“I’ll have intelligence personnel down here to tape everything he says when he wakes up,” Barghin stated to Lewicz. “I don’t know, but I think it might help if the first person he saw on waking was the wife he believed dead.”
“It’s possible,” nodded Lewicz. “But from what he was saying earlier, I doubt if you’ll make a lot of sense from him.”
Barghin shrugged. “Maybe not. But so long as there’s a hope in hell of digging the monster’s weak spot out of what the poor bastard saw while he was in Jacksonville, we shall have to hold off the nuclear missile we have waiting.”
“I see what you mean,” said Lewicz soberly. “It’s going to be bad enough treating the survivors of Jacksonville anyway. If they’ve been exposed to radiation and heat flash as well, I wouldn’t care to have to try and save them.”
“Did you get any clear idea of how he managed to escape?”
“Yes, I think so. From what we could figure—it’s on tape if you want to hear it—he suddenly realized that the only pain he could feel was his injured arm. He said all the others had died and they had become new people. I think that means that he is one of the last survivors of the original captives, and they’ve been left to themselves because they’re too weak and ill to be useful to the monster’s new plans.”
“Did he know what the plans were?”
“He hadn’t been made to work on any of them, and he said he couldn’t make out what was going on. He’s so starved and apathetic I don’t think he cared any more.”
“Peter! Peter!” Mary whispered, and no hint of movement showed in the tortured face. It had been an illusion. She sat back and went on holding his hand.
Two quiet young officers in uniform had moved in and sat on chairs just inside the door of the mobile hospital. One of them carried a portable tape recorder. They did not trouble her, and she ignored them. They talked quietly, or read. At intervals one or other of them changed places with a new arrival. Nurses came and changed empty bottles of plasma and nutriment for new ones. Hours that seemed like weeks crept by.
Once, she found she had been asleep, and her heart pounded for fear she had missed a flicker of consciousness. But there had been no change. Or had there?
“Peter!” she said again. And the eyes opened. Looked at her. Puzzled.
“But—” he said faintly. And then smiled.
“Yes,” said Peter, pushing aside a heap of photographs and keeping one back. “I saw things like that. A sort of hugh rack of them, standing on the field at the missile station.”
“Good,” said the intelligence lieutenant. He made a note. “We think they’re oxygen bottles. A lot of them were dug out of the place where the monster came from. How about this?”
Peter studied it, frowning. “No. I don’t think so. Big or small?” The lieutenant indicated with his hands. “No.”
“How about this, then?” The new picture showed an oblique overall view of the missile station. It had been taken from the racing scanner missile and its details were blurred. “Can you fill us in on some of these indistinct objects?”
Peter hunted his memory, trying to gather correspondences between the foreshortened aerial view and what he had seen on the ground.
“This thing has changed since I saw it,” he said at length. “I think. When I was there it was all skeleton; struts and a few plates. Now it’s grown. It’s been closed in.”
“That was our impression. That seems to be the thing about which everything’s revolving. Have you any idea what it is?”
“No.” Peter turned the photograph round and round. “Is it just possibly a sort of armor-plated protection for the master? I know he was very angry when the missiles fell on his headquarters. Maybe this is meant to serve instead of this crazy kind of sedan chair we had to carry him around in.”
“It’s possible, I suppose,” the lieutenant said dubiously. “But my God! It must weigh a hundred tons or more!”
“Do you think that would bother him?” said Peter grimly, and shuddered as he recalled things he had seen in Jacksonville. “He’d cheerfully make people lie down in the road and lubricate it with their blood to make it slide easily if they couldn’t carry it.”
Mary put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and he leant his head sideways to touch it with his cheek. He had learned not to move the hand that was no longer there.
“Okay, and thank you,” said the lieutenant as he shuffled the pictures into a file. “I’ll leave you alone for a bit and let you rest. We really appreciate your help.”
“The poor bastards still there will appreciate it more,” said Peter. “They’re letting me get up tomorrow. I’m coming out to the front and do some work on the spot.”
Something was definitely coming to a crux in Jacksonville. The frantic tempo of work had slackened. Now the only remaining pocket of haste was at the missile base, around the cryptic metal structure that had been made of used car parts. Barghin smiled dourly as he remembered how he had said he suspected the monster could make rockets out of just that and other incredible scrap.
But it was growing dark, and after sunset Jacksonville was like a dead city, without electric lights, moving vehicles or even campfires. It was cold. Barghin pitied the victims huddling together in half-wrecked buildings for warmth. If this waiting had to continue into winter … Even though the climate here was southerly and mild, exposure would surely claim many of the weakened slaves. It wouldn’t matter if they were well fed and clothed, but after rain, for instance, they would succumb to pneumonia like corn before the harvester.
He called in the scanner missile. It was too dark to get usable pictures now. Tomorrow, they would know for sure what was ahead.
XIX
THE FIRST hint of the climax came an hour before dawn.
The watchers on the cordon were told by their mechanical ears and eyes of movement ahead. Another army, like the one that had broken before Mechanical Shovel? They triggered the floodlights and stared across the suddenly brilliant countryside.
Yes. Something of the kind. Only this was not the same armed desperation as before. It was a steamroller advance, akin to the unstoppable march of the recruits from Savannah and Brunswick. Doubtless these were part of the same horde.
They stopped momentarily as they passed the advance watchposts; broke the searchlights, smashed the TV eyes and the microphones, and went on. Their faces were dull, their steps slow. They came ahead like corpses.
Nervously, wondering if they too were to be subjected to the lashing mental pain that must be driving these strangers, the troops at the front of the cordon prepared to meet them.
For them, the lash of pain did not come. But the hordes from the monster’s city moved in among them, ignored calls to stop, ignored threats, shook off physical restraint—and kept walking.
In the confusion of night, it was hard to make out how many of them there were, but it seemed that a quarter of a million at least of the monster’s slaves had been driven out on this crazy march. Sometimes they eddied around a military vehicle and overturned it by brute force. Mostly, they continued ahead steadily.
Barghin was dragged from sleep by a frantic orderly, and rushed in his pajamas to the radio wagon, to consolidate and digest the startled reports. His first thought was for the mobile field hospital unit in the evacuated belt behind the cordon. The only man to have come back alive from the monster’s domain was there. He must be gotten out of the way of the advance, and quickly.
A dozen similar petty details occupied his mind for the first half hour after the alarm, but then he began to notice something peculiar about the pattern he was receiving. No serious damage was being done. The slaves were unarmed. The lash of pain could follow them even here, but the troops among whom they were advancing were not themselves suffering. It looked as though it ought to add up to something. But what?
Report from a detachment of the medical corps. They had evolved a method of dealing with the slaves. Three soldiers held them down while a medical order
ly jabbed them full of anaesthetic. They had nearly a hundred unconscious now, and were running low on supplies.
Ingenious, Barghin thought, and ordered all the stocks of anaesthetic that could be found to be commandeered and brought to the area.
Another group reported. They were using cruder methods of cracking the slaves over the head. They said they were doing it only to men of good physique. Women and children they were letting through into the evacuated area.
That was a point. The evacuated area was thirty miles deep most of the way on the western side. He gave amending orders so that the anaesthetics and the medics would be waiting on the other side of the evacuated zone. By then, the wave of slaves would be tired out and easier to deal with, as well as there being longer to prepare for them. They wouldn’t make it across the zone till evening, at their present rate of progress. He ordered all units not actually engaged with the slaves to go to ground and let them pass without opposition, and countermanded all attempts to halt their progress.
So whatever the original aim of this outflow of human robots, its energy was going to be dispersed uselessly, and the sum total of its effect would be to incapacitate a number of advance observation posts. Barghin frowned. Why had so large a number of slaves suddenly become redundant in the monster’s opinion? There must be a key somewhere. He wished it were dawn, so that the scanner missile could get some pictures of what was happening in the city itself.
Maybe—maybe it was intended only as a diversion. Maybe the monster was consolidating, having completed the task he had planned. Maybe he was ready to launch nuclear attacks in revenge for the missiles that had so narrowly missed him.
Maybe he had something up his sleeve which human beings had never dreamed of.
The drone of a ’copter coming in nearby interrupted his musing. “Go see if that’s the Trants, and if it is get me someone from Intelligence and bring them here right away,” he commanded an orderly. The man saluted and doubled away.
It was the Trants. Peter, his stump swathed in bandages, was walking with his arm around Mary, and his feet seemed uncertain. As soon as he came into the command vehicle, Barghin made him sit down.
“I’m sorry to haul you out of bed like that,” he said. “I heard from Lewicz that you were fit to get up today, though, and with this crazy bunch of zombies going straight for the field hospital I figured you were safer here than there. How do you feel?”
Peter managed a wry grin. “Tottering,” he said. “But I’m fine otherwise.”
The intelligence lieutenant who had interviewed Peter the previous evening came in, saluted, and went to one side with his files of data. “Right,” Barghin grunted. “Trant, you’re in a better position to guess at the monster’s way of handling his slaves than we are. I’m inclined to think that this outburst of two hundred thousand people is a feint. Do you think he rates us high enough to think it worth confusing us?”
Peter shook his head. “Not unless he’s learnt some lessons in the past few days. When I left, he was still treating us like vermin, beneath his notice. I think that fits with the way I was able to walk out of the town. He regarded me as expended.”
“On the other hand,” ventured the lieutenant, “the first reports we’ve had of the composition of the victims who’ve left the city shows that they’re mostly business types. We find very few practical men among them, engineering hands, or factory operatives. It’s hard to tell, naturally. But perhaps the technicians and technologists have been kept back because their skills are useful.”
“If that is the case,” Peter agreed, “I’m wrong. Maybe it’s my impression because while I was there there was little more complex going on than shifting rubble and wrecking cars, jobs anyone could do. This work at the missile base, though. It might have been worth his while to find engineers and so on.”
“In which case, that can be counted as a signal victory,” said Barghin. “To have made him recognize that we do have intelligence is worth taking notice of. As I see it, in the beginning he’d cheerfully have employed university professors to dig ditches. Now he’s catching on that it’s simpler to use people who already know what he wants done.”
“But what does he want?” said Mary heavily.
“I have a hunch we’re going to find out,” said Barghin. He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes to full dawn. He turned to the radioman, who was yawning enormously. “Get me a volunteer pilot to take a ’copter out over the city,” he said. “If the troops out here aren’t getting the monster’s treatment, there’s a chance we may at long last be able to go and look at the city for ourselves.”
A quarter of an hour later the report came back that the pilot had been low over the city, down to five hundred feet, without either being able to make out details of what if anything was happening or being struck by the monster’s mental lash. Barghin digested the news in complete silence, and then stood up straight.
“Well, I think I’d like to see what’s been happening. I’m tired of this fighting in the dark. This may be only a momentary lapse on the monster’s part, but we must take full advantage of it. Maybe he’s decided he can do without human aid altogether, in which case we can fire our nuclear missile and dispose of him. Maybe the whole surviving population has come out of the city, and they’ve been building him robot slaves.”
“But what if he let that ’copter alone to lure us into doing just this?” Mary said.
Barghin shrugged. “I’ve got the same automatic pilot on all these ’copters as the one that brought your husband here back from discovering the Queen Alexandra. And our counter-missile batteries are set to hit anything that goes up from the Jacksonville base. It’s not much of a risk.”
“In that case, I’d like to come along,” said Peter steadily. He looked at his wife with eyes that pleaded for understanding. “I’ll probably be able to see the pattern of the changes that have been taking place lately. Maybe the experts will be able to deduce new information from them.”
The big ’copter went cautiously at first, in case the success of the earlier trip had been due to a loophole in the defenses that had now been closed. But no missile whined skywards into the gray dawn, and their minds remained free of the monster’s pain.
This was a twenty-passenger machine. Barghin had had it crammed with a TV transmitter, film cameras, recording devices, and their operators. The intelligence lieutenant made scribbled notes and kept the microphone of his tape recorder close to Peter’s face for his comments.
They stared down across the city, which seemed almost as scarred and dead as the surface of the moon. It was virtually lifeless. A few birds could be seen. Their binoculars revealed victims huddled in sheltered corners who might or might not be alive. That was all.
“Nothing,” said Peter in a despondent tone. “Or almost nothing. I don’t know where the master has taken refuge—the monster, as you say. Curious, isn’t it? When one has to work under his power for a while, he gets the feeling that he really is a superior kind of being. The torture proves it, eventually. It’s like brainwashing.”
“Did you help move him from the church where he went to after City Hall?”
“Yes. But after that I got fever, and I don’t remember if we took him anywhere special afterwards. How about what’s going on at the missile station?”
Barghin took a deep breath. “It’s the chanciest place,” he said. “We’ll have to stand off far enough for a counter-missile to get at anything they throw at us. But all right. If we must, we must. Pilot!”
And here there was movement.
Around the now apparently completed shell of the mysterious object they had thrown together out of scrap, many slaves lay exhausted on the open ground. Remembering how often he too had fallen where he stood, Peter felt a surge of bitter pity.
But among them still moved staggering figures, mostly men in engineer’s overalls, some of them carrying instruments that the watchers could not identify because they were standing off instead of flying over the site.
The sky brightened.
And then Peter tried to clutch Barghin’s shoulder with his left hand. Only his stump moved, of course, and the pain of striking the raw end blinded him for a moment and made him cry out.
“Get us away!” snapped Barghin, fearing that the monster’s lash had descended.
“No! No, it’s only my stump!” said Peter. “But didn’t you see? Didn’t you notice? A flash of green under that—that thing standing on the field. A flash of green light that went clear underneath!”
Puzzled, Barghin shook his head. “I saw it,” offered the man operating the movie cameras.
“And didn’t you notice?” pressed Peter. “There’s nothing under that thing! It must weigh a good hundred tons. And there’s nothing holding it up! It’s just floating!”
“You must be mistaken,” said Barghin shortly. He adjusted focus on his binoculars and looked again. “No, there’s not enough light to see yet, but—Now I think we really had better get out of here. I think the monster’s coming.”
They stared anxiously. Sure enough, out of one of the vast hangars where the missiles were serviced, a line of chanting slaves was trudging. And, just before the ’copter whirred away, they glimpsed the monster coming into the light of day.
XX
BARGHIN shouldered his way past the technician operating the recording machines, and bent to the microphone of the radio. The air was already full of countermessages about the situation around the cordon. Barghin got hold of the command vehicle at base and ordered a direct circuit to the main transmitter.
“All units, attention!” he snapped. “Prepare for counter-missile action, casualty action, aerial action at all levels, possible nuclear attacks on cities. The monster’s at the Jacksonville missile base, and he has something new!”
Staring with aching eyes through his binoculars, Peter felt his heart sink. The monster was being taken out to the strange object. He was sure he had seen it floating! And the green light was back again, bright now, seeming almost solid between the thing and the ground.