A Matter For Men Part 6

NINE.

THE PLAGUES weren't over.

But this time we were better prepared. We had vaccines, and the lower population density and all the precautions still in effect from the first calamitous waves slowed the spread of the new plagues to a containable crawl.

The one that hit us was supposed to be one that you could recover from, although it might leave you blind or sterile-or permanently deranged. It had been around since the beginning -it just hadn't been noticed until the others were contained. Not controlled, just contained.

We lost the boys to it-Tim and Mark-and we almost lost Dad too. Afterward, he was a different man. He never fully recovered. Haggard and gray, he was almost a zombie. He didn't smile anymore. He'd lost a lot of weight and most of his hair, and suddenly he looked old. It was as if the mere act of surviving had taken all of his strength; he didn't have any left for living. A lot of people were like that.

And I don't think Maggie ever forgave him for the death of her sons. It had been his decision to bring us down from the mountain by July, but he couldn't have known. No one did. We all thought it was over.

The last time I saw him was when he left for San Francisco.

They'd "drafted" him-well, not quite drafted, but the effect was the same. Someone was needed to manage the reorganization of the Western Region Data Banks, and Dad was one of the few free programmers left. Most of those who'd survived had already nested themselves into security positions; programmers were valuable-without them, the machines would stop. But Dad was still a free agent, and therefore subject to the control of the Labor Requisition Board. He'd been right to be cautious about registering. When we came down from the mountain, his orders were waiting for him. He appealed,but it was rejected. The national welfare came first.

I drove Dad down to the train station that last day. Mom couldn't get away from the clinic-she'd made her goodbyes the night before. Maggie wouldn't come. Dad looked very thin. He carried only a single small suitcase. He didn't say much while we waited for the train to arrive. We were the only ones on the platform.

"Dad? Are you all right? You know, if you're ill-"

He didn't look at me. "I'm all right," he snapped. And then he said it again in a quieter tone. "I'm all right." He still wasn't looking at me, he was still staring down the track, but he reached over and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Do you need to sit down?"

He shook his head. "I'm afraid I might not be able to get back up." He said, "I'm tired of this, Jim. I'm so tired. . . ."

"Dad, you don't have to go. You have rights. You can claim the shock of-"

"Yes, I do," he said. And the way he said it left no room for argument. He dropped his hand from my shoulder. "You know about the guilt, Jim-survivor's guilt? I can't help it. There were people who deserved to live. Why didn't I die instead?"

"You did what you had to!"

"Just the same," he spoke haltingly, "I feel ... a responsibility now ... to do something, to make amends. If not to the rest of the world, then to ... the babies. Tim and Mark."

"Dad"-this time I put my hand on his shoulder-"listen to me."

He turned to me. "And I can't stand the look in her eyes anymore!"

"Maggie?"

"Your mother."

"She doesn't blame you!"

"No, I don't think she does. And she has every good reason to. But it's not the blame, Jim-it's the pity. I can't stand that." He faltered, then said, "Maybe it'll be better this way." He stooped to lower his suitcase to the ground. Very slowly, he put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me close for a last hug. He felt even thinner in my arms than he looked.

"Take care of them," he said. "And yourself."

He pulled back and looked at me, searching my face for one last sign of hope-and that was when I saw how old he had become. Thin and gray and old. I couldn't help it. I felt sorry for him too. He saw it. He had been looking for my love, and instead he saw my pity. I knew he could tell, because he smiled with a false heartiness that felt like a wall slamming into place. He clapped me on the shoulder and then turned quickly away.

The train took him south to San Francisco and we never saw him again.

It took the Bureau of Labor Management a lot longer to catch up to me, almost a year.

I had gone back to school. They had reorganized the State University system and you could get study credits for working on a campus reclamation team, saving and preserving the state of human knowledge as it existed before the plagues. It seemed in those first hectic months that everyone was an official of some kind or other. I even held a t.i.tle or two. For a while, I was Western Regional Director of the Fantasy Programmers' a.s.sociation-I only did it because the president of the organization insisted. She said I owed it to my father's memory as an author. I said, "That's. .h.i.tting below the belt, Mom," but I took the job. My sole responsibility was to sit down with a lawyer and witness a stack of doc.u.ments. We were claiming the copyrights of those authors who had not survived and for whom no surviving kin could be located. The organization was becoming the collective executor of a lost art form, because no one had the time for large-scale fantasy games anymore.

Halfway through the spring semester, I was drafted-really drafted, not labor-requisitioned.

The army was one of the few inst.i.tutions that was structured to cope with ma.s.sive losses of manpower without loss of structure; its skills were basic, widespread and nonspecialized. Therefore, it was the army that managed the process of survival. The army reestablished communications and maintained them. The army took charge of resources and utilities, protecting and allocating them until local governments were again able to a.s.sume the responsibilities of control. The army distributed food and clothing and medical aid. The army contained the plague districts until decontamination teams could be sent in-and as ugly as that latter task was, they handled it with as much compa.s.sion as was possible under the circ.u.mstances. It was the army that carried the country through the worst of it.

But that wasn't the army that I was drafted into.

Let me say this: I hadn't believed in Chtorrans any more than anybody else.

n.o.body I knew had ever seen a Chtorran. No reputable authority had ever come forward with any proof more solid than a blurred photo, and the whole thing sounded like another Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot or Yeti. If anyone in the government knew anything, they weren't saying-only that the reports were "under investigation."

"Actually, the truth should be obvious," one of the coordinators-they didn't call them instructors if they didn't have a degree -at the university had said. "It's the technique of the 'big lie' all over again. By creating the threat of an enemy from outer s.p.a.ce, we get to be territorial. We'll be so busy defending our turf, we won't have time to feel despair. That kind of thing is the perfect distraction with which to rebuild the morale of the country.

That was his theory. Everybody had an opinion-everybody always does.

And then my draft notice arrived. Almost two years late, but still just as binding. Congress had amended the draft act just for us survivors.

I appealed, of course. So they gave me a special cla.s.sification. "Civilian Personnel, Attached." They were doing that a lot.

I was still in the army -and then Duke shot a little girl. And I knew the Chtorrans were real.

The human race, what there was left of us, was at war with invaders from s.p.a.ce. And I was one of the few people who knew it. The rest of them didn't believe it-and they wouldn't believe it until the day the Chtorrans moved into their towns and started eating.

Like Show Low, Arizona.

TEN.

WE LEFT the jeeps at an abandoned Texaco station and hiked across the hills-and that flamethrower was heavy. According to the specifications in the manual, fully loaded and charged, tanks and all, it should have weighed no more than 19.64 kilosbut somewhere along the way we lost the decimal point, and Duke wouldn't let me go back and look for it.

So I shut up and climbed.

Eventually-even with Tillie the Ten-Ton Torch on my back -we reached the valley where we had spotted the worms less than a week before. Duke's timing was just right; we arrived at the hottest part of the day, about two in the afternoon. The sweat had turned the inside of my clothing clammy, and the harness for the torch was already chafing.

The sun was a yellow glare in a gla.s.sy sky, but the valley seemed dark and still. The gra.s.s was brown and dessicated and there was a light piney haze hanging over the woods; it looked like smog, but there hadn't been any smog since the plagues. This grayishblue haze was only natural hydrocarbons, a byproduct of the trees' own breathing. Just looking at it I could feel the pressure in my lungs.

The plan was simple: Shorty and his team would go down on the right flank, Larry and his would take the left, Duke would take the center. I was with Duke's squad.

We waited on the crest of the ridge while Shorty and Larry moved to their positions with their men. Meanwhile, Duke studied the Chtorran igloo. There was no sign of life; but then we hadn't expected any, didn't want any. If we had guessed correctly, all three of the worms would be lying torpid within.

When the binoculars were pa.s.sed to me, I studied the corral in particular. There weren't any humans in it, but there was something-no, there were a lot of somethings. They were black and shiny, and covered the ground like a lumpy carpet. They were heaving and shifting restlessly, but what they were I couldn't make out at this distance.

Shorty signaled then that he was did Larry.

"Okay," said Duke. "Let's go."

My stomach lurched in response. This was it. I switched on my helmet camera, hefted the torch and moved. From this moment on, everything I saw and everything I heard would be recorded for the log. "Remember," Duke had said, "don't look down if you have to take a leak-or you'll never hear the end of it."

We topped the ridge without any attempt to conceal ourselves and started moving down the slope. I suddenly felt very naked and alone. My heart was thudding in my chest. "Oh boy . . ." I said. It came out a croak.

And then remembered the recorder! I caught myself, took three deep breaths and followed Duke. Was anybody else this scared? They didn't show it. They looked grim.

This side of the valley was rocky and treeless; it was the other side that was dangerous. Duke signaled and I stopped. We waited for the others to take the lead. Count to ten. Another signal and we advanced. We were going leapfrog fashion; two men would move while the other two kept lookout, then the first two would watch while the second two advanced. All three groups moved forward this way. I kept my torch charged and ready; so did Duke, but the climb down the hill was slow and uneventful. And painful.

Nothing moved in the woods opposite. Nothing moved in the valley. And certainly nothing moved near the igloo-we watched, ready, and a moment later so that the hardest. Everything was still. We approached cautiously, three groups of four men each, s.p.a.ced about a hundred meters apart.

Where the ground leveled off, we paused. Duke sniffed the air and studied the forest beyond the chunky dome. Nothing. Still, he looked worried.

He motioned Larry's team forward. They had the Mobe IV with them-they called it "Shlep." The dry gra.s.s crunched under its treads. We waited till they were about a hundred meters forward, then followed. After a bit, Shorty and his men took up their position to the rear.

It seemed to me that the three groups were spread too far apart. Maybe Duke thought he was being careful by having us stretched across more territory; it'd be harder for the worms to overpower or surprise us. On the other hand, though, maybe he was being a little reckless too. Our combined torch ranges overlapped, but not by very much; we couldn't come to each other's aid as fast.

I was about to point this out to him when Larry's team stopped ahead of us. We approached to about thirty meters and then waited till Shorty's group was an equal distance behind. Then we all started moving again. Duke looked a little less grim and I started to breathe easier myself-but not much; this was still worm country.

We were close enough now to see the construction of the igloo in detail. I estimated it was four meters at its highest point and fifteen in diameter. It was made of layered rows of light-colored wood paste and chips; it looked fairly strong. All around the base was a jumble of dark vegetation so purple it was almost black. The scent was faint, but cloying nonetheless-like honeysuckle, but tasting of something fruitier.

I would have expected the dome to be more cone-shaped, like a beehive because of the way it must have been built, one layer at a time; but no, it was more of a mound-a spherical section with a flattened top. The door was a large arched opening, wider than it was high, and shielded by an interior baffle-like the "spirit wall" the Chinese used to put behind their front gates to keep ghosts out. We couldn't see into the but. There was no telling if there were worms inside or not.

Larry paused at a safe distance and unlocked the Mobe. The rest of us stopped too, all keeping our same relative positions. Larry stood up again and sent two of his men to circle the igloo; he and the remaining man, Hank, moved around the opposite way. Shlep waited alone, its radar turning back and forth in patient unquestioning rhythm. The rest of us watched the front door.

In front of the dome was something I hadn't noticed beforehad it been there last time? It was a kind of ... totem pole. Only it looked like-I don't know, a piece of blast art perhaps. Like something half-melted, a liquid shape frozen in the act of puddling. What the h.e.l.l was it? A signpost? A mailbox? It was made out of the same stuff as the dome and the corral. There was one large hole in the base of it, then three more of decreasing sizes placed almost casually above, oddly off center, and a score of ragged tiny holes all around. The thing stood more than two meters high, half the height of the dome, and directly in front of it.

After a bit, Larry and his men reappeared, each having circled the dome completely. Larry signaled that it was all clear. There was no back door; we couldn't be taken by surprise that way. "All right," Duke signaled back. "Send in the Mobe."

Larry waved and turned to Hank. He unfolded the remote panel on the man's back and armed Shlep. The Mobe's bright red warning lights began to blink; it was now unsafe to approach. If its sensory apparatus detected a large heat-radiating body close by, the EMP-charge on its back would flash, instantly roasting everything in the dome and probably a good way beyond-like a microwave oven, but faster.

EMP stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse; it's a burst of widespectrum high-energy radio noise.[1] Very wide spectrum. From radio to gamma. Very high energy. Linearly amplified. Very wide spectrum. From radio to gamma. Very high energy. Linearly amplified.

It probably would have been simpler to just toss a grenade into the but and duck, but Duke wanted to capture this shelter intact. We needed to learn everything we could about the Chtorrans. The EMP-flash would kill them without destroying them or the dome.

Larry waved again and Duke snapped, "All right, everybody down." This was probably the most dangerous part of the mission -we had to lie down in the gra.s.s to minimize the effects of stray radiation from the flash, but the position left us vulnerable because we couldn't use the flamethrowers if we were surprised.

Hank lay down with the remote panel and sent the Mobe rolling forward. He had his eyes pressed into the stereo sight and was looking solely through the eyes of the Mobe now. Beside him, Larry kept uneasy watch. The other two men had stretched a protective flash-foil in front of all four of them-the remote antenna stuck up beyond it-but the Mylar struts were refusing to stay anch.o.r.ed and the men were having to hold them up by hand. The rest of us were far enough back not to need foil, but we stayed down anyway.

The Mobe was in the dome now. Again we waited. The minutes ticked off with deliberate hesitation. The only motion was Hank's hands on the Mobe controls. He was murmuring as he worked and Duke was listening to his comments on a disposable (it would have to be) earphone. I couldn't hear what he was saying.

Hank stopped disgustedly and said something to Larry. Larry stood up, swearing softly. Hank turned back to his panel and did something, then sat up. The others let the flash-foil collapse. The Mobe was coming out of the but now, operating on its own guidance. Had it flashed? No, the red warning blinker was still going. Hank hit the remote and disarmed it; the light went out. The rest of us stood then, brushing ourselves off and checking our weapons.

The Mobe said there were no worms in the hut-but Duke never took a machine's word for anything. Mobes had been fooled before. Maybe the worms were cold-blooded, or perhaps they didn't give off much heat while they were torpid. Larry was going in to see.

The supposition was that at this time of day the worms should be slow and Larry should be able to burn them before they came fully awake and active. We wanted that shelter, and any piece of worm we could get. So he was going to try to scorch them lightly-enough to kill, not enough to destroy. It was tricky and dangerous and not recommended for those who wanted to die in bed. But if they were in there, Larry would get them. If not ...

Well, that was why the rest of us were waiting outside with torches.

Larry put on his 0-mask then, stooped and entered, the man with the grenades right behind him. Insurance. The grenades had suicide fuses. I didn't envy either of them. They bent low inside the "foyer" and disappeared to the right of the spirit wall.

Silence. And again we waited. A bee-or something-buzzed around my right ear and I brushed at it in annoyance. A drop of sweat trickled from my armpit down my side. The insect buzzed again.

I studied the plants around the base of the dome through the binoculars. They were scraggly clumps of something that looked like midnight ivy, mixed with something else that looked like sweet basil-or black marijuana. Both were a deep, intense shade of purple, almost black and almost impossible to see clearly. The coloring of the ivy must have shaded off into the ultraviolet because it seemed oddly out of focus in the bright sunlight-as if each curling leaf were outlined with hazy red neon. The ivy was streaked with fine veins of white, the basil stuff was spattered with red. We were close enough for the cloying scent to be annoyingly pungent. I a.s.sumed it was a product of the basil stuff. At closer range it would be overpowering.

At last Larry and the other man reappeared, angrily pulling off their masks. Larry's face was white. "It's empty!" he shouted. "There's nothing here!"

Duke said, "d.a.m.n," and kicked at a rock. "Shorty, keep an eye out. McCarthy, come with me." Then, abandoning his carefully staked-out position, he stalked toward the dome. I followed, struggling to keep up.

"How long has it been empty?" Duke asked.

Larry shrugged. "Beats the h.e.l.l out of me. You know as much about their nesting habits as I do. But it smells warm...... Duke shoved past him and ducked into the doorway. I started to follow, despite myself, then stopped-my mouth was dry. I stared at that dark hole of an entrance as if it were death. I couldn't take another step. And yet-I wanted to, more than anything. I peered cautiously, but couldn't see beyond the foyer. The interior was unlit. I took a step forward, tried to convince myself to make it two Abruptly, Duke exited, straightening and almost b.u.mping into me. He shot me an absentminded look of annoyance, then turned to Larry. "Check the enclosure. See what's in it. Post lookouts on the other side-but keep in sight of each other." He turned back to me. "You. You're supposed to be a scientist. I'll give you ten minutes to inspect the inside of that nest. Then I'm going to burn it."

"Huh? But we're supposed to-"

"Never mind what we're supposed to. That thing is full of eggs! You think I'm going to leave them here to hatch?"

I didn't bother to answer. The question was rhetorical. I bent and entered the worm hut.

The spirit wall was more than just a baffle behind the door. It joined the roof low enough to force me into a crouch, forming a circular cross section and becoming two inward-curving pa.s.sageways, one to either side, that followed the wall of the dome-how far around, I couldn't see; the ends were lost beyond the curve. The pa.s.sages were ramped upward; the floors were made of the same material as the walls and the roof, only the floors seemed spongier.

I crouch-crawled into the branch on the right; that was the way Duke had gone. The pa.s.sage led up and around through ninety degrees of arc and opened onto a circular room eight or nine meters in diameter and just tall enough to stand in. The leftward pa.s.sage opened up in the wall opposite.

I had a flashbeam, but it wasn't necessary here. There was an opening two meters across in the center of the roof. Light streamed in through this, as well as fresh air, but the temperature wasn't as cool as I had thought it would be inside. In fact, it was almost stuffy. There was a strong, stifling smell about the nest, somehow familiar; a sickly sweetish odor, but I couldn't place it easily. . . .

The room seemed smaller than I'd expected and the ceiling was lower than it had appeared from outside-of course, those upward-sloping ramps-this was the top part of the dome.

Was there a bottom section? There had to be. Or was it all foundation? There were several openings in the floor, all of them ominously dark. I stood there, hesitating. I was a scientistsupposed to be a scientist; at least that's what it said on my pay vouchers-but that didn't keep me from being afraid. I stood there indecisively and sniffed-that odd-flavored smell....

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I noticed something about the walls; they had a peculiar way of reflecting the light. I forgot the holes in the floor for the moment and turned off my flashbeam; the walls seemed almost-no, they were-translucent. The glare from outside was forcing its way through the material of the dome.

I inspected closer-and found that it wasn't a hardened wood paste at all, but some kind of dried wood-foam-a much lighter substance, but no less st.u.r.dy. Wood chips were suspended in it like raisins. I poked it with my knife and it was like carving hard paperboard. The walls of this dome were actually tiny bubbles of cellulose-based glue. That explained their peculiar light-transmitting properties, and they were probably excellent insulators as well. I sliced off as large a chunk of the wall as I could and dropped it into my sample pouch.

The rest of the room was featureless, except for those holes. There was an absolute lack of artifacts, excepting some chunks of chewed-up something, globs of grayish material like masticated asbestos. Some of the globs were almost a meter in diameter. They were stuck casually to the walls like pieces of chewing gum. I shrugged and cut off a sample and bagged it. If these Chtorrans were truly intelligent creatures, you couldn't prove it by this dwelling.