier surface.
"I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary Station, Van Wall says. He didn"t have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has dammed back the ice creeping from the south.
"And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you know. As a meteorologist I"d have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees; that no more than a five-mile wind could blow at -50; without causing warming due to friction with ground, snow and ice and the air itself.
"We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We dug our camp into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped most of it. But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at forty-five miles an hour. It went as high as forty-eight, and fell to forty-one at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose to -60 and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.
"Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of the South Polar Plateau slides down from that 18,000-foot bowl, down a mountain pa.s.s, over a glacier, and starts north. There must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the secondary pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antarctic Ocean.
"It"s been frozen there since Antarctica froze twenty million years ago. There never has been a thaw there.
"Twenty million years ago Antarctica was beginning to freeze. We"ve investigated, though and built speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.
"Something came down out of s.p.a.ce, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet long and 45 feet in diameter at its thickest.
"Eh, Van Wall? s.p.a.ce? Yes, but I"ll explain that better later." McReady"s steady voice went on.
"It came down from s.p.a.ce, driven and lifted by forces men haven"t discovered yet, and somehow-perhaps something went wrong then-it tangled with Earth"s magnetic field. It came south here, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That"s a savage country there; but when Antarctica was still freezing, it must have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been blizzard snow, as well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there must have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over the lip of that now-buried mountain.
"The ship struck solid granite head-on, and cracked up. Not every one of the pa.s.sengers in it was killed,but the ship must have been ruined, her driving mechanism locked. It tangled with Earth"s field, Norris believes. No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet"s natural forces and survive.
"One of its pa.s.sengers stepped out. The wind we saw there never fell below forty-one, and the temperature never rose above -60. Then-the wind must have been stronger. And there was drift falling in a solid sheet. Thething was lost completely in ten paces." He paused for a moment, the deep, steady voice giving way to the drone of wind overhead and the uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove.
Drift-a drift-wind was sweeping by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp. If a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each of the camp buildings beneath the surface, he"d be lost in ten paces. Out there, the slim, black finger of the radio mast lifted three hundred feet into the air, and at its peak was the clear night sky.
A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily from beyond to another beyond under the licking, curling mantle of the aurora. And off north, the horizon flamed with queer, angry colors of the midnight twilight.
That was Spring three hundred feet above Antarctica.
At the surface-it was white death. Death of a needle-fingered cold driven before the wind, sucking heat from any warm thing. Cold-and white mist of endless, everlasting drift, the fine, fine particles of licking snow that obscured all things.
Kinner, the little, scar-faced cook, winced. Five days ago he had stepped out to the surface to reach a cache of frozen beef. He had reached it, started back-and the drift-wind leapt out of the south. Cold, white death that streamed across the ground blinded him in twenty seconds. He stumbled on wildly in circles. It was half an hour before rope-guided men from below found him in the impenetrable murk.
It was easy for man-orthing -to get lost in ten paces.
"And the drift-wind then was probably more impenetrable than we know." McReady"s voice snapped Kinner"s mind back. Back to the welcome, dank warmth of the Ad Building. "The pa.s.senger of the ship wasn"t prepared either, it appears. It froze within ten feet of the ship.
"We dug down to find the ship, and our tunnel happened to find the frozen-animal. Barclay"s ice-ax struck its skull.
"When we saw what it was, Barclay went back to the tractor, started the fire up and when the steam pressure built, sent a call for Blair and Dr. Copper. Barclay himself was sick then. Stayed sick for three days, as a matter of fact.
"When Blair and Copper came, we cut out the animal in a block of ice, as you see, wrapped it and loaded it on the tractor for return here. We wanted to get into that ship.
"We reached the side and found the metal was something we didn"t know. Our beryllium-bronze, non-magnetic tools wouldn"t touch it. Barclay had some tool-steel on the tractor, and that wouldn"t scratch it either. We made reasonable tests-even tried some acid from the batteries with no results.
"They must have had a pa.s.sivating process to make magnesium metal resist acid that way, and the alloy must have been at least ninety-five percent magnesium. But we had no way of guessing that, so when we spotted the barely opened lock door, we cut around it. There was clear, hard ice inside the lock, where we couldn"t reach it. Through the little crack we could look in and see that only metal and tools were inthere, so we decided to loosen the ice with a bomb.
"We had decanite bombs and thermite. Thermite is the ice-softener; decanite might have shattered valuable things, where the thermite"s heat would just loosen the ice. Dr. Copper, Norris and I placed a twenty-five-pound thermite bomb, wired it, and took the connector up the tunnel to the surface, where Blair had the steam tractor waiting. A hundred yards the other side of that granite wall we set off the thermite bomb.
"The magnesium metal of the ship caught of course. The glow of the bomb flared and died, then it began to flare again. We ran back to the tractor, and gradually the glare built up. From where we were we could see the whole ice-field illuminated from beneath with an unbearable light; the ship"s shadow was a great, dark cone reaching off toward the north, where the twilight was just about gone. For a moment it lasted, and we counted three other shadow-things that might have been other-pa.s.sengers-frozen there. Then the ice was crashing down and against the ship.
"That"s why I told you about that place. The wind sweeping down from the Pole was at our backs.
Steam and hydrogen flame were torn away in white ice-fog; the flaming heat under the ice there was yanked away toward the Antarctic Ocean before it touched us. Otherwise we wouldn"t have come back, even with the shelter of that granite ridge that stopped the light.
"Somehow in the blinding inferno we could see great hunched things-black bulks. They shed even the furious incandescence of the magnesium for a time. Those must have been the engines, we knew. Secrets going in blazing glory-secrets that might have given Man the planets. Mysterious things that could lift and hurl that ship-and had soaked in the force of the Earth"s magnetic field. I saw Norris" mouth move, and ducked. I couldn"t hear him.
"Insulation-something-gave way. All Earth"s field they"d soaked up twenty million years before broke loose. The aurora in the sky above licked down, and the whole plateau there was bathed in cold fire that blanketed vision. The ice-ax in my hand got red hot, and hissed on the ice. Metal b.u.t.tons on my clothes burned into me. And a flash of electric blue seared upward from beyond the granite wall.
"Then the walls of ice crashed down on it. For an instant it squealed the way dry ice does when it"s pressed between metal.
"We were blind and groping in the dark for hours while our eyes recovered. We found every coil within a mile was fused rubbish, the dynamo and every radio set, the earphones and speakers. If we hadn"t had the steam tractor, we wouldn"t have gotten over to the Secondary Camp.
"Van Wall flew in from Big Magnet at sun-up, as you know. We came home as soon as possible. That is the history of-that." McReady"s great bronze beard gestured toward the thing on the table.
II.
Blair stirred uneasily, his little, bony fingers wriggling under the harsh light. Little brown freckles on his knuckles slid back and forth as the tendons under the skin twitched. He pulled aside a bit of the tarpaulin and looked impatiently at the dark ice-bound thing inside.
McReady"s big body straightened somewhat. He"d ridden the rocking, jarring steam tractor forty miles that day, pushing on to Big Magnet here. Even his calm will had been pressed by the anxiety to mix again with humans. It was lone and quiet out there in Secondary Camp, where a wolf-wind howled down from the Pole. Wolf-wind howling in his sleep-winds droning and the evil, unspeakable face of that monster leering up as he"d first seen it through clear, blue ice, with a bronze ice-ax buried in its skull.
The giant meteorologist spoke again. "The problem is this. Blair wants to examine the thing. Thaw it out and make micro slides of its tissues and so forth. Norris doesn"t believe that is safe, and Blair does. Dr.
Copper agrees pretty much with Blair. Norris is a physicist, of course, not a biologist. But he makes a point I think we should all hear. Blair has described the microscopic life-forms biologists find living, even in this cold and inhospitable place. They freeze every winter, and thaw every summer-for three months-and live.
"The point Norris makes is-they thaw, and live again. There must have been microscopic life a.s.sociated with this creature. There is with every living thing we know. And Norris is afraid that we may release a plague-some germ disease unknown to Earth-if we thaw those microscopic things that have been frozen there for twenty million years.
"Blair admits that such micro-life might retain the power of living. Such unorganized things as individual cells can retain life for unknown periods, when solidly frozen. The beast itself is as dead as those frozen mammoths they find in Siberia. Organized, highly developed life-forms can"t stand that treatment.
"But micro-life could. Norris suggests that we may release some disease-form that man, never having met it before, will be utterly defenseless against.
"Blair"s answer is that there may be such still-living germs, but that Norris has the case reversed. They are utterly nonimmune to man. Our life-chemistry probably-"
"Probably!" The little biologist"s head lifted in a quick, birdlike motion. The halo of gray hair about his bald head ruffled as though angry. "Heh, one look-"
"I know," McReady acknowledged. "The thing is not Earthly. It does not seem likely that it can have a life-chemistry sufficiently like ours to make cross-infection remotely possible. I would say that there is no danger."
McReady looked toward Dr. Copper. The physician shook his head slowly. "None whatever," he a.s.serted confidently. "Man cannot infect or be infected by germs that live in such comparatively close relatives as the snakes. And they are, I a.s.sure you," his clean-shaven face grimaced uneasily, "much nearer to us that-that."
Vance Norris moved angrily. He was comparatively short in this gathering of big men, some five feet eight, and his stocky, powerful build tended to make him seem shorter. His black hair was crisp and hard, like short, steel wires, and his eyes were the gray of fractured steel. If McReady was a man of bronze, Norris was all steel. His movements, his thoughts, his whole bearing had the quick, hard impulse of a steel spring. His nerves were steel-hard, quick acting-swift corroding.
He was decided on his point now, and he lashed out in its defense with a characteristic quick, clippedflow of words. "Different chemistry be d.a.m.ned. That thing may be dead-or, by G.o.d, it may not-but I don"t like it. d.a.m.n it, Blair, let them see the monstrosity you are petting over there. Let them see the foul thing and decide for themselves whether they want that thing thawed out in this camp.
"Thawed out, by the way. That"s got to be thawed out in one of the shacks tonight, if it is thawed out.
Somebody-who"s watchman tonight? Magnetic-oh, Connant. Cosmic rays tonight. Well, you get to sit up with that twenty-million-year-old mummy of his. Unwrap it, Blair. How the h.e.l.l can they tell what they are buying, if they can"t see it? It may have a different chemistry. I don"t care what else it has, but I know it has something I don"t want. If you can judge by the look on its face-it isn"t human so maybe you can"t-it was annoyed when it froze. Annoyed, in fact, is just about as close an approximation of the way it felt, as crazy, mad, insane hatred. Neither one touches the subject.
"How the h.e.l.l can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven"t seen those three red eyes and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling-d.a.m.n, it"s crawling there in the ice right now!
"Nothing Earth ever sp.a.w.ned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that thing let loose in its face when it looked around its frozen desolation twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through-searing, blistering mad!
"h.e.l.l, I"ve had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life-that it wasn"t dead, or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed, waiting-waiting. You"ll dream, too, while that d.a.m.ned thing that Earth wouldn"t own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.